Christina Tsai is a highly experienced investment specialist with over 15 years’ experience in global markets. She is the Co-Founder and CEO of 500 Startups, an international early-stage venture capital and startup accelerator since 2010. 

After completing her university education in 2002, Tsai joined the international sales department of OSIsoft where she held a support role to sales managers and distributors across over 20 international markets. Tsai started working for Google in 2003 in the technical support team for AdSense and Google Analytics. She then moved to lead product marketing for video monetization and eventually became the Product Marketing Manager of Google leading Google I/O a role she held until 2010. In 2007 Tsai was appointed as Product Marketing Manager of YouTube where she was responsible for product marketing. Tsai also drove co-marketing for syndication partners like Sony, TiVo, EA and Panasonic during her one year tenure at YouTube. 

Location

Christine Tsai was born in Guam and moved to the United States with her family when she was four years old. They made their home in the Bay Area and Tsai completed her basic education at Mission San Jose High in Fremont, California. She then enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Cognitive Science in 2002. During her time at the university, Tsai was involved with the Theatre Rice Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program. She also spent four months in an internship with Chevron Texaco Products Co. building a web-based dashboard model for US refinery managers. Tsai has vested interests in companies across a range of locations including the United States, Europe, Singapore, Shanghai, the United Kingdom, Canada, Hong Kong and Australia.

Remarkable Investments

As the head of 500 Startups, Christine Tsai is responsible for a wide variety of startup investments. The company has a total of more than US$350 million in committed capital across four main funds and 13 micro funds. Tsai and 500 Startups have invested in over 1,800 startups across the globe including notable investments in Udemy, Intercom, Viki (which was acquired by Rakuten), Wildfire (which was acquired by GOOG), Credit Karma and Twilio. 

Latest News

In early April 2018, Bizwomen wrote that Christine Tsai is planning on rebooting 500 Startups after recent setbacks. Tsai was reported to have said that she never expected to be the person leading the company. She said that the company is driven by its mission to discover great founders around the globe and to help build ecosystems and that they planned to refresh their mission values. Recode featured Christine Tsai and 500 Startups in April 2018. According to the article, the company was selling some of its parent company Mothership’s equity to the Abu Dhabi Financial Group. The terms of the sale were not revealed. In June 2018 betakit.com reported that Neha Khera joined 500 Startups as a partner in Canada and plans to actively support around 20% of the company’s Canadian portfolio, which amounts to 36 companies.