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

When I was early in my venture career, I was easily impressed by buzz around a deal. If the deal had high quality firms circling it, I felt FOMO. The reality is that I didn’t have confidence in own ability to assess companies independently, so I was easily swayed by others.

At Equal, we love partnering with founders that are building verticalized software platforms. We believe that there are many markets and sectors with important nuances that horizontal solutions are unable to fully capture, and the construction industry is no exception.

As a concentrated, thesis-driven firm, we spend the beginning of each year in planning mode. We outline the new ideas we’re excited to dive into, others we want to explore and a few that we may no longer be pursuing. The final result is what we call a “hunting list” — a set of theses for which we develop a Prepared Mind. The goal for each thesis we’re “hunting” is to have visibility of every company that aligns with our Prepared Mind — meeting with as many as possible and sharing our internal research with founders along the way.

When I first started working in the insurance industry in 2015, I (regrettably) used the word “disruption” a lot. I was making a career shift from capital markets into a buzzy, fairly new space called “fintech,” and I became excited about the massive TAM and archaic UX in insurance.

2022 saw perhaps the most emphatic rejection of the DTC-only narrative. As we beleaguered in our Death to DTC and Point of No Returns blogs, sky-high CACs and return rates, combined with a shift away from ecommerce back to brick & mortar, have undeniably exposed the weakness of the DTC-only strategy.