2025 Vic Award
The 2025 Victorian Pearcey Entrepreneur Award was presented to Sam Kroonenburg, co-founder and CEO of A Cloud Guru, and co-founder and co-CEO of Cuttable. The award was presented at a special dinner in Melbourne by Professor Eduard Hovy, Executive Director of Melbourne Connect, University of Melbourne.
Victorian Pearcey Chair, Jordan Green, summarised:
Once again the Victorian Pearcey Entrepreneur Award recognises the creation of a global success story, from right here in Melbourne.
Sam built a global success from scratch that has helped millions of students grow their careers and advance the cloud computing technologies that we all rely upon today. What stood out for the Pearcey Foundation in recognising Sam for this award are his continuing efforts and passion for technology and building companies with Cuttable, and in funding new founders and guiding our tech ecosystem.
Those who have worked with him are inspired by his ability to keep it all together while exuding optimism and energy; not caving under the relentless pressure to keep the technical, commercial, and creative aspects running at full speed. They call him a truly special person who is intelligent, energetic, collaborative, and an incredibly hard worker. His passion for technology and building companies does Australia proud on the world stage."
Photos
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Sam Kroonenburg
Sam was born and raised in Perth. In 1998, at 14, he took a weekend job in a local computer store. In 2005 he graduated with a degree in Software Engineering from Curtin University.
His early career was with Microsoft where he did innovative work in operating system development and systems utilities like the disk defragmenter, backup, and restore. His time with Microsoft included a stint in Oslo working on advanced, next generation search and SharePoint, working in C# and ASP.Net for both client and server side.
In 2010, Sam moved back to Melbourne and joined Kiandra IT, a consultancy helping clients with custom software development. In this role he gained a lot of experience; technically in full-stack development, Azure, and user experience; commercially while working on e-commerce, and corporate solutions; and, in management of projects and later, in executive and account management.
In 2015, Sam's older brother Ryan failed an interview for a job at Amazon in the UK. Back then, AWS was starting to grow rapidly, so the two brothers decided to write an online AWS training course, which they posted on the Udemy marketplace. An instant success due to the thousands of people eager for AWS certification who preferred a $20-$50 online course to paying $5k-$10k for in-person AWS training. Those first online courses were typically 20-30 hours long and presented in a way that was informative, fun, and interesting to watch.
A year later, unhappy with Udemy taking half of their revenue, they decided to build their own platform. At that time, AWS serverless was very new so building their platform and courses in parallel was state-of-the-art. Sam amazed his team as he helped build everything including video hosting, dynamic transcoding, payments, onboarding, instrumentation, forums, and more. He also led and drove the commercial effort and this company, known as A Cloud Guru, featured at conferences (their own, held in a warehouse in NY, and AWS Reinvent) and online (e.g., on Black Friday, a special offer increased their sales 40 times).
In 2017, he opened an office in Austin, Texas. The B2C approach was making them famous, which led to a B2B approach to drive scale. Corporates started buying enterprise licences, and the company grew rapidly adding programmers, content creators, editors and other support staff. With a proven product-market fit, Sam raised a $9m Series A investment to expand offices, staff, B2B sales, and introduce new features, including a sandbox and exam simulation.
In 2019 he raised a $40m Series B and then a much larger Series C to acquire a competitor. He managed the negotiations, merger and integration, making A Cloud Guru a global leader in AWS education and an AWS Hero organisation. Sam was regularly asked to give keynotes at AWS conferences and was invited to join the Forbes Technology Council.
By 2021, A Cloud Guru had grown to 2.5 million students and 4,500 customers worldwide. Sam was training more students on cloud computing than all the universities in Australia combined.
In June that year, A Cloud Guru was acquired by Vista Equity Partners and merged with competitor Pluralsight in a deal valued at more than $2b.
In 2023 Sam co-founded Cuttable, a first-of-its-kind automated content agency that combines advertising creativity with marketing science and AI technology. Cuttable enables brands and agencies to create entire advertising campaigns in the time it usually takes to write a brief. His purpose for this company is to give power back to the smaller brands who are competing with multi-billion-dollar entities. Cuttable is levelling the playing field by giving growth brands access to agency level strategy, design and output at a fraction of the price and by providing marketing teams with automated content generation at scale. The product helps marketing teams create, repurpose, edit, approve, publish, review, and repeat content
In January this year Sam became a founding Limited Partner of Glitch Capital, a $50m venture fund that is the first collaboration in Australia of tech founders who have exited their companies after achieving multibillion dollar valuations. A founders-for-founders approach that echoes the ethos and character of our recipient.
Choosing the recipient for this award is guided by three principles. Has the individual taken a risk, is this individual making a difference and is this individual an inspiration to others.
Taking a Risk
Sam has certainly taken those bold entrepreneurial risks. Building leading-edge technology to take the early lead in an emerging global market and scaling rapidly despite the risks. Now doing that again!
Making a Difference
He built a global success from scratch right here in Melbourne that helped millions of students grow their careers and advance the cloud computing technologies upon which we all rely today. The difference Sam has made to all those lives has been enhanced by the stellar exit and his continuing efforts to build global success from Melbourne, to fund new founders and to guide our tech ecosystem.
Being an Inspiration
Those who have worked with Sam are inspired by his ability to keep it all together while exuding optimism and energy; not caving under the relentless pressure to keep the technical, commercial, and creative aspects running at full speed. They call him a truly special person who is intelligent, energetic, collaborative, and an incredibly hard worker. His passion for technology and building companies does Australia proud on the world stage.
Those close to Sam assure us his success hasn’t changed him. They know him as a very nice person who is supportive, gentle, enthusiastic, confident, and humble. Always a collaborator and an open-minded problem solver. He partnered with his brother, has been supported and encouraged by his wife, and is father to five children under 15.
All of these and more, mean that Sam has very definitely taken a risk, made a difference, and is an inspiration!
An admirable Australian, his journey continues, his impact is growing, and I am confident that Sam will continue to inspire others in ways that make the world a better place.
Press
Mi3 Fast News, September 5th 2025, AI ad platform founder Sam Kroonenburg honoured with Pearcey Victorian Entrepreneur Award
CMOtech Asia, September 8th 2025, Sam Kroonenburg awarded for tech leadership & global impact
eCommerceNews Australia, September 8th 2025, Sam Kroonenburg awarded for tech leadership & global impact
