Christian Puscasiu

Christian Puscasiu General Information

Description

Mr. Christian Puscasiu serves as Managing Partner at Presidio Investors. He serves as Chairman at Elevate Semiconductor. He is also an Angel Investor. He joined Presidio Investors in 2017 and has been an active equity investor across private and public businesses, an entrepreneur, a business executive, and a teacher for over 20 years. He is based in California. At Presidio, he teamed with Karl Schade to raise and deploy Presidio's first institutional fund and build out the team. Before joining Presidio, he was the Co-Head of Direct Private Equity Investments at Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec ("CDPQ"), Canada's second-largest pension fund manager, which manages a private equity portfolio of more than $30 billion. His team invested over $4 billion directly into companies. In addition to moving CDPQ from passive co-investments to active co-underwriting (with board seats and strong governance rights), he also developed and led private investments for co-control and sponsor-less, including a successful technology strategy. A career private equity professional, he started investing at AEA Investors, a New York-based private equity firm, and then joined Blum Capital, where he collaborated with Mr. Schade in San Francisco after business school. He spent five years as a Partner at EQT in Germany investing in growth equity, leveraged buyouts, and turnarounds. At EQT, he helped take private Securitas Direct, the European leader in home security. In addition, he successfully turned around the Opportunity Fund, tripling the portfolio value over the years, and he opened the Munich office for the Expansion Capital group, now the Middle Market fund. He has also been teaching Master's and Executive students at UC Berkeley at the Haas School of Business and the Fung Institute of Engineering in the fields of Private Equity, Finance, and Entrepreneurship. Concurrently with teaching, he co-founded Three Bridges Venture Partners, an early-stage investment company that helps young companies with technology platforms aimed at solving existing enterprise problems to progress "from garage to office," investing his own and third-party capital. He began his career as a software engineer at Geoworks, then transitioned to management consulting at Bain & Company. He holds an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He served as a Board Member at AppSmyth.