Entrepreneurship in the World of Investing — Announcing the 1st Emerging Managers Circle Summit
By: Rick Zullo, GP & Co-Founder at Equal Ventures
Nine years ago, I was finishing up business school at Columbia, doing just about anything I could to break into VC full-time. I was interning at two firms (Bowery Capital and Foundation Capital) and volunteered to be Co-President of the schools PE/VC Club. I went to business school for a singular purpose, to break into VC, and wanted to exhaust every last opportunity I could to make that happen. For many (even our own career services department), it seemed that my transition into VC just wasn’t going to happen.
Even amidst the doubt created by being rejected by 100+ venture firms (a conservative estimate), I had been obsessed with the idea of starting my own fund. For better or worse, I had been an outsider to the venture world. Even when I interviewed for venture roles before business school, I was told “Why would I hire University of Richmond and Deloitte, when I can hire Princeton and McKinsey?” The rejection that I experienced as an outsider led me to the hypothesis that there must be another way.
Each year, Columbia’s PE/VC club hosts an annual conference — generally just club members, a few speakers and some alums for a happy hour. When it came time for our leadership team to plan that year’s conference, we opted to go bigger. We rented out a big conference space with the intention to host hundreds of outsiders — to make it a legitimate industry event, not just a student pet project. We were incredibly ambitious in our outreach to GPs, sponsors and media, attempting to create something of far greater scale than the conference had ever been. Ultimately, we had over a thousand attendees (the conference actually made money), recruited dozens of industry leaders (including senior leadership / founders from firms like Apollo, NEA, General Atlantic, Greycroft, Canaan, Blackstone and dozens of up and coming VC firms) and had Bloomberg and Fox Business reporting live from the conference. We pulled off something that I think was pretty special and I largely attribute it to an amazing team and a topic that myself and many others are very passionate about — “Entrepreneurship in the World of Investing”.
In an industry focused on backing entrepreneurs, there is little discussion about those who are the entrepreneurs in our own industry. We focus more on the deals instead of that. For me, I was always the opposite. I loved reading about the formation of Benchmark in eBoys, watching documentaries about Don Valentine and Arthur Rock and tuning into Fred Wilson’s blog on a daily basis. These were investors on the frontier of their industries — willing to bet their careers on an investment hypothesis that had never been proven before. These were my heroes.
Four years ago, we started Equal Ventures. I was finally actualizing my dream to start a firm — one that I felt the market needed and that best utilized the skills we could bring to founders. The first year was damn near impossible. It’s no secret that I was nearly broke and that we had a baby on the way. Something that seemed obvious to us was clearly not obvious to the larger LP market and we really struggled to raise. It became very clear during this process that the LPs capable of investing in first time funds (let alone those that can be the first institutional check into those funds) are a rare breed and should be cherished deeply. Amidst this process, we started a group called the Emerging Managers Circle — a collective of emerging VC fund managers that would get together to learn, collaborate and support each other. We started in small intimate circles before scaling into large meet-up style formats. When COVID hit, we opened up the group to a virtual presence and it exploded in popularity. Over the last 3–4 years, this group has provided invaluable advice and encouragement to myself and many others. I don’t know if Equal would have survived were it not for the support of our peers within the community.
As myself and everyone else started to emerge from our COVID-cocoons, it became clear that we should bring this group together. There were so many faces that had played a meaningful role supporting me over the pandemic that I had yet to meet in person — getting them together all in one room seemed like a logical and potentially magical opportunity. We brought the idea to our friends at Silicon Valley Bank in August and they were incredibly supportive.
Next week, we will host the first ever Emerging Managers Circle Summit — an invite only summit of the industry’s leading emerging managers and the LPs backing them. This event was only distributed to EMC members and LPs in our network and sold out in less than 48 hours. Even after securing a larger location, we still have >100 highly qualified VC managers and LPs on our waitlist. We’ll be hosting over 100 emerging fund managers, a cadre of the industry’s leading firm founders (folks like Fred Wilson, Joel Cutler and Aileen Lee) and dozens of LPs representing literally hundreds of billions of dollars. Needless to say, we’ve been humbled by the interest.
Even as the market sours, our industry thirsts for innovation. The demand for original / independent approaches to venture isn’t going away and, one could argue, is more important than ever. The future of VC NEEDS to look different from the past to meet the needs of today’s founders. Like all industries, we must evolve and we believe emerging managers are at the heart of that evolution. Our firm is honored to play a role in supporting that.
While this event is fully sold out, if you have interest in supporting the group or future events, please reach out to us on Twitter at @EqualVentures or at team@equal.vc.
*Read more on Twitter here
