Sami Khan

Sami Khan is an experienced growth marketer specialised in helping early-stage consumer-facing products launch and scale to millions of customers. He played key roles in the growth and development of companies now collectively valued over $15B, including Acorns, Honey, Dave.com, Root, and many more.

Sami is a Bachelor of Science in Management, Marketing, and Law from A.B. Freeman School of Business. He co-founded Startcase Digital to help early-stage startups find customers on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. The company has helped over 130+ different startups in the US and internationally validate product demand, refine positioning, and scale. 

He was also the Growth Advisor at Honey (joinhoney.com, which later got acquired by PayPal) where he contributed to the company’s efforts to pioneer digital growth efforts for the top savings extension in the world. 

Sami now focuses on bridging the virtual and physical worlds with ATLAS Reality, Inc. which he founded in 2016. The firm pioneered owning virtual real estate simulating the real world where players can claim land exactly where they are standing in the real world. With ATLAS players get cash back for every parcel of land they own in the ATLAS metaverse. 

After his Bachelor of Science in Management, Marketing, and Law from A.B. Freeman School of Business in 2011, Sami Khan began his work as a West Coast Regional Coordinator at Examracker, Inc., where he helped coordinate MCAT courses in the Southern California region, sometimes teaching MCAT courses himself.

He joined Memorandom, a photo communication app as a Chief Executive Officer in 2012. The project’s collaboration with AF / Square team, the digital investment unit inside of the Atom Factory, resulted in "office hours” series on LinkedIn to talk about the companies coming through its offices in Los Angeles.

Thereafter, Sami joined Leads Barter, Inc. as Business Development Manager in 2013 in Greater Los Angeles Area. As a Growth Advisor at Skurt (Acquired by Fair.com), which he joined in 2015, he was responsible for the launch and growth of the demand rental car service. 

He was also the Growth Advisor at Honey (joinhoney.com, which later got acquired by PayPal) where he contributed to the company’s efforts to pioneer digital growth efforts for the top savings extension in the world. 

Sami joined Acorns, a financial and payments solution, in 2014. He led launch efforts to grow the company as the #1 finance app in the US in 2014. He also advised on pre-launch strategy and set up all campaign strategies that included Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Twitter, Google, Youtube, TV, and Radio. 

Now the marketer who helped grow that business to a nearly $1 billion valuation is turning his attention to location-based gaming in the hopes that he can take on leading contender Niantic with a startup that challenges the notion of what gaming could be,  Atlas Reality.

Sami takes the skills he honed while building up services like Acorns, the browser extension for bargain hunters like Honey, game development to make games more viral from their inception and integrate new types of experiences.

“The biggest thing is how do you de-risk what is perceived as a hit-driven industry?” Sami says.

“Games are closer to digital apps than back in the days of the console and companies should ship it like an e-commerce concept… If adoption of the game is going to be the decision factor of whether a game fails or succeeds… why isn’t the adoption of the game tested before the title is built or while the game is being conceived?”

So for his first foray into gaming, Sami is combining a crowdsourced approach to the development of the game and applying it to what many people think is gaming’s next big frontier — the location.

With Atlas Reailty, Sami pushes the limits of what it means to be a “game”. The virtual real estate product, ATLAS:EARTH, creates a gamified experience that earns players cash back. By owning parts of the world in which they live, work and play, the company is proving that players care about their “local” status, even in a virtual version of their world.