Professional Role and Company Overview
Sam Hashemi is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Felt, a cloud-native, collaborative mapping platform headquartered in Oakland, California. Founded in March 2021 alongside co-founder Can Duruk, Felt is positioned as the world's first collaborative internet-based mapping tool designed to enable users—ranging from casual map-makers to professional teams—to create, share, and contextualize spatial data-driven maps easily and rapidly. The platform targets diverse industries including government, climate response, education, energy, utilities, insurance, telecom, and transportation.
Felt’s strategic mission revolves around making mapping effortless and accessible, reflecting increasing global dependency on maps for urgent climate change-related crises such as wildfires, floods, and droughts. The company explicitly aims to empower a wide range of users with spatial intelligence tools enabling rapid situational awareness and planning, exemplified by use cases like wildfire response coordination and infrastructure planning.
Professional Background and Expertise
Sam Hashemi’s professional trajectory demonstrates deep expertise in human-computer interaction (HCI) and user experience (UX) design, which informs his leadership philosophy and product development approach. Before founding Felt, Hashemi was CEO and Co-founder of Remix (2014 – 2021), a geospatial software platform used by over 400 cities in 19 countries for urban transportation planning. Remix was acquired in March 2021 for approximately $100 million, highlighting Hashemi’s track record in building scalable, impactful geospatial SaaS businesses.
His early career includes designing complex interfaces for specialized professionals such as astronauts, scientists, and judges, demonstrating proficiency in designing user-centric technology for demanding and varied contexts. This background supports a strong design-thinking orientation now reflected both in Felt’s product development and Hashemi’s company culture. Notably, decisions such as adopting Discord over Slack for corporate communication illustrate his emphasis on authenticity and culture design aligning with user and team experience.
Leadership Philosophy and Market Position
Hashemi emphasizes the application of design thinking beyond product to company-building, focusing on intentional decision-making and emotional resonance in communication and organizational culture. His view of design extends to managing hundreds of decisions and interactions daily to shape the company’s vision and ethos, especially critical when attracting and retaining talent in a competitive tech labor market, notably post-pandemic.
He advocates for early and transparent conversations on product-market fit and pricing strategy, underscoring adaptive leadership and strategic awareness of market pulls and customer demands learned during his Remix tenure. Hashemi prioritizes anticipating broader societal trends—such as climate change—and positioning Felt’s product to serve the evolving future of map usage rather than reactive development shaped solely by immediate customer requests.
Funding and Growth
Felt raised $4.5 million in seed funding led by Bain Capital Ventures in early 2021. The company has achieved a significant milestone by launching Felt 1.0 and actively scaling its user base, expanding from individual users to supporting team collaboration use cases. This growth phase includes strategic recruitment to build out development and design teams focused on refining the platform and broadening market penetration.
Industry and Market Relevance
Felt’s position as the only cloud-native GIS platform emphasizes agility and modern SaaS standards in spatial intelligence tools. The platform addresses clear pain points in map creation, traditionally a complex process requiring advanced technical skill or expensive proprietary software, by providing fast, intuitive map-making that supports collaborative workflows. Felt's approach addresses both consumer and enterprise demands in sectors increasingly reliant on geospatial data analytics amidst climate challenges and digital transformation pressures.
Public Presence and Thought Leadership
Sam Hashemi actively shares insights on design-led entrepreneurship, the future of mapping as a medium, and startup strategy through interviews, podcasts, and industry publications including Bain Capital Ventures insights, GISCafe interviews, and various LinkedIn posts. He is recognized for advocating the integration of design thinking in leadership, product development, and company culture. Hashemi’s background links him tightly to the human-computer interaction research community from Carnegie Mellon University and ongoing engagement in startup ecosystems.
Summary:
Sam Hashemi is a seasoned geospatial technology entrepreneur with a strong foundation in design and UX, leading Felt to become a pioneering cloud-native GIS collaboration platform focused on democratizing and revolutionizing map creation. His leadership is marked by a strategic design-thinking ethos, proven product-market success via Remix, and effective navigation of emerging climate and technology trends relevant to spatial intelligence. Felt’s recent seed funding and product launch position them for accelerated growth in multiple industries demanding agile, user-friendly mapping solutions.
