We dive deep into our sectors. Our research drives our insights and thesis-driven approach.

Over the last decade, we’ve seen tremendous growth in commerce transacted online. We’ve gone from buying books to buying houses online in a very short timeframe. We’ve also experienced tremendous growth in B2B commerce, with transaction sizes sometimes even larger than houses. With that, we’ve seen incredible variance in the outcomes attached to startups pursuing e-commerce, despite the tremendous growth (and promise) of this category.

The $300B+ off-price retail sector is rapidly transforming as it sheds old associations with bargain bins, outdated styles, and low-quality / damaged goods. Once seen as the last resort for picked-through, leftover inventory and liquidation prices at the expense of quality, today’s top off-price players are ushering in a new era of premium off-price shopping aided by challenged market dynamics. As record high credit card debt and looming concerns of stagflation continue to pressure the consumer and brands and retailers continue to grapple with excess inventory, off-price is emerging as the obvious answer for brands eager to offload unwanted inventory and cash-tight consumers looking for a great deal.

The Equal Ventures Insurance Index is a quarterly summary of public equity performance in the P&C insurance industry. This post summarizes Q3 2024 performance of our insurance indices, and aims to highlight key themes and trends underlying the price action. As always, our goal is to help support observers of the insurance industry in identifying key drivers and catalysts (and not to recommend any specific investments).

Recently, we’ve seen incredible interest in AI-enabled services. We’ve long been believers in technology’s potential to unleash value in service businesses (previous investments include companies like Vettery, Block Renovations and Leap), but we think it’s essential to determine the scope and sustainability of technology’s impact on a company’s economic performance to determine if the thesis makes sense. We refer to this as “measuring the moat”.

We started Equal on the belief that we were entering a new technology super-cycle, one that would rapidly transform the way we work and live. Over the last 6 years, we’ve seen massive technology developments, enabling the thesis that we’ve held sacred since Day One – that these technologies would become so mainstream that they would enable rapid digital transformation of the old world economy. While value will undoubtedly be created by the foundation technology innovations themselves, the opportunity in thoughtfully deploying instances of these technologies throughout industries is far larger.