Not Just Investors, But Product Owners
It’s no secret that we verticalize our staff at Equal Ventures. Chelsea is focused on the intersection of retail and supply chain, Simran on Climate and Adam on Insurance. While Rich and I are generalists, each of these individuals spends the vast majority of their time focused exclusively on those spaces. They are constantly meeting industry experts, researching investment themes, developing sourcing networks, evaluating deals and helping companies in those specific sectors. This is in pretty stark contrast to myself, since I spend my time fairly evenly across each of those.
While not intuitive, it’s not surprising that the tactics necessary to succeed in each of these sectors are different. The founders, industry experts and customers all have their own culture that is unique and specific to that sector. As we started to build out our industry tracks a few years ago, we didn’t anticipate these differences. When it came to our off-sites and planning, strategies were developed from the group with a top-down approach, including OKRs/goals that were consistent across each. In many ways, this was a reflection of our desire to simplify structures and create a shared set of expectations for accountability, pushing our platform forward. Along the way, we made progress, but it was clear that what might work in one area might be far less effective in others.
Simultaneously, we saw the growth of our talent. Chelsea and Simran joined us in 2020 and have evolved into full blown beasts. I consider myself pretty damn informed on the sectors that they lead, but I’m now finding them constantly explaining things to me and tapping into opportunities of knowledge I would never have seen. This was always an inevitability (after all, they are both smarter than I am), but their dedicated focus on these sectors certainly accelerated their path from competency to mastery. Along the way, we hired Adam, who brought >5 years of experience as an operator in early-stage insurtech leaders, PolicyGenius and Counterpart. While he’s only been with us for a few months, it’s already clear he has mastery level capability in the industry.
So what do you do when you realize that everyone around the table is smarter than you? Get out of the way. That’s what we’re doing at Equal. Starting in 2023, we’ve changed our planning efforts from a top-down approach to one led by our Product Owners – Chelsea, Simran and Adam. As Product Owners, they are responsible for developing and executing Equal’s strategy for dominating each of those verticals at the seed stage. This includes the themes we should be spending our time on, the expert / customer networks we need to build, how we establish and build our brand in these verticals and the internal investments we need to make to “win” the category. These plans are/will be informed heavily by Rich and myself, but this is a marked transition in enabling our employees to leverage their best judgement to propel Equal’s brand forward into each of these spaces and to do so with what they believe will resonate best with the specific culture of that sector. Every member of the Equal team provides feedback on each other’s roadmaps (challenging the themes and strategies the Product Owner proposes) to help us arrive at the best outcome. These categories are bound together by the mental models we’ve developed as a firm (of which we’ll share more in the coming year) and the values that embody our POV on the future of entrepreneurship.
As a firm founder, I can safely say the only thing I am more protective of are my own two kids. But Equal is in many ways a startup and I’m hopeful our constant exploration for a better way to do things creates a defining edge for our firm. Great firms are built on trust and I trust the judgement and insights of each of these individuals – I’m truly fortunate to learn from each of them each day. With that, I’m excited to see each of them play a greater role in determining the direction of our firm and believe we will be significantly better for it. Not only will this enable us to personalize our approaches further to each of these markets, but it will free up firm leadership bandwidth and enable Chelsea, Simran and Adam to grow in ways they otherwise would not.
As I look to 2023, this is one of the developments of our firm that I’m most excited about. I love seeing our staff grow and I’m excited to see how they grow this year and in the years to come. Please join me in congratulating Chelsea, Simran and Adam on these new roles and please reach out to them if you are a founder or investor in these spaces.
*Read this on Medium here
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