In December 2025, Heritage announced the promotion of longtime leader Sam Spiegel to COO and technology principal. Spiegel joined the firm in 2013, working as part of the world & ancient coins department, and has held various roles since. Antiques and The Arts Weekly recently connected with Spiegel to learn more about his past at Heritage and a little bit about his new position.

Congratulations on your promotion to COO and technology principal! Can you explain to our readers a little bit about what this role entails?

I see my role as sitting at the center of the company to bridge the gap between the business needs of our category specialists and our IT and operations teams. I come out of a specialist background in world & ancient coins and having worked closely with those departments from the start, I understand both the client-facing auction business and the behind-the-scenes infrastructure that supports it. Ultimately, my goal is simple: to help our employees be as efficient, informed and successful as possible.

What are some of the most important or memorable changes you have made to the technological infrastructure at Heritage?

It became clear shortly after I started at Heritage just how important our index was to our success; that is, a unified mapping system between the same types of items. One of my early successes was building out an index for our world coins department, which allows us to automatically produce the basic description and catalog references, provide relevant comparable results from past auctions and include third-party population information right on the lot page. We had done this in US coins for years, but world coins was a much larger task. Since then, I’ve worked with our other collectibles categories to refine and expand their indexes, with the ultimate goal being to provide as much helpful information for our bidders as possible. The way I view it is that a well-informed bidder is a confident bidder, and a confident bidder is a strong bidder.

Raiden Honaker, a Heritage currency consignments director, assessing a potential lot. Photo credit: Josh Jordan for Heritage Auctions/HA.com.

You joined Heritage in 2013 and have held numerous positions. What skills and experiences are you taking with you into this new chapter?

I’ve done a little bit of almost everything at the company — advising buyers and consignors, conducting private sales, working with our IT department, solving customer service problems, managing teams, working across offices and categories and so on — that I think I have a better idea of how all the pieces fit together than most people. I believe that experience is going to be very important in this role, where, in the central nature of the position, I can see what we’re doing in one area of the business and make sure we apply any good ideas elsewhere. The nature of our business is that our categories operate semi-independently, because, as an example, our comics specialists are the best people in the world to know how to effectively sell comic books. But if I see something we’re doing in our sports or coins department that I think may help our comics department, I can act as the link and make sure they are at least aware of other ideas and projects elsewhere in the company.

In the press release announcing your promotion, you said you have “been fortunate enough to learn from some of the most dedicated and visionary people in the industry.” Can you name a few mentors or role models of yours (past or present) that have made an impact on your career?

I have to give a lot of credit to our co-founders, Steve Ivy and Jim Halperin, for instilling a philosophy at Heritage that has had a dramatic influence not just on our company, but the entire collectibles business. As an example, Heritage was an early adopter of the internet in the 90s, and Jim had the vision in the mid 90s, when our auction business was just beginning, to open up our sales archives as a searchable database that was free to everyone. Prior to that, only dealers had the time, experience and knowledge to understand market values; the average collector was at a major disadvantage because there was a huge knowledge gap between them and the professionals. It was counterintuitive to some extent, because we were giving up our own edge as a wholesale coin trading firm, but Jim and Steve recognized the potential of the auction business and the importance of leveling the playing field between dealers and collectors, so that everyone had access to the same information. That broad range of thinking and commitment to transparency still informs what we, and especially I, do today at the company.

What are you looking forward to most in this new role?

What I’m most excited about is the opportunity to take what makes Heritage work so well in one area of the business and apply it across others. I enjoy learning about new categories, and this role gives me the opportunity to learn about other parts of the business that I may have had less direct involvement with previously. At the same time, I can find common challenges across categories and have a broader impact on the business when solving problems.

—Kiersten Busch