Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Angel

Investor Stage

Early stage Venture,Seed

Sam Bright is a C-suite executive with nearly two decades of tech leadership experience building and scaling teams, experiences, and businesses both organically and inorganically spanning strategy, mergers and acquisitions, operations, strategic partnerships, product, customer experience, and general management / P&L ownership.

Currently, he serves as the Chief Product and Experience Officer at Upwork (NASDAQ: UPWK), the world's largest work marketplace, where he leads an ~900 person globally distributed team located in 45 countries across Product Management, Design, User Experience and User Research, Talent Success, Customer Experience, Community Management, New Businesses, Payments, Risk, Trust and Safety, and Business Development.

He most recently led the Verticals team at eBay where at peak scope, he oversaw a) multi-billion dollar business units encompassing art and collectibles, business and industrial, electronics, fashion, home and garden, lifestyle, media, parts and accessories, sporting goods, and toys (>$30 billion in 2019 GMV) b) WHI, a global Software as a Service (SaaS) subsidiary focused on the automotive sector.

Sam serves as a member of the Board of Trustees for TIAA, a Fortune 100 financial services organization and on the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum Advisory Council. He was a member of the Board of Directors at Benetech for 6 years and is a member of NACD. He has been named to Products that Count's inaugural 2022 Global CPO 20 list of influential and innovative Chief Product Officers around the globe, Black Enterprise's 2018 "List of the Most Influential Blacks in Technology,” Savoy Magazine's "2020 Most Influential Black Executives in Corporate America," and The Agenda Diversity 100.

Specialties: Vertical Platforms, Marketplaces / Consumer-Facing Businesses / eCommerce / SaaS businesses, P&L Ownership, General Management, Go to Market Strategy, Business Operations, Cross-Functional Leadership, Strategic Partnerships & Alliances, Product Strategy, Customer Experience, Mergers and Acquisitions, Team Leadership & Development, and Board Governance