Jon Perl

Jon Perl is co-founder and chief executive of QA Wolf, a company in Seattle, Washington, that writes and maintains automated end-to-end tests for its customers’ web and mobile apps. He grew up in Virginia and came to software by automating a task at his first job.

Growing Up on a Computer

His mother is an architect and his father an electrical engineer, and he grew up on a computer, according to Code Story. He picked up programming at his first job, where he automated the company’s manifest creation. At a later company he watched a systems failure force his customers back onto manual processes, and he and his future co-founders wanted to make sure that never happened again.

Founding QA Wolf

Perl, Laura Cressman and Scott Wilson founded QA Wolf in 2019, according to GeekWire. The founders first tried to build AI that would automate testing, which did not work at the time, so they set it aside. QA Wolf found its market in the summer of 2021, going from zero to $1 million in revenue in three months, Perl said on Entrepreneurs on Fire. After GPT-4 arrived the company returned to AI and built a team to automate testing work. By its Series B in 2024, he said, its third version could automate 80% of the tasks its people had done by hand.

Perl’s view of business is that people underrate generosity. He argues that founders should be generous with equity and pay for the people they work with. He lives in Seattle with his wife, his young family and his dog.