Mike Ghaffary
A native of Cupertino, Mike caught the technology bug at an early age. He started playing video games at age 4, taught himself programming at 13, and founded his first startup at 19. While studying for the bar exam, he had the idea for BarMax, a $1000 iPhone app for exam preparation, which is currently the top rated bar exam course in the app store.
Mike went on to co-found Stitcher, an early podcasting company backed by Benchmark where he led partnerships with The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Washington Post, TechCrunch, and many others. Mike was also early at TrialPay, a payments company that was acquired by Visa, where he led the partnership with Facebook that doubled the company’s revenue.
Mike’s enthusiasm for the early stage brought him to Yelp in 2010, where he was Vice President of Business Development and Corporate Development, and ultimately started the mergers and acquisitions function. In that role, Mike secured more than 200 partnerships with leading companies, including Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung, and he led Yelp’s acquisition of Eat24. The founders of Eat24 asked Mike to step in as CEO of the new subsidiary, where he helped scale the company to 500 employees and generated 700 million in gross revenue.
Mike has a BS in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, and a JD/MBA from Harvard University.
Biography
A native of Cupertino, Mike caught the technology bug at an early age. He started playing video games at age 4, taught himself programming at 13, and founded his first startup at 19. While studying for the bar exam, he had the idea for BarMax, a $1000 iPhone app for exam preparation, which is currently the top rated bar exam course in the app store.
Mike went on to co-found Stitcher, an early podcasting company backed by Benchmark where he led partnerships with The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Washington Post, TechCrunch, and many others. Mike was also early at TrialPay, a payments company that was acquired by Visa, where he led the partnership with Facebook that doubled the company’s revenue.
Mike’s enthusiasm for the early stage brought him to Yelp in 2010, where he was Vice President of Business Development and Corporate Development, and ultimately started the mergers and acquisitions function. In that role, Mike secured more than 200 partnerships with leading companies, including Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung, and he led Yelp’s acquisition of Eat24. The founders of Eat24 asked Mike to step in as CEO of the new subsidiary, where he helped scale the company to 500 employees and generated 700 million in gross revenue.
Mike has a BS in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, and a JD/MBA from Harvard University.
As an angel investor and advisor to consumer and software companies, Mike backed Superhuman, Strava, Faire, Metromile, and Optimizely, among others, before becoming a partner at Social Capital, where his portfolio included CloudKitchens and Standard Cognition.
Mike is especially excited about online marketplaces, productivity, and software that he might have found useful when he was building companies.
You’ll find Mike working on his next productivity hack—he wrote a book on “Inbox Zero” and listens to audible books and podcasts on 3x speed. You can also find him riding his bike to the top of Mt. Tam at sunrise, snowboarding down a mountain, or having living room dance parties with his young kids.
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