Blog

Sam
Kerr

Product Leader

Technologist

Investor

Hello! I'm Sam. I am a customer-obsessed product leader, cryptopgraphy and reverse engineering practioner, and finance data nerd. I've released multiple award winning products and solved challening problems in my career that I'd love to tell you more about.
Check out my blog
About Me
My story

I learned to code when I was little when my dad gave me his old work laptop. I taught myself QBasic on that thing and loved coding ever since. I can code over a dozen programming languages and am in the top 0.36% of Stack Overflow users (really.)

Products, especially software products, have always interested me. It is not enough to build something cool, but it must be something that solves a problem a user has that can be delivered to them at the right time and in the right way. I have been in the field of Product Management for most of my career, building digital products to do just that. I have taken multiple products from initial concept to successful launch.

I was born in Cincinnati, OH and live here now with my wife and two children. As a Cincinnati native, I am addicted to our local chili. Highly recommend you try it if you've never had it before!

  • Address: Cincinnati, OH, USA
  • E-mail: sam@samuelkerr.com
Activities
What I Do
Product Management

I have brought multiple award-winning products to market in my career. I have also integrated multiple acquired companies into an existing company's product portfolio. I am passionate about identifying opportunities for products that solve user needs while ensuring successful business outcomes.

Enterprise Software

All businesses will become software businesses and need the tooling to support that. My career has given me experience in the ideation, development, and successful launches of enterprise software products. I enjoy the personas involved and the challenges in scaling a good idea to something enterprises can depend on.

Product Consulting

Helping others uncover customer needs, develop innovative solutions, and establish mature product processes is an area I provide value in. I am especially interested in working with small, early-stage companies as they work through these areas.

Investments

Investing is about understanding how the world works and identifying opportunities to put capital towards those areas that benefit society and shareholders. I focus on public markets as well as some private investments.

Open Source

Building on the shoulders of giants helps us get closer to the stars. I'm proud to have advocated for open source software in my professional career. Open source helped me advance my career and skills when I was learning and I'm looking for opportunities to contribute back to meaningful projects.

Gaming

One of my passions is gaming, whether it is sports, video, board, or card games. Games are a fun way to solve problems with a team or test your skills against an opponent. One of my favorite games is Go, which I have played since I was a teenager.

Products
Highlighted products I've launched
2022
GitLab Analytics

An option for customers to instrument their own applications, have the results appear in GitLab, and enrich that data with information from GitLab and other data sources. Integrated an acquired company as part of this effort.

2021
GitLab Compliance

Introduction of coverage-guided and API fuzz testing. This allows customers to find bug and security issues in their apps that traditional scanning tools and checkers miss by testing for application-specific behavior.

2019
GitLab Defend

An expansion to GitLab's offering to enable customers to protect deployed web apps from anomolous traffic and hacking attempts.

2019
Arxan for Android and iOS

A new product built from the ground up to protect modern Android applications built using languages like Kotlin and Java from hacking. This product won an RSA Hot award in 2019 when released.

2018
Arxan Threat Analytics

An expansion to our desktop, mobile, and web product lines to provide real-time alerting back to customers when their apps were under attack so they could take action. This product won an RSA Hot award in 2018 when released.

2013
TransformIT

An innovative new whitebox cryptography product for digital media, finance, banking, telecom, medical device, and other applications. It is used to protect data in apps that run on over 100 billion devices worldwide.

Experience
Working with
2022-Present
GitLab
Group Product Manager

2019-2022
GitLab
Principal Product Manager

2013-2019
Arxan Technologies
Senior Director of Product Management

2012-2013
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Associate Staff, Malware Analysis

Education
Studied at
2022
Master of Business Administration

Purdue University

2012
Master of Science
Computer Science

Purdue University

2011
Bachelor of Science
Computer Science

Graduated with Honors. Minor in Psychology
Purdue University