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With a barrel of oil hitting over $100 per barrel, energy prices have come into mainstream focus a lot lately.

For those of us in the energy sector, however, energy prices have become a dominant focus of the last year as the demand from hyper scalers contributes to escalating prices. This trend, however, isn’t solely the fault of hyper-scalers or even the latest conflict in the Middle East. A few years ago, the climate narrative shifted from “sustainability” to “abundance” - a belief centered around the ability to produce endless clean energy, to justify its own consumption. As a life long climate professional, I’m here to say “Fuck Abundance”.

Our economy is already at a fickle state given inflationary concerns and the persistent mindset around unlimited energy consumption places systemic risk to the livelihood of everyday Americans. Utility bills used to be a nuisance…now there can be months where your utility bill is more than your mortgage. Reducing energy consumption used to be a sustainability imperative, but it’s now become an absolutely necessary economic imperative as you’ll see in the data below.

These 10 states are the ones paying the highest % of their monthly income to utilities and the rise in that % has been fairly dramatic over the last 3 years. Keep in mind, the incomes listed here are based on the average income for the state. Those in the bottom third of median incomes spend 16% of their income on energy. And, the utility bills listed here are the average over the course of the year, which is subject to volatility that could make a given month significantly higher than others. When you combine this with the fact that most lower income homes tend to be less efficient than higher income homes, it’s easy to see how utility bills could become a significant impediment to the individuals living in these states.

Equally interesting is the political composition of these states. Every single one of these states went “Trump” in the 2024 election. Counter to the narrative, these aren’t states that are experiencing inflated prices due to investments in clean energy and sustainability, they are actually the ones experiencing the greatest challenges because they didn’t (albeit South Dakota leverages a heavy dose of wind power). The result is that the average American in these states is being hurt.

Another lens that we thought worth looking into were utility bills as a % of a household’s mortgage payment (see below). Folks in South Dakota are now seeing their utility bill be 14% of their mortgage payments. In many cases, that’s going to be significantly more than their property taxes or other monthly household expenses. Anecdotally, I spoke with a homeowner in Pennsylvania who said that their utility bill in January (which was historically cold) was higher than the mortgage payment they had on their home. The average American isn’t used to paying 2 mortgages at once, so this has the potential to place meaningful household harm. Perhaps even more alarming, utility bills represent an even higher percentage of median rent.

The list above remains largely republican leaning, but the introduction of a few “purple” swing states is intriguing. This affordability crisis is largely removed from the surge in data centers. While Ohio and Pennsylvania are growing hubs, most of the other states on this list have relatively benign development. The states with the most data centers per capita including Virginia, Texas and California, would rank 19th, 27th and 48th for “Energy Bill as a % of Mortgage Payment (2024)”. These states are seeing booming AI / data center demand, while investing heavily in clean energy and sustainability, and are subsequently seeing dramatically lower bills as % of the relative income and housing costs.

The fact of the matter is that this problem is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Our power generation infrastructure is decaying at an alarming rate as coal, nuclear and hydro facilities are extended beyond their previously believed useful life. As hyper-scaler demand continues to grow, supply can not come on fast enough to meet their demand. My contacts within large organizations that are seeking to bring more energy capacity online are sharing that they can’t even get turbines for at least 2.5 years (even when cutting to the front of the line), meanwhile the permitting backlog of projects results in an average lead time of ~4.5 years and the only 19% of projects requesting interconnection from 2000-2019 made it to completion by 2024.

Rising energy prices are ultimately a function of supply and demand. For better or worse, the ability to dramatically impact supply in the short-term is hampered by technological and regulatory impediments. While we can invest in these and progressively address over time, there is only so much we can do to address near-term supply. Given the extent of energy price escalations, why would we confine ourselves to a single side of a two-sided market? Giving up on demand-side management in cutting off half the addressable opportunity.

This is part of the reason why we find batteries and the concept of Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) so compelling, but they are unlikely to be enough and come with their own permitting and supply chain constraints (along with other environmental and economic externalities). The reality is the business case for investments in energy efficiency has dramatically improved amidst a time where we are not only seeing dramatic rises in energy prices, but also dramatic technology advancements that can cut into the largest cost center of energy efficiency - the soft costs of designing, evaluating, delivering and monitoring these projects. Truth be told, many of the largest energy efficiency opportunities are centered around automation and optimization of existing infrastructure, which requires little or no capital investment. We don’t need to build a new grid right beside our partially utilized existing grid, funding tons of new hardware / capex. Instead, we can and should make the grid we have run MUCH more efficiently. Nonetheless, the concept of energy efficiency tends to fall on deaf ears as we continue to pursue our obsession with consumption under the premise of “abundance”.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen this show before. For decades, the oil industry lobbied to expand recycling as means to promote continued demand in plastic production. Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s–1990s, major oil companies and chemical producers—including firms like ExxonMobil, Dow, and Chevron—funded trade groups and public campaigns to convince Americans they could “have their cake and eat it too”. In this fantasy, there wouldn’t be environmental consequences to the unlimited use of plastics, since the plastics would be recycled. Yet here we are 50 years later and only 9% of plastic is actually recycled and we have a pile of plastic sitting in the Pacific Ocean that is twice the size of Texas.

The reality is that you can’t have your cake and eat it too. We need to find ways to curb consumption (especially peak energy demand) to avoid catastrophic outcomes - both economically and environmentally. “Sustainability” no longer motivates this large-scale behavior change, but kitchen table MATH can. The ROI of investments in grid utilization and energy efficiency make sense and are overdue. We need to put storytelling of a make-believe energy economy aside to focus on the math. Failure to do so does nothing more than to hurt the average American.

“F*ck Abundance”

Apply to Attend

The Commerce Capital Summit is an invite-only gathering of the biggest tastemakers in commerce - executives from prominent brands and retailers, founders of exciting commerce technology players, and investors across the PE/VC spectrum. Equal Ventures is co-hosting with Google to create a space for real, substantive conversations about the future of commerce.

From the beginning, our goal has been to meet a clear need in the ecosystem: bring together the decision-makers who are shaping the future of commerce as the industry stands at an inflection point. AI is reshaping consumer behavior and augmenting retail operations. Social commerce is rewriting the rules of brand building. The lines between physical and digital are ever blurring. There has never been a more important moment to get the right people in the same room.

We’ve already locked in an incredible group of speakers and will announce more over the coming weeks.

We invite all interested to request an invite here. The Summit is free of charge for attendees and more details can be found at commercecapitalsummit.com.

Commerce is being rewritten - we hope to see you at the Summit!

Shopping increasingly shows up disguised as entertainment. The purchase feels less like a transaction and more like a natural conclusion to a story that your brain has already rationalized.

Impulse buying is not new. What’s new is how efficiently social commerce manufactures the moment. Entertainment contexts, creator-led trust, and algorithmic feeds now do the merchandising for you, shaping why consumers want to buy in the first place. This shift is forcing brands to rethink demand formation as something that happens upstream of the storefront, in places they do not fully control, on timelines that do not respect traditional planning cycles.

The scale of this shift is already meaningful. US social commerce sales reached $87.0B in 2025 (up 21.5% YoY) and the category is projected to surpass $100B in 2026. TikTok Shop alone hit ~$15.82B in US sales in 2025 and is projected to exceed $20B in 2026 and $30B in 2028.

TikTok Shop Retail Ecommerce Sales

Source: EMARKETER Forecast, November 2025

Importantly, the above growth does not currently represent category sales dominance. Social commerce only represented 6.9% of US retail ecommerce sales in 2025, and ecommerce itself was projected to be ~16-17% of total US retail sales in 2025, with Q3 2025 data totaling 16.4%. These facts can coexist.

Even as a minority share of total retail sales, social commerce can matter disproportionately because it is increasingly the point of origin for consumer desire, reshaping how people buy through entertainment and parasocial connection.

What makes this moment distinct is that every major platform is now reorganizing around social commerce simultaneously. YouTube announced in-app checkout for 2026, with over 500,000 creators already enrolled in YouTube Shopping. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan’s 2026 letter explicitly positioned YouTube as a “premier shopping destination,” adding more optimal brand partnership tools and shoppable links to Shorts, as well as making it easier for influencer marketing agencies and brands to find and hire creators.

Instagram is increasingly a discovery engine built around short-form video. Reels captured 46% of total time spent on the platform in the US, up from 37% in 2024, while more than half of Instagram ads now run in Reels. Whatnot recently raised $225M at an $11.5B valuation, generating $6B in GMV in 2025, more than 2x in 2024 with high engagement, about 80 minutes per day and 80% month over month retention.

This is not limited to a single product vertical. “For TikTok, health, wellness, and beauty are top categories, followed by accessories, household items, fashion, and cosmetics,” according to EMARKETER. They go on to state that TikTok Shop’s best-selling items combine low price points, spur-of-the-moment appeal, trendiness, and they rely heavily on strong creator amplification.The breadth of categories gaining traction signals that creator-mediated commerce is becoming a general-purpose distribution model.

We see a number of opportunities as the market moves from renting attention to building scalable entertainment distribution.

Owning The Narrative

Both performance marketing and creator-led commerce are probabilistic systems. The difference lies in who owns the persuasion. In performance marketing, the brand controls the message and pays to put that message in front of people. In creator-led commerce, the brand delegates persuasion to a trusted curator and pays for access to that curator’s credibility, audience, and conversion ability. That works! But brands know that renting credibility comes with structural tradeoffs: you don’t fully control the message, you don’t fully own the audience, and you do not always retain the learnings in a way that compounds.

So, brands are starting to internalize the function, copy-cating mega-creators for insight. MrBeast’s listing for a Creative, Viral Marketing role is exceptionally explicit about the new composite skill that brands are scrambling to hire: someone who can “build engines, not campaigns” and “convert cultural moments into sign-ups, activation, revenue, retention, and repeat engagement.” That is a very different mandate from traditional brand marketing. It is much closer to a creator-growth operator sitting at the intersection of entertainment, distribution, and conversion.

The same logic is showing up in how brands talk about creators. Kat Chan, senior director of brand marketing at Duolingo, put it well: influencers will become “more core to brands than one-off transactional content.” EMARKETER also quotes Business Insider’s Tameka Bazile making the companion point: rather than simply paying creators transactionally, more brands are pulling creator talent closer to the team itself so they can internalize community, fluency, and virality.

The In-House Creator Stack

Large companies are now organizing around this at the executive level. Gap created its first-ever Chief Entertainment Officer role in January 2026 to build and scale its entertainment, content, and licensing platform across music, television, film, sports, gaming, and cultural collaborations. Gap has labeled that broader strategy “Fashiontainment,” and Richard Dickson later summarized the thesis even more plainly: “Fashion is entertainment, and today’s customers aren’t just buying apparel, they’re buying into brands that tell compelling stories and drive cultural conversations.”

You can see this shift take shape through the commerce infrastructure itself, not just organizational design. Sephora launched My Sephora Storefront in September 2025, an affiliate platform that keeps checkout entirely within Sephora’s ecosystem, built in partnership with motom. Within weeks, the program reached 1,000 live creator storefronts, exceeding internal projections. Condé Nast announced Vette, a creator-led commerce platform launching in early 2026, which lets influencers and editors operate independent curated storefronts with Condé Nast handling checkout and brands fulfilling orders via drop-ship.

Brands are proving that they want to own these channels. Owning the channel means owning the creative, learnings, and ideally the customer relationship that compounds over time. Affiliates and UGC then become variable distribution on top of owned content. Though they must tread lightly as EMARKETER found that 26% of consumers distrust any form of influencer marketing, so ensuring these truly feel like entertainment above traditional advertisements will be a thin tightrope to walk.

The New Operational Playbook

Once you bring the creator function in-house, the question shifts from “did we buy the right traffic?” to a harder set of problems: can we manufacture repeatable hits without turning the brand into a roulette wheel? When performance is driven by a fat-tailed content portfolio (most posts do nothing, a few do everything), the temptation is to chase the last spike. And when brand and creator-mediated content lives across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and owned channels simultaneously, this challenge can become genuinely complex.

Furthermore, striking success with virality is an operational stress test. When creator-led commerce works, it produces demand curves that look nothing like traditional retail: unpredictable spikes, overnight sellouts, and second-order effects that cascade through fulfillment, customer service, and inventory planning.

Modern Retail’s Feb 2026 case study on Cakes Body and Béis reads like a field guide to burst readiness: Cakes once hired TaskRabbit to ship after selling out overnight, later filled about 15 customer service roles in 24 hours, and kept the engine running by posting with high frequency and amplifying the best content into paid. Béis adds the second-order lesson: “it’s rarely just that one item.” Stockouts become the start of the next moment via pre-orders, wait lists, and hype-building around restocks.

Even TikTok is learning this in public. ADWEEK reported TikTok reversed a plan to phase out seller-fulfilled shipping in the US after pushback from merchants who argued that centralized fulfillment would reduce flexibility, pressure margins, and make viral demand harder to manage.

The Opportunities Ahead

In a world where commerce channels behave like content channels, with demand driven by algorithmic spikes rather than seasonal planning, brands need entirely new categories of tools and solutions. Demand forecasting that incorporates real-time social signals. Fulfillment infrastructure that can elastically scale within hours, not weeks. Customer service automation that handles 10x volume surges without degrading experience. Inventory systems that can convert a stockout into a waitlist into a restocking moment. The operational stack for creator-driven commerce is largely greenfield, and the brands riding the wave today are often duct-taping solutions together in real time.

If you’re building in any of these seams, we’d love to learn what you’re seeing. Reach out to us at sophia@equal.vc and chelsea@equal.vc

Equal Ventures is a thesis-driven, early stage venture firm focused on bridging the digital divide. We partner with founders and businesses deploying technology within legacy industries, specifically climate, insurance, retail, and supply chain.

About the Role

As an Analyst/Associate at Equal Ventures, you will work with the partnership to develop and refine investment theses, source new investments, and support portfolio companies from seed through scale.

You will be expected to own deals end-to-end, represent Equal externally with founders and ecosystem partners, and help level up the firm through content, events, and internal initiatives.

This role is based in person at our New York City office. Compensation for the role will depend on seniority and experience and includes a base salary in the range of $60k–$150k, guaranteed fund carry, and the opportunity to earn an annual performance bonus.

Core responsibilities include

• Proactively sourcing high-quality early-stage opportunities through founder relationships, ecosystem engagement, and outbound channels

• Supporting investment diligence, including market analysis, customer and expert calls, and conviction-driven memo writings

• Supporting portfolio companies on operations, hiring, go-to-market, fundraising, and partnerships

• Building Equal’s brand and presence within the ecosystems that we operate in by producing content, hosting and attending events, and extending relationships with key points of influence in our industries and the broader venture capital ecosystem.

• Supporting the firm’s overall operations: we’re a small team and everyone works together to own workstreams that help level-up the firm

About You

Experience

• 1-4 years of relevant professional experience

• Background in venture capital, growth equity, private equity, consulting, banking or a high-impact operating role

• Experience working with technology companies and/or within our major verticals

Attributes

• Hustle — As a small firm, we win through persistence, perseverance and sweat above all else.

• Professional — Takes immense pride in the detail, thoroughness, accuracy, and overall quality of their work.

• Self-directed — Works with team members to complete tasks without someone looking over their shoulder.

• Team Player — We like everyone in our firm to feel like an owner of the firm, which requires all of us to go above and beyond to support each other and the overall interests of the firm.

• Inquisitive — Obsessed with learning.

• Connector — Brings a depth of venture and industry connections to the table and is eager to build more.

• Integrity — Never sacrifice ethics for economics.

Application

If you are interested, please fill out the form here. You will be asked to respond to the following questions:

1. What are 1-2 sectors or investments that you are most excited about investing in over the next few years and why?

2. What are 2-3 companies that you find particularly interesting that have raised less than $5m? Why do you think they are exciting?

3. What do you like to read or listen to? This could include books, podcasts, blogs, newsletters, journals, magazines, etc.

4. In 100 words or less, why you?

We will follow up directly if there is a strong fit.

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Let’s call it how it is…it’s been a tough month for SaaS believers.

While I’ve never claimed to be a “SaaS” investor, I find the latest drawdown (20% in the last month alone) to be fascinating. What started as a globalized meltdown of the sector based on fear of AI disruption is now morphing into a far more subtle debate as the true merits of these companies.

Truthfully, these were the debates investors should have always been having on these type of companies. As we highlighted in our piece “Death to Revenue Multiples – Long live the DCF”, revenue multiples were always a terrible way to value software companies because each company is built and scales differently. Software companies typically had high barriers to entry (large build and distribution costs) that impeded competition and gave further advantage to scaled incumbents (If it takes each company $5m to launch a new product, but the scaled company has 1) a built in distribution network and 2) lower cost of capital, then they have clear competitive advantage over a startup). This enabled virtually EVERY startup company of scale to generate meaningful profits. Then times changed.

Over the last few years, we started to see the cost of developing and distributing software products come down dramatically, along with an acceleration of capital that significantly broke down those barriers to entry. The result was that a lot of companies grew very quickly, but this was primarily driven by a value transfer of once profitable incumbents (who were now being valued by a function of EBITDA / DCF) to startups (who were valued based on revenue multiples, indiscriminate of the underlying economics of these companies. While I’m most traditionally a seed-stage investor, looking at the financial statements of later stage companies would break my brain. Companies were spending endless dollars on “R&D” which was really just to maintain product parity with the market. The same went for promotional discounts, customer success and other items that made it clear that if the spending ever stopped, that these companies would churn customers and become irrelevant. The terminal value of these companies is truthfully “ZERO”…there was zero chance for them to ever achieve FCF profitability. Nonetheless, the broader market would value them on a growth-adjusted revenue multiple and investors were happy to fund the tab.

Now, AI has put this dynamic on steroids. The costs of developing and distributing software products has collapsed more in the last 12 months than it has in the last 12 years. This is what scares SaaS investors, as the cost of maintaining revenue growth for standard SaaS companies is skyrocketing. Folks are questioning who is going to flip the bill to maintain customer and market parity (let alone growth) and realize that there is an existential threat to the survivability of these companies. SaaS was just another “product” and like any other consumable, could be easily copied, produced cheaper and its momentary profits seized. Truth be told, many of these companies could (and undoubtedly) will, go to ZERO.

The reality, however, is that not all revenue is created equal. Amidst the landscape of SaaS slop, there are great companies. Ones that maintain durability via competitive advantage (or what we refer to as “Capabilities” and are actually being accelerated by AI.

Take a look at the chart below. This is the estimated “AI” revenues for a company that I’m personally invested in. Zero to nearly $2b in 3 years, not bad. What value would be put on an AI business that went from zero to $2b in 3 years when we see the best firms in the valley giving $500-$1b valuations for startups with $1m of ARR? AI is only part of the business for the company, but the overall business is demonstrating nearly 40% EPS growth (yes, its profitable), yet only trades at 4x sales, 14x EBITDA and 14x forward PE.

Most of you have probably figured this out already, but the company below is Salesforce (who I believe will be a huge beneficiary from AI) and is trading at a market cap of ~$175b despite over $40b of trailing twelve month (TTM) revenues. Salesforce is a great example of “the baby being thrown out with the bathwater”, as great companies are being beaten down indiscriminately from the bad ones amidst the SaaSpocalypse.

As you look across the SaaS landscape, there are known pockets of resilience. Companies that have built in developer platforms, cross customer network effects and/or maintain the system of record for their clients and the industry. We don’t view these companies as “products”, we view them as “platforms”, given the inherent flywheels in their business / product that enable compounding competitive advantage. These companies may (and often do) yield a low NPS score, but they are amongst the highest retention companies in existence. That’s not a sign of weakness, but rather of strength. Despite the countless startups that have attempted to take them down, nothing has stopped these companies and AI is likely an accelerant to the existing advantages of these companies by enabling them to rapidly develop, launch and distribute new features and customer experiences that they previously couldn’t…all at a fraction of the cost of what it would have previously cost them and a fraction of the cost of what it would cost upstarts to achieve parity.

In 2024, we dove into this dynamic and allotted each of the companies in Bessemer’s Cloud Index to “Product” or Platform”. What we found is that Platform companies demonstrated superior operating margins, FCF yield and Rule of 40. They tended to grow a bit slower, but they were superior businesses, yielding higher multiples. To my surprise, when we reexamined the revenue multiples of these companies to their SaaS peers, their multiples came down as much or more (see below). Many of the SaaS companies had made significant efforts to improve their efficiency metrics (Rule of 40 improved from 43% to 50% for our comp set over that time period), but that still dwarfed in comparison to the nearly 70% demonstrated by our platform bucket. Despite these sets of companies operating remarkably differently with entirely opposing positioning in today’s AI-fueled market, the entire basket was indiscriminately treated with a large draw down.

All this is to say that this “SaaSpocalypse” is temporary. To paraphrase Benjamin Graham, ‘The market is often wrong in the short-term, but always right in the long-term”. The destruction (or at very least, devaluation) of “product” SaaS companies is an inevitable and truth be told, I still think they are criminally over-valued. Many of these companies will die. The product platforms, however, will likely experience a very different fate and today’s lows may represent a generational buying opportunity.

As a founder, you need to be architecting your company as a platform from Day Zero, embedding the aspects of compounding competitive advantage into your product from the start. This tweet from my friend Jeff Morris Jr. sums it up well…”you need to spend less time on building an MVP in 2026 & way more time on product strategy”. As an investor, this is even more emphatically true…nothing is worse than investing in a road to nowhere and companies that are living on product pull without a defensible strategy are likely doomed to failure.

In the age of AI, build platforms, not products. Otherwise, you might as well be investing your time and money into dirty bathwater.

Frank Tanner of Morgan Creek has a fabulous framework for evaluating managers. He calls it the “5 S’s” – Source, Select, Secure, Support and Signal. As I think about how we’ve always handled our own performance management process for our team, it very much aligns with these 5 S’s focusing on sourcing, research / market intelligence, deal evaluation / execution, portfolio support and branding / marketing.

For a long time, I found little value in branding / marketing as part of an investment firm. From my naïve POV, our job was to invest in non-consensus companies, which very much meant that we should be finding opportunities that others weren’t. I saw folks preaching that VC was an “access” game and dismissed that as group think chasing momentum in over-priced deals. This led me to prioritize research to find the uncovered gems, knowing full well that I wasn’t going to beat Sequoia (either in clout or in check size) in an all-out dual.

Things changed dramatically when I started Equal. Some of our readers have likely heard this story in various different forms, but the process of starting a firm required me to build new skills. As one of my strongest LP connections told me when starting the firm, “Rick, I love you, but you have no juice…you have no brand.” They weren’t wrong. I had a solid track record with some early unicorns and real DPI, but very few in the venture community knew or cared who I was. This made it incredibly difficult to raise.

As we finally got Equal off the ground, I had put more effort into developing a brand – more so because this was clearly something LPs cared about, rather than me thinking it would actually benefit our investment process. It wasn’t until a friend of mine called me out during one of our peer circle sessions over Covid that things clicked. As long as I’ve been an investor, I have always written very detailed research reports on the spaces I like to invest and memos for deals I like to invest in (even a seed stage investment generally warranted a 20+ page memo). While I have many faults, seldom do folks fault me for the level of work and thoroughness I approach a given space or investment opportunity. To me, this process has been essential for me to build conviction as an early investor building a track record and I found warmth in the security blanket of being able to show my homework as if to say “Even if this deal doesn’t work out, look at all this fancy work I did. I swear, I’m not dumb or lazy!”

One day during one of my peer circle sessions, I was outlining my work for a recent investment when one of the other participants called me out saying, “Rick, you do all this work, but none of it ever sees the light of day. Maybe 10 people see this. Why are you being such a wuss?” At that point, I had never shared my theses or work publicly. Folks knew a few spaces I was broadly interested in, but I didn’t want to box myself into a corner and I was afraid that folks would poke holes in my work. As I outlined my rationale, the other participant in our peer circle told me “That’s an ego problem, not an economic one. You’re worried that people will disagree with you and hurt your feelings. Meanwhile, holding this back is hurting your companies, your firm and yourself. You need to put this out there and you will figure out whether people believe you or not, but doing all this work to let something sit on a hard drive is pointless.”

From then on, we started publishing some of our research reports (some of which have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times) and have become increasingly prescriptive as to where we would like to invest. While the messaging behind what Equal invested in was previously murky (which was a consistent point of feedback for passes during our Fund 1 raise), we now were able to tell people exactly what we were looking for. Before long, we stumbled on the “prepared mind” narrative and it’s become synonymous with our firm’s brand since.

This single push ultimately became one of the most impactful catalysts for our firm. All of sudden, I had VCs and customers reaching out to me to show interest in the findings that we developed. These folks became thought partners, expanding our universe of ideas and ultimately the networks that we could bring to a company. This also greatly benefited the companies – every single investment we made that had a thesis deck behind it (or what we have subsequently coined as “Prepared Mind Deep Dives”) was ultimately marked up…every single one. These reports became rally cries of a sort. We developed conviction as a team, we amassed a critical mass of customers/partners for that thesis through that process (generally aiming for several million dollars of pent-up revenue demand prior to investing) and could assess the interest of potential down-stream investment partners based on the work we published. While this work was extremely slow and methodical, it did enable us to marry our conviction behind a company with the connections and capital necessary to give these companies a marginally better chance at winning. This was immensely impactful in helping us find off the beaten path companies and heling them transition from “non-consensus” to “consensus” – where we believe the alpha of venture capital exits.

Over time, things have changed. We continue to be extremely research-oriented, but the velocity of seed makes the job of finding needles in a haystack more challenging than ever before. We still “hunt” (which is what we call our out-bound driven approach to finding the off the beaten path opportunities), but we certainly are seeing a lot more founders walk in our door than in the past. Over the last few years, we’ve developed and expanded our “hatch” strategy, which is working with repeat founders to start their next great company. Over the last 2.5 years, we’ve now done 6 of these and the current or exited combined enterprise value of the founders’ prior companies is nearly $10b. In each of these cases, we’re still doing our exhaustive research, amassing a critical network of customers and sharing our research with downstream partners to empower that “rally cry” effect, but are gaining access to founders that normally wouldn’t work with a firm like ours (we had previously invested in the founders’ prior companies in just 2 of the 6 cases). When I asked one of our most accomplished teams about why they decided to come to us, they said “I was asking folks who knew this space really well and yall’s name kept on coming up. I hadn’t even heard of you or Equal, but I realized that if you knew this space as well as others said you did, you could not only be really helpful, but also set a really powerful signal for future rounds.” I thought to myself, “signal”?

Fast forward to 2026, I’m seeing some companies raise at $1b valuations on <$1m of revenue. Those companies may be in the same space with identical metrics to companies that go unfunded. Why? Because of signal. I was speaking with a peer recently and he was telling me about one of his portfolio companies that recently completed its Series A with a top tier VC firm. We know each other well enough that I spoke to him candidly, “To be honest, I’m surprised. I heard that company was struggling, is it working?” He responded, “Not really, but Sequoia was in the seed so everyone was chasing it. Process was ferocious.” The single fact that Sequoia was involved in the deal (in what was a miniscule check compared to the quantum of capital they manage) incited a bidding war for a company that was not objectively performing. The reason why? Because Sequoia has signal.

We’re in an investment market that subjectivity reigns supreme. For better or worse, objective financial performance means nothing compared to the heat and momentum a company can generate behind it. We see high growth companies with outstanding metrics raising at single digital revenue multiples and others with comparable performance raising at several hundred times revenue. As a value investing disciple, it breaks my brain. Ultimately, these companies need to measure up to the valuations they’ve raised at, but undoubtedly, it’s far better to have these conditions as your tailwinds, than as headwinds. Being on the right side of that equation not only means less dilution and dramatically lower cost of capital, but it can be a powerful tool to help attract talent, customers and additional financing partners. All of this won’t win the game for you, but it certainly increases your margin for error. This forces us to evaluate with our companies how to turn market perception from “non-consensus” to “consensus”.

In a market that is rife with subjectivity, determining how to set signal is paramount. Often, founders can do this themselves. With most of our “hatches”, the founders are driving the signal far more than our research and business development support. But for off the beaten path opportunities, investor-led signal matters more than ever before. We’ve seen investors go from ignoring founders to clamoring after them once they have a reputable lead (who wouldn’t want to co-invest with a multi-time Midas lister?). We’ve seen customers do the same, racing to be the 2^nd or 3^rd “early-adopter” to a nascent company, after seeing it validated by someone else. As a partner to these companies, we repeatedly ask ourselves, “How can we better help this company show signal in the market?”.

We press upon ourselves to help set that signal through research, our “bridger’ networks and our industry summits. It’s more powerful in some areas than others, but a friend of mine at a top-tier venture firm said it best “Rick, if you guys do anything in these sectors, we’re going to take a hard look. But the second you go outside of those, we couldn’t care less.” Harsh, but ultimately very clarifying.

Once successful, signal sets itself (I don’t think Bill Gurley or Fred Wilson would need a 20 page research report to get people excited in a deal they are doing), but as an early venture professional and/or emerging manager, finding your path to signal is as existential as oxygen.

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Next week will mark 3 years since my Grandmother passed.

She had a tremendous impact on my life and was always one for words. She dedicated her life to her family above all else, but she was also tough. She wasn’t the type of person to have embroidered pillows, but if she did, they’d have some of her favorite expressions like “You are lucky to be living” on them.

She appreciated everything that life gave her, but whining and excuses were not allowed. As I grew up, there were always plenty of things that I could complain or make excuses about, but she always had some quip back to me to assert, ‘So what are you going to do to fix that? The world isn’t going to do it for you.’ These little nudges had a big impact on my life. I’ve been knocked down a bunch along the way, but the folks who know me best, know that I get back up.

As a parent now, I think a lot about instilling those values in my kids. I’m a big fan of Angela Duckworth’s book “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” and candidly worry about the lack of resiliency across the social fabric of our society. We live in a world where scapegoating is endless. Not only is that misplaced, but it’s entirely unproductive. As Teddy Roosevelt once said, “Complaining about a problem without proposing a solution is called whining”. I love this quote so much that I had it put up on the walls in our office. Our job as founders and funders isn’t to identify the problems, it’s about finding the solutions. That’s how you win – finding solutions to problems over and over and over again. If you do that consistently over a long time horizon, you will achieve far greater success than simply identifying and whining about the problems.

The other day, I saw a post about a Stanford study highlighting that repeated complaining actually weakens your brain and strengthens stress pathways. The simple act of complaining about something actually engrains neural pathways in your brain that not only make you complain more, but make you less happy. Who wants that? The scaffolding of our minds is always evolving, but changes aren’t sudden. They compound over long time horizons to enforce increasingly stronger pathways. This is the basis of cognitive-behavioral therapy - identifying unproductive behaviors and consciously altering your responses to enforce more productive patterns to the point that they become instinctual. No one is born a “whiner”, but more importantly, no one needs to remain one.

As a father, this is a lesson I try to instill with my kids every day. One of the favorite expressions we have in our household is “Are you a winner or are you a whiner?”. My kids know the answer and they know that it’s far preferrable to be winners > whiners. Not only is this one of the fastest parenting hacks I’ve seen to get kids to stop complaining (which every kid is going to do from time to time), but it’s also part of my long term efforts to ensure that my kids are establishing the neural pathways for solving problems, not just complaining about them. I ask them what we can do to solve whatever they are having difficulty over. I ask them how they can contribute or take control over solving that difficulty. I then ask them what they think they can do even better next time. I’m not qualified to give parenting advice, but I’m hopeful that my intention and efforts result in my kids establishing the pathways and tools necessary to tackle the problems they will face in the years ahead.

As I think about founders, there are just some folks who know how to win. They do it over and over and over again. It’s not a secret that when you’ve had success once, it gets easier to achieve the next time. Often the “wins” get bigger each time, too. Elon Musk didn’t start off with Tesla or SpaceX…those came after starting Zip2 and X.com (which ultimately merged with PayPal). He learned how to “win” and kept on winning. As David Faber from CNBC said the other day “I don’t think you can ever bet against Elon…he just knows how to win.”

As this Stanford study asserts, winning isn’t an inherent skill, it’s something learned. Tom Brady didn’t win national championships at Michigan and Elon Musk didn’t sell his first company for a billion dollars, but as I look at the most successful folks in society, they have developed and reinforced patterns that enable them to win. They don’t complain about problems, they solve them. They attack them head on and are ruthless in their self-improvement to identify pathways to help further improve their odds of winning. I often come back to this Tom Brady quote, “To be successful at anything, the truth is you don’t have to be special. You just have to be what most people aren’t: consistent, determined, and willing to work for it.” That’s how you win, not by scapegoating, whining or complaining, but by consistently showing up with the determination and work ethic necessary to take small wins and compound them into big ones. That’s how you learn how to win.

If you are a founder (or board member), don’t just identify problems, solve them. Stack the solutions on top of each other and sure enough, you will be sitting atop some wins. Those wins can help catapult you to even bigger wins. Complaining about the problems isn’t going to get you anywhere and will only reinforce patterns to failure. As Robert Frost once said, “The best way out is always through.” I can safely say that Grandma Zullo would approve of that.

Last month we presented to our LPAC and shared our “State of the Venture Economy”, alongside the usual general updates that we do for such meetings.

Unsurprising to many that I speak with frequently, I’m pretty concerned about the state of the overall economy and capital markets. Even since last month, we’ve seen fairly unprecedented events (the Japanese bond market…) making me worry further about the state of markets.

I often return to this graphic from Boom and Bust: A global history of financial bubbles, highlighting the 3 core ingredients for bubbles to exist – speculation, marketability and money/credit. It’s safe to say that AI has incited each of these and as I see the state of the economy, valuations, wealth concentration, leverage and actual execution, it seems that we’re tempting the fate of a pullback yet again.

Amidst this, there are two major dynamics at play – a grossly over-priced seed market and an increasingly concentrated of venture players. I outline in the deck the data supporting these factors, but also some of the practical implications of this that could make life for emerging managers and certain companies very difficult.

My desire is not to be the wet blanket, but to be prepared for the fight ahead. I believe showing restraint when others are “all-in” is a prudent act of risk management to ensure our companies can achieve full maturity and our firm can continue to compound in the years to come. As I wrote about in the Fortune of Failure (initially shared with LPs back in Nov. of 2021 and later published in 2022), I think there is a lot that fund managers and founders can do to build resiliency against market swings like this. Information is the strongest defense mechanism for market volatility and I want to do my best to make sure that everyone is armed with as much information as possible, regardless of whether they choose to utilize it or not.

Plenty of folks have come to different conclusions on the state of the market (including A16Z, which coincidentally released a similar report today that is chalked full of amazing insights) and that’s completely fine. They could be right and I hope they are. The benefit of being a bear in a bull market as a venture capitalist is that when you are wrong, you know that you’ve left money on the table, but ultimately you have done very well. If you are a VC bull as the market turns bearish, however, that’s when things can get dangerous very quickly. For me, I’d personally rather take my risk on partnering with the best companies, rather than the movement of market cycles.

We don’t quite have the research or production team of A16Z, but I’m hopeful you find value in some of the data and insights from our “State of the Venture Economy” report. As always, we welcome feedback and encourage you to engage with us via our posts on Linkedin and Twitter if you can.

With that, please take a look at our full report here.

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As some of you may have seen, we already posted our 26 predictions for 2026 a few weeks earlier. We did this year’s predictions as a team, but it nudged me to reflect on my predictions from last year to see how we fared.

I tried to make these predictions provocative at the time and the results are rightfully mixed. We’ll see how these trends fare as we head into 2026, but after a wild end to the year, I can safely say that we’re teed up for an ever more wild 2026.

1. The stock market will see a correction of at least 15% with technology stocks taking the biggest hit - RIGHT

While the stock market ended up double digits for the year it toppled >15% from beginning of the year and nearly 20% from it’s top. Technology stocks were certainly hit the hardest amidst this rout (Nvidia started the year north of $150 and hit a lot of $86 a share, a 43% drop), but ultimately bounced back to new all-time highs (it’s now in the high $180’s). That said, while we saw some weakness in software, but the AI-related trade more than covered for those losses.

Nonetheless, the same things that I was concerned about in 2025 leave me concerned on an even more sincere level in 2026. Valuations remain incredibly high (Tesla is trading at >100x EBITDA despite double digit declining sales) and we have the added complication of immense CapEx investment that hasn’t fully materialized in the income statement or balance sheet. As I’ve noted elsewhere, many of the top AI players are gamifying the depreciation schedule of their AI-related infrastructure (extending it well beyond it’s ACTUAL usable life to reduce its cost in the current year) and saddling up to off balance sheet SPVs for data center build outs – both factors that place a tremendous amount of downside risk to the system (as evidenced by rising CDS cost of large infrastructure build out plays like Oracle and Coreweave). These liabilities could cripple these companies (sending shares down dramatically) if momentum in AI falters and given the wealth concentration behind a consolidated list of Mag7 names, a down pattern likely couldn’t be contained to the tech sector.

2) We’ll see more defections from big VC funds and more emerging managers “growing up” - MIXED

The outcome on this one was a bit more ambiguous. We saw some major defections from VC mega funds, especially at the largest firms. There is a clear cultural shift that’s happening at many of the big shops and it will be interesting to see how it plays out in the years to come as these platform funds were able to reload on capital without issue, enabling them to attract talent to replace the departures.

As for emerging managers “growing up”, that was far less definitive. A few of the leading emerging managers started in the last decade raised funds (many of which at still unannounced), but I don’t think we saw anyone really steal the torch from incumbents. The real breakouts seem to be coming from the generation prior (those firms started in 2005-2015). There are a few firms really starting to heat up (folks like Kindred and Conviction come to mind, but there are many more), but given the massive growth of the larger platform firms (including the emergence of Thrive as one of those firms), it’s hard to make the case that we saw a major maturation of the emerging manager ecosystem.

3) A record number of funds will close up shop - RIGHT

I don’t have the data to support this claim, but anecdotally, this seemed to be right on. While it takes a long-time for firms to “die”, I know of a LOT of funds that effectively shut down operations, laid off staff, were acquired and/or returned capital. 2025 was a BRUTAL year for emerging manager fundraises (after a very favorable environment in 2021-2023) and many managers found themselves struggling to raise successive funds. Deep in their deployment cycles, this has left a lot of managers absent capital in an environment where the major platform funds have bid up seed-stage pricing to a level that makes seed investing (where emerging managers generally play) incredibly difficult. A decade ago, simply being in the pack of top quartile seed deals was enough to earn good returns. Now, that looks increasingly difficult and having a “right to win” is more important than ever. I’ve seen some incredibly prominent managers decide to take their ball and go home and suspect we’ll see more leading into 2026 unless there is a major turn-around in fundraising.

4) Tech and Trump break up – WRONG

I successfully called that the marriage between Trump and Musk would be short-lived, but the tech/VC community has gotten far more cozy to Trump than I ever would have anticipated. I theorized that Trump would ultimately have to choose between his traditional MAGA base and the traditionally left-leaning utopiast from the tech world, but much of the tech world has largely abandoned their leftist policy in favor to jump on the MAGA bandwagon. Whether this is a reaction to the impacts of left leaning policies in CA and more recently in NYC or simply the tech community chasing the favor (and dollars) associated with being in Trump’s inner circle, the tech community has shown far greater support for Trump than I anticipated. Keep in mind, it wasn’t long ago that venture capital firms put “F*ck Trump” on their homepage, so to see the broad support we are is fairly surprising.

5) America gets back to “business” – RIGHT

When I wrote this, “9-9-6” was not yet a “thing”. It’s crazy how much a difference a year makes and while we may be past peak “9-9-6” culture, America decidedly got back to business. Folks are bragging about sleeping in the office, culture is far more formal than I’ve seen in recent years and everyone is obsessed with “building”. Given the amount of capital available to founders, companies are tackling ambitious agenda’s with a heavy American Dynamism tilt (which outside of AI, was clearly THE category of interest) and now we’re seeing VCs opine on their new-found expertise in energy, manufacturing and defense policy at a level I haven’t seen since plethora of medical opinions we had from VCs during the pandemic.

I, for one, am ecstatic with the back to business mindset and it’s been great to see so many companies/teams moving with the pace/velocity/execution they are. In many respects, this is leaving a lot of cultures that were forged during the pandemic (which I would largely say were far more focused on work-life balance) in the dust, especially as the AI race provides a perceived prize that could potentially justify the hours, commitment and sacrifices made by these teams. Only time will tell, but I’m all for us getting down to business and hope this continues into 2026 and beyond.

That’s it folks, some right and some wrong. As always, I welcome feedback on our takes and how these trends will evolve in the years to come!

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“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” - Aristotle

Every year, I try to give myself a rally cry – something that will serve as my manifesto for the year. Historically, I haven’t publicized these, but those around me hear them early and often (likely to the point of ad nauseam). That said, I think these rallying cries warrant their purpose. It’s impossible to capture everything you want to accomplish with a single line, but simplifying your priorities into a single constraint often provides a lot more clarity.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my rally cry for this year over the last few months and really latched onto it after Thanksgiving. Last year was a year of historic highs and lows for me, leaving me craving consistency to level out that volatility. Consistency, while almost ultimately unattainable, brought a lot of rigor and efficiency to the endless queue of tasks I had to take on for our firm and my family over what was an unprecedented year. Simply put, it was the only way – show up and make sure that I treated every day like it was existential.

As I think about 2026, it’s my objective to make that consistency not just a survival mechanism, but a force. The beauty and curse of being in this business is that you become a sociologist of sorts – you are constantly interacting with different cultures across the companies and investment firms you work with, enabling a rare opportunity to see the best (and worst) practices across each. I’m on over a dozen boards and I can safely say that each culture is unique. When interacting with the founders of those companies, they are equally unique. But what is not unique is the consistency I see in the highest-achieving founders and organizations. The highest achieving of the bunch make commitments and keep them. They make audacious goals knowing the sacrifices necessary to achieve them. They don’t treat the fate of their business as a random walk, but rather something deterministic and self-correct decisively whenever they deviate from the path of success. Simply put, they commit to excellence.

Tom Brady has a quote that really spoke to me, “To be successful at anything, the truth is you don’t have to be special. You just have to be what most people aren’t: consistent, determined, and willing to work for it.” For someone who is devoid of any special abilities, I found this really inspiring – that I TOO could be successful as long as I was consistent, determined, and willing to work for it (although I don’t think I ever had the frame to play in the NFL or to be successful at any professional sport for that matter). But I think that quote only shows one side of the story. We are a function of our own flywheels and that street goes two ways – negative habits reinforce negative habits and positive habits reinforce positive ones. The trick is making sure that your own flywheels are headed in the right direction.

2025 brought a resurgence to work ethic with the popularization of “9-9-6” culture, but I think “9-9-6” fails to address the true core of what I found myself craving. I believe in productivity > activity. I‘ve worked enough 100+ hour weeks to know that hours worked is not the yardstick for achievement. I now appreciate the flexibility that I have to work when, how and where I can be most impactful. What matters more than when and where, however, is the how.

I’ve long believed that rules, KPIs and most goal frameworks are subject to gamification, especially if they aren’t artfully structured. With that, I’ve tended to focus on objectives and principles – constructs that serve the true intent of what you are hoping to accomplish and guide your actions in support of those. This is why the rally cry has been so critical to my prioritization, acting as a guiding principle for my actions throughout the year. As I put on my sociologist hat, I see the highest performing people and organizations share a singular principle. A commitment to excellence. There is a famed Buddhist principle that says that “How you do anything is how you do everything” and as I look at the highest performing people I know and follow, they treat everything (at least everything relevant to their businesses) with a commitment to excellence. They don’t cut corners, they don’t wait for success to find them and they don’t take it for granted when they achieve it. They make investments and sacrifices to get it right whether it be the most mundane of customer interactions or the “make or break” moment for their companies. They stack those moments on top of each other each day, compounding that commitment and making the process of achieving excellence the default, not the exception. They don’t revel in glory when they achieve success, they get right back to work and build on that commitment. When you treat mundane customer interactions with a commitment to excellence, you are positioning yourself to outperform in those “make or break” moments where excellence matters most.

This leads me to my rally cry for the year from no other than Aristotle – “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

As I think about the powerful framing of this quote, it gets me incredibly excited for the year ahead. While I know I will stumble and fall endlessly on this path, my objective/principle is to commit to the habit of unlocking excellence. I’ve discussed this quote with a few of my founders already (one of whom fed me the “How you do anything is how you do everything” line) and it prompted some worthwhile discussions. Not so much on whether they were committed to excellence, but whether they were holding their teams to the same lofty expectation. That’s hard to do across large, fast-growing and heavily complex organizations, but if we’re really being honest with ourselves, the best organizations embed this ethos into their culture. Their employees don’t just “9-9-6”, they commit to excellence and do what it takes to achieve that (regardless of whether that’s a 50 hour work week or 120).

I’ll be the first to acknowledge that you can’t be excellent at EVERYTHING – it simply isn’t possible given the tradeoffs implicit with limited time/resources. But you can choose what to prioritize and to form habits around those to make achieving excellence easier. Unlike in football, venture is not the function of being born with special capabilities – it is a function of showing up with consistency, determination and the work ethic necessary to do the job right. That is something that we can all achieve if we set our minds to it. That’s what I’m committing to in 2026 and I hope you will too.

Equal Ventures is a thesis-driven, early stage venture firm focused on bridging the digital divide. We partner with founders and businesses deploying technology within legacy industries, specifically climate, insurance, retail, and supply chain.

Role Overview

The Event Operations Lead will own the operational planning and execution of Equal Ventures’ events and summits across all verticals. This role is highly execution-oriented and is responsible for ensuring that all events run smoothly, on time, and on budget, while delivering a high-quality experience for speakers, sponsors, and guests.

Please note: This is not an investment role and does not lead to an investment position. However, we view the individual that joins our team to be a critical member when it comes to ensuring that the firm can operate effectively and be the best partner to entrepreneurs and LPs.

The Event Operations Lead will work with our team in office 4 days a week in New York City. The anticipated base salary range for this role is between $80,000 and $130,000 and will include carry as well as potential for bonus.

Key Responsibilities

Event Planning & Logistics:

• Own end-to-end logistics for all Equal Ventures events and summits such as our Climate Capital Summit, Insurance Capital Summit, Emerging Manager Circle Summit, our annual Founder & LP Summits, and numerous small-scale events throughout the year.

• Lead venue sourcing, site visits, and contract coordination.

• Manage all vendors (AV, catering, signage, production, photography, etc.)

• Build and maintain detailed run-of-show documents and production timelines.

• Oversee day-of event execution, including on-site coordination and troubleshooting.

Guest & Speaker Experience

• Manage guest communications, invitations, and confirmations.

• Own the events@equal email inbox and respond to all inbound event inquiries.

• Coordinate speaker logistics, schedules, and support in prep calls.

• Ensure a seamless experience for speakers, sponsors, and attendees.

Project Management

• Set timelines and milestones for each event and summit.

• Conduct event kick-off meetings and working sessions.

• Track progress against timelines and flag risks or delays early.

• Take detailed notes, circulate action items, and hold stakeholders accountable.

Sponsorship Support

• Support sponsorship outreach and coordination.

• Work with sponsors to ensure delivery on agreed-upon benefits and activation.

• Coordinate sponsor logistics, branding, and on-site needs.

Budget Management

• Build and manage event budgets.

• Track expenses and reconcile post-event spend.

• Identify cost efficiencies without compromising quality.

Collaboration

• Partner closely with Product Owners to plan and execute vertical summits.

• Coordinate with internal team members and external partners as needed.

Qualifications & Skills

• 3+ years of professional experience in event production, event operations, or event management; experience in project management, operations, or marketing is a plus.

• Proven ability to manage multiple events and projects simultaneously while maintaining strong attention to detail, deadlines, and follow-through.

• Highly organized, with the ability to bring structure to ambiguity, prioritize effectively, and track progress.

• Comfortable sourcing, negotiating with, and managing external vendors and partners.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills: confident corresponding with speakers, sponsors, vendors, and guests.

• Highly collaborative, with a desire to work closely with internal team members and incorporate feedback into planning, while also capable of working independently and owning execution.

• Strong desire for excellence and takes pride in the detail, thoroughness, accuracy, and overall quality of their work.

• Hustle-driven mindset. As a small firm, we win through persistence, perseverance and hard work.

• Friendly: We like nice people, no egos.

How to Apply

Please complete the application form here: Event Operations Lead Application.

You will be asked to upload your resume and answer the following three questions (250 words maximum each):

1. What piqued your interest in this role? What are you hoping to get out of your next career opportunity?

2. What experience do you have managing events, logistics, or complex projects? Please share specific examples.

3. How would your current/prior employer describe your performance and contributions to their firm?

4. What skills or strengths do you bring that would make you effective in a fast-moving, detail-heavy event environment?

We look forward to hearing from you!

Equal Ventures is a thesis-driven, early-stage venture firm focused on bridging the digital divide. Climate & Energy are among the core focus areas of our firm, and we are excited to add a senior investor to help scale our efforts in this area.

We are looking to bring on a Principal or Partner to serve as a Product Owner of our climate and energy investing practice. This individual will play a central role in developing investment theses, sourcing and leading investments, supporting portfolio companies, and representing Equal within the broader climate ecosystem.

This role is ideal for someone who combines strong investing judgment with deep domain exposure across climate or energy, whether from startups, operating roles, or prior venture or growth equity experience.

About the Role

As a Principal or Partner at Equal, you will operate as a senior investor with meaningful autonomy and responsibility. You will work closely with the partnership to shape Equal’s climate and energy strategy while owning end-to-end execution across sourcing, diligence, investment decisions, and portfolio support. You will also spearhead and scale our community experiences across the space, such as our annual Climate Capital Summit.

This role is based in person at our office in New York City. In-person collaboration is an important part of our team culture. Title, compensation, and economics will be commensurate with experience and seniority. All members of our firm receive carry.

Compensation for the role will depend on seniority and experience and includes a base salary in the range of $200k–$300k, guaranteed fund carry, and the opportunity to earn an annual performance bonus.

Core Responsibilities Include

• Owning and evolving Equal’s climate and energy investment theses across key sub-sectors

• Proactively sourcing high-quality early-stage opportunities through founder relationships, ecosystem engagement, and outbound research

• Leading investment diligence, including market analysis, customer and expert calls, and conviction-driven memo writing

• Driving investment decisions and representing Equal on boards or in close advisory relationships with founders

• Supporting portfolio companies on strategy, hiring, go-to-market, fundraising, and partnerships

• Building Equal’s brand and presence within the climate and energy ecosystem through producing content, hosting and attending events, and extending relationships with key points of influence in energy and the broader venture capital ecosystem

• Serving as lead for Equal’s Climate Capital Summit

• Supporting the firm’s overall operations: we’re a small team and everyone works together to own workstreams that help level-up the firm

About You

Experience

• 7+ years of relevant professional experience

• Background in venture capital, growth equity, private equity, or a high-impact operating role at a climate or energy startup

• Strong familiarity with climate or energy markets, technologies, and value chains

• Prior experience leading investments or owning meaningful diligence processes is strongly preferred

Attributes

• Industry expert — A detailed understanding of the energy/climate venture landscape with the ability to predict trends, evaluate emerging companies in the sector and influence key decision makers.

• Hustle — As a small firm, we win through persistence, perseverance and sweat above all else.

• Professional — Takes immense pride in the detail, thoroughness, accuracy, and overall quality of their work.

• Self-directed — Works with team members to complete tasks without someone looking over their shoulder.

• Team Player — We like everyone in our firm to feel like an owner of the firm, which requires all of us to go above and beyond to support each other and the overall interests of the firm.

• Connector — Brings a depth of venture and industry connections to the table and is eager to build more.

• Integrity — Never sacrifice ethics for economics.

Application

If you are interested, please fill out the form here. You will be asked to respond to the following questions:

1. Share more about your experiences across climate and/or energy and what you are looking for out of your next role?

2. What are one or two climate or energy subsectors you are most excited about and why?

3. What is a company that you find particularly interesting that has raised less than $5m? Why do you think it is exciting?

4. In 100 words or less, what is missing from the early-stage climate/energy investing ecosystem? What can/should Equal bring to the ecosystem that has yet to be provided by other investors?

5. In 100 words or less, why you?

We will follow up directly if there is a strong fit.

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In a report last week, Gallagher Re referred to Jan 1 renewals as a “period of choice..and opportunity for cedants.” Reinsurance capital is at record levels, driven by “strong retained earnings” in reinsurance, growing availability of “alternative”, non-traditional capacity, and “structural” rate adequacy across most lines of business. They conclude that we are entering a market with both “record levels of capital” and a strong “motivation to deploy it.”

In other words: the insurance industry is flush with capital. Insurers still perceive rates to be high enough to be worth growing their book, which in turn is driving more competition, and pushing those “adequate” rates lower. Just a few years ago, in an extremely hard market driven by inflation and natural catastrophe losses, reinsurance capital was supply constrained. Carriers were generally forced to pay high premiums and to cede less risk than they hoped. This year, Gallagher Re noted that “some reinsurers were not able to deploy as much capital” as they planned. We’ve effetively rotated from a reinsurance market with too-little capacity to a softer environment with excess capital looking for new opportunities.

In 2024, we wrote about the shifting insurance rate cycle, from a decidedly hard market into a period of renewed growth and profitability. Since then, rate increases have moderated, new MGAs and carriers have entered the market, and carrier spend on advertising and growth recovered from depressed levels.

Whereas 18 months ago the industry was on the precipice of a growth-fuelled recovery, now it seems the game is about to get more difficult. Through this cycle carriers and insurtechs have been rewarded for showing strong PIF and premium growth; this will necessarily moderate amid falling rates, increased competition, and tougher y/y comps.

As the insurance environment becomes more challenging, it will accelerate ongoing industry trends and create strategic opportunities for carriers adept at managing the cycle. Below, I outline some of the ways in which I expect a softening reinsurance market to impact the industry over the coming months.

The MGA boom will continue

As reinsurers look for more opportunities to deploy capital, MGAs will offer them the fastest opportunity to do so. Underwriters focused on traditionally high-loss categories and E&S will continue to be appealing, because of the opportunity for tech leverage and because there is generally less competition in those segments. As shown in the charts below, surplus lines have grown fourfold over the past twenty years, and in some lines have outperformed the broader admitted P&C market on losses.

Interestingly, Gallagher Re’s report noted that alternative capital in “long-tail lines” (i.e., the riskiest and toughest to insure) “has roughly doubled” over the past year. This means capital is rushing towards areas like catastrophe-exposed property (where rates fell by 10-20% on Jan 1, and where 2025 losses actually fell despite the LA fires). The same categories that reinsurers did not want to touch two years ago are now growing the fastest. I expect to see more capital go to specialty underwriters and MGAs with a track record in these categories.

Carriers will seek new ways to differentiate

Admitted insurance coverage tends to be fairly commoditized. But in an increasingly competitive market characterized by falling rates, insurers will want to avoid a race to the bottom on pricing. Insureds and brokers will increasingly demand user experiences and products that meet their needs. This might look like more personalization of coverage, faster claims experiences, new embedded parametric offerings, and broader proactive risk management services. While these bells and whistles are unlikely to command a premium from most buyers, they may help carriers and MGAs attract customers and differentiate their brands at the margin. Personal lines insurers might also aim to achieve this through advertising and brand-building – Progressive, for example, massively ramped ad spend in 2024-2025 (their Q1 2025 spend was 86% higher vs. Q1 2024). Marketing growth will decelerate (since it already recovered) and incremental dollars will likely have diminishing returns, but total spend is likely to remain high.

Growth, but with more precision

Carriers are still hungry for growth with rates still generally attractive/adequate, but underwriting margins are expected to narrow. It is becoming incrementally more difficult to acquire new business compared to 12-18 months ago. To compensate, carriers need to more thoughtfully optimize their business mix and growth strategy. Instead of an indiscriminate land grab, they will target the customers with whom they have a right to win with more precision. There is evidence that they have already started to do so. In Progressive’s November earnings call, when asked about the decelerating rate of growth and the increase in competition across the market, CEO Tricia Griffith replied, “This is when the fun starts.” She then detailed the company’s strategy to implement more robust segmentation and bundling/cross-sell to fuel growth now that rate increases have moderated. Similarly, Chubb’s Evan Greenberg made comments last quarter about “discipline” in underwriting and vowed not to “chase” reinsurance opportunities or resort to a “gut feeling” in segments where they don’t see adequate rates.

Operational Excellence > Balance Sheet

Insurance is fundamentally a finance business: access to a balance sheet or capacity drives the ability to write and scale policies profitably. But at a moment when there is excess (and increasing) capital flowing into the industry, an outsized share of competitive advantages will derive from operational effectiveness rather than from access to capital. Automation and the infrastructure transformation that underpins it are becoming even more important as new underwriters enter the market and rates face pressure. A survey by BCG (shown below) suggests that the insurance industry is already ahead of the curve in “piloting” GenAI compared to other non-technology industries.

As a result, vertical AI is rapidly proliferating across underwriting and claims - a trend I believe will continue, and that I remain excited about. But piloting is not enough; you can see in the same chart above that insurance lags in scaling AI initiatives. As competition intensifies, the biggest winners will be those who invest in infrastructure and processes to enable and scale innovation most effectively. The urgency of automation and transformation was already true independent of the softening market, but I believe the rate cycle will further catalyze and accelerate innovation in the months to come.

If you are building something new in insurance or want to talk more about any of the themes discussed above, please reach out to adam@equal.vc.

And for insurance industry executives, operators, and investors: Equal is excited to launch the 2026 Insurance Capital Summit this spring in NYC. More information to come in several weeks, but for now, if you’re interested in speaking roles at the summit, you may submit your information here.

As we come to the end of 2025, the Equal team has been having some spirited conversations about what might be ahead in 2026. From AI eating insurance, robotaxi wars, and the lure to advertisers of 6 billion eyeballs tuning in for the World Cup, we’re sharing 26 predictions across Equal’s core sectors of commerce, supply chain, insurance, and climate, and the broader market for 2026!

COMMERCE:

1. The average U.S. consumer will NOT get better in 2026 …

The K-shaped economy will continue to bifurcate. The rich got richer. The top 10% of earners made up half of retail spending this year, boosted by market gains. Average consumer sentiments remain at an all time low as the affordability crisis increasingly hits the middle class. Jobs report also looking bad. In a world where daily spikes in Mag 7 gains are driving consumption decisions, we’re going to be in a world of hurt when (not if) the market corrects.

2. … which means, the value segment will continue to grow

Every single segment of the consumer is trading down or in some classes, just flat out not spending. Walmart and TJX are both up 30% this year, Target is down 30%, and Amazon is flat. With tariffs finally hitting prices, which will continue into next year, everyone’s going to be looking for a deal.

3. Advertisers won’t be wowed by Google’s first AI ad but it won’t matter. OpenAI will try to respond but find out that ads are harder than it looks

There have been conflicting reports on whether we’ll see the first Gemini ads in 2026. My bet is that we will see something deployed on Gemini next year. The efficacy will be fairly mixed but it won’t really matter? Advertisers weren’t happy with PMax, Google’s last advertising overhaul, but that didn’t make a dent on revenues. Google has a chokehold on advertisers and has developed an insane machine tailor made to satisfy and placate enterprise customers that won’t be easily replicated. Besides Google’s insane consumer reach across Search, YouTube, Maps, etc., it’s developed deep infrastructure across ads deployment and data & analytics as well as a well-oiled GTM army particularly good at enterprise sales and rollout. OAI’s nascent efforts in enterprise and limited success compared to Anthropic suggests they will need to make a ton of investments here – reminder it took Meta 2-3 years to really figure it out!

4. We’ll see a lot of ads (maybe ads for AI?!) at the World Cup

6B (!!!) viewers are expected to watch 48 countries across 104 games hosted across the U.S., Mexico and Canada next summer. Telemundo, who has the exclusive Spanish-language broadcasting rights across all games, has reported that they’ve already seen 2x the ad spend from 2022. With ticket prices for the 2026 World Cup already breaking records with prices 3x those of previous tournaments, advertisers will be salivating for a chance to grab the IRL eyeballs of a wealthy and global audience. My prediction is that we’ll see one of the major AI players drop major buckaroos for a chance to make a splash! Also no one is asking for this but my personal finals prediction is 3-1 Portugal over Argentina.

5. More international brands will come to town.

A huge part of why the 2026 World Cup’s so much more expensive than previous iterations is that even a weakened U.S. consumer is by far the most powerful consumer globally. Foreign retailers and brands flooded into the U.S. this year and we’ll see more in 2026

6. Livestreaming -> liveshopping?

Even though Kim’s Kimsmas x SKIMs TikTok livestream drew fairly anemic views (the numbers I could find cited ~25k peak viewers on an account with 10.6M followers but with no source), I believe 2026 is the year that live shopping will finally reach the mainstream U.S. consumer. Whatnot significantly expanded outside collectibles as fashion and premium plants were among their top 2025 categories. TikTok reported that just over Black Friday Cyber Monday, creators and sellers hosted 760K livestream sessions with 1.6B views on the platform. No surprise, PopMart, the darling of weird stuff in 2025, was a top performer.

7. The best creators will 10x with AI.

Yes, no questionably, there will be a lot more AI slop. But there will be creators who leverage the proliferation of freemium / cheap AI prosumer products to great advantage. Creators are extremely entrepreneurial and the best ones will find ways to incorporate AI to not only power their efficiency, but also their creativity.

SUPPLY CHAIN & LOGISTICS:

8. We won’t see a huge freight rebound next year

With this consumer, I don’t anticipate a massive rebound in demand in 2026. If more capacity leaves the market due to compliance crackdown and carrier bankruptcies, prices will at least hold or move up slightly. I don’t think 2026 will look worse for carriers and brokers still in market, but I’m not sure it’ll look much better either.

9. There won’t be Liberation Day 2.0

Somewhat dependent on midterm results but my bet is that we won’t see the amount of uncertainty regarding tariffs in 2026. Increased real estate demand from the retail segment suggests that c-suites have gotten comfortable with the “new normal” and feel comfortable making longer term decisions again, particularly value players who are looking to capitalize on consumers looking for discounts.

10. The Robot(axi) Wars are coming

Waymo is planning on being in 20 more cities by the end of 2026. Uber is vowing to be in 10 cities. Tesla just tested rides without safety drivers in Austin, although behind schedule as Musk had promised a fleet covering 50% of the U.S. population earlier this year before revising down to 60 cars in Austin. I think it’s highly likely that at least one MSA (likely SF or LA) gets a 2026 sequel to the early Uber / Lyft “win at any price” saga.

11. Amazon will publicize their first “dark warehouse”

The scale of Amazon’s robotic ambitions came into stark relief this year. Only Amazon could turn a $775M acquisition of Kiva Systems in 2012 into a robot army 1 million strong a mere 13 years later. Amazon believes that robots could enable them to automate 75% of ops and reduce the number of people the company has to hire by 600k by 2033. Will Amazon unveil the world’s first “dark warehouse,” a fully autonomous warehouse fulfilling Prime order 24/7 without lights because humans need lights but robots don’t, in 2026? A bit ominous but I am equal parts scared and impressed - as always, we’re #longamazon.

12. We’re not done with king-making within AI x supply chain and logistics

We’ve already seen significant king-making behavior within other verticals, notably legal and medical. 2025 saw some of this within the supply chain, particularly with AI platforms targeting the freight broker thanks to the $906B topline number of the nation’s freight bill. This is not going to stop in 2026. We’ll see more fundraising activity within freight for sure but expect to see similar fundraising dynamics start within other legacy industries with massive procurement dollars, notable wholesale, distribution, construction, and more.

INSURANCE:

13. High-performing MGAs will take more market share

A growing volume of non-traditional reinsurance capacity will flow towards high-performing specialty MGAs. As carriers vie for growth in a healthy and softening pricing cycle, the increased competition is creating a strong environment for new distributors to gain share and offer new/innovative products. For the best-performing MGAs, wholesalers and brokers are already seeing expanded capacity panels and favorable reinsurance renewals, which are likely to accelerate after Jan 1.

14. Casualty and property rate trends will diverge

The inflection toward softer property rates accelerated in 2025, with rates falling 8% q/q by Q3. This follows years of unprecedentedly hard markets, and reflects rates that are rich, growing competition, and a 2025 US hurricane season that (thankfully) resulted in lower insured loss than anticipated. In 2026, expect property rates to continue softening, while casualty rates are buoyed by worsening trends in “social inflation,” fraud, and evolving professional lines liabilities.

15. Deepfake Fraud becomes an existential threat to loss ratios

Cyber resilience has been a priority (and pain point) for insurers for years. But as AI proliferates across the economy, expect instances of fraud and cyber crime to accelerate with it. Programmatic claims fraud, deepfakes, cargo/inventory theft, and other sophisticated criminal activity is unfortunately evolving faster than risk management infrastructure is being adopted. Carriers, insureds, and even governmental stakeholders will increasingly be attuned to business and systemic risks and loss.

16. AI-Native Infrastructure for insurers is the new cloud

Investment in agentic workflow capabilities and services took off this year across enterprise carriers and claims organizations. As solutions proliferate and enterprise buyers feel the pressure of proving real ROI, the focus will shift toward infrastructure that supports AI deployment. Carriers want derisked end-to-end solutions, and most will not be able to just throw AI on top of outdated mainframe or even cloud backends. As Deloitte wrote, carriers need to “fix the plumbing for the shiny new technology to work.”

17. ACA Subsidies will be revived in some form – but it is too little, too late

Despite the longest federal shutdown in history, ACA subsidies have not yet been resurrected. Individual premiums are skyrocketing as healthier buyers may opt out of coverage, and for employers, health benefit costs (already sitting at record highs) are set to increase in 2026 by the highest amount in more than a decade. With massive public support for subsidies and untenable coverage, we expect a retroactive reinstatement of the subsidies. But either way, we expect significantly more focus to be on group benefits design, as the ROI from optimization increases and broader technology integration catalyzes new cost-effective options. Market dislocation creates opportunities for brokers, administrators and health plans that deliver superior savings, transparency, and UX.

18. Insurance affordability impacts real estate valuations and liquidity

In Q1 2025, as devastating fires wreaked havoc across Los Angeles, the climate risks to homeowners and systemic risks to the insurance ecosystem became front-page national news. In 2026, expect to see insurance affordability become even more intricately tied to property values and desirability. Though some brokers might prefer to ignore it (as evidenced by Zillow recently killing its First Street integration that promised more climate risk transparency), the impact on property sales is already here. In the absence of federal action, expect highly regionalized policies to distort property and insurance markets.

CLIMATE:

19. Energy efficiency is cool again

2025 brought with it the age of abundance, collapsing the existing narrative around peak energy demand, conservation and sustainability. The problem is that we have seen massive increases in the price of electricity (despite some of the lowest gas prices we’ve seen in years) that made the already daunting affordability crisis even more perilous. With rising energy prices and falling costs of energy management interventions, the ROI for energy savings has never been better. Energy efficiency might start to feel about as cool as the AC folks are blasting at full tilt.

20. Sponsors and incumbents go shopping

We saw a tremendous amount of hyper-scalers engage in corpdev maneuvers with legacy energy incumbents in 2025, but the truth is that a lot of legacy assets are still trading at fairly significant discounts. Climate has been an ICE COLD fundraising and capital markets environment (unless you are in data centers and nuclear) and the reality is that a lot of these companies still hold significant value. Our guess is that we start to see the pendulum swing back toward buying, especially as well-capitalized players see heightened clarity on policy and seek more proven yield.

21. Consolidation in Climate Tech

We’re now a few years removed from the boom years of climate tech and seeing companies (particularly those related to sustainability, carbon or EVs) and climate-specific funds running on fumes. Each of these groups are struggling to raise capital in what appears to be the most frigid market for energy-related investment that I’ve seen since the latest climate tech wave (except for pockets focused on data centers, nuclear and resilience, which I would broadly put in the American Dynamism bucket). These companies and funds can only extend their runway for so long and we’re starting to see what we think will be a wave of shutdowns from both founders and funders. This will position those with the capital for success in a much less crowded field than what we saw in 2022.

22. The GPU depreciation fight turns into a circularity + grid strategy

Hyperscalers and neo clouds have made large, very public bets that the useful life of AI hardware will last longer than the hype cycle. We are already seeing dispersion in depreciation assumptions (e.g. six years vs. four), even as NVIDIA’s release cadence tightens. This creates a reality in which obsolescence does not equal unusable, and secondhand demand for less intensive tasks can stay surprisingly durable.

We expect to see the beginning of an actual GPU refurbishment / secondary market stack emerge, because the economics will be too good to ignore, especially when compute is bottlenecked by power + interconnect. The shape of this is already taking hold in China. Taking this further, we expect regulators/industry to get louder about critical-mineral recycling and e-waste economics.

23. Interruptible compute becomes the new interconnection currency

In 2026, we expect large load to be perceived both as a customer and grid resource. Google has already signed demand-response style agreements to curtail AI data center load during peak periods, which is a far cry from always on. We expect grid operators will begin explicitly pricing (or requiring) curtailment capability to manage reliability risk.

24. Storage will become America’s fastest-to-build capacity product

In 2026, batteries will be framed as the quickest reliability lever in constrained regions. The build-rate is already telling you where this goes: the EIA was highlighting major battery additions (with Texas expecting ~7 GW in 2025, much of it in the second half), and industry data shows storage posting record quarters (e.g., ~4.7 GW installed in Q3 2025).

Costs also unlock new use cases as BloombergNEF’s 2025 survey has stationary storage pack pricing down sharply (reported around $70/kWh, ~45% lower than 2024) which expands the set of projects that pencil.

GENERALIST:

25. AI inequality inside the firm becomes visible and starts driving organizational design

OpenAI’s December 2025 enterprise report shows large usage gaps between frontier and median users. Frontier workers are sending 6x more messages per seat than the median user. In 2026, we expect companies to double down on enablement and internal playbook investment as their AI returns concentrate on power users. This may open new roles and budgets for AI operations as productivity deltas become a talent retention and performance-management issue.

26. The great unbundling of trust continues across our sectors

The UN’s ITU warned deepfakes are eroding trust and urged for digital verification systems and standards to fight misinformation and fraud. Regulators hardened the surface area as the EU confirmed there is no pause on the AI Act rollout, with general-purpose AI obligations applying from August. Meanwhile, Gartner predicts 40%+ of enterprises will see security or compliance incidents tied to it by 2030.

In 2026, we expect budgets to migrate towards verification layers: governance, monitoring, provenance, permissions, and audit trails, as no organizations want to be the headline. This paves the way for AI governance to become its own disciplinary function with its own headcount and tooling.

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Search once began with a keyword; this year, it starts with a question. And instead of ten blue links, shoppers will see a generative answer. A single summary that decides who gets seen, who gets discovered, and who disappears entirely.

Or at the very least, that’s the belief of the AEO / GEO movement - that consumers are increasingly turning to AI interfaces like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews rather than traditional search for product and brand discoveries and recommendations. Over the past 18 months, hundreds of brands, agencies, and startups have tried to position themselves inside AI-powered discovery systems – the chat assistants, search summaries, and shopping copilots that are quietly (and some loudly on X) rewriting how consumers find products online.

It’s all come to a head this past Black Friday. Per NRF, ~200M U.S. consumers shopped during the five-day stretch from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday, marking the biggest turnout since 2017. A troubled consumer under inflationary pressures resulted in a record $44B in topline online sales (with mixed volume results) across Black Friday and Cyber Monday per Adobe Analytics. It’s no surprise that consumers are seeking deals - according to Semrush’s U.S. data, 2025 search volume for “Black Friday deals” climbed roughly 22% year-over-year, averaging 453,500 monthly searches. But the story isn’t just about more traffic - it’s about where that traffic is coming from. And for the growing ecosystem of “answer optimization” players, this holiday season is the first true litmus test. All the pilots, pitch decks, and client promises of the past year will finally meet the only metric that matters – sales.

Here, the initial results are a bit more mixed. There are numerous breathless headlines purporting the higher conversion of AI chat from Semrush’s new AI Visibility Index finding that brands cited in AI answers convert at 4.4× the rate of those reached through traditional search to Microsoft Clarity citing similar results. There is a clear trend of web traffic shifting to AI platforms from traditional search - even before this year’s holiday rush, Similarweb estimated AI platforms drove ~1.13 billion referral visits in June 2025, up 357% YoY, while zero-click searches (e.g., Google’s AI Overview) continue to rise. Sensor Tower reported that consumer use of Rufus, Amazon’s AI chat, increased 86% due to Black Friday and that almost 40% of Amazon App shopping sessions utilized Rufus.

Does AI actually result in better conversion? Amazon remains the only major retail play to publicly attribute incremental sales to AI as it claims Rufus is on pace to pull in an extra $10B in sales. While Amazon reports that users who used Rufus did see higher conversion, it’s unclear if AI usage actually caused higher conversion. While skeptics might make the argument that higher intent consumers are more likely to use Rufus in the first place, it seems undeniable that if consumers start expecting AI-powered recommendations, other retailers and brands have to fall in line to keep up.

The Rise of AEO / GEO / AI SEO / etc.

November 2022, ChatGPT launches. Two months later, it reached 100M in MAUs. By 2024, dozens of startups were pitching “Answer Engine Optimization” platforms to brands and retailers. Some focused on content generation; others built analytics to track whether a company’s products were cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews. Agencies followed quickly, selling “GEO audits” to help clients understand how they appear inside generative responses.

Brands haven’t stood still either. For instance, not only have both Walmart & Target rolled out AI-powered search and shopping features ahead of the holiday season, they’ve announced (and in Target’s case, already executed on) direct integrations within ChatGPT. Retailers like Instacart have begun experimenting with how to structure product data so it’s readable by AI systems. Tagging inventory for relevance, rewriting descriptions to sound “answer-friendly,” and exploring integrations that feed directly into chat engines.

AEO startups have quickly evolved from simple audits to building data pipelines, knowledge graphs, and visibility tracking dashboards. Larger incumbents like Semrush and Ahrefs have launched their own AI visibility features. Brands are also refining what “AI shelf presence” means in practice. Ensuring they’re cited when consumers ask questions like “Top sneakers under $200 for running a marathon?” Everyone agrees that if generative interfaces become a major gateway for commerce, securing a brand’s presence there will be essential. What’s still missing are the standards of consistent analytics, attribution models, and definitions of what “visibility” even means inside a generative interface.

Lessons from the Past

Every wave of digital discovery has followed a predictable pattern: chaos, consolidation, and concentration of value. Each time, new discovery channels emerged, brands and agencies scrambled to adapt, and three distinct layers of businesses took shape.

• Service
  SEO shops and performance marketing firms emerged to operationalize new discovery tactics. They were the doers – profitable but dependent on client budgets and vulnerable to algorithm changes. Many grew quickly but ultimately plateaued or were absorbed by larger enterprises. iCrossing, once the largest independent SEO agency, sold to Hearst in 2010 for $325 million. 360i (Dentsu, 2010) and Merkle (Dentsu, 2016, ≈ $1.5 billion) fetched higher multiples only after layering in analytics and CRM technology

• Enablement
  Analytics platforms, bidding automation, and visibility trackers translated agency workflows into code. These tools could be sold to thousands of clients instead of dozens, creating leverage that services couldn’t. Semrush, public since 2021, generated $376.8 million in FY2024 revenue and was acquired by Adobe on November 19th for ~$1.9B. Ahrefs, fully bootstrapped, surpassed $100 million ARR with fewer than 100 employees. BrightEdge and Conductor converted agency know-how into recurring SaaS models and raised late-stage rounds.

• Infrastructure
  Sitting below both layers were the platforms that defined discovery economics. They owned the rails, set the rules, and captured enduring value. Google Ads generated over ~$265 billion in 2024 ad revenue, eclipsing the combined scale of every SEO tool and agency beneath it. The $3B acquisition of Double Click in 2008, 8 years after Google launched ads, remains one of the few AdTech wins (along with Trade Desk, AppNexus, Criteo, AQuantive at the time) that VCs dream of. Meta and Amazon have both similarly consolidated digital spend as performance marketing moved fully inside closed ecosystems.

By the late 2010s, platforms proved their ability to flex their powers as the tollgates of the internet. Without clear differentiation and moats, agencies quickly became commoditized. The enablement layer produced some winners but ultimately, the vast majority of value created accrued upstream to the platform, who own the eyeballs. With the advent of video, we’re seeing the story repeat. YouTube is already an advertising powerhouse and TikTok and Whatnot are trying to make it a trilogy.

The Coming Reality Check

Every gold rush hits a reality check - is AEO headed for one? As Black Friday ends, the renewal season has begun. Many of the first wave of AEO contracts signed in 2024 and early adopters will all be contemplating the ROI question. That pressure will likely trigger the first consolidation cycle in this new category. On the buyer side, CMOs will demand visibility tied directly to conversion, not mentions or citations. On the builder side, startups will need to prove they’re more than wrappers around public APIs; without proprietary data or distribution, retention will be tough. On the agency side, many will revert to classic SEO retainers under a new name if AEO metrics prove hard to sustain

Beneath those pressures sit deeper structural challenges. Attribution remains the biggest challenge. Unlike traditional search, many AI-driven interactions end without a click, making ROI murky. As one analyst put it, “zero-click environments break standard attribution.” Budgets are tightening and experiments that can’t tie directly to the funnel are the first to go. Much of what’s being sold today looks like repackaged SEO with a new acronym, easy to replicate and hard to defend. And the major platforms still hold the cards. If OpenAI, Google, or Microsoft internalize visibility tools, they can compress entire layers of this market overnight. The winners will be those that build defensible integrations like proprietary data feeds, API access, or knowledge graph pipelines that models depend on.

The comparison to early SEO is hard to ignore. In 2010, thousands of small firms promised PageRank miracles. Within five years, the market had consolidated to a handful of dominant players. The same pattern is now unfolding here, eventually winners will emerge who build scale, data, or platform advantage, while the rest fade, pivot, or get acquired.

Looking Ahead

The rush around AI-powered discovery is already here. Just like the search boom of the 2000s and the social boom of the 2010s, this visibility wave will eventually normalize. As attribution improves and marketers learn what truly drives ROI, we’ll get a clearer picture of which efforts create lasting impact and which were early experiments.

Black Friday 2025 was the first real stress test. If last year’s signals hold, brands that prepare now could gain a meaningful edge. But it’s still early. The landscape is evolving in real time, and no one yet knows how discovery will settle in a world without blue links. If you’re already seeing this shift in your own work or building to help brands be discovered we’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out to chelsea@equal.vc!

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The Equal Ventures Insurance Index is a quarterly summary of market performance and trends in P&C insurance. The indices we report include public equities from insurance and insurtech, from which we draw insights about key themes affecting the sector. This post summarizes the performance of our indicies in Q3 2025 and the first weeks of Q4. As always, our goal from this post is to help support observers of the insurance industry in identifying trends and catalysts that affect the P&C industry (and never to recommend any specific investments).

In many ways, Q3 was a continuation and acceleration of themes from Q2, with carriers and brokers in our indicies pointing to slowing (or contracting) rate growth. Healthy combined ratios and availabilty of reinsurance capacity are driving competion higher as rates trend lower. While profitability is still generally strong, lower growth and the increasing possibility of slowing macro led P&C indicies to underperform the broader (quite strong) equity market. Follow below for our takeaways from Q3 2025.

Q3 2025 Index Summary & Highlights:

• P&C stocks generally underperformed the strong equity market in Q3. Legacy brokers in our index fell by a median of 6% and carriers were up by 3%, compared to SPX +8%

• Insurtech carriers (once again) outperformed on average, though the group showed more dispersion in prices across companies.

• Light natural catastrophe activity supported strong reinsurance performance, but also accelerated softness in rates, with property rates down 8% q/q.

If there were a single overarching theme to explain P&C performance in Q3, it would be increasing competition and lower rates.

The Marsh Global Insurance Market Index showed commercial rates fell 4% on average in Q3, following a 4% decline in Q2. Again, rates were led lower by property (-8%). Casualty rates remain positive but decelerated Q/Q. As Marsh’s CEO John Doyle said in the company’s Q3 earnings call, “It’s a competitive market.” Insurer ROE remains “quite strong” prompting carriers to look for growth and undercut on pricing, even amid signs the economy is slowing. Doyle pointed to the “unsustainable” mismatch between softening rates and the rising structual “costs of risk,” including extreme weather events and social inflation, which are “increasing at a rate much higher than GDP.” Over the long term, he concludes that more complex risks will be good for the brokerage and risk consulting business (as they may drive rates higher and make consultative expertise more important). But in Q3, the trend toward softer rates hit the sector hard.

Legacy brokers in our index were down by a median of 6% in Q3. Brown & Brown (BRO, -15%), the 6th largest US broker, is a case in point. The company reported substantial renewals in its property segment during the quarter, and rate declines pushed organic growth lower, leading the stock to get crushed in its July earnings. Commentary on the call was that E&S rates were down as much as 15-30% in some segments— an acceleration to the trend that was already worsening in the prior quarter.

The story was similar for legacy carriers, which traded modestly higher on the quarter but underperformed the SPX by close to 500bps. Kemper (KMPR, -20%) led the carrier index lower on similar rate pressures. Their Q2 report in August showed deceleration in policies in force, and they posted adverse loss developments that they attributed to “large losses” and social inflation. Asked about the competitive environment on their earnings call, their CEO assured analysts that they are not “putting on the breaks” in response to softening rates, but also reminded listeners that “the double-digit growth that folks experienced over the last 1.5 years” were not normal or sustainable long term. The growth narrative definitely feels different from a year ago.

While softening rates led by property were already in motion throughout 1H, it is important to note that Q3 also turned out to be an unexpectedly light quarter for seasonal natural catastrophe losses. Catastrophe bonds and reinsurance capital were at record highs and the hurricane season was expected to be intense, but turned out to be much more modest than feared heading in Q3. Though this is great news for reinsurers and for property owners/residents in storm-prone and coastal areas, it may also continue to put pressure on the trajectory of property rates. RenaissanceRe (RNR, +5%) remarked on their earnings call that “this year has gone exceptionally well with respect to hurricanes,” and although rates are coming in, they continue to see rate adequacy and strong opportunities to deploy additional capital at high ROE. In other words: the stronger balance sheet from avoided catastrophe events and growth opportunities are more than offsetting the lower rates. As they stated on the call: “rates went up 50% in 2023, and over the last two quarters we’re talking about rate changes in the 10-ish percent range.” JPM estimated a 4-8% profit lift for reinsurers on the quarter given this dynamic, and the reinsurance subsector outperformed primary carriers in Q3.

By and large, insurtechs once again continued to outperform. Lemonade (LMND, +22%) traded way up on both its August and November quarter results. Q2 results showed 29% y/y growth of in-force premium, the 7th consecutive quarter of acceleration (bested in November by an 8th sequential increase that came in at 30%). Q2 revenue was up 35% y/y, outpacing premium growth, and reflecting big improvements in both gross loss ratio and cross-sell conversion in the previously challenged auto segment. With growth continuing to ramp and gross losses falling, the stock is up >360% in 24 months. ROOT, which started its recovery earlier and is further along in its cycle, had more paltry PIF growth of 12% and traded lower on its report, but remains up >135% over 12 months. In a quarter marked by P&C underperformance, the insurtech segment remains a bright spot.

Trends in rates, competition, natural catastrophes, and overall macro will continue to drive performance of the P&C sector over the remainder of the year. We continue to believe that a focus on underserved segments and differentiated profitability offers long term opportunities for P&C carriers and distributors that will persist regardless of near-term trends in pricing. If, like us, you’re watching this space closely or building something new, we’d love to hear from you — feel free to reach out to me at adam@equal.vc.

We’re excited to open up a spot for a MBA intern to join our team to focus on Climate and Energy research and investing for the 2025-26 school year. This opportunity offers direct exposure to early-stage venture investing, giving interns a chance to learn from and work alongside our team on research and diligence efforts.

MBA interns at Equal work closely with the investment team to evaluate new companies, analyze emerging themes across the industries we invest in, and contribute to research deep-dives that shape our thesis-driven approach. They gain a front-row seat to how early-stage startups are built and how investors decide which teams are poised to build category-defining companies.

The internship requires a commitment of 10-15 hours per week, with the expectation that you will be in our NYC office at least one day per week. This opportunity will likely be best suited for students currently in NYC or within commutable distance (ex. New Haven or Philadelphia). The internship includes a paid stipend. We are open to both first or second year students – first years will have the opportunity to continue into the summer if they are interested.

Ideal Candidate

• Intellectually Curious — Insatiable thirst for knowledge on how / why things work

• Professional — Takes immense pride in the detail, thoroughness, accuracy, and overall quality of their work. Capable of engaging and developing relationships with industry leaders, founders and other investors in accordance with the Equal brand

• Self-directed — Works with team members to complete tasks without someone looking over their shoulder

• Friendly — We like nice people, no egos

• Bonus: Experience leveraging Gen AI tools for research (ex. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc) and/or to build automations (ex. n8n, Zapier, etc)

Application Instructions

If you’d like to apply, please complete the application linked here. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis till we’ve filled the spot but we highly recommend applying before Monday, December 1st.

The form will ask you to submit your Resume or CV along with short responses to the following questions:

1. What are you hoping to get out of this opportunity?

2. What do you like to read or listen to? This could include books, podcasts, blogs, newsletters, journals, magazines, etc.

3. What is a company that you find particularly interesting that has raised less than $5m? Why do you think it is exciting?

4. (Optional) Are there any segments around climate or energy that you are particularly excited about?

We will follow up directly if your background and experience is a fit.

Application link: https://equalvc.typeform.com/climate-2025.

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Alternative capital in reinsurance reached $121B in the year ended June 2025, a record high, and roughly 60% higher compared to a decade earlier. Reinsurance industry ROE was north of 14% last year (and higher in 2023), and for institutional investors, reinsurance can provide attractive, uncorrelated returns. Today, non-traditional capital (i.e., from outside the reinsurance industry) constitutes roughly 15% of total reinsurance capital.

This is good news for a host of reasons. More capital, from a broader base of diversified sources, helps to improve the availability and affordability of reinsurance. It also reduces volatility and capacity crunches – for example, McKinsey reported that spikes in reinsurance pricing after catastrophe events have generally become less severe as alternative capital’s share of the total reinsurance capital increased over the past two decades. Growth in alternative reinsurance capital therefore directly impacts the price and availability of P&C coverage.

The influx of alternative capital also supports innovation across the insurance value chain. Newer investors seeking high returns may be particularly drawn to non-traditional and tech-enabled approaches across specialty insurance, areas startups are increasingly gravitating towards. More capital begets more underwriting and product innovation, which can boost profitability, and in turn drive more capital and capacity into the industry.

We wrote about growth in (and our interest in) the specialty insurance space in our recent post introducing Bluefields to the Equal portfolio. Insurable risks are trending more complex, forcing underwriters to adapt how they evaluate and manage risks to construct profitable programs. You don’t need to look far beyond major news headlines to see examples of the many catalysts for specialty underwriting: climate change and worsening natural catastrophes; more risk accumulation in high-risk areas; volatile inflation data; social inflation and a trend toward “nuclear” verdicts in some casualty lines…the list goes on. A decade of insurtech innovation enables new approaches that can dramatically improve profitability, and accelerating AI adoption is only increasing that impact.

Both traditional reinsurers and non-traditional investors are pushing capacity towards these new approaches, creating opportunities for early stage companies. We outlined some of the various approaches founders may take at the intersection of non-traditional capacity and specialty insurance, and evaluated them across a high-level matrix of investment considerations. The goal is not to recommend any specific approach, but instead to highlight some of the pros and cons of each for those exploring this space.

Probably the most pure-play way to build in this category is to launch a specialty MGA. US MGA premiums more than doubled over the past five years. The rapid growth has been funded in part by fronts, captives, and other structures that provide capacity for novel underwriters. Because of their popularity in the market, there is a playbook for launching MGAs that has evolved (and improved) significantly with more technology and a more robust ecosystem. Companies like Stand in Equal’s portfolio demonstrate that AI-assisted underwriting and risk management can get to market efficiently and take share rapidly.

Another approach is to start at a different spot in the value chain, and instead build a front or underwriting carrier that backs new underwriters and programs. This approach might quickly scale across multiple different types of insurance products, compared to the more focused approach of a single MGA. There are fewer venture-backed companies taking this approach relative to starting MGAs, but it likely requires substantially more complexity and capital to get it started.

Data and modeling platforms that support new underwriting approaches are important for all stakeholders in the alternative capital ecosystem. Better use of data supports the launch of more profitable programs, and in turn makes it easier for alternative investors to deploy more capital into reinsurance. The downside is that enterprise sales cycles and network effects can take a long time to materialize.

The final approach we included is a platform or marketplace that better matches non-traditional capital with underwriting opportunities. This approach may match investors, or may even directly participate as a buyer/seller. Greater liquidity in reinsurance would drive even more alternative capital into the space, and it supports increased visibility, transparency, and efficiency. The flipside of course is that it’s very challenging to do this more effectively than reinsurance brokers, especially when many of the largest reinsurers still value discretion. This category of innovation is therefore complex and would likely take a long time to scale.

The approaches outlined above are definitely not exhaustive, and are not even mutually exclusive, since they largely complement each other. They demonstrate a range of solutions and opportunities that are supported by (and in turn also support) the growing availability of alternative capital. If, like us, you believe more tech-enabled specialty insurance will drive even more non-traditional capital into the industry, you might expect to continue seeing new businesses emerge across each of these archetypes, as well as others. If you’re building in this space, or interested to discuss further, we’d love to hear from you – reach out to adam@equal.vc.

I’ve long been a HUGE fan of Geoffrey Moore’s book “Crossing the Chasm”. That said, as we work with more and more AI companies, we are witnessing a fundamental breakdown in the customer behavior that Geoffrey observes and reports on.

For those that haven’t read the book, Geoffrey Moore emphasizes that the success of innovative products depends on capturing a specific segment of the market before mainstream adoption can occur. The belief is that “Early Adopters” are the visionaries who are willing to take risks on new technologies because they see the potential for a significant competitive advantage or transformation. Unlike the mainstream market (such as mid-market / enterprise buyers) that seek ample validation, early adopters are hobby enthusiasts in technology allowing them to gain conviction faster. Moore argues that startups should focus on winning over these early adopters first, using their enthusiasm and feedback to refine the product and build credibility, creating a bridge—or “chasm”—toward the larger, more risk-averse majority.

Historically, we’d always seen startups as the early adopters for new entry products. After all, these customers are visionaries themselves - they are other startups who understand the need to embrace the unproven to gain an edge on the competition. They evangelize the lack of bureaucracy as a means to “move fast and break things”, allowing them to sign up as customers earlier than others.

In vertical AI, however, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Perhaps it’s the competitive threats of new AI upstarts potentially competing with maturing startups, or the vapid urgency of today’s corporate environment, but more often than not, we are seeing legacy institutions as the early adopters for our products. These institutions are committing early, dedicating real budget, and sprinting through implementations. This starkly contrasts with the behavior we are seeing by some (not all) of the startups that we partner with that are often: 1) very low willingness to pay, 2) overly protective of their IP and resistant to rely on others (often to their own detriment) and 3) insist on high service level requirements above and beyond what enterprise customers do.

This isn’t specific to a single one of our 4 sectors, it’s a general observation across the companies we work with across each of our verticals. While these startups have often been the foundation for other startups to launch themselves across the chasm, we’re seeing an increasingly wide chasm between today’s AI upstarts and others that matured prior to the more recent advancements, buzz and funding available via AI. Candidly, we think this is a flawed approach. Being a mature startup is harder than ever before - fundraising markets are categorically focused on AI, credit markets have dried up and the bar for going public has increased. In our opinion, you should be doing ANYTHING you can to get ahead, especially partnering with the latest and greatest AI specialists to get additional leverage for your business and to cut your burn.

We’re seeing several in our portfolio who were once ardently focused on building their own vertical tools (largely upon the belief that their tech stack was their core defining characteristic), now pivot into a much more hospitable posture to other vertical AI startups that can help them widen the moats they have over legacy competitors with very successful results. This requires those companies to put their egos on the shelf and realize that today’s modern business models aren’t about the application interfaces you’ve developed, but the networks, customers and data that you have accumulated over the life of your business. For startups, I would embrace ANYTHING that enables you to further amplify those existing assets…if not, the legacy incumbents (who often have broader distribution and troves of underutilized data) will.

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As we’ve highlighted in some of our recent posts on AI value creation and “Hidden AI”, there are increasingly diverse set of ways to win given the technology advancements made available to founders today. One of the models that has come into heavy focus (and scrutiny) is AI-powered roll-ups. There are a lot of reasons to be excited about this model, after all, it’s one of the most direct pathways to tie the outcomes of AI to your own bottom-line, while implementing AI as swiftly and fully as you can. That said, it may also be the most controversial of AI value creation strategies with some claiming that it’s simply PE dressed up in VC’s clothing. With that, we wanted to share additional perspective given our experience and research on the space.

As many know, we are early investors in Equal Parts, an AI-powered aggregator of insurance agencies. While many have recently sprinted full force into AI roll-ups, our thesis behind what would ultimately become Equal Parts was born in 2021, far before AI was part of the calculus. AI has supercharged this thesis making a thesis that we already loved even more powerful, however, the truth is that very few properly understand how most of these roll-up strategies actually create value.

In PE, you aren’t just counting on revenue multiples, you need to drive real EBITDA and/or earnings growth to create value. As we see many of the pitches that come in under this umbrella, many are simply heralding the top line growth of these companies with incremental margin expansion from AI implementations, without determining whether they are actually creating any LONG-TERM improvement in the earnings potential of the company. It is our opinion that those that don’t have very little chance of generating venture returns and, perhaps more realistically, will struggle to deliver PE level returns. The reality is that PE people are pretty fricking smart and a bunch of newcomers approaching that market with hubris and big budgets seem unlikely to deliver the execution or financial prowess to succeed (more often than not, we actually are seeing a lot of these companies burn through capital and then sell for less than their paid in capital raised as companies like Thrasio ultimately did.

But there will indeed be winners and we believe Equal Parts has a hell of a shot to be one. There are some industry specific conditions that make insurance agency roll-ups particularly attractive (and its also helpful to back a proven beast like Mike 😊), but there are 4 essential characteristics that we believe enable success for AI-driven roll-ups.

The 4 Rules of AI-Powered Roll-up Success

1. White collar services

This may seem obvious, but the principal advantage of AI is not in making assets cheaper, but in reducing the labor cost associated with labor-intensive businesses. With that, identifying industries where AI-affected labor represents the most significant component of the industry’s cost structure is critical to determining whether the model has enough juice to squeeze. For those who read our “Hidden AI” piece, you can see that identifying the cost structure of a given business and determining where AI may have the greatest leverage on the overall cost profile is critical to success.

The businesses with the highest labor cost components don’t just have lots of bodies, they have expensive ones. Using AI to replicate the behavior of off-shored individuals earning a few dollars an hour doesn’t generate significant enough leverage when you look at the competing computing/token costs. What is far more interesting is identifying expensive “white collar” services that can be trained to deliver superior results at a superior price point via AI.

2. Recurring Revenue

Expensive labor costs are just the first step in this process, with recurring revenue seeming to be requisite for long-term success. We are seeing plenty of de novo operators automating white collar services such as graphic design, legal services and tax prep and those businesses could very well be highly successful (albeit, it’s too early to tell and it’s hard to discern whether customers will constantly bid out services to the lowest cost provider, ultimately creating a race to zero marginal profit as competition enters into what are now early greenfield categories). But if you are buying a company, you need to ensure that company has long-term terminal value, otherwise the CAC:LTV dynamics of this growth model don’t work. Services that need to constantly acquire customers to maintain revenue limit predictability of a given company (as we saw with many of the Amazon merchant aggregators) and the #1 rule of a roll-up strategy is to ensure that you don’t take losses on cash that you put out the door. There is undoubtedly a certain degree of financial engineering necessary to any roll-up model and having visibility of future revenue streams from the companies purchased is critical not only ensuring that any acquisition target is successful, but to properly finance this as a strategy for growth.

3. Revenue side synergies

The vast majority of AI-powered roll-up stories are heavily focused on cost-side synergies. I don’t blame them. AI is really good at identifying and exploiting lower cost strategies. The problem is that those cost advantages are largely ephemeral. Any business that wants to have LONG-TERM success in this category needs to assume that competition will implement similar AI interventions (at some point), ultimately competing any initial advantages down to the industry’s new cost structure. While the cost advantages delivered via AI may produce some initial dopamine given the initial margin lift produced, competition encroaching on your market as they gradually adopt AI will ultimately lead to a declining margin structure – something that is often lethal to a business.

Perhaps even scarier, if you are investing in a business that has a declining cost structure, there is ample risk that prices for your services may decline significantly over time, leading to significant ACV declines from your existing customers. We’re already seeing this play through in the TPA market as well as other white-collar services as emerging AI-powered entrants compete prices asymptotically down to the point of zero margin. For a startup trying to show growth to investors, it’s incredibly difficult to combat declining ACVs and we’ve seen the cost curves in some of these spaces collapse pricing per activity by >50% in a given year (meaning that a given company needs to double its customer base just to stay flat). This is one of the reasons why we see insurance agencies as particularly suited to benefit from the long-term effects of AI – insurance premiums naturally rise with inflation (creating pre-baked revenue growth every year), but commissions are ultimately set at industry standards (generally 10-25% based on volume and type of coverage). Customer ACVs don’t fall as AI enters the space, just costs making these businesses more profitable over time (NOTE: this could ultimately lead to asset prices going up making acquisitions increasingly difficult, but such conditions would also dramatically improve the implied market value of our company as well).

Revenue-side synergies, however, are far more sustainable. When aggregation via AI can enable companies to produce incremental revenue lift (while simultaneously benefitting from AI-powered cost advantages), then you have a compelling and durable profit margin. Ideally, these revenue side synergies demonstrate increasing returns to scale that enable incremental acquisitions to demonstrate incrementally higher yield. Notably, we see this in insurance, where larger premium volumes enable agencies to not only achieve higher commission rates, but also gain access to additional products to cross-sell, further lifting the both the revenue and margin profile of not just the target, but the rest of the underlying agencies in the portfolio. We wrote about this dynamic in our Prepared Mind Deep Dive on the space and it’s one of the core considerations for why insurance agency roll-ups are so effective.

4. Roll-up as a wedge into something bigger

While the 3 rules above provide a blue-print for success, the most exciting companies in this category will leverage the initial advantages of this model to achieve something beyond the roll-up model itself. As you can see, so much of my ideology around these types of opportunities (as well as in AI and broader investing) is rooted in competitive dynamics. Ultimately, building an at-scale player can yield good returns (especially for early investors), but leveraging that position of strength to slingshot into an even bigger prize is where the real win is. I won’t unveil what that is for Equal Parts, but if successful, the company has the potential to monopolize the entire retail insurance market, a feat that would make it the largest insurance agency on the planet (NOTE: the largest insurance agency in the US is currently valued at ~$150b). Developing the next Acrisure (a $25-30b insurance agency aggregator started in the last 15 years) isn’t too shabby, but make no mistake, Mike and the Equal Parts team have their eyes set on an objective capable of producing 10x that.

As always, every company is its own snowflake and some of these rules may or may not be relevant to every given company, but I’m hopeful this initial list of criteria provides some clarity to how we think through these type of opportunities at Equal. Building great companies is NOT meant to be easy and as the great Charlie Munger once said “Anything that is too easy, should raise your suspicions.” Building a great company with this model requires tremendous nuance and ruthless execution, making this model far less applicable and far more difficult than most think. That said, for those who can figure out how to apply these rules to develop a category monopoly, we see a tremendous opportunity for value creation.

As always, our phone lines are open for those who are ready to climb that mountain.