Austin Hay

Austin is an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures. He is a marketing technologist, engineer, founder, and AI builder with a background in finance and systems.

He has been part of five startups, consulted two dozen companies, and founded three of his own. He was the fourth employee at attribution company Branch Metrics. Shortly after, Austin built and sold a marketing agency to the CDP company mParticle, and then led Growth. He was then the 6th employee at the FP&A startup Runway helping raise $30M and scale the company in its first few years. Afterwards, he joined Ramp to lead Martech and Growth Systems. In between he built a small education platform called The Marketing Technology Academy, which he sold to Reforge in 2022. He later co-founded Clarify, a next-generation CRM, which raised $22.5M from USVP and Gradient, and where he helped launch the first product and grow the team in its earliest days. 

In addition to serving founders, Austin has served a wide variety of public and private companies as a marketing, growth and GTM advisor, including: Walmart, JPMorgan Chase, Mars, Mozilla, Airbnb, Turner, Warby Parker, Postmates, Foursquare, Strava, Jet.com, Notion, Bain, Krisp, ABinBev, Michaels, Wonder, Appsflyer, Braze, Sonos, Robinhood, Capital One, Rover, AtoB and Replit. 

Before joining KV, Austin spent his time as a fractional CMO & COO and helped teams deploy AI systems to solve advanced operational, marketing and GTM challenges. He writes about these learnings weekly on his Newsletter The Growth Stack Mafia. 

Austin holds a BS in civil engineering from USC, graduate degrees in finance and environmental engineering from Stanford, and an MBA from Wharton. 

‍