Chris Pinkham

Who is Chris Pinkham?

Chris Pinkham is an entrepreneur and technologist born in Singapore, raised and educated in Britain and South Africa.

Chris was formerly Vice President, IT Infrastructure at Amazon.com, responsible for the company's global infrastructure engineering and operations. While in this role, he conceived, proposed and, together with Willem Van Biljon, built Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, the highly successful public cloud service.

Prior to Amazon, Chris created and ran the first commercial ISP in South Africa, Internet Africa, which he sold to UUNET 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 and subsequently started a new venture with his long-time friend Willem. The company, Nimbula, was focused on Cloud Computing software and was funded by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners. In March 2013, Nimbula was acquired by Oracle Corporation.

Chris has co-authored a couple of patent applications: "Managing Communications Between Computing Nodes", "Managing Execution of Programs by Multiple Computing Systems"