Entrepreneur 

Christina founded her first startup in the spring of 2011 when she and fellow Harvard Business School (HBS) sectionmate Alex Nelson incorporated Quincy Apparel. A direct-to-consumer ecommerce brand that created stylish professional clothes for ambitious young women, the company's secret sauce was an innovative approach to fit. Christina and Alex raised $1M in angel and venture capital and launched three collections over two years as they perfected their approach. But while their customers loved the brand, operational issues overwhelmed the first-time founders and they ran out of runway before reaching product-market fit. 

After they shut down, HBS Professor Tom Eisenmann wrote a case study on the failure of Quincy Apparel that has become a key class in the first-year entrepreneurship course at Harvard Business School and in many other top MBA programs. Christina is grateful for the learning Quincy gave her and the opportunity to share her failure has become an important part of her story. (It's why she included an entire chapter on failure in The Portfolio Life.)

After Quincy, Christina spent the next decade toggling between founding new ventures and joining the leadership teams of early-stage companies in the New York startup community. She was the founder of BridgeUp: STEM, a social enterprise venture focused on attracting high school girls to computer science, built in partnership with the American Museum of Natural History and funded by a $7.5M grant from the Helen Gurley Brown Foundation. She also co-founded TLDNE, a media company that produced the popular The Limit Does Not Exist podcast, in partnership with Cate Scott Campbell. The show was distributed by Forbes and, later, iHeart Media, publishing 125 episodes over 3 seasons and garnering millions of downloads from listeners around the world. 

In addition to her founding roles, Christina was proud to play a key role in the growth of Startup Institute, a Boston-based career retraining company as the founding director of the New York campus and the VP of marketing and communications for the global venture. And she joined David Kidder and Anne Berkowitch as an early executive at Bionic, an innovation consultancy that built startup ecosystems inside the Fortune 500. With a track record spanning P&G, Nike, Citi, General Mills, and more, Bionic was acquired by Accenture in 2020.