Operator-led FDE recruiting & advisory

Before founding Golden Geese, Paxton was employee 25 at Windsurf (formerly Codeium). He helped scale the GTM org and was a top-performing AE as Windsurf’s revenue grew from $2M to $20M in under 12 months. Cognition AI acquired Windsurf in 2025.

Paxton began his sales career at MongoDB, rising from top-performing SDR to Enterprise AE while working in Austin, NYC, and SF. Prior to tech sales, Paxton was a Fulbright Scholar in Mexico and a sketch-comedy writer.

Also wrote the book

Giant of the Job Search

Written in the Dark Ages before ChatGPT, Giant of the Job Search is a quick and entertaining read for prospective SDR and FDE candidates. Its strategy and tactics remain relevant and actionable today.

Find the book →

Before founding Golden Geese, Maggie was an early employee at Windsurf (formerly Codeium), joining as employee 30, the company’s second Deployed Engineer, and its first technical hire outside the Bay Area. She led some of Windsurf’s largest and most strategic deployments before building and leading a deployed engineering team across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America.

She later moved into a Strategic Account Executive role, closing more than $2.2M in ARR in seven months, before returning to more technical work through a special projects role reporting directly to the President of Cognition. There, she worked across product, marketing, operations, and enablement.

Maggie began her career as a Solutions Architect at AWS and later joined Grafana Labs, where she earned President’s Club every year and developed deep expertise in OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, and continuous profiling.

Across AWS, Grafana, Windsurf, and Cognition, Maggie has spent her career at the intersection of technical depth, customer execution, and team building. She has hired, managed, and worked alongside forward-deployed engineers—and built Golden Geese from firsthand experience with what makes these teams exceptional.