Mike Ghaffary

Following a decade of collaboration with Rebecca and Paul, Mike officially joined Canvas Ventures as a general partner in 2019, where he invests in innovation for consumers and software. Mike draws from his 10 years in business development to work with companies on their early business development initiatives, revenue lines, and partnerships as well as their go-to-market strategy and execution.

A native of Cupertino, Mike 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.

Mike 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. Mike 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.

Mike’s 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, Mike 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 Mike 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.

Mike has a BS in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, and a JD/MBA from Harvard University.