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The number #1 job of an early-stage VC is to invest in people. If you get the people part wrong, nothing else can go right. As an investor, it can be terrifying that something that can seem so qualitative represents the lion’s share of influence in investment performance, but it’s the truth. This is what places such a significant premium on repeat founders with demonstrated success and sky high valuations for founders that seemed “de-risked”.

In a recent conversation I had with a founder looking for some friendly advice, he asked “what metrics do I need for a seed round?”. I get this question a LOT and it always frustrates me a bit. To distill the total worth of a company to a few basic metrics has always felt limiting, especially when the value of the company is what it will do in the future, not in the past. For better or worse, I don’t focus on metrics at seed and I personally don’t know why others do.

A big part of our mission at Equal Ventures is to democratize access to digital technology. We fervently believe that technology is the great “equalizer” — improving the way people work and live, while enabling equality and meritocracy. Pie in the sky? Maybe. But we’re seeing this thesis play out across our portfolio, enabling truck drivers to earn a living wage, buildings to be more sustainable, workers to improve their efficiency and childcare to be more affordable.

We’ve all heard this type of hyperbole (and frankly I’ve been guilty of it myself) in the startup ecosystem. While I’m glad to be in an industry that is anchored in positivity (despite the fact that we say “no” to 99.9% of the companies we see), the investor in me can’t help but try to create some structure out of this opaque chaos. Market size analysis is often flawed (and way too generous), assessing teams is subjective (and often highly rooted in bias) and growth at the earliest stages can often be hacked together in unsustainable ways (providing a false positive of product-market fit).

A few months back, we wrote about the initial progress Leap had been making coming out of the pandemic as we announced their long undisclosed Series A. Today, we’re excited to announce that Leap has raised $50m led by BAM Elevate to power the future of retail. As we noted in our past post, Covid was not kind to the retail world. When we entered April of 2020, GMV on the Leap platform was down effectively 100%. The company was resilient, however, and finished 2020 up close to 100%. While 2021 continued to present Covid challenges, the story for Leap has been very different, growing from 13 to 47 stores and increasing in revenue by 4.3x.