James Mister, '10

Position
Senior Investment & Expansion Manager, Bavarian U.S. Offices for Economic Development
Bio/Description

James Mister ’10 is a strategy professional with a passion for future mobility, data privacy, and early-stage startups. Besides advising early-stage startups in the autonomous and smart vehicles space, he currently serves as the senior investment and trade official for the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs, Energy & Technology in the US-West and is based in San Francisco. In this role he and colleagues support companies across the tech, industrials, and life science spectrum like Lyft, Cloudflare, Palantir, Qualtrics, and Sierra Nevada Corp. (aerospace) with EU/EMEA strategy and expansion plans. He briefly worked with the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs in Silicon Valley and prior to that in Munich for many years in the mobility and energy infrastructure space, including at Siemens and for a global engineering consulting firm.

A 2015 McKinsey & Co. Germany Perspective Change fellow, James has attained a broad range of experiences—from due diligence on both the buy and sell side of M&A, private equity, and corporate VC deals to ex-post contract negotiation with Kazakh and Chinese oil and gas officials. He holds an M.S. in Energy Economics & Natural Resource Management from the Technical University of Munich and an A.B. in Politics from Princeton. Though he hails from Chicago, he speaks German, Mandarin, Dutch, Spanish, and French.