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Startup CEO Who Coded His Way Out: Rainway’s Andrew Sampson

Rainway takes real-time streaming to new heights with a suite of low-latency, bufferless tools for developers and organizations. Sounds amazing right? Well, we had the privilege of talking to Andrew Sampson who is the CEO of this forward-thinking gaming development company. 

 

If you want to build cloud gaming services or need to send high-end video and audio to your phone or tablet without worrying about the processing power on the other end, Rainway’s got you covered. 

Andrew started the company in Atlanta five years ago, then moved it to Seattle where it went through the Techstars program in 2018, and in 2019, Rainway raised $3.5M. Rainway’s original product, now called Rainway Gaming, allows people to dial into their PC or cloud-service provider through any remote device to play games from their personal gaming library. 

Since this product started, Rainway has developed many more software and services to make gaming development and gaming, in general, more efficient for its users. In the past few years, the team has grown and now has 15 members. This number will continue going up as the company keeps striving to scale up the ladder. Given his current success, it is hard to believe that not that long ago, things looked decidedly different for Andrew. 

Unfortunately, Andrew got into technology right at the time of the 2008 recession. It was a difficult time for him and everyone in the country and he ended up becoming homeless. This was due to the obvious economic circumstances that everyone was facing at that time. He realized that his way of getting out of this was dropping out of high school and learning how to code himself. He said to himself that “coding is going to be the way that I sort of lift myself out of this poverty.” 

As a company, Rainway is starting to transition away from making the gaming development world their core focus and quickly realizing that they have technology that allows them to change the way desktop applications are built, distributed and tested. They have begun building new services and applications such as Rainway App Services and Instant Apps. These services allow you to take your desktop applications such as video games and any other apps you have on your desktop and push them into Rainway’s data center. This infrastructure allows you to start using the desktop apps immediately inside of your web browser. 

Andrew fought his hardest battles and ended up coming out of his difficulties with Rainway. Both he and the company grew in more ways than one and continue to grow and foster an accessible and efficient digital environment. 

Want to hear more about Andrew’s story? Check out the full episode of the Founder Shares podcast, available wherever you like to listen.