Christian Puscasiu joined Presidio Investors in 2017, and he has been an active equity investor across private and public business, an entrepreneur, a business executive and teacher for more than 20 years. Christian 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.
Prior to joining Presidio, Christian 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), Christian also developed and led private investments for co-control and sponsor-less, including a successful technology strategy.
A career private equity professional, Christian 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. Christian 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 a 2.5-year period, and he opened the Munich office for the Expansion Capital group, now the Middle Market fund.
Christian has also been teaching Masters 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 started his career as a software engineer at Geoworks, then moved to management consulting at Bain & Co.
Christian holds an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor from UC Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Presidio Board Seats: Centennial Media (Chairman), Elevate Semiconductor (Chairman), Alliant National (Chairman) and Almaden