Chris Tolles, CEO

Chris is CEO and co-founder of Topix, which he has led since 2007. He joined the founding team in 2004, when Topix launched as an aggregated news site, later becoming the biggest community news site in the U.S. Chris then steered the company to become a high-growth, editorially driven entertainment site leveraging the largest audience platforms on the Web.

Before Topix, Chris co-founded Spoke Software, the first enterprise-focused social networking company. Prior to Spoke, he co-founded the Open Directory Project, the most extensive human-edited directory of the Internet, and sold it to Netscape/AOL. His sales and marketing career began at Sun Microsystems, where Chris rose to become head of marketing for Network Security products. He has a degree in Computer Science and Economics from the University of California at San Diego, where he was awarded the Michael Addison Award for his thesis on the structures of the electronic-information industry. Chris is a native Northern Californian, a long-term San Francisco resident, and an Eagle Scout.