Ali Afridi

Investor

Ali is a Principal at Equal Ventures where he focuses on investments across the firm’s core verticals. Ali is in his second stint at Equal, previously being a part of the team from 2018-21. In between his time at the firm, Ali was an EIR at Fractal where he was a part of the founding team and CEO of Drenchworks, a project management system for specialty contractors in construction.

Ali got his start in VC as an intern at General Catalyst Partners and then worked full-time at Lightbank, a Chicago-based VC firm. On the side he maintains an industry-wide VC newsletter called SandHill.io that aggregates the latest theses from 700+ VCs.

Ali

’s latests insights

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Jan 25, 2024

The Ultimate Startup Quest

In the startup world, an aspiration many of us share is to be a part of building something special. A product or business that becomes a stalwart in its industry and innovates to better serve its customers and partners. Through my own journey, I believe that Equal Ventures has the potential to be one such institution in the venture industry, and I’m thrilled to rejoin the team after a few years on the operator side.

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Jun 16, 2021

Introducing the Equal Ventures Talent Network

One of the startup hacks that I realized early in my tech journey was that VCs are an incredible resource for figuring out the best startups to join, especially at the earliest stages. In a world where >50k startups get started every year, and >10k raise seed rounds, it can be daunting for an individual to figure out which private companies are showing promising signals and starting to grow. However, on the investment side, VCs have access to far more information, giving a guiding signal to some of those that may be most promising.

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