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

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.

In 2018, I wrote a memo to crystalize my thoughts on the retail space. Even then, the retail industry was experiencing unprecedented disruption at the hands of Amazon. I titled the memo, “The Rebirth of Retail” and called for someone who could be an offline competitor to Amazon/Shopify. The hypothesis was that if someone could establish a shared offline retail platform that leveraged data to optimize the placement and utilization of brands across locations, they could have a monopolistic advantage over the rest of the retail market, experiencing lower costs, higher store utilization, better risk management and higher sales per store than any legacy retailer could on their own. In doing so, they’d have the opportunity to capture millions of stores and grab a huge chunk of a $1T prize.

At Equal Ventures, we believe that leveraging technology to solve the challenges of climate change will represent one of the most pressing and important innovation dilemmas of our lifetime. While some of these challenges will be solved by advances in power generation technologies and material sciences, tremendous efficiencies are lost due to misalignments in the value chain. Nowhere is this more obvious than in energy efficiency for commercial buildings.