Adam Torres and Michael Reid discuss The Milken Institute Global Conference.
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Show Notes:
Listen to Milken Institute Global Conference coverage. In this episode, Adam Torres and Michael Reid, General Partner & Co Founder at Deep Future, explore the VC landscape and the Milken Institute Global Conference.
About Michael Reid
Neuroscientist & investor. A domain expert in biotech, biological & chemical sciences. With a 10 year track record investing in biotech & technology, Michael has built a global network of investors, managers & commercial partners to support our portfolio companies.
About Deep Future
Deep Future backs mad scientists, rogue inventors, crazy hackers & maverick entrepreneurs implementing science fiction, solving big problems and helping our species become better ancestors.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today’s guest is Michael Reed, and he’s a general partner and also a co-founder over at Deep Future, which is a vc firm, which we’ll talk about that as well.
And this particular interview is part of our Milken Institute. Global Conference 2025 series where we highlight and interview individuals that attended the conference and get their, their perspective not only on the conference, but any type of projects they’re working on, and of course their company.
So first off, Michael, welcome to the show. Happy to have you here. Yeah, thank you. I’m happy to be here and thank you for allowing me to speak to your listeners today. So Michael, definitely excited to get into what you’re doing over at Deep Future and to talk more about your work. I mean, I know it was proposed to me that you know, Isaac Hayes looking American neuroscientists doing research with bono looking futurist.
And these aren’t my words. By the way, for everybody that’s listening, these are just the way I’ve heard some of the description, so I’m excited to, to get into that because I’ve been through your website, I’ve seen some of the work that you’re working on, and I think it’s very fascinating. So I’m happy to bring this to my audience.
But before we get into that first off, Milken conferences, have you attended in the past? Is this your first time attending? Like, where do you fall in line with, the conference overall? Yeah, this was my first time going to the Milken conference and I was actually in London. I’m based out of New York, but I was in London at the time and I had the opportunity to join and I jumped on the flight and I flew there.
Yeah. And yeah, part of my fascination was with the Milken Institute and with Michael Milken personally, is that. One of my friends Lloyd Lewis, she’s the widow of Reginald Lewis. Mm-hmm. A couple of a year and a half ago, she had a book release and interrupt me whenever you feel the need to mm-hmm.
Because I might continue. Okay. So she was telling me one day that Reginald Lewis, this is back in the eighties, he had done a, a major transaction, quote unquote, major. And the Wall Street Journal wanted to do an article on him and they wanted to say, black man does A-E-C-D-E-F. And he said, no, don’t put black man, just put A man did whatever.
And they said, well, okay, can we put your picture in the Wall Street Journal? And they put his picture in and she said That Reginald or Mr. Lewis, she insists. She said, Mr. Lewis came into the room one night and said, I just got a call from a guy named Michael Milken. And he said, I saw what you did with nothing.
Let’s see what you could do with some real money. Wow. And this is just speaks to the visionary person that Michael Milken is, and when she told me that, I became fascinated with him a bit. So when I got an invitation to Michael Milton Institute Global Conference, I jumped on first thing moving to la Yeah.
What an amazing story. These are, this is one of my favorite parts about, about covering this conference is all these connections and all these stories that you know, In my opinion, we’ll be lost if we don’t, if we don’t record them and share them. And I think it’s amazing, part of the legacy overall, what the institute’s looking to accomplish.
So thank you for sharing that. I never heard that one, obviously, which that’s awesome. So now that you attended, and I love talking to first time attendees. I’ve been now three, I think going on four years now. I mean, we’ve covered, and I’ve done a ton of interviews and I’m, this, to me, it’s my Super Bowl every year, like going to this.
It’s like that, that’s one of my favorite things. And it’s, and I feel like the community builds, like a lot of the same people go year after year. You get to see what people are progressing, what they’re working on. So I have my views, but I’m curious on your end, you go to conferences all around the world, like what stuck out about this particular experience and what was different?
What made it special? So if you compare it to Davos, so if you compare it to FI mm-hmm. The main one is Saudi Arabia. Vos seems to have lost its North Star, I think. And FII, in Riyadh is great because it’s personable and personal. Mm-hmm. And so this, what I found here, the most salient and amazing aspect of the Milken Conference was that you’re compelled to meet people and talk to people in a safe space.
So you find that the people that you’ve seen on tv, the people that have influenced your thought process, people that you respect or you don’t respect are right there in front of you and they feel comfortable enough to even engage you because everyone has the name tag and everybody is kind of forced to funnel through a main area of the hotel.
So it’s personal. You get to learn, you get to grow. The programming was amazing. You get to hear things that you couldn’t hear anywhere else, and I was running into friends from Thailand, from Monaco, from Brazil. I have friends from everywhere. You couldn’t stand three minutes without having someone amazing that you haven’t seen in a long time, right there in front of you.
And it’s small enough. 3000 people I think. Unlike Davos, where it’s just way too many people and it’s just too much going on there. And less transactional than Davos. So it’s really purpose driven. Mm-hmm. So this makes it special. This makes, it makes it meaty. This makes it valuable. This makes it something.
Probably the best event in the world to go to. Wonderful. Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, I, everything that you said, I’ve just, experienced them all and I see what you’re saying and yeah, it just I agree. I wanna switch it up a bit here. I wanna get into what you’re doing over at Deep Future and with your partner.
First off, I see co-founders like how did this idea, how did this firm, like, how’d this come about? And let’s start there. Okay, so my background is neuroscience. I mean, I’m an academic. I spent most of my life in the lab doing research on the brain, and I was doing research in Switzerland at the EPFL before I moved back to the United States.
To New York. That’s where I’m from. I’m an American, and sometime after that, one of my friends, his name is Pablo Holman, who is something of a futurist or. Tech guru. He was the first hire for Jeff Bezos for Blue Origin, and he was there for seven years. And then after that, Nathan Volt and Bill Gates brought him in to build and grow something called the Intellectual Ventures Lab.
So he approached me, he, he was there for 12 years. 12 years. And he approached me, it was his idea, and he said, listen, Michael, I have the curse of always being. Too far in advance, but I tell you, the solutions to the biggest problems in the world fly in deep tech. And so you say, well, what is deep tech? Deep tech is everything.
That’s pretty much not software. You can imagine advanced physics material sciences things. And then you have deep tech examples and every single industry and walk of life that you can imagine, it’s in agribusiness, it’s in. Transportation, it’s in energy, it’s in everything. And so even entertainment, as you find deep tech examples.
So we’re a bit agnostic in the deep tech space, but when he approached me with this, he said, well, with your background and with your community in Switzerland and more global and my background, mostly Silicon Valley and a lot of iconic people around the world, we could put together people who have shared values as us.
Also our big visionary and see that a lot of our solutions are gonna be found in these modern industrials, deep tech. And so we prepared ourselves. We went through AADE Rezi course at VC Lab, which was amazing. Those guys are great over there. He and Mike took some classes in Columbia Business School.
We prepared ourselves. Mm-hmm. We talked to the smartest people we know. We gathered some investors, and it’s a select group of investors. All of our LPs are really extraordinary people. They’re founders of banks, they’re founders of companies that are now public. They’re people who understand that we can solve some of these problems and it’s gonna take people who have a certain value system and a certain background to do it.
And these are the people we gather to back us. And that’s, in a nutshell. Who we are and what we do. Hmm. What are, why are you so optimistic about, like, about deep tech? ’cause obviously a lot of different things you could have done with your partner, a lot of different ways you could have went with this and you know, what, where, where does the optimism come from?
Like, why now? You know the funny thing is that when you’re, and I’m sure if you have any scientists that are listeners, they can relate. Mm-hmm. When you are a scientist, you get up every day and you’re doing your experiments and you think somebody cares and you secretly think you’re gonna win the Nobel Prize.
Yeah, yeah. One day. And you think that you’re gonna make a difference in the world. You really. There to serve humanity. Yeah. And so when I left, just like a podcaster, just so you know, Michael, same thing. Go ahead. Yeah. Right. And it’s rewarding, you feel like there’s some humanity there? Absolutely. And when I left the lab a lot of people knew me and approached me because of my network of banking families in Switzerland.
And so I found myself caught in this. Spiral of always just introducing banking families to investment opportunities. Mm-hmm. Around the world. And it’s a bit dehumanizing. You’re not doing anything except trying to make money. You’re not necessarily making the world a better place. So you miss that waking up every morning and bouncing off very low paid, I would say, to do something to make a difference in the world.
And so now with the deep tech investing. Each one of our companies, we now have 30 companies in our portfolio. And knock on wood, only one of them has failed and she gave us all of our money back. So all of our companies are doing well after two and a half years of doing this. But the thing is that the thing that brings one joy and you wake up tired, but enamored with your life because you’re giving each one of these people who have a vision, they’re like you.
The scientists in the lab. They have a solution for a major problem in the world, and you’re backing them, and if they solve it, you’ve made the world a better place because each one of them has a vision and a dream, and you are helping enable that. So it’s rewarding. So this how you go from being in a lab to getting that same, I don’t wanna call it a high, but getting that same purpose driven life.
Yeah. So it’s, very rewarding. Talk a little bit about, about how you choose your, process and how you choose what type of companies that you’re going to back and yeah, just let, let us in, in, you know, bird’s eye view of what, what you’re up to there on the decision making process.
Yeah. We have a really cool process because Pablos is like a beacon for a lot of people to find us because. Well, he has a great book that’s coming out that’s even gonna be more of a help. The book is called Deep Future, but he has some great TED Talks. He’s got a top 10 TED Talk with 26 million views.
I think it’s actually number 11 now, but it’s still, it’s you got a lot of viewers and people find us. And so with that, with people finding us, and we’ve hosted salons, I call it a salon in the Gertstein Paris 1920s. Definition of the word salon. We’ve hosted 60 around the world in 19 different cities and have played hosted over 7,000 people.
So we have a massive global community, and people find us, these companies find us, these founders find us, and when they find us for us, we say to ourselves, well, okay. Is this something that can move the needle? Is this something that can change the world? Is this something that we have an advantage in evaluating because of our technical backgrounds?
We don’t have to wait for someone to validate a technology. We can look at it and go deep ourselves, and we have a network to even reach out to Nobel Laureates and so forth and get a second opinion. ‘ cause we have that network. And so this is the network effect. We look at something, we evaluate it, then we go to someone in our community to make sure we are seeing what we think we’re seeing.
And then we give them their initial money most of the time. And then we go to our LPs and we say, Hey, do you guys want to co-invest? Or if there’s enough of you, we can create an SPV. But we’re very disciplined about our. About our portfolio. We’re not gonna put any more risk on our portfolio than we predetermined we would do a long time ago.
Mm-hmm. And so what happens then is, and this is where we have an advantage again, we say, how can we help that company? How can we help that company grow? So if you take one of our May, I talk about one of our portfolio companies. Please, please. Yeah. We have a portfolio company called Des Cycle. They’re based in the uk.
My friends founded this company and they’re mining families from the uk and they founded this company called Death Cycle that uses a very elegant chemistry called Tactics utic. This is is a chemistry where you can dissolve metals in a low energy nontoxic way, and so their strategy was that they would employ this technology in the mining space to get gold out of stone.
And stopped using Mercury and cyanide. Right. So when we saw them and we looked at what they were doing, they licensed the technology from Lester University, we said, well, listen, I remind you Pablos worked with Jeff Bezos for seven years. So he knew a guy named Casey Ani. And Casey is a gentleman who would decommission a lot of the.
Data centers for Amazon and also Microsoft and Salesforce. Long story short, we put these people together and we realized that we can, and if we take a ton of printed circuit boards, we could dissolve out 236 grams of gold and get 90, 99 point something percent of the gold all the time. And we know the gold’s there because we put it there.
They did a pilot study, they scaled it up, they made it modular, mobile, and we basically gave them their biggest potential client. And that’s what we do for each one of our companies. We say, okay, how can we give you wings? How can we help you grow? We know leaders in every industry that I can imagine, so how do we help you take it to the next level and ensure that we make a return for our LPs, and we do that with each one of our companies.
Hmm. Wow. What, what a great story. And and it’s exciting. And I looked on your website and I saw there’s a whole big list. And and thank you for sharing one particular example and I do wanna use some of the time that we have left here. If people are, I understand that you’re raising a fund, you have some other opportunities here, so.
Maybe let’s approach this in closing and from two different manners, if there is, you know, some deal flow and some interesting products out there, or, or companies I should say. And in the, in that deep space side of things, like if somebody wants to connect, how do they do that? And then on the investor side, if there are some investor opportunities coming up and, and your fund that you’re raising for like, like how do people get information and how do they connect on that one?
That’s easy because you, they could go to our website, which is Deep Future Tech, TECH. We’re not raising capital right now. We’re deploying capital. Okay. You know, eventually we’ll be raising capital again for another fund, but right now we’re just looking for, as Pablo says, you know, if you see a guy with crazy hair at a DeLorean, call us.
Because that’s the type of people we’re looking for. And we are Pablos has his book coming out July 20th, 22nd actually. It’s called the Future, and it’s a fun, fun story. This is funny. His mother wrote him a letter and his mother said, listen, I’m not just saying this because you’re my son. It’s actually a good book and I’m not a tech person, and I got everything in him.
I told him to put it on the book. I don’t think he did it though. Ah, that should be one of the testimonials in the front. And Paolo’s mom says, is good, is good. You haven’t seen that before, but I love it. It’s a funny book because it goes through the whole history of computers and this guy Pablos growing up as a kid in Alaska with nothing else to do except take computers apart.
Mm. You know, it goes through his growth and the growth in development of technology. So it’s a fun read and I, encourage people to pick it up. It’s, you know, if they have the chance to be everywhere after July. Wonderful and just reach out to us, especially if we’re coming to your town. We give pretty amazing events.
Sounds like a plan. well, Michael, this has been great having you on the show today. And just for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll put some of those links in the show notes, so you can just click on the links, head right on over, and connect with Michael and his team. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you. New content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button if you haven’t done so yet. And Michael, thanks again for coming on the show. Thank you.
