Chris Neumann

Investor | Founder | Advocate

ABOUT CHRIS NEUMANN

I’m a 4x founder-turned-early-stage investor.

I was previously a General Partner at Panache Ventures, one of Canada’s leading early-stage funds. At Panache, I led Pre-Seed investments into companies building in infrastructure, energy and developer tools, including Soma Energy, Revyl, Reworkd, Platformatic, and Sandgarden.

I started in venture capital nearly a decade ago, investing in AI and data companies for 500 Startups. After that, I founded Commonwealth Ventures, a San Francisco-based accelerator that helped Canadian and UK startups raise Seed and Series A funding from Silicon Valley VCs.

Before I was an investor, I was the CEO and Cofounder of DataHero (acquired by Cloudability) and the first employee of Aster Data (acquired by Teradata).

My focus for the past 10 years has been investing in startups based outside of California and helping their founders learn the strategies and best practices that Silicon Valley companies leverage to win.

I write a weekly newsletter about Silicon Valley trends, the business of venture capital and startup best practices. You can sign up to get weekly 3-minute reads delivered to your inbox every Wednesday here.

A bit more about me:

  • I have an MS in Computer Science from Stanford (specializing in distributed computing and recovery-oriented computing) and a BS in Computing Science from Simon Fraser University.

  • I was once part of the team at Motorola responsible for the E1 ROKR (a joint venture with Apple that pre-dated the iPhone). You can still find videos online of Steve Jobs trying not to lose it on stage when the phone didn’t work. 🙃

  • I host the annual Founders Day conference in Vancouver — the largest founder-focused event in Western Canada.

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