Jason Gong
Growth leader. 10+ years across startups I've founded, companies I've scaled, and software brands I've built GTM engines for. I tend to end up at the intersection of something deeply technical and something that requires figuring it out from scratch.
Experience
GrowthX
2025 - 2026VP of GTM
Joined as the first GTM hire. Built the GTM function from scratch for an AI-native content marketing company. Took the business from $1.5M to $12M in revenue in under a year. Full-funnel ownership: pipeline generation, client acquisition, onboarding, pilot management, upsell, and service delivery across 50+ software brands simultaneously. AI was not a feature of the work. It was the operating model.
$1.5M to $12M revenue
50+ brands
10K+ pages published
AI agents in production
Select Client Results
Augment Code
Invisible to #1 across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini in 4 months
Webflow
8% of self-serve signups from AI search. Converts 6x vs organic.
Lovable
ROI positive by month 4-5. Template library became core growth channel.
+ 45 others
Vercel, Ramp, Udemy, Abnormal Security, Surge AI, and more.
AI-Led Growth Community
Co-founded the AI-Led Growth community and newsletter as GrowthX's top-of-funnel engine. Hosted executive dinners, ran workshops, and open-sourced playbooks.
7K+ newsletter subscribers
48% open rate
1,000+ workshop registrations
100+ exec dinner attendees
Workshops & Talks
AI Visibility Playbook: Lessons from 50+ Brands
Workshop / 1,000+ registrations
Vibe Marketing with Lovable: 0 to $200M Playbook
Workshop / Case Study
Content Strategy for AI Search (AEO) - 2hr Workshop
Workshop / Open-sourced
How to Build a Website for AI Search in 2026
Workshop
What Your Positioning Strategy Actually Costs You
Workshop / w FletchPMM
Thoughts on Investing in AI Visibility
Podcast
Firezone
2020 - 2022Co-Founder (Y Combinator)
Co-founded an open-source alternative to legacy VPNs (Cisco, Palo Alto). Built on WireGuard for modern zero-trust networking. COVID timing, remote teams needed secure access to internal resources without the enterprise bloat. Went through YC, raised seed funding. Launched on Hacker News to 183 points and strong traction. Wrote about the experience of building an open-source company through YC, and why technical documentation is the most underrated growth channel.
Y Combinator
Seed funded
183 pts on Hacker News
Show HN: Firezone, an open-source WireGuard-based alternative to OpenVPN
news.ycombinator.com / 183 points, 35 comments
Hacker News launch
Show HN
Firezone: WireGuard config manager with 2FA and SSO
r/linuxadmin
Community discussion on Reddit
Reddit
8 open source companies from YC Demo Day W22
TechCrunch
Featured in TechCrunch YC coverage
TechCrunch
Kite
2019 - 2021Growth Lead, then Head of Growth · Acquired by Affirm
Kite was an AI coding assistant before the category existed. Cursor in 2019. Used NLP, then large language models, to help developers write code. Joined as the first growth hire and built the function. We were probably the first company to try charging developers for tokens, which is now the industry's standard billing model. Growth had no walls between product, marketing, and engineering.
7M developers
5% of Stack Overflow traffic
40K YouTube subs in 3 months
First to charge for tokens
Channels built from scratch: Partnered with Spyder (open-source editor, hundreds of millions of users) by donating engineering time in exchange for bundling. Built Jupyter Notebooks' integration marketplace. Pioneered programmatic YouTube influencer sponsorship of old videos (old dev tutorials drive most views, not the latest upload).
Affirm
Growth (Post-Acquisition)
2021 - 2022
Joined through Kite acquisition. One of the few people with "Growth" in their title at a public fintech company.
Bardeen
Head of Growth
2022
AI browser automation tool. Led growth. Built an outreach automation that replied to cold emails with roasts and better versions. Started as a joke. Booked calls.
Why This Role
Built AI-native GTM systems across 50+ brands simultaneously. That's the cross-portfolio operating model.
AEO, SEO, and content infrastructure is my core practice. Augment Code and Webflow are live case studies.
I build systems that teams run after I leave. That's how every engagement I've done actually works.
Thought leadership with receipts: newsletter, workshops, executive dinners, open-sourced playbooks.
I'm always the first growth hire. I join when there are 0-1 people and build the function.
Technical enough to build it myself. AI workflows, prompt engineering, sales tooling, enrichment.
Education
University of Waterloo — Business Finance, Computer Science, Economics