Michael Dempsey – Investing in Bleeding Edge Technology

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:03)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:28)
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.
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 Dempsey** (3:05)
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, really fell in love with 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. I wanted to understand the startup ecosystem a little bit more. So I joined a company called CB Insights pretty early on. The company is most well known for the newsletter. Me and this other guy, Matt Wong, would spend all day looking at all the data coming in across private market financing, fundraising, app store rankings, et cetera, and basically figured out what should we write about today. We would write 12 to 15 blog posts each week on data-driven venture capital, private market insights. We did that for a couple of years and really saw the team scale.
In that time, really two things informed my view a lot about my career. The first, as I got to sit in this really interesting seat, I was talking to a bunch of founders, talking to a bunch of investors, a lot of corporates, but we're never really deeply digging into areas. I think the first thing I came to notice was an obvious example of everyone's standing around a pool waiting to see who jumps in first in venture, and then once one person does, everyone does. And we saw that both on the data side, but also just on the topic side. Secondarily, I became really obsessed with a lot of these more kind of out there, deeply technical type areas, and those things were at the time like robotics, machine learning, computational biology, AR, VR, space.