Venture capital has a habit of relying on outdated practices and data. I’m seeing a lot of commentary on what fund sizes are most effective on Twitter, but the truth is that the fund strategies of individual firms are so nuanced that when you zoom too far out on the data, it loses a lot of signal.

When I was starting off in venture, a more senior investor told me that ‘you need to be one of the first 5 investors a founder calls to have a shot at winning that deal…if you’re not a top 5 investor for at least some portion of founders, you’ll likely not make it in this business’. This really stuck with me. I was at a VC firm in Chicago trying to build my career and left myself asking “how could I possibly be a top 5 investor for some hot SaaS company in the valley?” The reality is that I couldn’t and that realization laid the foundation for what is now Equal Ventures - an ardent focus on prepared mind investing in areas that I/we feel we can be a top 5 investor.

Last week, Josh Wolfe wrote about some of the trends he’s seeing around the venture industry and how that might play out in the years/decades to come. Amongst those was a prediction that 30-50% of venture firms may cease to exist. When you combine this data with the fact that 17% of venture funds make it to fund 4 and 44% of VC capital raised this year went to just 2 firms, my belief is that the consolidation and extinction of firms could unfortunately be far greater.

As we (and others) have written about in recent months, the venture market is experiencing some systemic challenges that have the potential to depress returns for some time. Simply put, there is too much capital seeking too few opportunities, particularly at the seed stage. Multi-stage firms have eliminated pricing discipline at seed stage and the proliferation of seed firms has made the task of investing at this stage as competitive as it’s ever been, leading me to believe that indexed seed investing in today’s environment will produce poor returns.

1 day, 5 keynotes, 30 speakers, 400 attendees, and an astounding 4,500 people on the waitlist. The second annual Climate Capital Summit hosted by Equal Ventures is officially in the books!

“Bridging the Digital Divide” What does that actually mean? We reference this term a lot and it's a metaphor that speaks to me. As I think of crossing a chasm, that requires a bridge to the other side (unless your Evil Knievel). The terrain on one side of that chasm can be very different from the other, making it essential for the bridge to level the variance between these seemingly opposing bodies for any one to reach the other side safely.