Equalls, a new advisory firm founded by six senior leaders who spent their careers on various sides of the agency-advisory-creative-client table, launches today to support leaders through real work at the intersection of breakthrough thinking and execution. The advisory is centered on the belief that human judgment and peer-to-peer counsel is what is needed inside moments of consequence—emergence, refounding, growth, transformation, or repair. The six founders have collaborated across their careers for more than two decades. Equalls turns that history into the model: senior operators, strategists, and creators working together with client partners to find the truth and help make the decisions they can’t alone.

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Equalls founders Scott Dadich, Greg Hoffman, Jon Iwata, Platon, Stacey Tank, and Michael Ventura.

Equalls founders Scott Dadich, Greg Hoffman, Jon Iwata, Platon, Stacey Tank, and Michael Ventura.

As AI collapses the cost of execution, legacy agency and consultancy models built on staffing, hours, and dependency are ripe for disruption. Equalls is grounded in what is not AI-able: judgment, discernment, taste, and instinct.

Equalls’ founding partners comprise three leaders from the agency, editorial and creative worlds and three who spent their careers as clients and operators: Michael Ventura, founder and former CEO of Sub Rosa and author of Applied Empathy and Constellation Thinking; Scott Dadich, former Editor-in-Chief of WIRED and creator and executive producer of Netflix’s Abstract: The Art of Design; Platon, the internationally renowned portrait photographer, storyteller and public speaker; Jon Iwata, who led brand and marketing at IBM across three different CEOs; Greg Hoffman, former Chief Marketing Officer of Nike and author of Emotion by Design; and Stacey Tank, former C-suite executive at GE, HEINEKEN, and The Home Depot.

“The thing a leadership team has been missing is an equal,” said Michael Ventura, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Equalls. “Everyone around a CEO has a stake in the answer. We built Equalls to be the senior thought partner who doesn’t. Our job is not to create more work. It is to unlock clarity, better decisions, and progress.”

“The people I’ve kept central in my life are the ones who told me something true when it would have been easier not to,” added Scott Dadich, Equalls Co-Founder and Managing Partner. “Five of them are in this firm. Different careers, same belief: that candor is the most valuable thing you can give someone with a consequential decision in front of them.”

The ultimate work of leadership is to close the distance between what a company says and what it does, until belief and action cohere. The firm is already engaged with a roster of world-class clients, helping leadership teams surface the deeper problems beneath the brief, make consequential choices and move from ideas to action without building a permanent consulting apparatus.

About Equalls

Equalls is a senior advisory firm built for leaders navigating moments of consequence. The founding of something new, or its refounding. When a hypergrowth company has to scale its culture, not just its operations. When a leader steps into the role, or hands it on. When enterprises come together, or break apart. When AI rewrites the rules. And yes, in crisis. These are the passages that decide what a leader and an institution will become, and they are when the usual sources of advice prove least equal to the moment. Founded by Michael Ventura, Scott Dadich, Platon, Jon Iwata, Greg Hoffman, and Stacey Tank, Equalls brings together experience from the agency, editorial, creative, and C-suite worlds to provide independent thought partnership grounded in judgment, discernment, and real-world experience. Learn more at equalls.us

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