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

A lot of people ask me “Why does Equal exist?” It’s a pretty existential question, but my core belief is that we’re here to do something incredibly simple — Deliver the same VC product that founders have grown to expect, to the next generation of founders.

Free and seamless returns have long been cited as a critical part of the ecommerce customer experience. Over the past few years, as retailers and brands made ecommerce returns increasingly effortless, consumers bought more stuff online and, because returns were getting easier, returned more stuff! A vicious, unstainable cycle of returns proliferation had started and COVID made things even worse. ~40% of retailers further relaxed their return policies in order to incentivize purchases — the value of all retail merchandise returned in 2021 reached $761B with return rates of ~20% for ecommerce, vs. 15% for non-ecommerce sales. The story is even worse when we zoom into different product categories.

Nine years ago, I was finishing up business school at Columbia, doing just about anything I could to break into VC full-time. I was interning at two firms (Bowery Capital and Foundation Capital) and volunteered to be Co-President of the schools PE/VC Club. I went to business school for a singular purpose, to break into VC, and wanted to exhaust every last opportunity I could to make that happen. For many (even our own career services department), it seemed that my transition into VC just wasn’t going to happen.

We’re proud to announce our investment in MVMNT, a platform to democratize access to software for freight shippers and brokers, and to congratulate them on their $20m Series A with A16Z One of our core insights at Equal is the revealed low willingness to pay for software by non-digitally native industry buyers, despite incredible ROI. We’ve seen time and time again that a healthy value proposition simply isn’t enough to convince customers, especially at the long-tail of the market where they lack the budget, cashflow and technology acumen, to invest in digital transformation. One of our prevailing approaches to these conditions is to offer a core system on a freemium basis and to identify an alternative means of monetization that attacks other cost centers, stealing wallet share from other analog service providers, rather than increasing their existing (IT) costs.

Every year, I attend InsureTech Connect (ITC), the largest gathering of insurance innovators on the planet. I’ve been speaking at the conference since its very first year and it’s been amazing to see its growth over the last few years. This year brought together nearly 10,000+ from over 50 countries and I was fortunate to share the stage with some incredible panelists (including Bill Pieroni, CEO of ACORD, Arun Balakrishnan, CEO of Xceedance, Farooq Sheikh, Global Head of Insurance at Unqork and Jillian Slyfield, Chief Innovation Officer at Aon) to discuss “The Future of Commercial Insurance Broking”. While there were some great take aways from the panel, learnings from the conference as a whole included: