#41 Investing in Convergence: AI, Blockchain and IoT - A Conversation with Rumi Morales

Summary: Rumi Morales is a Partner at Outlier Ventures, an investment firm focused on early stage companies with an investment horizon of 10-20 years driven by an investment thesis focused on convergence of AI, Blockchain and IoT. Our conversation covers her experience surviving the Asian Financial crises, the burst of the dot.coms and the global financial crisis - and how lessons from those experiences helped shape her views. She shares her experience managing venture investments at CME Group, navigating the digital disruption in trading and the appeal of AI and blockchain technologies in financial markets. The discussion also covered promising use cases for blockchain and IoT, the implications of “Crypto Winter” and comparisons of Blockchain and AI as the “troubled child who talks about everything” and the “quiet teenager that goes to their room and closes the door without saying anything”. Companies discussed include SmartCognition, Haja Networks, IOTA, Sovrn, Fetch.AI, Ocean Protocol and Botanic/SEED.