Alex Kinnier

Alex believes in the transformative power of small, technology centric teams. At Builders, Alex partners with these teams to speed up learning cycles and bring their products to market faster for maximum impact.

As an ardent technologist, product developer, entrepreneur, and investor, Alex has been developing products with the potential to change the world for 18 years. While at Builders, Alex also serves as the founder and CEO of Upside, a DC based local commerce company. Prior to Builders, Alex served on Opower’s executive team as the Senior VP of Product, leading the company’s product development teams, including engineering, product management, user experience, services and analytics.

As an investor Alex has served as a Partner at Khosla Ventures and NEA. Some of his investments include Climate Corporation (acquired by Monsanto), Skybox (acquired by Google), Solumn (acquired by Climate Corporation), Pellion Technologies, and AVOS.

Alex started his career in product management positions at Google and before that Procter & Gamble. At Google, Alex built the agency display advertising team and created Google’s next generation third party serving and targeting system. Here, he was the leader of the acquisition of DoubleClick. Alex earned an Executive Management Group award for leading the product response to Microsoft’s IE7 browser launch that significantly increased Google’s search share. He was also employed in brand management and product development roles at Procter & Gamble. In product development, he led the development and launch of three new-to-the-world Febreze products that helped the brand achieve sales of over $400 million in 50 countries in 24 months.

He holds an M.B.A. with distinction from the Harvard Business School and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering with honors from Lehigh University.