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

One of the most exciting things about building a company is the opportunity to bring incredible people together for a shared purpose. As a startup ourselves, we believe talent is the lifeblood of our business and that every hire represents an opportunity to strengthen that shared purpose. With that, we’re excited to announce the addition of Liz Hart to our team.

We have high ambitions for 2022 and one of the things we’re most excited about is the team we are assembling at Equal Ventures. We believe strongly in our core values and are fortunate to work alongside individuals who not only exude incredible performance and integrity, but the epitome of these values. Seeing the growth of our team, as a whole and the individuals within, is one of the most rewarding parts of building a company, and we’ve been fortunate to see the incredible growth of our team members over the last year.

2021 was a big one for Equal Ventures. We started to see our earliest companies achieve breakthrough velocity and are excited about the progress of both our portfolio and the broader firm. We’ve now had 6 of our first 7 investments raise their Series B from top firms and feel that the best days are yet to come for many of these companies. One of those earliest investments was ThreeFlow, a SaaS-enabled marketplace in the benefits industry that recently announced a $45m round from Accel. The story with ThreeFlow takes us back nearly 3 years and warrants some reflection given how far our fledgling firm has come during that time.

The attention span of today’s investor is incredibly finite. It seems that every other week a new sector is razor “hot,” leading to a spree of founding companies in the category and an equally rampant sprint of investors going after those companies. For better or worse, our little firm is likely to get priced out of these categories if a category and team are consensus “hot,” so our only real choice is to ignore the noise of “heat” and focus on categories we are going to love over the next twenty years.

We’ve all heard Marc Andreessen’s epochal prediction that “software is eating the world,” but in recent years, that phrase has come to mean so much more in the venture business. We started seeing companies consume their technological advantages, rather than selling them to the market. Companies started attacking legacy incumbents head-on, raising venture capital and leveraging many of the same tactics of high-growth software companies to steal share. It’s impossible to understate the significance of this shift as it broadens the investible scope from simply software companies and applications (which are high growth and high margin, but relatively small with respect to global GDP), to EVERYTHING. It’s also added a ripple of complexity to investing. I was recently with one of the partners of a major VC firm and he asked “are these really tech companies?” As always, the answer isn’t binary. Some of these companies are simply copycats of legacy business models with a license to burn. Others will leverage technology to create unprecedented economic advantages and consumer surplus, transforming their industries.