At 6:30 in the morning, Ingwon Chae could already be at his desk, watching the numbers go the wrong way. In 2019 he was trading derivatives at Morgan Stanley. A difficult stretch of trades had left him staring at a portfolio in red, with limited room to change the situation. The working day had begun; the sense of command had declined to attend.
Years later, introducing the business he was building, he recalled trying to accept that “some things are just out of one’s control.” It is an unusually candid opening for a founder’s sales pitch. Most pitches offer the speaker as the solution to uncertainty. Chae began with his own acquaintance with it.
Today, the New York-based co-founder and CEO of Glencoco deals in a different kind of exchange. Businesses want introductions to potential customers. Salespeople want a way to turn their ability to talk, listen and persuade into paid work. His marketplace puts a transaction around the qualified meeting. The proposition sounds simple enough to fit on a napkin. Delivering it requires considerably more stationery.
Before the sales pitch, a campus dance
Chae’s earlier résumé contains a rather less conventional production credit. At MIT, where he studied economics, he produced the campus version of Gangnam Style. Eddie Ha directed; Richard Yoon played Psy. Released in October 2012, the parody had passed four million views by early November.
The production recruited student groups and professors, with Noam Chomsky among the cameos. Chae remembered the surprise: “I’ve never been inside the storm that is a viral video.” For a student project, that was quite an audience to discover on the other side of the camera.
The episode gives the later executive biography some welcome mischief. Before the growth roles and the investor announcements, there were friends making a film and discovering that strangers wanted to watch. A campus project can have ambitions without requiring a business model. It can also leave a better photograph than most corporate off-sites.
A sales education, fax machine included
Chae’s professional route ran through finance and a departure from Columbia Law School. He later discussed leaving law school to pursue entrepreneurship in a 2023 conversation with Nico LoPresti. The sequence resists the tidy career ladder: economics, trading, law, enterprise technology. Each change put a different kind of work within reach.
At Verkada, his responsibilities included operations and demand generation. By April 2020, he was publishing essays about how sales representatives could build a career inside the company. These pieces are useful glimpses of what occupied him before Glencoco: the relationship between individual initiative and the organization that makes it productive.
In his account of a salesperson’s first six months, learning had a timetable. Reps had two quarters to get up to speed. Quotas reflected that progression. Territory planning mattered, as did knowing customers, working with channel partners and understanding how an opportunity became a sale. Responsibility came with support, and the account executive remained the person holding the customer relationship together.
His essay about the first year found room for improvisation. One rep discovered a customer base in Australia and helped open a regional business. Another used fax machines to reach an industry’s customers. A fax machine is an excellent corrective to fashionable business vocabulary: occasionally the effective channel is the one making a noise in the corner.
Those examples belonged to other salespeople. Chae’s choice to celebrate them is the revealing detail. He treated a playbook as something people could improve through experience. There was room for initiative after learning the work, and room for an unexpected method if customers responded.
A companion piece about promotion emphasized internal advancement and relationships across departments. In that April 2020 snapshot, all 13 inside sales managers had started as account executives. Chae also described managers discussing employees’ career goals. His writing paid attention to what happened to the person doing the selling, alongside what happened to the sale.
“Our mission is to create millions of opportunities by connecting enterprise products and people.”
Ingwon Chae · Glencoco’s mission
Putting the meeting on the menu
After Verkada came a growth role at Wiz. In 2022, Chae co-founded Glencoco with Jason Bao, whose engineering background included Verkada and Meta. The pairing brought growth and software experience to a problem Chae had encountered from inside companies: getting the sales operation staffed, equipped and working.
The founding argument was about the costly interval between needing customers and having a team able to find them. A company might need more sales conversations before it could justify more hiring. A salesperson might have ability without an immediate employer. Each side could spend months trying to find the other through the usual machinery of recruitment.
Glencoco offered a marketplace where businesses could describe their product, specify the people they wanted to meet and set a price for a qualified introduction. Sales professionals could work on those campaigns using tools built into the platform. Chae’s launch message also described AI-assisted learning modules drawn from a business’s website, bringing product knowledge closer to the point of work.
In November 2023, Glencoco announced a $3 million seed round led by Felicis and Crossbeam. The launch plan included investment in the platform, infrastructure, service expansion and AI. The early product combined calling, scheduling, training and checks on meeting quality. At launch, the company’s stated share was 30 percent of each qualified meeting transaction.
- 01A business sets the briefTarget customers, criteria, price.
- 02A caller works the campaignTraining, tools, conversations.
- 03A meeting earns its placeHeld, qualified, then paid.
There is a practical distinction between booking time and creating a useful meeting. An empty calendar slot can be filled very efficiently with the wrong person. Qualification is therefore part of the product itself. The business and the caller need a shared understanding of the result being purchased, with enough evidence to settle whether it arrived.
Six months, counted carefully
On the first day of 2024, Chae published an account of the marketplace’s first six months. He reported 10,900 signups, more than 350 monthly active users, 42 businesses served and 2,100 meetings booked. Those are different measures, and they tell different parts of the story. A registration expresses interest; a meeting records a further step.
Historical company-reported figures, not current totals.
The same update put sales-qualified opportunities above 600 and estimated revenue pipeline between $6 million and $12 million. Pipeline describes possible business under discussion. It should keep its label when it appears in a founder’s story; a prospective sale has still to make the journey to becoming one.
His review also described an eight-person core team, largely engineering and operations. Among the product details were voice auditions, campaign training, performance records and automated payouts after a meeting had happened and qualified. These are the less photogenic components of a marketplace, but they determine whether strangers can work together with a reasonable understanding of the rules.
In October 2024, Dunamu & Partners announced an investment of approximately two billion Korean won. At that point, reported clients included Verkada, Multiplier and Rho. The funding marked another stage for the company; the customer examples showed the sort of businesses buying access to the conversations.
The work behind the freedom
Glencoco’s current sales-rep page gives the proposition a more detailed working shape. It lists independent-contractor eligibility across 35 jurisdictions, performance-based compensation, a group interview with roleplay, and live coaching. Applicants encounter an audition before they encounter a campaign.
The current requirements also make the commitment concrete: at least 40 hours per week within Eastern business hours and a minimum six-month engagement. Scripts and talk tracks are initially set by the customer. Remote work still has a clock, a method and someone listening to whether the pitch lands.
By May 2026, Glencoco said gross transfers to callers had exceeded $2.27 million. That is a company-reported payout figure. It measures money moving to people doing the work, a useful counterpart to the early counts of registrations and booked meetings.
For Chae, the operating question now reaches beyond matching two parties. A caller needs enough preparation to represent a business; a business needs confidence in the person representing it. Coaching, screening and agreed expectations take time. The telephone may be familiar, but familiarity does not make the job effortless.
Someone still has to answer
Across Chae’s public career, the subjects change while a particular problem recurs: how an individual gets room to act inside a larger system. Trading made the limits visible. His sales writing described people learning the rules, then finding their own customers and methods. Glencoco makes the relationship between a business and a salesperson into the business itself.
His stated ambition is to create opportunities by connecting products and people. The phrase becomes more concrete when set beside the work: a brief someone can understand, a call someone can make, a meeting both parties consider useful, and a payment that follows.
There is something pleasingly human about the endpoint of all this infrastructure. After the training modules, the software, the qualification criteria and the scheduling, a person still has to begin a conversation. Chae has taken an unusual route to that ordinary moment. He is building his company around what might happen when the person on the other end decides to stay on the line.