Samir Arora

Samir Arora was born in New Delhi, India. He studied electrical and electronic engineering at Birla Institute of Technology and Science.[2] Arora has an EMP from INSEAD, attended Executive Education at Harvard Business School, and holds a diploma in Sales and Marketing from the London Business School.[3]

Samir Arora worked at Apple[2] in Software and New Media from 1982 to 1991. Arora wrote a white paper called "Information Navigation: The Future of Computing" in late 1986[2] while working directly for the chairman and CEO of Apple, John Sculley.[4] He left Apple to found the spin-off Rae Technology from Apple.[5][6]

From 1992 to 1995, Arora was chairman and chief executive officer of Rae Technology. In 1995 Samir Arora co-founded NetObjects, Inc. and together with a design and development team including David Kleinberg, Clement Mok and his brother, Sal Arora, created NetObjects Fusion, one of the first Web design products that allowed Web sites to be designed, structured and created without programming.[7]

In 1997, after the launch of NetObjects Fusion, IBM invested approximately $100 million in a share exchange to buy 80% of NetObjects, corresponding to a valuation of around $150 million.[8] NetObjects, Inc. went public on NASDAQ in 1999 with IBM staying the majority shareholder.[9] From June 2003 to February 2004, Arora served as chairman of the board of Tickle, Inc.,[10] one of the first social networking sites founded in 1999.[11] Tickle was acquired by Monster.com in May 2004.

In 2003, Mode Media (formerly Project Y and then Glam Media), Inc. was formed by a number of people including Arora.[12] Arora was the interim CEO of Glam Media from 2003 to 2005, and CEO from 2006 to 2016.[13] For his work at Mode Media, Arora was included by MIN Magazine in the Digital Hot List 2008[14] and was named Web 2.0's Don Draper as one of the 30 men shaping our digital future by GQ Magazine [15] On June, 2017, a year and a half after the departure of Samir Arora and Marc Andreessen, Mode Media U.S. was acquired by BrideClick, who changed the company name to Glam, Inc.[16] [17] Mode Media continued its operations in International and in January, 2017 an investment group Montaro purchased Mode Media in Japan. In March, 2017 shareholders appointed Samir Arora as the executive chairman of Mode Media in Japan to help with its turnaround to rebuild Mode's technology and operations.[18][19]

In April 2016, Samir Arora founded Sage Digital,[20] a new AI verified experts platform startup and currently operates as its chief executive officer. Sage began with 100 manually curated experts and has grown to 250k experts and influencers and 5 million businesses.[21] [22]

In October 2019, celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson, started using Sage to build his digital presence—across books, restaurants, and events—and to amplify the voices of experts not heard in mainstream media. After the COVID-19 pandemic, Samuelsson’s CEO, Derek Evans, asked Sage to extend the Sage platform to handle charitable projects and contributions. Samir’s team volunteered to help and on July 18, they launched Project Bento platform for Harlem Serves Up!. In its first 24 hours, it handled an amazing $100,000 in contributions for World Central Kitchen, CityMeals on Wheels and other Harlem charities to provide urgent relief. In addition, the they helped raise $4.8 million for charities such as World Central Kitchen, CityMeals on Wheels and to create meals. [23] [24]

In July 2020, Arora with Marcus Samuelsson, Derek Evens, and Brad Koenig created Project Bento Fund, a California nonprofit corporation to provides urgent support to restaurants, local, minority-owned and BIPIOC businesses and their employees most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, economic, racial and social crisis. [25]

In August 2020, WME signed up Arora and his company Sage Digital to focus on talent partnerships with WME's clients and Sage entered into a multimillion-dollar deal with the Marcus Samuelsson Group and WME [26]

Arora was editor and publisher of the annual awards and book Foodie Top 100 Restaurants with contributing top food critics Patricia Wells, Ruth Reichl, Gael Greene, Masuhiro Yamamoto, Jonathan Gold, Bruno Verjus, Alexander Lobrano, Charles Campion, Vir Sanghvi, Aun Koh, Susumu Ohta, Kundo Koyama, Yuki Yamamura, Karen Brooks, Phil Vettel, Marie-Claude Lortie, Erika Lenkert and Diane Tapscott [27] [28]