Mercatus is excited to welcome Megan Fitzpatrick to its growing team. Megan comes to Mercatus from AQR Capital Management, bringing over her years of experience as both a journalist and a content strategist focused on private market investments. Ali Mamujee, VP of Product Marketing, recently sat with Megan to learn more about her new role, what brought her to Mercatus, and her thoughts on the future of private markets storytelling and education.
What is your role and what are you hoping to accomplish for Mercatus?
I am leading content strategy for Mercatus, and that means I’m here to create all kinds of stories that can help raise awareness of our brand and win new partners in the private markets. I hope to leverage our own in-house expertise to help educate fund managers about the importance of having a flexible and powerful data management platform. There are so many important stories about how we’re different that are just waiting to be told.
What is your background / story?
I was a business journalist and editor for many years, covering everything from Wall Street to emerging technologies. I ran the digital editorial teams at several publications, including Fortune and MIT Technology Review. After experiencing the contraction in the media industry one too many times, I decided to transition my skills to corporate content strategy. Before joining Mercatus, I was the content strategist at AQR, a large quantitative asset manager. My passion is still telling great stories, but as a content strategist, I’m just doing it for a different audience.
What excites you about Mercatus?
I’m most excited about this team. I’ve never worked with a more driven, passionate group of people who are willing to do whatever it takes to be successful. It’s inspiring! I also just really believe that this is a pivotal time in the markets for fund managers to move away from their legacy, Excel-based mode of data management and reporting. This cultural shift to remote work has really shown how important it is for fund managers to have a flexible and fast architecture to deliver insights for investors and plan for the future. So I’m excited to seize this moment with great storytelling about how we’ve helped others get there.
What are unmet content needs for private market investors seeking data management technology?
This is a fast-growing industry that is becoming ever more complex, so it’s easy to see why fund managers have little time on their hands to educate themselves about software. Many of them are used to waiting days or weeks for the reports or performance information they need, so they may not understand the edge that a fast, reliable data management platform can give them. But that is beginning to change, especially as their investors are increasingly demanding transparency. So I think the biggest unmet need is simply educating this industry about how its data management can be improved and why it needs to modernize now.
Give us a fun fact about yourself. Or what is something interesting about you?
I went to college with someone with my same first and last name. I never met her but over the years I got all kinds of calls, invitations, flower deliveries, and once even a check in the mail that were meant for her. Then after college, I went on to become a journalist, so I was highly Google-able and easy to reach, and I started getting emails intended for the other Megan Barnett from the University of Virginia. I always wrote people back and managed to track her trajectory through law school and her moves around to different legal jobs. Finally, when I was a reporter working on a story years after college, a source said “You know, there’s someone else with your name who would be great for you to talk to for this story.” So I called her up and interviewed her for the piece. We finally met after so many years and she had no sense of humor about the situation at all and never mentioned she was ever mistaken for me. I ended up keeping her quote out of the story because it would have been too hard to explain to the reader!
