Founder Profile / Retail Technology
Co-Founder & CTO · Zipline · West Vancouver, BC
The self-taught developer who skipped university, assembled computers at 16, sold a company for $150M, and is now rebuilding how retail talks to its people.
Somewhere in a Gap store right now, a shift manager is reading a message from corporate. She knows what the promotion is, how to set it up, and what questions her team will ask. She has the answers. That pipeline - from executive strategy to frontline execution - runs on Zipline, and the person who built that pipeline is Jeremy Baker.
Baker is the Co-Founder and CTO of Zipline, the enterprise SaaS platform that has quietly become infrastructure for some of retail's most recognizable names: Gap, LUSH, Sephora, LEGO, American Eagle Outfitters, L.L.Bean, BevMo, Cole Haan, Torrid. The list is long and the problem the company solves is deceptively simple - getting the right information to the right people in stores, every single day, without it getting lost in email threads or buried in a binder.
Baker didn't come to this through retail. He came through hardware - at 16, in a small Canadian town, he was assembling computers and selling them to local businesses. He was self-taught, entrepreneurial by necessity, and uninterested in credentials. When the time came to choose between university and building a web design company, he built the company. That was the late 1990s. He hasn't stopped building since.
Never forget that it's all about the people. We exist to enable positive change in our customer's lives, not to build a product or a company.- Jeremy Baker, Co-Founder & CTO, Zipline
His path into the tech industry ran through Raincity Studios (Director of Web Development) and a stint running Illanti Industries Inc, before a nearly five-year stretch at Yahoo as a Senior Prototyper on the Search and internationalization teams. He joined Yahoo around 2007, working under Larry Cornett. By 2010, he had won the Yahoo SuperStar award for a Prototyping and Experimentation tool that got pushed out across nearly every major Yahoo property. That kind of reach - a single engineer's tool running across a web giant's entire infrastructure - shapes how you think about scale.
He left Yahoo in 2012 to co-found MightyHive, an enterprise ad-tech company. Two years later, MightyHive was acquired by S4 Capital - the media group founded by Sir Martin Sorrell - for $150 million. Baker had his first major exit. He was already thinking about the next thing.
That next thing was Zipline, co-founded in August 2014 with Melissa Wong, who serves as CEO. Wong brought the retail operating perspective - she had worked in corporate roles at Gap and Old Navy and knew exactly how information moved (and didn't move) through retail chains. Baker brought the engineering. Together they built a platform designed specifically for the problem every large retailer quietly knows is broken: the communication gap between corporate and stores.
Zipline's architecture is built for the specific reality of retail operations: store managers checking in on mobile devices between tasks, district managers who need visibility across dozens of locations, corporate teams who need confirmation that their communications actually landed. The platform combines frontline communications, task management, resource libraries, learning tools, analytics dashboards, and audit capabilities into a single system. It replaced the binders, the email chains, and the phone trees that retail had been running on for decades.
The timing became significant in 2020. When the pandemic hit and retailers suddenly needed to communicate rapidly-changing health protocols, safety procedures, and operational pivots to every store employee simultaneously, Zipline became essential. The company doubled its customer base during the pandemic and reported 2.5x revenue growth. In March 2021, Zipline raised a $30 million Series B led by Fifth Wall, with Emergence Capital, Ridge Ventures, Hillsven Capital, Veeva co-founder Matt Wallach, and the Fisher Family Fund participating. Dan Wenhold from Fifth Wall joined the board.
Total funding sits at $39.6 million. The company is expanding into pharmacy, grocery, and convenience store verticals - retail formats where the communication gap is, if anything, even wider than in specialty retail.
Baker leads from West Vancouver, BC, heading a fully distributed engineering team. Zipline was remote-first before remote work was a trend. The company was built that way from day one, and the engineering culture reflects Baker's values: clear communication, curiosity, and - a requirement he states explicitly when hiring - kindness. If a candidate isn't kind, no technical ability changes the outcome.
He credits the women in his life for his success with a specificity that goes beyond the generic: his mother, who worked at a community center in the small Canadian town where he grew up; his wife, who supported repeated relocations and the intense early years of building companies; and Melissa Wong, whose retail operating knowledge shaped what Zipline actually became. Baker has been through burnout - more than once - and he's open about it. His recovery method is unglamorous and practical: a "Brain Dump" technique that clears the cognitive backlog and gets him functional again. He works with an executive coach. He reads. He treats failure as curriculum.
The gap between what corporate says and what stores actually do is the most expensive problem in retail. Nobody talks about it. Zipline fixes it.- On Zipline's core value proposition
Baker's open-source work on GitHub (username: jhubert, active since the early 2000s) gives a window into how he thinks technically - early contributions include a JavaScript SQLite layer built before browser-based SQLite was even a mainstream conversation, a live CSS editor that shipped for multiple browsers, and an A/B split testing plugin for Rails. The repositories have hundreds of combined stars. The work is practical, sharp, and deployed - not theoretical.
His Twitter handle is @jhubert - he joined in July 2006, the same year Twitter launched. His personal site is jeremyhubert.com. He is not someone who cultivates a large public persona. The work - at Zipline, in the codebase, in the customer relationships that result in quotes like the one from Gap's Brandon Panepinto - is where he shows up.
The story of Zipline is not the story of a grand retail disruption narrative. It's more specific than that. It's about a co-founder who understood that the distance between a corporate memo and a store employee's daily task list was, in practice, measured in comprehension, not kilometers. And who built a company, with a partner, to close that distance. For 170,000 people, and counting, it's working.
Zipline by the numbers
Baker is a person who runs toward difficult problems rather than building moats around solved ones. His hiring philosophy is a distillation of everything he values: he looks for people who can write clearly, who have taken the time to understand the company before they walk in the door, and who are kind. Not polite - kind. There's a difference, and he knows it.
He talks about burnout without euphemism. He's experienced it. He recovered. He built systems to prevent it. The executive coach, the Brain Dump technique, the commitment to mentorship - these aren't productivity hacks. They're the infrastructure of someone who has learned from running too hard and decided to engineer a more sustainable pace.
He attributes his success, repeatedly and specifically, to the women around him. In a world full of solo-founder mythology, Baker is notably clear that the company he built is inseparable from the people who built it with him.
Almost 30 years of building things on the internet, before "founder" was even a job title people aspired to.
At 16, Baker didn't ask for permission to start a company. He assembled computers in a small Canadian town and sold them to local businesses. The degree question came later - and when it did, he chose a web design company over a campus.
The Yahoo! prototyping tool wasn't a small project. It went to nearly every Yahoo property. That's what the SuperStar award in 2010 was for - a single engineer's work becoming infrastructure for one of the world's most visited websites.
Baker co-founded Zipline with Melissa Wong after leaving MightyHive. Wong came from inside retail (Gap, Old Navy). Baker came from engineering. The combination was the thesis: you need to understand both the ops and the code to fix the gap between them.
When the pandemic hit, Zipline became emergency infrastructure. Corporate retail teams could finally reach every store employee simultaneously with real information. Customer base doubled. Revenue 2.5x'd. Not because of clever marketing - because the problem had become acute.
Baker is open about burnout in a way that most CTOs aren't. He's been through it multiple times. His recovery system - the Brain Dump technique - is analog and unglamorous. Clear the mental backlog, start again. He coaches others through it too.
His GitHub username is jhubert - a nod to his full name Jeremy Hubert Baker. He joined Twitter in July 2006, the same year the platform launched. One of the earliest tech adopters who never built a personal brand around it.
Retail's core operating problem is not strategy - it's translation. A corporate team makes a decision; that decision needs to arrive at 400 stores as a clear, actionable task, not as a memo nobody read. Zipline is the translation layer.
The platform combines frontline communications, task management, learning tools, analytics, audit capabilities, and resource libraries into a single system. Store managers get information in context. District managers get visibility across locations. Corporate gets confirmation that communications landed.
Baker and Melissa Wong built this specifically because Wong had worked inside the problem at Gap and Old Navy. The platform isn't a generic enterprise comms tool retrofitted for retail. It was built for retail from the ground up.
Customers include
Backed by
Baker operates across several platforms with the consistent handle jhubert - a name he's used for more than two decades online. His professional work is most visible through Zipline's output and his open-source contributions on GitHub.