Michael Ghaffary JD

Michael Ghaffary JD General Information

Biography

Mr. Michael Ghaffary serves as Advisor at Canvas Ventures. Mr. Ghaffary is an Angel Investor. He served as a General Partner at Canvas Ventures. He also is a Co-Founder and serves as an Advisory Board Member at TestMax. He serves as a Board Member at Float Health, Flyhomes, Nubrakes, ResQ, Marvin, Roofstock, Flowspace, PipeDreams, and OfferFit. He serves as an Advisor at Burst Capital. He is an Angel Investor. He served as a Partner at Social Capital. He served as a Board Member at Darwin Homes. He previously served as Chief Executive Officer at Eat24. He also served as Vice President, Business and Corporate Development at Yelp. He holds a BSBA in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a JD from Harvard Law School. He Co-Founded Stitcher. A native of Cupertino, he 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. He 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. He 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. His 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, he 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 him 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.