Speakers and Chairs Bios

MB Christie is Chief Operating Officer for Tech City UK, a national organisation focused on accelerating digital growth in the UK through supporting tech scale-ups, addressing the digital skills gap and acting as the tech community's voice to government.

MB has gained a unique perspective on the digital landscape after 20 years of growing digital businesses in start-ups and corporates alike. Curious from birth, she started her career as a journalist for The Washington Post. Then she turned into an accidental entrepreneur in Prague in 1990, by creating the first phone directories in post-communist Czechoslovakia, because she needed it as a foreign correspondent. In 1994, with the birth of the first Mosaic browser, MB’s company Resources joined Microsoft in a ground-breaking project to create the first official Czech government website. Having caught digital entrepreneurial bug, she moved to London in 1998, and joined QXL, Europe’s fastest-growing online auction business, as Product Director in London helping it scale from 1 to 13 countries in 18 months during first dotcom boom. Next to Rightmove, the UK’s largest property site, as Product director for three years while it scaled to IPO. Most recently, she was Product Director for the Financial Times, building and steering digital products that successfully transitioned the news organization from print to digital for 8 years.

MB, an American by birth, earned her bachelor’s degree from The London School of Economics and Political Science in 1985.