Christopher Golda

My name is Christopher Golda (b. 1985, Canada). I’m an immigrant entrepreneur and investor based in San Francisco. I’ve been interested in entrepreneurship, product design, and computer programming from a young age, starting my first Internet business in high–school. In 2007, I received a BASc in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto.

My last venture, BackType, began at Y Combinator in the summer of 2008 in Cambridge, MA. We believed that conversations were becoming a valuable subset of information on the Internet, so we set out to organize that information in new and interesting ways. BackType became a SaaS analytics company that helped quantify the marketing value of social media. The distributed data processing work we did to build the BackType product became the basis for the Lambda Architecture. In 2011, BackType was acquired by Twitter, where I became one of the first product managers for advertising, responsible for all reporting and analytics until I left in 2014. At Twitter, I also helped open source, Storm, a distributed realtime computation system developed at BackType. Storm was declared a Top–Level Project by the Apache Software Foundation in 2014, and it’s now used by companies like Alibaba, Apple, Samsung, and Uber.

Today, I invest in and advise early–stage startups on product vision and execution, team and company building, product management, marketing, and more. I’m an investor in startups like Benchling and Coinbase, and invest in cryptocurrencies like Øx and Filecoin. I’ve also served as an advisor for Y Combinator’s Startup School. Outside of technology, my interests include art, electronic music, fashion, furniture design, and wine. I run a wine advisory service called, The Cellar Book, which aggregates the best wines for sale in the country at the best prices.

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