Goeun Choi
After a decade in private-market finance, from M&A banking to private equity to venture capital, Justin decided he'd rather build as an insider than invest as an outsider. He saw that future in LinqAlpha, and now, as its GTM Strategy & Operations Lead, he's building durable go-to-market channels for the finance professionals he came from.
Hi, I'm Justin Cho, GTM Strategy & Operations Lead at LinqAlpha.
I came up through private-market finance and moved into operating, and what I do here is design and scale the go-to-market channels that bring LinqAlpha to finance professionals: defining the KPIs that actually matter and building disciplined pipeline management around them.
My path ran through the heart of the industry. I started as an investment banker at Bank of America Merrill Lynch advising on multi-billion-dollar M&A, spent two years as a private equity associate at Glenwood investing in consumer technology, and most recently was a venture investor at Naver Ventures, where I sourced and led deals across AI foundation models, vertical AI, and AI infrastructure. I earned my MBA at Kellogg along the way.
Ever since ChatGPT set off the AI boom in late 2022, I'd been looking for a way to combine my finance background with the technology. Investing in AI startups at Naver taught me the operational and strategic challenges they face, and it left me wanting to build as an insider rather than invest as an outsider. Around then I met Hojun, LinqAlpha's CEO, here in San Francisco. His adaptability, humility, and optimism struck me as genuinely rare qualities in a founder, and a phenomenal pitch did the rest. I was convinced.
My first thirty days made three things obvious. The work is AI-native: on the business development team, everyone is a builder, using AI coding tools to spin up sales brochures in GitHub repos, share markdown files for automation, and draft product emails. For the first time, I felt like I was living in the future of enterprise AI workflows. The people are 10x: our engineers write the PRD, push the code, request QA, and ship the feature themselves, work that would take a full team a month at most companies. And it's global from day one, working across time zones and serving clients from Hong Kong and Singapore to New York, Dubai, and London.
What I most want to develop here is what I'd call agentic judgment: knowing whether a task is better handled by an agent at all, whether a given agentic plan can actually work, and whether the agent can recover from ambiguity, errors, and missing context. Alongside that, I'm building durable, repeatable go-to-market channels for finance professionals, who are highly educated, busy, and often quite tech-savvy, which makes them a harder audience than most. The compass through all of it is our customers' voice. No AI trend matters if it doesn't improve a customer's workflow, so what they need and the pain points they want AI to solve always come first.
If I had to name the culture in one word, it's growth: everyone here is focused on shipping faster, winning new customers, and expanding the ecosystem. Outside of work, I'm usually with my kid, playing pickleball or padel with friends, or hiking with my family, making the most of Northern California with weekend trips to Big Sur, Sonoma, and Half Moon Bay. But what pulls me back to the desk is the chance to help transform a high-stakes industry I know from the inside.