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Marc van der Chijs (37) is a Dutch Internet entrepreneur living in Shanghai. Marc was born in Arnhem (The Netherlands) in 1972 and in his youth he moved many times. During his primary and high school years he lived in many different places, including Wehl, Laag-Keppel, Curacao (Netherlands Antilles), Brummen, Ommen and Valdosta (Georgia). In 1991 he started his university studies at Maastricht University, where he studied Business Economics/International Management with a focus on Corporate Finance.

During his university period he was among others active in student investment club Sigma as a board member (1992-1993), as president of the Marketing Association Maastricht and a board member of the National Marketing Association (1993-1994), and as co-founder of the Finance Association Maastricht (1994-1995). From September 1994 until January 1995 Marc spent a semester Grenoble (France) where he studied a semester Applied Economics (in French).

He worked as a private tutor starting in 1992, teaching economics to students and for a while even to a high school class (without the necessary papers for that). Later he taught mathematics and statistics to first-year students as a student-teacher at Maastricht University (1993-1995). Marc also worked for KPMG Ebbinge Campus as a student recruiter (1994-1995). He did an internship for the Limburg Institute of Finance, doing research for a real estate index with Prof. Kees Koedijk and Prof. Piet Eichholtz. He also wrote his thesis on this subject and graduated with a Masters Degree in 1995.

On January 2, 1996 Marc started his career at Mercedes-Benz headquarters in Stuttgart (Germany) as an international management trainee (Internationale Nachwuchsgruppe). During this one-year trainee program he did 3 projects in the field of Finance, one of them the partial implementation of SAP at Mercedes-Benz Indonesia in Jakarta. From 1997-1999 he worked at Daimler headquarters in Finance, doing among others the Mercedes-Benz liquidity planning, advising the Daimler currency hedging committee, and as a manager controlling passenger cars USA & Canada.

In the summer of 1999 Marc was offered the position of financial controller at Mercedes-Benz Canada, but he decided not to take it and instead applied for a similar postion in Beijing at DaimlerChrysler Northeast Asia. In October 1999 he was offered this job after several interviews in Beijing. The next 3 months he worked partly on controlling for NE-Asia, partly on the hand-over of his job in Stuttgart and on studying Chinese. Marc moved full-time to Beijing in January 2000.

Marc enjoyed living and working in China and saw many other opportunities while working for Daimler. In the summer of 2002 he decided that he would not renew his 3-year contract as senior manager planning & reporting nor go back to Daimler headquarters. Instead he quit his job in October 2002 and started studying Chinese at Beijing Foreign Language University (Beijing Waiguoyu Daxue), with the intention of studying for one year before becoming an entrepreneur. But because only studying Chinese was not enough to fill his time he set up his first company after one month already - exactly on his 30th birthday! This company took off quicker than expected and combining this with studying turned out to be a problem - the university teachers did not like him to be away on business trips all the time. When he was forced to make a choice he decided to quit his studies after the first semester.

During the next two years Marc was a consultant, helping foreign companies to enter China. His consulting company merged into China Bay partners in 2003. During this time Marc also worked together with Sierk Vojacek at SVP Film, helping with the production of China's first reality show "Beyond the Infinity" and with TV commercials for international and local Chinese brands. During this time his interest for (new) media started to develop. In 2004 Marc met Gary Wang (Wang Wei) at the first Shanghai Formula One race, where they decided to play a round of golf together. During this round they talked about podcasting and decided to set up a company for this together. This happened on October 15, 2004 and that was the start of Tudou.com (at that time still called Toodou.com).

Tudou was officially launched on April 15, 2005 and from then it went very quickly. From an idea for a site about mainly audio podcasting, Tudou managed to become the leading video site in China. Marc never worked full-time at Tudou, as he was also still a managing partner at China Bay. It is under Gary Wang's leadership that the company grew into what it is now. As a co-founder, Marc has been on the board of Tudou since the beginning, together with some of the venture capital firms that have invested a total of USD 85 million into the company over 4 rounds of financing.

Late 2005 Marc was approached by Spill Group (now Spil Games) to help them set up an online casual game website in China. He set up Spil Games Asia to do this in January 2006 and the company has grown into one of the biggest players on the Chinese market. As of January 2009 the company has 33 million unique visitors per month on its Chinese sites www.xiaoyouxi.com and www.game.com.cn. It also runs the number one online casual game site in Indonesia and fast-growing sites in India and Japan. Spil Games Asia has its own flash game develoment studio, Zlong Games. This is probably the biggest flash studio in China, with an output of 1-2 new games per week.

Next to this Marc invests in and advises Chinese start-ups as an angel investor. These are mainly internet or internet-related companies located in Shanghai.

Marc is married to Grace Wang, with two children (Scott, born on 27-12-2007, and Elaine, born on 21-05-2009). They live in Shanghai. In his free time Marc likes to participate in endurance sports: he runs marathons, in 2007 he rode a mountain bike from Lhasa through the Himalaya to Kathmandu, and in 2008 he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.