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

1 day, 11 panels, 39 speakers, 230 attendees from 5 continents and a staggering 1,700 on the waitlist later, and the first annual Climate Capital Summit is officially in the books! Last week, Equal Ventures hosted top climate decision-makers at the Company in New York City for a series of conversations focused on topics ranging from infrastructure to software, CleanTech 1.0 to ClimateTech, the role of O&G in the energy transition and whether we should actually celebrate the IRA. The Summit’s primary theme centered on the full climate capital stack, of which ClimateTech is just a small portion. With this view in mind, we’re excited to share some of our learnings from the day below.

With AI becoming the latest “THING” in the tech sector, some are predicting an extinction level event for existing software companies. As Dave Yuan of Tidemark points out, this is only partially true. The latest AI tools not only have the power to make software more powerful, but also to greatly decrease its cost of production. With that, many are concerned that legacy platforms unable to leverage AI will be rendered obsolete, and they’re not wrong! If I were a generic workflow product, I would be terrified. The moat around these products is now next to nil as the barriers to entry of software production have been washed away. What were once successful niche software product companies are now being obliterated by new entrants leveraging the functionality of AI models. Perhaps even more daunting is the speed and efficacy of this destruction, with companies that have existed for years and taken millions of dollars to build being dismantled by teams capable of using AI to launch comparable (and arguably better) products in weeks with incredibly lean engineering teams.

For the last few years, the Emerging Manager Circle (EMC) has been an immense influence on my life. As someone who grew up outside of traditional venture circles, the process of launching a venture fund was daunting. I didn’t have mentors who were willing to show me the ropes, I just had an irrational belief that Equal Ventures was something that founders needed and knew I wanted to spend the rest of my career building it.

We launched the insurance index last quarter to help investors keep tabs on trends and valuations in the insurance ecosystem. With Q2 now (somehow already) behind us, we’re back to report on performance over the past quarter and the first half of the year.

Today, we’re publishing the last of Equal’s Product Owner perspectives on retail, a sector that makes up almost 20% of U.S. GDP (see previous posts on supply chain, insurance, and climate). Despite a massive TAM, the sector’s structurally low margins suggest that not only is getting to economies of scale critical, but also investment into technology is limited. These dynamics set the stage for the current state of investing within retail: