Christian Tang-Jespersen is a Partner with ACME. Christian acts as a board member and strategic advisor for a number of growth-stage technology companies. Christian further acts on the board of DenmarkBridge, a public-private nonprofit initiative bringing disruptive startups, investors, and large corporations together.
Christian has acted as CEO & President and in global management roles in technology companies for the past 20 years, based out of the US, China, Singapore, and Switzerland, and currently resides in Denmark. He has served as a member of the Technology Advisory Council at Magna, one of the world’s largest automotive suppliers and as strategic advisor for Temasek, sovereign fund of Singapore. Further, Christian acted as board member and advisor to the founder CEO of Solidenergy Systems until its IPO on NYSE at multi-billion valuation.
Christian brings management experience in corporate and operational roles in organizations with 50-5000 employees. He has proven turn-around experience and growth-management, managing P&L from $25M to $750M. Prior to ACME, he grew Swiss-Singaporean Heptagon exponentially since joining in 2010 as CEO, resulting in a $2.5B trade sale in late 2017.
As an advisor, Christian has completed in excess of $10B transactions, including a dozen major M&A deals in telecommunication and high-tech as well as several IPOs and Private Placements.
I’m a third culture kid and lived in four different countries before I became a teenager. Since then, I have worked and travelled through more countries than I care to remember and have lived on three continents – every experience, each meeting and every different country I called home over the course of my life, have all defined who I am today. Cultures make and break us. I’m a firm believer that the more distinct cultures we get exposed to, the more we realize how similar we are. And yes, you owe your kids to show them the world. Please.
As a kid, I was asked by my mother to count the number of pictures of girls versus boys in our school textbooks — not my proudest moment when I intentionally added a couple of girls to the number to get more balance (and likely to avoid my mom’s lecture about gender inequality). She is a strong feminist – a red sock, as it was called at that time. Today we welcome (well most of us) diversity and equality. At that time, not so much.
I had three relatively nasty head fractures before the age of 10; the doctors at the local hospital knew me by my first name (personalized service for a VIP customer, I guess). But I also grew up assuming free health-care was completely normal.
I started cooking as a kid and I loved it. I loved to experiment with flavours, mixing up crazy stuff. As I grew up, I tried to use ingredients from all the places I visited. To this day, I still favor the complexity and simplicity of Japanese and Italian food. It is hard to make food simple and relatable. A bit like technology.
I wore a dark red robe for work when I was 28. Nothing extraordinary, just the only way we were allowed to proceed in the Danish High Court. I couldn’t afford to buy one myself; the court had reserves that we, the young attorneys, could borrow. The key was to arrive very early as most of them smelled of the terrified young and sweaty lawyers– fear and red robes do not mix well. Fear may affect you, but should never define you.
My grandfather was the world’s strongest tailor. Seriously. A pretty good tailor – and national champion in weightlifting. Never forget that real skills beat everything else.
“They said it couldn’t be done… but how did they know?” This was the sign on my dad’s desk in his classic corner office, on the most prestigious square in Copenhagen. I distinctly remember this sign; it always stuck with me – and many of my former colleagues will roll their eyes when I refer to it. It’s funny how things define us from early on. He was old school, but I honestly cannot remember one time where he would not give me his full attention (still smoking his cigar though).
