In this episode, 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.\xa0 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 , and via LinkedIn at\xa0 .\xa0 You can contact John via email at , and via LinkedIn at .\xa0 __________________________________________________________________________ For more episodes from Investor Connect, please visit the site at: \xa0\xa0 Check out our other podcasts here: \xa0 For Investors check out: \xa0 For Startups check out: \xa0 For eGuides check out: \xa0 For upcoming Events, check out \xa0\xa0 For Feedback please contact info@tencapital.group\xa0\xa0\xa0 Please , share, and leave a review. Music courtesy of .