Wayne Zhang

Chief of Staff — Strategy, Partnerships & Internal AI Transformation

• Produced market intelligence and strategy reports every 1–2 weeks for Dify's management team, turning North America GTM progress, developer adoption patterns, enterprise AI signals, competitor moves, and partnership signals into recommendations on ICP, positioning, product narrative, use cases, and partner strategy.
• Supported investor relations by drafting board and investor updates, mapping strategic relationship opportunities, and turning selected partnership conversations into CEO-level investor follow-ups.
• Led internal AI workflow adoption using Claude Code and Codex, helping business teams apply AI to daily operations while building market research and contribution analysis systems.

North America Market Development & GTM Lead

• Served as Dify's first U.S.-based GTM hire, owning early North America buyer conversations and closing approximately $250K in customer revenue across ICP discovery, qualification, product education, negotiation, and account conversion.
• Helped shape U.S. SaaS GTM strategy as the business expanded to approximately $3M in U.S.-sourced ARR, including market strategy, growth experiments, customer feedback, and a positioning shift from developer-first users toward business teams.
• Mapped 50+ U.S. AI, developer tools, cloud, and startup ecosystem contacts and developed selected relationships; represented Dify at NVIDIA GTC, AWS events, and San Francisco AI / developer conferences.

Co-founder / Market Entry & Growth

• Helped Chinese brands enter the U.S. market through market research, positioning, localization strategy, content testing, and growth channel setup, assessing fit with U.S. users and consumer contexts.
• Designed TikTok product testing and live-stream validation programs, using two-month content and live campaigns to assess product-market fit, user demographics, content feedback, and conversion signals.
• Led growth experiments across TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook; used Google Analytics to analyze user behavior, build paid and content testing loops, and optimize pricing and payment conversion.

R&D Engineering Intern

• Worked at a Y Combinator-backed robotics-adjacent intelligent manufacturing startup founded by former Tesla directors, gaining early exposure to physical automation, robot-enabled production workflows, and factory deployment realities.
• Operated in a U.S.-China cross-border company context, building familiarity with how Bay Area / U.S. startup teams coordinate with China-based manufacturing and deployment resources.
• Built context that later shaped my GTM work: understanding how technical products must fit into real operating environments, operator workflows, reliability constraints, and product integration requirements.