🎙 Speaker Series: Investing at the Frontier with Derek Handley
🌱 Attend this session if you want to learn about how investing at the frontier of deep technology and sustainability can help accelerate the world to a better future.
About the Speaker
Derek Handley is the Co-Founder & Managing Partner of Aera VC.
Derek is a futurist, entrepreneur and an aspiring civilian astronaut signed up to visit space with Virgin Galactic. He created the Aera Foundation in 2014 as a charitable studio catalysing social innovations to reframe the status quo for a sustainable future which subsequently launched Aera VC.
Prior to establishing Aera, Derek alongside Sir Richard Branson, was the Founding CEO of The B Team, a non-profit alliance of global business leaders acting as a catalyst for bold dialogue, courageous leadership and brave action toward a fairer, greener and more human economy.
Prior to The B Team, Derek spent 10 years founding and growing early mobile-tech company The Hyperfactory, which he built to be a global success and later exited to Meredith Corporation/Time Inc. He was named in the Silicon Alley 100 Most Influential Tech People in NYC, and awarded the New Zealand EY Entrepreneur of the Year for this. He helped found over a dozen start-ups while based in New York, including the venture-studio Human Ventures.
Returning to New Zealand with his wife and family, Derek founded Wiser Conversations, an online conversation and podcast series helping people ask better questions to develop self-knowledge and purpose in their lives. Wiser programs run at AUT University in Auckland where he is an Adjunct Professor; through workshops for family offices and elite athletes around the world.
Derek is currently studying towards a Masters in Religion at Harvard. Previously he studied at MIT, Singularity University and Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He was appointed the Social Innovator in Residence at Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania from 2016-2017. He sits on the board of Sky Television and was a formative member of the Air New Zealand Sustainability Advisory Panel.
About the Interviewer
Candice Ammori advises climate tech startups and was most recently the Founding Director of On Deck Climate Tech where she built a startup ecosystem and invested in climate tech companies. In the last year, she brought together 750+ people from across the global climate tech ecosystem, from policy experts to investors and founders, and helped talented folks start dozens of impactful organizations. Before that, her career spanned finance, data science, VR, cloud computing, and running a local business. She has a grad degree in statistics (focused on the ethics of AI) from the University of Michigan.