Sam Fort
Sam Fort stepped into the board chair role at America SCORES Bay Area in 2024 after 16 years on the board, bringing both deep organizational knowledge and growth expertise from his role as partner at DFJ Growth. We talked to Sam about his earliest roots, what has kept him committed to the organization, and the promise and pitfalls of AI for SCORES and beyond.
You grew up in Texas. How did that experience shape you?
I was actually born in Philadelphia while my parents were grad students at UPenn. But within six months, we moved to Texas. My dad, a New Englander and bit of a countercultural academic, earned a PhD in Asian religions and took a position at TCU in Fort Worth. My mom was an MBA from Wharton, so that’s where I probably got my business interest.
Fort Worth is much bigger now, but back then it was only a few hundred thousand people. It was a fish-out-of-water story for my Northern Yankee family. But being Texan is something I really grew to appreciate. Fort Worth prides itself on its Texas roots. People wear 10-gallon hats and big boots and go to the honky-tonk on weekends. Fort Worth is also known for the stock show and its rodeos, and of course, its fantastic Mexican food. It was a great place to grow up.
When I go back to Texas, I can have a bit of drawl. I say “Howdy” and “Y’all”, that kind of stuff. But I never really fully embraced the cultural or political mindset. The politics there are much more conservative, and there’s more of a draw to fields like agriculture and construction, though also service industries like real estate and law.
After high school, I moved to the Northeast and back to UPenn to study electrical engineering and economics.
You ended up in the tech world, or working alongside it in your professional career. When did the tech bug first bite you?
My dad got us an Apple IIGS computer when I was in elementary school. I was around seven or eight. It had these big floppy disks and very little memory. It couldn’t do much. But I remember logging in and playing a game called “Kid Pix.” You had a canvas and could draw whatever you wanted, like a digital wallpaper. It seems quaint today, but I love it and got hooked. I also played strategy games and then took up coding in middle school because I thought it would be interesting to build my own games. The experience taught me I could create anything on this incredible canvas of a computer.
In the mid-90s, in the early days of the Internet, I was in eighth or ninth grade. All of a sudden, I had access to all this information, literally right at my fingertips. I remember opening my eyes, thinking, Wow, this is amazing. This could change everything.
The other big moment was at Camp Watonka, in Pennsylvania. It had all the regular summer camp stuff, but the real draw was the science component. I was able to take an electronics class where we built a circuit board and installed transistors and capacitors. I remember being in the lab wearing my goggles and using a soldering iron to create a strobe light. It was amazing that I could build a real electronic device and understand how it all worked. It was a formative experience – my first exploration of electrical engineering – and it felt like magic.
You’ve stepped into the board chair role at America SCORES after 17 years with the organization. What initially drew you to SCORES, and what’s kept you there?
Soccer was my first love growing up. I played through high school and then intramurally in college. In high school, I coached a YMCA team of five and six-year-olds. Though the idea came out of looking for something charitable to do for my college applications, I ended up loving it. We had a blast that season.
So when I came out to the Bay Area, I was looking around for some nonprofits to work with. I volunteered with a few organizations, but hadn’t found one I wanted to stick with for the long term. In 2008, I played in the SCORES Corporate Cup with my team at TPG, where I was working at the time. The Cup was super fun and very professionally run. There, I learned about the program – soccer, poetry, service learning. What’s that all about?
I met Colin Schmidt (SCORES Executive Director) and asked if we could grab coffee to talk more about the program. He was smart, motivated, and an ambitious leader. I was only 26, but I asked if there were openings on the board. He was receptive and invited me to join a board meeting. I liked the group and realized I could learn a lot, not only from Colin, but also from other board members, including (former board chairs) Jon Denholtz and Mark Talucci.
Seventeen years later, I’m still here and passionate and excited about the future. The scale of the program has matured immensely. Back then, our budget was around $200-300K a year. Now it’s $7 million-plus, and we’re reaching so many more kids. Every time I go to an event and see the kids read their poetry, I realize what an impact we’re having. At the recent field opening at MLK Middle School, Mayor Daniel Lurie came for the ribbon cutting, and NBC and Telemundo televised the event. We’re making waves, and it’s awesome to be part of that momentum.
Being part of SCORES gives me some perspective on the world we live in, which includes fast-moving tech, wild-eyed entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, and venture capital companies working to change the world. SCORES grounds me and reminds me that this is the real world. These are the people we’re helping and who are helping others. It means a lot to me.
I also see a lot of expansion potential for what we’re doing now. We’re working with districts like Contra Costa County, bringing them programming that meets their specific needs. We can use more digital tools and AI to expand our reach and distribution, and we have people on the board and staff who understand how to make that happen. I think there’s another level we can take this to over the coming decade. I’m excited to get that kickstarted in my tenure as board chair.
AI feels almost omnipresent now in the Bay Area. Where do you see the opportunities and possible hazards of AI for SCORES and the broader community?
The world is becoming increasingly digital in many ways: in how we interact with each other, how we learn, and how we entertain ourselves. We’ve digitized our communication, record-keeping, and data analysis. One thing I’m excited about at SCORES is the rich data set we have about kids and their outcomes. We can look at this data longitudinally over a long period with far better tools now to automate, manipulate, and analyze it to fully understand the kinds of impacts we’re having. What are the levers to drive better obesity outcomes, better academic outcomes, or college acceptances?
Newer technology also helps us with our fundraising and the donor side. We can track our donors better now and identify who might be interested in a program like SCORES. We can automate the drafting of emails and streamline our grant applications to reach donors while adding in personalization and customization. We could also take our curriculum and our poetry lessons to far more kids through digital applications that don’t require boots on the ground. With generative AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others, we can imagine creating digital coach sidekicks customized to each child that help kids with their social, emotional outcomes and keep them on track with their curriculum learning. These are the kinds of ideas we’re working through to create more engaging experiences for kids with better outcomes.
But there are risks that come with the use of AI. Are you going to be able to achieve these kinds of outcomes? Are kids going to be as engaged as they would be with a real-life person coaching them through things in the classroom? Are there data and privacy issues we need to be aware of, like data getting into the wrong hands and kids’ information ending up on the dark web? So there are a lot of risks that come with the benefits that we have to calibrate. But my hope is that we can drive a better program with better outcomes and broader distribution.
Philosophically, I think we’re going to have to wrestle with the inequities that technology drives in the decades to come. Technology, back to the Industrial Revolution, has created inequality and a growing gap between the haves and have-nots. People who can harness that technology reap disproportionate rewards, while tech can marginalize others.
I think it’s incumbent on the AI-led companies and the people backing them to find ways to give back and do right by humanity, rather than just reap the rewards themselves. It’s a real positive that many of these companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have a public benefit component (and in OpenAI’s case, a nonprofit attached to the company that prioritizes the mission of creating safe AI for the benefit of humanity). We’ve got to ensure that those gains are relatively distributed across everyone. So my hope is that in the Bay Area, that ethos continues to be a top priority.
Final question. Help us understand Sam. What are the absolute essentials for your day?
I’m a bit of a health biohacking nerd and have tried all kinds of stuff. I wear my Apple Watch and have tried a Whoop Band and an Oura Ring. But in the morning, the thing I’m most grateful for is my Eight Sleep. It’s a water-filled pad that you put on top of your mattress that’s connected to a cooling or heating device that spreads warm or cool water on top of your mattress. I like things cold, while my fiancé likes it warm. So it all works out.
After that, I need a caffeine kick, so a hot pot of coffee gets me going. I try not to eat breakfast, though, as I do a 16-hour fast. Not a big deal as I’m not usually hungry in the mornings. Then I listen to podcasts as I’m driving to work, mostly tech and health & wellness-related ones. And I exercise five or six days a week, as much for my mental as physical health. I’m usually doing 6,000 to 8,000 steps a day and weight training three days a week – and a sauna after that. On weekends, we do something active, like hiking or Barry’s Bootcamp.
And then after all of that, I really like to kick back with some really good TV, a movie, or a good basketball game (go Dubs!).
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