Gabriel Hammond

I love investing in my heritage. My mom immigrated to the United States in 1974. She graduated first in her medical school class at Cayetano Heredia in her hometown of Lima, Peru, and came to New York City to complete her residency. She was a force of nature. Among many other things, I am grateful that she taught me to speak Spanish! There is so much untapped potential in Latin America.

I slept on the floor of my 300 square foot Hells Kitchen apartment for 3 years after founding my first company, Alerian, because I couldn’t afford to replace my broken murphy bed. I was 25 years old.

I left the world of Wall Street finance because I didn’t like who I had become. The single most influential part of your environment is the people you are surrounded by. If you’re not careful, you can lose yourself in that – in fact, our brains our wired that way.

After I sold my first company, SteelPath Funds, to Invesco, I decided to go back to school. Not for any gain but for the journey of working on my PhD in psychology. I’ve never enjoyed learning so much in my life. I soaked it in. I wish that I had enjoyed it during my undergraduate years in the same way, but I was too busy trying to get somewhere…

I love venture investing and will do it for the rest of my life.

I love learning. I love learning from passionate, young people who know more about some aspect of life – whether that’s a technology, a market, a technique, an industry – than I will ever know.

Our culture produces people who are incredible at marketing themselves but aren’t actually good at anything. The most attractive quality to me in a person is their being truly excellent at what they do. It doesn’t matter what it is, but that they care to be the best at it. Our founders are truly excellent.

I have always told anybody who has worked with me - you will learn a lot more from my mistakes, than you will from the things I do well.

I want my future grandchildren to have clean oceans to play in, snow capped mountains to summit, and enjoy the big beautiful outdoors for ever ything that it is. I care deeply about leaving this Earth, which I have borrowed from them for my brief time here, the same way I found it, wonderous and beautiful.

I will always see the world through the eyes of a child.