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Christopher P. Lynch (born April 22, 1963) is an American venture capitalist. He invested in sqrrl, DataRobot, 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 was CEO. Additionally, he was CEO at Vertica System.

Early life

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.

Career

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 Prominent 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 Prominent & 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 was 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 was Vice President of Worldwide Content Delivery for Cisco.

Vertica

At Vertica Lynch was president and CEO, leading the company from a late-stage startup to the top ranked Big Data company globally. In 2011 Vertica was acquired by Hewlett Packard in a deal whose terms were undisclosed. At HP Lynch was the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Hewlett-Packard's Database Business Unit, a role he took after HP's acquisition of Vertica Systems in February 2011, where he was CEO.

Boards and recent ventures

Lynch is as an advisor and mentor to many Boston area entrepreneurs and is on the board of RayV Networks (acquired by Yahoo!), docTrackr (acquired by Intralinks), and H-Streaming (acquired by Adello). He was Chairman of Azuki Systems, co-founded by ArrowPoint and Acopia founder Chin-Cheng Wu (acquired by Ericsson in 2014). He is personally invested in a number of early-stage startup companies, including PowerInBox and Kinvey. Lynch is a noted supporter of St. Baldrick's Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to pediatric cancer research.

Hack Reduce

In 2012, Lynch co-founded Hack Reduce along with Frederic Lalonde as a way to cultivate a community of Big Data experts in Boston. It is located in the historic Kendall Boiler and Tank Company building at 275 Third Street in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hack Reduce was founded in conjunction with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ Big Data Initiative, which is a financial contributor.

References

1. Williams, Alex. "Sqrrl Raises $2 Million For Secure, Scalable Big Data Technology Originally Developed At NSA". TechCrunch. Retrieved August 20, 2012.
2. "TechStars grad DataRobot gets Boston office, Atlas investment - Boston Business Journal". Archived from the original on September 26, 2013.
3. Darrow, Barb. "Threat Stack nets $1.2M to protect your cloud servers". GigaOm. Retrieved October 23, 2013.
4. Harris, Derrick. "Nutonian raises $4M to extract the laws of physics from data". GigaOm. Retrieved October 23, 2013.
5. Huang, Gregory T. "Big Data Startup Hadapt Backed by $6.75M from Atlas". Xconomy. Retrieved November 8, 2012.
6. "Entrepreneurs team up to open data center". boston.com. November 6, 2012.
7. Staff, Globe (May 22, 2011). "Area college commencements". Boston.com. The Boston Globe.
8. BentleyUniversity (May 25, 2011). "Bentley Graduate Commencement 2011 #4 Address - Christopher Lynch Part 1" – via YouTube.
9. Furrier, John. "HP Lead Big Data Exec Chris Lynch Resigns". forbes.com.
10. "ArrowPoint soars in debut". CNN Money. March 31, 2000. Retrieved March 26, 2012.
11. "ArrowPoint technology hits Cisco jackpot".
12. Moore, Galen (April 29, 2010). "Vertica grabs former Acopia CEO". Boston Business Journal. Retrieved March 28, 2012.
13. "Big Data Market Size And Vendor Revenues - Wikibon". wikibon.org.
14. Furrier, John (March 16, 2012). "HP Lead Big Data Exec Chris Lynch Resigns". Forbes.com. Retrieved March 28, 2012.
15. Huang, Gregory (March 28, 2011). "Vertica CEO Chris Lynch Talks HP Acquisition, Fires Back at Netezza, IBM in "Big Data" Battle". Xconomy Boston. Retrieved March 28, 2012.
16. Moore, Galen (April 8, 2011). "Billerica's Vertica plans growth path after Hewlett-Packard acquisition". Boston Business Journal. Retrieved March 28, 2012.
17. http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2011/09/26/daily1-Startup-PowerInbox-rings-up-16M-in-new-funding.html Archived October 1, 2011, at the Wayback Machine PowerInBox] and
18. "'Big data' center hack/reduce getting big buzz - Boston Business Journal". Archived from the original on April 10, 2014.

• 21st-century American businesspeople
• 1963 births
• Living people
• Bentley University alumni