Chris Gardner

Prior to joining Underscore VC as an investing partner, Chris spent the better part of three decades as an entrepreneur, founder, and product and marketing executive at Boston-area venture-backed companies. His last five roles all resulted in exits that created good outcomes for both employees and investors.

While better-known as a FinTech entrepreneur, Chris is a self-professed nerd and technology omnivore. In addition to payments, Chris has spent time at companies focused on speech recognition, video streaming, mobile marketing, mobile messaging, e-billing, and document management.

Most recently, Chris was an executive at PayPal and led their P2P, PayPal Here, and In-Store payments products after Paydiant, the company he co-founded, was acquired by PayPal in 2015. During his time at PayPal, Chris also led product diligence and then product integration on PayPals $2.2B acquisition of iZettle.

Prior to Paydiant and PayPal, Chris was CMO and head of Products at ExtendMedia, a video content delivery and commerce platform software company that was acquired by Cisco in 2010; SVP of Products and Marketing at m-Qube, North America’s leading premium SMS mobile payments provider that was acquired by Verisign in 2006; and VP of Products and Marketing at edocs, Inc., an e-billing, payments, and customer self-service company that was acquired by Siebel Systems in 2004. Chris had an early start in mobile when he joined the founders of OmniBrowse, Inc. as VP of Marketing, and helped launch one of the first mobile data service providers in the US. OmniBrowse was acquired by Microsoft in 1999.

Chris earned a BA in Communications from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst a really long time ago.