Cha Li

Cha Li is a serial entrepreneur turned angel investor and one of the more active early-stage backers in China. He was among the first cohort of Chinese university students after the 1977 restoration of the national college-entrance exam, entering the oil-painting department of the China Academy of Art. He later went abroad, earning a master's degree from the University of London in the late 1980s/early 1990s, and held management positions at multinational media companies including Saatchi & Saatchi and Ziff Davis.

He built his operating career largely overseas. In the United States he served as president/CEO of ventures such as EastWest Creative Communication Inc. and InterPro, and was Asia CEO of the UK-listed company MoPo. His entrepreneurial arc was famously uneven — an early venture that was acquired within roughly two years, followed by a second company in New York that failed dramatically and left him financially devastated, before a later venture reached a public listing. He often frames his return to China and move into investing as "the last startup I'll ever do."

Back in China, in 1999 he co-founded the incubator IdeaFactory together with Xue Cunhe (a UTStarcom co-founder and later CEO of SoftBank China Capital), building some of China's earliest search-engine, online-learning, online-music and mobile-gaming companies. He subsequently launched the Qianlong (Dragonvest) venture fund, and in 2012 established iStart Ventures — an angel fund and three-month accelerator in Shanghai, created in partnership with local government and SBCVC — occupying roughly 10,000 square meters of space. He is also the author of the entrepreneurship book 《给你一个亿，你能做什么？》 ("If I Gave You 100 Million, What Could You Do?"), regarded by many grassroots founders as a startup handbook.

Across his angel career he has backed on the order of 50–100+ technology and internet startups, and positions himself less as a financier than as an experienced "older brother" to young founders.

• Stage & checks: Seed and Series A, writing roughly RMB 500K–5M per company; iStart runs both a fund and an accelerator that converts a small slice of ~1,000 annual applicants into funded teams.
• People over sectors: "As an angel investor, I don't go with crowds, so I don't have a limitation on the areas I invest in." He deliberately avoids narrow sector mandates.
• Bet on youth: He champions inexperienced, young founders — "being young and inexperienced is an advantage… experience is a limitation" — and has encouraged student founders to pause university to build.
• Invest in people and new technology: His shorthand thesis is "投人更投新技术" (invest in people, and even more in new technology), favoring technology- and product-driven, light-asset businesses over traditional industries.
• Three things he looks for: (1) an innovative "killer app" idea, (2) founder qualities — leadership, execution, and determination, and (3) a sustainable business model with clear revenue logic.
• Contrarian on downturns: "When winter comes, that's when real entrepreneurs are actually building" — he views downturns as filtering for genuine founders.