Chris Pinkham is an entrepreneur

Entrepreneur

An entrepreneur is an owner or manager of a business enterprise who makes money through risk and initiative.The term was originally a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish-French economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to a person who is willing to...

 and technologist

Technology

Technology is the making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, machinery, and procedures. The word technology comes ;...

 born in Singapore

Singapore

Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...

, raised and educated in Britain

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 and South Africa

South Africa

The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

.

Chris was formerly Vice President, IT Infrastructure at Amazon.com

Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

, responsible for the company's global infrastructure engineering and operations

Business operations

Business operations are those ongoing recurring activities involved in the running of a business for the purpose of producing value for the stakeholders...

. While in this role, he conceived, proposed and, together with Willem Van Biljon

Willem Van Biljon

Willem van Biljon is an entrepreneur and technologist born, raised and educated in South Africa. Willem graduated from the University of Cape Town with a degree in Computer Science....

, built Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the highly successful public cloud service

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....

.

Prior to Amazon, Chris created and ran the first commercial ISP

Internet service provider

An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...

 in South Africa, Internet Africa, which he sold to UUNET

UUNET

UUNET founded in 1987, was one of the largest Internet service providers and one of the nine Tier 1 networks. It was based in Northern Virginia and was the first commercial Internet service provider...

 in 1996. The company, now owned by MTN, remains one of the largest ISPs on the African continent.

In 2006, Chris left Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services is a collection of remote computing services that together make up a cloud computing platform, offered over the Internet by Amazon.com...

 and has since started a new venture with his long time friend Willem. The company, Nimbula

Nimbula

Nimbula is a startup backed by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners based out of Mountain View. The company was founded by Chris Pinkham and Willem Van Biljon who led the team that created Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud . Nimbula develops cloud orchestration software for the implementation of public...

, is focused on Cloud Computing software and is funded by Sequoia Capital

Sequoia Capital

Sequoia Capital is a Californian venture capital firm located on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California. The Wall Street Journal has called Sequoia Capital "one of the highest-caliber venture firms", and noted that it is "one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture-capital firms"...

 and Accel Partners

Accel Partners

Accel Partners is a global venture and growth equity firm funding companies from inception through the growth stage.The firm is based in Palo Alto, California with major offices in Bangalore, Beijing, London, and Shanghai....

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Chris has co-authored a couple of patent application

Patent application

A patent application is a request pending at a patent office for the grant of a patent for the invention described and claimed by that application. An application consists of a description of the invention , together with official forms and correspondence relating to the application...

s:
"Managing Communications Between Computing Nodes", "Managing Execution of Programs by Multiple Computing Systems"