Software People Stories Following the money with Sam Fonoimoana
In this episode, Sam Fonoimoana, Founder and CEO of Datajoin – a B2B marketing analytics company, shares his thoughts and experiences related to
- Growing up in Hawaii and California and studying at BYU
- Choosing business as a career in joining his Father in law’s export business
- Getting into MBA to study Finance
- Starting with a role to plan budgets and review progress with various departments in a publishing company
- Learning to code, to get various reports to analyze data, as an analyst
- How he gets and associates context with data, to infer meaning
- His philosophy of following the money: get customers, retain customers
- His trigger to start his company, Datajoin, to connect data from the web and data that resides within an enterprise using context
- Experience of working with techies, after the export business
- His experience from being part of sports teams influencing the core values at Datajoin - that include Aloha! and ‘it takes a village to raise a child’
- Confidence he got from his mother - about being able to get anything he wanted to achieve
- His joy and frustrations with Information technology
- How he sees the impact of AI/ML techniques on data analytics
- His career advice, for people considering a career or aspiring to shift to Data techniques
Sam Fonoimoana started his career in Finance (FP&A) and transitioned into Marketing Analytics helping companies such as Adobe, DOMO and Ancestry.com. He also taught Marketing Analytics at BYU Hawaii in beautiful Laie, HI.Today, he is the Founder and CEO of Datajoin – a B2B marketing analytics company that is the go-to solution for connecting first-party data across the MarTech stack through their proprietary “Micro Integrations”. Their customers include Cisco, ARM, Adobe and Equifax.Sam is the first VC-backed tech Founder and CEO of Polynesian descent in Utah having closed a seed round led by Sepio Capital.Sam and his wife Sabrina never have a dull moment with their children. They have 3 beautiful daughters and 4 wonderful sons. All 4 of their sons have been diagnosed with autism. When Sam is not at his computer, he can be found with his family at the park, rec center, restaurant, or on a road trip!Sam received his MBA in Finance from Brigham Young University.
You can reach him at
Linkedin.com/in/sam-fonoimoana