Transcript
Introduction
Patrick
My guest today is Michael Dempsey, General Partner at Compound Ventures. Michael invests in a broad range of areas but has a unique talent for combining brand building and direct consumer relationships with technically demanding sectors. Our conversation covers the rise of virtual influencers, robotics, and how to best identify key inflection points in the evolution of new technologies. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Michael Dempsey.
Michael's Background
So Mike, I'd love to begin with a simple thumbnail sketch of your career to this point. Describe for the audience, how you got into the business you're in now and what the major stages of your career have been to this point.
Michael
I'd start with in college I spent a lot of time thinking about finance and trading a little bit and really became obsessive with markets broadly. After school, went to work at a hedge fund, doing everything from long/short on the public side to some derivatives trading, to eventually some cross-border private equity as well from Asia to the US. And eventually, started to do a little bit of seed investing there, which was a little off for 2011, hedge funds doing seed stuff - there weren't a ton of people doing it. At that point, I really fell in love with the seed investing stuff. I think that was both intellectually stimulating to me and still had the level of paranoia that public markets brought me, which is there's always someone working harder to destroy you on the other end of a trade.