Welcoming Ali Afridi back to Equal Ventures
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I’m elated to announce that Ali Afridi is rejoining Equal Ventures as a Principal starting today.
This marks the third time I’ve had the pleasure of hiring Ali — the first when he was in college while I was at Lightbank and second when we started Equal (joining us even prior to closing a single dollar of capital). Ali left Equal in late 2021 for the other side of the table to pursue his entrepreneurial routes. Since then, he launched Drenchworks, a vertical SaaS company for plumbing & mechanical contractors, and built a self-sustaining VC insight aggregator called Sandhill.io.
I’ve always had tremendous admiration for Ali. When drafting our job specs for employees at Equal, I drew them up with many of the qualities that I believe define Ali. Above all else, Ali demonstrates authentic curiosity for questions plaguing our industries, as well as the passion, intelligence and grit to find the answers to those questions. Ali has a hacker’s mindset, far different than my own. He’s always testing new concepts to determine if a thesis survives with real world application. Ali brings this same type of rigor to the venture business, building tools to find new sources of information, rapidly A/B test ideas and productize workflows. Ali has always brought tremendous insight to our investments, but his added experience going from “zero to one” will make him an even more valuable asset to our firm and our companies.
Ali’s arrival also represents a tremendous shift forward in the level of support we can provide entrepreneurs. When Ali first joined our firm, we were all generalists supporting various theses across our four core verticals. As we added to the team, everyone was a generalist until we inevitably hit a breaking point — it was simply too difficult for everyone on the team to be at the level of depth necessary to have a deeply substantive perspective on each of our markets. So we verticalized our staff, assigning insurance coverage to Ali. While this verticalization was incredibly effective for our firm, it wasn’t a great fit for Ali, a natural generalist who didn’t see himself dedicating the rest of his investment career solely to insurance. After Ali departed and we recruited Adam, we evolved our team structure to “product owners” — ensuring that our industry leads were not only involved in each portfolio company and/or deal we were evaluating in their sector, but also providing them leadership over our strategy for building the best product for founders in those sectors. This was another tremendous shift forward for our firm.
Last month, we penned a piece on our latest operational evolution as a firm — Competitive Specialization in Founder Support, a strategy made possible by Ali’s arrival. One of the core values, we have long believed at Equal, is that “a firm should not be a collection of fiefdoms.” Nonetheless, this is the way that virtually every firm gravitates. With Ali rejoining, our goal is to have “three hats on every ball,” collectively and collaboratively partnering together to bring each of our unique strengths to every company in our portfolio. Founders won’t have to choose whether they want a seasoned board member, an investor who is dedicated solely to their market or an operator with tremendous experience going zero to one — they’ll get all three. As someone who will readily admit that the capabilities of our Product Owners and Ali surpass my own in virtually every possible way, I’m extremely confident this will be our greatest step forward yet in providing THE best support possible to seed stage founders in our markets.
Rarely do you have the opportunity to see someone grow and progress so much over their career as I have had the opportunity to see in Ali’s and it’s an absolute honor to have him back at Equal. Ali will be leading deals (across each of our four markets in tandem with our Product Owners), supporting portfolio companies and finding new ways to make Equal a better firm every day. If you are a founder building in any of our industries, I encourage you to reach out to him and join me in welcoming back Ali Afridi to Equal Ventures!
(P.S. — make sure to follow Ali on Twitter at @AliKAfridi)