Darren Thompson has more than 30 years of leadership experience building high growth businesses and working in the financial services industry. He was the former CFO of Bowery Farming, the leading technology-enabled indoor farming company in the United States.
Previously, he was the president of Spruce Finance, a leading tech-enabled consumer finance company serving the renewable energy industry, where he first united his passion for environmental sustainability with creating sustainable business models. He has also been the CFO for B2R Finance and Lending.com, both Blackstone owned fintech companies, and the EVP and CFO for RevolutionMoney, an online payments and credit card company that was sold to American Express in 2010.
Prior to making the move to early stage companies, Thompson spent the first half of his career working with some of the leading financial institutions. He served as the senior vice president and head of the Credit Finance Business for Fannie Mae. In this capacity, Thompson was the senior-most officer in the company with responsibility for the largest portfolio of single asset risk in the world valued at $2 trillion. Prior to Fannie, he was a managing director at Goldman Sachs and at Morgan Stanley.
Thompson formerly served as a board member for Avenue Capital Group’s public credit mutual funds (ACP, ACS) and was also on the board of the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC. He is honored to have served as a judge for the White House Fellows Program and he is a former member of the governing board of the Robert Toigo Foundation (the leading organization in promoting diversity in the financial services industry).
Thompson speaks extensively on the subjects of global capital markets and entrepreneurial management. Recently he was a guest lecturer on entrepreneurial management at the Johnson School of Business, Cornell University, and on financial markets at George Washington University’s graduate economics program.
Originally from Vestal, NY, Thompson holds a degree in biochemistry from Harvard College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.