Why EQUIAM Exists

Before EQUIAM was founded, I was part of the early team at Forge, one of the first real marketplaces for private-company shares. The memory that stands for that whole era is a spreadsheet. On one large tranche alone, more than fifty employees of one of the hottest pre-IPO companies in the world (a company whose app you have probably used today if you listen to music or podcasts) were looking to sell, and I was frantically updating rows as the orders moved while colleagues ran other tranches of the same stock. In a single quarter, Forge closed well over $100 million of that company's shares for institutional buyers and family offices.

That trade was not an exception. The order flow showed what the financial press mostly missed at the time: employees of the strongest private technology companies in the world were selling their shares, steadily, year after year, because paper wealth does not pay rent.

The inversion

Private companies never used to look like that: dozens of employees rich enough to sell well over $100 million of stock in a single quarter, with a queue of institutional buyers on the other side. The reason they do now is the structural fact underneath everything EQUIAM does. Microsoft went public in 1986 at a valuation under $800 million. Every brokerage account in America could buy it, and the roughly three-thousand-fold compounding that followed happened in public, where anyone could own it. Amazon listed in 1997 at under half a billion dollars. The pattern held for decades: companies came to the exchange young, and the public market was where their value was created.

That arrangement is over. The defining companies of this era cross $100 billion in value while still private, and arrive at the exchange, when they arrive at all, fully grown. The public market still creates wealth, but it now receives these companies after their value has been created. An investor who waits for the listing hoping to be early to the next Microsoft is buying compounding that is already done, at a price that reflects it.

Who actually gets locked out

Institutions adapted fine, and the club seats are theirs. Retail investors are excluded by eligibility rules that exist for real reasons, and this page is not an argument against those rules.

The person the system fails sits in between: the individual or family office with millions to allocate, legally qualified to invest in private funds, and structurally invisible to the club. Since 2018, though, the failure has changed shape. Back then the few real doors were still under construction. Today there are a thousand doors, and the trap is that access split into two products that share a name.

Bad access is everywhere. Calling it commoditized is too kind; commodities have quality standards. It is the special purpose vehicle stacked two layers deep with fees on fees, wrapped around whatever name happened to be available and priced off the last round's say-so. In this cycle, it is a double layer of carry on a negative-gross-margin AI wrapper that the disciplined money already passed on. This is allocation by availability, and the tell is that it finds you.

Good access is as hard as it ever was, and in the defining companies it is harder, because those companies need nothing from new money. A primary allocation in a proven leader, or a clean direct secondary at a sane price in a decent share class, goes to the buyers the company and the sellers already trust: credible, fast, repeat counterparties who did the work. There is no login for good access, which is earned transaction by transaction.

The split took most of a decade. In the late 2010s the first marketplaces were building doors where none had existed. The zero-rate years of 2020 and 2021 industrialized the bad kind: syndicates, feeder funds, and stacked vehicles selling exposure to anything with a logo. The AI cycle has raised the stakes on both sides, with bigger prizes behind the wall and worse product in front of it. Discipline, the thing that separates good access from bad, never got productized, because it cannot be.

The climb

EQUIAM was founded in 2018 on a bet about how that story would end. From inside Forge, I could see the doors getting built; building them was the job. The plumbing problem was going to get solved, and once it was, the hard problem would shift from getting in to knowing what was worth getting into, and at what price. Access was on its way to becoming a product, and judgment never would be.

I was not the only one making that bet. Ziad Makkawi had spent more than twenty years building financial services businesses, and he was reading the same shift from the outside in: as private valuations grew, more and more insiders would need liquidity, and almost no institutional investor was focused on that corner of the market. He spent months diligencing the private secondary platforms in San Francisco, which is how he found his way to my desk at Forge, and then he asked me to join him in launching EQUIAM. He brought the outside view and the operating experience; I brought the inside view of the flow and the data skills to systematize it.

So we built the firm in what felt like the wrong order and turned out to be the right one. The screening systems came first: a process that reads thousands of Series B-and-beyond private companies against the same yardsticks, so that conviction starts from evidence rather than from whichever deal happened to knock. Then came the underwriting discipline, the work of pricing the strongest names the screen surfaces against what the shares are worth, whatever the last headline said. We made our first investment in 2019, and there have been more than ninety since. We started where the inefficiency was loudest, buying direct secondaries from employees, founders, and early investors, and we evolved with the market as it matured. Today we participate in primary growth rounds as routinely as we buy secondaries, and the mix follows the opportunity rather than a doctrine. Positions are concentrated in proven market leaders, typically entered 12 to 36 months before expected liquidity, through whichever door offers the better price.

EQUIAM is a lean team and a stack of systems on purpose, with the screen doing the reading so the humans can do the judging.

The why, plainly

We exist because the dividing line in modern investing is no longer public versus private. It is before the value is created versus after. The window between a company's breakout and its listing has become the most consequential stretch of its financial life, and for qualified investors there was no disciplined, systematic way to stand in it. Building one felt like an obligation: markets are supposed to connect capital to value creation, and here was a decade of value creation that the architecture of investing skipped.

Year eight

A manifesto is usually a founding document, which makes this one eight years late. In 2018 this page would have been a promise: untested systems, no investments, and a thesis about where value had moved with no evidence we could meet it there. We chose to climb first. Eight years, more than ninety investments, and several full market seasons later, the premise has been tested with real capital, through conditions nobody would have chosen for a young firm.

We are writing it now because the firm is at the strongest point in its history, and from here we can see the next peak. The first eight years were spent building the instrument: the screens, the underwriting discipline, the routes into companies, and the judgment about when to use which. That instrument is now being turned on the firm itself. The bet we made on markets in 2018, that everything except judgment becomes a product, is proving true inside investment firms too, and we are rebuilding our own around it: systems carry the work, and people make every decision that matters.

Outside the firm, we think the largest value-creation cycle private markets have ever hosted is underway, and that more of it will happen behind the IPO wall than ever before. The spark was noticing the wall, and the climb was building something that could scale it. What comes next is the part we founded the firm for.

The world is drowning in bad access and did not need one more firm selling it. We built EQUIAM so that a qualified investor's entry into private technology could be underwritten with the same rigor a public-market investor takes for granted, and so the years when great companies do their compounding are not, by default, someone else's return.

This page describes the firm and its history and is not an offer to sell securities; our funds are offered under SEC Rule 506(c) to qualified purchasers only.