Christopher Golda

I’m an early-stage investor and entrepreneur based in San Francisco. I serve as a Venture Advisor to Menlo Ventures for SaaS and Dev/DevOps technology startups. My last venture, BackType, was a SaaS analytics company that helped quantify the marketing value of social media, backed by Y Combinator, True Ventures, Lowercase Capital, and more. The distributed data processing work we did at BackType became the basis of the Lambda Architecture. BackType was acquired by Twitter, where I became responsible for the Ads Center as revenue grew from $140M to $1.4B. At Twitter, I also helped open source Apache Storm, a distributed realtime computation system developed at BackType. Full bio.

My investment criteria:

1. Are the founders top 0.01% entrepreneurs?
2. What does this team understand about the market that other teams don’t?
3. What is the biggest risk to the company, and can the team solve it?
4. If it works, how big of an impact will this company have?

— Christopher Golda (@golda) August 8, 2019

How I Help Founders

• Product: I’ve led product for SaaS products with hundreds of thousands of users, and can help early teams think about product vision, design, and strategy. I’m especially passionate about helping startups with customer development and finding product/market fit. For larger teams, I can help build a Product Management team from the ground up – the right way.
• Fundraising and M&A: After being in Silicon Valley for over a decade, I’ve worked or co-invested with most top-tier VC firms at the early-stage. I help founders compose their Seed and Series A rounds from deck feedback to selecting which investors to work with, and I can make all the introductions necessary to run a fast and effective fundraising process. When the time comes, I can also help successfully navigate an M&A process.
• Team & Company Building: At my last startup, we were obsessed with building a top 0.01% engineering talent team. We continued to maintain that standard on my team at Twitter, as the company grew from 300 to 3,000 employees. I help founders think about culture, design hiring processes, and close candidates.
• Founder Miscellany: I’ve been in the same shoes as a Founder CEO, and now as an individual, full-time investor, I’m the most aligned with the entrepreneurs I back. I’m always “on call” and enjoy helping with the issues founders face day-to-day.

I’m only as active as an entrepreneur wants me to be; that could mean rolling my sleeves up to work together on product, but more often it means waiting for monthly or quarterly updates, and only helping when asked.

Portfolio

Current stage
Seed — Series A — Series B+

Biography

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, backed by True Ventures, Lowercase Capital, and more. 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 (NYSE: TWTR), where I became responsible for the Ads Center as revenue grew from $140M to $1.4B. At Twitter, I also helped open source Apache 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 serve as a Venture Advisor to Menlo Ventures for SaaS and Dev/DevOps technology startups. 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.

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