Patrick Finnegan began his career as an entrepreneur while struggling to fit in at a Delaware boarding school. He started businesses as a way to cope (some above board, like building websites, and some less so, like selling fake IDs). He dropped out after hearing about the Thiel Fellowship, which awarded $100,000 to fellow dropouts under 22 years old. Though he didn’t make it to the finalist round after traveling out to Las Vegas, he remembers seeing Lucy Guo and hearing about Dylan Field, who had founded Figma. Finnegan decided to follow a similar path, moving to New York to start a budding startup career and meet other young people across the city’s tech and art scenes.
Finnegan earned a smattering of
headlines as a precocious 19-year-old wunderkind before going mostly under the media radar. But he’s been productive over the past decade, gaining a name through putting together special purpose vehicles and venture funds that became early backers of buzzy projects. One, the prebiotic soda Poppi, completed an acquisition with Pepsi for nearly $2 billion last year. But where Finnegan has built his reputation is as a connector: the type of amorphous yet essential investor who knows someone who knows someone who can turn a little-known product into a cultural phenomenon. For Poppi, Finnegan facilitated an intro to the manager of Post Malone, who became one of the drink’s most high-profile ambassadors. “He just knows everybody,” Poppi cofounder Stephen Ellsworth told me. “That is Patrick’s superpower.”
That may not seem like the foundation for a successful VC firm. Still, in today’s impossibly saturated attention economy—where every new product seems to have an A-list celebrity as an investor or spokesperson—finding authentic boosters is a hot commodity. It’s also why Finnegan partnered with Chris Hollod to build Second Sight Ventures, which is announcing the close of its $75 million first fund. Like Finnegan, Hollod built a career out of the celebrity-driven investment paradigm. Through his role as the managing partner at Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade Investments, he really pioneered the model, though he started the firm around when Finnegan was still in middle school.
Now, the two are finding early-stage opportunities in a category that Finnegan describes as “tech companies that also have a cultural edge.” Investments for the firm have included the Kardashian-backed supplement brand Lemme and the Mario Carbone-backed restaurant software startup
Loyalist. “We’re really just making sure that we’re investing in businesses that know how to tell good stories,” Finnegan said. “And then helping them amplify and tell better stories.”
I asked whether Finnegan, now knocking on the doorstep of 30 years old, is worried about losing his edge. “Just being a student and knowing my place and just being a sponge,” he said, echoing his early experience trying out for the Thiel fellowship. “I don’t want to be the smartest person in the world.”
Leo Schwartz
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