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I’m elated to announce that Ali Afridi is rejoining Equal Ventures as a Principal starting today.

Recently, our friends at Boldstart Ventures wrote a piece about “Inception Investing,” investing at the formation stage of the company, highlighting the evolution we’re seeing in the seed stage venture market. We wrote about some of these dynamics in our post, “Seed is the new Series A,” discussing the implications of these evolutions and the need for investors to align their strategies and core competencies to where they’re best positioned for today’s market.

When we started Equal Ventures, one of the core hypotheses we had was that “Seed was becoming the new Series A.” Series A rounds had historically been several million dollars as the first institutional capital to come into rounds, but then those rounds started to drift bigger and later as the costs of starting companies fell, enabling companies to achieve meaningful progress on angel capital (what had previously been largely considered for “friends, family and fools”). This dynamic all of a sudden made angel investing extremely attractive, giving birth to its professionalization — seed investing.

At times, venture can feel like the least structured form of professional investment approaches. The availability of data is sparse (especially at the earliest stages), its agency is far lower than private equity and its liquidity limitations (often over a decade!) can lead to incredibly long feedback cycles before determining what is and isn’t successful. I’ve been public about how I believe this leads to the many faults of our industry — namely around bias and momentum chasing — both of which I believe inhibit the greatest aspect of our industry: the ability to empower economic mobility in a way that no other asset class can.

As I look at the vast majority of venture partnerships, they’re structured like a fleet of pirates under a single flag. Your objective as a GP is to source deals, win them and then to sit on the boards of those companies. The primary point of connection you have with your fellow partners is around your partner meetings, offsites and fundraising — at many firms, partners were only required to be in the office one day a week (well before the pandemic), spending the vast majority of their time with their portfolio companies or networking with other investors.