Samantha G. Wolfe: Making the never-done-before a reality

This success she believes is the direct result of grounding herself in reality. “One of the things I live by is the brutal truth that “no one cares.” It’s not a fun thing to remind yourself of, but it’s a good reality check,” says Samantha. She proposes the same insight to her clients. She adds, “I constantly ask myself, and we ask our clients, “Why should [your target] care?” Even if you have made the most ground-breaking technology, you have to make it really easy for your potential customers to understand your value and why they should buy what you are selling. Most people are just too busy to take the time to understand why your company’s product or service is really cool.” Another factor that contributed to her success looking back, she says maybe being one of the first girls to go to a traditionally-boys high school, Deerfield Academy. “There were about 100 girls and 450 boys that first year. All of the girls were considered pioneers, much like the women in XR now,” says Samantha. “Having that kind of experience makes it much easier to be a pioneer in spatial computing – to build the market for emerging technologies and educate people on the possibilities.”

For the fellow women striving to be leaders, Samantha has a simple formula: Start a list. She recommends, “Start a list of projects with proof points that you can reference whether it be in a resume, an interview, a meeting about a job promotion, or even if you ask yourself, “Have I done this before?” She also stresses the importance of building a great team. Samantha surrounds herself with smart people. “I adore people more creative and more innovative than I am. I got into marketing to sit next to and to work with those people,” says Samantha. While building her team, above anything, she appreciates passion. She says, “I’m happy to teach someone how to do something if they really want to learn. In interviews, I like to ask the question, ‘What would you do if you could do anything?’ If their answer is to work in a different industry or to travel the world, I likely would spend the rest of the interview helping them to try and figure out how to do that. But I won’t be hiring them.” She also appreciates it when people are ‘just nice’ even when they have different points of view. “I know that isn’t really a requirement for a business, but it makes the days much better,” says Samantha. “I was drawn to my partners as we all come at marketing innovation from different perspectives, but we fundamentally agree on the need for valuable and purposeful technology. No ‘tech for tech sake’.”