Richard Kerby

Venture Partner

Richard is Co-Founder and Venture Partner at Equal Ventures. Prior to co-founding Equal Ventures, Richard was an investor at Venrock, where he led seed-stage and Series A stage investments in 6Sense, Amino Apps, Beckon, Burner, Luxe Valet, and Salsify.

Prior to joining Venrock, Richard was an investor at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), where he focused on identifying and evaluating later-stage investments. While at IVP, Richard worked with IVP portfolio companies such as Dropbox, FleetMatics, PopSugar, Shazam, and Yext. Prior to joining IVP, Richard worked in the Investment Banking Division of Credit Suisse.

Richard is a proud Georgetown alum and is a rabid Hoyas basketball fan. Richard is also the founder of Stealth Mode, a community of more than 1,500 African American founders, operators and investors.

Richard

’s latests insights

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Apr 20, 2023

Payroll is Big Business

A few weeks ago, I put out a post on vertical fintech, and in this post, I will be diving deeper into one specific model within vertical fintech: verticalized payroll. In that previous post, I mentioned the difficulty in leading with fintech rather than workflow because of the commoditized nature of many fintech products. Payroll, in a horizontal sense, could also be seen as a commodity offering, but it is a product offering that is embedded within the HR workflow stack and, when applied in a single vertical, is not a commodity given the nuances that must be taken into account for specific markets.

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Feb 23, 2023

More Vertical Fintech, Please

Before generative AI became all the rage, vertical software, and embedded/vertical fintech were all the rage (perhaps it still is for many others as it is for me). At Equal, we love investing in vertical software businesses.

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