Brown CS Blog

Sam Dooman, a Brown CS alum who also studied music, works as the founding engineer at Down Dog, a company that develops apps for practicing fitness at home, including yoga, high-intensity interval training, and meditation.

Sam joined Down Dog in 2017, shortly after the product launched. The company was founded by two Brown alums in 2015 and operates out of San Francisco. Over the past decade, Down Dog has grown significantly, and its yoga app is now the number one search result when users search “yoga” in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.

Sam's interest in working at startups developed during his time at Brown. As a first-year student, he interned at a consulting firm outside Washington, DC, but found that the experience didn’t match what he wanted to do long term. The following summer, he interned at the meditation startup 10% Happier and discovered that he enjoyed the environment of smaller companies.

The next summer, he participated in the first summer of B Lab Ventures at Brown, working with two friends on a startup project. Through those experiences, he became confident that he wanted to work in startups after graduating.

“One thing I learned early from my prior internships was the value in working and learning directly under engineers, so I thought this experience with Down Dog would help me learn how startups are run effectively from a very engineering-led team,” says Sam. “I originally thought I would work at Down Dog for a couple years, and then go start my own thing.”

Early Work At Down Dog

When Sam joined Down Dog in 2017, the company was still in its early stages. One of his first responsibilities was building the first web version of the app. “One of my first big projects was getting the app to play video instead of showing a series of images,” he says.

The company’s user base grew rapidly in the years that followed. According to Sam, the business doubled annually during the first three years after he joined. During the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020, the company made the app free during global lockdowns, which led to a large spike in usage, almost 20x a month.

Now, almost 9 years later, Sam has built several huge features including infrastructure for fully translating the app, the generator to pick music for workouts, and the free for schools program. “In the back of my mind, I always wanted to be a teacher, maybe do something related to music, so it was cool to get to teach workout classes at scale with that aspect incorporated. I got lucky that this job checked off a lot of my personal boxes,” says Sam.

Sam says that working with the team has been one of the most rewarding aspects of the experience. “Working with people that you really respect and admire and get along with is one of the greatest things ever,” says Sam. “Brown attracts a certain kind of do-gooder, those that have a big impact on the world and want to make it better, even if it’s in a small way, like making it easier to work out at home for people, so I loved working at this startup.”

Teaching And Bootstrap

Alongside his work in industry, Sam has remained interested in teaching and education. During his time at Brown, he noticed how strongly the computer science community valued teaching through the department’s undergraduate teaching assistant (UTA) program.

“Brown CS kids care a lot about teaching and the UTA program is awesome, and I remember talking to [Brown CS faculty member] Shriram [Krishnamurthi] my senior year, who wanted more people to do the actual teaching part outside of university,” says Sam. “Hence, Bootstrap, which I was excited about, because it combined teaching a summer class with curriculum development.”

Bootstrap, which was founded and co-led by two Brown CS faculty members and serves more than 49 states and 50 countries, crafts free, research-based, integrated Computer Science and Data Science modules for Math, Science, Business and Social Studies classes in grades 5-12. Sam contributed to early work on what is now Bootstrap: Data Science, which was the first integrated Data Science course offered nationally.

“The idea of making something and then going and immediately seeing it in practice and getting to tweak it live really excites me as an engineer,” says Sam.

“Bootstrap also cares about a lot of the right things in terms of accessibility, which I admired,” says Sam. “They take care of all types of kids, like kids who can’t see a certain color or can’t use the mouse or need to use dictation.” Although he now works primarily in industry, he continues to support Bootstrap through donations and advising.

CS Education And AI

Sam is also thinking about how new technologies may shape the future of computer science education.

“When it comes to the topic of AI in education, it’s equal parts exciting and scary to me,” says Sam. “It’s now easier than ever to get started, but it’s also easier than ever to create something where you have no idea what’s going on, so it’s harder to maintain. Hopefully, everyone will figure out how to thread the needle between leveraging AI tools and not delegating all of our thoughts to them.”

Sam believes students should first build strong foundations before relying heavily on automated tools. He thinks the right path in future education for computer science students would be to manually work through the intro sequence courses without any code generators, and then gradually “put your foot on the gas” of large language models as they move into more product-based classes, which is especially helpful if they’re interested in doing startups. His use of AI consists of writing the core functionality of his work himself, and then validating it with models when needed.

The B* Fellowship

In recent years, Sam has also created a program aimed at supporting early-stage founders. “I always wanted to be a teacher, but I also want to do Down Dog probably forever, so how can I do both of those things?” asks Sam. “Well, I started a fellowship, where we created a program more specifically for individualized consumer software products, because that’s actually what I have been doing for so long.”

The program, called the B* Fellowship, provides mentorship and support to students building consumer software products. “Creating the fellowship was partially selfish because I want to surround myself with smart, interesting, motivated people, and Brown CS has an abundance of those people,” says Sam. “But Brown gave me a great education and I also wanted to pay it forward, so I’m hopefully offering something that is not easily available in the regular classes, like concrete industry experience and stories from running a startup.”

This year marks the fourth year of the fellowship. Adithya Sriram, a Mathematics/Computer Science concentrator, and Jerry Zheng, who studies International and Public Affairs/Business Economics were two of the summer 2025 fellows. With Sam’s mentorship, the pair launched a startup called Pagio.

“The B* Fellowship gave me the freedom to drop my summer internship in favor of building a startup. With Sam's support and mentorship, we were able to build and launch Pagio, which has grown to 1500 users since then,” says Adithya.

Sam says that the fellowship is designed to fund students who want to build something interesting, and might want to turn it into a business some day.

“I wanted my program to be similar in spirit to the open curriculum,” says Sam.  ”B* is an opportunity for students to try out being a founder full time, while living and breathing a problem or area they're passionate about."

Brown CS regularly publishes news articles about our pioneering and innovative alums. We have no financial involvement in any of the companies mentioned above and have not been compensated in any way for this story. The views and opinions expressed above are those of individuals, and do not necessarily state or reflect those of Brown CS, nor does their publication here constitute an endorsement of them.

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