Steve Sammartino

Steve wrote his first lines of computer code at age 10. He is one Australia’s most respected futurists and business technologists. He has an incredible ability to make sense of how emerging technology applies to your industry.

He is a born entrepreneur, and had his first startup at age 12 – an organic egg farm before the words “organic” or “startup” had been invented! He even started a clothing business part time and managed to build up the business to a point where he sold it. He used to start work at 5 am, sell to customers at lunch time and do the administration at night.

After completing studies in Economics and Finance at University he worked in multiple Fortune 500 companies including Proctor & Gamble, SAB Miller, Kimberly Clark, Mondelez (Kraft / Cadbury), WPP (the world’s biggest media company). He held many senior positions culminating in Directorships before decided to revert to his true passion for technology. His experience means he intimately understands the disruptive forces many established companies are facing today.

Steve has had multiple technology startups and he launched one of the first ‘Sharing Economy’ startups Rentoid.com, before Uber or Airbnb. Steve had a successful exit selling the startup to a public company. He now invests in emerging technologies and has multiple advisory board positions in startups involved in a variety of disruptive technologies across the Airline Industry, Automotive, Real Estate & Co-working, Internet of things, Quantified Self, Mobile applications, and 3D Printing technologies. Steve is heavily involved in the startup scene in Shanghai, China and has a passion for the culture. He travels there regularly for business and even speaks Mandarin.

Extreme projects are something Steve loves doing, in order to demonstrate what is possible today. He knows how to generate attention in the modern age of marketing with a number of his viral videos to his name. He recently built a full size driveable Lego car from 500,000 pieces. It has an engine made completely from Lego, and it runs on air. He also crowd funded the project on Twitter. It has over 8 million views on Youtube and was a global news story. He also put a toy space ship into earth orbit for under $2000 to prove how cheap powerful technology has become.

His debut book, The Great Fragmentation is a technology strategy manifesto for the modern age. It has been translated into multiple languages and has received rave reviews from some of the world’s leading business thinkers. It has a 5 star rating on Amazon. In 2017 Steve published his highly anticipated second book, The Lessons School Forgot, How to hack your way through the technology revolution.

A media commentator on technology and the future, Steve is a regular on the ABC and provides expert assessment on the rapidly evolving technology sector. He has also been featured on the BBC, The Smithsonian Institute, The Discovery Channel, Mashable, Wired, The LA times, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and even had documentaries made about his projects.