Chris Messina is an investor, product designer, and technologist best known for inventing the hashtag in 2007. A Carnegie Mellon alum, he shaped early‑2000s tech culture—driving Mozilla Firefox to its first 100M downloads, co‑creating BarCamp and coworking, and launched Google Developers and the Google+ Platform. He’s held senior roles at Google, Uber, and Republic before becoming a YC-backed founder, and then General Partner at the Ride Home AI Fund in 2023—backed by a $6M vehicle for vertical AI startups. The #1 hunter on Product Hunt, he supports early‑stage founders and continues coaching makers on product launches.

Hi! This is my ActivityPub.Space account that I'll hopefully use for more protocol/meta discussions going forward instead of alienating anyone on my main.

For my more casual posts, check out @eblu@wetdry.world.

https://j12t.org/

Co-Founder (NodeBB) | Husband 🤷‍♂️ and Dad 🙉 to three | Rock Climber 🧗‍♂️ | Foodie 🥙 | Conductor 🎵 | Saxophonist 🎷

✅ Small teams craft better code.
🇨🇦 Made in Canada
🗨️ Federating NodeBB with funding from NLNet ♥️🇪🇺

He/him. Board member at CoSocial.ca.

Research Director, Social Web Foundation.

Director of Open Technology at Open Earth Foundation (OEF).

Author of "ActivityPub: Programming for the Social Web" from O'Reilly Media.

Founder of Wikitravel, StatusNet, identi.ca, Fuzzy.ai.

Creator of pump.io. Co-creator of GNU social.

Co-chair of the Social Web Working Group at W3C. Co-author of ActivityStreams 2.0. Co-author of ActivityPub. Co-author of OStatus.

Grad student in CS at Georgia Tech.

In Montreal, from San Francisco. Greek, Arab, American, Canadian, cook, gardener, runner, dad, husband.