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Team

The partners who make every investment decision, and the advisors who counsel the firm.

Partners

  1. Ziad MakkawiFounder & CEO
  2. John ZicFounding Partner
  3. Arin NazarianPartner
  4. Joe DayPartner
Ziad Makkawi

Founder & CEO

Ziad Makkawi

Ziad has founded four investment firms, among them Algebra Capital, the $1.5 billion asset manager he sold to Franklin Templeton in 2011.

He has spent three decades building and running investment firms. He ran Istithmar World's $5 billion sovereign private equity portfolio as CEO and CIO, and later QFB's $500 million private equity portfolio.

As private valuations grew, he saw that the people who built these companies would need liquidity long before their companies went public, and that almost no institutional investor was set up to provide it. He founded EQUIAM in 2018 to be that investor, and it has been his full-time work ever since. He chairs the investment committee. Outside the firm, he also serves on the investment committee of the Dubai Future District Fund.

He began his career as a systematic arbitrage trader at JP Morgan and has executed more than $10 billion of capital markets transactions.

MBA, NYU SternMaster's in International Affairs, ColumbiaB.A. in Economics, Rice

Path to EQUIAM

  1. JP Morgan
  2. Algebra Capital
  3. Istithmar World
  4. QFB
  5. EQUIAM 2018
John Zic

Founding Partner

John Zic

John was the sixth non-founder hire at Forge, where he executed more than $500 million of secondary transactions and built the first private-market index based on real-time secondary prices.

Forge was one of the first marketplaces for private-company shares and is now part of Charles Schwab. There he watched employees of the strongest private companies sell their shares year after year.

At EQUIAM he designed the firm's investment model, leads capital raising, and oversees deployment and portfolio management across its funds. He writes on private markets. He began his career in EY's consulting practice.

B.B.A., Notre Dame

Path to EQUIAM

  1. EY
  2. Forge
  3. EQUIAM 2018

Writing

Arin Nazarian

Partner

Arin Nazarian

As a Principal at Kingfish Group, Arin built relationships with more than 300 chief executives and operators, and led private equity investing that deployed more than $1 billion across co-investments and direct investments.

He began his career in healthcare investment banking at Lehman Brothers, then joined Gryphon Investors, a middle-market private equity firm.

After Kingfish, he invested in private markets for the family office of a pre-IPO Goldman Sachs partner, and joined EQUIAM in 2020. He leads investment execution: sourcing, the first read of each company, and carrying each transaction through the company's own approval and transfer process.

USC Marshall School of Business, Honors Program

Path to EQUIAM

  1. Lehman Brothers
  2. Gryphon Investors
  3. Kingfish Group
  4. Family office
  5. EQUIAM 2020
Joe Day

Partner

Joe Day

At Bridgewater Associates, Joe designed systematic equity strategies and wrote macro research for the firm's $90+ billion alpha portfolio. He then built data-driven strategies for mid- to late-stage private companies as a Partner at Tribe Capital.

Since joining EQUIAM in 2022, he has worked on the systems that screen the market and handle much of the initial research and sits on the investment committee that makes every decision. He also writes much of the firm's published research.

Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics, University of Graz (visiting scholar at Stanford)M.F.E., CornellB.S. and M.S. in Physics, UC Santa Barbara

Path to EQUIAM

  1. Bridgewater Associates
  2. Tribe Capital
  3. EQUIAM 2022

Writing

Roles and credentials as represented by each individual. Biographies summarize selected prior experience and are not exhaustive. Prior roles do not imply any current relationship with the firms named.

Advisors

  • Vijay Advani

    Vijay Advani

    Former CEO, Nuveen ($1T+ AUM); former Co-President, Franklin Templeton

    Full bioClose bio

    Vijay brings decades of leadership experience across global asset management. He currently serves as Independent Trustee and Director at Fidelity Mutual Funds and as Senior Advisor and Member of the ESG Advisory Council at Neuberger Berman. He also serves as a Director at Seviora Group.

    Previously, Vijay served as Executive Chairman and CEO of Nuveen, where he grew AUM by 14% to over $1 trillion during his tenure. Before Nuveen, he was co-President of Franklin Templeton Investments, a $1.3 trillion asset manager. He began his career as a senior executive at the World Bank (IFC), advising governments on financial markets development.

    Vijay holds an MBA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a degree from the University of Mumbai.

  • Mike Ryan

    Mike Ryan

    CEO, Bullet Point Network; former Head of Public Equity, Harvard Endowment

    Full bioClose bio

    Mike is Co-Founder and CEO of Bullet Point Network and has served as CIO of MDR Capital, his family office, since 2009. He has extensive experience as a director, committee chair, and board chair across numerous corporate and non-profit boards.

    Mike's institutional investment career spans leadership roles at the world's most prominent financial institutions. He served as Head of Public Equity and Absolute Return at the Harvard endowment, Head of Global Securities (overseeing equities, fixed income, currencies, and commodities) at Credit Suisse, and Partner and Head of Global Equity Products at Goldman Sachs.

    Mike graduated summa cum laude from Yale University with a B.A. in Economics. He was an Academic All-American in basketball.

  • Thomas Buberl

    Thomas Buberl

    CEO, AXA ($850B assets); board member, IBM

    Full bioClose bio

    Thomas is Group CEO of AXA, a global leader in the insurance industry with over $850 billion in assets, 150,000 employees, and more than $100 billion in annual premiums. He also serves as a Member of the Board at AXA XL.

    His board affiliations include IBM (US), where he serves as a Member of the Board, Bertelsmann, where he sits on the Supervisory Board, and Temasek Holdings, where he is a Member of the European Advisory Panel.

    Prior to AXA, Thomas served as CEO of Zurich Financial Services Switzerland and as a Manager at Boston Consulting Group.

  • Perry Ha

    Perry Ha

    Founder and Managing Director, Draper Athena; MIT Board of Trustees

    Full bioClose bio

    Perry is the Founder and Managing Director of Draper Athena, a venture capital firm with offices in the US and Korea. He serves as a Member of the Board of Trustees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    Perry has founded and leads multiple ventures across technology sectors. He is Co-Founder and Chairman of Juvenis Inc., an anti-aging solutions company, and Chairman of Knowledge AI, an AI-based EdTech company operating in the US and Korea. He also serves on the boards of Blockchain Labs and Impacter Pathway.

    Perry holds B.S. and M.S. degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

  • Kelly Rodriques

    Kelly Rodriques

    CEO, Forge; former CEO, PENSCO (sold to Opus Bank)

    EQUIAM Executive Committee member

    Full bioClose bio

    Kelly is Group CEO of Forge, a global private securities marketplace, and led the company through its acquisition by Charles Schwab. He also serves as Founder of Operative Capital, an early-stage financial technology investment fund, and as Operating Partner with Ignition Growth Capital.

    Previously, Kelly served as CEO of PENSCO, a financial services firm enabling investors to access non-exchange traded assets including private equity and real estate, which was sold to Opus Bank in 2017. He was a founding investor in mFoundry, a provider of mobile banking, which was acquired by Fidelity Information Systems in 2013. He also served as CEO of Blowtorch Entertainment.

  • Najam Kidwai

    Najam Kidwai

    Founding CEO of two companies that went public; original EQUIAM investor

    EQUIAM Executive Committee member

    Full bioClose bio

    Najam is a Dubai and UK-based entrepreneur, investor, and board member with a focus on disruptive technology companies across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. His investment portfolio includes Forge Global, Neurable, Transfi, Klickl Bank, EQUIAM, and Chainge Finance.

    Najam founded and chaired Crypto 1 Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition company that raised $230 million in its December 2021 IPO. He also founded C1 Fund, a digital assets fund focused on infrastructure.

    Throughout his career, Najam has served as Founding CEO of two companies that successfully completed IPOs and has held investment roles at Frontier Ventures, Edge Venture Capital, and Stanford Research International.

Advisor affiliations and titles as represented to EQUIAM; certain roles may be current or former. Advisory relationships do not constitute an endorsement of any EQUIAM fund. Biographies summarize selected experience and are not exhaustive.

Careers

We hire rarely and carefully. If you would like to be considered, send a note and your resume to info@equiam.com.

Currently raising Private Tech 30 Fund II

This page describes the firm and is not an offer to sell securities. See important disclosures