Christian Tooley

Tell us your story:

Christian Tooley is a multi-award-winning strategic advisor, impact investor, and global speaker. He consults, coaches, and invests alongside radical founders, bold funders, and progressive organisations building for systems change – at the intersection of strategy, systems, and scaling, with impact. He is currently Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the London School of Economics (LSE).

Formerly Bain’s Venture Lead for EMEA – where he led strategy, innovation, and investment projects – and a World Economic Forum Global Shaper, Christian brings over a decade of global insights from advising Fortune 500 CEOs, fund managers, and startup founders across cities from London to Hong Kong. He is the founder of i³ investing, Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ founder and funder group. As an angel and board advisor, his portfolio spans healthtech, deeptech, fintech, and consumer sectors.

A sought-after keynote speaker & facilitator – from SXSW to Web Summit – he guides others to reimagine systems in an increasingly chaotic world, bridging tech and truth. He is currently developing Contradict, a platform exploring the messy intersections of capital, culture, and systemic contradictions. Outside of work, he has solo-backpacked twice across Asia and Latin America, and spends a lot of time with Charlie & Kimchi (meow).

Impact:

I feel grateful to have created a space for queer entrepreneurship and ambitious LGBTQ+ startup founders. We are the U.K. and Europe's fastest growing, and largest, queer founder community for "intersectional incredibles". Our flagship (un)conference iiF is the world's first to unpack intersectionality as a criteria for investment. Fostering LGBTQ+ innovation in the startup ecosystem is critical to pave the way towards systemic change.

I continue to make strides to reimagine what queerness and financial wellbeing looks like going forward, in an increasingly chaotic world.

Advice:

Think about your end game and how that can evolve. How do you want to use your role, initiative, or own company to support your own ambition & can that support our community? For myself, I need to be advising and investing in radical founders who are driven by impact. My end game is reimagining our systems, and how "queering" as a concept is a pathway towards this.