In this episode of Investor Connect, Hall welcomes John Zic, Partner and Founding Team Member at EQUIAM.

Headquartered in San Francisco, California, EQUIAM is a non-traditional, systematic VC firm. They use deeply researched, proprietary, data-driven algorithms to make their investment decisions.

EQUIAM focuses on finding great firms and capturing the high returns associated with these bets, but they are equally invested in bringing world-class portfolio engineering practices to the private markets, mitigating risk, and increasing long-term performance. This focus, along with their proven execution capability, allows them to offer their investors diversified portfolios of private firms designed to outperform in even the most challenging environments.

EQUIAM is deal-structure agnostic, tapping both primary and secondary markets for private firms. They leverage a variety of private and publicly available data streams to create a book of signals that identifies private firms positioned for outperformance. Their visibility on both historical and live-price data, combined with their logic-driven models, allows them to identify and unlock the most attractive entry and exit points for their investors.

John leads several functions at EQUIAM overseeing the investment execution process, driving investment model optimization efforts, and leading core strategic initiatives. Prior to EQUIAM, John was the 6th non-founder hire at Forge. While there, he facilitated $500 Million+ of private equity secondary transactions helping to grow company revenues 300% Y-o-Y. John executed hundreds of transactions across dozens of issuers, gaining best-in-class knowledge of private secondary transaction mechanics, issuer-specific idiosyncrasies, and general private equity market dynamics.

In addition to market-related activities at Forge, John led multiple data-centric initiatives including the formulation and development of the Tech30 Index, a market-cap weighted index of the 30 largest VC-backed private companies in the U.S. based upon proprietary secondary-trading marks. 

Prior to Forge, John spent several years in management consulting with a heavy focus on data science and big data analytics.

John discusses how he sees the VC industry evolving, the biggest change he thinks we will see in the next 12 months, his investment thesis, and some of the companies he has invested in.

You can visit EQUIAM at www.equiam.com, and via LinkedIn at  www.linkedin.com/company/equiam/. 

You can contact John via email at john@equiam.com, and via LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/johnzic/. 

For a full transcript, click here.

 

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Hall T Martin is the director of Investor Connect, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to the education of investors for early-stage funding. All opinions expressed by Hall and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Investor Connect. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for the basis of investment decisions.