After starting a small web consultancy building Drupal sites as a high school student in Connecticut, he dabbled in systems administration for Drupal, worked in hosting engineering at Acquia, then joined mobile payment startup Venmo as a one-man systems engineering group where he worked on scaling up their data stores and performance tuning.
Sam Kottler is a new Linux Foundation individual member. That company was sold this summer for $26 million and Kottler started working full time in the virtualization R&D group at Red Hat. Meanwhile, the sophomore at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts is pursuing a double major in political science and computer science. On the side, he contributes to Fedora and volunteers a few hours each month for the New York group of Technology for Obama.