Futurist, Award-Winning Speaker, Best-Selling Author & Technology Pioneer
Samantha Radocchia, or “Sam Rad,” is a futurist, best-selling author, multimedia storyteller, and frontier tech pioneer who combines the mindsets of an anthropologist and technologist.
Sam is the founder of Radical Next, a meta-media studio and strategic consultancy creating transformative stories, experiences, and media productions that shape the future. Her upcoming book by the same name, Radical Next: Thriving in Times of Radical Change explores how “radical next ideas” and technologies will transform societies in the decades to come.
A charismatic speaker and compelling storyteller, Sam delivers keynotes and creates experiences globally at industry events, Fortune 500 corporations, trade associations, national governments, international organizations, and NGOs — empowering individuals, leaders, and organizations not only to survive, but to thrive through radical and accelerating change.
Sam was trained in anthropology and symbolic systems, studying simulated and virtual realities, multiple dimensions, and metaverses — pushing the bounds of human consciousness and social organizations through her research. Her early work focused on virtual world economies, and she was amongst the first anthropologists to live in the virtual world “Second Life” in 2009.
As a futurist, this work has led Sam on a journey working with a range of frontier technologies, indigenous and emerging social structures, people, places, and practices. She refers to herself as an archaeologist of the future, as Fredric Jameson coined — applying a traditional anthropological ethnographic approach to envisioning and illustrating future possibilities.
A four-time entrepreneur, Sam holds several patents linking the physical and digital worlds, and has served across multiple founding executive roles across the C-Suite. An early blockchain and web 3 pioneer, she previously was co-founder of LOVE, a London-based Web 3 communication platform, and Chronicled, a San Francisco-based blockchain company bringing trust to global commerce and supply chains. Prior to Chronicled, Sam founded two companies leveraging AI to map personal taste.
Sam is the author of the #1 Best Seller, Bitcoin Pizza: The No Bullshit Guide to Blockchain, writes as a contributor to Forbes, and was named to the 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30 list. She’s deeply passionate about decentralization and believes technology is a tool to empower not entrench.
Sam is no stranger to risk and has accumulated over 700 jumps as a competitive skydiver.