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Marc van der Chijs (39) 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 (NL), Laag-Keppel (NL), Curacao (Netherlands Antilles), Brummen (NL), Ommen (NL) and Valdosta (USA). 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 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. Because of working on TV projects 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. As a co-founder, Marc has been on the board of Tudou since the beginning until late 2010 when the IPO process started. Tudou went public on the NASDAQ on August 17, 2011 under the symbol TUDO.

Late 2005 Marc was approached by Spill Group (now Spil Games) to help them set up an online casual game presence in China. He set up Spil Games Asia in January 2006 which he led as CEO until 2011. He is still an advisor to Spil Games. Spil Games Asia has its own game development studio, Zlong Games. This studio among others produces flash and HTML5 casual game content, including social games and mobile games. The studio has about 80 employees.

In 2011 Marc helped to co-found the personalized fashion site unitedstyles.com, together with Xander Slager and Joop Dorresteijn. The start-up was a finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt in Beijing in November 2011. Starting from 2012 Marc spends mosts of his time on growing unitedstyles into a leading fashion company.

Next to this Marc still invests in Chinese start-ups as an angel investor. These are mainly Internet or Internet-related companies located in Shanghai. He is also a limited partner in US angel fund Seraph Group.

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 and in 2010 Mount Fuji (up and down in one day outside the main season).