Tory Reiss

The Dispatch

Start with the 13,000 funds.

On Reiss's desk, figuratively, sit roughly 13,000 hedge funds. Decades of returns data, sliced and re-sliced, all in service of one stubborn question: which of these are actually worth your money? Equi's answer is to throw out 99% of them. The software surfaces the top 1%, and only then do humans start asking hard questions. That inversion - machine first, conviction second - is the whole company in miniature.

Reiss is the CEO and co-founder of Equi, a New York-based investment manager and technology platform that does something Wall Street spent decades making difficult: it hands ordinary investors the kind of alternative strategies that usually live behind a velvet rope of minimums and introductions. Equi is part RIA, part product studio. It builds its own strategies and uses data to find the best outside managers in the world, then puts both on a single platform.

If that sounds like a founder who enjoys dismantling gatekeeping, the resume agrees. Reiss is a three-time founder of venture-backed financial technology companies. He has been, at various points, an entrepreneur, an activist, and an educator - and he lists them in that order.

The crypto chapter that built the playbook

Before Equi, Reiss co-founded TrustToken (now Archblock), where he ran business development and helped launch two things that mattered. The first was TrueUSD, a dollar-backed stablecoin that became one of the fastest-growing in history and crossed a $1 billion market cap. The second was TrueFi, an on-chain lending protocol that originated more than $1.7 billion.

The unifying idea was trust as a product. TrueUSD's pitch was radical only because the rest of the category wasn't doing it: real dollars, real attestation, real redemption. In a market still nursing the bruises of Mt. Gox and Silk Road - stories Reiss has recounted at length on Anthony Pompliano's podcast - building the boring, verifiable version was the contrarian move.

"We hire missionaries, not mercenaries."

Tory Reiss, on building Equi

Before crypto, an AI that fought debt

Rewind further and you find Harvest, which Reiss co-founded as one of the first AI-driven debt management and refinancing platforms - software built to speed a consumer's journey out of debt. The throughline from Harvest to TrueUSD to Equi is not the technology. It's the target: a financial system that quietly charges people for not having access, and a founder who keeps trying to delete the charge.

His earlier career moved through the more conventional corridors - business development at Lob, enterprise work tied to Microsoft, and roots in finance. But the pattern was set early. Reiss studied Behavioral Economics and Entrepreneurship in Emerging Markets at Northwestern University, with time at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has been fascinated by how people actually behave around money - not how the models say they should - for as long as he has been working.

Run the company like you mean it

Equi's internal culture borrows a phrase from Jewish tradition: Tikkun Olam, repairing the world. Reiss wants charitable giving woven directly into the platform, so that both the company and its customers can route a slice of their returns to causes they care about. It is not a marketing footnote; it is one of six stated values, sitting alongside exceeding client expectations and pursuing truth.

His hiring philosophy is just as deliberate. He weighs "intelligence and potential more than experience," and runs a contractor-to-employee pipeline so both sides can test the fit before anyone signs anything permanent. Through downturns, his advice is unglamorous and exactly what you'd expect from someone who watched crypto winters arrive: manage costs with discipline, forecast conservatively, survive to grow.

From day one, Equi served customers globally, on the bet that the appetite for genuinely diversified, uncorrelated returns isn't confined to a zip code. Two co-founders anchor the thesis: Reiss on the build-and-go-to-market side, and Itay Vinik, the firm's CIO, who spent 15-plus years in asset management - starting at UBS, then running a market-neutral hedge fund - on the returns side.

Outside the company, Reiss is an advocate for criminal justice reform and for financial literacy in public education, a subject he has taught for more than a decade. The activism and the entrepreneurship aren't separate hobbies. They are the same instinct pointed at different walls.