answer-engine-optimization
(9)
Jeffrey Herzog Built for Google. Now He’s Betting on the Answer Machine.
The founder who caught search before it became an industry is back at the same old puzzle in a new disguise: how does a business become the answer people trust?
Maura Ginty Learned the Web by Writing It - Now She Markets for Two Audiences
She began as an online editor who had to code her own pages. Three decades later, Maven Clinic's CMO is still doing the same essential job: making complicated systems legible to humans, while insisting that every fashionable metric earn its keep.
Kody Gurfein Built a Marketing Career on the Hardest Product to Fake: Clarity
She joined Exiger to build marketing from zero. A decade later, the English literature graduate is arguing that in an AI-mediated market, a company's clearest story may be part of its technical infrastructure.
Chris Andrew Bet the Next Website Visitor Wouldn't Be Human
He noticed himself asking ChatGPT for answers instead of opening 20 tabs. Three years later, Scrunch had turned that small behavioral tell into a new kind of marketing infrastructure - and a place inside Sitecore.
Alex Halliday
He built his first traffic empire at 13, took a company public at 25, and now he is betting that the future of marketing is engineering, not copywriting.
Thenuka Karunaratne
Thenuka Karunaratne is the CEO and co-founder of daydream, a San Francisco startup building an AI-native agency for organic search that pairs SEO agents with human growth experts. He started making money from affiliate websites in high school, bootstrapped a streaming-search business called Flixed through college using programmatic SEO, and in September 2023 launched daydream with co-founder Shravan Rajinikanth. The company raised a $15M Series A in April 2026 led by WndrCo, bringing total funding to roughly $21M.
Brian Stempeck
Brian Stempeck is the CEO and co-founder of Evertune AI, a New York startup that helps brands measure and improve how they show up inside AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. He spent 11 years on the executive team of The Trade Desk as employee number eight, serving as Chief Client Officer and later Chief Strategy Officer and a board member, and helped grow the company from a tiny team to a public company worth tens of billions. Before adtech he was a management consultant at Bain & Company and, earlier still, a political journalist. He founded Evertune in 2024 with former Trade Desk colleagues to build the category he calls Generative Engine Optimization.
Andrew Yan
Andrew Yan is the co-founder and CEO of AthenaHQ, a Y Combinator-backed San Francisco startup building tools to help brands get discovered inside AI answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. A former Google Search product manager who also worked at DeepMind, the US Army Lab and Vimeo, he finished a Columbia degree in computer science and math in three years. Before tech, he was a touring jazz saxophonist who played in the band that inspired the Oscar-winning film Whiplash.
Marcel Santilli
Marcel Santilli is the CEO and Co-Founder of GrowthX AI, a San Francisco-based 'service-as-software' company that combines expert-led strategy with AI workflows to drive organic growth for B2B companies. Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Santilli spent 15+ years as a CMO and marketing executive at companies including IBM, HP/HPE, HashiCorp, Scale AI, and Deepgram, helping scale a combined $1B+ in ARR across three unicorns. After spending over 1,000 hours encoding marketing workflows into AI at Deepgram, he co-founded GrowthX AI in September 2024 with CTO Daniel Lopes. The company reached $7M+ ARR profitably in under 12 months — using only its own methodology, zero paid ads — before raising a $12M Series A led by Madrona Ventures in May 2025.