Andrew Sampson

Andrew Sampson was born in 1995 in Atlanta, Georgia, and grew up in Atlanta. His autobiographical essay of April 18, 2025, also says that he was born in Atlanta.⁠[1][2][3]

His Substack profile says that during the financial crisis of 2007–2008 he became homeless and dropped out of high school in his first year to focus on coding full time; his personal website also calls him a high-school dropout.⁠[1][2]

In his 2025 essay he writes that he spent his 13th birthday in a Motel 6 with his father, his older sister and his newborn niece—“just our life now.” The family had lost the house, and he kept his Dell Dimension 4500 computer through repeated moves between motels; his father was out of money and the computer was to be pawned, and that night he taught himself Java in Notepad and played RuneScape. He writes that it was the first time in months that he cried.⁠[3]

In October 2015 Sampson, then 20 and living in Miami, launched Aurous. AFP wrote that Aurous described itself as a search engine for streaming, searching online platforms for music and giving links for users to listen; Sampson envisaged it as a one-stop site for music fans, who could also import playlists from other platforms. Music Business Worldwide wrote that the unlicensed music streaming service had been nicknamed “Popcorn Time For Music” and “The New Grooveshark,” and named Sampson as its owner.⁠[4][5]

Within days of the launch, the major record labels jointly sued Aurous for copyright infringement, saying it offered access to pirated material, and quickly obtained a temporary restraining order against Aurous’s infringing conduct; a court temporarily stopped the site. AFP wrote that in earlier testimony Sampson said he was unaware of copyright violations because Aurous had no control over users’ searches and no power to remove material from third-party sites.⁠[4][5]

In December 2015 Aurous reached a $3 million settlement with the five plaintiff labels, Atlantic Records, Capitol Records, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Bros. Records. In its December 9, 2015 story AFP wrote that the settlement was filed that Wednesday in federal court in Miami, that Aurous agreed to shut down permanently and pay $3 million in damages to the labels, and that Aurous did not immediately comment beyond the settlement.⁠[5][4]

Music Business Worldwide wrote that Aurous consented to the court entering a permanent injunction and judgment against it, that the settlement required Aurous and its founder to permanently stop operating aurous.me and any other website or software similar to the Aurous system, and that Aurous agreed to transfer all of the intellectual property in its service to the plaintiffs; owner Sampson agreed to cease all operations and close the platform. Cary Sherman, chairman and chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, said, “Aurous appropriately agreed to shut down.”⁠[5][4]

In 2016 Sampson met Evan Banyash. Their first project together aimed to bring a computer’s functions into the browser for managing networks of machines; called Ulterius, it was an open-source platform for managing computers from a web browser. Sampson recalled, “The goal was to bring the computer into the browser.” He said the team built a lot of technology but lacked passion for the product and disliked doing sales.⁠[6][7]

In a 2021 GeekWire interview Sampson said that before Rainway they had a company called Ulterius, a name that was sort of like a Latin word, and that Aurous, the company he had founded before that, was also a Latin word. The organizations listed on his GitHub profile include Ulterius and RainwayApp.⁠[8][9]

Looking at the users of the downloadable end-user version, the team saw that most people were using it to play video games, so it pivoted. Sampson said, “Let’s take this one core feature that everyone loves so much, optimize it for gaming, and turn that into a product.” He said the pivot began in March 2017. He recalled that the idea came at a PAX East show, when he and Banyash, waiting in line for a panel, talked with someone playing games on a phone who was very disappointed at how the mobile version was watered down compared with the PC version: “By the end of the trip, we had new clarity on how to pivot.”⁠[6][7]

Rainway was founded by Sampson and Evan Banyash and opened in early 2018 in Atlanta; in January 2018 it launched a free web-browser beta. ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry wrote that the product had been in development for 11 months before that. GeekWire’s startup spotlight gave the company’s headquarters as Atlanta and its staff as eight and said it had raised no outside money; Sampson said it “has been bootstrapped so far, to focus on building the core tech.” In an interview with Nintendo Life Sampson said that Rainway entered beta in January 2018, when it chose the web as its platform.⁠[10][7][11][12][8]

Sampson explained that the name Rainway came from Banyash, who said it was the Swahili word for “stream” with two letters changed; after Sampson had registered the company and the domain, Banyash said he did not know where he had got the word. The company moved to Seattle a couple of months later.⁠[8]

In GeekWire’s startup spotlight Sampson said that what set Rainway apart was its “games-first” approach, so that users could log in and play without knowing networking details; he called building web applications that push browsers hard the smartest move, since it let the team reach several platforms from one code base and run on locked-down school and work computers, and named letting perfectionism and premature optimization slow development during the prototyping phase as the biggest mistake. He said he had always looked up to Bill GatesBill GatesBill Gates is an American entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist who cofounded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975 and served as its chief executive and chairman. He later shifted his focus toward global health, education and climate, chairs the Gates Foundation, and manages investments through arrangements including Cascade.Open the full entry for his genuine compassion for others, which motivates him to give back, and advised new entrepreneurs to seek honest feedback: “Don’t just surround yourself with cheerleaders.”⁠[7]

Rainway took part in the Techstars Seattle accelerator, whose Demo Day was held on April 18, 2018; a GeekWire photo caption shows Sampson at Techstars Seattle Demo Day in April. Sampson and Banyash, co-founder and chief technology officer, first moved from Atlanta to Seattle for Techstars and then moved the company to Seattle permanently.⁠[7][6][13]

On June 22, 2018, the Thiel Foundation announced the 20 members of the 2018 class of the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry; he was second on the list, with his hometown given as Dallas, Georgia. The announcement lists his project as Rainway, Inc. (game streaming) and describes him as co-founder and CEO of a web-based platform that lets users play their PC games from anywhere on a range of devices. It states that the Thiel Fellowship, launched in 2011, encourages young people to pursue big ideas and start companies instead of attending college, and that fellows receive a $100,000 grant and mentorship. His personal website also describes him as a Thiel Fellow.⁠[14][2]

In 2018 Rainway raised a $1.5 million seed round from Palo Alto-based GoAhead Ventures to grow its team; GeekWire wrote in 2020 that the company received its initial startup funding in August. The team then had nine people, and the first goal was faster development for Android, iOS and game consoles. Rainway worked from Madrona Venture Group’s new Create33 space in Seattle, with staff spread across Seattle, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, Canada and Belgium.⁠[6][10]

Rainway was then in open beta with almost 85,000 users and expected to reach 100,000 within a couple of months; the standard service was free, a premium tier with options such as extra party-mode seats was planned, and the company aimed to leave beta by the end of the year. Users install the client on a gaming PC, link a Steam account and leave the computer running, then play from another device’s web browser; the benchmark is whether a device can play a 60 fps YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry video without buffering. The app is peer-to-peer, with little data beyond brokerage information and metadata passing through Rainway’s servers.⁠[6]

Demonstrating for GeekWire, Sampson used an old IBMIBMIBM (International Business Machines Corporation) is an American information technology company, renamed in 1924 from the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R).Open the full entry ThinkPad linked to a PC 150 miles away and showed a video of Project CARS at high settings streamed from San Francisco to Seattle over a local Starbucks Wi-Fi network. He said the team spent a lot of time making sure the service worked on the most common public Wi-Fi networks, with the goal of keeping latency as low as possible and bringing PC gaming to every screen with an Internet connection; the demos he cited included Destiny 2 on a Chromebook, Fortnite on an Android tablet and, his favorite, Overwatch on an Intel Compute Stick.⁠[6]

In October 2018 Sampson, as Rainway’s co-founder and CEO, was interviewed by Nintendo Life. Rainway had shown its app running on the Nintendo Switch in a “First Look” trailer that was later taken offline. Sampson said internal prototypes “performed pretty well,” but that limitations in the running method and a changing streaming protocol meant a Switch version was not in active development; he admitted the team could have done a better job communicating that the trailer was a concept, and said that Rainway would prefer an eShop release on the Switch.⁠[12]

He said the first week of launch brought so much traffic that the team struggled to keep the service online, that Rainway was gaining thousands of new users a month who played games such as Fortnite, Overwatch and Monster Hunter: World, and that the company was hiring engineers to bring the app to Android and Xbox One over the following months. He said Rainway should be “free forever,” with no paywalls and no sale of user data, making money mostly from cosmetic social features; he praised Microsoft and Sony for their responsiveness and said he was grateful to be part of Seattle’s tech and startup community.⁠[12]

On November 13, 2018, Forbes published its 2019 30 Under 30 list for games; Sampson, 23, and Evan Banyash, 22, were named together as co-founders of Rainway. Forbes described Rainway as a free web service that lets players stream PC games to other devices such as mobile phones and said it had received $1.7 million in funding. His personal website lists him as a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.⁠[11][2]

GeekWire wrote in March 2019 that Rainway had officially launched on Windows at the end of January, having raised investment for its beta the year before; GeekWire’s funding story later that year said that Rainway “made its official launch on the Windows platform last year.”⁠[15][13]

On March 19, 2019, GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry announced its Stadia cloud gaming service at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Speaking to GeekWire by phone from the conference, Sampson said, “We did get there first.” He tweeted that day that Google “misrepresented” the performance of its beta tests and that Rainway had launched low-latency game streaming in Chrome, Firefox and Safari two years earlier, “building an extension to your games, not a replacement.”⁠[15]

He argued that Google “doesn’t understand that openness is a big reason why people love playing video games,” pointing to Defense of the Ancients as an example of what players’ control over their games produces: “People want to be able to configure and tinker.” He called doing away with upgradable hardware “almost baffling.” The article said that Rainway users had logged more than two million hours of gameplay since launch and that the company had teased an announcement later that week about coming to Xbox.⁠[15]

In 2019 Rainway raised another $3.5 million on top of its seed round of the previous year, led by Bullpen Capital with Madrona Venture Group, GoAhead Ventures and Bill Mooney, bringing its total to $5.2 million. It added two advisors: David Perry, former CEO of Gaikai, which Sony acquired for $380 million, and Jon Kimmich, who spent 16 years at Microsoft and helped launch the original Xbox. The company then had 15 people and planned to bring its service to iOS (in beta), Android, Xbox and other platforms.⁠[13]

Sampson described Rainway as “entirely decentralized” and compatible with various digital distributors and hardware providers; he said Stadia required buying games on Google’s cloud hardware and took away modding. He described Party, a feature in development that lets users host multiplayer lobbies for any game and invite friends or strangers on any device, and said Rainway wanted to build a “personal NetflixNetflixNetflix is a U.S. entertainment company that offers streaming series, films, games, and live programming, headquartered in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997, it grew from online DVD rental into an international subscription entertainment service and also runs original content, advertising, and in-person experience businesses.Open the full entry for games.” Kimmich said that Sampson and the Rainway team had proven they could deliver the service.⁠[13]

In 2020 GeekWire gathered statements from Seattle startup leaders on racism and discrimination amid the outrage over George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. Sampson, CEO of the gaming startup Rainway, took part in the Seattle protests that past weekend and said he was “hit dead on with tear gas.” He urged investors to “normalize the idea of investing in talented black founders by actually doing it.”⁠[16]

In January 2020 Rainway released a public beta of its game streaming platform on Xbox One: users installed the app from the Microsoft Store and opened Rainway’s dashboard on a Windows 10 PC to stream. The servers were overwhelmed on launch day; Sampson said, “We put on 30,000 new users in the first day.” On January 29, 2020, he tweeted from his account @Andrewmd5 thanking users for crashing the API. Users across all platforms then numbered about 300,000, Rainway had released iOS and Android versions, and it had recently raised $3.5 million.⁠[10]

Sampson said cloud gaming services such as Google Stadia were not competition, because Rainway served PC gamers with different needs: “Cloud gaming is an entirely different market.” On January 31, 2020, GeekWire added an update saying that Rainway had been removed from the Microsoft Store “for the time being” because of “unexpected circumstances.”⁠[10]

On April 19, 2021, Seattle-based Rainway announced a partnership with Microsoft, providing its software development kit (SDK) and integrating its browser solution into the Xbox Cloud Gaming streaming stack so that Xbox content could be played in Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome and Safari. The release said companies could license the SDK through Rainway App Services to build their own real-time interactive streaming experiences, with Microsoft one of the first App Services partners; it names CEO Sampson and CTO Evan Banyash as co-founders. Sampson said Microsoft “was able to use our technology to bring Xbox Cloud Gaming to more users and devices.” His personal website says that the technology of Rainway, which he founded, powers Xbox Cloud Gaming.⁠[17][2]

His Substack profile describes Rainway as a “cloud-streaming stack” that brought cloud gaming to mainstream audiences and helped Microsoft reach billions of devices.⁠[1]

In 2021 Sampson, as co-founder and CEO, gave GeekWire an interview. The article said that Rainway’s technology powered the PC and iOS versions of Microsoft’s Project xCloud and that the company had grown to 15 people and remained independent despite several acquisition offers. Sampson recalled that a Microsoft engineer came across Rainway while demonstrating Azure in Africa, where there were no Xbox servers, which led to meetings with Catherine Gluckstein, head of product and strategy for Project xCloud, and Phil Spencer, head of Xbox; he said Rainway did not seek prominent credit because it was no longer focused on consumer gaming.⁠[8]

His Substack profile quotes Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming: “Andrew is awesome. I’ve learned a lot from him in our discussions on many topics.”⁠[1]

Sampson said Rainway was moving from gaming to technology for building, distributing and testing desktop apps, developing Rainway App Services and Instant Apps to stream desktop software such as games and 3D architecture programs from its data centers to browsers, so that a $300 Chromebook could run software that normally needs a powerful PC, with schools, the public and private sectors, architecture and gaming as targets. He said the cloud was too far away, AWSAmazon Web ServicesAmazon Web Services (AWS) is the cloud computing business of Amazon. Launched in July 2002, it made its public debut with the Amazon S3 storage service on March 14, 2006, and has since added hundreds of services, including Amazon EC2; its segment net sales were about $46.0 billion in the third quarter of 2026.Open the full entry’s US West 2 region being in OregonOregonOregon (officially the State of Oregon) is a state on the Pacific coast of the western United States; its capital is Salem and its largest city is Portland. It was admitted to the Union on February 14, 1859, as the 33rd state. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 4,237,256.Open the full entry, a couple of hundred miles from Seattle, so Rainway was building data centers in cities for latency as low as 16 to 20 milliseconds; he called the desktop ecosystem a “Wild West” and said Rainway planned APIs to standardize updates, code signing and distribution.⁠[8]

He said Rainway App Services was a paid developer platform priced at $30 per user per month for an organization plus usage fees; he said IntelIntelIntel is a semiconductor company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, founded by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore in 1968; it introduced the 4004 microprocessor in 1971, its x86 processors have long powered personal computers, it has pursued a foundry strategy since 2021, and Lip-Bu Tan has been its chief executive officer since 2025.Open the full entry benchmarks ranked Rainway first in latency, bandwidth use and resource use, that the company had spent about four to five years on video compression, and that compression was only about 30% of the work, the team having also built its own network stack, message formats and packet handling.⁠[8]

On July 26, 2021, the law firm Hutchison PLLC published on JD Supra a video feature by Trevor Schmidt, “Startup CEO Who Coded His Way Out: Rainway’s Andrew Sampson.” The page says that Sampson did not have a conventional path, that he had been underestimated throughout his life, had experienced overt racism and had heard “no” more times than he could count; it says he had been through Techstars, grown the team to more than 15 people, raised funding for Rainway and built it to revenues of over $10 million.⁠[18]

On September 2, 2021, Scott Hanselman’s Hanselminutes podcast released episode 804, “Powering Cloud gaming with Rainway's Andrew Sampson.” The show notes say the technology behind Rainway’s web-based gaming platform powers the PC and iOS versions of Microsoft’s Project xCloud, and that Hanselman and Sampson talked about his career and how Rainway uses web technology.⁠[19]

On February 10, 2025, Sampson published “zeroperl: Sandboxing Perl with WebAssembly” in his Substack newsletter ./make, writing, “I'm building a new startup and file metadata plays an important role.” The zeroperl it describes is a build of Perl compiled to WebAssembly so that tools such as ExifTool can run client-side, fully sandboxed and self-contained; he mentions having experimented with compiling .NET to WebAssembly and having contributed filesystem fixes to the WACS WebAssembly runtime.⁠[20]

On April 14, 2025, he published a post introducing Hako, a fork of PrimJS, the JavaScript engine behind ByteDance’s Lynx framework, compiled to WebAssembly so that it can be embedded in any program, with sandboxing, memory and “gas” limits and profiling; the post claims 28% gains over QuickJS in synthetic benchmarks and a release build of about 800KB. He wrote that he was releasing Hako into early access that day as “an early 30th birthday gift to myself.” His GitHub profile pins Hako, the binary serialization tool bebop and the real-time API framework tempo, all under the 6over3 organization.⁠[21][9]

On April 18, 2025, he published the essay “Oh, the Life You'll Live,” writing that he turned 30 that day and was in the Japanese countryside with “the love of my life” beside him. He wrote that in the seventeen years since his thirteenth birthday he had worked alongside people he had idolized, helped build industries worth billions, traveled the world, bought his first home and found family in the most unlikely places. He recalled that at 25, during the pandemic, he led more than 30 people and his company kept going while others downsized or closed; afterwards he burned out, felt he had lost part of himself and stepped away from everything he knew to recover. He describes himself as a builder who loves technology and thanks the friends, mentors and investors who supported him.⁠[3]

As of November 2026 his personal website says that he previously founded Rainway and is now thinking about how AI can optimize developer experience (DevEx) and disrupt incumbents; it says he currently lives in Tokyo. His GitHub profile gives his location as Japan and his company as 6over3.⁠[2][9]

Sampson created Netflix Roulette. Adweek describes it as an API-driven website on which users filter Netflix films and shows by genre, rating, director, actor or keyword and then press “spin” for a random pick. In his Substack profile he writes that the viral web app gave developers an alternative API for Netflix data after Netflix killed its public API, and that it was sold to Reel Good in 2018. ETCentric wrote that Reelgood, which tracks more than 300 streaming services, had acquired Netflix Roulette and planned to extend the random-pick feature to services such as AmazonAmazonAmazon is a publicly traded U.S. technology and retail company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, with its principal corporate offices in Seattle. Its businesses span e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment, digital advertising, membership and entertainment services, consumer electronics, and Amazon Web Services cloud computing.Open the full entry, HBO, HuluHuluHulu is a U.S. subscription streaming service offering series, films and original programming from the major television networks and studios, along with Hulu + Live TV, which includes live channels. It was founded in 2007 as a joint venture between NBCUniversal and News Corporation and opened to the public in March 2008; after a series of ownership changes, The Walt Disney Company took operational control in 2019 and full ownership in 2025, and is integrating Hulu into Disney+ as Disney’s global general entertainment brand.Open the full entry, Showtime and Starz; Reelgood said that Netflix Roulette’s creator “had moved on to other projects and no longer had time and energy to maintain the product.”⁠[22][1][23]

He created Borderless Gaming, a tool that turns windowed video games into borderless, fullscreen-style windows and saves time-consuming alt-tabs. In his Substack profile he writes that it has been adopted by millions and influenced how Windows displays video games. The project’s GitHub repository sits under his account, is open source under the GNU General Public License v2.0, was previously hosted as Codeusa/Borderless-Gaming and is also sold on Steam; as of November 2026 it had about 6,700 stars. His profile also says that he contributed to the survival horror game The Forest.⁠[24][1]

In an essay published on January 2, 2026, he recalls that at seven, just after having his tonsils removed and with his doctor forbidding solid food for weeks, he badly wanted the Rocket Power toy that came with Burger KingBurger KingBurger King is a fast-food hamburger chain founded in Miami in 1954, known for its flame-grilled burgers and its signature Whopper, and is the world’s second-largest fast-food hamburger chain by number of restaurants. Since 2014 it has been part of Restaurant Brands International, a Canada-incorporated company headquartered in Miami, together with Tim Hortons, and the vast majority of its restaurants are run by franchisees.Open the full entry’s fries; he worked on his father, who refused several times before bringing the fries home, and after a few fries he coughed blood onto the table. His father cleaned up and asked whether it had been worth it, and he said it had. He writes that he remembers this every time someone tells him that creative is a corner you can cut.⁠[25]

On his personal website he calls himself a self-taught engineer and a Techstars graduate. His Substack profile calls him “one of America’s few and most renowned Black tech founders,” describes him as an avid analog street photographer who shoots everyday life on 35mm and medium-format film cameras and writes essays on race, mental health and socioeconomic inequality, and says that he lives in New York City and Paris; his personal website says that in his spare time he restores vintage film cameras, most recently an Andy Warhol photo booth, and writes.⁠[2][1]

His Substack newsletter is called ./make. Posts listed in its archive include “Bringing .NET to the Edge: How to Run Your CLI Applications on Cloudflare Workers with WASI” (November 21, 2023); “zeroperl: Sandboxing Perl with WebAssembly” (February 10, 2025); “Get in loser. We're rewinding the stack.” (February 11, 2025); “4 mains or nothing at all.” and “RE: VSCode Extension Drama” (March 1, 2025); “Hako” and “Oh, the Life You'll Live” (April 2025); “Reverse Engineering iWork” (October 15, 2025); “Embedding TypeScript” (November 6, 2025); “TypeScript x Perl” (November 15, 2025); and “If the Marketing Is Good, You'll Bleed for the Product” (January 2, 2026).⁠[26][25]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[27]

Personal website: https://andrew.im/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

Substack newsletter ./make: https://andrews.substack.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2][1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/andrewmd5 (opens in a new window).⁠[2][9]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rust/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2][9]

GitHub: Public account: https://github.com/andrewmd5 (opens in a new window).⁠[2][9]

Instagram: Public account: https://www.instagram.com/andrew.rfc/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]