Fireside Chat with Joe Tsai

Please join us for a fireside chat with Tsai CITY's benefactor, Joseph Tsai (Yale BA '86, JD '90), co-founder and executive vice chairman of Alibaba. Highlighting the power of college and graduate students to be leaders and changemakers through innovative thinking, the conversation will reflect on Tsai CITY's mission: to support students from diverse backgrounds and disciplines to seek innovative ways to solve real-world problems. Yale students will have the chance to hear about the vision for Tsai CITY, get insight on innovating in times of uncertainty, and ask questions. This event will be held online; a Zoom link will be provided to registered attendees.

About Joe Tsai: Joe Tsai is a co-founder and executive vice chairman of Alibaba Group, a global Internet technology company based in China. His career at Alibaba spans over 20 years, during which he was the company’s chief financial officer and oversaw strategic investments. He is a founding member of Alibaba Partnership.

Tsai is Governor of the Brooklyn Nets (NBA) and New York Liberty (WNBA), and is Chairman of the teams’ home arena Barclays Center. He owns the San Diego Seals, a professional indoor lacrosse team in the National Lacrosse League and has investments in the Premier Lacrosse League and Los Angeles FC of Major League Soccer. Tsai played high school football and lacrosse at The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. He was a member of the varsity lacrosse team at Yale and has been a consistent supporter of the Yale men’s and women’s lacrosse programs. Yale won the NCAA Division I Men’s Lacrosse National Championship in 2018 and played in the Championship Final in 2019. In 2017, Tsai received the George H.W. Bush ‘48 Lifetime of Leadership Award from Yale University.

Through the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation, Tsai and his wife Clara Wu Tsai are active philanthropists supporting initiatives in education, research, criminal justice reform, the arts and, most recently, humanitarian relief during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to founding Alibaba Group, Tsai was a private equity investor with Investor AB of Sweden’s Wallenberg family. He is a graduate of Yale College (BA ’86) and Yale Law School (JD ’90), and practiced tax law as an associate with Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York from 1990 to 1993.

The conversation will be moderated by three Tsai CITY leaders:

Anjelica Gonzalez, Tsai CITY faculty director, serves as Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and part of the Vascular Biology and Therapeutics Program. Gonzalez has a dedicated interest in training the next generation of scientists to think in an interdisciplinary way and approach problems from a scientifically global perspective. Gonzalez’s translational research interests have led to the development of new technologies that are being deployed in underserved and low-infrastructures settings across the world. Within Yale, Anjelica has been recognized for her dedication to exceptional teaching, having been awarded the Provost’s Teaching Award, the top prize awarded for teaching across all of Yale University.

Clare Leinweber, Tsai CITY executive director, is an experienced leader in innovation education. For over 15 years, she has mentored and taught hundreds of student innovators, founders and joiners, helping them develop compelling ideas to solve real-world problems by creating for-profit or not-for-profit ventures and by innovating from within established organizations. Prior to Yale, Clare ran the Penn Wharton Entrepreneurship center.

Genevieve Liu, Tsai CITY Student Advisory Board co-chair, is a senior at Yale majoring in Ethics, Politics & Economics. Genevieve's interests lie at the intersection of business and law. Alongside acting as chairwoman of the Tsai CITY Student Advisory Board and a venture fellow at Rough Draft Ventures, she is also a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and a member of the Yale Mock Trial Team. Genevieve spent her past summer working in operations at Facebook, remotely.