Christopher P. Lynch

Christopher P. Lynch born April 22, 1963 is an American Venture Capitalist and entrepreneur. He invested in sqrrl, DataRobot, Gizmox,Threat Stack, Nutonian and Hadapt. He co-founded hack/reduce, a Boston-based Big Data incubator in May 2012. Lynch was a founding member of ArrowPoint communications and Acopia Networks where he served as CEO. Additionally, he was CEO at Vertica Systems.

He is currently living outside of Boston with his wife and 5 children.

Early life and education

Christopher P. Lynch was born in Yonkers New York to Paul and Nora Lynch. The family of five children soon returned to the Boston Area where father Paul had roots. He graduated from Arlington High School in Massachusetts in 1981 and attended Suffolk University where he earned his bachelor's degree in business management in 1986. He earned his MBA from the McCallum Graduate School of Business in 1991. In May 2011 Lynch received an honorary doctorate of commercial science degree from Bentley University and addressed the graduates during the commencement ceremony.

Early Career

Lynch began his technology sales and marketing career by joining Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1987 as a sales representative. From there he joined Wellfleet Communications led by another DEC alum, Paul Severino (which merged with SynOptics to form Bay Networks in 1994). Lynch then went to Prominet as Vice President of sales, purchased by Lucent in 1997 where he held the position of V.P. of North American Data Sales.

Arrowpoint

In 1997 Lynch left Lucent to continue his relationship with mentor Paul Ferri of Matrix Partners (investor in Prominet & Arrowpoint) to join ArrowPoint Communications with Chin-Cheng Wu. ArrowPoint provided Web switches and Web network services (WebNS) software allowing customers to optimize the use of the web for e-commerce and content delivery. Lynch served as Vice President of Worldwide Sales, Marketing and Support through its initial public offering in 2000. Later that year the company sold to Cisco for Cisco Systems for $5.7 billion, the second largest purchase in Cisco’s history. After the acquisition Lynch served as Vice President of Worldwide Content Delivery for Cisco.

Acopia

In 2002 Lynch left Cisco to found Acopia Networks with Chin-Cheng Wu. Acopia would go on to become a leading provider of high-performance intelligent file virtualization services. The company focused on storage virtualization and the eliminating time and disruption associated with storage-related tasks. Lynch served as CEO and the company was acquired by F5 Networks in 2007 for $210 million. At F5 he was Senior Vice President of Data Solutions.

...
Wikipedia