Today, I’m incredibly excited to announce the addition of my long-time friend Garrett Koehn as a Venture Partner.
I first met Garrett through my dear friend David Mort of Propel Ventures. Garrett was at CRC, one of the largest insurance wholesalers in the industry, serving as its President and eventually as its Chief Innovation Officer. While CRC was Garrett’s day job, anyone who has met him knows that startups are his true passion. Garrett’s name came up consistently across the startups I met with, so I made it my mission to get to know him better at the conferences we attended. Over time, we started bringing Garrett into a few of our own companies and our founders have loved working with him. Dan Preston, co-founder and CEO of Equal portfolio company Stand, had this to say about him, “Garrett possesses an extremely rare combination of entrepreneurial spirit and industry experience. Together with deep intellectual curiosity and a desire to help the founders he supports, he is someone I regularly lean on as our company scales. The combination with Equal is a great example where 1+1 isn’t a 2, it’s a 10”. Earlier this year, we made the decision to formalize what had already been a tight relationship and we’re ecstatic to have him as a member of the Equal family.
Garrett brings 25+ years of complex commercial insurance expertise to Equal, along with significant experience in private-equity backed companies as a leader across 4-successful private equity transactions. At CRC, Garrett was responsible for operations in excess of $10 billion in written premiums annually and strategy relating to international markets, fintech, diversity and inclusion and executive lines of insurance.
Garrett’s addition to the firm is part of a broader shift in how we staff for the needs of our founders and the market. As we mentioned in our post “Relationships Over Research”, with research being continually commoditized, we’ve realized the lasting, defining factor in creating edge for our founders is with the relationships and influence we have with customers and business partners in our core sectors. While we will always be rooted in the “Prepared Mind”, we have felt a greater need for executive talent that could further our agency with other executive decision makers. Folks like Garrett can do more than just open doors, they can actively help founders walk through them. With that, we feel he is a perfect example of the executive talent we want in Equal’s circle.
Again, please join us in welcoming Garrett to the Equal Ventures team!
