Gallant Chen

VP Digital Marketing, Zendesk

Gallant Chen is currently the VP of Digital Marketing at Zendesk, a customer service platform designed to bring organizations and their customers closer together. He was previously the Director of Online Marketing at SurveyMonkey and was responsible for driving online customer acquisition and conversion activities including paid search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), display advertising, retargeting, etc.. Before SurveyMonkey, he was the Product Marketing Manager at Apple, and later served as the Web Marketing Manager. Before Apple he was the private equity associate at Evercore Partners from 2001 to 2002, and was the product manager at Business.com from 2000 to 2001. Gallant graduated from Stanford University with a BS in Industrial Engineering and later obtained his MBA in Marketing, Technology Management from Northwestern University – Kellogg School of Management.

Articles by Gallant Chen

The Founder’s Mental Health Playbook: What I Learned After Nearly Burning Out

A hard-won guide to staying mentally healthy while building a startup I founded Stitcher, the podcast platform, in 2007 and ran it for seven years until we sold in 2014....

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) for Early Stage Companies

In our latest session from the Mucker Growth Series featuring Ethan Smith from Graphite, we explored AEO, a significant new approach for optimizing visibility in AI-driven search, particularly relevant as...

Startup Guide to AI Visibility: Be the Brand ChatGPT Recommends

Introduction Today, users aren’t just searching on Google. They’re asking ChatGPT, Claude, Google’s Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI systems for advice. AI visibility is the new frontier of brand awareness....

Practical Uses of AI & Automation for Startup Operations

In a recent Mucker Growth Series session, we invited Rock Vitale, Founder & CEO of Easie, to share how he’s helped early-stage teams move from manual, fragmented workflows to streamlined,...

2025 New York Tech Week Recap Of Mucker Sessions

Last week during New York Tech Week 2025, we joined more than 1,000 events hosted by founders, investors, and VCs. This post is a full Mucker recap of the three...

How to Build a Customer Support Function for Startups Using AI Tools with Alex Velinov

Delivering high-quality customer support can be one of the most resource-draining parts of a startup. The good news: we’re at a turning point where founders can use AI tools to...