Samantha Wong

Sam holds a BA/LLB majoring in history from the University of New South Wales. She grew up between Perth and Sydney, Australia, the daughter of 2 migrant technology entrepreneurs. Since then she has lived in the UK, France, Denmark and spent good amounts of time in both San Francisco and Malaysia. She lives with her partner and daughter in Auckland, New Zealand. Sam enjoys yoga and traveling around the beautiful Kiwi landscape, as well as learning Te Reo Maori to complement her fluent Australian and Kiwi English, conversational French and what she describes as poor Danish.

Samantha Wong is a General Partner at Blackbird Ventures, a technology venture capital fund built to back Australia and New Zealand’s most ambitious founders. Originally operating only in Australia, Blackbird was an early investor in some of the biggest Aussie startup successes – Canva, Zoox, Safety Culture and CultureAmp. Sam led the effort to raise an inaugural $60M venture capital fund focussed on New Zealand founders, as well as establish Blackbird’s first international office in Auckland. Prior to joining Blackbird she co-founded the legaltech startup CapacityHQ and was a Product and International Strategy Manager at an ASX-listed global e-commerce startup. She initially trained as a lawyer and practiced in corporate and litigation teams at Minter Ellison before career-pivoting into startups in 2010. Sam is passionate about diversity in technology and venture capital and spearheaded the release of the Model Code of Conduct for the Startup Community in Australia as well as a venture capital internship program for women.

Sam, mentored by Andrew Rothery, is a member of Class 26 serving at Blackbird Ventures.