Derek Footer

With 25+ years building, founding and investing, Derek has a natural fluency in diverse cultures and startup ecosystems, matched by linguistic fluency in 5 languages. His career as a founder included a Latin American Yahoo! clone founded in Chile in 1994, while he was in law school, segueing into a continent-wide consultancy that built some of the first Internet banking and large corporate sites. After the sale of that business, he became the head of DirecTV Latin America’s interactive television unit and afterwards served as as Vice President for Content at OpenTV, working with European software providers and major cable television providers such as ESPN, Time Warner and the precursor of Comcast. 

Rejoining the startup world, he founded BlueLake Media, and established SeeFootie, an Internet broadcaster that for a time was the only way to see full schedules of European football – with 12 English Premier League teams including Arsenal and Liverpool, German Bundesliga, Dutch Eredivisie, French Ligue 1, and select matches from the Champions League and the UEFA Cup. Founding the company in a garage in Menlo Park, California, he negotiated the multi-year rights to these top leagues, managed the development of the site at a time when AWS and other content delivery networks did not exist (using bundled T1 lines in a converted garage down the street from Google). Unfortunately at the time content was something major VCs avoided, so despite signing a term sheet with a Luxembourgeois VC, it was too late and an exit was forced.

But this created an opportunity to begin an investment career and Derek subsequently founded two venture firms: HardTech Labs, a fund focused on health, agriculture, nutrition and life sciences and Origo Ventures, a seed-stage fund investing in Latin American technology companies (still investing under the name of Fen Ventures). Derek also serves on the Board of Trustees of Pacific Ridge School. He holds two patents and has a J.D. from Boston University School of Law and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is based in San Diego, California and Berlin, Germany.