For those who have not heard the news, Sam Blackman, the founder of AWS Elemental, died unexpectedly at the age of 41 this week, due to sudden cardiac arrest. Faultline first came across Sam in September 2011, after we published an interview with Julien Signes, the CEO of Elemental rival Envivio, likening him to Gerard Depardieu and suggesting comically that they might be the same person. Sam Blackman emailed in saying how funny he thought it was and subscribed immediately. That showed he had a sense of humor, and that he was deeply engaged with overturning Envivio’s lead in software encoding, something that history now says he more than achieved in his time at Elemental. At the very next Elemental…