He graduated from Arlington High School in Massachusetts in 1981 and attended Suffolk University where he earned his bachelor's degree in business management in 1986.
In May 2011, Lynch received an honorary doctorate of commercial science degree from Bentley University[7] and addressed the graduates during the commencement ceremony.
From there he joined Wellfleet Communications led by another DEC alum, Paul Severino (which merged with SynOptics to form Bay Networks in 1994).
[15][16] Lynch is as an advisor and mentor to many Boston area entrepreneurs and is on the board of RayV Networks (acquired by Yahoo!
He was Chairman of Azuki Systems, co-founded by ArrowPoint and Acopia founder Chin-Cheng Wu (acquired by Ericsson in 2014).
In 2012, Lynch co-founded Hack Reduce along with Frederic Lalonde as a way to cultivate a community of Big Data experts in Boston.