Alex Kinnier

Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Upside

Last Reviewed: September 28, 2026

Executive Summary

Alex Kinnier is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Upside, the Washington, DC commerce platform through which brick-and-mortar retailers offer consumers cash back in order to grow their profit. His route there is unusual for a consumer-facing founder: product management at Procter & Gamble and Google, three years as a partner at Khosla Ventures and another at New Enterprise Associates, and then an executive seat at Opower, where he ran product and engineering through its 2014 IPO. Upside was built with colleagues from that Opower team: fellow co-founder Rick McPhee had been Opower’s engineering chief.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder and CEO of Upside, listed on the company’s leadership page alongside co-founders Wayne Lin (Chief Product Officer) and Rick McPhee (Chief Information Officer).
• Upside was reported by Entrepreneur in December 2022 to have 50,000 locations on its platform, to reach 30 million people and to be valued at $1.5 billion.
• Senior Vice President at Opower from July 2012, named in its 2014 IPO prospectus for product management and user experience and reported to the SEC in 2015 as SVP, Products and Engineering.
• Partner at Khosla Ventures from 2008 to 2011 and at New Enterprise Associates from 2011 to 2012.
• Group product manager at Google earlier in his career.
• Listed in a January 2024 SEC filing as Managing Member of the General Partner of Builders VC Fund III.

Professional Journey

Kinnier trained as a chemical engineer at Lehigh University and began his career at Procter & Gamble in brand management and product development. He moved to Google as a product manager, rising to group product manager; in his own conference biography he describes building Google’s agency display advertising team. The Google experience is also the origin story Upside tells about itself: Entrepreneur reported that watching AdWords use anonymised historical data to optimise online shopping led him to ask why the same could not be done for shops in physical neighbourhoods.

He then spent four years on the investing side, as a partner at Khosla Ventures from 2008 to 2011 and at New Enterprise Associates from 2011 to 2012, before joining Opower in July 2012 as Senior Vice President, Product Management and User Experience. Opower completed its initial public offering in April 2014. By May 2015 his SEC filings gave his title as SVP, Products and Engineering, covering the company’s product, engineering, user experience and analytics teams.

He left to co-found Upside, headquartered in Washington, DC. Upside describes itself as a new model for commerce: brick-and-mortar retailers use it to increase profit, and consumers earn cash back on purchases. In his own words, the aim is to personalise brick-and-mortar commerce in the way online shopping already is. Rick McPhee, who had run engineering at Opower, is a fellow co-founder. By late 2022 Entrepreneur put the business at 50,000 locations and a $1.5 billion valuation. The company’s 2026 announcements include a new fuel-offer model in New Jersey with QuickChek, a debit-card integration with Varo Bank, and a rollout across nearly 400 Wendy’s restaurants operated by Meritage Hospitality.

Alongside Upside he has kept a foot in venture investing: a 2024 Form D lists him as Managing Member of the General Partner of Builders VC Fund III, a San Francisco fund.

Education

Harvard Business School

MBA

Lehigh University

Bachelor’s degree, Chemical Engineering