Wayne Lin

Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Upside

Last Reviewed: September 28, 2026

Executive Summary

Wayne Lin is co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Upside, a Washington, DC company that runs a cash-back marketplace linking consumers with gas stations, grocery stores and restaurants. Upside began as GetUpside in January 2016. Lin founded it with Alex Kinnier, now chief executive, after the two had worked together at Opower, the DC energy software company Oracle bought for $532 million, and earlier at Google. The business model is performance-based: retailers pay only when Upside can show that a promotion brought them profit. Lin was the company’s COO in its early years and now leads product. Upside says his work has helped it drive $5 billion in commerce.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Upside, originally GetUpside, in 2016 with Alex Kinnier; the company is headquartered in Washington, DC.
• Served as GetUpside’s COO while the company expanded from gas stations into grocery stores and restaurants in 2018.
• Now co-founder and Chief Product Officer, among Upside’s senior leadership with CEO Alex Kinnier and co-founder and CIO Rick McPhee.
• Upside credits his product, marketing and operations work with helping the company drive $5 billion in commerce.
• Worked with Kinnier at Opower, later acquired by Oracle, and before that at Google.

Professional Journey

Lin’s career before Upside ran through two companies known for using data at scale. He worked at Google and at Opower, the Washington, DC energy software company that Oracle acquired for $532 million. Kinnier worked at both companies too, and the two carried the same approach into their next venture: using personalization to change behaviour in the physical world.

GetUpside launched in January 2016 with cash-back offers at gas stations. By late 2018, when Lin was the company’s chief operating officer, it was adding grocery stores and restaurants. Speaking to Technical.ly DC at the time, he described the model plainly: “The core of our system is all around digital personalization,” and “We only get paid when we show the merchant that we brought them profit.”

The company has since shortened its name to Upside and describes its mission as advancing “the economic power of people living and working in the real world.” Lin now leads product as Chief Product Officer. In a May 2025 post on the company’s retailer blog, he described Upside’s direction as “empower[ing] all commerce to be more efficient and profitable via data, personalization, and payments.” He credited the company’s grocery partners with shaping how the product developed.

Upside’s author biography of Lin also says that, alongside his work at the company, he founded a not-for-profit and holds patents on five technologies designed to help people save energy and lower costs.

Education

No education record was found in a first-party or dated editorial source.