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2024-02-27T15:02:55

2024-02-27T15:02:55

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=22542

2024-02-27T15:41:46

2024-02-27T15:41:46

a-testament-to-timeless-genius-nightfall-and-other-stories-by-isaac-asimov

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A Testament to Timeless Genius: “Nightfall and Other Stories” by Isaac Asimov

<p>As someone who has always been fascinated by the intersection of technology, futurism, and human ingenuity, discovering Isaac Asimov&#8217;s &#8220;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08LN9G74S/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Nightfall and Other Stories</a>&#8221; was a revelation. Having long admired Asimov&#8217;s renowned Foundation series, I was surprised to find myself unacquainted with his short stories. This collection, however, quickly proved itself a treasure trove of prescient insights and timeless narratives which I found even more impressive as the stories were written between 1941 and 1967!</p> <p>Asimov&#8217;s ability to foresee technological and societal developments is nothing short of prophetic. In &#8220;The Last Question,&#8221; for instance, he explores the concept of a supercomputer grappling with the entropy of the universe, a narrative that resonates deeply in today&#8217;s age of advanced artificial intelligence and existential inquiries about the future of the cosmos. It&#8217;s a vivid illustration of the perennial quest for understanding in the face of the unknown.</p> <p>In “Nobody Here But –”, Asimov imagines a self-aware computer system that may very well “have a desire to more machines until there were millions of them all over the earth, fighting with human beings for control” thus setting the stage for countless stories from The Terminator to The Matrix. The topic is also incredibly timely as we seem to be nearing the ability to create Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).</p> <p>Another gem, &#8220;Franchise,&#8221; remarkably anticipates the rise of data-driven decision-making and the potential for AI in governance, a topic of immense relevance in our current era of big data and algorithmic predictions. Asimov&#8217;s foresight in envisioning a world where a single voter, selected by a computer, represents the will of the populace, speaks to the core of contemporary debates around democracy and technology.</p> <p>&#8220;Nightfall,&#8221; the titular story, is a masterclass in building tension and exploring the psychological impact of astronomical events on a civilization. Its depiction of a society unprepared for a cataclysmic event echoes current concerns about global challenges and our collective response to impending crises. The story&#8217;s exploration of fear, science, and ignorance is as pertinent today as it was when written.</p> <p>What strikes me most about Asimov&#8217;s writing is his ability to blend scientific curiosity with deep philosophical questions. His stories are not just forecasts of future technologies but are also profound inquiries into the human condition. They challenge us to consider the moral and ethical dimensions of our scientific endeavors.</p> <p>&#8220;Nightfall and Other Stories&#8221; is not just a collection of science fiction narratives; it is a compilation of visionary ideas that transcend their era. Asimov&#8217;s work is a testament to the enduring power of the human imagination, and this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the confluence of technology, society, and the future.</p>

<p>As someone who has always been fascinated by the intersection of technology, futurism, and human ingenuity, discovering Isaac &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/a-testament-to-timeless-genius-nightfall-and-other-stories-by-isaac-asimov/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;A Testament to Timeless Genius: &#8220;Nightfall and Other Stories&#8221; by Isaac Asimov&#8221;</span></a></p>

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A Testament to Timeless Genius: &#8220;Nightfall and Other Stories&#8221; by Isaac Asimov. Categories - Books. Date-Posted - 2024-02-27T15:02:55 . As someone who has always been fascinated by the intersection of technology, futurism, and human ingenuity, discovering Isaac Asimov&#8217;s &#8220;Nightfall and Other Stories&#8221; was a revelation. Having long admired Asimov&#8217;s renowned Foundation series, I was surprised to find myself unacquainted with his short stories. This collection, however, quickly proved itself a treasure trove of prescient insights and timeless narratives which I found even more impressive as the stories were written between 1941 and 1967! Asimov&#8217;s ability to foresee technological and societal developments is nothing short of prophetic. In &#8220;The Last Question,&#8221; for instance, he explores the concept of a supercomputer grappling with the entropy of the universe, a narrative that resonates deeply in today&#8217;s age of advanced artificial intelligence and existential inquiries about the future of the cosmos. It&#8217;s a vivid illustration of the perennial quest for understanding in the face of the unknown. In “Nobody Here But –”, Asimov imagines a self-aware computer system that may very well “have a desire to more machines until there were millions of them all over the earth, fighting with human beings for control” thus setting the stage for countless stories from The Terminator to The Matrix. The topic is also incredibly timely as we seem to be nearing the ability to create Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Another gem, &#8220;Franchise,&#8221; remarkably anticipates the rise of data-driven decision-making and the potential for AI in governance, a topic of immense relevance in our current era of big data and algorithmic predictions. Asimov&#8217;s foresight in envisioning a world where a single voter, selected by a computer, represents the will of the populace, speaks to the core of contemporary debates around democracy and technology. &#8220;Nightfall,&#8221; the titular story, is a masterclass in building tension and exploring the psychological impact of astronomical events on a civilization. Its depiction of a society unprepared for a cataclysmic event echoes current concerns about global challenges and our collective response to impending crises. The story&#8217;s exploration of fear, science, and ignorance is as pertinent today as it was when written. What strikes me most about Asimov&#8217;s writing is his ability to blend scientific curiosity with deep philosophical questions. His stories are not just forecasts of future technologies but are also profound inquiries into the human condition. They challenge us to consider the moral and ethical dimensions of our scientific endeavors. &#8220;Nightfall and Other Stories&#8221; is not just a collection of science fiction narratives; it is a compilation of visionary ideas that transcend their era. Asimov&#8217;s work is a testament to the enduring power of the human imagination, and this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the confluence of technology, society, and the future.

2024-02-13T15:37:13

2024-02-13T15:37:13

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=22492

2024-02-13T15:37:14

2024-02-13T15:37:14

zero-to-billions-techstars-alumni-conversation-with-alejandro-garcia-amaya

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Zero to Billions Techstars Alumni conversation with Alejandro Garcia-Amaya

<p>I was invited to share my journey with the Techstars alumni community. Here are the questions that we covered.</p> <p>You began your entrepreneurial journey in 1998, Having co-founded and been CEO of several successful ventures like Aucland, Zingy, and OLX.</p> <ul> <li>What inspired the creation of each business, and how did your vision for them evolve over time?</li> <li>Did you have to pivot from the initial idea at any time?</li> <li>Did you have a methodology/process for finding product market fit?&nbsp;</li> <li>When did you know it was the right go-to-market time?&nbsp;</li> </ul> <p>These three ventures have reached great heights! Aucland evolved into one of the largest auction sites in Europe. Zingy raked in an impressive $200 million in annual revenues within just four years. And of course, OLX, a household name worldwide, operates in a whopping 30 countries with a massive team of over 10,000 employees. Quite the journey, right?</p> <ul> <li>What specific strategies or initiatives were key drivers in the growth of those companies?</li> <li>Did you identify common practices, like strategic partnerships or customer retention initiatives, that consistently contributed to the success of each venture?</li> </ul> <ul> <li>What were the biggest challenges you faced in scaling each one of them?</li> <li>For startup founders looking to build and scale online marketplaces, what advice would you give to ensure sustainable growth and the creation of a strong network effect?</li> </ul> <p><strong>Navigating Global Markets:</strong></p> <p>Having successfully transposed and adapted these business ideas across the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Latin America,&nbsp;</p> <ul> <li>What strategies have you found most effective in navigating and thriving in diverse global markets?</li> <li>If a founder is about to enter into a new region (EU), what are some questions or pitfalls they should be aware of?&nbsp;</li> </ul> <p><strong>Transition to Venture Capital:</strong></p> <p>Fast-forwarding to your role as Founding Partner at FJ Labs, you&#8217;ve invested in over 1100 companies over time, including major players like Alibaba and Coupang. Having over 900 active investments now.&nbsp;</p> <ul> <li>What factors influenced your transition from hands-on entrepreneurship to venture capitalism?</li> <li>How does your entrepreneurial background influence your investment decisions at FJ Labs?</li> <li>What principles or philosophies guide your approach to angel investing, and how have these principles evolved over time?</li> </ul> <p><strong>Angel Investing:</strong></p> <p>Angel investors typically get involved with startups during their early stages, and you were recognized as the #1 Angel Investor globally by Forbes.</p> <ul> <li>What excites you the most about early-stage investing, and what challenges do you find most rewarding to tackle at this phase?</li> <li>What criteria do you prioritize when selecting startups to invest in, particularly in the dynamic realm of online marketplaces and network effects?</li> </ul> <p><strong>Advice to Founders:</strong></p> <ul> <li>What advice would you give to startup founders seeking angel investment, and what key factors do you believe contribute to a successful pitch?</li> </ul> <p><strong>Balancing Risk and Innovation:</strong></p> <p>Angel investing involves a level of risk.&nbsp;</p> <ul> <li>How do you strike a balance between taking calculated risks and ensuring potential rewards for both yourself and the startups you invest in?</li> </ul> <p><strong>Supporting Portfolio Startups:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Beyond financial investment, how actively do you engage with and support the startups in your portfolio? Are there specific ways you contribute to their growth and success?</li> </ul> <p><strong>Networking and Deal Sourcing:</strong></p> <p>Building a strong network is crucial in the world of angel investing and also in the world of founding and growing a startup.&nbsp;</p> <ul> <li>How do you approach networking, and what strategies do you use to source promising investment opportunities?</li> </ul> <p><strong>Learning from Investments:</strong></p> <ul> <li>With such a vast portfolio, are there particular investments or experiences that stand out as valuable learning opportunities for you as an angel investor?</li> <li>As an angel investor, what key lessons have you learned that you believe founders should pay attention to?</li> <li>Given your global investment activities, how do you stay informed about emerging trends and opportunities in various regions?</li> </ul> <p><strong>Future Predictions:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Looking ahead, what do you predict will be the next big wave or innovation in tech, and how can entrepreneurs position themselves to ride that wave?</li> </ul> <p><strong>Work-Life Integration:</strong></p> <p>You have a blog, where you talk about your professional and personal life.</p> <ul> <li>How do you manage your time effectively to ensure a balance between professional commitments and personal interests like travel, kitesurfing, and tennis?</li> <li>Do you find that these activities influence your leadership approach?</li> <li>How does this creativity translate into your leadership style, and how do you encourage a creative environment within your professional endeavors?</li> </ul> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Fabrice Grinda on organic growth and global market entry strategy with Alejandro Garcia-Amaya" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/06ogu4ZIOkw?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>If you prefer, you can <a href="https://www.techstarsalumni.org/zerotobillionspodcast/episode/1d906c2b/fabrice-grinda-founder-of-fjlabs-1-angel-investor-with-300-exits" data-type="link" data-id="https://www.techstarsalumni.org/zerotobillionspodcast/episode/1d906c2b/fabrice-grinda-founder-of-fjlabs-1-angel-investor-with-300-exits" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">listen to the podcast</a>.</p> <figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Fabrice-Grinda-on-organic-growth-and-global-market-entry-strategy-with-Alejandro-Garcia-Amaya.mp3"></audio></figure> <p>Here is a transcript of the conversation for your reading pleasure.</p> <p class="has-text-align-left"><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> Today, we are honored to have Fabrice Grinda, founding partner at FJ Labs. Joining us, Fabrice, welcome.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Thank you for having me.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> All right. So, sit back for a second. I&#8217;m going to give a little bit of a background on you and then we&#8217;ll jump right into a number of the questions. So, Fabrice is a prominent internet entrepreneur and investor with a notable track record of 300 exits and 1,100 angel investments via his role as founding partner at FJ labs, a venture capital firm.</p> <p>Before becoming an investor, Fabrice launched a number of successful companies such as OLX. The largest classifieds site in India, Brazil, Pakistan, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Portugal, and many other emerging markets operating in 50 countries and has over 3000 employees. Before OLX, Fabrice founded and led Zingy, one of the largest wireless media companies in the Americas. Fabrice initiated his entrepreneurial journey in 1998 with the creation of Aucland, which evolved into one of Europe&#8217;s largest auction sites. Beyond his ventures, Fabrice worked as a management consultant for McKinsey and company, holding a BA in economics from Princeton University. He engages in global travel, kite surfing, which looks intense, tennis and shares insights on his personal and professional life through blogging at fabricegrinda.com, that&#8217;s GRINDA.com.</p> <p>So, thank you. Welcome. I heard a number of tales from your journeys, and I can&#8217;t wait to jump into a number of them here. So, you began your entrepreneurial journey in 1998 and having co-founded and you&#8217;re a CEO on a number of successful ventures, like I mentioned in Aucland, Zingy and OLX. I&#8217;m going to cover a few anecdotes I heard from building each company and ask you for a lesson or lessons learned from each respective company. So, let&#8217;s jump into this.</p> <p>You left McKinsey to start Aucland. So, after college, you went McKinsey, worked there, and then you left McKinsey, start Aucland, the eBay for France in your early twenties.</p> <p>A couple of years or so into building Aucland, you could have sold it to eBay for, I believe the offer is 20 million, but you wanted to continue growing it. You were able to eventually raise 50-60+ million. At the end, you sold your stake to a private investor. What were some lessons learned from your experience? Cause that is fascinating, creating a company at fairly quickly already having a certain type of offer and declining it and then growing it. So, I&#8217;m sure there&#8217;s a million things that you learned, but what are some that come to mind?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Yeah. So, I knew I wanted to be a tech founder, by the way, before I even went to college or McKinsey, McKinsey was like business school, except they pay you.</p> <p>And when I created my company, you know, I actually liked creating something out of nothing, I wanted to be a founder. &nbsp;And I guess when you&#8217;re 23 at the time, I didn&#8217;t realize how much money like 20 million dollars was. When you have, you know, I had nothing, but somehow it didn&#8217;t feel meaningful in any way, shape, or form.</p> <p>I&#8217;m like, nah, I want to build something massive. I&#8217;m going to change the world. And 20 million is nothing, you know, there&#8217;ll be opportunity to make it to the future. I&#8217;ll build something much bigger and if it fails, whatever. And I didn&#8217;t realize how. Life changing and meaningful than the amount of money was.</p> <p>And so, I just missed it without even considering it, honestly. I was like, meh, nah. And in a way it was the correct choice because like maybe I raised the capital, we grew dramatically, and then later got a 300 million buyout offer from eBay. So, yes, we&#8217;ve taken the dilution. Instead of owning 75 percent of the company, I now own 40 percent of the company, but 40 percent of 300 million is 120 million.</p> <p>It&#8217;s still worth a lot more than the 75/20. The problem, that said, in hindsight, knowing how hard it is to make money and how life changing it is and the fact that it can that it can make it easier for you to fund your next startups, et cetera. Probably should have taken the 20 to begin with.</p> <p>Number two, that said. Once the 300 came, I could not convince my VCs to take the offer. So, that was another big lesson there in the sense that I&#8217;ve never raised money before, so I never negotiated a stock purchase agreement before. I didn&#8217;t have a drag along so I could not force a sale. I didn&#8217;t have all the core rights that I would have been expected to. Now, of course, this is in a time period where these rights, you know, safe dose didn&#8217;t exist, standard set of docs didn&#8217;t exist. And I&#8217;ve never done these things before. So, I didn&#8217;t know. I relied on my lawyer who&#8217;s supposed to have known better and didn&#8217;t negotiate the right, right.</p> <p>So couldn&#8217;t force a sale. Ultimately, we merged with a publicly traded company. &nbsp;Notionally for a lot more, but that stock promptly fell 99.98%. And I was telling the VC, this is not a good company. The eBay offers way better, but I can’t convince them, and many lessons learned. So, (A) 20 million is a lot of money. (B) Make sure you have like standard set of rights. Like, you know, drag rights, or at least piggyback and preemptive rights. And (C), pick a VC who&#8217;s aligned with you. Like I raised money at the highest valuation for the person who invested the most. But ultimately, it was not a normal VC. It was a very rich French person who wanted to show the world that they understood the Internet, but they weren&#8217;t in it to build successful companies. They were it to like to appear in the press to be strategic. And so, when the time came to exit, they didn&#8217;t care about exiting. I mean, the problem with someone who&#8217;s worth a hundred billion. I mean, at that time, I think it was only 20 billion is making a couple hundred million more makes no difference to them.</p> <p>And so even though it was my recommendation we should exit, they were like, “Nah, I&#8217;m not exiting”. And I couldn&#8217;t change that. And they were in control, even though it was my company. And so, a number of mistakes in terms of raising money from the wrong VC to negotiating the wrong rights to not realizing how much money 20 million dollars was at the beginning.</p> <p>So yeah, a lot of interesting life lessons. Then again, if I&#8217;d made 120 million at like 25. So, this was like two years later. When the eBay offer came, I probably would have been an arrogant and insufferable asshole. And so, you know, the eating a piece of humble pie, going from zero to hero, you know, and cover every magazine, et cetera, back to zero again.</p> <p>It was probably a very valuable life lesson that I needed to learn.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> I love that. That&#8217;s very reflective and life changing. That&#8217;s incredible. Let’s move on to the next venture. So Zingy.</p> <p>For this second venture, I heard you originally were thinking of an idea that you could bootstrap instead of finding venture capital for it. What made you think this way? And I know that eventually you also had to fundraise, but it was a very hard journey. Much harder than your first experience. Can you cover some of that?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Well, when you&#8217;re raising money in the bubbles. In the 1998, with a pedigree, I could say, top of my class at Princeton.&nbsp; McKinsey, one of the first to ever be promoted directly to associate whatever, like people were throwing money at me.</p> <p>In 2001, I knew the world would change and it was obvious that capital was going to be either impossible to raise or extraordinarily difficult. And, by the way, I thought the Internet was not going to be this big thing.</p> <p>I&#8217;m like, you know what it&#8217;s not going to be the revolution I expected it to be. It&#8217;s not gonna be big. It&#8217;s not gonna be big a way to make money. But like, I&#8217;m not doing this because I want to make money. I&#8217;m doing this because I&#8217;d like the zero to one. I&#8217;d like to be a tech founder. I would like to be mission-driven, but because my core mission right now is to be a founder, I&#8217;m willing to sacrifice the idea to just do something that I think I can build profitably with very little capital.</p> <p>And so, it was more a reflection of the macro circumstances in which we found ourselves. Which is like the winter of tech, basically. It was like, even though it was not a global recession, it was a tech recession. It was very, very deep.</p> <p>So in 2001, I&#8217;m like, okay, I&#8217;m going to do ringtones. Not because I liked ringtones. I thought it was silly. Uh, but I thought I could build it pretty cost effectively in the US, because it had been successful in Europe and in Asia. <strong></strong></p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> So, focusing on ring tones, because you&#8217;re thinking about how quickly, in terms of go to market, you can sell this and already start generating revenue or profit.</p> <p>But even before, even when you pick that idea, did you try to fundraise or you did, and it was because it was such a gloomy market that it just didn&#8217;t work out or what was the case?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Oh no, I actually try to fundraise. In in fact, the first two years were painful. I invested every last penny I had.</p> <p>I borrowed a hundred thousand of my credit card. I slept on the couch at the office. I lived in New York, $2 a day. I mean, I couldn&#8217;t even afford coffee. I could only eat ramen noodles, missed payroll 27 times. I talked to every VC, but I think by the time. I think my first sentence that happened when I&#8217;m telling them I&#8217;m doing BTC telecom, when every BTC company in the world from Webvan and Pets.com, I&#8217;d gone under. Every telco company, like MCI Worldcom had gone under, I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;d finished the sentence. They&#8217;d hung up, right? Like there was no traction. I never even got a meeting to raise capital. So, you know, I try to raise capital. It would have like saved a lot of hair loss. But it was impossible.</p> <p>And here&#8217;s the irony is once we became profitable, because so this company was built the old-fashioned way on profits. You know, we went from a million revenues in 02, to 5 in 03 to 15 in 04 to 200 in 05. But like we became profitable.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> Hold on. So, a million, when did you get a million, in how long?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Revenues in 2002.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> And how long had the company been operating for?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> I created the company July 2, 2001, and we launched a couple months after that, basically. So, we did million revenue first year.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> Wow! Okay. So, I mean, a million in a year or 12 months, or a bit less. That&#8217;s still fairly impressive!</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Yeah, it was okay.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> So even with that million, you&#8217;re trying to fundraise and, no one would pick up the phone. Wow!</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> No VCs. I know. I raised 1.4 million, but I raised 1.4 million in 5 to 10k increments. Any person I would meet, I&#8217;ve been like, ah, this amazing startup, please invest.</p> <p>And I did raise 1.4 million, but literally in 10, the biggest check I was getting was like 10k. And at some point, I ran out of friends and family that I could beg and grovel for money, which is why I ended up missing payroll so many times. And, of course, every time we tell the employees, I don&#8217;t understand what went wrong. The banks didn&#8217;t process the wiring the payroll properly this month. Of course, I didn&#8217;t have any money. That&#8217;s why it wasn&#8217;t processed. Then I would find some guy to give me 5k, then poof, make payroll!</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> That&#8217;s weird that you have to check the banks. Oh my God, that is wild. I love that. I love hearing that journey. There are so many of us founders have gone through that or are going through that.</p> <p>So, this is really helpful to be able to hear that.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> By the way, the most meaningful day of my tribunal journey, to date, is August 15, 2003. The day we became cashflow positive, not EBITDA positive, cashflow positive. We were EBITDA positive for three or four months already because then we were masters of own destiny.</p> <p>We knew we were not gonna die, and I was able to pay back, my hundred thousand credit card debt and all the things I haven&#8217;t paid, and the back payroll, et cetera. That was, to date, the most important date of my life.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> That was three years. Three years into it, something like that.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Two years and two months</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> Wow! That&#8217;s incredible. Even more than you mentioned in the fourth year, you already generating 200 million. You ended up, well, I always love asking this question to every one of our special unicorn founders in this show. Do you remember what your first sale? To whom it was and how did you get it going?</p> <p>How did you sign that first customer? I know with Zingy, you were selling to enterprise.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Eventually. Yeah. So, I wanted to sell the enterprise. I wanted to run the, the mobile content platforms for the operators. But in 2001 in the US, it was the dark ages. There was no, there was no text messaging.</p> <p>You could not text message within an operator, let alone cross operator. They didn&#8217;t think they needed this content, even though it was huge in Europe and Asia. And I was not, they were not picking up my phone calls either. So, I launched direct to consumer just as a proof of concept. I even, I had to hack my way into the delivery networks and gateways of AT&amp;T and Cingular, et cetera, to be able to deliver.</p> <p>I didn&#8217;t have a contract with them. I just like found a way to deliver through their gateways that were open. I started selling, charging via credit card. And I had the consumer to have to pick their network and phone. It was like the most archaic way of delivering it.</p> <p>And that&#8217;s why I didn&#8217;t really scale at the beginning. But the point was showing up at all the conferences, being a CTIA. Proving my staying power and I kept knocking the door of the carriers. Eventually MSN at that time was like desperate for revenues. So, I essentially bribed them. I gave them like, I don&#8217;t know 100k or 50k to become their official partner that led a press release, which lends us to some credibility, even though it didn&#8217;t really beat any revenues. Then randomly, at that time, Motorola was running the NEXcell content portal. They reach out randomly and they said, hey, we saw you video Microsoft. Do you want to discuss doing something with us?</p> <p>So, we started running it for them. And then NEXcell reached out to me and said, hey, well, you know, this is working pretty well. Can we do it directly? And then the first real contract in my life is Sprint. But I&#8217;ve been knocking the doors for two years and a half, and it&#8217;s just little by little, beat through staying power and presence of showing we&#8217;re not this flash in the pan startup. Got the contract once sprinted it, everyone else wanted to do it.</p> <p>So, then it became, you know, they&#8217;re all lemmings. So once Sprint had done it, it was successful. We got a call from everyone from AT&amp;T to singular to Verizon, and then we went from like dying for revenues to being overworked, especially with no money to build connectivity and partnerships with all these people.</p> <p>And also, they sent me like three, you know, these are ginormous companies. They sent me like 300-page RFPs. I filled in the RFPs myself. I just promised to do everything. I just said, yeah, we&#8217;ll do everything.</p> <p>Once we had signed the contract, I obviously didn&#8217;t deliver. And at 20th of what I&#8217;d promised, but it didn&#8217;t matter. That&#8217;s when they were pregnant, and they didn&#8217;t have a choice. So, I focused on the core. I&#8217;m like, you know what? I promised all these other things, but you know. Let&#8217;s do this to get going. And then we&#8217;ll work on the rest later.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> And they kept with it! And they’re like sure.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> And they kept with it and it&#8217;s too late. We were coding and we were live, and it worked extraordinarily well.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> When you were going directly to the consumer, even though it wasn&#8217;t scalable, what was the time period? And what type of numbers or what type of key indicators were you looking at that allowed you to say, you know what, like, we really are up to something. I know this, like, we got to keep knocking on these doors. We got to keep doing this. Like, what was the shining light for you there?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> It was not our numbers. Our numbers were de minimis and irrelevant. It was the fact that in Japan, this was a multibillion-dollar category and profitable.</p> <p>In Korea, it was a multibillion-dollar category and profitable. In Europe, there were multiple players that were like doing hundreds of millions of sales and profitable. And so, if humans globally are very similar, if something works somewhere, it&#8217;s going to work somewhere else because at our core, we want to communicate. We want to socialize.</p> <p>We want to have a sense of purpose. We want to be entertained. And if there&#8217;s something works somewhere, it&#8217;s going to work elsewhere. Now it&#8217;s going to be, you need to adapt that it&#8217;s not a carbon copy, but fundamentally the ideas are pretty similar. And that&#8217;s what it works so well in the rest of the world.</p> <p>I&#8217;m like, it&#8217;s going to work in the US. It&#8217;s just a question of time. And I need to be there when the market opens up with all the building blocks in place. Now, if it had taken two more years, I probably would have been dead. So fortunately, it happens before I ran out of like complete semen, cash, et cetera.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> As you were signing up these enterprises, so sprint and all the other enterprises that came along, for in terms of team and talent, was there a moment where you said, we need to bring some individuals with enterprise level experience when it came for sales, so you already had that.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> No. I couldn&#8217;t afford salespeople anyway.</p> <p>In fact, the main issue is we want, at some point I stopped being able to. After I signed the Sprint deal and we signed everyone else. I didn&#8217;t have any cash until Sprint paid us. So, we signed Sprint, we went live April 1, 2003, but they paid quarterly plus 45, the check arrived August 15, 2003, but once they went live, everyone else wanted to sign.</p> <p>But I didn&#8217;t pay my, my staff from April 1 to August 15. So, we went from 27 people to seven. Cause you know, when you stop paying people, they stop showing up for work for some reason. I don&#8217;t get that. And so, all of a sudden, we were massively overworked with everyone wanting to sign us and we had, we had no more staff.</p> <p>So, I just start coding again. I was project manager slash front end developer slash head of sales, slash you name it.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> Customer success.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Fortunately, we saw the core, the CTO and the core back up office team that could help with the integrations. But, yeah, we went live and finally we&#8217;re profitable and then we scaled.</p> <p>And I sold the company a year later for 80 million cash.</p> <p>So, this time for cash, not equity. And I sold it over half of it, but that was not the most meaningful day in my life. Because, at that point, we were on a rocket ship. We went, you know, as I said, we did five million revenues, 50-200, we&#8217;re hiring people right and left. We&#8217;re growing like crazy. I was so busy.</p> <p>My reward of myself for selling the company was like, I think I bought an Xbox, a TV and a tennis racket. And I&#8217;m like, you know, I still lived in my studio apartment for like multiple more years because I was too busy. And you know, I didn&#8217;t do this for the money anyway. Like, I thought this was an interesting thing to do and build.</p> <p>Even though I didn&#8217;t like the mission of like selling ringtones and mobile contents, and I wanted other mission.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> When it comes to lessons learned with Zingi, I love to also learn about the scaling. The fast growth, bringing in talent and making sure everyone&#8217;s in the same page. Is there a particular lesson, any particular pitfalls? Anything that you can share for founders out there right now that are going through that, right?</p> <p>They found product market fit. Now they&#8217;re, they&#8217;re growing at a pretty fast clip. And what are things that they should keep an eye on or the questions they should be asking themselves?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> The good news for us is our core team, you know, the CTO, me, et cetera, we&#8217;re like in place and it was really execution on existing contracts.</p> <p>So, it didn&#8217;t really require fundamental new senior hires. I think the only thing I would change differently is like, regardless of the talent of someone, which I since implemented as a no asshole policy. Regardless of your IQ ability to deliver whatever, if you&#8217;re not a good person to other people and you don&#8217;t treat people well, you have no place here.</p> <p>It took me too long to realize that. But other than that, not really. I made more hiring mistakes in the first company because my VCs were pushing me to hire like, you know, gray-haired, experienced people. And they were just not a cultural fit for the company. Like in tech startups is better to make the wrong decision but learn from it and pivot. Then like to try to get consensus to find the perfect answer, which never exists.</p> <p>And so, people with your culture may make a lot of sense.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> You mentioned that you ended up selling for 80 million cash offer. What are, are there some lessons there? I remember hearing you mention about investment that you brought in an investment bank and that that was actually very helpful being able to do that.</p> <p>Can you share a little bit more about that?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Yeah. So, I kept getting buyout offers. We want you to be profitable for like 8 million, 10 million, 12 million. And then I&#8217;ve said like, I&#8217;m not selling. And then this buyer came in, offered 40. And I&#8217;m like, okay, this is now I&#8217;ve realized how much money that is.</p> <p>And it is life changing. And I own half the company and I&#8217;ve been so close to zero so many times. I&#8217;m like, let&#8217;s definitely consider it. I hired a banker to run an auction and they looked at like 10 different potential buyers and they increased the price, but frankly, just because they run an auction from 40 to 80.</p> <p>So, that was helpful. That’s number one. And number two, just as importantly during the negotiation of the stock purchase agreement, et cetera, they could play the role of bad cop. Because obviously if the buyer, you want to have a good relationship with the buyer, you&#8217;re going to be there for a while. They&#8217;re going to lock you up.</p> <p>And, I stayed there for 18 months. So, you can&#8217;t be the one negotiating every little detail in your, in the sales contract. And so, the natural division of labor is the bankers, the bad cops, you&#8217;re the good cop. Meaning that I will tell them like, look, I want to work with you, but my bankers are telling me what you&#8217;re offering is on market.</p> <p>And that&#8217;d be silly to accept that. I just don&#8217;t want to look silly in front of them but give me something I can work with that seems reasonable. Obviously, I&#8217;m the one actually telling them what I wanted. So, I&#8217;m the one driving, like from the optics perspective, you appear to be the compromising nice guy and the bankers are the evil people that are negotiating so aggressively.</p> <p>And so, with that good cop bad up routine. It is very effective. So, the bankers I hired were worth every penny. They play the role of the bad cop. They doubled the price. We got what we needed, and it was amazing.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> I love that! Let&#8217;s move into the last of the three big ventures here. OLX. For this third venture, I heard you originally want to improve Craigslist, but that did not work out.</p> <p>So, you created OLX. You decided to launch it in a hundred countries in investing 50k per country. Where did that idea come from? This go-to market, of exactly what I mentioned, all these countries dedicating a slice for each one and seeing what sticks. How did that come about?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> So, I loved marketplaces. I studied market design in college. My first startup I received, which is an eBay of Europe and I helped build an eBay Latin America where marketplaces. I love the acid light nature, the winner takes most from nature, the fact they bring liquidity and otherwise opaque markets. This is what I really wanted to build.</p> <p>So had I not been resource constrained, I would not have built Zingy. I would have built something like OLX earlier. In fact, I own the OLX domain. I bought it in 98. So, it&#8217;s something I&#8217;ve been meaning to buy. And build for a long time.</p> <p>And in hindsight, I should have built a classified site to begin with, not an auction site, but perhaps people would not have funded it because they didn&#8217;t believe in the business model.</p> <p>It didn&#8217;t exist until later. So, 2005, I knew I wanted to exit Zingy was in the company I was meant to be building. And I didn&#8217;t like the people I sold it to. They were a Japanese company. We had massive cultural misunderstandings. I had the opportunity to buy Shazam for like a million dollars.</p> <p>And they said, no. I mean, there are a lot of things we could have done. And I&#8217;m like, look, they would take all my profits, send them to Japan. I&#8217;m like, look, if you want someone like me, it&#8217;s to go build a billionaire company. Let me conquer the world. If not, you don&#8217;t need me, you know. Like, it&#8217;s just to maximize profits, you know, let me go do my own thing.</p> <p>So, after 18 months, I left. And Craigslist has already started becoming a cultural phenomenon in the US in terms of liquidity, but I felt that they were doing a disservice to the community because they were not moderating the content, they had an old UX UI. So, I went to Craig and Jim and I&#8217;m like, look, I&#8217;ll do it for free.</p> <p>Like, not because I want to make money out of this, but because I think you&#8217;re not helping the humanity by having the spam, the scam, this prostitution, murderers, et cetera. Like we could do a much better job here, but you have liquidity. So, let&#8217;s take advantage of that. And they said no, so then I try to buy them out.</p> <p>They also said no. So, I&#8217;m like, okay, let&#8217;s go build it. Now to answer your question directly. Why try to launch in a hundred countries. Once someone has network effects in marketplaces is very hard to break. And there are already in common players in the U. S. like Craigslist or in France that had network effects. And it would take tens of millions in these countries and that type of capital was still not available. Now, the VCs that had not funded me in my last company, all of a sudden were throwing themselves at me because I&#8217;ve been very successful in the last company. So, now I have capital. At 10 million I go to launch. But I didn&#8217;t feel that was enough to go and like take Craigslist head on.</p> <p>And I realized there&#8217;s a certain amount of serendipity in these marketplace side businesses as to what takes off when, where, et cetera. And I knew how to build supply. When you build a marketplace, you typically started the supply because the sellers are financially motivated to be in the platform.</p> <p>You can go to them, tell them, Hey, look. I don&#8217;t currently have any buyers, but I&#8217;m free. So, it costs you nothing to be here. Why don&#8217;t you list? And people typically are willing to list. So, I did that, you know, and the core categories of like, sale goods, real estate, cars, in a hundred countries.</p> <p>Again, 50k. Back of the day, there was much less competition in general. Many countries had no in common players. I could buy a long tail marketing on Google for like a penny a cluck, especially in these secondary countries and, and all the content led SEO. Every single listing is an ad that could be indexed.</p> <p>So, we launched, not sure if I&#8217;d seen this done anywhere else, but I don&#8217;t know. I&#8217;ve seen serendipity happen in marketplaces before. And so, we launched, and it really took off in four places. So, focus on these four, close down all the other countries and then use the profits for these.</p> <p>So, it really really really worked in Portugal and Pakistan. But obviously these are not large markets. It kind of worked, reasonably well, in Brazil and India. So, we&#8217;re like, Hey, this, this is where we&#8217;re going to focus. So, we focused on these four, once we became very successful and profitable in Brazil, then we use the profits from there to then go and expand to the other countries and ultimately ended up with 350 million units a month in 30 countries with over 10,000 employees,</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> Geez! I love that you went after all these countries. Was it helpful that because of this scale, you had much you had better clarity of what the numbers indicated, right? Like, you could clearly see the difference in intake from Brazil and all that. Whereas if you might have done it in fewer countries, you might not have gotten, or was that not something.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Yeah, but you need to remember I built two auction sites before, right? Mercadolibre and Aucland. I knew that a marketplace that sells goods as liquidity, if the probability of you selling is about, if you list something, it&#8217;s about 20, 25%. That&#8217;s when you start getting liquidity. And yes, I did have an AB test across all these 100 countries.</p> <p>And some clearly emerge as dominant, but I knew what metrics I was looking for. Net new listing per capita per thousand capita in the country. I had a very, very clear KPIs or AKRs of what I was looking for. And yes, having these different countries helped compare between them. Then, as I said, I mean, we went from a hundred down to four and then re-expanded eventually once we&#8217;d won these to 30, where OLX kind of is today.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> Having marketplaces be your sweet spot, what would you say are some vital customer acquisition lessons when it comes to building a marketplace? And you mentioned a couple of things, but if we could go a little bit deeper into that.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> So, I typically started the supply because the supply is financially motivated in the platform, but you highly curate your supply.</p> <p>And the biggest single mistake founders can make in marketplaces is put an infinite supply in the platform. And the problem is if you do that is there&#8217;s no buyers for it. So, the sellers are not engaged. They&#8217;re going to churn and maybe even if there&#8217;s a buyer, they won&#8217;t reply because they haven&#8217;t been engaged before.</p> <p>And so, you find very select high quality sellers. You make sure they&#8217;re happy and motivated. Then you find demand for them. And once you have liquidity at that level, it could be national. It could be zip code. Whatever. It doesn&#8217;t matter what it is. Once you have liquidity, then you still supply a bit more than you bring them in and you keep scaling in parallel, making sure that you keep liquidity metrics, liquidity throughout and that both your sellers and buyers are happy.</p> <p>And that&#8217;s when eventually you start seeing the network effects kick in. Your businesses really have that work effects once you see your cash go down, right? So, as you scale. Many companies see their cost of acquisitions increase, then they&#8217;re not network effect businesses. They&#8217;re still driven by whatever paid acquisition channel or sales team they&#8217;re using.</p> <p>Network effect businesses really with scale, you actually start seeing lower and lower CACs. In the early days, in fact, your CACs could be very high because you&#8217;re injecting liquidity in the market. And that&#8217;s okay as long as you keep a very clear track of whether or not you have liquidity and things are working.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> That&#8217;s so interesting that you start with the supply versus the demand. My initial reaction, and I haven&#8217;t done a marketplace, but my initial reaction would be make sure that you actually have someone that actually cares to buy this thing, and versus providing something, but in your case, you&#8217;re saying make sure that the quality is there in the supply, and then that should attract the demand.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> The demand is harder to get. Let&#8217;s start there. And people have many options to buy something. And so, getting demand is expensive and unless you have something for them, you&#8217;re not going to come to you. And so, getting them is not that super useful. As I said, the reason I started supply is because it’s easy or easier, right?</p> <p>If you&#8217;re a real estate broker and tell them, Hey, let&#8217;s all your, you can put your properties here for free. They&#8217;ll do it. Or if you&#8217;ve got a car, I use car sales, whether it&#8217;s like, Hey, let&#8217;s your cars here for free. They&#8217;ll do it. Yeah. So, I start there because it&#8217;s actually something that I can get that has a certain amount of value that I can then bring to buyers to convince them to convert.</p> <p>So, I started with the easy side and then I go to the hard side.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> Was there a particular sector that you focus in on a niche first? And what was that sector and how did you decide to then pick what the next sector would be?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Yes. So many of the countries we were in didn&#8217;t have functioning payment systems and didn&#8217;t have functioning delivery mechanism. There&#8217;s no post office. And so, classifieds are more powerful in these types of countries because there&#8217;s no Amazon. There&#8217;s no eBay. There&#8217;s no alternative. And I thought long and hard what category we should focus on. And we started on used goods, especially things like electronics, cell phones, because the in used goods, people transact multiple times a month, right?</p> <p>So, I knew that the very valuable categories are cars and real estate, but cars and real estate people transact once every 5-10 years. And so, it does not lead to recurring organic traffic. But in used goods, if you&#8217;re buying and selling video games and, and cell phones and computer parts, et cetera, actually do get your users engaged.</p> <p>And so, that allowed us to have the cheapest form of traffic. And so ultimately, we had organic traffic. Most of the vast majority of our traffic is organic coming on average, two times a month to transact. And then you could use that traffic to go and win cars and real estate. And so, using the used goods, which is a high recurrence category to then fund extension and to the high value by low recurrence categories made the most sense.</p> <p>And that was a big difference with our competitors and allowed us essentially to add compete because our customer acquisition costs were lower. You know, we&#8217;d acquire someone for very cheap to come and whatever. Buy a video game for $10 or $5. And then eventually they&#8217;d buy a car.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> How did you structure, let&#8217;s say when you moved into Brazil or you moved into India and you said all focus, all energy, all resources go this direction. How did you structure the team? And they go to market within, cause they&#8217;re so different. You know, there&#8217;s so different places, but maybe they&#8217;re not like what you said, right?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> They&#8217;re not, what are the core categories in India and Brazil? They&#8217;re the same cars, real estate, cell phones, video games, computer parts, furniture. I mean. They&#8217;re the same categories everywhere that the same needs. The same concerns on preventing scams and spam and phishing and prostitution and stuff like that. And the same types of sellers, right? Like we would go to car dealers and real estate brokers or agencies to get listings.</p> <p>And so, the approach was same. And in fact, for the longest time, we didn&#8217;t have anyone on the ground in any of those countries. I centralized all operations in Buenos Aires. Because Deremate was built in Buenos Aires so when I was leaving Deremate I took over the entire team and it was the same thing.</p> <p>And so, it&#8217;s basically I followed the exact same strategy, I&#8217;ve followed my auction site in terms of starting a supply, centralizing the tech platform. And because Buenos Aires is a cosmopolitan city where you have people from all around the world, we had the customer care team for Russia, for Brazil, for India, et cetera, in Buenos Aires.</p> <p>Eventually we opened local operations, but for the longest time, we were all centralized in Buenos Aires. Same categories and obviously slightly different categories and obviously you needed the geographic make out of these countries to be different. But pretty funnily, yeah, everything&#8217;s centralized and it worked really, really well.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> That&#8217;s incredible. And I wanted to just spend a little bit of time and delve deeper into the marketplace. So, thanks for sharing that. Mostly because as when we fast forward to your role now as founding partner at FG Labs, when you&#8217;ve invested over 1,100 companies, including major players like Alibaba and Coupang, having over 900 active investments, all that, your investment thesis falls with marketplaces, right? Isn&#8217;t that still very much where you place your emphasis on, or is that one of the things and there&#8217;s more?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Well, I&#8217;m an accidental VC, first of all. So, I never set out to be a VC. It just so happens that while I was running all these companies, I was very visible to consumers and to the public.</p> <p>And so other founders said, hey, can you invest? And I thought long and hard, should I be an investor while I&#8217;m a CEO? Is it a distraction from my core mandate? But I&#8217;m like, look, if I can articulate lessons learned to others. It makes me a better founder. If I can keep my fingers on the pulse of the market, it makes me a better founder.</p> <p>So, as long as I find a way to invest very quickly. It doesn&#8217;t take more than one hour to decide if I invest or not, it&#8217;s okay. So, by 2013, when I sold OLX, I made 175 investments, like dozens of exit was doing really well. So, I&#8217;m like, you know what? With my partner Jose, who co-founded Deremate with me, I&#8217;m like, let&#8217;s create a family office, keep investing.</p> <p>And then people started saying, Hey, we would like, to invest with you. And so, we created a first VC fund in 2016. But frankly, what we do is angel investing adventure scale. We behave like angels. I still invest in a two, one-hour meetings. We decide if we invest or not, et cetera.</p> <p>Now, the reason it&#8217;s marketplaces, of course, I&#8217;ve been focusing and building and investing marketplaces for the last 25 years. And I actually even studied market design in college. And I still like network-effect businesses writ large. And so, my definition of marketplace is rather broad. It&#8217;s an intermediary between a buyer, something a seller or something, you know. So, if FinTech company that&#8217;s lending capital is usually a marketplace because there&#8217;s a provider capital and buyer capital, for instance.</p> <p>So, it&#8217;s a broad definition. And these days we&#8217;re mostly doing B2B marketplaces. It is our bread and butter. The reason it&#8217;s not the sole focus is we do have a philosophy that if you&#8217;ve done right by us, we will invest, we&#8217;ll back you no matter what you do the second time around. And at this point, we&#8217;ve backed 2000 founders, 300 exits, 150 of them we made money on.</p> <p>We lost money on the 150, then 150 we made money on. That&#8217;s about 300 founders. So, these 300 founders are coming back and they&#8217;re like, Hey, I&#8217;m building a new company, regardless of what they&#8217;re doing. They get a check from us.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> That&#8217;s an incredible amount of exits. That ratio is insane.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Oh yeah. And also, a credible amount of success, right? Making money in half the deals we&#8217;re invested in. So, we treat follow ons as though we were not an existing investor. So, we don&#8217;t always follow on and, and we often sell on the way up. We sell our winners. It&#8217;s like the anti VC strategy. When we feel something is overvalued, we&#8217;ll still have our position.</p> <p>And so, in 2021, when everyone else was going crazy. I wrote a blog post entitled <em>Welcome to the Everything Bubble, </em>where I articulated why I thought that every asset class from real estate, bonds to public equities to crypto to SPACs to NFTs to privates, especially late-stage drivers, were valued and why people should be selling as much as they could.</p> <p>Now, of course, It&#8217;s a private market, so you, we only sold a fraction of what we wanted to, but nonetheless, we had a fair amount of exits because there was a moment where other VCs would buy you in secondaries. We typically would sell 50% of our position and, and many of the companies in the up rounds.</p> <p>By the way, the founders would be happy for it. They&#8217;d ask us to sell because they didn&#8217;t wanna get too diluted by the new primary equity coming in the company. By these 300 founders. Let me give you an example. We, we backed a founder called Brett Adcock, who built a company called Vettery.</p> <p>It was a labor marketplace. We sold it to Odeco for a hundred million. We made like 8.5 extra money pretty quickly. And then he decided he was going to build an electric flying taxi company. Self-flying taxi cabby called Archer. So, we didn&#8217;t even take a call. We&#8217;re like, here&#8217;s our check. We did, we didn&#8217;t negotiate.</p> <p>And then he sold that or took it public or whatever. And then he decided to build a humanoid robot, electric company, electric robots that are humanoid to replace humans and picking packing warehouses, we also sent her a check. Also, it didn&#8217;t really take a call, you know. So, as there are now 300 of these founders running around, that is becoming an increasingly large portion of the portfolio.</p> <p>That said, we still do marketplaces because network effect businesses are beautiful, right? As I said, customer acquisition costs decrease as they scale their winner takes most their capital efficient. Yeah, once you have liquidity, it doesn&#8217;t take that much capital to win.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> What criteria do you prioritize when you&#8217;re selecting startups to invest in?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Yeah, so we have four criteria and they&#8217;re very explicit and, and we require all four to invest. So, some VCs will tell you, I only invest in extraordinary founders and that&#8217;s it. That&#8217;s the only criteria. That&#8217;s not true for us. We want extraordinary founders, which for us as a definition, but I&#8217;ll explain that.</p> <p>So, I want an amazing team, a good business meeting good time and unit economics fair deal terms. Nothing&#8217;s cheap in fact, but fair and that matches our thesis of where the world is heading and that is making the world a better place addressing either an equality of opportunity or climate change or the mental, and physical well-being crisis.</p> <p>And so let me double click and all for it. Number one team, we want people that are extraordinarily eloquent because people that are very eloquent or in a better position to raise capital to attract better teams, to do better BD, better PR, et cetera, and know how to execute. And the way I tease out at a one-hour call, if they know how to execute is the way they describe number two, which is how attractive the businesses and I care deeply about union economics.</p> <p>Now we&#8217;re mostly seed and A, that&#8217;s for bread and butter. But we will do some pre-seed. Even pre-seed, I want the founder to be able to articulate what do you think&#8217;s estimated customer acquisition costs looks like based on landing page analysis, density, keyword analysis, conversion rate from the landing page signups to what he thinks purchases will be based on what the industry averages are.</p> <p>And he better be able to articulate what the margin structure of the businesses like this is the AOV. And I expect them to give me an AOV that&#8217;s in line with the industry. And this is their margin structure. And even, and the unit economics I look for is one where you recoup your fully loaded CAC on a contribution margin two basis after six months and the three exit after 18 months.</p> <p>And who knows what your LTB to CAC is because A, you haven&#8217;t been live for more than 18 months and B, you know, ideally you have negative churn. And so ultimately, it&#8217;s 10 to 1, 20 to 1, whatever. And if you&#8217;re not there, I want to know why you&#8217;re going to get there with scale, without needing every star in the multiverse together.</p> <p>Number three, I want to deal terms to be fair. We invest in 200 companies a year. So, we know where the median valuation is. And we want to invest in something that&#8217;s fair. And so right now, you know, it&#8217;s like a seed round. You&#8217;re raising your, if you&#8217;re a marketplace where you do 150K in GMV or maybe 30K in net revenues, and you&#8217;re raising three at 10 pre, seed. Pre-seed you&#8217;re maybe raising one at five. And an A round, you&#8217;re doing five, 600K in GMV or maybe a hundred, 100-150K in net revenues or MRR and you&#8217;re raising seven at 23 pre.</p> <p>And the mean is higher. And of course, if you&#8217;re a second time founder, the valuation might be higher. But that&#8217;s where really the market is today. And the B’s right now, you&#8217;re doing two and a half million in GMV a month that were the 15 percent take rate, or maybe 500, 600, 700 K and MRR.</p> <p>And you&#8217;re raising 15 and 50 pre. If you&#8217;re way off of that. We may pass on some price and it&#8217;s okay. Well, maybe we&#8217;ll revisit the next round if you grow into the valuation. And number four, as I said, very clear theses on the future of work, the future of food, the future of real estate, the future automotive, the future of mobility.</p> <p>We want things that fall in line with that future. And we need all four criteria to be collectively true. Even an amazing team, if we don&#8217;t like the rest, we&#8217;re not doing it.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> I love that. Well, that&#8217;s thank you for that breakdown. Super clear. When it comes to, I remember you hearing and this will be, there&#8217;s 2 more questions. This is 1 of them. And I&#8217;m very appreciative of your time.</p> <p>You&#8217;ve mentioned about, we&#8217;re talking about the future. And where your investments are now, what investments get you super excited. I heard you talk about, like B2B services and improving within a number of industries, how things get done really?</p> <p>Can you a little bit into that? You&#8217;re discussing, what was it like in the manufacturing sector?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Yeah. So, I&#8217;d say B2B marketplaces are bread and butter right now. There’re five subsites but let me take a step back. So, if you look at your consumer life, you have an amazing experience. Amazon, you can order anything and get it a day or two or DoorDash for food or Uber for cars or Airbnb or booking.com. And 25 percent of your online, of your purchases has basically been digitized as a consumer. But if you&#8217;re a business. You&#8217;re still in the dark ages with like sub 1 percent penetration in most categories.</p> <p>So, imagine you want to buy petrochemicals. There&#8217;s no online catalog. There&#8217;s no connectivity to the factory to see availability. There&#8217;s no pricing. There&#8217;s no online ordering. There&#8217;s no online payments. There&#8217;s a tracking of your order. There&#8217;s no insurance, and there&#8217;s no financing, and all these could be different companies.</p> <p>And this needs to happen in every major vertical. So, number one, digitizing B2B supply chains of inputs. So, petrochemicals, that&#8217;s Knowde. Or steel, it&#8217;s like Metaloop or Reibus. Or gravel and a company called Schuttflix and made every major input category. Number two, digitizing SMBs. Anyone they love the category, you know. You started a pizzeria because you like cooking pizzas and chit chatting with your customers.</p> <p>You did not start a pizzeria because you&#8217;re like, I am excited to be building a website, entering comments with Google and Yelp, negotiating with suppliers, doing a deal with Uber and DoorDash, getting a POS, doing accounting. No! And so, we&#8217;re investing in companies that do all the grunt work. So, it kind of falls in future of work and SMB enablement for them.</p> <p>So, we&#8217;re investors in Slice for pizzerias. Cents for dry cleaners and Odeko for coffee shops. And Chipper in Columbia for bodegas, and Fresha for barbershops, you know. And some of these at real scale, I mean, Fresha, I think 70,000 barbershops, billions in payment volume going through the platform. It really transforms the lives of these SMB owners.</p> <p>Number three, moving supply chains out of China into friendly countries, especially India. So French shoring, I guess would be the core thesis in these massive tailwinds but if you&#8217;re, and this kind of falls in the second category as well, if you&#8217;re a little manufacturer in India, you own a factory, all you want to do is manufacture, what you don&#8217;t want to be doing is entering RFQs, doing prototyping, dealing with like exports and customs and invoicing and getting paid by these big companies in Europe or in the U.S. And so, we&#8217;re investors in marketplaces for apparel, for ceramics, for rugs, for linen, et cetera, that are helping these SMB manufacturers in India scale and sell to the West. But for the buyers, it&#8217;s fundamental because they&#8217;re also moving their supply chains out of China, which is a massive geopolitical risk, regardless.</p> <p>Number four. Labor marketplaces that have support all these things. So, we&#8217;re investors in WorkRise, which is a labor marketplace for oil services workers or, or people doing solar installations, et cetera. And we&#8217;re investors in Trusted Health, which is nurses. Hundreds of millions of GMV were investors in Job&amp;Talent which is a blue-collar worker marketplace in Spain and Southern Europe.</p> <p>And I guess number five. The infrastructure layer to support all these B2B marketplaces. So, we&#8217;re investors in Flexport, which is a digital freight forwarder. ShipBob, which is a last mile picking, packing, delivery platform, and many, many, many others like payment companies like Rapyd or Stripe, that are supporting these different types of companies.</p> <p>And so that&#8217;s really the bread and butter today, but we ended up doing a lot of fun, interesting things because of like the intravenous network we have, but also where curiosity takes us.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> I know that you mentioned that twice a year or so, that you meet up with a number of individuals and you talk about the future and different industries that excite you.</p> <p>Is there any content from that you do share, whether it&#8217;s through your personal blog or like a white paper on something, anything that you love that you do have and you love for people to go to and check out.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> So, yeah, so twice a year we do these conferences where I bring LPs, other VC partners and founders to talk about like the future of humanity, what doesn&#8217;t exist, should exist, how to make the world a better place.</p> <p>Nothing explicit comes out of it except that we come up with ideas and then we go look for founders to either build them or we invest in them. Okay. So, it becomes part of like things we build in or invest in the year or two to come. But yes, I do write a lot on my blog. About trends, theses, where we&#8217;re at, where we&#8217;re going, and I write about everything and anything like, macroeconomics, crypto, whatever crosses my mind, but it usually has, or there is a pretty big overlay of where we are in AI, what is the state of entrepreneurship? And so, it is a way for me to structure my thoughts and, and create a conversation with the community at large.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> We&#8217;ll make sure to, when we share our talk, to have your personal blog link there as well. Anything that we didn&#8217;t cover that you&#8217;d love to share anything else that you love to share with the community.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Yeah, I guess my one analysis is I&#8217;m profoundly optimistic about where we are. And we&#8217;re still at the very beginning of the tech revolution. We are about to digitize the entire BDB world. That&#8217;s a trend that&#8217;s going to take 10, 20 years. It&#8217;s massively deflationary. Because it&#8217;s deflationary, it&#8217;s inclusionary and will increase people&#8217;s purchasing power and quality of life where on the verge of a massive revolution in climate tech, where we&#8217;re seeing now that deflationary power of tech through batteries and solar becoming so much cheaper than everything else that we&#8217;re going to completely transition or, or energy creation to a carbon free system to the point that I suspect that the marginal cost of electricity within 30, 20, 40 years will be 0, which will actually lead another revolution. And we&#8217;re going to be able to, like, grow crops in the desert, desalinate salt water.</p> <p>I mean, there is so much positive things that are coming, uh, that if you take a step back that the trends are so optimistic and an AI itself will probably lead to a massive productivity revolution, which will transform our lives for the better. Now, we are at the top of the hype cycle, so probably in the next few years is going to disappoint and it&#8217;s going to take a while before it&#8217;s incorporated in government and in large enterprise where it will really impact productivity, but in 10 years, 20 years, it will probably completely transform the life we live for the better. And so.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> I&#8217;m super excited as well.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Yeah, I am so excited. We&#8217;re on the verge of building a better world of tomorrow, which will be a world of equality of opportunity of plenty, and it&#8217;ll be environmentally sustainable. So, I&#8217;m excited to be part of helping to build this world and you should be too.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya:</strong> Yes. Well, thank you so much for the time. Thank you, Fabrice. Enjoy the rest of your day! Thank you.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Thank you. Take care.</p> <p><strong>Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: </strong>Take care.</p>

<p>I was invited to share my journey with the Techstars alumni community. Here are the questions that we &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/zero-to-billions-techstars-alumni-conversation-with-alejandro-garcia-amaya/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Zero to Billions Techstars Alumni conversation with Alejandro Garcia-Amaya&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Zero to Billions Techstars Alumni conversation with Alejandro Garcia-Amaya. Categories - Interviews &amp; Fireside Chats. Date-Posted - 2024-02-13T15:37:13 . I was invited to share my journey with the Techstars alumni community. Here are the questions that we covered. You began your entrepreneurial journey in 1998, Having co-founded and been CEO of several successful ventures like Aucland, Zingy, and OLX. What inspired the creation of each business, and how did your vision for them evolve over time? Did you have to pivot from the initial idea at any time? Did you have a methodology/process for finding product market fit?&nbsp; When did you know it was the right go-to-market time?&nbsp; These three ventures have reached great heights! Aucland evolved into one of the largest auction sites in Europe. Zingy raked in an impressive $200 million in annual revenues within just four years. And of course, OLX, a household name worldwide, operates in a whopping 30 countries with a massive team of over 10,000 employees. Quite the journey, right? What specific strategies or initiatives were key drivers in the growth of those companies? Did you identify common practices, like strategic partnerships or customer retention initiatives, that consistently contributed to the success of each venture? What were the biggest challenges you faced in scaling each one of them? For startup founders looking to build and scale online marketplaces, what advice would you give to ensure sustainable growth and the creation of a strong network effect? Navigating Global Markets: Having successfully transposed and adapted these business ideas across the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Latin America,&nbsp; What strategies have you found most effective in navigating and thriving in diverse global markets? If a founder is about to enter into a new region (EU), what are some questions or pitfalls they should be aware of?&nbsp; Transition to Venture Capital: Fast-forwarding to your role as Founding Partner at FJ Labs, you&#8217;ve invested in over 1100 companies over time, including major players like Alibaba and Coupang. Having over 900 active investments now.&nbsp; What factors influenced your transition from hands-on entrepreneurship to venture capitalism? How does your entrepreneurial background influence your investment decisions at FJ Labs? What principles or philosophies guide your approach to angel investing, and how have these principles evolved over time? Angel Investing: Angel investors typically get involved with startups during their early stages, and you were recognized as the #1 Angel Investor globally by Forbes. What excites you the most about early-stage investing, and what challenges do you find most rewarding to tackle at this phase? What criteria do you prioritize when selecting startups to invest in, particularly in the dynamic realm of online marketplaces and network effects? Advice to Founders: What advice would you give to startup founders seeking angel investment, and what key factors do you believe contribute to a successful pitch? Balancing Risk and Innovation: Angel investing involves a level of risk.&nbsp; How do you strike a balance between taking calculated risks and ensuring potential rewards for both yourself and the startups you invest in? Supporting Portfolio Startups: Beyond financial investment, how actively do you engage with and support the startups in your portfolio? Are there specific ways you contribute to their growth and success? Networking and Deal Sourcing: Building a strong network is crucial in the world of angel investing and also in the world of founding and growing a startup.&nbsp; How do you approach networking, and what strategies do you use to source promising investment opportunities? Learning from Investments: With such a vast portfolio, are there particular investments or experiences that stand out as valuable learning opportunities for you as an angel investor? As an angel investor, what key lessons have you learned that you believe founders should pay attention to? Given your global investment activities, how do you stay informed about emerging trends and opportunities in various regions? Future Predictions: Looking ahead, what do you predict will be the next big wave or innovation in tech, and how can entrepreneurs position themselves to ride that wave? Work-Life Integration: You have a blog, where you talk about your professional and personal life. How do you manage your time effectively to ensure a balance between professional commitments and personal interests like travel, kitesurfing, and tennis? Do you find that these activities influence your leadership approach? How does this creativity translate into your leadership style, and how do you encourage a creative environment within your professional endeavors? If you prefer, you can listen to the podcast. Here is a transcript of the conversation for your reading pleasure. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: Today, we are honored to have Fabrice Grinda, founding partner at FJ Labs. Joining us, Fabrice, welcome. Fabrice Grinda: Thank you for having me. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: All right. So, sit back for a second. I&#8217;m going to give a little bit of a background on you and then we&#8217;ll jump right into a number of the questions. So, Fabrice is a prominent internet entrepreneur and investor with a notable track record of 300 exits and 1,100 angel investments via his role as founding partner at FJ labs, a venture capital firm. Before becoming an investor, Fabrice launched a number of successful companies such as OLX. The largest classifieds site in India, Brazil, Pakistan, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Portugal, and many other emerging markets operating in 50 countries and has over 3000 employees. Before OLX, Fabrice founded and led Zingy, one of the largest wireless media companies in the Americas. Fabrice initiated his entrepreneurial journey in 1998 with the creation of Aucland, which evolved into one of Europe&#8217;s largest auction sites. Beyond his ventures, Fabrice worked as a management consultant for McKinsey and company, holding a BA in economics from Princeton University. He engages in global travel, kite surfing, which looks intense, tennis and shares insights on his personal and professional life through blogging at fabricegrinda.com, that&#8217;s GRINDA.com. So, thank you. Welcome. I heard a number of tales from your journeys, and I can&#8217;t wait to jump into a number of them here. So, you began your entrepreneurial journey in 1998 and having co-founded and you&#8217;re a CEO on a number of successful ventures, like I mentioned in Aucland, Zingy and OLX. I&#8217;m going to cover a few anecdotes I heard from building each company and ask you for a lesson or lessons learned from each respective company. So, let&#8217;s jump into this. You left McKinsey to start Aucland. So, after college, you went McKinsey, worked there, and then you left McKinsey, start Aucland, the eBay for France in your early twenties. A couple of years or so into building Aucland, you could have sold it to eBay for, I believe the offer is 20 million, but you wanted to continue growing it. You were able to eventually raise 50-60+ million. At the end, you sold your stake to a private investor. What were some lessons learned from your experience? Cause that is fascinating, creating a company at fairly quickly already having a certain type of offer and declining it and then growing it. So, I&#8217;m sure there&#8217;s a million things that you learned, but what are some that come to mind? Fabrice Grinda: Yeah. So, I knew I wanted to be a tech founder, by the way, before I even went to college or McKinsey, McKinsey was like business school, except they pay you. And when I created my company, you know, I actually liked creating something out of nothing, I wanted to be a founder. &nbsp;And I guess when you&#8217;re 23 at the time, I didn&#8217;t realize how much money like 20 million dollars was. When you have, you know, I had nothing, but somehow it didn&#8217;t feel meaningful in any way, shape, or form. I&#8217;m like, nah, I want to build something massive. I&#8217;m going to change the world. And 20 million is nothing, you know, there&#8217;ll be opportunity to make it to the future. I&#8217;ll build something much bigger and if it fails, whatever. And I didn&#8217;t realize how. Life changing and meaningful than the amount of money was. And so, I just missed it without even considering it, honestly. I was like, meh, nah. And in a way it was the correct choice because like maybe I raised the capital, we grew dramatically, and then later got a 300 million buyout offer from eBay. So, yes, we&#8217;ve taken the dilution. Instead of owning 75 percent of the company, I now own 40 percent of the company, but 40 percent of 300 million is 120 million. It&#8217;s still worth a lot more than the 75/20. The problem, that said, in hindsight, knowing how hard it is to make money and how life changing it is and the fact that it can that it can make it easier for you to fund your next startups, et cetera. Probably should have taken the 20 to begin with. Number two, that said. Once the 300 came, I could not convince my VCs to take the offer. So, that was another big lesson there in the sense that I&#8217;ve never raised money before, so I never negotiated a stock purchase agreement before. I didn&#8217;t have a drag along so I could not force a sale. I didn&#8217;t have all the core rights that I would have been expected to. Now, of course, this is in a time period where these rights, you know, safe dose didn&#8217;t exist, standard set of docs didn&#8217;t exist. And I&#8217;ve never done these things before. So, I didn&#8217;t know. I relied on my lawyer who&#8217;s supposed to have known better and didn&#8217;t negotiate the right, right. So couldn&#8217;t force a sale. Ultimately, we merged with a publicly traded company. &nbsp;Notionally for a lot more, but that stock promptly fell 99.98%. And I was telling the VC, this is not a good company. The eBay offers way better, but I can’t convince them, and many lessons learned. So, (A) 20 million is a lot of money. (B) Make sure you have like standard set of rights. Like, you know, drag rights, or at least piggyback and preemptive rights. And (C), pick a VC who&#8217;s aligned with you. Like I raised money at the highest valuation for the person who invested the most. But ultimately, it was not a normal VC. It was a very rich French person who wanted to show the world that they understood the Internet, but they weren&#8217;t in it to build successful companies. They were it to like to appear in the press to be strategic. And so, when the time came to exit, they didn&#8217;t care about exiting. I mean, the problem with someone who&#8217;s worth a hundred billion. I mean, at that time, I think it was only 20 billion is making a couple hundred million more makes no difference to them. And so even though it was my recommendation we should exit, they were like, “Nah, I&#8217;m not exiting”. And I couldn&#8217;t change that. And they were in control, even though it was my company. And so, a number of mistakes in terms of raising money from the wrong VC to negotiating the wrong rights to not realizing how much money 20 million dollars was at the beginning. So yeah, a lot of interesting life lessons. Then again, if I&#8217;d made 120 million at like 25. So, this was like two years later. When the eBay offer came, I probably would have been an arrogant and insufferable asshole. And so, you know, the eating a piece of humble pie, going from zero to hero, you know, and cover every magazine, et cetera, back to zero again. It was probably a very valuable life lesson that I needed to learn. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: I love that. That&#8217;s very reflective and life changing. That&#8217;s incredible. Let’s move on to the next venture. So Zingy. For this second venture, I heard you originally were thinking of an idea that you could bootstrap instead of finding venture capital for it. What made you think this way? And I know that eventually you also had to fundraise, but it was a very hard journey. Much harder than your first experience. Can you cover some of that? Fabrice Grinda: Well, when you&#8217;re raising money in the bubbles. In the 1998, with a pedigree, I could say, top of my class at Princeton.&nbsp; McKinsey, one of the first to ever be promoted directly to associate whatever, like people were throwing money at me. In 2001, I knew the world would change and it was obvious that capital was going to be either impossible to raise or extraordinarily difficult. And, by the way, I thought the Internet was not going to be this big thing. I&#8217;m like, you know what it&#8217;s not going to be the revolution I expected it to be. It&#8217;s not gonna be big. It&#8217;s not gonna be big a way to make money. But like, I&#8217;m not doing this because I want to make money. I&#8217;m doing this because I&#8217;d like the zero to one. I&#8217;d like to be a tech founder. I would like to be mission-driven, but because my core mission right now is to be a founder, I&#8217;m willing to sacrifice the idea to just do something that I think I can build profitably with very little capital. And so, it was more a reflection of the macro circumstances in which we found ourselves. Which is like the winter of tech, basically. It was like, even though it was not a global recession, it was a tech recession. It was very, very deep. So in 2001, I&#8217;m like, okay, I&#8217;m going to do ringtones. Not because I liked ringtones. I thought it was silly. Uh, but I thought I could build it pretty cost effectively in the US, because it had been successful in Europe and in Asia. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: So, focusing on ring tones, because you&#8217;re thinking about how quickly, in terms of go to market, you can sell this and already start generating revenue or profit. But even before, even when you pick that idea, did you try to fundraise or you did, and it was because it was such a gloomy market that it just didn&#8217;t work out or what was the case? Fabrice Grinda: Oh no, I actually try to fundraise. In in fact, the first two years were painful. I invested every last penny I had. I borrowed a hundred thousand of my credit card. I slept on the couch at the office. I lived in New York, $2 a day. I mean, I couldn&#8217;t even afford coffee. I could only eat ramen noodles, missed payroll 27 times. I talked to every VC, but I think by the time. I think my first sentence that happened when I&#8217;m telling them I&#8217;m doing BTC telecom, when every BTC company in the world from Webvan and Pets.com, I&#8217;d gone under. Every telco company, like MCI Worldcom had gone under, I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;d finished the sentence. They&#8217;d hung up, right? Like there was no traction. I never even got a meeting to raise capital. So, you know, I try to raise capital. It would have like saved a lot of hair loss. But it was impossible. And here&#8217;s the irony is once we became profitable, because so this company was built the old-fashioned way on profits. You know, we went from a million revenues in 02, to 5 in 03 to 15 in 04 to 200 in 05. But like we became profitable. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: Hold on. So, a million, when did you get a million, in how long? Fabrice Grinda: Revenues in 2002. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: And how long had the company been operating for? Fabrice Grinda: I created the company July 2, 2001, and we launched a couple months after that, basically. So, we did million revenue first year. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: Wow! Okay. So, I mean, a million in a year or 12 months, or a bit less. That&#8217;s still fairly impressive! Fabrice Grinda: Yeah, it was okay. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: So even with that million, you&#8217;re trying to fundraise and, no one would pick up the phone. Wow! Fabrice Grinda: No VCs. I know. I raised 1.4 million, but I raised 1.4 million in 5 to 10k increments. Any person I would meet, I&#8217;ve been like, ah, this amazing startup, please invest. And I did raise 1.4 million, but literally in 10, the biggest check I was getting was like 10k. And at some point, I ran out of friends and family that I could beg and grovel for money, which is why I ended up missing payroll so many times. And, of course, every time we tell the employees, I don&#8217;t understand what went wrong. The banks didn&#8217;t process the wiring the payroll properly this month. Of course, I didn&#8217;t have any money. That&#8217;s why it wasn&#8217;t processed. Then I would find some guy to give me 5k, then poof, make payroll! Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: That&#8217;s weird that you have to check the banks. Oh my God, that is wild. I love that. I love hearing that journey. There are so many of us founders have gone through that or are going through that. So, this is really helpful to be able to hear that. Fabrice Grinda: By the way, the most meaningful day of my tribunal journey, to date, is August 15, 2003. The day we became cashflow positive, not EBITDA positive, cashflow positive. We were EBITDA positive for three or four months already because then we were masters of own destiny. We knew we were not gonna die, and I was able to pay back, my hundred thousand credit card debt and all the things I haven&#8217;t paid, and the back payroll, et cetera. That was, to date, the most important date of my life. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: That was three years. Three years into it, something like that. Fabrice Grinda: Two years and two months Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: Wow! That&#8217;s incredible. Even more than you mentioned in the fourth year, you already generating 200 million. You ended up, well, I always love asking this question to every one of our special unicorn founders in this show. Do you remember what your first sale? To whom it was and how did you get it going? How did you sign that first customer? I know with Zingy, you were selling to enterprise. Fabrice Grinda: Eventually. Yeah. So, I wanted to sell the enterprise. I wanted to run the, the mobile content platforms for the operators. But in 2001 in the US, it was the dark ages. There was no, there was no text messaging. You could not text message within an operator, let alone cross operator. They didn&#8217;t think they needed this content, even though it was huge in Europe and Asia. And I was not, they were not picking up my phone calls either. So, I launched direct to consumer just as a proof of concept. I even, I had to hack my way into the delivery networks and gateways of AT&amp;T and Cingular, et cetera, to be able to deliver. I didn&#8217;t have a contract with them. I just like found a way to deliver through their gateways that were open. I started selling, charging via credit card. And I had the consumer to have to pick their network and phone. It was like the most archaic way of delivering it. And that&#8217;s why I didn&#8217;t really scale at the beginning. But the point was showing up at all the conferences, being a CTIA. Proving my staying power and I kept knocking the door of the carriers. Eventually MSN at that time was like desperate for revenues. So, I essentially bribed them. I gave them like, I don&#8217;t know 100k or 50k to become their official partner that led a press release, which lends us to some credibility, even though it didn&#8217;t really beat any revenues. Then randomly, at that time, Motorola was running the NEXcell content portal. They reach out randomly and they said, hey, we saw you video Microsoft. Do you want to discuss doing something with us? So, we started running it for them. And then NEXcell reached out to me and said, hey, well, you know, this is working pretty well. Can we do it directly? And then the first real contract in my life is Sprint. But I&#8217;ve been knocking the doors for two years and a half, and it&#8217;s just little by little, beat through staying power and presence of showing we&#8217;re not this flash in the pan startup. Got the contract once sprinted it, everyone else wanted to do it. So, then it became, you know, they&#8217;re all lemmings. So once Sprint had done it, it was successful. We got a call from everyone from AT&amp;T to singular to Verizon, and then we went from like dying for revenues to being overworked, especially with no money to build connectivity and partnerships with all these people. And also, they sent me like three, you know, these are ginormous companies. They sent me like 300-page RFPs. I filled in the RFPs myself. I just promised to do everything. I just said, yeah, we&#8217;ll do everything. Once we had signed the contract, I obviously didn&#8217;t deliver. And at 20th of what I&#8217;d promised, but it didn&#8217;t matter. That&#8217;s when they were pregnant, and they didn&#8217;t have a choice. So, I focused on the core. I&#8217;m like, you know what? I promised all these other things, but you know. Let&#8217;s do this to get going. And then we&#8217;ll work on the rest later. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: And they kept with it! And they’re like sure. Fabrice Grinda: And they kept with it and it&#8217;s too late. We were coding and we were live, and it worked extraordinarily well. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: When you were going directly to the consumer, even though it wasn&#8217;t scalable, what was the time period? And what type of numbers or what type of key indicators were you looking at that allowed you to say, you know what, like, we really are up to something. I know this, like, we got to keep knocking on these doors. We got to keep doing this. Like, what was the shining light for you there? Fabrice Grinda: It was not our numbers. Our numbers were de minimis and irrelevant. It was the fact that in Japan, this was a multibillion-dollar category and profitable. In Korea, it was a multibillion-dollar category and profitable. In Europe, there were multiple players that were like doing hundreds of millions of sales and profitable. And so, if humans globally are very similar, if something works somewhere, it&#8217;s going to work somewhere else because at our core, we want to communicate. We want to socialize. We want to have a sense of purpose. We want to be entertained. And if there&#8217;s something works somewhere, it&#8217;s going to work elsewhere. Now it&#8217;s going to be, you need to adapt that it&#8217;s not a carbon copy, but fundamentally the ideas are pretty similar. And that&#8217;s what it works so well in the rest of the world. I&#8217;m like, it&#8217;s going to work in the US. It&#8217;s just a question of time. And I need to be there when the market opens up with all the building blocks in place. Now, if it had taken two more years, I probably would have been dead. So fortunately, it happens before I ran out of like complete semen, cash, et cetera. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: As you were signing up these enterprises, so sprint and all the other enterprises that came along, for in terms of team and talent, was there a moment where you said, we need to bring some individuals with enterprise level experience when it came for sales, so you already had that. Fabrice Grinda: No. I couldn&#8217;t afford salespeople anyway. In fact, the main issue is we want, at some point I stopped being able to. After I signed the Sprint deal and we signed everyone else. I didn&#8217;t have any cash until Sprint paid us. So, we signed Sprint, we went live April 1, 2003, but they paid quarterly plus 45, the check arrived August 15, 2003, but once they went live, everyone else wanted to sign. But I didn&#8217;t pay my, my staff from April 1 to August 15. So, we went from 27 people to seven. Cause you know, when you stop paying people, they stop showing up for work for some reason. I don&#8217;t get that. And so, all of a sudden, we were massively overworked with everyone wanting to sign us and we had, we had no more staff. So, I just start coding again. I was project manager slash front end developer slash head of sales, slash you name it. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: Customer success. Fabrice Grinda: Fortunately, we saw the core, the CTO and the core back up office team that could help with the integrations. But, yeah, we went live and finally we&#8217;re profitable and then we scaled. And I sold the company a year later for 80 million cash. So, this time for cash, not equity. And I sold it over half of it, but that was not the most meaningful day in my life. Because, at that point, we were on a rocket ship. We went, you know, as I said, we did five million revenues, 50-200, we&#8217;re hiring people right and left. We&#8217;re growing like crazy. I was so busy. My reward of myself for selling the company was like, I think I bought an Xbox, a TV and a tennis racket. And I&#8217;m like, you know, I still lived in my studio apartment for like multiple more years because I was too busy. And you know, I didn&#8217;t do this for the money anyway. Like, I thought this was an interesting thing to do and build. Even though I didn&#8217;t like the mission of like selling ringtones and mobile contents, and I wanted other mission.&nbsp; Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: When it comes to lessons learned with Zingi, I love to also learn about the scaling. The fast growth, bringing in talent and making sure everyone&#8217;s in the same page. Is there a particular lesson, any particular pitfalls? Anything that you can share for founders out there right now that are going through that, right? They found product market fit. Now they&#8217;re, they&#8217;re growing at a pretty fast clip. And what are things that they should keep an eye on or the questions they should be asking themselves? Fabrice Grinda: The good news for us is our core team, you know, the CTO, me, et cetera, we&#8217;re like in place and it was really execution on existing contracts. So, it didn&#8217;t really require fundamental new senior hires. I think the only thing I would change differently is like, regardless of the talent of someone, which I since implemented as a no asshole policy. Regardless of your IQ ability to deliver whatever, if you&#8217;re not a good person to other people and you don&#8217;t treat people well, you have no place here. It took me too long to realize that. But other than that, not really. I made more hiring mistakes in the first company because my VCs were pushing me to hire like, you know, gray-haired, experienced people. And they were just not a cultural fit for the company. Like in tech startups is better to make the wrong decision but learn from it and pivot. Then like to try to get consensus to find the perfect answer, which never exists. And so, people with your culture may make a lot of sense. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: You mentioned that you ended up selling for 80 million cash offer. What are, are there some lessons there? I remember hearing you mention about investment that you brought in an investment bank and that that was actually very helpful being able to do that. Can you share a little bit more about that? Fabrice Grinda: Yeah. So, I kept getting buyout offers. We want you to be profitable for like 8 million, 10 million, 12 million. And then I&#8217;ve said like, I&#8217;m not selling. And then this buyer came in, offered 40. And I&#8217;m like, okay, this is now I&#8217;ve realized how much money that is. And it is life changing. And I own half the company and I&#8217;ve been so close to zero so many times. I&#8217;m like, let&#8217;s definitely consider it. I hired a banker to run an auction and they looked at like 10 different potential buyers and they increased the price, but frankly, just because they run an auction from 40 to 80. So, that was helpful. That’s number one. And number two, just as importantly during the negotiation of the stock purchase agreement, et cetera, they could play the role of bad cop. Because obviously if the buyer, you want to have a good relationship with the buyer, you&#8217;re going to be there for a while. They&#8217;re going to lock you up. And, I stayed there for 18 months. So, you can&#8217;t be the one negotiating every little detail in your, in the sales contract. And so, the natural division of labor is the bankers, the bad cops, you&#8217;re the good cop. Meaning that I will tell them like, look, I want to work with you, but my bankers are telling me what you&#8217;re offering is on market. And that&#8217;d be silly to accept that. I just don&#8217;t want to look silly in front of them but give me something I can work with that seems reasonable. Obviously, I&#8217;m the one actually telling them what I wanted. So, I&#8217;m the one driving, like from the optics perspective, you appear to be the compromising nice guy and the bankers are the evil people that are negotiating so aggressively. And so, with that good cop bad up routine. It is very effective. So, the bankers I hired were worth every penny. They play the role of the bad cop. They doubled the price. We got what we needed, and it was amazing. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: I love that! Let&#8217;s move into the last of the three big ventures here. OLX. For this third venture, I heard you originally want to improve Craigslist, but that did not work out. So, you created OLX. You decided to launch it in a hundred countries in investing 50k per country. Where did that idea come from? This go-to market, of exactly what I mentioned, all these countries dedicating a slice for each one and seeing what sticks. How did that come about? Fabrice Grinda: So, I loved marketplaces. I studied market design in college. My first startup I received, which is an eBay of Europe and I helped build an eBay Latin America where marketplaces. I love the acid light nature, the winner takes most from nature, the fact they bring liquidity and otherwise opaque markets. This is what I really wanted to build. So had I not been resource constrained, I would not have built Zingy. I would have built something like OLX earlier. In fact, I own the OLX domain. I bought it in 98. So, it&#8217;s something I&#8217;ve been meaning to buy. And build for a long time. And in hindsight, I should have built a classified site to begin with, not an auction site, but perhaps people would not have funded it because they didn&#8217;t believe in the business model. It didn&#8217;t exist until later. So, 2005, I knew I wanted to exit Zingy was in the company I was meant to be building. And I didn&#8217;t like the people I sold it to. They were a Japanese company. We had massive cultural misunderstandings. I had the opportunity to buy Shazam for like a million dollars. And they said, no. I mean, there are a lot of things we could have done. And I&#8217;m like, look, they would take all my profits, send them to Japan. I&#8217;m like, look, if you want someone like me, it&#8217;s to go build a billionaire company. Let me conquer the world. If not, you don&#8217;t need me, you know. Like, it&#8217;s just to maximize profits, you know, let me go do my own thing. So, after 18 months, I left. And Craigslist has already started becoming a cultural phenomenon in the US in terms of liquidity, but I felt that they were doing a disservice to the community because they were not moderating the content, they had an old UX UI. So, I went to Craig and Jim and I&#8217;m like, look, I&#8217;ll do it for free. Like, not because I want to make money out of this, but because I think you&#8217;re not helping the humanity by having the spam, the scam, this prostitution, murderers, et cetera. Like we could do a much better job here, but you have liquidity. So, let&#8217;s take advantage of that. And they said no, so then I try to buy them out. They also said no. So, I&#8217;m like, okay, let&#8217;s go build it. Now to answer your question directly. Why try to launch in a hundred countries. Once someone has network effects in marketplaces is very hard to break. And there are already in common players in the U. S. like Craigslist or in France that had network effects. And it would take tens of millions in these countries and that type of capital was still not available. Now, the VCs that had not funded me in my last company, all of a sudden were throwing themselves at me because I&#8217;ve been very successful in the last company. So, now I have capital. At 10 million I go to launch. But I didn&#8217;t feel that was enough to go and like take Craigslist head on. And I realized there&#8217;s a certain amount of serendipity in these marketplace side businesses as to what takes off when, where, et cetera. And I knew how to build supply. When you build a marketplace, you typically started the supply because the sellers are financially motivated to be in the platform. You can go to them, tell them, Hey, look. I don&#8217;t currently have any buyers, but I&#8217;m free. So, it costs you nothing to be here. Why don&#8217;t you list? And people typically are willing to list. So, I did that, you know, and the core categories of like, sale goods, real estate, cars, in a hundred countries. Again, 50k. Back of the day, there was much less competition in general. Many countries had no in common players. I could buy a long tail marketing on Google for like a penny a cluck, especially in these secondary countries and, and all the content led SEO. Every single listing is an ad that could be indexed. So, we launched, not sure if I&#8217;d seen this done anywhere else, but I don&#8217;t know. I&#8217;ve seen serendipity happen in marketplaces before. And so, we launched, and it really took off in four places. So, focus on these four, close down all the other countries and then use the profits for these. So, it really really really worked in Portugal and Pakistan. But obviously these are not large markets. It kind of worked, reasonably well, in Brazil and India. So, we&#8217;re like, Hey, this, this is where we&#8217;re going to focus. So, we focused on these four, once we became very successful and profitable in Brazil, then we use the profits from there to then go and expand to the other countries and ultimately ended up with 350 million units a month in 30 countries with over 10,000 employees, Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: Geez! I love that you went after all these countries. Was it helpful that because of this scale, you had much you had better clarity of what the numbers indicated, right? Like, you could clearly see the difference in intake from Brazil and all that. Whereas if you might have done it in fewer countries, you might not have gotten, or was that not something. Fabrice Grinda: Yeah, but you need to remember I built two auction sites before, right? Mercadolibre and Aucland. I knew that a marketplace that sells goods as liquidity, if the probability of you selling is about, if you list something, it&#8217;s about 20, 25%. That&#8217;s when you start getting liquidity. And yes, I did have an AB test across all these 100 countries. And some clearly emerge as dominant, but I knew what metrics I was looking for. Net new listing per capita per thousand capita in the country. I had a very, very clear KPIs or AKRs of what I was looking for. And yes, having these different countries helped compare between them. Then, as I said, I mean, we went from a hundred down to four and then re-expanded eventually once we&#8217;d won these to 30, where OLX kind of is today. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: Having marketplaces be your sweet spot, what would you say are some vital customer acquisition lessons when it comes to building a marketplace? And you mentioned a couple of things, but if we could go a little bit deeper into that. Fabrice Grinda: So, I typically started the supply because the supply is financially motivated in the platform, but you highly curate your supply. And the biggest single mistake founders can make in marketplaces is put an infinite supply in the platform. And the problem is if you do that is there&#8217;s no buyers for it. So, the sellers are not engaged. They&#8217;re going to churn and maybe even if there&#8217;s a buyer, they won&#8217;t reply because they haven&#8217;t been engaged before. And so, you find very select high quality sellers. You make sure they&#8217;re happy and motivated. Then you find demand for them. And once you have liquidity at that level, it could be national. It could be zip code. Whatever. It doesn&#8217;t matter what it is. Once you have liquidity, then you still supply a bit more than you bring them in and you keep scaling in parallel, making sure that you keep liquidity metrics, liquidity throughout and that both your sellers and buyers are happy. And that&#8217;s when eventually you start seeing the network effects kick in. Your businesses really have that work effects once you see your cash go down, right? So, as you scale. Many companies see their cost of acquisitions increase, then they&#8217;re not network effect businesses. They&#8217;re still driven by whatever paid acquisition channel or sales team they&#8217;re using. Network effect businesses really with scale, you actually start seeing lower and lower CACs. In the early days, in fact, your CACs could be very high because you&#8217;re injecting liquidity in the market. And that&#8217;s okay as long as you keep a very clear track of whether or not you have liquidity and things are working. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: That&#8217;s so interesting that you start with the supply versus the demand. My initial reaction, and I haven&#8217;t done a marketplace, but my initial reaction would be make sure that you actually have someone that actually cares to buy this thing, and versus providing something, but in your case, you&#8217;re saying make sure that the quality is there in the supply, and then that should attract the demand. Fabrice Grinda: The demand is harder to get. Let&#8217;s start there. And people have many options to buy something. And so, getting demand is expensive and unless you have something for them, you&#8217;re not going to come to you. And so, getting them is not that super useful. As I said, the reason I started supply is because it’s easy or easier, right? If you&#8217;re a real estate broker and tell them, Hey, let&#8217;s all your, you can put your properties here for free. They&#8217;ll do it. Or if you&#8217;ve got a car, I use car sales, whether it&#8217;s like, Hey, let&#8217;s your cars here for free. They&#8217;ll do it. Yeah. So, I start there because it&#8217;s actually something that I can get that has a certain amount of value that I can then bring to buyers to convince them to convert. So, I started with the easy side and then I go to the hard side. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: Was there a particular sector that you focus in on a niche first? And what was that sector and how did you decide to then pick what the next sector would be? Fabrice Grinda: Yes. So many of the countries we were in didn&#8217;t have functioning payment systems and didn&#8217;t have functioning delivery mechanism. There&#8217;s no post office. And so, classifieds are more powerful in these types of countries because there&#8217;s no Amazon. There&#8217;s no eBay. There&#8217;s no alternative. And I thought long and hard what category we should focus on. And we started on used goods, especially things like electronics, cell phones, because the in used goods, people transact multiple times a month, right? So, I knew that the very valuable categories are cars and real estate, but cars and real estate people transact once every 5-10 years. And so, it does not lead to recurring organic traffic. But in used goods, if you&#8217;re buying and selling video games and, and cell phones and computer parts, et cetera, actually do get your users engaged. And so, that allowed us to have the cheapest form of traffic. And so ultimately, we had organic traffic. Most of the vast majority of our traffic is organic coming on average, two times a month to transact. And then you could use that traffic to go and win cars and real estate. And so, using the used goods, which is a high recurrence category to then fund extension and to the high value by low recurrence categories made the most sense. And that was a big difference with our competitors and allowed us essentially to add compete because our customer acquisition costs were lower. You know, we&#8217;d acquire someone for very cheap to come and whatever. Buy a video game for $10 or $5. And then eventually they&#8217;d buy a car. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: How did you structure, let&#8217;s say when you moved into Brazil or you moved into India and you said all focus, all energy, all resources go this direction. How did you structure the team? And they go to market within, cause they&#8217;re so different. You know, there&#8217;s so different places, but maybe they&#8217;re not like what you said, right? Fabrice Grinda: They&#8217;re not, what are the core categories in India and Brazil? They&#8217;re the same cars, real estate, cell phones, video games, computer parts, furniture. I mean. They&#8217;re the same categories everywhere that the same needs. The same concerns on preventing scams and spam and phishing and prostitution and stuff like that. And the same types of sellers, right? Like we would go to car dealers and real estate brokers or agencies to get listings. And so, the approach was same. And in fact, for the longest time, we didn&#8217;t have anyone on the ground in any of those countries. I centralized all operations in Buenos Aires. Because Deremate was built in Buenos Aires so when I was leaving Deremate I took over the entire team and it was the same thing. And so, it&#8217;s basically I followed the exact same strategy, I&#8217;ve followed my auction site in terms of starting a supply, centralizing the tech platform. And because Buenos Aires is a cosmopolitan city where you have people from all around the world, we had the customer care team for Russia, for Brazil, for India, et cetera, in Buenos Aires. Eventually we opened local operations, but for the longest time, we were all centralized in Buenos Aires. Same categories and obviously slightly different categories and obviously you needed the geographic make out of these countries to be different. But pretty funnily, yeah, everything&#8217;s centralized and it worked really, really well. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: That&#8217;s incredible. And I wanted to just spend a little bit of time and delve deeper into the marketplace. So, thanks for sharing that. Mostly because as when we fast forward to your role now as founding partner at FG Labs, when you&#8217;ve invested over 1,100 companies, including major players like Alibaba and Coupang, having over 900 active investments, all that, your investment thesis falls with marketplaces, right? Isn&#8217;t that still very much where you place your emphasis on, or is that one of the things and there&#8217;s more? Fabrice Grinda: Well, I&#8217;m an accidental VC, first of all. So, I never set out to be a VC. It just so happens that while I was running all these companies, I was very visible to consumers and to the public. And so other founders said, hey, can you invest? And I thought long and hard, should I be an investor while I&#8217;m a CEO? Is it a distraction from my core mandate? But I&#8217;m like, look, if I can articulate lessons learned to others. It makes me a better founder. If I can keep my fingers on the pulse of the market, it makes me a better founder. So, as long as I find a way to invest very quickly. It doesn&#8217;t take more than one hour to decide if I invest or not, it&#8217;s okay. So, by 2013, when I sold OLX, I made 175 investments, like dozens of exit was doing really well. So, I&#8217;m like, you know what? With my partner Jose, who co-founded Deremate with me, I&#8217;m like, let&#8217;s create a family office, keep investing. And then people started saying, Hey, we would like, to invest with you. And so, we created a first VC fund in 2016. But frankly, what we do is angel investing adventure scale. We behave like angels. I still invest in a two, one-hour meetings. We decide if we invest or not, et cetera. Now, the reason it&#8217;s marketplaces, of course, I&#8217;ve been focusing and building and investing marketplaces for the last 25 years. And I actually even studied market design in college. And I still like network-effect businesses writ large. And so, my definition of marketplace is rather broad. It&#8217;s an intermediary between a buyer, something a seller or something, you know. So, if FinTech company that&#8217;s lending capital is usually a marketplace because there&#8217;s a provider capital and buyer capital, for instance. So, it&#8217;s a broad definition. And these days we&#8217;re mostly doing B2B marketplaces. It is our bread and butter. The reason it&#8217;s not the sole focus is we do have a philosophy that if you&#8217;ve done right by us, we will invest, we&#8217;ll back you no matter what you do the second time around. And at this point, we&#8217;ve backed 2000 founders, 300 exits, 150 of them we made money on. We lost money on the 150, then 150 we made money on. That&#8217;s about 300 founders. So, these 300 founders are coming back and they&#8217;re like, Hey, I&#8217;m building a new company, regardless of what they&#8217;re doing. They get a check from us. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: That&#8217;s an incredible amount of exits. That ratio is insane. Fabrice Grinda: Oh yeah. And also, a credible amount of success, right? Making money in half the deals we&#8217;re invested in. So, we treat follow ons as though we were not an existing investor. So, we don&#8217;t always follow on and, and we often sell on the way up. We sell our winners. It&#8217;s like the anti VC strategy. When we feel something is overvalued, we&#8217;ll still have our position. And so, in 2021, when everyone else was going crazy. I wrote a blog post entitled Welcome to the Everything Bubble, where I articulated why I thought that every asset class from real estate, bonds to public equities to crypto to SPACs to NFTs to privates, especially late-stage drivers, were valued and why people should be selling as much as they could. Now, of course, It&#8217;s a private market, so you, we only sold a fraction of what we wanted to, but nonetheless, we had a fair amount of exits because there was a moment where other VCs would buy you in secondaries. We typically would sell 50% of our position and, and many of the companies in the up rounds. By the way, the founders would be happy for it. They&#8217;d ask us to sell because they didn&#8217;t wanna get too diluted by the new primary equity coming in the company. By these 300 founders. Let me give you an example. We, we backed a founder called Brett Adcock, who built a company called Vettery. It was a labor marketplace. We sold it to Odeco for a hundred million. We made like 8.5 extra money pretty quickly. And then he decided he was going to build an electric flying taxi company. Self-flying taxi cabby called Archer. So, we didn&#8217;t even take a call. We&#8217;re like, here&#8217;s our check. We did, we didn&#8217;t negotiate. And then he sold that or took it public or whatever. And then he decided to build a humanoid robot, electric company, electric robots that are humanoid to replace humans and picking packing warehouses, we also sent her a check. Also, it didn&#8217;t really take a call, you know. So, as there are now 300 of these founders running around, that is becoming an increasingly large portion of the portfolio. That said, we still do marketplaces because network effect businesses are beautiful, right? As I said, customer acquisition costs decrease as they scale their winner takes most their capital efficient. Yeah, once you have liquidity, it doesn&#8217;t take that much capital to win. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: What criteria do you prioritize when you&#8217;re selecting startups to invest in? Fabrice Grinda: Yeah, so we have four criteria and they&#8217;re very explicit and, and we require all four to invest. So, some VCs will tell you, I only invest in extraordinary founders and that&#8217;s it. That&#8217;s the only criteria. That&#8217;s not true for us. We want extraordinary founders, which for us as a definition, but I&#8217;ll explain that. So, I want an amazing team, a good business meeting good time and unit economics fair deal terms. Nothing&#8217;s cheap in fact, but fair and that matches our thesis of where the world is heading and that is making the world a better place addressing either an equality of opportunity or climate change or the mental, and physical well-being crisis. And so let me double click and all for it. Number one team, we want people that are extraordinarily eloquent because people that are very eloquent or in a better position to raise capital to attract better teams, to do better BD, better PR, et cetera, and know how to execute. And the way I tease out at a one-hour call, if they know how to execute is the way they describe number two, which is how attractive the businesses and I care deeply about union economics. Now we&#8217;re mostly seed and A, that&#8217;s for bread and butter. But we will do some pre-seed. Even pre-seed, I want the founder to be able to articulate what do you think&#8217;s estimated customer acquisition costs looks like based on landing page analysis, density, keyword analysis, conversion rate from the landing page signups to what he thinks purchases will be based on what the industry averages are. And he better be able to articulate what the margin structure of the businesses like this is the AOV. And I expect them to give me an AOV that&#8217;s in line with the industry. And this is their margin structure. And even, and the unit economics I look for is one where you recoup your fully loaded CAC on a contribution margin two basis after six months and the three exit after 18 months. And who knows what your LTB to CAC is because A, you haven&#8217;t been live for more than 18 months and B, you know, ideally you have negative churn. And so ultimately, it&#8217;s 10 to 1, 20 to 1, whatever. And if you&#8217;re not there, I want to know why you&#8217;re going to get there with scale, without needing every star in the multiverse together. Number three, I want to deal terms to be fair. We invest in 200 companies a year. So, we know where the median valuation is. And we want to invest in something that&#8217;s fair. And so right now, you know, it&#8217;s like a seed round. You&#8217;re raising your, if you&#8217;re a marketplace where you do 150K in GMV or maybe 30K in net revenues, and you&#8217;re raising three at 10 pre, seed. Pre-seed you&#8217;re maybe raising one at five. And an A round, you&#8217;re doing five, 600K in GMV or maybe a hundred, 100-150K in net revenues or MRR and you&#8217;re raising seven at 23 pre. And the mean is higher. And of course, if you&#8217;re a second time founder, the valuation might be higher. But that&#8217;s where really the market is today. And the B’s right now, you&#8217;re doing two and a half million in GMV a month that were the 15 percent take rate, or maybe 500, 600, 700 K and MRR. And you&#8217;re raising 15 and 50 pre. If you&#8217;re way off of that. We may pass on some price and it&#8217;s okay. Well, maybe we&#8217;ll revisit the next round if you grow into the valuation. And number four, as I said, very clear theses on the future of work, the future of food, the future of real estate, the future automotive, the future of mobility. We want things that fall in line with that future. And we need all four criteria to be collectively true. Even an amazing team, if we don&#8217;t like the rest, we&#8217;re not doing it. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: I love that. Well, that&#8217;s thank you for that breakdown. Super clear. When it comes to, I remember you hearing and this will be, there&#8217;s 2 more questions. This is 1 of them. And I&#8217;m very appreciative of your time. You&#8217;ve mentioned about, we&#8217;re talking about the future. And where your investments are now, what investments get you super excited. I heard you talk about, like B2B services and improving within a number of industries, how things get done really? Can you a little bit into that? You&#8217;re discussing, what was it like in the manufacturing sector? Fabrice Grinda: Yeah. So, I&#8217;d say B2B marketplaces are bread and butter right now. There’re five subsites but let me take a step back. So, if you look at your consumer life, you have an amazing experience. Amazon, you can order anything and get it a day or two or DoorDash for food or Uber for cars or Airbnb or booking.com. And 25 percent of your online, of your purchases has basically been digitized as a consumer. But if you&#8217;re a business. You&#8217;re still in the dark ages with like sub 1 percent penetration in most categories. So, imagine you want to buy petrochemicals. There&#8217;s no online catalog. There&#8217;s no connectivity to the factory to see availability. There&#8217;s no pricing. There&#8217;s no online ordering. There&#8217;s no online payments. There&#8217;s a tracking of your order. There&#8217;s no insurance, and there&#8217;s no financing, and all these could be different companies. And this needs to happen in every major vertical. So, number one, digitizing B2B supply chains of inputs. So, petrochemicals, that&#8217;s Knowde. Or steel, it&#8217;s like Metaloop or Reibus. Or gravel and a company called Schuttflix and made every major input category. Number two, digitizing SMBs. Anyone they love the category, you know. You started a pizzeria because you like cooking pizzas and chit chatting with your customers. You did not start a pizzeria because you&#8217;re like, I am excited to be building a website, entering comments with Google and Yelp, negotiating with suppliers, doing a deal with Uber and DoorDash, getting a POS, doing accounting. No! And so, we&#8217;re investing in companies that do all the grunt work. So, it kind of falls in future of work and SMB enablement for them. So, we&#8217;re investors in Slice for pizzerias. Cents for dry cleaners and Odeko for coffee shops. And Chipper in Columbia for bodegas, and Fresha for barbershops, you know. And some of these at real scale, I mean, Fresha, I think 70,000 barbershops, billions in payment volume going through the platform. It really transforms the lives of these SMB owners. Number three, moving supply chains out of China into friendly countries, especially India. So French shoring, I guess would be the core thesis in these massive tailwinds but if you&#8217;re, and this kind of falls in the second category as well, if you&#8217;re a little manufacturer in India, you own a factory, all you want to do is manufacture, what you don&#8217;t want to be doing is entering RFQs, doing prototyping, dealing with like exports and customs and invoicing and getting paid by these big companies in Europe or in the U.S. And so, we&#8217;re investors in marketplaces for apparel, for ceramics, for rugs, for linen, et cetera, that are helping these SMB manufacturers in India scale and sell to the West. But for the buyers, it&#8217;s fundamental because they&#8217;re also moving their supply chains out of China, which is a massive geopolitical risk, regardless. Number four. Labor marketplaces that have support all these things. So, we&#8217;re investors in WorkRise, which is a labor marketplace for oil services workers or, or people doing solar installations, et cetera. And we&#8217;re investors in Trusted Health, which is nurses. Hundreds of millions of GMV were investors in Job&amp;Talent which is a blue-collar worker marketplace in Spain and Southern Europe. And I guess number five. The infrastructure layer to support all these B2B marketplaces. So, we&#8217;re investors in Flexport, which is a digital freight forwarder. ShipBob, which is a last mile picking, packing, delivery platform, and many, many, many others like payment companies like Rapyd or Stripe, that are supporting these different types of companies. And so that&#8217;s really the bread and butter today, but we ended up doing a lot of fun, interesting things because of like the intravenous network we have, but also where curiosity takes us. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: I know that you mentioned that twice a year or so, that you meet up with a number of individuals and you talk about the future and different industries that excite you. Is there any content from that you do share, whether it&#8217;s through your personal blog or like a white paper on something, anything that you love that you do have and you love for people to go to and check out. Fabrice Grinda: So, yeah, so twice a year we do these conferences where I bring LPs, other VC partners and founders to talk about like the future of humanity, what doesn&#8217;t exist, should exist, how to make the world a better place. Nothing explicit comes out of it except that we come up with ideas and then we go look for founders to either build them or we invest in them. Okay. So, it becomes part of like things we build in or invest in the year or two to come. But yes, I do write a lot on my blog. About trends, theses, where we&#8217;re at, where we&#8217;re going, and I write about everything and anything like, macroeconomics, crypto, whatever crosses my mind, but it usually has, or there is a pretty big overlay of where we are in AI, what is the state of entrepreneurship? And so, it is a way for me to structure my thoughts and, and create a conversation with the community at large. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: We&#8217;ll make sure to, when we share our talk, to have your personal blog link there as well. Anything that we didn&#8217;t cover that you&#8217;d love to share anything else that you love to share with the community. Fabrice Grinda: Yeah, I guess my one analysis is I&#8217;m profoundly optimistic about where we are. And we&#8217;re still at the very beginning of the tech revolution. We are about to digitize the entire BDB world. That&#8217;s a trend that&#8217;s going to take 10, 20 years. It&#8217;s massively deflationary. Because it&#8217;s deflationary, it&#8217;s inclusionary and will increase people&#8217;s purchasing power and quality of life where on the verge of a massive revolution in climate tech, where we&#8217;re seeing now that deflationary power of tech through batteries and solar becoming so much cheaper than everything else that we&#8217;re going to completely transition or, or energy creation to a carbon free system to the point that I suspect that the marginal cost of electricity within 30, 20, 40 years will be 0, which will actually lead another revolution. And we&#8217;re going to be able to, like, grow crops in the desert, desalinate salt water. I mean, there is so much positive things that are coming, uh, that if you take a step back that the trends are so optimistic and an AI itself will probably lead to a massive productivity revolution, which will transform our lives for the better. Now, we are at the top of the hype cycle, so probably in the next few years is going to disappoint and it&#8217;s going to take a while before it&#8217;s incorporated in government and in large enterprise where it will really impact productivity, but in 10 years, 20 years, it will probably completely transform the life we live for the better. And so. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: I&#8217;m super excited as well. Fabrice Grinda: Yeah, I am so excited. We&#8217;re on the verge of building a better world of tomorrow, which will be a world of equality of opportunity of plenty, and it&#8217;ll be environmentally sustainable. So, I&#8217;m excited to be part of helping to build this world and you should be too. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: Yes. Well, thank you so much for the time. Thank you, Fabrice. Enjoy the rest of your day! Thank you. Fabrice Grinda: Thank you. Take care. Alejandro Garcia-Amaya: Take care.

2024-02-06T16:56:55

2024-02-06T16:56:55

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=22345

2024-02-06T19:09:51

2024-02-06T19:09:51

3i-member-spotlight-interview

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https://fabricegrinda.com/3i-member-spotlight-interview/

3i Member Spotlight Interview

<p>I was recently featured on the 3i Members Founder Spotlight podcast, where I spoke with Eric Rosen and shared my philosophy on angel investing, offering tips for future founders, and discussing my insights on cryptocurrency, marketplaces, and more.</p> <p><a href="https://www.3imembers.com/" target="_blank" data-type="link" data-id="https://www.3imembers.com/" rel="noreferrer noopener">3i Members</a> is a membership network for accomplished private investors who source opportunities, share expertise, and build value for one another that goes far beyond the deal.&nbsp;</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Forbes #1 Angel Investor Fabrice Grinda | Founder Spotlight" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5vofXvmQcyk?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>In addition to the above YouTube video, you can also listen to the podcast on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lessons-from-forbes-1-angel-investor-fabrice-grinda/id1721393117?i=1000641344272" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">iTunes</a> and <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/5OwDXwam7gkYYD7O8WaHT1?si=c573ac9e87f14ede&amp;nd=1&amp;dlsi=18dfb22529de4ea1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Spotify</a>.</p> <p>iTunes:</p> <iframe allow="autoplay *; encrypted-media *; fullscreen *; clipboard-write" frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;border-radius:10px;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lessons-from-forbes-1-angel-investor-fabrice-grinda/id1721393117?i=1000641344272"></iframe> <p>Spotify:</p> <iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/5OwDXwam7gkYYD7O8WaHT1?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="352" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe> <p>Here is a transcript of the conversation for your reading pleasure.</p> <p><strong>Founder Spotlight: Lessons from Forbes #1 Angel Investor Fabrice Grinda</strong></p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> Hello. My name is Eric Rosen. Welcome to the joint podcast of 3i and the Rosen Report and the Founder Series. Today, I am honored to have our guest, Fabrice Grinda. Welcome, Fabrice. How are you today?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> I&#8217;m doing very well. Thank you for having me.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> Great. We&#8217;re very excited you&#8217;re here. So, you have had an amazing career and Forbes actually called you the number one angel investor in the world. How&#8217;d you get there?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> I&#8217;d say happened since I never meant to be an angel investor. I was a tech founder and other because I was so visible from the public, other founders came and asked me to invest in them and thought long and hard whether I should do it. And I started doing it and it took life on its own.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> So, what made you a public figure? What was the company that you founded? And how did that come about?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> So back in 1998, when I was 23, I built an eBay-equivalent of Europe and I was trying to bring the internet to Europe. And I guess the story was super compelling. It was you know, top of my class at Princeton, the French guy had gone to the US; learned the internet and the ropes and it was bringing it to Europe.</p> <p>And so, you know, it was on the cover of a magazine the equivalent cover of like whatever, Forbes, fortune, et cetera, and maybe very public. And so other founders started asking if I can invest with them. And look, I really hesitated for a long time because I&#8217;m like, is it a deviation from my mandate as a founder to be investing in other people?</p> <p>Ultimately, I decided that if I can articulate lessons learned to others, it made me a better founder. And if I could meet other founders and keep my fingers on the pulse of the market would make me a better founder, especially running a multi category site, understanding what&#8217;s happening in each categories. And therefore I started doing it.</p> <p>And you know, the reason I became so prolific is I think there&#8217;s so many problems to solve in the world and I want to solve all of them. And so, you know, when you think of something like climate change, it&#8217;s not one problem, thousands of little sub problems. And I want to back all the people trying to address every one of them individually.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> So, to be the most prolific angel investor, how many angel investments have you made?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> I&#8217;ve made 1100 angel investments to date, and I see about 300 deals a week.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> 300 deals a week. Wow!</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Yeah. And these days I&#8217;m making 200-300 investments per year.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> Geez, that&#8217;s amazing. And what are the most successful angel investments you&#8217;ve made?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Well, it was an early investor in Alibaba. I was at the beginning of Delivery Hero, which is like a door dash of Europe and Southeast Asia. I invested in Uber, Airbnb, Flexport, Slice. I mean you name it. My specialty is marketplaces and network-effect businesses. And these days they&#8217;re less well known because they&#8217;re mostly B2B. But in the early days that were all the consumer facing ones I mentioned.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> And is it always angel round? Is it, is it the seed? Is it the A, B, C? Where do you generally come in on those?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> I’m stage agnostic. But most of what I do, my bread and butter, I&#8217;d say it would be a seed and A. I rarely do pre seed because I don&#8217;t invest in competitors, and I don&#8217;t want to be locking me out of a category before I&#8217;ve seen all the different players and see what the emergent winner is.</p> <p>And I sometimes do B onwards because sometimes it takes that long for the winning player to emerge, but seed and A is really by bread and butter, but it&#8217;s about 70% seed and A, 20% B onwards, 10% pre seed. And then we&#8217;re also 55% U.S. and Canada, 25% Western Europe, and 10% Brazil and India, and 10% rest of the world, and really rest of the world, like India, Philippines Chile, Nigeria, whatever.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> Wow. So, to look at 300 deals a week, make 11 or 1200 investments in a year. How big is your team at FJ Labs?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> That&#8217;s 200 to 300 investments a year. The investment team is 11 people. The full team now is 33 people, given the huge back office. And so it&#8217;s kind of turned from what was really an Angel investing family office time approach to a venture capital firm, except we behave like angel investors.</p> <p>I said, what we do is angel investing at venture scale, because we take two one-hour meetings in the course of a week and we decide if we invest or not. So, we don&#8217;t take board seats. We don&#8217;t lead, we don&#8217;t price. We&#8217;re really the founder, former founders or founder-friendly, decide quickly with full transparency and we&#8217;re there to help you.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> Wow! That&#8217;s pretty quick turnaround. So, if you&#8217;re turning around that quickly, you must have a formula with things that are must haves or can&#8217;t haves. So, what are the three or four main traits that you need to make an investment? And what are the few things that are a non-starter, if they do this or don&#8217;t do this, that they&#8217;re out?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> So, I want four things and they are all required. So, one, I need to like the founders. Two, I need to like the business. Three, I need like the deal terms and four, I need to like the thesis and the problem that they&#8217;re solving. And what we&#8217;re looking for for each of them is thus follows. So, I want founders who are both visionary, extraordinary, eloquent spokespeople, but can also execute.</p> <p>So, the event diagram intersection of people that are extremely eloquent and visionary, but can execute is actually rather small. But you need both because someone who can. It&#8217;s very eloquent, is going to be able to raise money at a higher valuation, attract better people, is going to get more PR, better BD deals.</p> <p>But if you don&#8217;t have the execution skills, maybe you end up with, whatever, Theranos. And if you have someone who knows how to execute, but can&#8217;t speak, they&#8217;re not going to be able to raise, and they might build a small, profitable business. Number two. And I care about all four. I care about the time and the unit economics and even pre-launch, even someone pre seed needs to be able to articulate what the estimated unit economics will look like based on having done landing page analysis, customer acquisition costs estimates based on the CPCs and the conversion rate to purchase.</p> <p>They need to know the average order value of the industry. And the contribution margin and they better be expecting to be in line with the industry averages and people don&#8217;t know that, you know, to me, speaks to the fact they probably can&#8217;t execute. Number three, the deal terms need to be fair, not nothing in tech is cheap. But is it fair, in light of the round, the traction team and the option that they&#8217;re, that they&#8217;re doing, and we see so many deals, we really know what the median C round, A round, B round, et cetera, is that. And number four, you know, we were purpose driven. First of all, we want to solve, inequality of opportunity, climate change, and the mental and physical well-being crisis.</p> <p>And in each of these, we have clear theses on the future of work, the future of food, the future of real estate. Are you in line with this thesis? And are you solving a problem we care about? And we want all four to be true. And then based on pattern recognition, because of course, at this point, we&#8217;ve invested in 1,100 companies. We&#8217;ve seen so many companies, and we invested about 1% of the companies we see were able to make very quick decisions.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> Wow. And so, you told us the four traits that are kind of the must haves. If one or two things that if you see you&#8217;re like, I&#8217;m out right off the bat, obviously if you don&#8217;t like the founder, but I&#8217;m saying apart from that, are there terms or things that are just nonstarters for you?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> They&#8217;re kind of all related to this, right? Like, so if you don&#8217;t know your business model maybe some of these companies. So, look, the five-year survival rate of a startup is about 5%. But if you at launch don&#8217;t know your business model, probably it&#8217;s 0.1%. And so, we&#8217;re already talking like a 500 S.</p> <p>Yeah. And there are great businesses that started with no business model. Google and Facebook are examples of that, but it wouldn&#8217;t be the type of things I do because I, not trying to play Moneyball, I&#8217;m playing Powerball. I won most of my companies to make money. And by the way, the greatest to be the most prolific angel investor of the world is very easy, to be the most successful angel in the world, meaning you actually have exits and we&#8217;ve had 300 exits. We&#8217;ve been compounding at 39% IR for 24-25 years. That&#8217;s way harder to be the best you need to have exits. And we&#8217;ve made money in half the investments we&#8217;ve made.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> Wow.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp; Frankly, because of these four heuristics. So, we really want you to have a business model.</p> <p>We really want you to focus on your burn and your unit economics, which no one cared about in 2021. But finally, in 2023, as become normal. And we care about valuation. There&#8217;s some VCs who are like, well, the company&#8217;s gonna win the category. It doesn&#8217;t matter what price you get it; matters that you get it.</p> <p>And we don&#8217;t feel that&#8217;s true. If you get in at five and you sell for 50, you, you&#8217;re gonna do okay. But if you enter at 50 and, and you sell for 50, you, you get your money back. And, and if they sell for less than that, you don&#8217;t. And the reason we&#8217;ve made money in over half of our investments because we&#8217;ve been disciplined on price.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> Well, I can tell you this, I am definitely not going to be confused with the most prolific angel investor of all time. I&#8217;ve made about 30 out of my PA and I can tell you that I have lost money on a lot more than half of my investments. So, it sounds like I should be giving you my money. So, I want to ask this question in two ways. One, what are the biggest investments mistakes that you see others make? And two, what are the biggest mistakes that startups, you know, the founders make?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Well, different types of mistakes. I think what I didn&#8217;t like as a founder, when I was talking to investors, read large, frankly, is just the lack of transparency, people not getting back to me.</p> <p>People not respecting my time, showing up late on calls. And frankly I do a call with a VC or an angel. I would think it would go very well. And then they&#8217;d go straight instead of ghosting me, just actually give me, if you don&#8217;t want to invest, that&#8217;s fine. Just tell me why not, what I would need to change if I need to change it and do that.</p> <p>Now it&#8217;s more of a behavior towards angels in terms of like creating your credibility towards founders and just creating your creativity. They&#8217;re both mistakes of omission and commission, right? Like, so there are companies you probably should invest in that you don&#8217;t. And we&#8217;ve all made those for a variety of reasons.</p> <p>And then there&#8217;s companies you probably should not invest in that you do invest in and what leads you astray. Look, we stick to a neat knitting, right? When you&#8217;re a very smart, successful person, you have a tendency to believe, you know, everything and you can do anything. And the reality is that&#8217;s not the case.</p> <p>And we sound like we&#8217;re very prolific, but the reality is we do have a specialization. I&#8217;ve, I studied market design in college. I&#8217;ve been building marketplaces. The biggest marketplace I built is a company called OLX. It&#8217;s 11,000 employees in 30 countries. It&#8217;s the most successful classified site in the world.</p> <p>It&#8217;s what Craigslist should be if it was read properly with like mobile first, integrated payments and shipping, pre moderated content, female- friendly, no scam, no spam, and it&#8217;s the leading marketplace in all the emerging markets like Brazil, Latin, Ukraine, Russia, Eastern Europe, et cetera. And as a result, because I&#8217;ve been running marketplaces, I focus on building and investing in marketplaces and network effect businesses.</p> <p>I don&#8217;t go and do biotech and green tech and hardware, et cetera. So, I think many people are led astray by their own success and do things where they don&#8217;t have expertise.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen: </strong>&nbsp;Yeah, I like to say that, you know, I ran a billion-dollar hedge fund and mandate creep knowing what you&#8217;re good at.</p> <p>And I think what happens in periods of time that are euphoric and it&#8217;s hard to find stuff, you start going astray and trying to do something that&#8217;s not a core competency. And I would say 99 out of a hundred times it ends in tears. And so, you know, when I was in my fund, we did what we did and we didn&#8217;t.</p> <p>You know, look where we weren&#8217;t an expert. So, I think that&#8217;s a really, really good point.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Yeah. I mean, you look at it in life, right? Like there&#8217;s very successful neurosurgeons or whatever heart surgeons. And because they&#8217;re so good at what they do, they&#8217;re like, Oh, I&#8217;m going to be great investing and then they lose all of their savings.</p> <p>And so, know what you&#8217;re good at. And it doesn&#8217;t make you good at everything else. There&#8217;s mastery. Now to answer the second question is what are the biggest mistakes founders make? So, what kills companies the most in the top three-four is one, not finding product market fit, but that&#8217;s not a mistake.</p> <p>Number two, a much bigger mistake is fighting with your co-founders. If you do, if you can&#8217;t agree, it&#8217;ll tear the company down. Now, what&#8217;s interesting is companies with co-founders on average do better than companies without co-founders, but when the co-founders fight, it kills the companies. It&#8217;s two or three is the right number, not more, not less.</p> <p>And number three, actually raising too much money at too high a price. There is a fair valuation for your company, but there are moments where a company gets hot and frothy. And of course, if you&#8217;re a founder and someone tells you, hey, I&#8217;ll invest 50 at 150 pre, 200 posts, 25% dilution. It sounds more compelling that I&#8217;ll invest whatever 10 at pre, but if your company is really worth 10- 30 pre, 40 posts, same dilution in one case, you raise 50, the other case you raise 40.</p> <p>And you&#8217;re like, wait a minute. Why would I not take the 50? The issue is if you do not grow into your valuation, it will kill your company. Because if you have to do a down round, there&#8217;s anti-dilution provision, which reprices the prior round. And most often will kill the company. So, it&#8217;s a huge mistake many people made in 2021 where now they have to do either down rounds, or they have to do structured rounds. And maybe the example I gave from a valuation perspective is drastic. But if you don&#8217;t grow the valuation, it&#8217;s a big, big deal. So ,you really should think through what is the correct amount of capital you need because at the end of the day, by the way, the valuation in which you raise is a vanity metric.</p> <p>The valuation that matters is the valuation in which you exit in the end; and you need to set yourself up for success.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> You&#8217;re the expert and I&#8217;m definitely, clearly my, my venture track record does not look like 39 percent compounding for 30 years. So, but the one thing I&#8217;d say as I&#8217;ve sat on boards of startups, the consistent theme I see as one of the big mistakes is they don&#8217;t raise enough money because they don&#8217;t think,I sat on a board of a company like, oh, we&#8217;re only going to need X.</p> <p>I go, that&#8217;s going to last you six months. You can&#8217;t do that. You need like 10 X. Like, so I think I find that a lot of founders think they&#8217;re going to do it so quickly and with so little money and it ends up taking more. So, I thought it was interesting. I understand why you said what you said, that raising too much and antidilution for the down rounds and everything.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> It’s not raising too much, really raising it too high a price.</p> <p>You can raise a lot as long as you don&#8217;t spend it. The problem is when people raise too much, they spend it. Like we push all of our founders raise at least 18 months to two years of cash and for them for the most part, I don&#8217;t see them deviating from that, especially today. I mean, but frankly, even in 2021 everyone raised two years’ worth of cash. So, I don&#8217;t see that as being too big a problem. I think people trying to raise too much at too high a price and then not getting their teeth kicked in when the market says no, especially today is a much bigger problem.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> Okay. So, I want to wrap up that this section, but on one last question, and that is, as you make investments, you gave us your four must haves, do you look at the ownership structure of the co-founders, how much they own and is there a percentage of its two or three founders and it&#8217;s now the seed round, do you know, as an investor, I don&#8217;t want them to have too little because I don&#8217;t want them to be diluted, you know, down to nothing. And then they&#8217;re not incentivized.</p> <p>So, is there a number that you look for them to have?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Yeah. I mean, the cap table construction matters a lot. The founders, especially at seed need to have collectively, whatever, 70-80 percent of the company. You know, the pre seed probably they raised one at four or five pre. So, these angel investors have like 20%, maybe they have a few advisors by the end plus the employees. Yeah, they should have 60 to 70 percent of the company at that stage. And if for whatever reason, it doesn&#8217;t look like that. And someone else&#8217;s 50 percent of the company that, you know, then we would not invest because of the cap table construction. We weren’t the founders would be incentivized properly.</p> <p>Now the split between the founders is less relevant to some extent. Let&#8217;s say you&#8217;re three in your 100% pool wouldn&#8217;t be shocking if the CEO is 50%, the COO is 30% and the CTO of 20%. And then it depends, right? If you&#8217;re building an AI company, the CTO is a lot more. If you&#8217;re building a multi sided marketplace, maybe the CTO is 10 or 15, but sometimes they split equally. That matter is somewhat lost, actually.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> Okay. Thank you for clarifying that. So, a lot of pain has been taken in crypto markets and you and I&#8217;ve had crypto discussions before. What do you think about them today? Who are the ultimate winners? And is it going to look like, if you invested in Bitcoin you&#8217;re going to, you&#8217;re going to prevail over the next five years in light of the crazy money and inflation and concerns.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> I&#8217;m not particularly interested in Bitcoin just because it&#8217;s kind of like digital gold. It doesn&#8217;t really have a use case. I like assets that generate cash flows, right? Like for me, assets where it&#8217;s discounting present value of future cash flows. It&#8217;s something I can wrap my head around. So, I&#8217;m way more interested in applications on the Ethereum blockchain because if you want Ethereum is whatever AWS, but decentralized on which people are building applications. And there&#8217;s a whole bunch of really cool products there from in the DeFi world, like the Uniswap of the world or the AAVE and the Maker DAOs to all the different types of applications or Render.</p> <p>Render is a really cool product where it&#8217;s decentralized GPUs, allowing people to run AI or graphic intensive applications instead of like buying massive server farms of like NVIDIA graphic cards. And so, things like that are really cool. It feels to me like we&#8217;re turning a corner, meaning now that the Bitcoin ETFs are being approved or likely to be approved and are coming to the market that liquidity conditions have improved and that some of the overhangs, like people were worried that finance might blow up, that tether might be a fraud or like seemingly dissipating. I suspect things will look better. Definitely in 25. I&#8217;m not sure about 24 just yet because I&#8217;m so worried about the macro. But there are clear use cases. In fact, I&#8217;m building a yield bearing stable coin in crypto right now to try to replace USDC and USDT. So, I&#8217;m still bullish on the category.</p> <p>And by the way, it&#8217;s true, both of crypto and the web writ large, everyone&#8217;s been bearish because people have a tendency to be pro cyclical. These are the very best moments to be investing. Now. All of the posers are gone. The people that were in it for the quick buck. If people that are true believers and they&#8217;re now union economic focus. They&#8217;re making sure they&#8217;re not burning too much capital.</p> <p>They&#8217;re being sensible with the capital that they&#8217;re raising. They&#8217;re keeping capital for two, three years and, and, and growing in a sensible way. There&#8217;s way less competition. And yes, entry multiples are lower and exit multiples will probably be lower. But if you win the category, you&#8217;re going to win the very best investments.</p> <p>But the 2010s were made in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011. I mean, Uber, Airbnb, Instagram, WhatsApp, were all built and invested in in those time periods. For me, the most interesting investments of the 2020s will have been made in 22, 23, 24. And that&#8217;s true both in crypto and in the web writ large.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> That&#8217;s amazing. I, I do remember reading a story that I wanna say it was 2009 or 10.</p> <p>The founder of Airbnb tried to raise a $150,000 for 10 percent of the company. And he had all these notes, like it&#8217;s a horrible idea. He had all these emails from major VCs that basically told them to pound sand. So, you know, I think you&#8217;d have done pretty well buying spending $150,000. That was clearly one that I did not see.</p> <p>So, on that same topic, smart contracts, when will we see them really become more prevalent? And when you buy a house, you know, there&#8217;s all these nightmare stories about people steal the title of your house or when you&#8217;re buying anything of value, car, art, house, boat. When will we see the proliferation of smart contracts come to the market?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Yeah. So, you&#8217;re talking about smart contracts in the context of real-world assets, which I think is actually a mega trend and is coming, but I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s going to come, especially for these types of assets where frankly, title for a house works reasonably well in the, in the US it&#8217;s really well.</p> <p>And there&#8217;s a process that works well. I suspect that it&#8217;s mostly going to come for traditional finance. And so, the use case that we&#8217;re currently building, for instance, is creating a stable coin backed by U.S. treasury bills. And so, once you send me U.S. dollars, U.S.D.C., I actually go and buy T bills and then I give you S T U S E, which is your representation of those T bills, which you can then interact in DeFi with.</p> <p>And so, I think these things will be more compelling because settlement is faster. The costs are cheaper. I mean, think of the traditional financial world where if you want to sell the stock, it goes through a custodian to a broker at a bank. It takes two days or three days to settle. It makes absolutely no sense that you can&#8217;t send it from you to me directly.</p> <p>And so, I suspect that the real-world asset, you know, smart contract adoption will come through traditional assets first with T bills, then with bonds and ultimately probably with stocks and, others. And I think everything else will come way, way later. And the year where this will start becoming common, it&#8217;ll start in 24. It&#8217;ll be more common in 25 onwards, but starting T bills, which are frankly, the main use case.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> Amazing. What do you make of the AI craze and on that same vein, the founder of OpenAI, not honing any shares.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> There&#8217;s been many crazes, right? The smartphone craze, there was there were three craze for a while.</p> <p>They were there. The social number craze, the search engine craze. As ever, I suspect that there are hype cycles where in the short term we overestimate how impactful they&#8217;re going to be. And yet in the long term, we underestimate the impact they have at societal level. And right now, we&#8217;re probably just past the peak of the hype cycle where everyone was investing.</p> <p>I mean, even though tech writ large was in a recession, AI was like where capital was pouring. If you had the AI word in your startup, you could get crazy validations. I think a lot of these are going to end in tears because people invested in non-differentiated AI companies with no moats, no business model, I didn&#8217;t say in prices that said for society where they&#8217;re building is going to be extraordinarily valuable.</p> <p>What I make of it, most of these companies will being that have been built or probably not super compelling yet from a business perspective. And I&#8217;m being they&#8217;ll lead to great investments, but they will little by little improve productivity in the economy. We are going to see a productivity revolution.</p> <p>I mean, we see it in our startups, which, of course, are early adopters of AI, where they&#8217;re using it to help program, to do customer care, etcetera. And ultimately, it&#8217;ll seep into larger enterprise. But by when will, whatever, a large insurance company use it to process some medical claims? You know, that&#8217;s a decade away, right?</p> <p>We need to deal with that hallucination, et cetera. When it does happen, it&#8217;ll lead to a real productivity revolution, but it&#8217;ll take a long time. So, it&#8217;s real, it&#8217;s happening, it&#8217;s been overhyped. There&#8217;s probably going to be the Valley of Despair, et cetera. And ultimately, it&#8217;s going to be transformational, but it&#8217;ll take whatever, 5-10 years to get there.</p> <p>And I would only invest in it if you get in at reasonable valuations in a vertical application that has differentiated data and is doing something, you know, if you&#8217;re using OpenAI as your back end, and you&#8217;re giving you an open source, all of your data, you have no moat. Someone will go and kill you, possibly OpenAI.</p> <p>So, I wouldn&#8217;t do it that way at all. In terms of who owns, what shares, et cetera, the look different ways to fund these things and cap structures that you, that you can use you can open source. You don&#8217;t need to open source. I mean, there are different business models, right? Like think of what happened with Linux and then the companies were built on top of Linux. So, that&#8217;s a choice in terms of how to build the community and get developers. But you can build the business model on top.</p> <p>Also, if you&#8217;re wealthy enough and you don&#8217;t necessarily care, you&#8217;re like, I don&#8217;t do this for the money. I do this to really better the world. And I think that the political system is structurally incapable of addressing the challenges of our time which are typically beyond borders, you know, climate change, equality of opportunity, et cetera. That&#8217;s why I&#8217;m using the deflationary power of technology and its ability to improve user experiences to address these problems.</p> <p>The reason I&#8217;m doing it in a for profit way is it&#8217;s scalable, sustainable, and you actually have a metric and make sure that you&#8217;re doing the right thing. But you know, I don&#8217;t need to work. I could have retired 20 years ago.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> Well, that&#8217;s a, that&#8217;s a great answer. You, you talked about the quality of deal flow; being so much better today, and you said the good deals were done in 2008, 9, 10, and these in this section will be 22, 23, 24. Can you tell me a couple of the deals that you&#8217;ve done in the last year or two that you&#8217;re the most excited about that you think has the most trajectory on the upside?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Yeah. I&#8217;ll start by the thesis.</p> <p>So, if we&#8217;re not, if we&#8217;ve not been investing in AI, like everyone else in the last few years, the time to invest in AI would have been five years ago. What we&#8217;ve been doing instead is thinking, digitizing the business world. So, if you think of these crazy, amazing, beautiful user experiences you have in the consumer world, Amazon, DoorDash, Uber, Airbnb, and the business world, you have none of that, right?</p> <p>If you want to buy petrochemicals, there is no site where you can see what&#8217;s available, what&#8217;s the manufacturing capacity, what&#8217;s the pricing and then track payment, pay for it, get insurance, track the delivery, et cetera. And so, we&#8217;ve been, we have five theses in B2B marketplaces. One is writ large, bringing the discovery of inputs, petrochemicals, steel, gravel, et cetera, online with full transparency.</p> <p>And by the way, when I described like putting the catalog, putting the pricing, getting a connection of manufacturing capacity, ERP integrations, payments, I mean, these could be different companies on one. And so, we&#8217;re investors in Knowde, which is a petrochemicals marketplace. Schüttflix, which is a European marketplace for gravel, or Metaloop, which is a marketplace for steal in Europe as well.</p> <p>Number two, B2B enablement, right? Imagine you are a small business owner. You&#8217;re a Luigi and you&#8217;re building your pizzeria. You never got into those because you&#8217;d like to create a website and answer comments on Yelp and deal with accounting and negotiate with Uber and pick up the phone and create a delivery source.</p> <p>You&#8217;d like to cook pizza, you&#8217;d like to talk to your customers and now you need to do all these things in order to compete with Domino&#8217;s. And so, our thesis is both helping the SMBs compete with the large chains and B, Helping them do the things they love and doing everything else for them. So, we&#8217;re investors in a company called Slice, which is basically helping pizzerias do all the things they don&#8217;t like, pick up the phone, create the website, provide them with a POS, et cetera.</p> <p>We do the same thing in the cafe category with a company called Odeko. Which helps the coffee shop owners, they just want to be baristas. They don&#8217;t want to be dealing with like inventory management. And so, what&#8217;s amazing with the Odeko is they have a purchasing power of hundreds of millions of dollars, so they get better prices on coffee.</p> <p>They have the keys to the coffee shop. So, they go at night, replenish your inventory, not bother you and give you better pricing. So very high NPS. We do it the same for Fresha for hairdressers. We do the same with Jobox for locksmith. I mean, and list goes on to do it for bodega is helping them source, et cetera.</p> <p>Number three. As you know, many companies are intelligently moving the supply chains out of China. So French shoring is a mega trend. And so, we&#8217;re helping or we&#8217;re investing in companies that are moving supply chains from China to India to then export to the West. And again, it also falls in the SMB enablement because these are mostly mom and pop factory owners in India, who what they want to do is manufacture. They want to be answering RFQs and dealing with payments and tracking, discovering clients and creating prototypes, etc. So, these marketplaces do that for them. And so, we&#8217;re investors in a ZYOD, an apparel marketplace. Doocan, a rug and linen marketplace and Xim Kart, which is a ceramics marketplace.</p> <p>And you think of the category, we&#8217;re investing in it. Number four, we&#8217;re investors in labor marketplaces to support this. So, Trusted Health, a nurse’s marketplace that is doing hundreds of millions of bookings and traveling nurses or Rig Up, it&#8217;s now called Workrise, which is helping oil services workers work on oil platforms, or Jobandtalent helping blue collar workers work for Uber, Amazon in Europe. I mean, the list goes on. And last but not least, we&#8217;re investors in the companies that are supporting all of us. So, for this to work, you need global transportation, companies like Flexport which is an amazing international online freight forwarder company or ShipBob, which is helping offline retailers compete with Amazon by doing picking and packing, shipping, and maybe even same day delivery.</p> <p>And the list goes on. I&#8217;m giving you a lot of companies. Many of these are already billion-dollar companies, even though no one&#8217;s heard of them, and they are absolutely crushing it. And I&#8217;m excited to see when digital penetration in B2B goes from 1 percent where it is today to like 20%, these are going to be 10, 20 plus billion-dollar companies.</p> <p>So, it&#8217;s very, very exciting. It&#8217;s slow. It&#8217;s boring, but it&#8217;s amazing.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> So, you think a B2B is, is where the puck is heading there?&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Absolutely.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> Okay. So, there was a New York times article maybe almost 10 years ago that talked about you giving up all your possessions and it got down to 50 items. And I want to say, if the, if I remember right.</p> <p>A pair of socks was two items, I think, in that article.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> No, a pair of socks was one item.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> What, a pair of socks was one item?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Yeah, yeah.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> Okay. How’d you get there? How long did that last? I would last like a day. So how did that happen?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> No, it lasted for four years.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> Oh my God.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> So everything I own fit in my carry on, because of course I don&#8217;t want to, I didn&#8217;t want to check anything.</p> <p>My tennis bag, because of course I still need to play tennis and padel, and my backpack, which I have my computer and Kindle.</p> <p>The logic for it was twofold. One is, as we get older, I found that the quality of my friendships was framed. In the sense that, when you&#8217;re a kid and, you&#8217;re in college, you&#8217;re remaking the world, you&#8217;re seeing your friends all 24/7, you&#8217;re daydreaming about the future and all of a sudden people get busy with work, with wife, with kids, with husband, and instead of seeing them weekly, you start seeing them every 6 weeks and when you meet them, it&#8217;s no longer, let&#8217;s remake the world!</p> <p>It&#8217;s a biographical update in the last six weeks, since I last saw you, this is what happened at work, my kids, et cetera. And it&#8217;s okay, but it&#8217;s not the reason we became friends to begin with. And so, I decided, you know what? I just sold my company. That was in 2013. I sold OLX and I now have the flexibility and freedom to invest in those friendships.</p> <p>I want two things go back to A. to first principles. If you have an apartment, you go there. If you live in a city, you go there. If I have nothing, every day I can ask myself, where do I want to be? What do I want to do? Who do I want to see?</p> <p>And then, by having no obligations, I can try to go and rebuild proper relationships with my friends and family, considering that I&#8217;ve been working 100 hours a week, 7 days a week, for the last 20 years.</p> <p>And so, I tried a few approaches. I went couch surfing first, for my friends’ couches. Which was actually not a winning strategy because ultimately embedding myself in their life when they themselves were still busy with kids and work, et cetera, it didn&#8217;t work. So, I iterated a lot of that model. So, within six months, I decided, okay, that didn&#8217;t work.</p> <p>I lived in Airbnb. So actually, I lived in Airbnb in New York, which was amazing. There were this, all these billionaires that had like these 20-50 million apartments that were empty. And so, I could be in every neighborhood like for a month. And these beautiful places and host amazing events, et cetera.</p> <p>And so that distributed living and beautiful Airbnb around the world. I absolutely loved and I found a way to rekindle with my friends, not by living in their couches, but actually bringing them together at places where it was easy for them to go to during school vacations where there were activities for their kids.</p> <p>And so, I did it around my birthday in August and every Christmas and New Year&#8217;s to the point that now I fly 50-60 people every year to my place in Turks and for Christmas my family and my extended family. So, my last name is Grinda, we call ourselves the Grindaverse. And its super fun and it&#8217;s been an amazing way to reconnect with friends and family.</p> <p>The reason my acid light living ended is twofold. First, New York passed an anti-Airbnb laws. And so, all this inventory disappeared in 2015, all the high-end inventory. And then number two, I more recently started having kids and now I have a son who&#8217;s two years old. I have a daughter who&#8217;s going to be born in February and I have a five-month-old puppy.</p> <p>And those three things are not acid light. Let me tell you that I can have 50 items, but I think my son personally has 5,000 items and no longer is compatible with acid light living.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> Well, that&#8217;s a great story. I hadn&#8217;t realized, you know, the extent of why you did it and that&#8217;s fantastic to hear. In a similar vein, I retired early, my dad died when I was five and I don&#8217;t remember anything about my dad and I wanted to give my kids something I&#8217;d never had, which was a present father and I, for the last seven or eight years have been with them, you know, full time, which has been great.</p> <p>Now I&#8217;m at a different stage, they&#8217;re 17 and 16. Dad isn&#8217;t nearly as cool as he was a few years ago, so I need to go find something else to do now.</p> <p>So, you know, you live an interesting life with a lot of hobbies other than tennis, which you highlighted. What are a couple of things that you like to do when you&#8217;re not couch surfing on your friend&#8217;s couches?</p> <p>I kite surf, I heli-ski, I play padel, which is a tennis derivative which is big in Hispanic countries. And I do adventure travel. For instance, earlier this year, I walked to the South pole, you know pulling my hundred pounds flood and negative 50 temperature, 2 weeks fully disconnected.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> And, and I&#8217;ve done things like that where I&#8217;ve crossed Costa Rica on foot from, and bicycle from the Atlantic to the Pacific with just my tents and sleeping bag.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> Okay. You lost it. I&#8217;m not doing either of those. That&#8217;s not happening.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> I do a lot of these things. And then and, and non-athletic hobbies, I read 50 to a hundred books a year. I write a blog on whatever crosses my mind from macro to tech trends, to book reviews, to whatever. I love writing. And yeah, that&#8217;s basically it. Then I&#8217;m trying to being a cool father because to a two-year-old, you&#8217;re still very cool.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> Yeah. Well enjoy it until it lasts, Fabrice! Cause let me just tell you that coolness don&#8217;t last forever. It&#8217;s 17. You&#8217;re not that you&#8217;re not going to be that cool. So, it&#8217;s been great. Let&#8217;s end it with what&#8217;s your favorite part of being a 3i member.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> The community, I’ve been meeting amazing people. Like we&#8217;re playing at poker tournaments that I host or join. Actually, we&#8217;ve got a lot of investors in my fund out of 3i and seeing amazing opportunities. So, it&#8217;s been fun. I love Mark and what he&#8217;s built. I&#8217;ve loved and known him for forever. And I&#8217;m very happy to be a part of 3i.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> Well, we&#8217;re very happy to have you. This has been a very enlightening conversation.</p> <p>I know all those who have the chance to watch, we&#8217;ll learn a lot from. So, thanks for taking the time with us Fabrice. And I look forward to seeing you again soon.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Thank you for having me.</p> <p><strong>Eric Rosen:</strong> Thank you.</p>

<p>I was recently featured on the 3i Members Founder Spotlight podcast, where I spoke with Eric Rosen and &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/3i-member-spotlight-interview/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;3i Member Spotlight Interview&#8221;</span></a></p>

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3i Member Spotlight Interview. Categories - Interviews &amp; Fireside Chats. Date-Posted - 2024-02-06T16:56:55 . I was recently featured on the 3i Members Founder Spotlight podcast, where I spoke with Eric Rosen and shared my philosophy on angel investing, offering tips for future founders, and discussing my insights on cryptocurrency, marketplaces, and more. 3i Members is a membership network for accomplished private investors who source opportunities, share expertise, and build value for one another that goes far beyond the deal.&nbsp; In addition to the above YouTube video, you can also listen to the podcast on iTunes and Spotify. iTunes: Spotify: Here is a transcript of the conversation for your reading pleasure. Founder Spotlight: Lessons from Forbes #1 Angel Investor Fabrice Grinda Eric Rosen: Hello. My name is Eric Rosen. Welcome to the joint podcast of 3i and the Rosen Report and the Founder Series. Today, I am honored to have our guest, Fabrice Grinda. Welcome, Fabrice. How are you today? Fabrice Grinda: I&#8217;m doing very well. Thank you for having me. Eric Rosen: Great. We&#8217;re very excited you&#8217;re here. So, you have had an amazing career and Forbes actually called you the number one angel investor in the world. How&#8217;d you get there? Fabrice Grinda: I&#8217;d say happened since I never meant to be an angel investor. I was a tech founder and other because I was so visible from the public, other founders came and asked me to invest in them and thought long and hard whether I should do it. And I started doing it and it took life on its own. Eric Rosen: So, what made you a public figure? What was the company that you founded? And how did that come about? Fabrice Grinda: So back in 1998, when I was 23, I built an eBay-equivalent of Europe and I was trying to bring the internet to Europe. And I guess the story was super compelling. It was you know, top of my class at Princeton, the French guy had gone to the US; learned the internet and the ropes and it was bringing it to Europe. And so, you know, it was on the cover of a magazine the equivalent cover of like whatever, Forbes, fortune, et cetera, and maybe very public. And so other founders started asking if I can invest with them. And look, I really hesitated for a long time because I&#8217;m like, is it a deviation from my mandate as a founder to be investing in other people? Ultimately, I decided that if I can articulate lessons learned to others, it made me a better founder. And if I could meet other founders and keep my fingers on the pulse of the market would make me a better founder, especially running a multi category site, understanding what&#8217;s happening in each categories. And therefore I started doing it. And you know, the reason I became so prolific is I think there&#8217;s so many problems to solve in the world and I want to solve all of them. And so, you know, when you think of something like climate change, it&#8217;s not one problem, thousands of little sub problems. And I want to back all the people trying to address every one of them individually. Eric Rosen: So, to be the most prolific angel investor, how many angel investments have you made? Fabrice Grinda: I&#8217;ve made 1100 angel investments to date, and I see about 300 deals a week. Eric Rosen: 300 deals a week. Wow! Fabrice Grinda: Yeah. And these days I&#8217;m making 200-300 investments per year. Eric Rosen: Geez, that&#8217;s amazing. And what are the most successful angel investments you&#8217;ve made? Fabrice Grinda: Well, it was an early investor in Alibaba. I was at the beginning of Delivery Hero, which is like a door dash of Europe and Southeast Asia. I invested in Uber, Airbnb, Flexport, Slice. I mean you name it. My specialty is marketplaces and network-effect businesses. And these days they&#8217;re less well known because they&#8217;re mostly B2B. But in the early days that were all the consumer facing ones I mentioned. Eric Rosen: And is it always angel round? Is it, is it the seed? Is it the A, B, C? Where do you generally come in on those? Fabrice Grinda: I’m stage agnostic. But most of what I do, my bread and butter, I&#8217;d say it would be a seed and A. I rarely do pre seed because I don&#8217;t invest in competitors, and I don&#8217;t want to be locking me out of a category before I&#8217;ve seen all the different players and see what the emergent winner is. And I sometimes do B onwards because sometimes it takes that long for the winning player to emerge, but seed and A is really by bread and butter, but it&#8217;s about 70% seed and A, 20% B onwards, 10% pre seed. And then we&#8217;re also 55% U.S. and Canada, 25% Western Europe, and 10% Brazil and India, and 10% rest of the world, and really rest of the world, like India, Philippines Chile, Nigeria, whatever. Eric Rosen: Wow. So, to look at 300 deals a week, make 11 or 1200 investments in a year. How big is your team at FJ Labs? Fabrice Grinda: That&#8217;s 200 to 300 investments a year. The investment team is 11 people. The full team now is 33 people, given the huge back office. And so it&#8217;s kind of turned from what was really an Angel investing family office time approach to a venture capital firm, except we behave like angel investors. I said, what we do is angel investing at venture scale, because we take two one-hour meetings in the course of a week and we decide if we invest or not. So, we don&#8217;t take board seats. We don&#8217;t lead, we don&#8217;t price. We&#8217;re really the founder, former founders or founder-friendly, decide quickly with full transparency and we&#8217;re there to help you. Eric Rosen: Wow! That&#8217;s pretty quick turnaround. So, if you&#8217;re turning around that quickly, you must have a formula with things that are must haves or can&#8217;t haves. So, what are the three or four main traits that you need to make an investment? And what are the few things that are a non-starter, if they do this or don&#8217;t do this, that they&#8217;re out? Fabrice Grinda: So, I want four things and they are all required. So, one, I need to like the founders. Two, I need to like the business. Three, I need like the deal terms and four, I need to like the thesis and the problem that they&#8217;re solving. And what we&#8217;re looking for for each of them is thus follows. So, I want founders who are both visionary, extraordinary, eloquent spokespeople, but can also execute. So, the event diagram intersection of people that are extremely eloquent and visionary, but can execute is actually rather small. But you need both because someone who can. It&#8217;s very eloquent, is going to be able to raise money at a higher valuation, attract better people, is going to get more PR, better BD deals. But if you don&#8217;t have the execution skills, maybe you end up with, whatever, Theranos. And if you have someone who knows how to execute, but can&#8217;t speak, they&#8217;re not going to be able to raise, and they might build a small, profitable business. Number two. And I care about all four. I care about the time and the unit economics and even pre-launch, even someone pre seed needs to be able to articulate what the estimated unit economics will look like based on having done landing page analysis, customer acquisition costs estimates based on the CPCs and the conversion rate to purchase. They need to know the average order value of the industry. And the contribution margin and they better be expecting to be in line with the industry averages and people don&#8217;t know that, you know, to me, speaks to the fact they probably can&#8217;t execute. Number three, the deal terms need to be fair, not nothing in tech is cheap. But is it fair, in light of the round, the traction team and the option that they&#8217;re, that they&#8217;re doing, and we see so many deals, we really know what the median C round, A round, B round, et cetera, is that. And number four, you know, we were purpose driven. First of all, we want to solve, inequality of opportunity, climate change, and the mental and physical well-being crisis. And in each of these, we have clear theses on the future of work, the future of food, the future of real estate. Are you in line with this thesis? And are you solving a problem we care about? And we want all four to be true. And then based on pattern recognition, because of course, at this point, we&#8217;ve invested in 1,100 companies. We&#8217;ve seen so many companies, and we invested about 1% of the companies we see were able to make very quick decisions. Eric Rosen: Wow. And so, you told us the four traits that are kind of the must haves. If one or two things that if you see you&#8217;re like, I&#8217;m out right off the bat, obviously if you don&#8217;t like the founder, but I&#8217;m saying apart from that, are there terms or things that are just nonstarters for you? Fabrice Grinda: They&#8217;re kind of all related to this, right? Like, so if you don&#8217;t know your business model maybe some of these companies. So, look, the five-year survival rate of a startup is about 5%. But if you at launch don&#8217;t know your business model, probably it&#8217;s 0.1%. And so, we&#8217;re already talking like a 500 S. Yeah. And there are great businesses that started with no business model. Google and Facebook are examples of that, but it wouldn&#8217;t be the type of things I do because I, not trying to play Moneyball, I&#8217;m playing Powerball. I won most of my companies to make money. And by the way, the greatest to be the most prolific angel investor of the world is very easy, to be the most successful angel in the world, meaning you actually have exits and we&#8217;ve had 300 exits. We&#8217;ve been compounding at 39% IR for 24-25 years. That&#8217;s way harder to be the best you need to have exits. And we&#8217;ve made money in half the investments we&#8217;ve made. Eric Rosen: Wow. Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp; Frankly, because of these four heuristics. So, we really want you to have a business model. We really want you to focus on your burn and your unit economics, which no one cared about in 2021. But finally, in 2023, as become normal. And we care about valuation. There&#8217;s some VCs who are like, well, the company&#8217;s gonna win the category. It doesn&#8217;t matter what price you get it; matters that you get it. And we don&#8217;t feel that&#8217;s true. If you get in at five and you sell for 50, you, you&#8217;re gonna do okay. But if you enter at 50 and, and you sell for 50, you, you get your money back. And, and if they sell for less than that, you don&#8217;t. And the reason we&#8217;ve made money in over half of our investments because we&#8217;ve been disciplined on price. Eric Rosen: Well, I can tell you this, I am definitely not going to be confused with the most prolific angel investor of all time. I&#8217;ve made about 30 out of my PA and I can tell you that I have lost money on a lot more than half of my investments. So, it sounds like I should be giving you my money. So, I want to ask this question in two ways. One, what are the biggest investments mistakes that you see others make? And two, what are the biggest mistakes that startups, you know, the founders make? Fabrice Grinda: Well, different types of mistakes. I think what I didn&#8217;t like as a founder, when I was talking to investors, read large, frankly, is just the lack of transparency, people not getting back to me. People not respecting my time, showing up late on calls. And frankly I do a call with a VC or an angel. I would think it would go very well. And then they&#8217;d go straight instead of ghosting me, just actually give me, if you don&#8217;t want to invest, that&#8217;s fine. Just tell me why not, what I would need to change if I need to change it and do that. Now it&#8217;s more of a behavior towards angels in terms of like creating your credibility towards founders and just creating your creativity. They&#8217;re both mistakes of omission and commission, right? Like, so there are companies you probably should invest in that you don&#8217;t. And we&#8217;ve all made those for a variety of reasons. And then there&#8217;s companies you probably should not invest in that you do invest in and what leads you astray. Look, we stick to a neat knitting, right? When you&#8217;re a very smart, successful person, you have a tendency to believe, you know, everything and you can do anything. And the reality is that&#8217;s not the case. And we sound like we&#8217;re very prolific, but the reality is we do have a specialization. I&#8217;ve, I studied market design in college. I&#8217;ve been building marketplaces. The biggest marketplace I built is a company called OLX. It&#8217;s 11,000 employees in 30 countries. It&#8217;s the most successful classified site in the world. It&#8217;s what Craigslist should be if it was read properly with like mobile first, integrated payments and shipping, pre moderated content, female- friendly, no scam, no spam, and it&#8217;s the leading marketplace in all the emerging markets like Brazil, Latin, Ukraine, Russia, Eastern Europe, et cetera. And as a result, because I&#8217;ve been running marketplaces, I focus on building and investing in marketplaces and network effect businesses. I don&#8217;t go and do biotech and green tech and hardware, et cetera. So, I think many people are led astray by their own success and do things where they don&#8217;t have expertise. Eric Rosen: &nbsp;Yeah, I like to say that, you know, I ran a billion-dollar hedge fund and mandate creep knowing what you&#8217;re good at. And I think what happens in periods of time that are euphoric and it&#8217;s hard to find stuff, you start going astray and trying to do something that&#8217;s not a core competency. And I would say 99 out of a hundred times it ends in tears. And so, you know, when I was in my fund, we did what we did and we didn&#8217;t. You know, look where we weren&#8217;t an expert. So, I think that&#8217;s a really, really good point. Fabrice Grinda: Yeah. I mean, you look at it in life, right? Like there&#8217;s very successful neurosurgeons or whatever heart surgeons. And because they&#8217;re so good at what they do, they&#8217;re like, Oh, I&#8217;m going to be great investing and then they lose all of their savings. And so, know what you&#8217;re good at. And it doesn&#8217;t make you good at everything else. There&#8217;s mastery. Now to answer the second question is what are the biggest mistakes founders make? So, what kills companies the most in the top three-four is one, not finding product market fit, but that&#8217;s not a mistake. Number two, a much bigger mistake is fighting with your co-founders. If you do, if you can&#8217;t agree, it&#8217;ll tear the company down. Now, what&#8217;s interesting is companies with co-founders on average do better than companies without co-founders, but when the co-founders fight, it kills the companies. It&#8217;s two or three is the right number, not more, not less. And number three, actually raising too much money at too high a price. There is a fair valuation for your company, but there are moments where a company gets hot and frothy. And of course, if you&#8217;re a founder and someone tells you, hey, I&#8217;ll invest 50 at 150 pre, 200 posts, 25% dilution. It sounds more compelling that I&#8217;ll invest whatever 10 at pre, but if your company is really worth 10- 30 pre, 40 posts, same dilution in one case, you raise 50, the other case you raise 40. And you&#8217;re like, wait a minute. Why would I not take the 50? The issue is if you do not grow into your valuation, it will kill your company. Because if you have to do a down round, there&#8217;s anti-dilution provision, which reprices the prior round. And most often will kill the company. So, it&#8217;s a huge mistake many people made in 2021 where now they have to do either down rounds, or they have to do structured rounds. And maybe the example I gave from a valuation perspective is drastic. But if you don&#8217;t grow the valuation, it&#8217;s a big, big deal. So ,you really should think through what is the correct amount of capital you need because at the end of the day, by the way, the valuation in which you raise is a vanity metric. The valuation that matters is the valuation in which you exit in the end; and you need to set yourself up for success. Eric Rosen: You&#8217;re the expert and I&#8217;m definitely, clearly my, my venture track record does not look like 39 percent compounding for 30 years. So, but the one thing I&#8217;d say as I&#8217;ve sat on boards of startups, the consistent theme I see as one of the big mistakes is they don&#8217;t raise enough money because they don&#8217;t think,I sat on a board of a company like, oh, we&#8217;re only going to need X. I go, that&#8217;s going to last you six months. You can&#8217;t do that. You need like 10 X. Like, so I think I find that a lot of founders think they&#8217;re going to do it so quickly and with so little money and it ends up taking more. So, I thought it was interesting. I understand why you said what you said, that raising too much and antidilution for the down rounds and everything. Fabrice Grinda: It’s not raising too much, really raising it too high a price. You can raise a lot as long as you don&#8217;t spend it. The problem is when people raise too much, they spend it. Like we push all of our founders raise at least 18 months to two years of cash and for them for the most part, I don&#8217;t see them deviating from that, especially today. I mean, but frankly, even in 2021 everyone raised two years’ worth of cash. So, I don&#8217;t see that as being too big a problem. I think people trying to raise too much at too high a price and then not getting their teeth kicked in when the market says no, especially today is a much bigger problem. Eric Rosen: Okay. So, I want to wrap up that this section, but on one last question, and that is, as you make investments, you gave us your four must haves, do you look at the ownership structure of the co-founders, how much they own and is there a percentage of its two or three founders and it&#8217;s now the seed round, do you know, as an investor, I don&#8217;t want them to have too little because I don&#8217;t want them to be diluted, you know, down to nothing. And then they&#8217;re not incentivized. So, is there a number that you look for them to have? Fabrice Grinda: Yeah. I mean, the cap table construction matters a lot. The founders, especially at seed need to have collectively, whatever, 70-80 percent of the company. You know, the pre seed probably they raised one at four or five pre. So, these angel investors have like 20%, maybe they have a few advisors by the end plus the employees. Yeah, they should have 60 to 70 percent of the company at that stage. And if for whatever reason, it doesn&#8217;t look like that. And someone else&#8217;s 50 percent of the company that, you know, then we would not invest because of the cap table construction. We weren’t the founders would be incentivized properly. Now the split between the founders is less relevant to some extent. Let&#8217;s say you&#8217;re three in your 100% pool wouldn&#8217;t be shocking if the CEO is 50%, the COO is 30% and the CTO of 20%. And then it depends, right? If you&#8217;re building an AI company, the CTO is a lot more. If you&#8217;re building a multi sided marketplace, maybe the CTO is 10 or 15, but sometimes they split equally. That matter is somewhat lost, actually. Eric Rosen: Okay. Thank you for clarifying that. So, a lot of pain has been taken in crypto markets and you and I&#8217;ve had crypto discussions before. What do you think about them today? Who are the ultimate winners? And is it going to look like, if you invested in Bitcoin you&#8217;re going to, you&#8217;re going to prevail over the next five years in light of the crazy money and inflation and concerns. Fabrice Grinda: I&#8217;m not particularly interested in Bitcoin just because it&#8217;s kind of like digital gold. It doesn&#8217;t really have a use case. I like assets that generate cash flows, right? Like for me, assets where it&#8217;s discounting present value of future cash flows. It&#8217;s something I can wrap my head around. So, I&#8217;m way more interested in applications on the Ethereum blockchain because if you want Ethereum is whatever AWS, but decentralized on which people are building applications. And there&#8217;s a whole bunch of really cool products there from in the DeFi world, like the Uniswap of the world or the AAVE and the Maker DAOs to all the different types of applications or Render. Render is a really cool product where it&#8217;s decentralized GPUs, allowing people to run AI or graphic intensive applications instead of like buying massive server farms of like NVIDIA graphic cards. And so, things like that are really cool. It feels to me like we&#8217;re turning a corner, meaning now that the Bitcoin ETFs are being approved or likely to be approved and are coming to the market that liquidity conditions have improved and that some of the overhangs, like people were worried that finance might blow up, that tether might be a fraud or like seemingly dissipating. I suspect things will look better. Definitely in 25. I&#8217;m not sure about 24 just yet because I&#8217;m so worried about the macro. But there are clear use cases. In fact, I&#8217;m building a yield bearing stable coin in crypto right now to try to replace USDC and USDT. So, I&#8217;m still bullish on the category. And by the way, it&#8217;s true, both of crypto and the web writ large, everyone&#8217;s been bearish because people have a tendency to be pro cyclical. These are the very best moments to be investing. Now. All of the posers are gone. The people that were in it for the quick buck. If people that are true believers and they&#8217;re now union economic focus. They&#8217;re making sure they&#8217;re not burning too much capital. They&#8217;re being sensible with the capital that they&#8217;re raising. They&#8217;re keeping capital for two, three years and, and, and growing in a sensible way. There&#8217;s way less competition. And yes, entry multiples are lower and exit multiples will probably be lower. But if you win the category, you&#8217;re going to win the very best investments. But the 2010s were made in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011. I mean, Uber, Airbnb, Instagram, WhatsApp, were all built and invested in in those time periods. For me, the most interesting investments of the 2020s will have been made in 22, 23, 24. And that&#8217;s true both in crypto and in the web writ large. Eric Rosen: That&#8217;s amazing. I, I do remember reading a story that I wanna say it was 2009 or 10. The founder of Airbnb tried to raise a $150,000 for 10 percent of the company. And he had all these notes, like it&#8217;s a horrible idea. He had all these emails from major VCs that basically told them to pound sand. So, you know, I think you&#8217;d have done pretty well buying spending $150,000. That was clearly one that I did not see. So, on that same topic, smart contracts, when will we see them really become more prevalent? And when you buy a house, you know, there&#8217;s all these nightmare stories about people steal the title of your house or when you&#8217;re buying anything of value, car, art, house, boat. When will we see the proliferation of smart contracts come to the market? Fabrice Grinda: Yeah. So, you&#8217;re talking about smart contracts in the context of real-world assets, which I think is actually a mega trend and is coming, but I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s going to come, especially for these types of assets where frankly, title for a house works reasonably well in the, in the US it&#8217;s really well. And there&#8217;s a process that works well. I suspect that it&#8217;s mostly going to come for traditional finance. And so, the use case that we&#8217;re currently building, for instance, is creating a stable coin backed by U.S. treasury bills. And so, once you send me U.S. dollars, U.S.D.C., I actually go and buy T bills and then I give you S T U S E, which is your representation of those T bills, which you can then interact in DeFi with. And so, I think these things will be more compelling because settlement is faster. The costs are cheaper. I mean, think of the traditional financial world where if you want to sell the stock, it goes through a custodian to a broker at a bank. It takes two days or three days to settle. It makes absolutely no sense that you can&#8217;t send it from you to me directly. And so, I suspect that the real-world asset, you know, smart contract adoption will come through traditional assets first with T bills, then with bonds and ultimately probably with stocks and, others. And I think everything else will come way, way later. And the year where this will start becoming common, it&#8217;ll start in 24. It&#8217;ll be more common in 25 onwards, but starting T bills, which are frankly, the main use case. Eric Rosen: Amazing. What do you make of the AI craze and on that same vein, the founder of OpenAI, not honing any shares. Fabrice Grinda: There&#8217;s been many crazes, right? The smartphone craze, there was there were three craze for a while. They were there. The social number craze, the search engine craze. As ever, I suspect that there are hype cycles where in the short term we overestimate how impactful they&#8217;re going to be. And yet in the long term, we underestimate the impact they have at societal level. And right now, we&#8217;re probably just past the peak of the hype cycle where everyone was investing. I mean, even though tech writ large was in a recession, AI was like where capital was pouring. If you had the AI word in your startup, you could get crazy validations. I think a lot of these are going to end in tears because people invested in non-differentiated AI companies with no moats, no business model, I didn&#8217;t say in prices that said for society where they&#8217;re building is going to be extraordinarily valuable. What I make of it, most of these companies will being that have been built or probably not super compelling yet from a business perspective. And I&#8217;m being they&#8217;ll lead to great investments, but they will little by little improve productivity in the economy. We are going to see a productivity revolution. I mean, we see it in our startups, which, of course, are early adopters of AI, where they&#8217;re using it to help program, to do customer care, etcetera. And ultimately, it&#8217;ll seep into larger enterprise. But by when will, whatever, a large insurance company use it to process some medical claims? You know, that&#8217;s a decade away, right? We need to deal with that hallucination, et cetera. When it does happen, it&#8217;ll lead to a real productivity revolution, but it&#8217;ll take a long time. So, it&#8217;s real, it&#8217;s happening, it&#8217;s been overhyped. There&#8217;s probably going to be the Valley of Despair, et cetera. And ultimately, it&#8217;s going to be transformational, but it&#8217;ll take whatever, 5-10 years to get there. And I would only invest in it if you get in at reasonable valuations in a vertical application that has differentiated data and is doing something, you know, if you&#8217;re using OpenAI as your back end, and you&#8217;re giving you an open source, all of your data, you have no moat. Someone will go and kill you, possibly OpenAI. So, I wouldn&#8217;t do it that way at all. In terms of who owns, what shares, et cetera, the look different ways to fund these things and cap structures that you, that you can use you can open source. You don&#8217;t need to open source. I mean, there are different business models, right? Like think of what happened with Linux and then the companies were built on top of Linux. So, that&#8217;s a choice in terms of how to build the community and get developers. But you can build the business model on top. Also, if you&#8217;re wealthy enough and you don&#8217;t necessarily care, you&#8217;re like, I don&#8217;t do this for the money. I do this to really better the world. And I think that the political system is structurally incapable of addressing the challenges of our time which are typically beyond borders, you know, climate change, equality of opportunity, et cetera. That&#8217;s why I&#8217;m using the deflationary power of technology and its ability to improve user experiences to address these problems. The reason I&#8217;m doing it in a for profit way is it&#8217;s scalable, sustainable, and you actually have a metric and make sure that you&#8217;re doing the right thing. But you know, I don&#8217;t need to work. I could have retired 20 years ago. Eric Rosen: Well, that&#8217;s a, that&#8217;s a great answer. You, you talked about the quality of deal flow; being so much better today, and you said the good deals were done in 2008, 9, 10, and these in this section will be 22, 23, 24. Can you tell me a couple of the deals that you&#8217;ve done in the last year or two that you&#8217;re the most excited about that you think has the most trajectory on the upside? Fabrice Grinda: Yeah. I&#8217;ll start by the thesis. So, if we&#8217;re not, if we&#8217;ve not been investing in AI, like everyone else in the last few years, the time to invest in AI would have been five years ago. What we&#8217;ve been doing instead is thinking, digitizing the business world. So, if you think of these crazy, amazing, beautiful user experiences you have in the consumer world, Amazon, DoorDash, Uber, Airbnb, and the business world, you have none of that, right? If you want to buy petrochemicals, there is no site where you can see what&#8217;s available, what&#8217;s the manufacturing capacity, what&#8217;s the pricing and then track payment, pay for it, get insurance, track the delivery, et cetera. And so, we&#8217;ve been, we have five theses in B2B marketplaces. One is writ large, bringing the discovery of inputs, petrochemicals, steel, gravel, et cetera, online with full transparency. And by the way, when I described like putting the catalog, putting the pricing, getting a connection of manufacturing capacity, ERP integrations, payments, I mean, these could be different companies on one. And so, we&#8217;re investors in Knowde, which is a petrochemicals marketplace. Schüttflix, which is a European marketplace for gravel, or Metaloop, which is a marketplace for steal in Europe as well. Number two, B2B enablement, right? Imagine you are a small business owner. You&#8217;re a Luigi and you&#8217;re building your pizzeria. You never got into those because you&#8217;d like to create a website and answer comments on Yelp and deal with accounting and negotiate with Uber and pick up the phone and create a delivery source. You&#8217;d like to cook pizza, you&#8217;d like to talk to your customers and now you need to do all these things in order to compete with Domino&#8217;s. And so, our thesis is both helping the SMBs compete with the large chains and B, Helping them do the things they love and doing everything else for them. So, we&#8217;re investors in a company called Slice, which is basically helping pizzerias do all the things they don&#8217;t like, pick up the phone, create the website, provide them with a POS, et cetera. We do the same thing in the cafe category with a company called Odeko. Which helps the coffee shop owners, they just want to be baristas. They don&#8217;t want to be dealing with like inventory management. And so, what&#8217;s amazing with the Odeko is they have a purchasing power of hundreds of millions of dollars, so they get better prices on coffee. They have the keys to the coffee shop. So, they go at night, replenish your inventory, not bother you and give you better pricing. So very high NPS. We do it the same for Fresha for hairdressers. We do the same with Jobox for locksmith. I mean, and list goes on to do it for bodega is helping them source, et cetera. Number three. As you know, many companies are intelligently moving the supply chains out of China. So French shoring is a mega trend. And so, we&#8217;re helping or we&#8217;re investing in companies that are moving supply chains from China to India to then export to the West. And again, it also falls in the SMB enablement because these are mostly mom and pop factory owners in India, who what they want to do is manufacture. They want to be answering RFQs and dealing with payments and tracking, discovering clients and creating prototypes, etc. So, these marketplaces do that for them. And so, we&#8217;re investors in a ZYOD, an apparel marketplace. Doocan, a rug and linen marketplace and Xim Kart, which is a ceramics marketplace. And you think of the category, we&#8217;re investing in it. Number four, we&#8217;re investors in labor marketplaces to support this. So, Trusted Health, a nurse’s marketplace that is doing hundreds of millions of bookings and traveling nurses or Rig Up, it&#8217;s now called Workrise, which is helping oil services workers work on oil platforms, or Jobandtalent helping blue collar workers work for Uber, Amazon in Europe. I mean, the list goes on. And last but not least, we&#8217;re investors in the companies that are supporting all of us. So, for this to work, you need global transportation, companies like Flexport which is an amazing international online freight forwarder company or ShipBob, which is helping offline retailers compete with Amazon by doing picking and packing, shipping, and maybe even same day delivery. And the list goes on. I&#8217;m giving you a lot of companies. Many of these are already billion-dollar companies, even though no one&#8217;s heard of them, and they are absolutely crushing it. And I&#8217;m excited to see when digital penetration in B2B goes from 1 percent where it is today to like 20%, these are going to be 10, 20 plus billion-dollar companies. So, it&#8217;s very, very exciting. It&#8217;s slow. It&#8217;s boring, but it&#8217;s amazing. Eric Rosen: So, you think a B2B is, is where the puck is heading there?&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda: Absolutely. Eric Rosen: Okay. So, there was a New York times article maybe almost 10 years ago that talked about you giving up all your possessions and it got down to 50 items. And I want to say, if the, if I remember right. A pair of socks was two items, I think, in that article. Fabrice Grinda: No, a pair of socks was one item. Eric Rosen: What, a pair of socks was one item? Fabrice Grinda: Yeah, yeah. Eric Rosen: Okay. How’d you get there? How long did that last? I would last like a day. So how did that happen? Fabrice Grinda: No, it lasted for four years. Eric Rosen: Oh my God. Fabrice Grinda: So everything I own fit in my carry on, because of course I don&#8217;t want to, I didn&#8217;t want to check anything. My tennis bag, because of course I still need to play tennis and padel, and my backpack, which I have my computer and Kindle. The logic for it was twofold. One is, as we get older, I found that the quality of my friendships was framed. In the sense that, when you&#8217;re a kid and, you&#8217;re in college, you&#8217;re remaking the world, you&#8217;re seeing your friends all 24/7, you&#8217;re daydreaming about the future and all of a sudden people get busy with work, with wife, with kids, with husband, and instead of seeing them weekly, you start seeing them every 6 weeks and when you meet them, it&#8217;s no longer, let&#8217;s remake the world! It&#8217;s a biographical update in the last six weeks, since I last saw you, this is what happened at work, my kids, et cetera. And it&#8217;s okay, but it&#8217;s not the reason we became friends to begin with. And so, I decided, you know what? I just sold my company. That was in 2013. I sold OLX and I now have the flexibility and freedom to invest in those friendships. I want two things go back to A. to first principles. If you have an apartment, you go there. If you live in a city, you go there. If I have nothing, every day I can ask myself, where do I want to be? What do I want to do? Who do I want to see? And then, by having no obligations, I can try to go and rebuild proper relationships with my friends and family, considering that I&#8217;ve been working 100 hours a week, 7 days a week, for the last 20 years. And so, I tried a few approaches. I went couch surfing first, for my friends’ couches. Which was actually not a winning strategy because ultimately embedding myself in their life when they themselves were still busy with kids and work, et cetera, it didn&#8217;t work. So, I iterated a lot of that model. So, within six months, I decided, okay, that didn&#8217;t work. I lived in Airbnb. So actually, I lived in Airbnb in New York, which was amazing. There were this, all these billionaires that had like these 20-50 million apartments that were empty. And so, I could be in every neighborhood like for a month. And these beautiful places and host amazing events, et cetera. And so that distributed living and beautiful Airbnb around the world. I absolutely loved and I found a way to rekindle with my friends, not by living in their couches, but actually bringing them together at places where it was easy for them to go to during school vacations where there were activities for their kids. And so, I did it around my birthday in August and every Christmas and New Year&#8217;s to the point that now I fly 50-60 people every year to my place in Turks and for Christmas my family and my extended family. So, my last name is Grinda, we call ourselves the Grindaverse. And its super fun and it&#8217;s been an amazing way to reconnect with friends and family. The reason my acid light living ended is twofold. First, New York passed an anti-Airbnb laws. And so, all this inventory disappeared in 2015, all the high-end inventory. And then number two, I more recently started having kids and now I have a son who&#8217;s two years old. I have a daughter who&#8217;s going to be born in February and I have a five-month-old puppy. And those three things are not acid light. Let me tell you that I can have 50 items, but I think my son personally has 5,000 items and no longer is compatible with acid light living. Eric Rosen: Well, that&#8217;s a great story. I hadn&#8217;t realized, you know, the extent of why you did it and that&#8217;s fantastic to hear. In a similar vein, I retired early, my dad died when I was five and I don&#8217;t remember anything about my dad and I wanted to give my kids something I&#8217;d never had, which was a present father and I, for the last seven or eight years have been with them, you know, full time, which has been great. Now I&#8217;m at a different stage, they&#8217;re 17 and 16. Dad isn&#8217;t nearly as cool as he was a few years ago, so I need to go find something else to do now. So, you know, you live an interesting life with a lot of hobbies other than tennis, which you highlighted. What are a couple of things that you like to do when you&#8217;re not couch surfing on your friend&#8217;s couches? I kite surf, I heli-ski, I play padel, which is a tennis derivative which is big in Hispanic countries. And I do adventure travel. For instance, earlier this year, I walked to the South pole, you know pulling my hundred pounds flood and negative 50 temperature, 2 weeks fully disconnected. Fabrice Grinda: And, and I&#8217;ve done things like that where I&#8217;ve crossed Costa Rica on foot from, and bicycle from the Atlantic to the Pacific with just my tents and sleeping bag. Eric Rosen: Okay. You lost it. I&#8217;m not doing either of those. That&#8217;s not happening. Fabrice Grinda: I do a lot of these things. And then and, and non-athletic hobbies, I read 50 to a hundred books a year. I write a blog on whatever crosses my mind from macro to tech trends, to book reviews, to whatever. I love writing. And yeah, that&#8217;s basically it. Then I&#8217;m trying to being a cool father because to a two-year-old, you&#8217;re still very cool. Eric Rosen: Yeah. Well enjoy it until it lasts, Fabrice! Cause let me just tell you that coolness don&#8217;t last forever. It&#8217;s 17. You&#8217;re not that you&#8217;re not going to be that cool. So, it&#8217;s been great. Let&#8217;s end it with what&#8217;s your favorite part of being a 3i member. Fabrice Grinda: The community, I’ve been meeting amazing people. Like we&#8217;re playing at poker tournaments that I host or join. Actually, we&#8217;ve got a lot of investors in my fund out of 3i and seeing amazing opportunities. So, it&#8217;s been fun. I love Mark and what he&#8217;s built. I&#8217;ve loved and known him for forever. And I&#8217;m very happy to be a part of 3i. Eric Rosen: Well, we&#8217;re very happy to have you. This has been a very enlightening conversation. I know all those who have the chance to watch, we&#8217;ll learn a lot from. So, thanks for taking the time with us Fabrice. And I look forward to seeing you again soon. Fabrice Grinda: Thank you for having me. Eric Rosen: Thank you.

2024-01-31T16:21:59

2024-01-31T16:21:59

https://www.fabricegrinda.com/?p=22364

2024-01-31T18:48:36

2024-01-31T18:48:36

fj-labs-2023-year-in-review

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FJ Labs 2023 Year in Review

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FJ Labs 2023 Year in Review. Categories - FJ Labs. Date-Posted - 2024-01-31T16:21:59 .

2024-01-23T16:01:50

2024-01-23T16:01:50

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2024-01-23T16:01:51

2024-01-23T16:01:51

optimizing-life-post-exit

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Optimizing Life Post Exit

<p>I recently joined a Post Exit Founders Group with over 1,200 members. They asked me to share lessons learned on my post exit experience. I shared my reflections on how to identify what’s next in your journey and find what truly gives you joy in life. I realize this is a 0.01% problem and that my lifestyle is unconventional and reflects my personal preferences. However, many of the approaches I cover from iterating in your personal life and outsourcing things you dislike are applicable to most.</p> <p>Here is the timeline of what I covered:</p> <ul> <li>00:00 My Journey to Successful Tech Founder</li> <li>14:50 Unconventional Lifestyle and Work-Life Balance</li> <li>20:38 Finding Happiness Post-Exit: My Journey</li> <li>24:06 Investment Criteria and Team Importance</li> <li>28:21 Non-Traditional Family Setup and Work-Life Balance</li> <li>33:58 Outsourcing and Remote Assistants Strategy</li> <li>37:52 Remote Assistance and Mental Performance</li> <li>45:38 Entrepreneurship, Inequality, and the Future</li> <li>51:18 Balancing Work and Play: My Philosophy</li> <li>57:03 Founders and Leaders: Successes and Failures</li> <li>01:01:55 Decision-Making and Personal Experiences</li> </ul> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Optimizing Life Post Exit" width="840" height="630" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7PDzQkJXKGM?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>You can find the presentation I share on unlocking productivity <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-44-unlocking-productivity-streamlining-your-days-for-passion-and-purpose/" data-type="link" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-44-unlocking-productivity-streamlining-your-days-for-passion-and-purpose/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">here</a>. If you prefer to read the content, here is a transcript of my presentation:</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> What my posts, what my post exit strategy has been and became and also lessons learned along the way, and I&#8217;ll keep it brief enough that we can open up for Q and A. Brief: I&#8217;m French, though. I don&#8217;t sound French anymore, but basically, I fell in love with computers in 1984, the tender age of 10. It was love at first click.</p> <p>And I knew we were meant to be together forever. I was one of the top students in France in high school. And when I went to talk at, I guess they tried to interview me for Le Nain. They asked me, what do you want to be when you grow up? I&#8217;m like, I want to be a tech founder, like my role models, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.</p> <p>And they were like, what? You would betray the ideals of the French socialist revolution. And I knew there and then that I did not belong in France. And that was under Mitterrand. And so, in 92 went to college, went to 17 at Princeton, finished top of my class, actually did not study computer science because I felt I knew it already, and graduated top of my class in 96.</p> <p>And you wanted to be a tech founder but was I 21, was shy, was introverted, and so went to work for McKinsey and Company for a few years, which was kind of like Business school except they pay you. I thought I might miss the bubble doing that, but fortunately it didn&#8217;t. And in 98, I went on to build my first big startup.</p> <p>I was 23, which was an eBay type company for Europe. It was called Auckland. I raised 63 million in venture money. I had 150 employees in the five countries, grew at a 10 million a month in sales. Had an amazing 300-million-dollar cash offer prior to raising all the money from eBay. But fortunately, or unfortunately convinced my VCs to take it instead We sold for a billion which sounds like more but for stock to a company whose stock promptly fell 99.98 mark a cap from 10 billion to 30 million during my lockup period. So, sadly grabbed Victory or defeat from the jaws of victory that went from zero to hero and cover of every magazine back to zero all over again, which led to a brief period of soul searching in 2001 about what I should do next, but I realized, you know, I&#8217;d like building something out of nothing.</p> <p>I didn&#8217;t do this to make money. I&#8217;d like. I think this is the way to actually solve the world&#8217;s problems and harness the deflationary power of technology to make the world a better place, which is both inclusionary and addresses inequality of opportunity. And then with more recent tech, we can address climate change and the mental and physical well-being crisis.</p> <p>And so even though tech was not going to be this big thing. There&#8217;s not going to be a huge opportunity. This is where I belonged, and so I decided to remain a tech founder. So probably went on, came back to the U. S., came back to New York to build my second startup, with a constraint that it needed to be capital efficient because capital was no longer available.</p> <p>VCs would not fund anything in 2001. And upgrading company called zingy. I didn&#8217;t particularly like the product of selling, but it was a means to an end. It was a ringtone. So the heck, you know, one or two or three or four or five and it was extraordinarily tough. I missed payroll 27 times. I invested every last penny I had.</p> <p>I borrowed 100,000 on my credit cards. I&#8217;d lived. I slept in the office and shower in the office. I lived in New York, such on $2 a day for almost 18 months. But ultimately grabbed victory from the jaws of defeat. And we went from a million of revenues in 02 to 5 million in 03 when we became profitable, you know, building companies the old-fashioned way without funding being some profits to 50 in on 04 and hundred in 05.</p> <p>Sold that company this time for cash to a publicly traded competitor too early. But as we&#8217;ve all learned too early is better than too late. For 80 million of cash in the summer, in June of 04. And at about 50 percent of the company, I, I stayed on CEO for 18 months, and it&#8217;s interesting because at that point in time, it didn&#8217;t change anything in my life.</p> <p>I think I bought a TV, an Xbox, and a tennis racket, but I still lived in my, like, tiny studio apartment because the same way that I&#8217;d been working 100 hours a week before, once we became profitable and it sort of became our rocket ship, you know, we did one to 200 in revenues in four years. We kept hiring changing offices.</p> <p>I was working day and night ultimately left because I didn&#8217;t like the people I sold it to even though I liked being publicly traded and being, you know having to learn section four Well, I didn&#8217;t like it. I thought it was an ambition I had but then realized that being a publicly traded CEO didn&#8217;t mean the same thing in 2004 or 5 that it did 20 years earlier when you didn&#8217;t deal with section 404 and SOX compliance.</p> <p>And many of you public CEOs out there have come to realize that the regulatory environment has changed. And so, I decided to go back to my first true love, which of course was marketplaces, which was the reason I built the eBay type company to begin with. I like creating, I like acid light businesses that were winner takes most.</p> <p>That are highly deflationary and that bring liquidity and transparency in opaque fragmented markets. Craigslist at a ready come of age. And was large and larger growing. So, I went to try to convince Craig to either let me run Craigslist for free and they create a better user experience because I felt that they were letting down their community, even though they&#8217;re providing an amazing free public service.</p> <p>And he said no. Then I tried to buy him for a couple billion. He also said no. So, I wanted to build my own. Ended up building a company called OLX, which today is the largest classified site in the world. It&#8217;s 11, 000 employees in 30 countries. None of you have heard of it because even though we are part of the fabric of society and we have 350 million unique visitors a month, we were only big in emerging markets where the leading player in Brazil and all Latin America.</p> <p>And Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, and all the Eastern Europe. Well, the Russian asset was kind of stolen recently by Uncle Vladimir, but that&#8217;s another story. India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Philippines, all the Southeast Asia, and UAE and all the Middle East. Company is ginormous. Today&#8217;s worth, I don&#8217;t know, at least 10 billion.</p> <p>Would have been worth probably double that before the Russian asset was stolen. And, and, and doing really well. I sold it. So, I created that in 2006. I sold it. In a complex transaction over three years in 2010-2013 because I needed about a billion dollars to get it where it was because we had a publicly traded competitor in Europe.</p> <p>That was coming after us and spending were investing hundreds of millions in TV and emerging markets, which are American VCs back in the day would not have funded in 2015. I think a tiger or a softbank might have funded me to do this, but in 2010, it was hard to go and convince my American VCs for founders funds and general catalyst ambassador to give me hundreds of millions to go spend on TV and Zimbabwe and Pakistan.</p> <p>Ultimately sold the company. I say for three years after I they started investing in the company. I won the war with my biggest competitor. We merged 51 percent for us, 49 percent for them, and I left in 2013. Now, at that point in time, I was already an investor in 173 companies. Now, while I was CEO of a company of my first company in 98, I started being by virtue of being a consumer facing Internet CEO.</p> <p>A lot of the founders were approaching me asking if I should, if I could invest in their companies. And I thought long and hard, should I do this? And ultimately decided, you know Even though it is somewhat distracting. If I can articulate lessons learned to others, it makes me a better founder. And number two, I&#8217;m running a multi category horizontal site.</p> <p>If I can actually meet all the verticals and understand, keep my fingers on the pulse of the market, it makes me a better founder. So as long as investing in other startups doesn&#8217;t take more than one hour per startup, then it&#8217;s okay. And so, I decided to only invest in marketplaces and not work in back businesses.</p> <p>And I created four selection criteria by which I evaluated whether I would invest or not in one hour meeting in startups and kind of that took a life of its own, especially after 2004 when I my other exit. So, by 2013 at 173 investors at 37 exits was doing very well. And with a friend of mine really created just a family office where we were going to invest in startups.</p> <p>We were going to build startups. And in fact, since then, we&#8217;ve built in a studio model over 10 startups, one of which I ran a CEO founder. Grid became another unicorn sold that never expecting to be a VC. And in 2015, one of the people that I backed my competitor and when I was at OLX said, hey, we now own these different marketplace assets. We&#8217;d like to have exposure what&#8217;s going on and if visibility and what&#8217;s going on in the U. S. to bring to emerging markets and to perhaps defend against disruption, can we be an investor in you? And they actually offered to invest in my in my family office. I said no because I, A, I thought would be, if I kept raising, it would be infinitely dilutive.</p> <p>So, I didn&#8217;t want them to invest in the operating company or the GP, if you want. So I said, it said, let&#8217;s create a GPLP structure. Let&#8217;s create a fund that you can be a, that you can invest in the funds. Created a first fund of 50 million, where they were the sole LP. Now, of course, not including all the capital I was putting in. In 2016 deployed that by the end of 2017, then they agreed to fund to in 2018; raised 175 million from 20 LPs.</p> <p>And we&#8217;re finished pulling that mid 21. And then now we have a fund three, which is 290 million from 50 LPs. And LPs are either a combination of friends of mine that have been great tech founders, you know, the Reid Hoffman&#8217;s, the PayPal mafia, the Kevin Ryan&#8217;s of the world. You know, transfer wise founder, Wayfair founder, et cetera.</p> <p>Number two, like family offices being disrupted by tech and three strategics like eBay and actually all the people that have bought my old startups like Naspers, Process, Adavinta, Shifstead or Axel Springer, Recruit, et cetera. Now, what&#8217;s interesting is I&#8217;m not a normal VC. I, this, I would describe what I do as angel investing at venture scale.</p> <p>We write small checks. We don&#8217;t bleed. We don&#8217;t price. We don&#8217;t take board seats. We invest in every geography, in every industry, at every stage. And we decided two one-hour meetings using the exact same selection criteria that I defined 25 years ago, whether we best or not. So, every week we get about 300 inbound deals, and it&#8217;s all inbound based on our reputation and brand.</p> <p>Third comes from VCs. A third comes from the founders. We back from the past. We&#8217;ve invested in 1100 startups. That&#8217;s about 2000 founders. They come back with the next company. They send us their friends, employees, and about a third comes in cold. We review cold inbound. Deals are randomly assigned to one of the 11 investment team members, and we decide if we take a call or not.</p> <p>We take about 50 calls a week. The other all the other companies are like we have enough information decided that we don&#8217;t want to look at them right now. They&#8217;re out of scope, too early, too late, too expensive, whatever. Okay. We have an investment committee every Tuesday for the for the new deals after two hours.</p> <p>And then we take a second call about five to 10 of them every week. Let&#8217;s say seven on average, of which I&#8217;m mostly taking. And on the second call, I will decide if we invest or not, basically. We do the same thing for portfolio companies. We, we have many things that are non-traditional. So, we have set sizes per stage.</p> <p>We write 125K pre seed, 250K seed, 350K A, 550K B. Commitment checks are double. We don&#8217;t want to be a signal and we treat follow ons as though we were not existing investors knowing what we know now of the team of the company of the traction would we invest in this you ran at this valuation and very often the answer is no so we&#8217;ve only followed on in about 33 percent of the deals historically, and we often sell on the way up.</p> <p>We sell our winners. It&#8217;s the anti BC strategy. But because we&#8217;re price sensitive, and we know where the median valuations are, and I&#8217;m happy to share what they are later. If you guys are interested, we you know, we come in a reasonable or nothing&#8217;s cheap, but fair valuations on if we feel something&#8217;s overvalued, which simply are the winners.</p> <p>We sell 50 percent on the way up. Nothing&#8217;s magical, but 50 percent other than the fact that it&#8217;s a no regret philosophy. If the company goes to zero, we make five extra 10 X. We&#8217;re happy. And if it goes to infinity, we saw 50% and we&#8217;re happy to let it ride. And in a few cases will sell 75 percent of refields.</p> <p>Really outrageous. You know, 100 X a R or whatever. We still build companies. I&#8217;m currently building a personally I mean, It is part of the funds, but I mean, I&#8217;m allocating 40 percent of my time to it. A yield bearing stable coin to try to replace USDC and USDT backed by U. S. T. Bills. We don&#8217;t have a formal studio program anymore for a variety of reasons, but the returns of the studio were less compelling and less scalable.</p> <p>The returns on the investing side where, to date, we&#8217;ve had 1100 investments, 300 exits. We&#8217;ve been compounding at 37 percent IRR for 25 years, and of course, more of the capital has been deployed in the last six years than prior to that. We&#8217;ve deployed 600 million to date, of which 170 million, 179 million is for my partners and me, mostly for me, over 150 million of personal capital.</p> <p>Things I&#8217;ve been pretty, beyond what I do professionally in the post-it era. So, in 2013, I made a lot of iteration, so I realized that most people don&#8217;t bring as much iteration in their personal life as they do to their business life. And I came to realization, you know, every I saw my friends less often than I would like, and the quality of the relationship has changed because as you get older, your friends become busy.</p> <p>And as results, instead of like remaking the world that we did in college, when you see them, it&#8217;s a biographical update in the last six weeks since I last saw you, this is what our kids have been up to my wife, my husband, whatever my job, and but it&#8217;s not it&#8217;s okay, it&#8217;s not the reason we became friends.</p> <p>And so I actually decided to go through a period of extreme iteration, wherein I gave all my non-financial possessions to charity in late 2012, and I went down to 50 items, everything I own. Fit in a carry on my backpack and my tennis bag. And I decided, okay, to go back from first principles, because, of course, if you have a place to go to a city in which you live, you just go there and you don&#8217;t ask yourself if I have infinite time and an opportunity to do whatever I want and meet whomever I want and be wherever I want, what is it that I really would like to be doing?</p> <p>[Where is it I would like to be doing? And who is it I would like to be spending time with? I threw a lot of spaghetti in the wall, most of which failed, which is also true of startups in general. I started by going couch surfing on friends’ couches because I thought the idea was I could reconnect with them in a more meaningful way.</p> <p>Now, that failed dramatically because, as Benjamin Franklin said house guests like Bish start smelling after three to four days. And the reason is if you&#8217;re embedding yourself in their life, but they&#8217;re not making room for it because they are busy with work and kids and whatever, then it doesn&#8217;t work.</p> <p>And I&#8217;ve, as you can probably hear, Infinite energy. I go to bed very late. I don&#8217;t sleep very much. And so, my vision is like, we&#8217;re gonna, you know, we&#8217;re gonna like play tennis from like 8 p. m. to 10 p. m. We&#8217;re gonna remake the world. And, well, I try to sleep as much as I can in high quality sleep, but I am high energy and it wasn&#8217;t compatible with other people&#8217;s lives, especially since I was single and, you know, financially dependent and which is not the case of most people.</p> <p>Iterated a lot to the model where I am today where because; And I was couchsurfing at friends couches. So not a real opportunity to meet a wives, but Where I ended up, today It is one where I feel that each city and someone made a comment about like leaving the snow or whatever Each city is a best period to live in.</p> <p>You know, so I live in New York notionally, which means I&#8217;m in New York about four and a half months a year. I think New York is extraordinary in September and October, and it&#8217;s extraordinary like April 15 and June 15. But I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s particularly compelling, even though I&#8217;m in New York right now in the summer or in the winter.</p> <p>And so. I actually created a distributed life between three core locations where I home a place, and I rotate between them. I&#8217;m January, February, typically in Revelstoke, British Columbia, where I work from there during the day, but I&#8217;m heli skiing, backcountry skiing, et cetera, in the winter. March, I go back to Turks and Caicos, where I&#8217;m working during the day, but at night I&#8217;m like reading, writing, meditating, kite surfing, playing tennis, paddle, et cetera.</p> <p>And then April. May, June, I&#8217;m in New York. June, late June to early July, I go to see my family and friends in Nice. Visit uncles, aunts, family, cousins, nephews. I mean, I have a ginormous multi hundred percent family. Go back to my birthday for a few weeks in Turks in August, then go to Revelstoke in, in August to mountain bike rock climb, et cetera, again, working during the day, but doing all these activities at night and the weekends.</p> <p>Go to Burning Man every year, and then back to New York, September, October, and then back to Turks, November, December, and for New Year&#8217;s, usually go to Revelstoke. I add two weeks to a new exotic location every year. In 2023, for instance, the first two weeks of the year, I walked to the South Pole. I do a typically an off-grid category upgrade section every year where I completely disconnected. Usually alone, either doing, I know I crossed Costa Rica on bicycle from the Atlantic, the Pacific, but just my backpack, sleeping bag and tents and water filtration system and learned to start a fire.</p> <p>And I&#8217;ve done a lot of these types of adventures and I do them regularly, often alone these days with a guide. And pass alone alone. But now with a guy because I&#8217;d rather not die, especially now that I&#8217;m a father to a two-year-old, very nontraditional life relationship and general setup, but works for me.</p> <p>And I&#8217;m as happy as can be. Other thing. I know Jonathan Swanson from Thumbtack presented here, but I&#8217;ve structured my life to only do the things I love doing. And not do any of the things I don&#8217;t like doing. And so I have a virtual assistant in the Philippines which I pay 1500 a month who manages a big chunk of my online life, but more than you can imagine like if I’m going to play she&#8217;ll like I she knows I love tennis she&#8217;ll Fine, she&#8217;ll book free.</p> <p>She&#8217;ll identify the best clubs, find partners my level, pre book the lesson, pre book lessons or partners to play with. If I&#8217;m in New York, she&#8217;ll organize, she&#8217;ll look at all the activities there might be for me to do. She knows I like to organize intellectual salons. So, for instance, I&#8217;m hosting a post exit founder dinner tonight with like, six sets. Well, eight people total. And I host these intellectual salons in New York. I&#8217;m going to like whatever magic shows off Broadway, you name it. And all this could be outsourced. In addition to having an estate manager that manages my offline life and I outsource things like creating helping create photo albums, videos.</p> <p>But you name it, I&#8217;m happy to go in more detail on how, you know, I have four part time nannies that I&#8217;ve hired because French nannies are going to work more than 20 hours a week, but they, they cover 745 a.m. to 745 p.m. seven days a week, and they agree between themselves who works when and also who travels when and where.</p> <p>And so, I&#8217;ve, I&#8217;ve created an entire system for basically making sure that I live as rich, passionate life as I can and not do anything of the things I don&#8217;t like. And there are a lot of things I don&#8217;t like in life. I guess from a work life balance perspective, probably worth mentioning, New York plays the role of intellectual, professional, social, artistic endeavors.</p> <p>But I&#8217;ve come to realize that when you&#8217;re doing, you&#8217;re not being thoughtful, you&#8217;re not being reflective. And so actually, I like that alternation where I go from two months in New York, by the end of which I&#8217;m exhausted, because You know, it is 24/7, 7 days a week, basically to going to place like Turks, where even though I&#8217;m working during the day, the evenings are really meditating, reading, writing, being healthy, playing tennis, playing paddle, etc.</p> <p>So would not have expected and where I am, neither from a life setup perspective, three different distributed locations where everything&#8217;s kind of replicated from an infrastructure perspective, would not have expected to become a BC. And again, I&#8217;m a non-traditional VC. Because I don&#8217;t lead enterprise, et cetera.</p> <p>I don&#8217;t currently have institutional piece that that&#8217;s the objective for fund four, but I&#8217;m not changing my strategy. I don&#8217;t want to change. It is a reflection of my personal intellectual curiosity. I want to have the flexibility to continue to be building companies because I think it&#8217;s fun and interesting, et cetera.</p> <p>I&#8217;ll pause here. I spoke at a million miles per hour, which is I am prone to but happy to yeah, answer any questions and keep the conversation dialogue going.</p> <p><strong>Barak Kaufman:</strong> That was amazing. Fabrice, for doing that. So firstly, just for everyone, feel free to post questions in the chat. I think we&#8217;ll prioritize everyone to raise their hand just like Sam just did.</p> <p>I&#8217;ll come back to you in a second, Sam, but feel free to keep your hand raised and anybody else that wants to raise their hand in Zoom. Fabrice, just to kind of kick things off, kind of one question for me it sounds like you&#8217;ve kind of, like, tinkered and tried to perfect this model in the post exit life and you went through different iterations.</p> <p>I think you used those words. If you were going to give advice. To a founder who recently went through an exit, what advice would you give them?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Well, obviously, the answer is personal, but take time to reflect on what it is you truly love to do, what is it you&#8217;d like to allocate your time to and what is going to make you happy? You know, for instance I&#8217;ve come, I came to realize that I&#8217;ve been overworking like probably many of us have, and, and I love working, but I didn&#8217;t value it in my, my friends and family as much as I would like to.</p> <p>I didn&#8217;t, and they didn&#8217;t feel as valued. My grandmother, which had been the matriarch of the family, had used to host all of us at her place for Christmas, Christmas Eve, it was a tradition, like there&#8217;d be 20, 30 of us would come there, and we&#8217;d be organized by age, and she was really the rallying point of the family, and that had kind of gone away after her passing, and I decided, once I had the financial means to do that, to restart or rekindle the tradition, for instance, so for now, every year, Sometimes for my birthday, but definitely for Christmas or New Year&#8217;s, a big chunk of my family comes at my place in Turks and Caicos, and I literally, I&#8217;ll send a jet to pick them up in Nice and bring them over to Turks.</p> <p>I&#8217;ll find tickets for everyone. I&#8217;ll rent eight different houses. This Christmas, for instance, or this New Year&#8217;s, for instance, there&#8217;s 50 of us, 50. I came for two weeks and we had a blast and it&#8217;s something that I it does. It takes a lot of work to make happen, but it&#8217;s something that I valued and prioritize.</p> <p>Let me see if I can share my screen here just for a fun photo of the family. I can let&#8217;s go to Facebook for a second, not common moderation to do it. Not that Facebook is the best place, but I have that photo handy, so it makes it easier. Oh yeah, I did post it. Yeah. So, this is US 50 people for Christmas, for New Year.</p> <p>And it goes from my son, who&#8217;s two and a half to my uncle back here who&#8217;s 87. And these are, are I saved? It&#8217;s the family I have and the family I choose. So, it&#8217;s it&#8217;s it&#8217;s a very, it&#8217;s a very big group and but it&#8217;s super loving and supportive and something that I valued. So, I&#8217;d go to as I said, I&#8217;d go to first principles.</p> <p>I see a lot of questions. So maybe I&#8217;ll take I&#8217;ll take them 1 by one. Do you share the four criteria used to invest? So that&#8217;s a question for Michael Cassidy. The answer is I do. I will actually first put the link in with the actual criteria, but I will describe them as well briefly. So, wait a second.</p> <p>How FJ Labs, so I blog, as you can tell, I just wrote my year in review blog posts which covers professional, personal predictions, et cetera. So, these are the four criteria, the four criteria. So, in a one hour call, I&#8217;m trying to evaluate number one. Do I like the team? Well, I&#8217;ll give you the four and I&#8217;ll go in detail.</p> <p>Do I like the team? Number two, do I like the business? Number three, do I like the deal terms or number four? Is it in line with my thesis or vision of where the future of humanity is now? Number one, do I like the team? Every VC in the world will tell you I only invest in extraordinary people. The thing is it can&#8217;t be subjective.</p> <p>It can&#8217;t be something you know if you see it. And so, for us, Or for me, I have an explicit sense of what that means for it to be an amazing founder. And I want the Venn diagram intersection of founders that are both extraordinarily eloquent and amazing salespeople because they&#8217;re going to raise better capital and hire better terms, they&#8217;re going to attract better people, they&#8217;re going to have more BD and more PR.</p> <p>But that&#8217;s not enough, because if you only have that, maybe you don&#8217;t build a very profitable, sustainable company. Number two Do I want founders who know how to execute? And the way I tease out at one hour call if they can execute is the way they address the question number two. Question number two, which is, is this an attractive business?</p> <p>So, it&#8217;s a combination of total addressable market size, but more importantly, unit economics. Now I&#8217;m mostly seed rather than pre-seed, but even pre-see. I want the founder to be able to articulate what they&#8217;re that they&#8217;ve done it. Lending page analysis that they understand the density keywords that they know what the CPCs look like, how much they can spend per month based on an estimated conversion rate.</p> <p>What a cat looks like, and they better know what the average order value of the industry is and where the cost and margin structure looks like, and therefore get a sense of LTV to CAC. And if they&#8217;re alive while they be able to articulate what they are, and if they&#8217;re not good, and I want I like businesses where you recoup your fully loaded CAC on a CM2 basis in six months, and you 18 months, why it&#8217;s going to get there with skill.</p> <p>And when founders cannot articulate that, it typically does not lead to amazing outcomes from the ability to execute. And so, I want both of these things to be true, and I care deeply. It&#8217;s not all the founder and only the founder. I think Warren Buffett once said when the reputation of an amazing founder means that of a terrible business, it&#8217;s typically the reputation of the business that wins.</p> <p>And so, founders matter, but the business you&#8217;re in matters dramatically as well. Number three, deal terms. I know what the median is. The median these days for pre seed is about you&#8217;re raising one at four, five, pre, pre-seed seed you&#8217;re doing. If you&#8217;re a SaaS business, you&#8217;re doing 30 k at MRR or a marketplace, you&#8217;re one 50K and GMV and you&#8217;re raising three at 10 pre, and that&#8217;s or 12 free.</p> <p>A&#8217;s these days, you&#8217;re doing 100k plus in MRR 500, 600, 700k in GMV, you&#8217;re raising 7 at 23 pre 30 posts, and the B&#8217;s, you&#8217;re doing 500k plus in MRR, or you&#8217;re raising, you&#8217;re doing two and a half million GMV, and you&#8217;re raising 15 at 50 pre. These valuations to many appear low, especially people based in Silicon Valley, or people that have been investing in the new, new hot trend of the day.</p> <p>But that&#8217;s because the mean is higher than the median because they&#8217;re exceptional deals for second time founders that are raising these insane rounds. But what I&#8217;ve made money on half of my, so I&#8217;ve had 300 exits. I&#8217;ve actually made money in 50 percent of them 150 of them because I came in at a low price.</p> <p>And so even when the company got acquired, I came in at five or 10 15 or 20. And I did okay. If you come in at a high price, your price for perfection. And yes, there are some companies you&#8217;d rather be in than not, and you&#8217;re willing to pay up, but I&#8217;d be extraordinarily careful. To mix it up because I&#8217;ve only been answering questions in the chat, I&#8217;ll take Sam&#8217;s question, and then I&#8217;ll go back to the chat.</p> <p><strong>Barak Kaufman:</strong> Alright, cool. Thanks so much. So, it&#8217;s interesting to hear how you balance the nanny situation and multiple locations. And it sounds like you have young kids, so have you considered what to do with respect to school? Because this is something that I&#8217;m struggling with my wife and figuring out how to do multiple locations in school.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> So, I have a life partner. So, the school and I put the valuation matrix in the chat for schooling. So, we put my so until now, it&#8217;s been easy because my Some was too. So, you came with me everywhere and there was no school. So that was the the perfect setup. We decided to put so my big chunk of my family only speaks French.</p> <p>So, the nannies were only French speaking because, of course, we live in the U. S or New York and they&#8217;re going to have English by default. I put my son in a school called The Ecole. The Ecole is a new school created by one of the renaissance hedge fund founders and the philosophy is the rigor of the French system with the creativity of the American system where you have like public speaking and teamwork etc and you have both an English speaker and a French speaker in both class in each class plus a helper to deal with like everything else so it&#8217;s three people per class they have a two&#8217;s program my son is in the two&#8217;s program and so what I’m changing to my current schedule to make sure i see my son more Is I&#8217;m with them full time from April 15 to basically November 5 because we spend the summers together and I&#8217;m in New York then.</p> <p>Instead of going away for two months at a time, now what I&#8217;m doing is I&#8217;m making, I&#8217;m making sure, so we spend all of our vacations together but he, he and his mother doesn&#8217;t travel with me and, and she&#8217;s a partner at Kirkland the law firm. She&#8217;s working on like IPOs and M&amp; A and public work. So, I go. I make sure that I&#8217;m not away for more than two weeks. So, I&#8217;ll go two weeks with you to Turks alone, which I need anyway for reflection, etcetera. And I&#8217;ll come back to York to spend a week or two with them full time. And again, we don&#8217;t live together. So, we have a non-traditional relationship. We have a philosophy called living apart together, which probably it&#8217;s worth mentioning it for a second, because I find that if you spend too much time around your partner, you become roommates. As opposed to becoming really lovers and life partners, and you&#8217;re not present in every interact, iteration, interaction.</p> <p>And, you know, because if we&#8217;re together, if we live together, you know, maybe I want to be playing video games for a couple hours, or I want to be working, or whatever, and I&#8217;m not present. And so instead, we live separately, though I see my son literally every day, multiple hours a day, phone off, or we&#8217;re just playing.</p> <p>And I will put the link to the school in the chat, it’s called the Ecole. But if you&#8217;re not interested in and you know, I just said French speaking. It probably doesn&#8217;t make nearly as much sense for you, but it&#8217;s an amazing school and I&#8217;m putting it here. Okay, so we don&#8217;t live together, and we choose to go together.</p> <p>So, we do family night, maybe. Two nights a week. We do date night just us without kids two nights a week, and we do date night at my place. We do family night at her place, but I will see my son every day, multiple hours a day with phone off, but I don&#8217;t sleep there. And it works very well for us. And so, when, in the month where I&#8217;m traveling, where he&#8217;s in school, so October November, sorry, November, December though not the holidays because we&#8217;re together then I&#8217;ll be in Turks, we&#8217;re Revelstoke, so maybe say January, February, but I&#8217;ll come back to New York for a week.</p> <p>But we spend all of our vacations together. So again, non-traditional setup. It&#8217;s also a setup that my partner loves and that works for us. I focus on quality of time, not quantity of time. And I revised the right to change my mind about the setup and in the future, but I&#8217;ve already changed it, right? I went from two-month, two-month, two months to making it to maybe three weeks, one week, three weeks, one week, et cetera, to make sure that I&#8217;m seeing my kids as often.</p> <p>Well, kids plural, because I have a daughter coming February 15^th. Not for everyone. Thank you. Not for everyone, but it works for me. And I have a dog as well, a white shepherd, a white German shepherd that travels with me everywhere. Actually, I&#8217;ll give you a sense of how it works by putting a, put a photo, a link to my urine review in here. Okay, let me go back to the questions.</p> <p>I don&#8217;t know if anyone else has their hands raised. In the meantime, I&#8217;ll go back to this. How long did it take to donate everything? Rootprost, you&#8217;re thoughtful.</p> <p>It took very little time, but, and I had to put zero thought into it, but when I went to my partner and I&#8217;m like, Hey, I&#8217;m going to do this for the next six, whatever, X period of time, I&#8217;m giving away everything away. And she was like you have like this 13,000 square foot house and bowl of stuff. Who are you donating to and how?</p> <p>And she basically structured it for me. And so. It ended up being thoughtful, but not I was not very, but it took very little time because she really coordinated it. And that was back in 2012. And so, we, you know, from the books to the to that went to different schools or libraries to the furniture that went to either people.</p> <p>We knew people that needed it to the clothes that we don&#8217;t. I mean, everything ended up being more thoughtful, but I have to admit, I took. I just made the executive decision, give everything away, and I didn&#8217;t deal with the details that my partner did. And she&#8217;s amazing. Da da dum. Left connected, yeah. Why remote assistant? Why not local? My remote assistant in the Philippines. I&#8217;ve so I&#8217;ve never talked to her. I&#8217;ve never met her. Because I my philosophy for hiring is I hired like multiple of the same on Upwork or elsewhere. And then I give them a partial task. I see how they do. And then I keep the best. And that&#8217;s I found someone in Bangladesh like a dollar an hour to help with my photo albums.</p> <p>I&#8217;ve been someone in like Russia to help with my video editing, etc. In this case, it&#8217;s through a company called yourremoteassistant.com. I&#8217;ll put the link as well here. And you basically, so they send you one, they&#8217;re based on your specs. And if you&#8217;re not happy, you just change, get another one.</p> <p>That&#8217;s why I never bothered to interview her. We&#8217;ve been working together at this point, at this point for a decade. It&#8217;s extraordinary because she&#8217;s like a PhD in creative writing. She&#8217;s way, way more skilled than any assistant I&#8217;ve ever had, including in person. She works exactly whatever hours I want to work.</p> <p>So, when I change time zone, she changes time zone as well. She has access to everything from signatures to I mean, and I don&#8217;t know. I find that she&#8217;s been just more effective, harder working than anyone I&#8217;ve ever had in person. Not to mention it&#8217;s way cheaper. So, we at our firm, we have 10 of them.</p> <p>And the amount of stuff you can outsource is greater than you think. You know, if you like, if you have an online Shopify, they can do customer care. They can do, they can do inventory management. I mean, you name it. In my case, she will help. She pretends to be me, stays on the phone with T Mobile, or gets to doctor&#8217;s appointments.</p> <p>I mean, you name it. Everything is done, and it&#8217;s extraordinarily effective. And I actually like the working through WhatsApp with her. I find it. I don&#8217;t know. We have an office manager, and I used to have an in-person assistant. I&#8217;ve had many of them, including very well paid, super high end, and maybe that didn&#8217;t work nearly as well.</p> <p>I think for that type of role, I have an estate manager, and my estate manager, actually, maybe I&#8217;ll share my screen for a second. This is something I&#8217;m presenting tomorrow. Take it to one second, predictively. Minimize this.</p> <p>Life hacks. I mean, probably this is not obvious, but I don&#8217;t read any news whatsoever because, like, following the day by day of anything is actually not that relevant. So. Yes, it&#8217;s terrible and tragic what&#8217;s happening in Gaza or Ukraine, but you know it&#8217;s happening and then taking a step back once every six months understanding why, how, etc. is relevant, but like the day by day is completely irrelevant, you know, in COVID in the early days, it was all about like who violated the mandate, like there&#8217;s no real information, right? Like what I want to know in COVID is, you know, and it hasn&#8217;t come out yet is what would be the correct policy decisions to minimize health outcomes and economic and negative impacts and probably the answer is different in the early days.</p> <p>We have no vaccine that later when you do have a vaccine, but like that&#8217;s an analysis. That&#8217;s interesting. The day-to-day use. It&#8217;s all sensationalist BS. So, I don&#8217;t read news. I don&#8217;t read newspapers. I don&#8217;t read online news. I do nothing. I follow tech news, but like against time as a day. Twitter and all that stuff.</p> <p>It&#8217;s all negative all the time. They&#8217;re capturing your attention and focusing on outrage. I completely avoid it. I&#8217;m sort of saying so. You&#8217;re a remote assistant. The other very good one is Athena. That&#8217;s the one, that&#8217;s the company created by Jonathan Swanson from Thumbtack. You probably presented it here.</p> <p>But she manages all of my Agenda pending meetings. Confirm meetings. This is what I get every day. Then this is my agenda. If I know what it&#8217;s about, there&#8217;s no conversation. There&#8217;s no detail. But if I don&#8217;t know what it&#8217;s about, she will put the detail of the context of why I&#8217;m having the conversation.</p> <p>That&#8217;s for the next day. This is a typical day for me, by the way. So, yeah, and it goes to like, and it&#8217;ll include all the personal stuff. So, yes, I&#8217;m giving a speech or whatever here, but then. Paddle, which is a form of tennis. If you want 9 pm. to 11. Everything is in there. If I&#8217;m going to do a meditation, go to the gym.</p> <p>Everything is in my agenda every day, but she will manage invites for dinner. So, for instance, the dinner I&#8217;m doing tonight, she&#8217;ll book doctor&#8217;s appointment. She&#8217;ll wait in line at my behalf. She&#8217;ll book meditations, gym. She organizes tennis. She helps create posts. So, she knows how to code as well. I will write the blog post, but she will write, she will post it and she will publish it and send the newsletter and she manage the Substack.</p> <p>So, I do it in my WordPress, which I coded myself because I like doing that and I like writing, but she will manage the Substack on her own. She&#8217;ll buy stuff for me, including on Amazon, because it&#8217;s easier to just tell her. She&#8217;ll sign everything, do the KYC, do government research, look for shows for me to attend, manage my, she created a design for my birthday invite.</p> <p>She manages the invite lists. She manages all travel things and then this I iterate for album creation, you know, like slide 27 do this. This this photo makes me look back, but a different photo, whatever. And then you have the full album that I print and give to my parents. I do the same with someone else.</p> <p>By the way, I&#8217;ve been on UpWork for videos, and I create a video every year. And for every 1 of my major trips, and then for offline. I have an estate manager, so he&#8217;s my main estate manager. He&#8217;s a chef otherwise, but he drives, he cleans, car maintenance. If tonight for the dinner, he&#8217;s normally cooking, but he&#8217;s organizing the whatever, like waiters.</p> <p>If it&#8217;s a big party, he will bring, he will bring chef, like everything offline, and he manages the other property managers. For each of my properties, I have a estate manager slash property manager, and that is also the chef, and they manage the staff and all the licensing, and I do sublets, whereas this house here generates 4 million in revenues, when I am not there. And I am there four months a year, and they manage that, but they don&#8217;t manage the reservations. They just manage the customer experience. I&#8217;ve outsourced to an offline the reservation manager. I created the site myself, and I moved all the traffic from Airbnb to direct reservations because that&#8217;s what I&#8217;d like to do.</p> <p>But I have someone managing all the reservations for my dog. I have a full-time dog trainer and who actually travels with me. Gets all the documents. Gets the vaccines. Now that&#8217;s not forever. My dog is six months old, but for the first two years.</p> <p>And then for the nannies. So, I find them on care.com and also in a French. I make sure they speak French. They have a website to group routine themselves. I only take one for travel. They all have a shared calendar app. And I need them to be able to speak French verbally, can travel, can drive, because they need to be able to drive the kid. And everything&#8217;s organized here.</p> <p>Then there&#8217;s a nanny handbook that I created where everyone is following it. And so, there&#8217;s like instructions of what needs to be done, etc. So that model works.</p> <p><strong>Barak Kaufman:</strong> You&#8217;ve just wowed this entire group. I think everybody&#8217;s gone just throughout wherever they were at the level of optimization.</p> <p>So, thank you for sharing that. And there are quite a few requests if you&#8217;re comfortable sharing the presentation after.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> Yeah, I will. I think I’ve put the link. I put the link to the presentation and Dropbox, I think somewhere. But it&#8217;s gonna be on my blog. I&#8217;m also going through this in detail tomorrow on my podcast at noon, but it&#8217;ll be on my blog shortly.</p> <p>How do you manage all these companies and positions? Oh, I have a tool called EDA, but also more importantly, I have a big back office. So, the tool we use, let me put it here. It&#8217;s EDA.CA. Let&#8217;s see. Yeah, there, but it&#8217;s pretty cheap. It allows us to manage. Not everyone needs it, but also, we&#8217;re 34 in the firm. Of which, I mean, obviously 10 virtual assistants, but like 13 or like back office, COO, CFO, legal, all that stuff. And I don&#8217;t deal with any of that. Like, I don&#8217;t, life is too short to read legal documents.</p> <p>Life is too short to spend time doing admin work. So that&#8217;s why I have a team around me to do all that shit that I hate. Someone wrote. Life is too short to deal with assholes. Completely agree. I do not tolerate jerks. If you&#8217;re a brilliant founder, but you&#8217;re an asshole, I will not back you, I will not fund you.</p> <p>I will not invest with you. I will not hire you if you&#8217;re an amazing employee. Life is too short. You only work with people that you love working with.</p> <p>Let me go back to higher on the let&#8217;s see if I miss anything. What’s your most impactful mental performance practice? I do meditate. I meditate I have a 20, well,10-to-30-minute meditation practice every day. It is I will write a blog post on how it is.</p> <p>I do four or five different things, but they&#8217;re very quick and efficient, but I&#8217;m very good at being present. I have aphantasia. I cannot visualize and so whatever I&#8217;m doing, I&#8217;m doing that and nothing else. I also have no notifications on anything at ever my I don&#8217;t get email notifications, WhatsApp notifications. My phone never rings, never vibrates. Even a vibration takes you away from the present of what you&#8217;re doing. It&#8217;s like, Oh, maybe there&#8217;s something I should be looking at. You don&#8217;t want to have FOMO. Whatever you&#8217;re doing is that you&#8217;ve chosen to be doing the best and most important thing you should be doing right now, and so I have no notifications whatsoever, and I&#8217;m very good at, like, going from context to context in the present. Humans cannot multitask.</p> <p>You monotask. You want to monotask effectively. So, I will book time for emails. I will book time for whatever. And I will be present in that interaction, but I will not, but you don&#8217;t want to be doing many things simultaneously. Meditation, I like guided meditations not with, and I follow, I don&#8217;t have an app. I have a few meditations I do, a few breathwork practices. I read a lot, but I read for fun. I don&#8217;t read to be more productive. I read mostly sci-fi but I read biographies. I read every 50-100 books a year. But I read for fun. I read one hour every day before bed, which is why I ended up that school. I think we discussed how we&#8217;re going to change when school changes.</p> <p>How do you plan to school the child? Yeah, probably worth mentioning. I&#8217;m a laissez faire parent. It&#8217;s all about I want to encourage positive risk taking. I&#8217;m not a helicopter parent. I will. I wanted them to learn to fail and learn to fail in a positive way.</p> <p>And you need to fail repeatedly to succeed. And I will encourage and reward work and effort over outcome. And I&#8217;ve already worked with that pretty effectively. And yeah, and the anti-helicopter parent. But I provide love and presence to the fact that my partner and I love each other. I mean, we&#8217;ve been together for 11 years, and we&#8217;re like life partners.</p> <p>Even though it&#8217;s a non-traditional relationship, we have an open relationship, which is very non-traditional. And as I mentioned earlier, we don&#8217;t live together. It&#8217;s not for everyone, but it works for us.</p> <p>Will you start more companies? If I&#8217;m inspired to do it. So, the problem for me, sorry, company at this point is the opportunity cost of my time is infinitely high, and I find that the amount of leverage I have by working with founders and helping them. And helping that many founders where my impact is actually meaningful, both either strategic advice and or helping them fundraise, which is my superpower because I&#8217;m not leading. I share a deal with all the top pieces of the world is massive. And as a result of that, it’s very hard for me to justify being founder CEO versus doing this.</p> <p>But I like being founder CEO. So, I&#8217;ve created this hybrid model where I&#8217;m executive chairman, but not CEOs of companies that I like. Now, why do I do this? Right? I could have retired. 20 years ago. Actually, literally exactly 20 years ago. I was 29 when I got my first ginormous exit. It’s purpose driven.</p> <p>Oh, wait, I forgot to mention number four of the selection criteria got distracted. Number four was like; does it meet my thesis where the world is heading? And I have a very clear perspective on the future of work, the future of mobility, the future of food, the future of every category you can think of. And ultimately, it&#8217;s purpose driven.</p> <p>Are we solving a big problem? And there are three problems that I care about. Inequality of opportunity. Which I&#8217;m mostly addressing through marketplaces, because obviously they&#8217;re deflationary by virtue being deflationary. They&#8217;re inclusionary. Number 2 climate change, and I&#8217;m so optimistic that we&#8217;re going to solve it.</p> <p>I mean, I&#8217;m seeing so many improvements, especially in solar and batteries and many other things, right? Like, and this is 100 different subsectors that I&#8217;m beyond optimistic and happy to double click on that at some point. And number three as I said, the mental and physical well-being crisis.</p> <p>So why do I do these things? I think the political system is broken and is structurally incapable, but it&#8217;s broken, by the way, by design. I think it&#8217;s a feature. It&#8217;s not a bug. I think it&#8217;s the way the founding fathers intended it to be and people who think that the politics are so partisan, et cetera, it&#8217;s not worse than the past.</p> <p>I mean, we had a full-blown civil war, we had, like, race riots, we had, like you know. The desegregation movement, the anti-war movement in the 70s, all these were actually just as acrimonious as what we have now, just we have recency bias and we think now is worse, but actually life is amazing right now better than it&#8217;s ever been, even though our politics are broken, but they were always broken and I suspect they will continue to be broken, and so because the political system is, is incapable of addressing these systems and these issues, it&#8217;s up to us, doers, founders, investors to go and solve the world&#8217;s problems. And so, but I&#8217;m so optimistic. I mean, we are going to rise to the challenge of the 21st century and we are going to create a better world of tomorrow for our children and for ourselves, a world of equality of opportunity and a plenty.</p> <p>What is your relationship with money? it&#8217;s a means to an end. I don&#8217;t chase more of it actually. It doesn&#8217;t make any difference in my life. I&#8217;d more money is irrelevant, but I, so look, I do a lot of non for profit, right? I donate a lot of money. I fund the education of 10,000 kids K through 12 in Dominican Republic. But when I think of the impact I have, like the last company I built as 350 million unique visitors a month, we have 50 million people would make a living off the site.</p> <p>The impact of that for profit entity on the world is dramatic. I mean, we are part of the fabric of society in Pakistan, right? Like these are, and this is true for all the investments I make. I don&#8217;t invest because I think they&#8217;re, I do think they&#8217;re going to make money. And I like the fact that because they&#8217;re profitable, they&#8217;re scalable and sustainable, but they actually are all making a positive difference to the world.</p> <p>So, the objective is not to make more money. As I said, I could have retired 20 years ago. The objective is to solve the world&#8217;s problems. And I use the vector for profit technology enterprises to do it because their acid light scalable and can touch billions. Normal companies cannot touch billions of people that easily.</p> <p>Any thesis on how to bring back knowledge, truth and facts to the masses? Well, truth, I don&#8217;t know but knowledge for sure right like we are now in an extraordinary period of democratization of information, right? If you want to have access, if you want a class by the World Nobel Prize winner, it&#8217;s on Coursera and it&#8217;s free. If you&#8217;re a K through 12 student, you wanna improve in math, you can use Khanmigo, which is the AI by Khan Academy. It&#8217;s amazing! So, if you&#8217;re motivated self-learning, it is easier to learn anything that it&#8217;s ever been. YouTube videos on every topic, extraordinary. And if you wanna start a startup. When I started back in the 1990s, I needed like Oracle databases and Microsoft web servers and millions to just turn the lights on.</p> <p>I needed to build my own data center. Now you have no code, low code ai, like to, I could build you anything for sub 25K, probably. It&#8217;s amazing. It&#8217;s, it&#8217;s leading to a massive democratization of startup creation and entrepreneurship. That is beautiful.</p> <p>And so yeah, any advice for a founder starting a year off. I should have taken a year off. The problem is it doesn&#8217;t suit my personality particularly well, I&#8217;ve always been doing things. So I went from thing to thing to thing, but yeah, beat, think through the things you love doing and go pursue them. Like look, I work hard, but I play hard or like I&#8217;m kitesurfing and I&#8217;m a fantastic kitesurfer, heli-skier.</p> <p>I&#8217;m still a competitive tennis player. I&#8217;m still like college level tennis player. I&#8217;m 49. I beat like beat up on the 25-year-olds. You know, I exercise. When I&#8217;m in Turks, for instance, I was averaging three and a half hours of sports a day, every day to stay as fit as I can be. And yeah, just do fun, do crazy things. You always want to do like go to. I go to burning. I think psychedelics once in a while. You know, I drop acid. It&#8217;s amazing. Go do a deep go take Ayahuasca and do a deep journey. I mean, like, I don&#8217;t know, like, there&#8217;s so much to do and to be done and to live. It&#8217;s a privilege to be alive and it&#8217;s a privilege to be alive in this in this time period.</p> <p>It&#8217;s a privilege to be post exit. So, money is a tool for freedom. It&#8217;s not something to pursue more of, but to actually enjoy and use it to make the world a better place.</p> <p><strong>Barak Kaufman:</strong> I just want to say someone was messaging me directly on the side and said, I want to ask him if he takes psychedelics, but I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s appropriate.</p> <p>And then almost like on cue, he answered the question directly. So, thank you for that.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> I am an open book. Nothing is secret. And everything&#8217;s transparent. Yeah. So, at psychedelics, I&#8217;ve probably taken everyone in the world from 5 MeO DMT to Peyote to 2C B to Acid to Psilocybin and whatever to Ayahuasca.</p> <p>I take them rarely. I take them intentionally. So, it&#8217;s set, setting, intention. Crescents. I don&#8217;t microdose. I find microdose, you open yourself up to whatever, and then you&#8217;re going to work, and you have a stressful day. I think that&#8217;s idiotic. I like to macrodose, like, real, and either for fun, like, you know, let&#8217;s say, one, one and a half grams of mushrooms if I&#8217;m burning, man, or, like, if I were to do a real deep meditative journey, like, I did a nine gram psilocybin journey with music that was just, like, basically, you know, beautiful meditation for, like, seven hours.</p> <p>A very introverted that&#8217;s alone. You don&#8217;t do I don&#8217;t think both are interesting. I did a couple times a year. I wouldn&#8217;t recommend a huge amount of time because it takes time. It&#8217;s distracting whatever but I think it&#8217;s worth doing on a you know what a couple times a year basis. So, at burning man, I&#8217;ll do acid for sure acid is like the one thing to do at Burning Man.</p> <p>I know we’re probably overtime.</p> <p><strong>Barak Kaufman:</strong> I think as long as you’re willing to, yeah, it&#8217;s your call. It&#8217;s your call, your calendar. I think everybody&#8217;s enjoying it.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> I can give a few more minutes.</p> <p><strong>Barak Kaufman:</strong> All right, let&#8217;s do it.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda: </strong>What do I think about AI and the future of AI? So, here&#8217;s so here&#8217;s what&#8217;s interesting. I think AI in 23 went to, we were at like the top of the hype cycle. Where clearly there is a transformation in the quality of AI with GPD 3. 5 and obviously not before and Gemini and Bard, etc. And I do think it will ultimately transform society in a more meaningful way that we can imagine today. But I also think it&#8217;s going to take a lot longer than people think it&#8217;s going to take.</p> <p>And so that&#8217;s why I think we&#8217;re at the top of the hype cycle. And there&#8217;s going to be the period of delusion in the next five years. Because before. You know, when do we think governments who really integrate AI for improving its operating capacity or even large enterprise, right? Like if you&#8217;re a health medical claims processor, the hallucination problem is real.</p> <p>And like, you don&#8217;t want to have like, you don&#8217;t want to be liable for, for having bad results. And so, while I suspect in 20 years, it&#8217;ll be so transformative. We want to be able to recognize a lot of things, the way we work and a lot of things, humanity, and the next five years, I think it&#8217;s going to be the period of like disappointment.</p> <p>So, what I&#8217;ve been, and because AI overvalued as an investment category in businesses with no business model, no modes and no differentiation, I shied away from investing in AI other than a few specific vertical applications with proprietary data and in reasonable valuations, but they&#8217;re very far and few between, but everything we&#8217;re doing.</p> <p>These is a is a I everyone&#8217;s using a I write like every company is using it for customer care and to be better and programming. I use it every day, right? Like what? I am not a great coder anymore. So, when I&#8217;m coding my blog and I forget some functions that just ask a GPT. Hey, what do you need us? What&#8217;s the correct code? Don&#8217;t ask to code entire thing that it sucks at that. But like specific functions very easy.</p> <p>I have your investments done over time when you compare first time founders the second time. Yeah. Same average IRR, second time founders who, well I can actually wait, so second time founders fall in two buckets.</p> <p>Second time founders have been very successful the first time, often become more purposeful and mission-driven of the second time and it leads to both better outcomes and worse outcomes, meaning more companies fail because they&#8217;re taking more risks and when they succeed, they succeed bigger by their blended IRs is the same.<br><br>Second time founders who failed the first time on average have done better than both, than just general founders and the second time founders who&#8217;ve been successful the first time because they are hungry and have a point to prove it if they&#8217;ve learned the lesson why they failed.</p> <p>So, if they learn that, okay, oh, I spent too much money. I raised too much money at too high of a price, whatever, whatever it was, they need to learn, or they didn&#8217;t focus enough product market fit or uni economics, then it&#8217;s fine.</p> <p><strong>Barak Kaufman:</strong> Who&#8217;s the most impressive founder that you&#8217;ve ever backed.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> I&#8217;m not going to do the most impressive founder, but there was a few very impressive founder and founders and some, some have failed, some haven&#8217;t failed. So, for instance, Alex Gardner, who built a zoom pizza, which failed completely, he is so eloquent and such an amazing salesperson and very proud of Ryan from Flexport is extraordinary. He&#8217;s a machine and visionary is amazing.</p> <p>So, there are many amazing people out there. I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s one that&#8217;s like, oh, you know, but like people Yeah, [00:55:00] there&#8217;s like let&#8217;s say oh, yeah Brett Addock. He&#8217;s extraordinary. So, Brett built Vettery, which was a labor marketplace, which we sold for, like, 100 million at echo. Then he went on to build Archer, which is an electric vertical takeoff company, which is which took public and now he&#8217;s building Figure.</p> <p>Figure is made creating these humanoid robots who replace humans in warehouses. And the problems he&#8217;s solving to do that are so extraordinary. I guess I could put an Elon in the category as an early investor in let me put the figure link in here.</p> <p><strong>Barak Kaufman:</strong> I don&#8217;t remember if he&#8217;s in the community or not, but his it was twice shared as like SPDs to invest in at least a dozen founders from the group invested.</p> <p>There was a recording of like his pitch for it. I have sent that recording that he did for like fundraising to dozen right from Attic exited Repeat founders. But yeah, like he&#8217;s just it was the best pitch I&#8217;ve ever seen in my entire life. He&#8217;s just yeah.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> So, I think Brett is up there. Good. Amazing. Better. Obviously, I backed the Elon back in the day. I invested in 2007 and space X. Still an investor. I didn&#8217;t sell any of my shares. I&#8217;m not selling any of my shares. Yeah.</p> <p>Who do you look up to and why? I guess historical role models, Octavian, or Augustus, who basically single handedly created the Roman Empire and brought an end to the civil war in, in, in, in Rome and created the basis for 500 years of Pax Romana and a significantly improved livelihood for humanity writ large for 500 years. I mean, at least the first two, 300 of that.</p> <p>Alexander Hamilton, and not even American, but ultimately you know, reap. Trying to convince it forced the US repay his, that which created the treasury and li put the US on a path to becoming the world dominant superpower that it&#8217;s today would, would&#8217;ve been funnily different if he had lost these arguments back in the day.</p> <p>So, you know, and it depends. And then it&#8217;s like just geniuses in different forms, like Da Vinci, even though he&#8217;s, we know so much less of him that, you know, none of the biographies are super compelling. But yeah, I obviously am a fan of Walter Isaacson and Rod Trudeau biographies and the people that they cover.</p> <p><strong>Barak Kaufman:</strong> What about anybody current, currently alive?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong> You know, I think someone who gets, doesn&#8217;t get enough credit. Well, two people. Well, Deng Xiaoping, he passed not that long ago, but Deng Xiaoping, who basically transformed China from a communist say to a thriving and enriched a billion people in the making, right?</p> <p>Like decreased extreme property significantly by transforming China into capitalist country. Now, sadly, his legacy is being undone by Xi Jinping. So, if I if someone like Deng Xiaoping was in power in China today, I think China would actually be on track to become the wealthiest country in the world, but also I think would be an ally of the US.</p> <p>Sadly, we have a counter, we have a Mao descendants in Xi Jinping who cares more about nationalistic power and his own personal power than he does about the well-being of his people. And that is a lot of it. So, I think China is no longer going to be the dominant superpower of the 21st century, given the choices they&#8217;re making right now.</p> <p>It is sadly and. We have a cold war to not only brewing, but we&#8217;re actually active right now. So, thanks shopping would have been that in the recent decades. Bill Gates doesn&#8217;t give enough credit either. I think both for the role he played in the democratization technology. You know, a PC in every home, which has been massively deflationary and inclusionary as well, and actually the role he&#8217;s playing right now, it is not for profit initiatives.</p> <p>What&#8217;s the best life decision you&#8217;ve made? What are the examples of wrong decisions? I&#8217;ll start there. I try. I wanted to build an off-grid community. Where I could where it could let founders come and build, you know, with no real business model artists come and create and virtual leaders come and lead and maybe do it.</p> <p>And if it got too busy, do it maybe through applications, you know, where I see sell. And I bought a couple hundred acres of land in Belize, and well, first I got, I bought hundreds of thousands of acres in Belize, several percentage points of the country. Then we realized that in a, but in a republic, they can just take it away. What do you think you own? You don&#8217;t actually own, and they can take it away from you. So, then I&#8217;m like, Oh, I&#8217;m going to this much safer, more developed country, Dominican Republic. But I didn&#8217;t go in Punta Cana, Casa de Campo, I went in Cabarette, which because I like the kite. And I bought a couple hundred acres of land and turns out that it was still too banana republicy.</p> <p>I did that in 2013 to 2019, but Everyone from the mayor to the minister of environment, tourism, they all wanted bribes, which I know is not willing to bribe them because I told them my time. I don&#8217;t want to be a real estate developer. I want to be using my time to the betterment of humanity through harnessing the deflationary power of tech.</p> <p>And I&#8217;m not going to play the political game. Either you realize what I&#8217;m doing is amazing for you and your country and you&#8217;d let me do it legally, or I&#8217;m not playing. And I guess they decided not to let me play. And so even though I had 100 million development that I wanted to do in the Dominican Republic where I and I bought this one-mile beach friend hundreds of acres of land.</p> <p>I never got to get it off the ground because of I never got all the licensing because I didn&#8217;t want to bribe anyone, and it ultimately became starting to become dangerous. I mean, normally do all my guests catch the catch and yeah, dengue, et cetera. Attempted rapes. Many burglaries. I got full on attacked by people with shotguns. There was a blowout shootout in my garden. Because I mean, it&#8217;s beautiful. It&#8217;s Ross authentic. It&#8217;s like the average GP there is like, you know, 2000 a year, but my family hated it. They felt it was dangerous. And I guess I, because I like going at these upgrade places where I&#8217;m like, you know, very poor countries and I don&#8217;t have any, I don&#8217;t have any displays of wealth on me.</p> <p>I don&#8217;t appear where, you know, if you see me there, I&#8217;m like shorts and T, shorts and T shirt. I don&#8217;t have anything. I don&#8217;t have a watch. I don&#8217;t have. So, it never occurred to me, but, yeah. That was a mistake. It took six years and then I was like, okay, after we got it out, they murdered, they killed my dog.</p> <p>I mean, it was a disaster. So eventually I left, I moved to Turks and Caicos, which is now my like family retreat. And I should have done that way, way faster. Should not have waited six years. Lesson learned, best decisions, you know, best decisions never came immediately. It&#8217;s always through iteration that I ended up finding what was right for me, but best decisions, you know, just be true and authentic to yourself and who you are and what you want and pursue that like and whenever I&#8217;ve done that, it&#8217;s always paid off.</p> <p>I think I need to end it there. I&#8217;m meeting and very dear and I need to get there. But this is super fun.</p> <p><strong>Barak Kaufman:</strong> This is amazing.</p>

<p>I recently joined a Post Exit Founders Group with over 1,200 members. They asked me to share lessons &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/optimizing-life-post-exit/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Optimizing Life Post Exit&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Optimizing Life Post Exit. Categories - Speeches. Date-Posted - 2024-01-23T16:01:50 . I recently joined a Post Exit Founders Group with over 1,200 members. They asked me to share lessons learned on my post exit experience. I shared my reflections on how to identify what’s next in your journey and find what truly gives you joy in life. I realize this is a 0.01% problem and that my lifestyle is unconventional and reflects my personal preferences. However, many of the approaches I cover from iterating in your personal life and outsourcing things you dislike are applicable to most. Here is the timeline of what I covered: 00:00 My Journey to Successful Tech Founder 14:50 Unconventional Lifestyle and Work-Life Balance 20:38 Finding Happiness Post-Exit: My Journey 24:06 Investment Criteria and Team Importance 28:21 Non-Traditional Family Setup and Work-Life Balance 33:58 Outsourcing and Remote Assistants Strategy 37:52 Remote Assistance and Mental Performance 45:38 Entrepreneurship, Inequality, and the Future 51:18 Balancing Work and Play: My Philosophy 57:03 Founders and Leaders: Successes and Failures 01:01:55 Decision-Making and Personal Experiences You can find the presentation I share on unlocking productivity here. If you prefer to read the content, here is a transcript of my presentation: Fabrice Grinda: What my posts, what my post exit strategy has been and became and also lessons learned along the way, and I&#8217;ll keep it brief enough that we can open up for Q and A. Brief: I&#8217;m French, though. I don&#8217;t sound French anymore, but basically, I fell in love with computers in 1984, the tender age of 10. It was love at first click. And I knew we were meant to be together forever. I was one of the top students in France in high school. And when I went to talk at, I guess they tried to interview me for Le Nain. They asked me, what do you want to be when you grow up? I&#8217;m like, I want to be a tech founder, like my role models, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. And they were like, what? You would betray the ideals of the French socialist revolution. And I knew there and then that I did not belong in France. And that was under Mitterrand. And so, in 92 went to college, went to 17 at Princeton, finished top of my class, actually did not study computer science because I felt I knew it already, and graduated top of my class in 96. And you wanted to be a tech founder but was I 21, was shy, was introverted, and so went to work for McKinsey and Company for a few years, which was kind of like Business school except they pay you. I thought I might miss the bubble doing that, but fortunately it didn&#8217;t. And in 98, I went on to build my first big startup. I was 23, which was an eBay type company for Europe. It was called Auckland. I raised 63 million in venture money. I had 150 employees in the five countries, grew at a 10 million a month in sales. Had an amazing 300-million-dollar cash offer prior to raising all the money from eBay. But fortunately, or unfortunately convinced my VCs to take it instead We sold for a billion which sounds like more but for stock to a company whose stock promptly fell 99.98 mark a cap from 10 billion to 30 million during my lockup period. So, sadly grabbed Victory or defeat from the jaws of victory that went from zero to hero and cover of every magazine back to zero all over again, which led to a brief period of soul searching in 2001 about what I should do next, but I realized, you know, I&#8217;d like building something out of nothing. I didn&#8217;t do this to make money. I&#8217;d like. I think this is the way to actually solve the world&#8217;s problems and harness the deflationary power of technology to make the world a better place, which is both inclusionary and addresses inequality of opportunity. And then with more recent tech, we can address climate change and the mental and physical well-being crisis. And so even though tech was not going to be this big thing. There&#8217;s not going to be a huge opportunity. This is where I belonged, and so I decided to remain a tech founder. So probably went on, came back to the U. S., came back to New York to build my second startup, with a constraint that it needed to be capital efficient because capital was no longer available. VCs would not fund anything in 2001. And upgrading company called zingy. I didn&#8217;t particularly like the product of selling, but it was a means to an end. It was a ringtone. So the heck, you know, one or two or three or four or five and it was extraordinarily tough. I missed payroll 27 times. I invested every last penny I had. I borrowed 100,000 on my credit cards. I&#8217;d lived. I slept in the office and shower in the office. I lived in New York, such on $2 a day for almost 18 months. But ultimately grabbed victory from the jaws of defeat. And we went from a million of revenues in 02 to 5 million in 03 when we became profitable, you know, building companies the old-fashioned way without funding being some profits to 50 in on 04 and hundred in 05. Sold that company this time for cash to a publicly traded competitor too early. But as we&#8217;ve all learned too early is better than too late. For 80 million of cash in the summer, in June of 04. And at about 50 percent of the company, I, I stayed on CEO for 18 months, and it&#8217;s interesting because at that point in time, it didn&#8217;t change anything in my life. I think I bought a TV, an Xbox, and a tennis racket, but I still lived in my, like, tiny studio apartment because the same way that I&#8217;d been working 100 hours a week before, once we became profitable and it sort of became our rocket ship, you know, we did one to 200 in revenues in four years. We kept hiring changing offices. I was working day and night ultimately left because I didn&#8217;t like the people I sold it to even though I liked being publicly traded and being, you know having to learn section four Well, I didn&#8217;t like it. I thought it was an ambition I had but then realized that being a publicly traded CEO didn&#8217;t mean the same thing in 2004 or 5 that it did 20 years earlier when you didn&#8217;t deal with section 404 and SOX compliance. And many of you public CEOs out there have come to realize that the regulatory environment has changed. And so, I decided to go back to my first true love, which of course was marketplaces, which was the reason I built the eBay type company to begin with. I like creating, I like acid light businesses that were winner takes most. That are highly deflationary and that bring liquidity and transparency in opaque fragmented markets. Craigslist at a ready come of age. And was large and larger growing. So, I went to try to convince Craig to either let me run Craigslist for free and they create a better user experience because I felt that they were letting down their community, even though they&#8217;re providing an amazing free public service. And he said no. Then I tried to buy him for a couple billion. He also said no. So, I wanted to build my own. Ended up building a company called OLX, which today is the largest classified site in the world. It&#8217;s 11, 000 employees in 30 countries. None of you have heard of it because even though we are part of the fabric of society and we have 350 million unique visitors a month, we were only big in emerging markets where the leading player in Brazil and all Latin America. And Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, and all the Eastern Europe. Well, the Russian asset was kind of stolen recently by Uncle Vladimir, but that&#8217;s another story. India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Philippines, all the Southeast Asia, and UAE and all the Middle East. Company is ginormous. Today&#8217;s worth, I don&#8217;t know, at least 10 billion. Would have been worth probably double that before the Russian asset was stolen. And, and, and doing really well. I sold it. So, I created that in 2006. I sold it. In a complex transaction over three years in 2010-2013 because I needed about a billion dollars to get it where it was because we had a publicly traded competitor in Europe. That was coming after us and spending were investing hundreds of millions in TV and emerging markets, which are American VCs back in the day would not have funded in 2015. I think a tiger or a softbank might have funded me to do this, but in 2010, it was hard to go and convince my American VCs for founders funds and general catalyst ambassador to give me hundreds of millions to go spend on TV and Zimbabwe and Pakistan. Ultimately sold the company. I say for three years after I they started investing in the company. I won the war with my biggest competitor. We merged 51 percent for us, 49 percent for them, and I left in 2013. Now, at that point in time, I was already an investor in 173 companies. Now, while I was CEO of a company of my first company in 98, I started being by virtue of being a consumer facing Internet CEO. A lot of the founders were approaching me asking if I should, if I could invest in their companies. And I thought long and hard, should I do this? And ultimately decided, you know Even though it is somewhat distracting. If I can articulate lessons learned to others, it makes me a better founder. And number two, I&#8217;m running a multi category horizontal site. If I can actually meet all the verticals and understand, keep my fingers on the pulse of the market, it makes me a better founder. So as long as investing in other startups doesn&#8217;t take more than one hour per startup, then it&#8217;s okay. And so, I decided to only invest in marketplaces and not work in back businesses. And I created four selection criteria by which I evaluated whether I would invest or not in one hour meeting in startups and kind of that took a life of its own, especially after 2004 when I my other exit. So, by 2013 at 173 investors at 37 exits was doing very well. And with a friend of mine really created just a family office where we were going to invest in startups. We were going to build startups. And in fact, since then, we&#8217;ve built in a studio model over 10 startups, one of which I ran a CEO founder. Grid became another unicorn sold that never expecting to be a VC. And in 2015, one of the people that I backed my competitor and when I was at OLX said, hey, we now own these different marketplace assets. We&#8217;d like to have exposure what&#8217;s going on and if visibility and what&#8217;s going on in the U. S. to bring to emerging markets and to perhaps defend against disruption, can we be an investor in you? And they actually offered to invest in my in my family office. I said no because I, A, I thought would be, if I kept raising, it would be infinitely dilutive. So, I didn&#8217;t want them to invest in the operating company or the GP, if you want. So I said, it said, let&#8217;s create a GPLP structure. Let&#8217;s create a fund that you can be a, that you can invest in the funds. Created a first fund of 50 million, where they were the sole LP. Now, of course, not including all the capital I was putting in. In 2016 deployed that by the end of 2017, then they agreed to fund to in 2018; raised 175 million from 20 LPs. And we&#8217;re finished pulling that mid 21. And then now we have a fund three, which is 290 million from 50 LPs. And LPs are either a combination of friends of mine that have been great tech founders, you know, the Reid Hoffman&#8217;s, the PayPal mafia, the Kevin Ryan&#8217;s of the world. You know, transfer wise founder, Wayfair founder, et cetera. Number two, like family offices being disrupted by tech and three strategics like eBay and actually all the people that have bought my old startups like Naspers, Process, Adavinta, Shifstead or Axel Springer, Recruit, et cetera. Now, what&#8217;s interesting is I&#8217;m not a normal VC. I, this, I would describe what I do as angel investing at venture scale. We write small checks. We don&#8217;t bleed. We don&#8217;t price. We don&#8217;t take board seats. We invest in every geography, in every industry, at every stage. And we decided two one-hour meetings using the exact same selection criteria that I defined 25 years ago, whether we best or not. So, every week we get about 300 inbound deals, and it&#8217;s all inbound based on our reputation and brand. Third comes from VCs. A third comes from the founders. We back from the past. We&#8217;ve invested in 1100 startups. That&#8217;s about 2000 founders. They come back with the next company. They send us their friends, employees, and about a third comes in cold. We review cold inbound. Deals are randomly assigned to one of the 11 investment team members, and we decide if we take a call or not. We take about 50 calls a week. The other all the other companies are like we have enough information decided that we don&#8217;t want to look at them right now. They&#8217;re out of scope, too early, too late, too expensive, whatever. Okay. We have an investment committee every Tuesday for the for the new deals after two hours. And then we take a second call about five to 10 of them every week. Let&#8217;s say seven on average, of which I&#8217;m mostly taking. And on the second call, I will decide if we invest or not, basically. We do the same thing for portfolio companies. We, we have many things that are non-traditional. So, we have set sizes per stage. We write 125K pre seed, 250K seed, 350K A, 550K B. Commitment checks are double. We don&#8217;t want to be a signal and we treat follow ons as though we were not existing investors knowing what we know now of the team of the company of the traction would we invest in this you ran at this valuation and very often the answer is no so we&#8217;ve only followed on in about 33 percent of the deals historically, and we often sell on the way up. We sell our winners. It&#8217;s the anti BC strategy. But because we&#8217;re price sensitive, and we know where the median valuations are, and I&#8217;m happy to share what they are later. If you guys are interested, we you know, we come in a reasonable or nothing&#8217;s cheap, but fair valuations on if we feel something&#8217;s overvalued, which simply are the winners. We sell 50 percent on the way up. Nothing&#8217;s magical, but 50 percent other than the fact that it&#8217;s a no regret philosophy. If the company goes to zero, we make five extra 10 X. We&#8217;re happy. And if it goes to infinity, we saw 50% and we&#8217;re happy to let it ride. And in a few cases will sell 75 percent of refields. Really outrageous. You know, 100 X a R or whatever. We still build companies. I&#8217;m currently building a personally I mean, It is part of the funds, but I mean, I&#8217;m allocating 40 percent of my time to it. A yield bearing stable coin to try to replace USDC and USDT backed by U. S. T. Bills. We don&#8217;t have a formal studio program anymore for a variety of reasons, but the returns of the studio were less compelling and less scalable. The returns on the investing side where, to date, we&#8217;ve had 1100 investments, 300 exits. We&#8217;ve been compounding at 37 percent IRR for 25 years, and of course, more of the capital has been deployed in the last six years than prior to that. We&#8217;ve deployed 600 million to date, of which 170 million, 179 million is for my partners and me, mostly for me, over 150 million of personal capital. Things I&#8217;ve been pretty, beyond what I do professionally in the post-it era. So, in 2013, I made a lot of iteration, so I realized that most people don&#8217;t bring as much iteration in their personal life as they do to their business life. And I came to realization, you know, every I saw my friends less often than I would like, and the quality of the relationship has changed because as you get older, your friends become busy. And as results, instead of like remaking the world that we did in college, when you see them, it&#8217;s a biographical update in the last six weeks since I last saw you, this is what our kids have been up to my wife, my husband, whatever my job, and but it&#8217;s not it&#8217;s okay, it&#8217;s not the reason we became friends. And so I actually decided to go through a period of extreme iteration, wherein I gave all my non-financial possessions to charity in late 2012, and I went down to 50 items, everything I own. Fit in a carry on my backpack and my tennis bag. And I decided, okay, to go back from first principles, because, of course, if you have a place to go to a city in which you live, you just go there and you don&#8217;t ask yourself if I have infinite time and an opportunity to do whatever I want and meet whomever I want and be wherever I want, what is it that I really would like to be doing? [Where is it I would like to be doing? And who is it I would like to be spending time with? I threw a lot of spaghetti in the wall, most of which failed, which is also true of startups in general. I started by going couch surfing on friends’ couches because I thought the idea was I could reconnect with them in a more meaningful way. Now, that failed dramatically because, as Benjamin Franklin said house guests like Bish start smelling after three to four days. And the reason is if you&#8217;re embedding yourself in their life, but they&#8217;re not making room for it because they are busy with work and kids and whatever, then it doesn&#8217;t work. And I&#8217;ve, as you can probably hear, Infinite energy. I go to bed very late. I don&#8217;t sleep very much. And so, my vision is like, we&#8217;re gonna, you know, we&#8217;re gonna like play tennis from like 8 p. m. to 10 p. m. We&#8217;re gonna remake the world. And, well, I try to sleep as much as I can in high quality sleep, but I am high energy and it wasn&#8217;t compatible with other people&#8217;s lives, especially since I was single and, you know, financially dependent and which is not the case of most people. Iterated a lot to the model where I am today where because; And I was couchsurfing at friends couches. So not a real opportunity to meet a wives, but Where I ended up, today It is one where I feel that each city and someone made a comment about like leaving the snow or whatever Each city is a best period to live in. You know, so I live in New York notionally, which means I&#8217;m in New York about four and a half months a year. I think New York is extraordinary in September and October, and it&#8217;s extraordinary like April 15 and June 15. But I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s particularly compelling, even though I&#8217;m in New York right now in the summer or in the winter. And so. I actually created a distributed life between three core locations where I home a place, and I rotate between them. I&#8217;m January, February, typically in Revelstoke, British Columbia, where I work from there during the day, but I&#8217;m heli skiing, backcountry skiing, et cetera, in the winter. March, I go back to Turks and Caicos, where I&#8217;m working during the day, but at night I&#8217;m like reading, writing, meditating, kite surfing, playing tennis, paddle, et cetera. And then April. May, June, I&#8217;m in New York. June, late June to early July, I go to see my family and friends in Nice. Visit uncles, aunts, family, cousins, nephews. I mean, I have a ginormous multi hundred percent family. Go back to my birthday for a few weeks in Turks in August, then go to Revelstoke in, in August to mountain bike rock climb, et cetera, again, working during the day, but doing all these activities at night and the weekends. Go to Burning Man every year, and then back to New York, September, October, and then back to Turks, November, December, and for New Year&#8217;s, usually go to Revelstoke. I add two weeks to a new exotic location every year. In 2023, for instance, the first two weeks of the year, I walked to the South Pole. I do a typically an off-grid category upgrade section every year where I completely disconnected. Usually alone, either doing, I know I crossed Costa Rica on bicycle from the Atlantic, the Pacific, but just my backpack, sleeping bag and tents and water filtration system and learned to start a fire. And I&#8217;ve done a lot of these types of adventures and I do them regularly, often alone these days with a guide. And pass alone alone. But now with a guy because I&#8217;d rather not die, especially now that I&#8217;m a father to a two-year-old, very nontraditional life relationship and general setup, but works for me. And I&#8217;m as happy as can be. Other thing. I know Jonathan Swanson from Thumbtack presented here, but I&#8217;ve structured my life to only do the things I love doing. And not do any of the things I don&#8217;t like doing. And so I have a virtual assistant in the Philippines which I pay 1500 a month who manages a big chunk of my online life, but more than you can imagine like if I’m going to play she&#8217;ll like I she knows I love tennis she&#8217;ll Fine, she&#8217;ll book free. She&#8217;ll identify the best clubs, find partners my level, pre book the lesson, pre book lessons or partners to play with. If I&#8217;m in New York, she&#8217;ll organize, she&#8217;ll look at all the activities there might be for me to do. She knows I like to organize intellectual salons. So, for instance, I&#8217;m hosting a post exit founder dinner tonight with like, six sets. Well, eight people total. And I host these intellectual salons in New York. I&#8217;m going to like whatever magic shows off Broadway, you name it. And all this could be outsourced. In addition to having an estate manager that manages my offline life and I outsource things like creating helping create photo albums, videos. But you name it, I&#8217;m happy to go in more detail on how, you know, I have four part time nannies that I&#8217;ve hired because French nannies are going to work more than 20 hours a week, but they, they cover 745 a.m. to 745 p.m. seven days a week, and they agree between themselves who works when and also who travels when and where. And so, I&#8217;ve, I&#8217;ve created an entire system for basically making sure that I live as rich, passionate life as I can and not do anything of the things I don&#8217;t like. And there are a lot of things I don&#8217;t like in life. I guess from a work life balance perspective, probably worth mentioning, New York plays the role of intellectual, professional, social, artistic endeavors. But I&#8217;ve come to realize that when you&#8217;re doing, you&#8217;re not being thoughtful, you&#8217;re not being reflective. And so actually, I like that alternation where I go from two months in New York, by the end of which I&#8217;m exhausted, because You know, it is 24/7, 7 days a week, basically to going to place like Turks, where even though I&#8217;m working during the day, the evenings are really meditating, reading, writing, being healthy, playing tennis, playing paddle, etc. So would not have expected and where I am, neither from a life setup perspective, three different distributed locations where everything&#8217;s kind of replicated from an infrastructure perspective, would not have expected to become a BC. And again, I&#8217;m a non-traditional VC. Because I don&#8217;t lead enterprise, et cetera. I don&#8217;t currently have institutional piece that that&#8217;s the objective for fund four, but I&#8217;m not changing my strategy. I don&#8217;t want to change. It is a reflection of my personal intellectual curiosity. I want to have the flexibility to continue to be building companies because I think it&#8217;s fun and interesting, et cetera. I&#8217;ll pause here. I spoke at a million miles per hour, which is I am prone to but happy to yeah, answer any questions and keep the conversation dialogue going. Barak Kaufman: That was amazing. Fabrice, for doing that. So firstly, just for everyone, feel free to post questions in the chat. I think we&#8217;ll prioritize everyone to raise their hand just like Sam just did. I&#8217;ll come back to you in a second, Sam, but feel free to keep your hand raised and anybody else that wants to raise their hand in Zoom. Fabrice, just to kind of kick things off, kind of one question for me it sounds like you&#8217;ve kind of, like, tinkered and tried to perfect this model in the post exit life and you went through different iterations. I think you used those words. If you were going to give advice. To a founder who recently went through an exit, what advice would you give them? Fabrice Grinda: Well, obviously, the answer is personal, but take time to reflect on what it is you truly love to do, what is it you&#8217;d like to allocate your time to and what is going to make you happy? You know, for instance I&#8217;ve come, I came to realize that I&#8217;ve been overworking like probably many of us have, and, and I love working, but I didn&#8217;t value it in my, my friends and family as much as I would like to. I didn&#8217;t, and they didn&#8217;t feel as valued. My grandmother, which had been the matriarch of the family, had used to host all of us at her place for Christmas, Christmas Eve, it was a tradition, like there&#8217;d be 20, 30 of us would come there, and we&#8217;d be organized by age, and she was really the rallying point of the family, and that had kind of gone away after her passing, and I decided, once I had the financial means to do that, to restart or rekindle the tradition, for instance, so for now, every year, Sometimes for my birthday, but definitely for Christmas or New Year&#8217;s, a big chunk of my family comes at my place in Turks and Caicos, and I literally, I&#8217;ll send a jet to pick them up in Nice and bring them over to Turks. I&#8217;ll find tickets for everyone. I&#8217;ll rent eight different houses. This Christmas, for instance, or this New Year&#8217;s, for instance, there&#8217;s 50 of us, 50. I came for two weeks and we had a blast and it&#8217;s something that I it does. It takes a lot of work to make happen, but it&#8217;s something that I valued and prioritize. Let me see if I can share my screen here just for a fun photo of the family. I can let&#8217;s go to Facebook for a second, not common moderation to do it. Not that Facebook is the best place, but I have that photo handy, so it makes it easier. Oh yeah, I did post it. Yeah. So, this is US 50 people for Christmas, for New Year. And it goes from my son, who&#8217;s two and a half to my uncle back here who&#8217;s 87. And these are, are I saved? It&#8217;s the family I have and the family I choose. So, it&#8217;s it&#8217;s it&#8217;s a very, it&#8217;s a very big group and but it&#8217;s super loving and supportive and something that I valued. So, I&#8217;d go to as I said, I&#8217;d go to first principles. I see a lot of questions. So maybe I&#8217;ll take I&#8217;ll take them 1 by one. Do you share the four criteria used to invest? So that&#8217;s a question for Michael Cassidy. The answer is I do. I will actually first put the link in with the actual criteria, but I will describe them as well briefly. So, wait a second. How FJ Labs, so I blog, as you can tell, I just wrote my year in review blog posts which covers professional, personal predictions, et cetera. So, these are the four criteria, the four criteria. So, in a one hour call, I&#8217;m trying to evaluate number one. Do I like the team? Well, I&#8217;ll give you the four and I&#8217;ll go in detail. Do I like the team? Number two, do I like the business? Number three, do I like the deal terms or number four? Is it in line with my thesis or vision of where the future of humanity is now? Number one, do I like the team? Every VC in the world will tell you I only invest in extraordinary people. The thing is it can&#8217;t be subjective. It can&#8217;t be something you know if you see it. And so, for us, Or for me, I have an explicit sense of what that means for it to be an amazing founder. And I want the Venn diagram intersection of founders that are both extraordinarily eloquent and amazing salespeople because they&#8217;re going to raise better capital and hire better terms, they&#8217;re going to attract better people, they&#8217;re going to have more BD and more PR. But that&#8217;s not enough, because if you only have that, maybe you don&#8217;t build a very profitable, sustainable company. Number two Do I want founders who know how to execute? And the way I tease out at one hour call if they can execute is the way they address the question number two. Question number two, which is, is this an attractive business? So, it&#8217;s a combination of total addressable market size, but more importantly, unit economics. Now I&#8217;m mostly seed rather than pre-seed, but even pre-see. I want the founder to be able to articulate what they&#8217;re that they&#8217;ve done it. Lending page analysis that they understand the density keywords that they know what the CPCs look like, how much they can spend per month based on an estimated conversion rate. What a cat looks like, and they better know what the average order value of the industry is and where the cost and margin structure looks like, and therefore get a sense of LTV to CAC. And if they&#8217;re alive while they be able to articulate what they are, and if they&#8217;re not good, and I want I like businesses where you recoup your fully loaded CAC on a CM2 basis in six months, and you 18 months, why it&#8217;s going to get there with skill. And when founders cannot articulate that, it typically does not lead to amazing outcomes from the ability to execute. And so, I want both of these things to be true, and I care deeply. It&#8217;s not all the founder and only the founder. I think Warren Buffett once said when the reputation of an amazing founder means that of a terrible business, it&#8217;s typically the reputation of the business that wins. And so, founders matter, but the business you&#8217;re in matters dramatically as well. Number three, deal terms. I know what the median is. The median these days for pre seed is about you&#8217;re raising one at four, five, pre, pre-seed seed you&#8217;re doing. If you&#8217;re a SaaS business, you&#8217;re doing 30 k at MRR or a marketplace, you&#8217;re one 50K and GMV and you&#8217;re raising three at 10 pre, and that&#8217;s or 12 free. A&#8217;s these days, you&#8217;re doing 100k plus in MRR 500, 600, 700k in GMV, you&#8217;re raising 7 at 23 pre 30 posts, and the B&#8217;s, you&#8217;re doing 500k plus in MRR, or you&#8217;re raising, you&#8217;re doing two and a half million GMV, and you&#8217;re raising 15 at 50 pre. These valuations to many appear low, especially people based in Silicon Valley, or people that have been investing in the new, new hot trend of the day. But that&#8217;s because the mean is higher than the median because they&#8217;re exceptional deals for second time founders that are raising these insane rounds. But what I&#8217;ve made money on half of my, so I&#8217;ve had 300 exits. I&#8217;ve actually made money in 50 percent of them 150 of them because I came in at a low price. And so even when the company got acquired, I came in at five or 10 15 or 20. And I did okay. If you come in at a high price, your price for perfection. And yes, there are some companies you&#8217;d rather be in than not, and you&#8217;re willing to pay up, but I&#8217;d be extraordinarily careful. To mix it up because I&#8217;ve only been answering questions in the chat, I&#8217;ll take Sam&#8217;s question, and then I&#8217;ll go back to the chat. Barak Kaufman: Alright, cool. Thanks so much. So, it&#8217;s interesting to hear how you balance the nanny situation and multiple locations. And it sounds like you have young kids, so have you considered what to do with respect to school? Because this is something that I&#8217;m struggling with my wife and figuring out how to do multiple locations in school. Fabrice Grinda: So, I have a life partner. So, the school and I put the valuation matrix in the chat for schooling. So, we put my so until now, it&#8217;s been easy because my Some was too. So, you came with me everywhere and there was no school. So that was the the perfect setup. We decided to put so my big chunk of my family only speaks French. So, the nannies were only French speaking because, of course, we live in the U. S or New York and they&#8217;re going to have English by default. I put my son in a school called The Ecole. The Ecole is a new school created by one of the renaissance hedge fund founders and the philosophy is the rigor of the French system with the creativity of the American system where you have like public speaking and teamwork etc and you have both an English speaker and a French speaker in both class in each class plus a helper to deal with like everything else so it&#8217;s three people per class they have a two&#8217;s program my son is in the two&#8217;s program and so what I’m changing to my current schedule to make sure i see my son more Is I&#8217;m with them full time from April 15 to basically November 5 because we spend the summers together and I&#8217;m in New York then. Instead of going away for two months at a time, now what I&#8217;m doing is I&#8217;m making, I&#8217;m making sure, so we spend all of our vacations together but he, he and his mother doesn&#8217;t travel with me and, and she&#8217;s a partner at Kirkland the law firm. She&#8217;s working on like IPOs and M&amp; A and public work. So, I go. I make sure that I&#8217;m not away for more than two weeks. So, I&#8217;ll go two weeks with you to Turks alone, which I need anyway for reflection, etcetera. And I&#8217;ll come back to York to spend a week or two with them full time. And again, we don&#8217;t live together. So, we have a non-traditional relationship. We have a philosophy called living apart together, which probably it&#8217;s worth mentioning it for a second, because I find that if you spend too much time around your partner, you become roommates. As opposed to becoming really lovers and life partners, and you&#8217;re not present in every interact, iteration, interaction. And, you know, because if we&#8217;re together, if we live together, you know, maybe I want to be playing video games for a couple hours, or I want to be working, or whatever, and I&#8217;m not present. And so instead, we live separately, though I see my son literally every day, multiple hours a day, phone off, or we&#8217;re just playing. And I will put the link to the school in the chat, it’s called the Ecole. But if you&#8217;re not interested in and you know, I just said French speaking. It probably doesn&#8217;t make nearly as much sense for you, but it&#8217;s an amazing school and I&#8217;m putting it here. Okay, so we don&#8217;t live together, and we choose to go together. So, we do family night, maybe. Two nights a week. We do date night just us without kids two nights a week, and we do date night at my place. We do family night at her place, but I will see my son every day, multiple hours a day with phone off, but I don&#8217;t sleep there. And it works very well for us. And so, when, in the month where I&#8217;m traveling, where he&#8217;s in school, so October November, sorry, November, December though not the holidays because we&#8217;re together then I&#8217;ll be in Turks, we&#8217;re Revelstoke, so maybe say January, February, but I&#8217;ll come back to New York for a week. But we spend all of our vacations together. So again, non-traditional setup. It&#8217;s also a setup that my partner loves and that works for us. I focus on quality of time, not quantity of time. And I revised the right to change my mind about the setup and in the future, but I&#8217;ve already changed it, right? I went from two-month, two-month, two months to making it to maybe three weeks, one week, three weeks, one week, et cetera, to make sure that I&#8217;m seeing my kids as often. Well, kids plural, because I have a daughter coming February 15th. Not for everyone. Thank you. Not for everyone, but it works for me. And I have a dog as well, a white shepherd, a white German shepherd that travels with me everywhere. Actually, I&#8217;ll give you a sense of how it works by putting a, put a photo, a link to my urine review in here. Okay, let me go back to the questions. I don&#8217;t know if anyone else has their hands raised. In the meantime, I&#8217;ll go back to this. How long did it take to donate everything? Rootprost, you&#8217;re thoughtful. It took very little time, but, and I had to put zero thought into it, but when I went to my partner and I&#8217;m like, Hey, I&#8217;m going to do this for the next six, whatever, X period of time, I&#8217;m giving away everything away. And she was like you have like this 13,000 square foot house and bowl of stuff. Who are you donating to and how? And she basically structured it for me. And so. It ended up being thoughtful, but not I was not very, but it took very little time because she really coordinated it. And that was back in 2012. And so, we, you know, from the books to the to that went to different schools or libraries to the furniture that went to either people. We knew people that needed it to the clothes that we don&#8217;t. I mean, everything ended up being more thoughtful, but I have to admit, I took. I just made the executive decision, give everything away, and I didn&#8217;t deal with the details that my partner did. And she&#8217;s amazing. Da da dum. Left connected, yeah. Why remote assistant? Why not local? My remote assistant in the Philippines. I&#8217;ve so I&#8217;ve never talked to her. I&#8217;ve never met her. Because I my philosophy for hiring is I hired like multiple of the same on Upwork or elsewhere. And then I give them a partial task. I see how they do. And then I keep the best. And that&#8217;s I found someone in Bangladesh like a dollar an hour to help with my photo albums. I&#8217;ve been someone in like Russia to help with my video editing, etc. In this case, it&#8217;s through a company called yourremoteassistant.com. I&#8217;ll put the link as well here. And you basically, so they send you one, they&#8217;re based on your specs. And if you&#8217;re not happy, you just change, get another one. That&#8217;s why I never bothered to interview her. We&#8217;ve been working together at this point, at this point for a decade. It&#8217;s extraordinary because she&#8217;s like a PhD in creative writing. She&#8217;s way, way more skilled than any assistant I&#8217;ve ever had, including in person. She works exactly whatever hours I want to work. So, when I change time zone, she changes time zone as well. She has access to everything from signatures to I mean, and I don&#8217;t know. I find that she&#8217;s been just more effective, harder working than anyone I&#8217;ve ever had in person. Not to mention it&#8217;s way cheaper. So, we at our firm, we have 10 of them. And the amount of stuff you can outsource is greater than you think. You know, if you like, if you have an online Shopify, they can do customer care. They can do, they can do inventory management. I mean, you name it. In my case, she will help. She pretends to be me, stays on the phone with T Mobile, or gets to doctor&#8217;s appointments. I mean, you name it. Everything is done, and it&#8217;s extraordinarily effective. And I actually like the working through WhatsApp with her. I find it. I don&#8217;t know. We have an office manager, and I used to have an in-person assistant. I&#8217;ve had many of them, including very well paid, super high end, and maybe that didn&#8217;t work nearly as well. I think for that type of role, I have an estate manager, and my estate manager, actually, maybe I&#8217;ll share my screen for a second. This is something I&#8217;m presenting tomorrow. Take it to one second, predictively. Minimize this. Life hacks. I mean, probably this is not obvious, but I don&#8217;t read any news whatsoever because, like, following the day by day of anything is actually not that relevant. So. Yes, it&#8217;s terrible and tragic what&#8217;s happening in Gaza or Ukraine, but you know it&#8217;s happening and then taking a step back once every six months understanding why, how, etc. is relevant, but like the day by day is completely irrelevant, you know, in COVID in the early days, it was all about like who violated the mandate, like there&#8217;s no real information, right? Like what I want to know in COVID is, you know, and it hasn&#8217;t come out yet is what would be the correct policy decisions to minimize health outcomes and economic and negative impacts and probably the answer is different in the early days. We have no vaccine that later when you do have a vaccine, but like that&#8217;s an analysis. That&#8217;s interesting. The day-to-day use. It&#8217;s all sensationalist BS. So, I don&#8217;t read news. I don&#8217;t read newspapers. I don&#8217;t read online news. I do nothing. I follow tech news, but like against time as a day. Twitter and all that stuff. It&#8217;s all negative all the time. They&#8217;re capturing your attention and focusing on outrage. I completely avoid it. I&#8217;m sort of saying so. You&#8217;re a remote assistant. The other very good one is Athena. That&#8217;s the one, that&#8217;s the company created by Jonathan Swanson from Thumbtack. You probably presented it here. But she manages all of my Agenda pending meetings. Confirm meetings. This is what I get every day. Then this is my agenda. If I know what it&#8217;s about, there&#8217;s no conversation. There&#8217;s no detail. But if I don&#8217;t know what it&#8217;s about, she will put the detail of the context of why I&#8217;m having the conversation. That&#8217;s for the next day. This is a typical day for me, by the way. So, yeah, and it goes to like, and it&#8217;ll include all the personal stuff. So, yes, I&#8217;m giving a speech or whatever here, but then. Paddle, which is a form of tennis. If you want 9 pm. to 11. Everything is in there. If I&#8217;m going to do a meditation, go to the gym. Everything is in my agenda every day, but she will manage invites for dinner. So, for instance, the dinner I&#8217;m doing tonight, she&#8217;ll book doctor&#8217;s appointment. She&#8217;ll wait in line at my behalf. She&#8217;ll book meditations, gym. She organizes tennis. She helps create posts. So, she knows how to code as well. I will write the blog post, but she will write, she will post it and she will publish it and send the newsletter and she manage the Substack. So, I do it in my WordPress, which I coded myself because I like doing that and I like writing, but she will manage the Substack on her own. She&#8217;ll buy stuff for me, including on Amazon, because it&#8217;s easier to just tell her. She&#8217;ll sign everything, do the KYC, do government research, look for shows for me to attend, manage my, she created a design for my birthday invite. She manages the invite lists. She manages all travel things and then this I iterate for album creation, you know, like slide 27 do this. This this photo makes me look back, but a different photo, whatever. And then you have the full album that I print and give to my parents. I do the same with someone else. By the way, I&#8217;ve been on UpWork for videos, and I create a video every year. And for every 1 of my major trips, and then for offline. I have an estate manager, so he&#8217;s my main estate manager. He&#8217;s a chef otherwise, but he drives, he cleans, car maintenance. If tonight for the dinner, he&#8217;s normally cooking, but he&#8217;s organizing the whatever, like waiters. If it&#8217;s a big party, he will bring, he will bring chef, like everything offline, and he manages the other property managers. For each of my properties, I have a estate manager slash property manager, and that is also the chef, and they manage the staff and all the licensing, and I do sublets, whereas this house here generates 4 million in revenues, when I am not there. And I am there four months a year, and they manage that, but they don&#8217;t manage the reservations. They just manage the customer experience. I&#8217;ve outsourced to an offline the reservation manager. I created the site myself, and I moved all the traffic from Airbnb to direct reservations because that&#8217;s what I&#8217;d like to do. But I have someone managing all the reservations for my dog. I have a full-time dog trainer and who actually travels with me. Gets all the documents. Gets the vaccines. Now that&#8217;s not forever. My dog is six months old, but for the first two years. And then for the nannies. So, I find them on care.com and also in a French. I make sure they speak French. They have a website to group routine themselves. I only take one for travel. They all have a shared calendar app. And I need them to be able to speak French verbally, can travel, can drive, because they need to be able to drive the kid. And everything&#8217;s organized here. Then there&#8217;s a nanny handbook that I created where everyone is following it. And so, there&#8217;s like instructions of what needs to be done, etc. So that model works. Barak Kaufman: You&#8217;ve just wowed this entire group. I think everybody&#8217;s gone just throughout wherever they were at the level of optimization. So, thank you for sharing that. And there are quite a few requests if you&#8217;re comfortable sharing the presentation after. Fabrice Grinda: Yeah, I will. I think I’ve put the link. I put the link to the presentation and Dropbox, I think somewhere. But it&#8217;s gonna be on my blog. I&#8217;m also going through this in detail tomorrow on my podcast at noon, but it&#8217;ll be on my blog shortly. How do you manage all these companies and positions? Oh, I have a tool called EDA, but also more importantly, I have a big back office. So, the tool we use, let me put it here. It&#8217;s EDA.CA. Let&#8217;s see. Yeah, there, but it&#8217;s pretty cheap. It allows us to manage. Not everyone needs it, but also, we&#8217;re 34 in the firm. Of which, I mean, obviously 10 virtual assistants, but like 13 or like back office, COO, CFO, legal, all that stuff. And I don&#8217;t deal with any of that. Like, I don&#8217;t, life is too short to read legal documents. Life is too short to spend time doing admin work. So that&#8217;s why I have a team around me to do all that shit that I hate. Someone wrote. Life is too short to deal with assholes. Completely agree. I do not tolerate jerks. If you&#8217;re a brilliant founder, but you&#8217;re an asshole, I will not back you, I will not fund you. I will not invest with you. I will not hire you if you&#8217;re an amazing employee. Life is too short. You only work with people that you love working with. Let me go back to higher on the let&#8217;s see if I miss anything. What’s your most impactful mental performance practice? I do meditate. I meditate I have a 20, well,10-to-30-minute meditation practice every day. It is I will write a blog post on how it is. I do four or five different things, but they&#8217;re very quick and efficient, but I&#8217;m very good at being present. I have aphantasia. I cannot visualize and so whatever I&#8217;m doing, I&#8217;m doing that and nothing else. I also have no notifications on anything at ever my I don&#8217;t get email notifications, WhatsApp notifications. My phone never rings, never vibrates. Even a vibration takes you away from the present of what you&#8217;re doing. It&#8217;s like, Oh, maybe there&#8217;s something I should be looking at. You don&#8217;t want to have FOMO. Whatever you&#8217;re doing is that you&#8217;ve chosen to be doing the best and most important thing you should be doing right now, and so I have no notifications whatsoever, and I&#8217;m very good at, like, going from context to context in the present. Humans cannot multitask. You monotask. You want to monotask effectively. So, I will book time for emails. I will book time for whatever. And I will be present in that interaction, but I will not, but you don&#8217;t want to be doing many things simultaneously. Meditation, I like guided meditations not with, and I follow, I don&#8217;t have an app. I have a few meditations I do, a few breathwork practices. I read a lot, but I read for fun. I don&#8217;t read to be more productive. I read mostly sci-fi but I read biographies. I read every 50-100 books a year. But I read for fun. I read one hour every day before bed, which is why I ended up that school. I think we discussed how we&#8217;re going to change when school changes. How do you plan to school the child? Yeah, probably worth mentioning. I&#8217;m a laissez faire parent. It&#8217;s all about I want to encourage positive risk taking. I&#8217;m not a helicopter parent. I will. I wanted them to learn to fail and learn to fail in a positive way. And you need to fail repeatedly to succeed. And I will encourage and reward work and effort over outcome. And I&#8217;ve already worked with that pretty effectively. And yeah, and the anti-helicopter parent. But I provide love and presence to the fact that my partner and I love each other. I mean, we&#8217;ve been together for 11 years, and we&#8217;re like life partners. Even though it&#8217;s a non-traditional relationship, we have an open relationship, which is very non-traditional. And as I mentioned earlier, we don&#8217;t live together. It&#8217;s not for everyone, but it works for us. Will you start more companies? If I&#8217;m inspired to do it. So, the problem for me, sorry, company at this point is the opportunity cost of my time is infinitely high, and I find that the amount of leverage I have by working with founders and helping them. And helping that many founders where my impact is actually meaningful, both either strategic advice and or helping them fundraise, which is my superpower because I&#8217;m not leading. I share a deal with all the top pieces of the world is massive. And as a result of that, it’s very hard for me to justify being founder CEO versus doing this. But I like being founder CEO. So, I&#8217;ve created this hybrid model where I&#8217;m executive chairman, but not CEOs of companies that I like. Now, why do I do this? Right? I could have retired. 20 years ago. Actually, literally exactly 20 years ago. I was 29 when I got my first ginormous exit. It’s purpose driven. Oh, wait, I forgot to mention number four of the selection criteria got distracted. Number four was like; does it meet my thesis where the world is heading? And I have a very clear perspective on the future of work, the future of mobility, the future of food, the future of every category you can think of. And ultimately, it&#8217;s purpose driven. Are we solving a big problem? And there are three problems that I care about. Inequality of opportunity. Which I&#8217;m mostly addressing through marketplaces, because obviously they&#8217;re deflationary by virtue being deflationary. They&#8217;re inclusionary. Number 2 climate change, and I&#8217;m so optimistic that we&#8217;re going to solve it. I mean, I&#8217;m seeing so many improvements, especially in solar and batteries and many other things, right? Like, and this is 100 different subsectors that I&#8217;m beyond optimistic and happy to double click on that at some point. And number three as I said, the mental and physical well-being crisis. So why do I do these things? I think the political system is broken and is structurally incapable, but it&#8217;s broken, by the way, by design. I think it&#8217;s a feature. It&#8217;s not a bug. I think it&#8217;s the way the founding fathers intended it to be and people who think that the politics are so partisan, et cetera, it&#8217;s not worse than the past. I mean, we had a full-blown civil war, we had, like, race riots, we had, like you know. The desegregation movement, the anti-war movement in the 70s, all these were actually just as acrimonious as what we have now, just we have recency bias and we think now is worse, but actually life is amazing right now better than it&#8217;s ever been, even though our politics are broken, but they were always broken and I suspect they will continue to be broken, and so because the political system is, is incapable of addressing these systems and these issues, it&#8217;s up to us, doers, founders, investors to go and solve the world&#8217;s problems. And so, but I&#8217;m so optimistic. I mean, we are going to rise to the challenge of the 21st century and we are going to create a better world of tomorrow for our children and for ourselves, a world of equality of opportunity and a plenty. What is your relationship with money? it&#8217;s a means to an end. I don&#8217;t chase more of it actually. It doesn&#8217;t make any difference in my life. I&#8217;d more money is irrelevant, but I, so look, I do a lot of non for profit, right? I donate a lot of money. I fund the education of 10,000 kids K through 12 in Dominican Republic. But when I think of the impact I have, like the last company I built as 350 million unique visitors a month, we have 50 million people would make a living off the site. The impact of that for profit entity on the world is dramatic. I mean, we are part of the fabric of society in Pakistan, right? Like these are, and this is true for all the investments I make. I don&#8217;t invest because I think they&#8217;re, I do think they&#8217;re going to make money. And I like the fact that because they&#8217;re profitable, they&#8217;re scalable and sustainable, but they actually are all making a positive difference to the world. So, the objective is not to make more money. As I said, I could have retired 20 years ago. The objective is to solve the world&#8217;s problems. And I use the vector for profit technology enterprises to do it because their acid light scalable and can touch billions. Normal companies cannot touch billions of people that easily. Any thesis on how to bring back knowledge, truth and facts to the masses? Well, truth, I don&#8217;t know but knowledge for sure right like we are now in an extraordinary period of democratization of information, right? If you want to have access, if you want a class by the World Nobel Prize winner, it&#8217;s on Coursera and it&#8217;s free. If you&#8217;re a K through 12 student, you wanna improve in math, you can use Khanmigo, which is the AI by Khan Academy. It&#8217;s amazing! So, if you&#8217;re motivated self-learning, it is easier to learn anything that it&#8217;s ever been. YouTube videos on every topic, extraordinary. And if you wanna start a startup. When I started back in the 1990s, I needed like Oracle databases and Microsoft web servers and millions to just turn the lights on. I needed to build my own data center. Now you have no code, low code ai, like to, I could build you anything for sub 25K, probably. It&#8217;s amazing. It&#8217;s, it&#8217;s leading to a massive democratization of startup creation and entrepreneurship. That is beautiful. And so yeah, any advice for a founder starting a year off. I should have taken a year off. The problem is it doesn&#8217;t suit my personality particularly well, I&#8217;ve always been doing things. So I went from thing to thing to thing, but yeah, beat, think through the things you love doing and go pursue them. Like look, I work hard, but I play hard or like I&#8217;m kitesurfing and I&#8217;m a fantastic kitesurfer, heli-skier. I&#8217;m still a competitive tennis player. I&#8217;m still like college level tennis player. I&#8217;m 49. I beat like beat up on the 25-year-olds. You know, I exercise. When I&#8217;m in Turks, for instance, I was averaging three and a half hours of sports a day, every day to stay as fit as I can be. And yeah, just do fun, do crazy things. You always want to do like go to. I go to burning. I think psychedelics once in a while. You know, I drop acid. It&#8217;s amazing. Go do a deep go take Ayahuasca and do a deep journey. I mean, like, I don&#8217;t know, like, there&#8217;s so much to do and to be done and to live. It&#8217;s a privilege to be alive and it&#8217;s a privilege to be alive in this in this time period. It&#8217;s a privilege to be post exit. So, money is a tool for freedom. It&#8217;s not something to pursue more of, but to actually enjoy and use it to make the world a better place. Barak Kaufman: I just want to say someone was messaging me directly on the side and said, I want to ask him if he takes psychedelics, but I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s appropriate. And then almost like on cue, he answered the question directly. So, thank you for that. Fabrice Grinda: I am an open book. Nothing is secret. And everything&#8217;s transparent. Yeah. So, at psychedelics, I&#8217;ve probably taken everyone in the world from 5 MeO DMT to Peyote to 2C B to Acid to Psilocybin and whatever to Ayahuasca. I take them rarely. I take them intentionally. So, it&#8217;s set, setting, intention. Crescents. I don&#8217;t microdose. I find microdose, you open yourself up to whatever, and then you&#8217;re going to work, and you have a stressful day. I think that&#8217;s idiotic. I like to macrodose, like, real, and either for fun, like, you know, let&#8217;s say, one, one and a half grams of mushrooms if I&#8217;m burning, man, or, like, if I were to do a real deep meditative journey, like, I did a nine gram psilocybin journey with music that was just, like, basically, you know, beautiful meditation for, like, seven hours. A very introverted that&#8217;s alone. You don&#8217;t do I don&#8217;t think both are interesting. I did a couple times a year. I wouldn&#8217;t recommend a huge amount of time because it takes time. It&#8217;s distracting whatever but I think it&#8217;s worth doing on a you know what a couple times a year basis. So, at burning man, I&#8217;ll do acid for sure acid is like the one thing to do at Burning Man. I know we’re probably overtime. Barak Kaufman: I think as long as you’re willing to, yeah, it&#8217;s your call. It&#8217;s your call, your calendar. I think everybody&#8217;s enjoying it. Fabrice Grinda: I can give a few more minutes. Barak Kaufman: All right, let&#8217;s do it. Fabrice Grinda: What do I think about AI and the future of AI? So, here&#8217;s so here&#8217;s what&#8217;s interesting. I think AI in 23 went to, we were at like the top of the hype cycle. Where clearly there is a transformation in the quality of AI with GPD 3. 5 and obviously not before and Gemini and Bard, etc. And I do think it will ultimately transform society in a more meaningful way that we can imagine today. But I also think it&#8217;s going to take a lot longer than people think it&#8217;s going to take. And so that&#8217;s why I think we&#8217;re at the top of the hype cycle. And there&#8217;s going to be the period of delusion in the next five years. Because before. You know, when do we think governments who really integrate AI for improving its operating capacity or even large enterprise, right? Like if you&#8217;re a health medical claims processor, the hallucination problem is real. And like, you don&#8217;t want to have like, you don&#8217;t want to be liable for, for having bad results. And so, while I suspect in 20 years, it&#8217;ll be so transformative. We want to be able to recognize a lot of things, the way we work and a lot of things, humanity, and the next five years, I think it&#8217;s going to be the period of like disappointment. So, what I&#8217;ve been, and because AI overvalued as an investment category in businesses with no business model, no modes and no differentiation, I shied away from investing in AI other than a few specific vertical applications with proprietary data and in reasonable valuations, but they&#8217;re very far and few between, but everything we&#8217;re doing. These is a is a I everyone&#8217;s using a I write like every company is using it for customer care and to be better and programming. I use it every day, right? Like what? I am not a great coder anymore. So, when I&#8217;m coding my blog and I forget some functions that just ask a GPT. Hey, what do you need us? What&#8217;s the correct code? Don&#8217;t ask to code entire thing that it sucks at that. But like specific functions very easy. I have your investments done over time when you compare first time founders the second time. Yeah. Same average IRR, second time founders who, well I can actually wait, so second time founders fall in two buckets. Second time founders have been very successful the first time, often become more purposeful and mission-driven of the second time and it leads to both better outcomes and worse outcomes, meaning more companies fail because they&#8217;re taking more risks and when they succeed, they succeed bigger by their blended IRs is the same.Second time founders who failed the first time on average have done better than both, than just general founders and the second time founders who&#8217;ve been successful the first time because they are hungry and have a point to prove it if they&#8217;ve learned the lesson why they failed. So, if they learn that, okay, oh, I spent too much money. I raised too much money at too high of a price, whatever, whatever it was, they need to learn, or they didn&#8217;t focus enough product market fit or uni economics, then it&#8217;s fine. Barak Kaufman: Who&#8217;s the most impressive founder that you&#8217;ve ever backed. Fabrice Grinda: I&#8217;m not going to do the most impressive founder, but there was a few very impressive founder and founders and some, some have failed, some haven&#8217;t failed. So, for instance, Alex Gardner, who built a zoom pizza, which failed completely, he is so eloquent and such an amazing salesperson and very proud of Ryan from Flexport is extraordinary. He&#8217;s a machine and visionary is amazing. So, there are many amazing people out there. I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s one that&#8217;s like, oh, you know, but like people Yeah, [00:55:00] there&#8217;s like let&#8217;s say oh, yeah Brett Addock. He&#8217;s extraordinary. So, Brett built Vettery, which was a labor marketplace, which we sold for, like, 100 million at echo. Then he went on to build Archer, which is an electric vertical takeoff company, which is which took public and now he&#8217;s building Figure. Figure is made creating these humanoid robots who replace humans in warehouses. And the problems he&#8217;s solving to do that are so extraordinary. I guess I could put an Elon in the category as an early investor in let me put the figure link in here. Barak Kaufman: I don&#8217;t remember if he&#8217;s in the community or not, but his it was twice shared as like SPDs to invest in at least a dozen founders from the group invested. There was a recording of like his pitch for it. I have sent that recording that he did for like fundraising to dozen right from Attic exited Repeat founders. But yeah, like he&#8217;s just it was the best pitch I&#8217;ve ever seen in my entire life. He&#8217;s just yeah. Fabrice Grinda: So, I think Brett is up there. Good. Amazing. Better. Obviously, I backed the Elon back in the day. I invested in 2007 and space X. Still an investor. I didn&#8217;t sell any of my shares. I&#8217;m not selling any of my shares. Yeah. Who do you look up to and why? I guess historical role models, Octavian, or Augustus, who basically single handedly created the Roman Empire and brought an end to the civil war in, in, in, in Rome and created the basis for 500 years of Pax Romana and a significantly improved livelihood for humanity writ large for 500 years. I mean, at least the first two, 300 of that. Alexander Hamilton, and not even American, but ultimately you know, reap. Trying to convince it forced the US repay his, that which created the treasury and li put the US on a path to becoming the world dominant superpower that it&#8217;s today would, would&#8217;ve been funnily different if he had lost these arguments back in the day. So, you know, and it depends. And then it&#8217;s like just geniuses in different forms, like Da Vinci, even though he&#8217;s, we know so much less of him that, you know, none of the biographies are super compelling. But yeah, I obviously am a fan of Walter Isaacson and Rod Trudeau biographies and the people that they cover. Barak Kaufman: What about anybody current, currently alive? Fabrice Grinda: You know, I think someone who gets, doesn&#8217;t get enough credit. Well, two people. Well, Deng Xiaoping, he passed not that long ago, but Deng Xiaoping, who basically transformed China from a communist say to a thriving and enriched a billion people in the making, right? Like decreased extreme property significantly by transforming China into capitalist country. Now, sadly, his legacy is being undone by Xi Jinping. So, if I if someone like Deng Xiaoping was in power in China today, I think China would actually be on track to become the wealthiest country in the world, but also I think would be an ally of the US. Sadly, we have a counter, we have a Mao descendants in Xi Jinping who cares more about nationalistic power and his own personal power than he does about the well-being of his people. And that is a lot of it. So, I think China is no longer going to be the dominant superpower of the 21st century, given the choices they&#8217;re making right now. It is sadly and. We have a cold war to not only brewing, but we&#8217;re actually active right now. So, thanks shopping would have been that in the recent decades. Bill Gates doesn&#8217;t give enough credit either. I think both for the role he played in the democratization technology. You know, a PC in every home, which has been massively deflationary and inclusionary as well, and actually the role he&#8217;s playing right now, it is not for profit initiatives. What&#8217;s the best life decision you&#8217;ve made? What are the examples of wrong decisions? I&#8217;ll start there. I try. I wanted to build an off-grid community. Where I could where it could let founders come and build, you know, with no real business model artists come and create and virtual leaders come and lead and maybe do it. And if it got too busy, do it maybe through applications, you know, where I see sell. And I bought a couple hundred acres of land in Belize, and well, first I got, I bought hundreds of thousands of acres in Belize, several percentage points of the country. Then we realized that in a, but in a republic, they can just take it away. What do you think you own? You don&#8217;t actually own, and they can take it away from you. So, then I&#8217;m like, Oh, I&#8217;m going to this much safer, more developed country, Dominican Republic. But I didn&#8217;t go in Punta Cana, Casa de Campo, I went in Cabarette, which because I like the kite. And I bought a couple hundred acres of land and turns out that it was still too banana republicy. I did that in 2013 to 2019, but Everyone from the mayor to the minister of environment, tourism, they all wanted bribes, which I know is not willing to bribe them because I told them my time. I don&#8217;t want to be a real estate developer. I want to be using my time to the betterment of humanity through harnessing the deflationary power of tech. And I&#8217;m not going to play the political game. Either you realize what I&#8217;m doing is amazing for you and your country and you&#8217;d let me do it legally, or I&#8217;m not playing. And I guess they decided not to let me play. And so even though I had 100 million development that I wanted to do in the Dominican Republic where I and I bought this one-mile beach friend hundreds of acres of land. I never got to get it off the ground because of I never got all the licensing because I didn&#8217;t want to bribe anyone, and it ultimately became starting to become dangerous. I mean, normally do all my guests catch the catch and yeah, dengue, et cetera. Attempted rapes. Many burglaries. I got full on attacked by people with shotguns. There was a blowout shootout in my garden. Because I mean, it&#8217;s beautiful. It&#8217;s Ross authentic. It&#8217;s like the average GP there is like, you know, 2000 a year, but my family hated it. They felt it was dangerous. And I guess I, because I like going at these upgrade places where I&#8217;m like, you know, very poor countries and I don&#8217;t have any, I don&#8217;t have any displays of wealth on me. I don&#8217;t appear where, you know, if you see me there, I&#8217;m like shorts and T, shorts and T shirt. I don&#8217;t have anything. I don&#8217;t have a watch. I don&#8217;t have. So, it never occurred to me, but, yeah. That was a mistake. It took six years and then I was like, okay, after we got it out, they murdered, they killed my dog. I mean, it was a disaster. So eventually I left, I moved to Turks and Caicos, which is now my like family retreat. And I should have done that way, way faster. Should not have waited six years. Lesson learned, best decisions, you know, best decisions never came immediately. It&#8217;s always through iteration that I ended up finding what was right for me, but best decisions, you know, just be true and authentic to yourself and who you are and what you want and pursue that like and whenever I&#8217;ve done that, it&#8217;s always paid off. I think I need to end it there. I&#8217;m meeting and very dear and I need to get there. But this is super fun. Barak Kaufman: This is amazing.

2024-01-18T16:10:04

2024-01-18T16:10:04

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=22183

2024-01-18T17:41:20

2024-01-18T17:41:20

fj-labs-q4-update

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post

https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-q4-update/

FJ Labs Q4 2023 Update

<p>Friends of FJ Labs,</p> <p>Happy 2024! We are excited to dive back in after the holiday season and are optimistic that this coming year will be another incredible vintage for venture investing.</p> <p>We closed last year with a bang across investing, speaking engagements, and blog content and are excited to share our recent updates in this quarter’s digest.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1388" height="56" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22187" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png 1388w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-768x31.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1200x48.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1320x53.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1074" height="160" src="http://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Latest-Updates.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-22260" style="width:600px" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Latest-Updates.jpeg 1074w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Latest-Updates-768x114.jpeg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1388" height="56" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22187" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png 1388w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-768x31.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1200x48.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1320x53.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>While lots has been said about last year’s happenings, Fabrice gives his own succinct take (without notes or teleprompter!) in the below video. He describes where we sit in the current macro cycle, its impact on entrepreneurship, our thoughts on AI as an investment opportunity, and FJ Labs’ current thesis at the 2023&nbsp;<a href="https://fjlabs.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2587c27f0067eea486e801053&amp;id=893e61c914&amp;e=2c59bc0b19" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Transatlantic Leadership Forum</a>&nbsp;hosted by Goldman Sachs.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zEd_DlX7uY" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2004" height="1126" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Transatlantic-Leadership-Forum-Keynote.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-22292" style="width:600px;height:auto" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Transatlantic-Leadership-Forum-Keynote.jpeg 2004w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Transatlantic-Leadership-Forum-Keynote-768x432.jpeg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Transatlantic-Leadership-Forum-Keynote-1536x863.jpeg 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Transatlantic-Leadership-Forum-Keynote-1200x674.jpeg 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Transatlantic-Leadership-Forum-Keynote-1320x742.jpeg 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></a></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1388" height="56" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22187" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png 1388w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-768x31.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1200x48.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1320x53.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1108" height="160" src="http://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/By-The-Numbers.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-22261" style="width:550px" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/By-The-Numbers.jpeg 1108w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/By-The-Numbers-768x111.jpeg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1388" height="56" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22187" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png 1388w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-768x31.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1200x48.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1320x53.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1290" height="240" src="http://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Numbers.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-22262" style="width:550px" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Numbers.jpeg 1290w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Numbers-768x143.jpeg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Numbers-1200x223.jpeg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1388" height="56" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22187" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png 1388w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-768x31.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1200x48.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1320x53.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1130" height="168" src="http://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Portfolio-News.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-22263" style="width:550px" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Portfolio-News.jpeg 1130w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Portfolio-News-768x114.jpeg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1388" height="56" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22187" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png 1388w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-768x31.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1200x48.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1320x53.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p><strong>Hayden AI,&nbsp;</strong>a leader in artificial intelligence and geospatial analytics, raised an oversubscribed $53M Series B to further strengthen its market leader position. (<a href="https://fjlabs.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2587c27f0067eea486e801053&amp;id=7a694b2faa&amp;e=2c59bc0b19" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Businesswire</a>)</p> <p><strong>Vortexa</strong>, &nbsp;a London-based provider of a real-time global analytics for energy and freight markets, raised a $34M Series C, led by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital. (<a href="https://fjlabs.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2587c27f0067eea486e801053&amp;id=671f38b6f4&amp;e=2c59bc0b19" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Finsmes</a>)</p> <p>Vienna’s&nbsp;<strong>Refurbed&nbsp;</strong>raised a $57M Series C to expand its refurbished electronics marketplace. The company achieved significant milestones last year, having reached €1B GMV and achieving profitability in its home markets. (<a href="https://fjlabs.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2587c27f0067eea486e801053&amp;id=310c429760&amp;e=2c59bc0b19" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Tech.eu</a>)</p> <p>Spain-based&nbsp;<strong>Luzia&nbsp;</strong>raised a $10M Series A to introduce its AI chatbot tech to users through a WhatsApp-based bot, led by Khosla Ventures. (<a href="https://fjlabs.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2587c27f0067eea486e801053&amp;id=b24d89fc08&amp;e=2c59bc0b19" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">TechCrunch</a>)</p> <p><strong>Outfit Training</strong>, a Navy SEAL veteran-founded mobile outdoor fitness company, announced plans to expand its boutique fitness concept throughout the U.S. for the first time through franchising. (<a href="https://fjlabs.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2587c27f0067eea486e801053&amp;id=61c9d3d8a4&amp;e=2c59bc0b19" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">PRNewswire</a>)</p> <p>Other FJ Labs portfolio companies including&nbsp;<strong>Empowerly&nbsp;</strong>(managed marketplace for career counseling),&nbsp;<strong>Medelse</strong>&nbsp;(recruitment platform for healthcare professionals in France), and&nbsp;<strong>Yay Lunch</strong>&nbsp;(meal delivery service for schools in the U.S),<strong>&nbsp;</strong>raised new funding rounds last quarter. </p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1388" height="56" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22187" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png 1388w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-768x31.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1200x48.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1320x53.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="782" height="178" src="http://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Team-News.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-22264" style="width:400px" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Team-News.jpeg 782w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Team-News-768x175.jpeg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1388" height="56" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22187" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png 1388w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-768x31.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1200x48.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1320x53.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-1 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-top is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:33.33%"><div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="286" height="286" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Josh-Breinlinger.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-22273" style="aspect-ratio:1;object-fit:cover"/></figure></div></div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:66.66%"> <p class="has-text-align-left">We are delighted to announce that&nbsp;<a href="https://fjlabs.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2587c27f0067eea486e801053&amp;id=2a299dc53f&amp;e=2c59bc0b19" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Josh Breinlinger</a>&nbsp;has joined FJ Labs as a Venture Partner. Josh started his career in Mechanical Engineering after graduating from MIT in 2000. In 2004, he joined the founding team of Upwork (previously oDesk) and began his love affair with marketplaces. Since then, he has been a founding member of Rev and a general partner with Jackson Square Ventures. He has led investments in OfferUp, Alto Pharmacy, Crexi, and 20 other early-stage marketplaces. Welcome, Josh!</p> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1388" height="56" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22187" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png 1388w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-768x31.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1200x48.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1320x53.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="520" height="170" src="http://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Events.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-22265" style="width:297px;height:auto"/></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1388" height="56" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22187" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png 1388w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-768x31.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1200x48.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1320x53.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-2 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-top is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:33.33%"><div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="548" height="366" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Events-1.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-22274"/></figure></div></div> <div class="wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-top is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:66.66%"> <p class="has-text-align-left">At Abu Dhabi Finance Week, Jose participated in a panel discussing how e-commerce will impact the way we do business as well as the disruption we’re seeing in the industry by offrails payment providers and challenger banks.</p> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-3 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-top is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:33.33%"><div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="594" height="344" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Events-2.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-22275"/></figure></div></div> <div class="wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-top is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:66.66%"> <p class="has-text-align-left">At NY TechWeek, Fabrice gave a talk on best practices for effectively scaling marketplace growth. He was joined by several marketplace entrepreneurs investors.</p> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-4 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-top is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:33.33%"><div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="578" height="378" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Events-3.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-22276"/></figure></div></div> <div class="wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-top is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:66.66%"> <p>At the Association for Private Capital Investment in Latin America (LAVCA) week in NYC, FJ Labs Principal Matias Barbero moderated a panel on VC investing in LatAm with leading investors in the region including Valor, Kaszek, Canary, FinTech Collective, and ONEVC.</p> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-5 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-top is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:33.33%"> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="578" height="388" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Events-4.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-22277"/></figure> </div> <div class="wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-top is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:66.66%"> <p>Alongside our friends at London-based VC firstminute capital, we hosted a cocktail event for founders, investors, and NYC-based &nbsp;LPs at Fabrice’s apartment. These events serve as invaluable time to reconnect with our amazing founder network.</p> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1388" height="56" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22187" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png 1388w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-768x31.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1200x48.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1320x53.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="928" height="156" src="http://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Media-more.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-22266" style="object-fit:cover;width:500px;height:auto" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Media-more.jpeg 928w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Media-more-768x129.jpeg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1388" height="56" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22187" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png 1388w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-768x31.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1200x48.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1320x53.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-columns are-vertically-aligned-top is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-6 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-top is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:33.33%"> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="594" height="342" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Media-More-1.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-22283"/></figure> </div> <div class="wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-top is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:66.66%"> <p>Mark your calendars for Fabrice’s upcoming Playing with Unicorns episode, “Unlocking Productivity: Streamlining Your Days for Passion and Purpose”, which&nbsp;<a href="https://fjlabs.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2587c27f0067eea486e801053&amp;id=19cf8e9ee9&amp;e=2c59bc0b19" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><strong>you can stream this Thursday, January 11 at noon ET</strong></a>. He will cover general productivity tips and optimal outsourcing of one’s professional and personal life.</p> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-7 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:33.33%"> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="588" height="334" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Media-More-2.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-22285"/></figure> </div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:66.66%"> <p><a href="https://fjlabs.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2587c27f0067eea486e801053&amp;id=3a57d75f60&amp;e=2c59bc0b19" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Fabrice’s latest macroeconomic update</a>&nbsp;is not to be missed.&nbsp;He outlines the various factors leading to his near-term bearishness and reasons for cautious optimism as we look ahead.</p> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-8 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:33.33%"> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="594" height="296" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Media-More-3.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-22286"/></figure> </div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:66.66%"> <p>In this&nbsp;<a href="https://fjlabs.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2587c27f0067eea486e801053&amp;id=49aab423f3&amp;e=2c59bc0b19" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">marketplace startups masterclass</a>, Fabrice shares his thoughts on successfully building an online marketplace, the biggest mistakes marketplace founders make, and metrics required to raise capital at various stages.</p> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-9 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:33.33%"> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="586" height="406" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Media-More-4.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-22287"/></figure> </div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:66.66%"> <p>For a fun listen, check out Fabrice’s recent&nbsp;<a href="https://fjlabs.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2587c27f0067eea486e801053&amp;id=7bb4b07d6a&amp;e=2c59bc0b19" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">interview</a>&nbsp;with our good friend and European solo GP,&nbsp;Robin Haak, of Robin Capital. This wide-ranging conversation covers a variety of topics from adventure travel to risk taking, spirituality, startups and more.</p> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-10 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:33.33%"> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="604" height="234" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Media-More-5.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-22288"/></figure> </div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:66.66%"> <p>For any belated holiday shopping needs, make sure you peruse Fabrice’s infamous&nbsp;<a href="https://fjlabs.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2587c27f0067eea486e801053&amp;id=17cb9470f3&amp;e=2c59bc0b19" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">holiday gadget gift guide</a>.&nbsp;From ultra-light travel laptops, wireless headphones, ear plugs, an 8-in-1 charging station (or drone, RC truck, or outdoor ice bath :), he’s got you covered!</p> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1388" height="56" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22187" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line.png 1388w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-768x31.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1200x48.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Line-1320x53.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p><strong>And for more team writing…</strong></p> <p>FJ investment team members Luke Skertich and Lauren Lee wrote an insightful two-part&nbsp;<a href="https://fjlabs.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2587c27f0067eea486e801053&amp;id=30f8ef1a00&amp;e=2c59bc0b19" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Playbook for Building Saas-Enabled Marketplaces</a>. They reviewed hundreds of companies and identified factors that best contributed to the success of these models. Hope you enjoy!</p>

<p>Friends of FJ Labs, Happy 2024! We are excited to dive back in after the holiday season and &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-q4-update/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;FJ Labs Q4 2023 Update&#8221;</span></a></p>

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FJ Labs Q4 2023 Update. Categories - FJ Labs. Date-Posted - 2024-01-18T16:10:04 . Friends of FJ Labs, Happy 2024! We are excited to dive back in after the holiday season and are optimistic that this coming year will be another incredible vintage for venture investing. We closed last year with a bang across investing, speaking engagements, and blog content and are excited to share our recent updates in this quarter’s digest. While lots has been said about last year’s happenings, Fabrice gives his own succinct take (without notes or teleprompter!) in the below video. He describes where we sit in the current macro cycle, its impact on entrepreneurship, our thoughts on AI as an investment opportunity, and FJ Labs’ current thesis at the 2023&nbsp;Transatlantic Leadership Forum&nbsp;hosted by Goldman Sachs. Hayden AI,&nbsp;a leader in artificial intelligence and geospatial analytics, raised an oversubscribed $53M Series B to further strengthen its market leader position. (Businesswire) Vortexa, &nbsp;a London-based provider of a real-time global analytics for energy and freight markets, raised a $34M Series C, led by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital. (Finsmes) Vienna’s&nbsp;Refurbed&nbsp;raised a $57M Series C to expand its refurbished electronics marketplace. The company achieved significant milestones last year, having reached €1B GMV and achieving profitability in its home markets. (Tech.eu) Spain-based&nbsp;Luzia&nbsp;raised a $10M Series A to introduce its AI chatbot tech to users through a WhatsApp-based bot, led by Khosla Ventures. (TechCrunch) Outfit Training, a Navy SEAL veteran-founded mobile outdoor fitness company, announced plans to expand its boutique fitness concept throughout the U.S. for the first time through franchising. (PRNewswire) Other FJ Labs portfolio companies including&nbsp;Empowerly&nbsp;(managed marketplace for career counseling),&nbsp;Medelse&nbsp;(recruitment platform for healthcare professionals in France), and&nbsp;Yay Lunch&nbsp;(meal delivery service for schools in the U.S),&nbsp;raised new funding rounds last quarter. We are delighted to announce that&nbsp;Josh Breinlinger&nbsp;has joined FJ Labs as a Venture Partner. Josh started his career in Mechanical Engineering after graduating from MIT in 2000. In 2004, he joined the founding team of Upwork (previously oDesk) and began his love affair with marketplaces. Since then, he has been a founding member of Rev and a general partner with Jackson Square Ventures. He has led investments in OfferUp, Alto Pharmacy, Crexi, and 20 other early-stage marketplaces. Welcome, Josh! At Abu Dhabi Finance Week, Jose participated in a panel discussing how e-commerce will impact the way we do business as well as the disruption we’re seeing in the industry by offrails payment providers and challenger banks. At NY TechWeek, Fabrice gave a talk on best practices for effectively scaling marketplace growth. He was joined by several marketplace entrepreneurs investors. At the Association for Private Capital Investment in Latin America (LAVCA) week in NYC, FJ Labs Principal Matias Barbero moderated a panel on VC investing in LatAm with leading investors in the region including Valor, Kaszek, Canary, FinTech Collective, and ONEVC. Alongside our friends at London-based VC firstminute capital, we hosted a cocktail event for founders, investors, and NYC-based &nbsp;LPs at Fabrice’s apartment. These events serve as invaluable time to reconnect with our amazing founder network. Mark your calendars for Fabrice’s upcoming Playing with Unicorns episode, “Unlocking Productivity: Streamlining Your Days for Passion and Purpose”, which&nbsp;you can stream this Thursday, January 11 at noon ET. He will cover general productivity tips and optimal outsourcing of one’s professional and personal life. Fabrice’s latest macroeconomic update&nbsp;is not to be missed.&nbsp;He outlines the various factors leading to his near-term bearishness and reasons for cautious optimism as we look ahead. In this&nbsp;marketplace startups masterclass, Fabrice shares his thoughts on successfully building an online marketplace, the biggest mistakes marketplace founders make, and metrics required to raise capital at various stages. For a fun listen, check out Fabrice’s recent&nbsp;interview&nbsp;with our good friend and European solo GP,&nbsp;Robin Haak, of Robin Capital. This wide-ranging conversation covers a variety of topics from adventure travel to risk taking, spirituality, startups and more. For any belated holiday shopping needs, make sure you peruse Fabrice’s infamous&nbsp;holiday gadget gift guide.&nbsp;From ultra-light travel laptops, wireless headphones, ear plugs, an 8-in-1 charging station (or drone, RC truck, or outdoor ice bath :), he’s got you covered! And for more team writing… FJ investment team members Luke Skertich and Lauren Lee wrote an insightful two-part&nbsp;Playbook for Building Saas-Enabled Marketplaces. They reviewed hundreds of companies and identified factors that best contributed to the success of these models. Hope you enjoy!

2024-01-16T15:57:16

2024-01-16T15:57:16

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=22169

2024-01-16T15:57:17

2024-01-16T15:57:17

episode-44-unlocking-productivity-streamlining-your-days-for-passion-and-purpose

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https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-44-unlocking-productivity-streamlining-your-days-for-passion-and-purpose/

Episode 44: Unlocking Productivity: Streamlining Your Days for Passion and Purpose

<p>People often ask me how I manage to accomplish so much while leading such a rich, passionate life as illustrated by <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/2023-an-angel-is-born/" target="_blank" data-type="link" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/2023-an-angel-is-born/" rel="noreferrer noopener">my 2023 year in review</a>. In this episode I share all my secrets. I will cover everything from general productivity tips to how and what you can outsource in your professional and personal life.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Episode 44: Unlocking Productivity: Streamlining Your Days for Passion and Purpose" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/g6Gs2WjXLcY?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>For your reference I am including the slides I used during the episode.</p> <div id="wppdfemb-frame-container-22171"><iframe id="wppdf-emb-iframe-22171" scrolling="no" data-pdf-index="2" class="pdfembed-iframe nonfullscreen" style="border: none; width:100%; max-width: 100%; min-height: 1000px;" src="https://fabricegrinda.com?pdfID=22171&#038;url=https%3A%2F%2Ffabricegrinda.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2024%2F01%2FProductivity.pdf&#038;index=2" ></iframe></div> <p>If you prefer, you can listen to the episode in the embedded podcast player.</p> <figure><iframe loading="lazy" title="Libsyn Player" style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/29447908/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/forward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/000000/" height="90" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen=""></iframe></figure> <p>In addition to the above YouTube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/44-unlocking-productivity-streamlining-your-days-for/id1532336635?i=1000641347830" data-type="link" data-id="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/44-unlocking-productivity-streamlining-your-days-for/id1532336635?i=1000641347830" target="_blank" rel="noopener">iTunes</a> and <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/6iBGdJ0KaLTGQlJOj2DETl?si=491ed6ba4dcd4844" data-type="link" data-id="https://open.spotify.com/episode/6iBGdJ0KaLTGQlJOj2DETl?si=491ed6ba4dcd4844" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Spotify</a>.</p> <p>If you prefer to read the content, here is a transcript of the episode: </p> <p>Happy New Year, everyone. I hope you had wonderful holidays and that the beginning of the year is treating you very well. So, there&#8217;s been a recurring theme over the last few months where people keep asking me, How is it that you seem to have this Super passionate life where you can do all these different types of activities and play with your son and frankly live life to the fullest and yet be extraordinarily productive when it comes to work and get so, so much done.</p> <p>And I decided that it warranted sharing all my tips and secrets with all of you. And, you know, to illustrate that perhaps probably worth, showing an example of what I do in a given year for a brief moment. Let me show you this. So, this is my year-end review where I review everything that I did personally and professionally throughout the year.</p> <p>From adventures, playing with Fafa, to going to different locations. And also review what happened in the speeches I gave, what we accomplished at work and my predictions for the year. So, this is my blog. It&#8217;s called 2023 and Angel is born as a homage to my new dog Angel, which you can see there.</p> <p>But how to do all this, how to lead this passionate life is something I want to share with, with all of you. So with that, any further ado, let&#8217;s get going. Welcome to episode 44, unlocking productivity. Streamlining your days for passion and purpose.</p> <p>Now, the main reason to do this, by the way, is not to improve productivity, right? Like, you&#8217;re not being productive for the sake of being productive. You&#8217;re being productive for the sake of living your best possible life. So obviously, to some extent, it starts with understanding what is it that you love to do?</p> <p>What is it that you are extraordinarily good at and focus on that and everything else, you know, don&#8217;t focus but generally speaking there are three types of tricks or tips for productivity. So, I&#8217;m going to Separate this presentation in three parts. One is general tricks and tips to how to outsource all the things you can do online, and you can ask for us more than you think And then three, all the things you could add source offline and along the way, we&#8217;ll discuss some of the life setup choices that I&#8217;ve made.</p> <p>Which again, these were more personal choices, but it goes to show you can lead non-traditional lives that are still amazingly effective. Let me start with sharing my screen. Oh, one second. We set it up. Okay, perfect. The presentation is ready to go. So, I&#8217;ll start with the general productivity tips.</p> <p>I&#8217;ll spend a fair amount of time here because some of these things seem easy to describe, but I think we&#8217;re fundamental. So, the first thing is spend extraordinarily little time following news writ large. And by news, I mean everything, you know, newspapers, radio news, TV news you name it. I don&#8217;t actually even follow politics.</p> <p>So I actually take this to an ultimate extreme. I don&#8217;t follow news at all. And I&#8217;ll talk about why that is, how you stay informed when you&#8217;re not following news. And, and what and how do you allocate your time otherwise? So, the first thing you need to remember is news is the news is not actually meant to inform you.</p> <p>It is created by media companies. These media companies are trying to capture your attention, and they&#8217;re trying to capture your attention in order to sell you advertising or to sell advertising. And the best way to do that is to focus on negative things. Information because your amygdala is hypersensitive to negative information.</p> <p>So, the way your brain works is obviously tend to up to 10,000 years ago. If you saw a ruffling in their leaves or whatever, it could be a tiger and it could eat you. And if you were not focused on the negative news, you would actually not be able to survive. You would be eaten by the tiger. And as a result, humans are hypersensitive to negative information.</p> <p>And media companies have realized that, and they&#8217;re focusing on outrage, and they&#8217;re focusing on all the things that can annoy you to capture your attention. But it&#8217;s actually extraordinarily terrible for your mind, and when you look at it on a day by day basis, if you follow the news, It feels to me that the news has this eye of Mordor where they focus on one thing, whatever is capturing the current zeitgeist, whether it&#8217;s COVID, whether it&#8217;s Ukraine, or more recently Gaza, and it&#8217;s trying to provoke outrage.</p> <p>Regardless of your point of view, the media outlet you follow is going to try to create outrage for you to keep track, keep your information, or keep your attention and sell you advertising. The issue with that, beyond the fact that it&#8217;s a massive waste of time and it&#8217;s negative for you, the not much really happens.</p> <p>You know, if you take a step back, if you read the newspaper every day or follow the news every day, how much marginal incremental news is there on a daily basis? And you realize it&#8217;s highly repetitive and at the same time, in addition to being highly repetitive. It often is, highly sensationalistic.</p> <p>It&#8217;s not where the actual information is. You know, when the Wright Brothers flew a plane for the first time, it actually wasn&#8217;t reported in the news. It was reported the, the only thing that was reported were like, whatever, the train accidents and murders and whatever of the day. And these types of break, breakthroughs are happening every day, and they&#8217;re not really covered.</p> <p>So when I think about, like, what I want to be informed on, you know, it&#8217;s actually not the day-to-day coverage. So, imagine what happened in COVID. When COVID first happened, it was like scares. Oh, we&#8217;re all going to die. And where people were following who got COVID and who was violating the restrictions, etc.</p> <p>It was like entertainment. It was not news per se. What you really want to know, which of course is a book that has not been written yet, is, what would have been the policies that would have decreased mental health and physical health outcomes or, like, led to the best ones without impacting the economy?</p> <p>And maybe the answer changes over time before and after vaccines. But that is not what was covered. It was all, like, sensationalist bullshit that&#8217;s not that interesting. Likewise, okay, once you have the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, you know, the play by play, minute by minute is not all that relevant.</p> <p>What matters more is like, okay, what are the consequences for Europe, for the U.S., for the Cold War II setup that we have. And these things are better to look at with like six month or 12 months. The minute-by-minute outrage, not all that relevant. And so, I actually consume zero news. Don&#8217;t read newspapers, don&#8217;t watch TV news, etc.</p> <p>The way I stay informed is I partake in a few groups. Ergo, ERGO is one of them, Green Mantle by Neil Ferguson’s is another, where every few months, at least once a year, we meet with, like, policy makers and people that are analysts to think through, okay, what are the conclusions of all these things that have been happening?</p> <p>The one exception to that, which is why I say spend ten minutes per day on news, is, in my case, Tech news. I, it impacts my life. And it&#8217;s important to know what are the trends, who&#8217;s raising, who&#8217;s failing. And so I actually do spend 10 minutes a day reading Techmeme and Techcrunch, or CNET, Engadget,&nbsp; and Tom&#8217;s hardware.</p> <p>These latter are more entertainment. Like what gadgets would I like. I spend de minimis time consuming news writ large. Instead, I focus on analyst reports with the direct primary sources and with six month or a year of like of outlook in terms of like, okay.</p> <p>This is what happened in the last year and this is what we think probabilistically could happen in a go forward basis that this guy can impact you. This is how I stay on top of, like, my macro predictions, for instance. It doesn&#8217;t, you know, it comes from following what&#8217;s happening at FOMAC, etc. Not by reading newspapers in any way, shape, or form, which, all of which are negative.</p> <p>And this applies to news writ large, so, you know, don&#8217;t follow Twitter, for instance. I think it&#8217;s also very bad for your Mental health and internal health. Number two, compartmentalize, meaning be present in whatever it is you&#8217;re doing. People are terrible at multitasking. You want to be monotasking and doing one thing and being present in whatever task you&#8217;re doing.</p> <p>Now, sometimes it&#8217;s easier to say than to do, but once you&#8217;re done with work, you know, when you&#8217;re playing tennis, play tennis, focus on the next point, not thinking about like, oh, what you didn&#8217;t do, what you need to do tomorrow. Otherwise, you&#8217;re going to be terrible at tennis, and it&#8217;s going to be way harder for you to fall asleep.</p> <p>So be present. You know, leave things in one activity for that activity and go back to it when the time comes, but don&#8217;t deal with it while you&#8217;re doing something else. Number three is people have a tendency to procrastinate. And, it&#8217;s very easy to put off things. So, to get things done, actually set deadlines.</p> <p>With short time fuses. I put it as a deliverable for myself in, in my calendar and I&#8217;ll talk about how I manage calendar on soon in order to get things on, you know, if I want to write a blog post, I&#8217;ll actually block time my calendar for writing the blog post and make sure that it, that, that it&#8217;s that it&#8217;s deliver it on time this way I can publish it on time because we live in a world where we&#8217;re constantly bombarded with information.</p> <p>It&#8217;s actually good to take time off, right? Like, yeah. If you are doing, you are not thinking. And so, it is good to have time to be reflective. I try to have Fridays where I have much fewer meetings than other days, or ideally no meetings. That doesn&#8217;t always plan out that way, and I try not to work weekends these days.</p> <p>But actually having time to think and reflect is very important. In fact, my entire life is structured around, okay, when I&#8217;m in New York for like a one month or two months, it’s all on all the time, be it intellectual salons, dinners, etc. And then when I go to Turks and Caicos, because in the evenings there&#8217;s nothing social for me to do there, that&#8217;s when I&#8217;m more reflective.</p> <p>I read, I write, I publish many more blog posts, I, and I&#8217;m trying to be more thoughtful. Next point is limit meetings. I think that&#8217;s a generally accepted rule, but meetings need to have a purpose. Like if you&#8217;re taking a meeting, you need to know what, why you&#8217;re meeting, who you&#8217;re meeting with, what you&#8217;re trying to get out of it.</p> <p>So, it needs to be a clear agenda. It should have as few people as possible in the meeting. And I try to keep them to 30 minutes or less. Now, I&#8217;ve realized that when I&#8217;m evaluating a startup, 30 minutes is usually too short, so it&#8217;s more an hour that I block just to be safe and make sure I have the time to go in enough depth to make a proper investment decision.</p> <p>But in general, the tip is keep meeting short and, and try to get to the point of them. And as a rule, what I&#8217;m do, what I do is my meetings are back-to-back in 30-minute increments. So, in a given day, I could have 14 meetings. If someone shows up 15 minutes late, they only get 15 minutes. If they show up 31 minutes late, they get no minutes.</p> <p>I&#8217;m not, I&#8217;m going to be on time for every one of the meetings. I think punctuality is a mark of respect, and you want to be on time. And in fact, the number one complaint many founders have of VCs is they don&#8217;t respect their times when they&#8217;re late. Show up actually one to two minutes early to every meeting.</p> <p>And respect and respect the time to the other. And so, if you show up 31 minutes late, you aren&#8217;t going to be rescheduled for a future date, and maybe never rescheduled, depending on how I feel and why it happened. Next point is make very quick decisions, right? It&#8217;s better to make a quick decision and be wrong because you can course correct.</p> <p>Then don&#8217;t look for perfection. It&#8217;s definitely true in, in business settings. In startups where you&#8217;d rather make a decision, throw the spaghetti on the wall. See if the spaghetti is sticking and if not, you know move on and try something else. Time blocking, so what I do, and I, I will demonstrate that shortly with an example day in my calendar, is everything is in my calendar.</p> <p>So, if I need to do emails, it&#8217;s in the calendar. If I need if I&#8217;m going to go to the gym, and in fact if it&#8217;s there, it gets done. If it&#8217;s not in the calendar, it does not exist. Next point is more tactical. You want to be focused and present in whatever activity you, you are doing. And so all notifications should be off.</p> <p>So, my phone does not ring, does not vibrate, doesn&#8217;t have anything showing up on the screen ever. It&#8217;s on permanent do not disturb. The, you cannot get through to me from that perspective. So, if I want to go check messages, I will proactively at a time that I choose. Go to check my Instagram or my WhatsApp or my text messages.</p> <p>But even vibration, which feels perhaps as in intrusive, if the phone is in your pocket and it vibrates, it takes your attention away from what you&#8217;re doing, and all of a sudden you have, you know, FOMO. It&#8217;s like, Ooh, what is it that I&#8217;m receiving? What is it I should be checking? So, you should not be getting any pop ups, notifications on anything.</p> <p>New emails coming in should not be bumping, beeping. Nothing should beep. Nothing should vibrate. Nothing should, should show up in any way, shape, or form. Now, if you have kids and you&#8217;re worried that they need to be reached by the school or whatever, you can create a rule where even though you&#8217;re in do not disturb two, three or four people create a very big list.</p> <p>Otherwise, it defeats the purpose of this can get through to you. And I do have that in my case, given that father is going to school, but in general, you don&#8217;t want any distractions whatsoever. Again, as I mentioned earlier, humans suck at multitasking. You want to be monotasking. If I block an hour for emails, I&#8217;m doing emails then.</p> <p>I don&#8217;t want to be doing anything else. If I&#8217;m on a call, I want to be present and focused on my call and taking notes and thinking not being doing other things. Otherwise, you&#8217;re not going to have the most thoughtful analysis and presence for whatever it is you&#8217;re doing. Next point is general life advice, you know, and basically you want to be in life penny foolish and pound wise.</p> <p>So, you want to be extraordinarily careful on large decisions, on large purchases, things that are going to impact you financially. So, buying a house renting something that perhaps is too expensive for you, buying a car, and definitely avoid luxury items. They&#8217;re pointless, you know. I don&#8217;t have a watch.</p> <p>I have a smart watch, but I don&#8217;t have like any luxury items like art, etc. They don&#8217;t bring me pleasure. They&#8217;re not really useful. I&#8217;d rather splurge on experiences when travel with like friends and family rather than, than physical goods in general, which probably makes a lot of sense. And, last but not least, you know, you need probably way fewer items than you think you do.</p> <p>And that means it is very healthy, at least once a year do a pruning. I just give away things I don&#8217;t use. So, every spring, I do a spring cleaning, where most of the things I haven&#8217;t been wearing, clothes wise, for instance, I will give away to charity. You know, if you&#8217;re not using it, most likely not going to continue using it, you will not miss it.</p> <p>And so you lead a lighter life. I wouldn&#8217;t try to avoid purchasing things in the first place to avoid this, but regardless, very healthy to do on a general basis. Now let&#8217;s talk about, like, much more specific, how to, I mean, doing what I&#8217;ve just described makes you more productive already, and not consuming any news saves you a lot of time, but how do you, like, multiply your horsepower in general?</p> <p>This brings me to point number two. So, what&#8217;s actually helped me the most, by far, is outsourcing. I outsource. everything I can in life and everything that, that I don&#8217;t love doing. Now, you may think, hey, I can type faster than my assistant. Why would I want an assistant? Well, if you&#8217;ve studied economics at all and Ricardian theory of comparative advantage, is even if you are better than your assistant at everything that she does, because you make more doing whatever it is your core activity is, you&#8217;re better off still having it.</p> <p>Still, still having an assistant, even though you may be better than her at her tasks. And that&#8217;s okay. Now, the key superpower we&#8217;ve found and discovered is using remote assistance, especially in the Philippines, which we&#8217;ve been working with for, like, probably around 20 years here at FJ Labs. And well, personally, and then at FJ Labs in the last decade, we have 10 of them at FJ Labs, and I have a personal dedicated virtual assistant.</p> <p>I use YRA, but a friend of mine who&#8217;s a genius at outsourcing. His name is Jonathan Swanson. He built Thumbtack. He had like thousands of like people in the Philippines for Thumbtack just created a company called Athena actually to help people become master delegators as well. So, these two companies are great.</p> <p>YRA is about $1,500 a month full time. And so, this is someone extremely qualified working at your hours, whatever time zone you&#8217;re in, in English. And Athena I think is about 3, 000 a month. But you can also buy quarter time or half time. And I&#8217;m going to show you that you can outsource a lot more than you think.</p> <p>So, in my case I have a dedicated assistant, her name is Rose. Probably not a real name, but that&#8217;s okay. Maybe a team and not one person, that&#8217;s also okay. And actually, the funny thing is, I&#8217;ve actually never spoken to her on the phone. I’ve, I don&#8217;t know what she looks like. And, I&#8217;ve never even interviewed her.</p> <p>The way I recruit people, in general well, in YRA, they just find someone for you, and then you decide if you like them or not, and then you, and then you decide, and if you&#8217;re not happy, they&#8217;ll change. But when I hire people in Upwork or elsewhere, which I will describe later for the other activities that I outsource, I usually hire like 10 people for the same task given that it&#8217;s like a buck an hour or 2 an hour.</p> <p>It&#8217;s not a big deal. And then I see the one I like best, and then I keep that person for the rest of these tasks, not just this time, but on a recurring basis. And so that process works reasonably well. It saves you a lot of time of having to do interviews and filtering.</p> <p>So, work outsourcing. Now, a lot of this is probably going to be more basic, but basically this is an example of the email Rose sends me every day at the end of the day of what she did during the day. So, it shows all the pending meetings that she has yet to confirm and schedule, and then number two, all the confirmed meetings.</p> <p>That she scheduled she in that same email, and she also covers all the personal tasks, etc. So, it&#8217;s an email that she sends me daily of all the things she did for me. And during the day, we typically interact by a combination of WhatsApp and email on things to be done, whether they&#8217;re urgent or, you know, things that can be scheduled for a later day.</p> <p>Every day, and this is a prototypical example of what a day looks like for me. She sends me my calendar for the next day. Now, if I know what it&#8217;s about, she doesn&#8217;t put more details, just a zoom link. You know, so Zimozi is my Indian team that helps me with my blog from a design perspective or coding perspective and with Trident&#8217;s website.</p> <p>We&#8217;re doing a monthly check in to see how things are going. We&#8217;re currently launching, that was the 9 am. meeting. We&#8217;re currently launching a new incubation company and so that&#8217;s the 10 am. meeting, doesn&#8217;t need more detail. Quick check in with Martin, he&#8217;s on a 30-minute call, that&#8217;s the founder of Mundi, we&#8217;re checking out how things are going.</p> <p>And then for Midas, this is meeting. I added myself to the calendar, which is why there&#8217;s no context. But I was meeting, I think, potential employee or potential partner, and then I have a bunch of meetings with, I think, VCs or partners for Midas. And then later on with my co-founding partner at FJ Labs, Jose, to discuss different things.</p> <p>See how the rest of the day goes. So, you see, it&#8217;s kind of like back-to-back to back to 9 to 10 to 11, 11 30 to 12 30 to 1 15. VC meeting for Midas, which is the new stablecoin or yield bearing stablecoin that I&#8217;m currently launching to try to compete with USDC, USDT. Another. Then I&#8217;m meeting a founder actually at my place just to catch up.</p> <p>Like she, she left her old company. She is thinking what to do next. And so, it&#8217;s interesting to figure out and see if I can help her and also think through what she should be doing. Is she creating a new company? Should we be investing there? Etcetera. And that is full context. Same thing. Meeting another VC for Midas at 2 pm. 3 pm, meeting another founder to get an update on what they&#8217;re up to and how they&#8217;re doing more fundraising, founder calls, and then going to a speaker event for a speech I was giving the next day at the Transatlantic Leadership Forum. And then I&#8217;m playing paddle from 9pm to 11pm with my brother, Olivier.</p> <p>So, everything is in here, whether I&#8217;m doing a meditation, whether I I&#8217;m playing tennis or paddle. Everything is the agenda, and this way I have a clear action plan for the day. And that is sent the night before when Rose signs off at like 6 or 7 pm. every day. Perhaps the place or the thing that you can outsource way more than you think is actually your personal life.</p> <p>So Rose, in addition to managing my business life, manages my personal life. So, here&#8217;s a few examples. In New York, I love hosting salons and, and founder dinners, intellectual dinners, etc. So, I have a list of a whole bunch of people that I invite for different dates. And so, we will discuss who we&#8217;re inviting.</p> <p>She&#8217;ll send the invites and then we&#8217;ll create, create a, an email with like this venue, some of your dietary restrictions. These are the topics. And the topics are far ranging. It could be like, oh, how do we reinvent politics for the 21st century? What are the ethics and morality of torture? What or even personal, like, you know if you were to write a, a book on any 72-hour period of your life, what 72 hours would it be?</p> <p>So, we track, I mean, she tracks who the, the guest replies are. We try to be eight for these dinners. But we also do these things with you know, founder dinners, et cetera, on a regular basis. I host multiple dinners a week. I hosted a post exit founder dinner last night, for instance doing another dinner tonight.</p> <p>Next thing is, there are a lot of things that take a lot of your time. You know, so for instance, if you want to book doctor&#8217;s appointments, if you want to fill in all the forms. On medical forms, I&#8217;d rather do it ahead of time. She can do all that for me. And these things you have to wait online, wait on the call, etc.</p> <p>She can pretend to be me. She has a Google phone number in the Philippines, so she has a U.S. phone number. So, for instance, T-Mobile had disconnected my international data. It took her four hours on the phone with repeated calls to fix it, but she was able to fix it. Again, it&#8217;s four hours of my life that I would have never gotten back, and I&#8217;m very grateful that she is actually in a position to do that.</p> <p>Same thing, she books my meditations, she blocks all my gyms and, and, and buys whatever the trainer needs to buy. And for tennis, like, she knows I like tennis. So, if I&#8217;m traveling to a new location, and there&#8217;s tennis or paddle, she will look at all the clubs around me, look at availability, find either people at my level, or book me lessons.</p> <p>This way, already for two, three times a week, wherever I&#8217;m going, I already have tennis organized. And I don&#8217;t need to do anything. I didn&#8217;t pick the club, I didn&#8217;t call them, I didn&#8217;t find the partners. Everything&#8217;s organized. In the calendar, I guess I&#8217;m not doing it more right now, but in the past, I even asked for things like dating where with my assistant back in the day when I, when I was on online dating apps.</p> <p>I first like we did a call. We&#8217;re like, okay, this, these are the people I like or don&#8217;t like. So, this is I would swipe right or left. Now use a VPN, connect as me, and you can swipe for me. Then, okay, this is how I, and, and then she would do it. And we would agree on. Course correct, what made sense or not, then she would look at how I would chat and she would replicate that.</p> <p>And then finally, I&#8217;m like, okay, I&#8217;m happy to go on a date, you know, once a week, Friday and maybe whatever, Tuesday, twice a week 8 pm, or 7 pm, or 9 pm. Here&#8217;s the slots in the calendar. Go and book them. And so, she would like then swipe for me. match me with a potential date, schedule the date, it&#8217;d be in the calendar, and then the day before, I would look at, like, the profile of the person that she matched me with, and I&#8217;d decide if I&#8217;m interested in going or not, right?</p> <p>Like, if you&#8217;re trying to go on online dating, at the end of the day, the rest is not interesting. The only thing you want to know is, do you like the person you&#8217;re meeting? So let&#8217;s get to a meeting as fast as possible. So, if you can avoid the entire tedium of swiping, chatting, etc., and get directly to the last point, great.</p> <p>And if I disagreed with a choice, you know, I said, no, I don&#8217;t actually like this person for whatever reason, which of course corrects her. She would just cancel the date and that was it. And so, it didn&#8217;t take any time for me, other than showing up at the date, which was always literally in the bar across the street from where I live, at whatever the set time was.</p> <p>And so even an activity that seems to take a lot of people a lot of time, was de minimis from a time perspective for me because it was all done for me and it worked extremely well Now as many of you know, I love writing. I love writing on my blog. I Blog in a regular basis. I share things about my life now.</p> <p>I do the writing myself because I love it, I do the research, etc. But the rest that is and many about it, which is actually putting in a WordPress replicating on soft stack creating the newsletter sending the newsletter All of that, she does for me and again, saves a huge amount of time. Write my, the value creation is in the creative genius of writing and what I want to share and thinking, etc.</p> <p>Not at all in the admin type things. You know, let&#8217;s go to WordPress and, and, and upload it and send it et cetera. So, I like the writing, not that other part, and she does that for me as well. And by the way, all this is one person doing all of us. She buys things for Angel, my dog. She will also research, like, entry requirements, and I get passports for a dog.</p> <p>She will buy things if I need for Fafa. She there&#8217;s an app that the school, the Equal has, which is amazing, where there&#8217;s all the photos of the day. She will download the photos. She’ll like, pay the nannies, like, everything needs to be done. But, like, even researching things, like, oh, how do I get someone a birth certificate or a passport?</p> <p>You know, she will research, which is also a massive time saver. By the way, noticing all the questions that people were asking, I will address them at the end, one by one. So, we&#8217;ll do kind of a Q&amp; A at the end of when I&#8217;m done presenting everything here. So, she signs documents for me.</p> <p>But the documents I would say that are not the most important ones, right? I, if I rented a, a house, you know, rental agreement or need to do KYC, so things like that, that are not really important, that I don&#8217;t need to be doing myself. She has my digital signature. I say, okay, sign this. Poof work. I, for, she has actually, also probably worth mentioning, she has access to my email and she has access to my credit card.</p> <p>But she has one credit card, and so what I can do is every month I can log in on that one credit card and see where the purchases are and make sure everything&#8217;s okay. So that&#8217;s the safety control mechanism if you want. But she has access to my email and she&#8217;s like, all the legal documents are sent to legal, so I don&#8217;t need to deal with them.</p> <p>All the all things that look like spam are moved in a folder called potential spam. So again, I don&#8217;t need to deal with them. But I am the one replying to my own emails because many of them need my thoughtfulness. But she will, you know, if I need to find out how to get a police form for a friend, for some whatever reason or KYC someone asks, she will like to figure out how to get the data and, and help me get it.</p> <p>So again, online. General admin docs, etc. Now, continuing on like things that most people don&#8217;t outsource that they probably should is like figuring out how to have a more rich life and wherever you live. And so, for instance, in New York, I love magic. I love Broadway. I love off Broadway. I love comedy clubs and you don&#8217;t want once you&#8217;ve done the basics like going further off the beaten field, you know, going to House of Yes for a dirty circus show or whatever. We&#8217;re going to company 14 in Bushwick to see the there are various shows. And so, I have her before I go to new city task. We&#8217;re like, what are the things that are happening right now? So, this is an example of, Oh, and actually, might as well, there&#8217;s a lot of chat here, so might as well add the chats.</p> <p>And this way the community can see the conversation that&#8217;s going on. So this is an example of when I came in September to New York, she researched all the different musicals that were like Broadway, Off Broadway that are in, A bit off the beaten path, including reviews, suggesting the ones I would like, the nice I could do.</p> <p>And from there, I actually ended up booking multiple shows. I, I took my son to a balloon museum, which is so much fun. I&#8217;ll be posting the photos of that on Instagram in a few days. Took my son to a train show at the New York Botanical Gardens. I went to see like an off Broadway, like, musical parody of Friends.</p> <p>She ordered my, like, Halloween costume. They&#8217;re like, there&#8217;s so much that you can ask for us to make sure that your life is rich, as rich as possible. And in New York, I try, there&#8217;s so much to be done that you can have a very rich life. Again, New York is my haven of, like, social, artistic, professional endeavors.</p> <p>And things like, you know, conferences I need to go to. Same thing. She&#8217;ll send the bio. She&#8217;ll show me the agenda. She&#8217;ll add it on my calendar and make sure that, that, that I show up. Next thing is she helped me create my 50th birthday invites, so I&#8217;m celebrating my 50th birthday next august 3rd in 2024 and so help design the invite on paperless posts, we&#8217;re sending it, we&#8217;re tracking who&#8217;s coming, we&#8217;re figuring out like all, how many rooms we need, where et cetera.</p> <p>And so, she helped design it. She said it. She&#8217;s tracking the replies to make sure that everything is structured correctly. But even for that, for instance, I also hired a party planner to help me with like the vision of the night and what&#8217;s going on and everything happening. So, I don&#8217;t need to deal with it.</p> <p>All the amenities things, from that perspective, now I also have a travel agent for booking flights, but beyond the travel agent, Rose will help me on like everything around. How do I get there? Hotel rooms getting upgraded, getting reimbursed. So, Burning Man this year was supposed to fly out. On Sunday, but of course it was muddy, so it got canceled.</p> <p>So, I walked out of Burning Man, like getting reimbursed for the flight that I didn&#8217;t take and, you know, adding Heli skiing to the agenda, notifying people that FJ Labs are not working these days. All these things, you know, need to be done. And again, none of them seem particularly big, but they add up.</p> <p>And the more of these things you ask for us, the more free time you have, to do what you want. Now, you can have, beyond Rose, as I said, I already have a travel agent. I have a party planner. But I hire other people for other tasks. So, every year, for instance, I like to create, and maybe let&#8217;s just go to me here.</p> <p>I like to create an album. This is a photo album of the, of what happened during the year. It starts with a timeline, with every date chronological from beginning of the year to the end. And then for each section, there is photos of, of, of what&#8217;s going on. And it&#8217;s a beautiful album, it&#8217;s a paper, it&#8217;s a memento to the year.</p> <p>Now the reason I do that is parents don&#8217;t deal with digital very well. And, and actually creating the album allows you to relive the year. So, I love it, it&#8217;s all over my library, I give it to my mom, I give it to my dad. They, they love it, it&#8217;s a way to connect with the story I have. And so, I went on Upwork.</p> <p>I created a post saying, hey, I need someone to help me with this. And I got a lot of replies. As I said, I hired, I hired like 10 people to do the job. And ultimately, one person in Bangladesh, was the best for these and I, and, and, and one, well, originally someone in Russia, but then I couldn&#8217;t pay them anymore because of the sanctions.</p> <p>So, someone in Bangladesh. So, the way we work together is. Actually, let me take a step back of how I organize my, my photos. So let me share my screen again. Not necessarily the easiest to see. Let&#8217;s see if I could go full screen. Okay, so during the year, and this is all the photos I&#8217;ve taken during the year, you see all the dates, you know, January 1 to February 22, February 23 to February 27.</p> <p>For each of the locations I am, I create a folder. And in that folder, I have a subcategory of what&#8217;s going on there. Cross country skiing, February heli skiing, FJ Labs, etc. Which can then be used to create subsections in the album. And so, I don&#8217;t do, and by the way, I do this along the year as the year is coming along.</p> <p>So, if you wait until the end of the year, you won&#8217;t remember anything. Creating this structure will be impossible. So, I take the photos of my phone. I get photos from my friends through AirDrop or whatever. And then I, I create the folder. So, for instance, I already have in 2024, January 1 to January 7, Turks and Caicos is where I was.</p> <p>And now January 7 to January 14 in New York, where I am currently, where I&#8217;m uploading photos little by little. And I delete them from my phone once I&#8217;ve uploaded them. So, this is all in Dropbox. Then I share the Dropbox link let&#8217;s go back to 2022, because that was the example I gave you with my, Charmin, who&#8217;s currently in Bangladesh.</p> <p>And then we have interactions on it. So, she does a first pass as to what she thinks makes the most sense. And let me go back here and go back to full screen. Okay, perfect. So, she does a first pass and let&#8217;s go back here, see if this can read. Yeah. And then after she gives me the first pass, I give her a lot of feedback.</p> <p>You know, date format looks wrong or, oh, I don&#8217;t like this photo. So, for each page, there&#8217;ll be like, Photo 6. It&#8217;s like, oh, replace photo 1, replace photo 2. Oh, I look fat. I don&#8217;t like this angle. This is not that interesting. Oh, you&#8217;re forgetting something. I don&#8217;t like the quote. Whatever it may be. And so, this is, I&#8217;m the creative director for, for this endeavor.</p> <p>It takes a lot of iteration. I&#8217;m currently working, for instance, on the 2023 album. Which I hope will be done in a few weeks or a month, which I will then gift to my parents, but also put my coffee shop coffee desk and you saw the result of it is after many iterations, the album that I showed you with the timeline and photos again, no one needs to do this and not everyone used to do this, but I find that it&#8217;s an amazing way to relive the year.</p> <p>And it&#8217;s an amazing gift to give to your parents who love it or are not great with digital and giving them a link on whatever Dropbox. I do the same for videos I create. I&#8217;m going to share a video. So, at the end of the year, I create a video. Now I will play an example of that video.</p> <p>So, I will go, oh, one minute and 15 change this. One minute 17 do this. It&#8217;s the same thing. I found someone on out on. And I found someone on Upwork, and we edit videos. Again, someone other than Rose. This is what it looks like. I&#8217;ll give you a quick example. Let me minimize this. Let me give you a quick example of what that looks like.</p> <p>&nbsp;Let’s see, 20 videos, pretty cool. Year in review video.</p> <p>Let me make sure there&#8217;s no sound because it&#8217;s copyrighted music. I don&#8217;t want to get a copyright strike. Perfect. So, let me play a few seconds of this. Maybe I&#8217;ll make it even full screen.</p> <p>And same thing, it follows the year, so it starts in January, in this case I was in Rubble Soak. Shows, it&#8217;s set to music. It shows the adventure and then it goes through the rest of my year and I play that at the family gatherings at the end of the year. I send the family, I send the friends and family, et cetera.</p> <p>And it&#8217;s pretty amazing. You know, you see the first increment, but then it ultimately it totally moves to, you know, I was at the upfront summit, and then I go and hosted things and then the covid, etc. Pause this video here, and we can go back to the next type of things that I outsource. Let&#8217;s go back to this. And let&#8217;s go back to the presentation.</p> <p>Okay, so next phase of things that I outsource. Now, I realize this next phase is not necessarily possible for everyone. I am extraordinarily privileged from a financial perspective to be in a position to outsource things in the offline world. Now, the online world, I think it&#8217;s with, it&#8217;s within reach for most people.</p> <p>As I said, it&#8217;s like 1500 a month. And 1500 a month to outsource as much as I&#8217;ve outsourced is actually pretty extraordinary. W when you, the bang for your buck that you get is amazing. And I&#8217;ve gotten more out of doing things online with Upwork and your remote assistant, etc. than you know, with in person assistance from that perspective.</p> <p>That said, in at FJ Labs we have an office manager that does a lot of the offline things, but. For the things I described the virtual assistants of the Philippines are actually better. As I said, I&#8217;m also in a privileged position to outsource things in my offline life. Now, this is way more expensive and so not. within reach for everyone.</p> <p>But I have an estate manager. This is Paul. We&#8217;ve been working together now for 80 years. And in addition to being an estate manager, he&#8217;s a chef. In fact, I&#8217;ve organized it. That&#8217;s very often. The same manager is the chef and does anything. So, he manages all the other property managers. I have three properties.</p> <p>I&#8217;ll go through that shortly. He drives me, if need be, organizes like the housekeeping staff. If I&#8217;m hosting a dinner, if it&#8217;s small dinner, I&#8217;ll just cook and take care of it himself. But he will hire waiters, if we&#8217;re catering, you hire the caterer, like anything, like getting, car insurance, car maintenance, picking up packages, dealing with the mail, anything that&#8217;s like in person.</p> <p>Now, in my case, I don&#8217;t actually like cooking. So, for me, I want to outsource it and I tell them to have, he knows my, I don&#8217;t also plan my meals. I don&#8217;t tell them, oh, this is what I want to eat. It&#8217;s like, these are the things I like. Just go, go for it. Be creative. Feed me healthy food that, that I&#8217;m going to like.</p> <p>He doesn&#8217;t run the menus by me, he just does it. And I trust him to do things I like, and if I don&#8217;t like it, you know, I&#8217;m just actually going to, to give him feedback. Now, I have this kind of setup for each of my three locations. I have three core locations where I spend my time. And for each of them, I have a property manager who also is a chef and manages the rest of the staff, handles the licenses because I sublet them on Airbnb if I can, which I can&#8217;t in New York or Revelstoke, but I can in Turks and Caicos.</p> <p>And their goal is to delight me and or whatever guests I have, be they my family or renters from the Airbnb equivalent. Now the reason I have three homes is I&#8217;ve made a decision to structure my life in a pretty nontraditional way. Two realizations. Realization number one is each city has a very best moment of time to live in.</p> <p>So, New York is extraordinary in the, in the spring and in the fall, right? Like you want to be in New York in September and October, in April, in May, and maybe the first half of June. It is way less compelling in the summer. It&#8217;s too hot, it&#8217;s humid, it&#8217;s way less compelling, and like January, February, December. And so, I try to go to the places where there&#8217;s, where it&#8217;s the best time to be there. So, my year is typically structured with January, February in Revelstoke in British Columbia, where I like to go backcountry skiing on weekends, and, and snowshoeing, and ice climbing, and dock sliding, et cetera, but it&#8217;s mostly a brand backcountry skiing, heli skiing.</p> <p>March I go to Turks and Caicos to thaw and like kite surf and play tennis and play paddle, et cetera. As I said, April, May, June in the New York area, and then I start heading to Nice to see my family in the south of France. Before usually going for my birthday in, in Turks and Caicos, and then all of August I go to Revelstoke in the mountain where I like to go mountain biking and hiking and rock climbing, etc.</p> <p>Then I go to Burning Man, and again, September, October, New York, and then November, December, Turks. Though, to be exact, I usually go to Turks until December 26, and then New Year&#8217;s I spend in Revelstoke. That&#8217;s why I have snow for, for New Year&#8217;s and in the holiday season, in addition to having the sun.</p> <p>Now, in addition to that, every year I like to add a two-week trip somewhere where that is new and, and, and a massive adventure like Antarctica in 2023, that is often off grid and adventurous, you know, where I&#8217;m like just a backpack and a tent and a water filtration system. Beyond that, so that, that&#8217;s core setup.</p> <p>And beyond the fact that each place has a best time or location to be there. My perspective is that each, you want your work life balance. And so, New York, as I mentioned earlier, is a place of professional, social, artistic, intellectual, it is busy 24/7. I&#8217;m going out. I&#8217;m meeting friends. I&#8217;m hosting dinners.</p> <p>I&#8217;m going to events with founders. It is so busy that after a month or two, I am completely burnt out. And I&#8217;m tired and I need a place to recharge. Now, in Revelstoke and Turks, I&#8217;m not on vacation. I actually work during the day. So, Revelstoke, typically, I will only do the backcountry skiing, etc. on the weekends.</p> <p>And or if there&#8217;s a day off, like this month, we have two days off in January. So, I&#8217;m taking the, and I think there&#8217;s a Friday and a Monday. And I&#8217;m heli skiing those days in addition to the weekends. And same thing in Turks, I&#8217;ll work during the day, but when the day ends, whatever time that may be, I&#8217;ll go kitesurf and play tennis and play paddle and read and write and meditate.</p> <p>And so, the you know, New York I&#8217;m doing, and in Revelstoke and Turks and Caicos, I&#8217;m being healthy, I&#8217;m being reflective. And it&#8217;s a combination of a place where I&#8217;ll either be alone, to recharge my social batteries, or I will bring a huge gathering or spattering of friends and family. So, for instance this year, and I&#8217;ll go back to for a quick second if it&#8217;ll open to my blog.</p> <p>I brought 50 people; I brought 50 people for Christmas and New Year&#8217;s which was like the gathering of my family. Yep, and this is. This is our new year photo. 50 people of both the family I have and the family I choose. Which has been absolutely amazing. Like, going back here. So, it&#8217;s kind of like the life setup in terms of like moving around.</p> <p>So, continuing of the things I outsource. I also outsource the, so I&#8217;ve separated for Triton, for instance, which is rented out when I&#8217;m not there and generates millions of revenues a year, the guest services local in person versus reservations. So, I have a reservation manager, Rae-Anne, who helps like create the pricing manage the different channels and do all the reservation part of the experience until it is Handed over to Lori and her team to do the actual guest services experience.</p> <p>She also usually or sometimes has someone from YRA to help. With the work that she needs to do. As you know, I got a dog this year, Angel. And for Angel, for at least for the first few years, given how busy I am otherwise, especially in New York, I have a full-time dog walker, dog trainer, travels with me everywhere, takes care of Angel, gets the vaccines up to date.</p> <p>Yeah, it gets all the papers and everything that needs to be done. And that&#8217;s Mike. And it helps, especially when you live in a place, you know, like New York and when I&#8217;m busy in New York obviously when I&#8217;m in Turks and rubble, so, you know, Angel can be roaming free and we can be playing all day, but even then, I want her to be very well trained.</p> <p>I want to be able to walk with her off leash and her not to, and just follow the directions. If I want her to play, she goes play, and if I want her to come back and pay attention off leash, regardless of distractions, squirrels, other dogs, cars, whatever, that she listens. And so, I want her to be very well trained, and Mike is amazing for that.</p> <p>So, nannies, actually before I talk nannies, maybe I&#8217;ll go back to the, the, the travel setup for a second. Now that I have a son who&#8217;s starting to go to school, instead of doing two-month, I don&#8217;t want to be away from him too long. I&#8217;m actually making sure that, A, obviously we spend all of our vacations together, and when we&#8217;re in New York, we&#8217;re together all the time.</p> <p>But when I go to like Turks, let&#8217;s say, December 1 to 15, it&#8217;s like two weeks, I&#8217;ll still spend a week in New York. To make sure that I&#8217;m around them at the right time. So, I&#8217;m changing the, even though it&#8217;s a bit more travel, I&#8217;m changing the two months, two months to more like two weeks, three weeks, one week, two weeks, et cetera, to make sure I spend more time with them.</p> <p>So nanny setup. So we wanted coverage seven days a week from 7:45 am to 7:45 pm. So, we found, a bunch of nannies on care.com mostly, some Facebook groups as well. The core mission or the core vision was that one of the nannies to be. In fluent accent less French who can travel internationally, so I have a passport, and can drive which obviously creates a number of limitations. And the reason for the French, by the way, is obviously I&#8217;m French. My family mostly is French speaking. We live in New York, so he&#8217;s going to be getting English. In general, even though he&#8217;s in a bilingual school called the École, which is absolutely amazing. It&#8217;s like the Rigor of the French system with creativity and public speaking and teamwork of the American system, because school, TV, friends, whatever, and living in the US is in English. I figured, let&#8217;s have the nannies only speak French to him. Now, what I have the nannies do is, when we travel, it&#8217;s only one nanny that travels with us.</p> <p>And, but if it&#8217;s multiple weeks long, maybe they&#8217;ll swap. There&#8217;s a WhatsApp group for the nannies to coordinate between each other. So, the reason it&#8217;s four of them, by the way, and you can meet them here, you can see their little bios and who&#8217;s doing how many days, etc. As they, well, French nannies, I guess, don&#8217;t want to work too many hours in general.</p> <p>And so this is kind of the amount of hours they wanted to work. So, someone would work once a day, two days a week. And so actually having four part time who agree between themselves, who&#8217;s traveling, who&#8217;s taking what days, et cetera works really well to give us full coverage without any issues.</p> <p>They&#8217;re paid on a per hour basis, or an hourly basis based on the hours worked. So, there&#8217;s a Westside group, they coordinate, they train they tell each other what happened before, what needs to happen. And they have a calendar called Cozi where all the doctor&#8217;s appointments, et cetera, that they populate, and they know what tasks need to be done.</p> <p>And they do everything from preparing one meal a day to buying groceries. Well, diapers not really needed anymore, but medicine, bath supplies, I mean, whatever needs to be taken care of. They do in addition to taking care of Francois, picking him out of school, dropping off at school, et cetera. Now, in addition to that, Let&#8217;s say there&#8217;s a date night or I need to go out or whatever, and I need coverage beyond 7:45 pm.</p> <p>Add the slot requests and the calendar and they between themselves agree who&#8217;s going to take it. So again, it doesn&#8217;t require me to do anything. Now realize this is a pretty expensive proposition because I have essentially seven-day coverage 12 hours a day. There is a cheaper way for people to do this.</p> <p>Which is if you have an au pair, now an au pair, the issue is a, they need to live with you, so you need to have room for them, which is not viable for everyone, and typically it&#8217;s only one or two years, and the number of hours they work is capped. So, what you can do for you to be a cheaper alternative than this is au pair plus daycare.</p> <p>If you do au pair plus daycare, you can get something not quite as bespoke, but rather effective for a fraction of the cost of what I&#8217;m describing here. Now I have a nanny handbook, which shows all the rules. You know, you need to speak to them only in French. When my daughter&#8217;s coming, you&#8217;ll only speak to her in French.</p> <p>What you need to cook. What Francois likes et cetera. So, everything is kind of like explained in the nanny handbook. This is only two pages of it, but it&#8217;s actually like whatever 20-page handbook that&#8217;s prepared for any new nanny to be on boarded automatically and be able to be effective.</p> <p>So that&#8217;s basically it in terms of what I have towards how it&#8217;s outsourced, which is way more in general than you think you can. So let me go cover some of the questions that were asked. And take it from there. Okay if you&#8217;d like agendas for the startups, you&#8217;re interested in investing in so the time is managed properly.</p> <p>Question from Payum. So, I don&#8217;t need an agenda for the startup. I&#8217;m investing. I&#8217;m going, I&#8217;m considering investing in as long as I have the deck ahead of time and I&#8217;ve read and I&#8217;ve reviewed it. So, I&#8217;ve won the deck for sure, because I want to make sure that I&#8217;m ready and I&#8217;ve prepared. So, when I typically take second calls, which is what I usually do, I have read the first debrief.</p> <p>And so I&#8217;m not going to have the founders re repeat the full story over again, over and over again. As a founder, when I was raising money, it drove me crazy that VCs regularly would be just making me repeat the same story over and over again. I&#8217;m like, do you not guys not read each other&#8217;s notes? Do you not want to go deeper into it?</p> <p>It feels it felt shallow every time. And so, I will read the debrief by the first debrief of whomever wrote in the took the first call on the team. I will read the deck and I&#8217;m going to go straight into Q and A. I don&#8217;t need the entire story repeated to me, which I think is also a courtesy of the founder, but it also leads to a deeper, meaningful interaction.</p> <p>So, no agenda other than that. Let&#8217;s see. What else? How do you quantify like time saved? How to be sure that scheduling actions do not consume as much time as you would have not outsource the task itself? I mean for low value task. I don&#8217;t quantify it. I can feel it and how much time I have to do the things I love.</p> <p>You know, so for instance it&#8217;s not all that hard to buy things on Amazon, but if I have like 20 things to buy, it&#8217;s way easier to like, you know, send Rose. Oh, buy this, this, this, this, this, the link and like she deals with that. It&#8217;s not a huge amount of time, but like little by little it adds up. So, I&#8217;m not quantifying it.</p> <p>In general, I just realized that in a given year, I can do so much and so much more than most people because I am fully levered up. The other, you know, I guess, superpower user of outsource people, Jonathan Swanson from Thumbtack or formerly Thumbtack, now creating Athena. I think we&#8217;re going to do a joint session.</p> <p>We&#8217;re going to like see our best practices and see if we can learn anything from each other. To figure out what, if anything else, we should be doing and whether or not it&#8217;s worth quantifying. At the end of the day, I&#8217;m not doing this to be more productive, as I said, which is why I&#8217;m not trying to quantify it.</p> <p>I&#8217;m doing this because I want to lead an amazing, fulfilled life. And so, for me, the proof is in the pudding. If I&#8217;m actually spending my time with my son and playing video games and reading books and doing things I love doing rather than things I don&#8217;t like doing, It means it&#8217;s working. And so that&#8217;s kind of the way I think about it.</p> <p>Not reading news. What are your favorite analyst&#8217;s source of insights? So, I love Noahpinion. Noah Smith. Let me let me share that here. He&#8217;s on Substack. Let&#8217;s see. Noah Pinion. Of course, I have my microphone in front of me, so. Oof. Oof. Thanks. So, of course, we share a lot of, like, similar. Oh, wait, I need to share my screen.</p> <p>We share a lot of, like, similar, philosophical alignment in terms of, like, techno optimism and, and we&#8217;re both economists by formation, so I read, I read Noahpinion. I think it&#8217;s really interesting and the other things I&#8217;m the members of or I don&#8217;t know if they&#8217;re a actually, let&#8217;s see ergo, maybe it&#8217;s a consultancy, okay, maybe doing this live is not the best, which we&#8217;ll see.</p> <p>Yeah, so this group and they have like a lot of thoughtful analysis of what&#8217;s going on and everything from politics, geopolitics, macroeconomics, et cetera. Actually, talking about it for a quick second, when it comes to politics, I don&#8217;t really follow it. Because if I, if I take a step back.</p> <p>I don&#8217;t think it matters all that much. And actually I would argue politics have been, in a way the political system in the U. S. which seems so broken, and like the making of the sausage is awful, actually kind of works. You know, if I go to the 1950s and I&#8217;m like And I&#8217;m a Democrat and I&#8217;m like, Oh, what do I want to see in 70 years?</p> <p>You know, so in 2023, I want desegregation. I want women in the workforce. I want general, I want like IVF and the pill and a lot of like these social, socially liberal trends that have actually happened. And yes, it and flows and there&#8217;s setbacks in the Roe v. Wade, etc. But for the general part, it actually, if that&#8217;s what you wanted, you&#8217;ve gotten it, right?</p> <p>And we&#8217;re seeing right now like drug legalization etc. Or at least decriminalization. And if you&#8217;re a Republican and you&#8217;re like, well, I want the, and you&#8217;re in the 1950s and I want a lower marginal tax rates and less regulation of industries like airlines, et cetera, the reality is you kind of got that as well.</p> <p>And so over the long period of time, this isn&#8217;t works, but the day to day is acrimonious and awful and it&#8217;s not that relevant. It doesn&#8217;t change my life in any way, shape or form. So following politics is literally, it&#8217;s like negative entertainment. It&#8217;s like a form of religion. People follow it. And they feel so passionately about things that I think, ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, don&#8217;t matter all that much, right?</p> <p>As a kid, my ambition was to be in politics because I looked at, like, the people that impacted the world in the past, like Augustus, or Octavian, or Alexander Hamilton. But in the world we live in, politics really doesn&#8217;t change all that things too much and I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s a bug, I think it&#8217;s a feature.</p> <p>I think the founding fathers created a system that was balanced where it made things hard to change out of by design. And, and so it takes a long time to get there. But I think ultimately you get the right outcomes with like yeah, populous here and there and things that ebb and flow, but it gets there.</p> <p>I mean, Churchill once famously said that the U. S. can be counted on doing the right thing after all other options have been tested and I think that tends to be very true but ultimately does get there after many, many mistakes and meanderings. And so I&#8217;m profoundly optimistic, actually, on the fact that we will get ultimately the right outcomes, even though the day to day can feel weird and scary, etc.</p> <p>But, by the way, isn&#8217;t that much more acrimonious than the past? I mean, you need to remember, the U. S. had a full-blown civil war. We had political opponents that used to shoot each other in duels. I mean, I&#8217;m very, you know, sad, like, that Alexander Hamilton died in a duel back in the day. We had, like, massive, civil rights riots race riots.</p> <p>We had an entire war movement with riots. If anything, it&#8217;s less violent today than it was. 30, 40 years ago. And so it feels worse, but I think it may very well be recency bias. And so yeah, don&#8217;t follow politics. Waste of time. Don&#8217;t follow news. Focus on things you can control in your life that make you happy and focus on positive things.</p> <p>Because if you take a step back, most things are amazing and like getting better every day. And, and when I look at the life we led, like, when I was a kid and today so many things have gotten better and cheaper. So, I&#8217;m profoundly grateful and optimistic to grateful to be living now and optimistic about the future.</p> <p>So Thomas is asking me if I worry about potential fraud, given that she&#8217;s access to my information, emails, etcetera. The reason I don&#8217;t worry very much is first of all, she doesn&#8217;t have access to she has a credit card to pay, but that&#8217;s it, right? She doesn&#8217;t have my she can&#8217;t send wires. She doesn&#8217;t have access to my banking information.</p> <p>And in credit card, you&#8217;re not with a credit card, you are not liable for credit card fraud. And so all I need to do is every month go through the credit card receipts, make sure I approve of all the credit card purchases. And if not, I dispute them and then see where they came from which has happened multiple times, but not actually from my assistant, from people like, you know, somehow getting a credit card number and trying to buy things with that.</p> <p>But actually, the credit card company is reasonably good at detecting weird patterns or behavior and blocking transactions. And regardless, they reimburse you when fraud happens. So hasn&#8217;t been an issue. So yeah, it doesn&#8217;t really have access to anything other than that credit card, which is kind of itself a control mechanism.</p> <p>And in terms of emails, you know, most things that are really secure, you use a ledger or a YubiKey or a two-factor authentication, right? Like email doesn&#8217;t really give you access to these things. So, all of my really secure things are fine. And, and if I think of the cost benefit analysis, the risk of fraud versus the time I&#8217;m saving, it&#8217;s completely worth it.</p> <p>And also, I don&#8217;t give her access to email directly, I think there&#8217;s a way to delegate so she can reply on my behalf and see emails or whatever. I&#8217;m not the one who set it up, it&#8217;s my good friend William, I don&#8217;t know exactly how it is, but it works pretty well. I&#8217;m thinking of another question that was sent ahead of the episode by Saeed Jabbar.</p> <p>How do you learn how to break into flow states as well? Perhaps, a I think I&#8217;ll do another episode on flow states, but obviously part of the objective of these things to be present and to be in a position to get into flow states. And so, for me, it&#8217;s combination of meditating and I have a meditation practice.</p> <p>It&#8217;s 20 minutes a day, sometimes 30 minutes that I do every day that I will share in probably an upcoming episode of like, what is my meditation practice? And maybe I&#8217;ll broaden it to flow states because flow states you can get through mastery, right? Like I would argue possibly in a flow state right now presenting this.</p> <p>I could be in a flow state playing tennis or kite surfing. So if you&#8217;re really good at something and you like it, You can enter a flow state through the mastery of that. You can get through flow states through meditation, you can get in flow states through psychedelics, which I like partake in several times a year.</p> <p>Not often, but like, you know, with set intentions, setting, you know, like LSD or psilocybin, or it could be an amazing way to do that. So, I will do another episode, I think, on flow states, meditation practice. And cover that there, but perhaps the way it relates to this episode is this episode is how do you free up time to do other things?</p> <p>And one of those things you can do is actually get in a flow state, see what other questions we have. Okay, Charaf from DHARMA, a portfolio company, well hi Sharaf, I&#8217;m glad to be an investor. So transparent and super helpful. Do you ever get professional imposter syndrome choosing to live with such radical transparency and need and with what makes you personally happy?</p> <p>I&#8217;ve never had imposer syndrome. So maybe this is like, takes us to a different topic on like happiness in general. Many people I talk to, they have this, like, little voice in their shoulder, which is like, Oh, you&#8217;re not good enough. You&#8217;re not this enough. You&#8217;re not smart enough.</p> <p>You&#8217;re, you don&#8217;t belong here. If anything, as a kid, I was really Sheldon Cooper and in college, for sure, Sheldon Cooper. I had the opposite problems. Like I, I believe you thought I belong there even when I zero. So, for me, it was more like, Oh, obviously I&#8217;m amazing. I&#8217;m extraordinary. Everything&#8217;s. And so, I never had imposter syndrome.</p> <p>From that perspective, I felt I belong. Now, the difference is, as a kid, it was delusional. I thought I knew everything. And then, of course, as you get older, you realize how little you know. And once you fall flat on your feet on your face and you get your teeth kicked in, you realize that how little, you know, and you approach life with way more humility.</p> <p>I was a definitely arrogant before and now I&#8217;ve come to realize how little I know, but I know some things and that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m trying to share here. Now the beauty or not the beauty is like I&#8217;m actually not famous, right? Like it doesn&#8217;t sharing all these things is my way of giving back to founders and people out there want to live a better life.</p> <p>But I&#8217;m and it connects to those it connects with and it&#8217;s a very small subset of people. I don&#8217;t have a publicist I&#8217;m not trying to be famous I&#8217;m not trying to be a public person. I like sharing what I learn, and it helps the people it hurts. But I am not going, I don&#8217;t want to be, I don&#8217;t want to have the public profile to be Elon.</p> <p>I could argue I have more impact on the world than Elon, in terms of like, changing the lives of people today, right? Like I&#8217;m an investor in 1100 companies. They&#8217;re highly deflationary. They touch the lives of billions. You know, how many people have gone in space with SpaceX so far? Yes, it makes you dream, but it&#8217;s not changing the lives of people on a day-to-day basis.</p> <p>You know, millions of people make a living off of OLX, the company I built. And to me, that&#8217;s real impact. Both are useful in their own way. But regardless of impact, would I want to be a public persona? And the answer is no. I have exactly the level of visibility I want to have where Marketplace founders come to me for advice and come to me for investment.</p> <p>And I can raise funds to do whatever I need, but I don&#8217;t want more. More than that would probably be an impediment on my quality of life. I can lead the life I lead with no restrictions. I don&#8217;t need bodyguards, no one bothers me, no one recognizes me. Being anonymous is amazing. So, I share out of love for writing, speaking, sharing, learning.</p> <p>It&#8217;s also a way, like kind of part of the reason I write publicly is it&#8217;s a way to think through and for myself and to learn what I&#8217;ve learned. It structures my thoughts. So, as I think through what things I want to do in the future, I usually write them down. I weigh the pros and cons and publishing them leads to conversations, which I think are interesting.</p> <p>But because I&#8217;m not popular, I&#8217;m not famous, and I have no intention of being famous. This works, and it&#8217;s okay to be transparent. Now, it&#8217;d be possibly different if I, you know, if I was walking down the street, people would mob me, or I&#8217;d go to restaurants, or whatever, it&#8217;d be, it&#8217;d be an inconvenience and lower my quality of life, then I wouldn&#8217;t do it.</p> <p>But as is where it&#8217;s just sharing life lessons, it works and it has not impacted me, at all. And by the way, I like doing this. Like, I get pleasure out of, like, sharing, speaking, thinking and I&#8217;m very good at it. Like, as I said, it&#8217;s possibly one of the ways in which I&#8217;m in a flow state. I love writing, love speaking, and it comes very naturally to me.</p> <p>You know, none of this is scripted. Like, if you look at the speech, I gave at the Transatlantic Forum on the 15-minute speech with no pauses, no hums, no has, no hesitations. And I just gave it and the speaking of it came to me naturally. Now, of course, practice makes perfect. I practiced that many times.</p> <p>I had to learn the quote by Mark Twain, but it ultimately worked. Okay, next question. So, Sam on YouTube what&#8217;s the craziest thing you&#8217;ve outsourced? I mentioned earlier, it&#8217;s a, I outsource my dating life where I train my assistant to swipe for me on like Bumble and Raya. I showed her, okay, these are the people I like, okay, now for one hour, then, or 30 minutes, then, okay, you do it, okay, I agree, I disagree, so we iterated, get to the point of 95%, then I&#8217;m like, hey, we match, this is how I would chat with this person now you do it, and then, okay, I agree, this is how I would speak, okay, now here&#8217;s my schedule for the next few weeks set up a date, these days, these days, these days, and she would go ahead and schedule dates with people, and the only thing I needed to do would show up on the date with obviously I would have a printout beforehand of like who the person is, what we talked about. And if I didn&#8217;t like the person because she chose incorrectly, A will refine the process on a go forward basis. But B, I would just say cancel the date. And so, it took no time for me. And the date will always be at the bar literally across the street, actually from where I live here, like literally across the street behind me.</p> <p>So it takes very, very little time. Thomas, one more question regarding the virtual assistants. How well does it work with their support in countries with other languages? So, the Filipino assistants don&#8217;t speak French. So, she uses Google Translate. So, if you&#8217;re in France or French, I would use a different company.</p> <p>I don&#8217;t know what company to recommend. I&#8217;m sure one exists. Maybe they can find someone who&#8217;s French speaking. I didn&#8217;t ask them. Most of my interactions were in English. And for the things that are in French, I do get emails in French. I think she uses Google Translate and it&#8217;s good enough. So, but I&#8217;m, the model I&#8217;m sure works and I&#8217;m sure there are people probably in, I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s Algeria or Morocco or Tunisia that do these types of things for French speaking people.</p> <p>Regarding outsourcing, what are the two companies that you mentioned? Let me reshare my screen for a quick second up to the presentation. And maybe I&#8217;ll full screen it while we&#8217;re at it so you can look at it. But the two companies, I actually, I&#8217;ll full screen it for a second. Poof. YRA, it&#8217;s literally, it&#8217;s yourremoteassistant.com. So put it maybe here up. Voila! They have several hundred of them. We have 10 of them directly. Let me go back to the presentation. Oops, wrong window. Up, up. And the other one is Athena, which I mentioned is the Jonathan Swanson. Company from Thumbtack, who&#8217;s a master outsourcer. They&#8217;re more expensive, possibly a higher end.</p> <p>I have not tried them, but I trust Athena Virtual Assistant. Let&#8217;s try that. Oof. And voila. These are the two. I have not used Athena, but I, as I said, I trust Jonathan to do this to me, to be amazing at this and to make sure that it works very well. Okay. Going back to the questions.</p> <p>Okay what did you have these Thank you for this transmission? Super clear. Thank you. Okay. I think I kind of covered everything in terms of why to do it. What to do with the time you&#8217;ve had when you can ask for us. what? And I How not to follow the news, etc. And so, I&#8217;ll take it from there.</p> <p>Thank you for joining this show. I think I&#8217;ll do another show on flow state, my meditation practice, because it&#8217;s rather productive. It&#8217;s not a point to be productive, but it doesn&#8217;t take that much time, and works rather well for me at some point in the future. And yeah, we&#8217;ll take it from there. So, thank you all for watching, and I will be posting this, including the presentation on my blog, probably next week so you can rewatch it and have access to the direct PowerPoint, and I&#8217;m available as usual for questions by email.</p> <p>Thank you. Thank you all of you.</p>

<p>People often ask me how I manage to accomplish so much while leading such a rich, passionate life &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-44-unlocking-productivity-streamlining-your-days-for-passion-and-purpose/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Episode 44: Unlocking Productivity: Streamlining Your Days for Passion and Purpose&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Episode 44: Unlocking Productivity: Streamlining Your Days for Passion and Purpose. Categories - Playing with Unicorns. Date-Posted - 2024-01-16T15:57:16 . People often ask me how I manage to accomplish so much while leading such a rich, passionate life as illustrated by my 2023 year in review. In this episode I share all my secrets. I will cover everything from general productivity tips to how and what you can outsource in your professional and personal life. For your reference I am including the slides I used during the episode. If you prefer, you can listen to the episode in the embedded podcast player. In addition to the above YouTube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on iTunes and Spotify. If you prefer to read the content, here is a transcript of the episode: Happy New Year, everyone. I hope you had wonderful holidays and that the beginning of the year is treating you very well. So, there&#8217;s been a recurring theme over the last few months where people keep asking me, How is it that you seem to have this Super passionate life where you can do all these different types of activities and play with your son and frankly live life to the fullest and yet be extraordinarily productive when it comes to work and get so, so much done. And I decided that it warranted sharing all my tips and secrets with all of you. And, you know, to illustrate that perhaps probably worth, showing an example of what I do in a given year for a brief moment. Let me show you this. So, this is my year-end review where I review everything that I did personally and professionally throughout the year. From adventures, playing with Fafa, to going to different locations. And also review what happened in the speeches I gave, what we accomplished at work and my predictions for the year. So, this is my blog. It&#8217;s called 2023 and Angel is born as a homage to my new dog Angel, which you can see there. But how to do all this, how to lead this passionate life is something I want to share with, with all of you. So with that, any further ado, let&#8217;s get going. Welcome to episode 44, unlocking productivity. Streamlining your days for passion and purpose. Now, the main reason to do this, by the way, is not to improve productivity, right? Like, you&#8217;re not being productive for the sake of being productive. You&#8217;re being productive for the sake of living your best possible life. So obviously, to some extent, it starts with understanding what is it that you love to do? What is it that you are extraordinarily good at and focus on that and everything else, you know, don&#8217;t focus but generally speaking there are three types of tricks or tips for productivity. So, I&#8217;m going to Separate this presentation in three parts. One is general tricks and tips to how to outsource all the things you can do online, and you can ask for us more than you think And then three, all the things you could add source offline and along the way, we&#8217;ll discuss some of the life setup choices that I&#8217;ve made. Which again, these were more personal choices, but it goes to show you can lead non-traditional lives that are still amazingly effective. Let me start with sharing my screen. Oh, one second. We set it up. Okay, perfect. The presentation is ready to go. So, I&#8217;ll start with the general productivity tips. I&#8217;ll spend a fair amount of time here because some of these things seem easy to describe, but I think we&#8217;re fundamental. So, the first thing is spend extraordinarily little time following news writ large. And by news, I mean everything, you know, newspapers, radio news, TV news you name it. I don&#8217;t actually even follow politics. So I actually take this to an ultimate extreme. I don&#8217;t follow news at all. And I&#8217;ll talk about why that is, how you stay informed when you&#8217;re not following news. And, and what and how do you allocate your time otherwise? So, the first thing you need to remember is news is the news is not actually meant to inform you. It is created by media companies. These media companies are trying to capture your attention, and they&#8217;re trying to capture your attention in order to sell you advertising or to sell advertising. And the best way to do that is to focus on negative things. Information because your amygdala is hypersensitive to negative information. So, the way your brain works is obviously tend to up to 10,000 years ago. If you saw a ruffling in their leaves or whatever, it could be a tiger and it could eat you. And if you were not focused on the negative news, you would actually not be able to survive. You would be eaten by the tiger. And as a result, humans are hypersensitive to negative information. And media companies have realized that, and they&#8217;re focusing on outrage, and they&#8217;re focusing on all the things that can annoy you to capture your attention. But it&#8217;s actually extraordinarily terrible for your mind, and when you look at it on a day by day basis, if you follow the news, It feels to me that the news has this eye of Mordor where they focus on one thing, whatever is capturing the current zeitgeist, whether it&#8217;s COVID, whether it&#8217;s Ukraine, or more recently Gaza, and it&#8217;s trying to provoke outrage. Regardless of your point of view, the media outlet you follow is going to try to create outrage for you to keep track, keep your information, or keep your attention and sell you advertising. The issue with that, beyond the fact that it&#8217;s a massive waste of time and it&#8217;s negative for you, the not much really happens. You know, if you take a step back, if you read the newspaper every day or follow the news every day, how much marginal incremental news is there on a daily basis? And you realize it&#8217;s highly repetitive and at the same time, in addition to being highly repetitive. It often is, highly sensationalistic. It&#8217;s not where the actual information is. You know, when the Wright Brothers flew a plane for the first time, it actually wasn&#8217;t reported in the news. It was reported the, the only thing that was reported were like, whatever, the train accidents and murders and whatever of the day. And these types of break, breakthroughs are happening every day, and they&#8217;re not really covered. So when I think about, like, what I want to be informed on, you know, it&#8217;s actually not the day-to-day coverage. So, imagine what happened in COVID. When COVID first happened, it was like scares. Oh, we&#8217;re all going to die. And where people were following who got COVID and who was violating the restrictions, etc. It was like entertainment. It was not news per se. What you really want to know, which of course is a book that has not been written yet, is, what would have been the policies that would have decreased mental health and physical health outcomes or, like, led to the best ones without impacting the economy? And maybe the answer changes over time before and after vaccines. But that is not what was covered. It was all, like, sensationalist bullshit that&#8217;s not that interesting. Likewise, okay, once you have the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, you know, the play by play, minute by minute is not all that relevant. What matters more is like, okay, what are the consequences for Europe, for the U.S., for the Cold War II setup that we have. And these things are better to look at with like six month or 12 months. The minute-by-minute outrage, not all that relevant. And so, I actually consume zero news. Don&#8217;t read newspapers, don&#8217;t watch TV news, etc. The way I stay informed is I partake in a few groups. Ergo, ERGO is one of them, Green Mantle by Neil Ferguson’s is another, where every few months, at least once a year, we meet with, like, policy makers and people that are analysts to think through, okay, what are the conclusions of all these things that have been happening? The one exception to that, which is why I say spend ten minutes per day on news, is, in my case, Tech news. I, it impacts my life. And it&#8217;s important to know what are the trends, who&#8217;s raising, who&#8217;s failing. And so I actually do spend 10 minutes a day reading Techmeme and Techcrunch, or CNET, Engadget,&nbsp; and Tom&#8217;s hardware. These latter are more entertainment. Like what gadgets would I like. I spend de minimis time consuming news writ large. Instead, I focus on analyst reports with the direct primary sources and with six month or a year of like of outlook in terms of like, okay. This is what happened in the last year and this is what we think probabilistically could happen in a go forward basis that this guy can impact you. This is how I stay on top of, like, my macro predictions, for instance. It doesn&#8217;t, you know, it comes from following what&#8217;s happening at FOMAC, etc. Not by reading newspapers in any way, shape, or form, which, all of which are negative. And this applies to news writ large, so, you know, don&#8217;t follow Twitter, for instance. I think it&#8217;s also very bad for your Mental health and internal health. Number two, compartmentalize, meaning be present in whatever it is you&#8217;re doing. People are terrible at multitasking. You want to be monotasking and doing one thing and being present in whatever task you&#8217;re doing. Now, sometimes it&#8217;s easier to say than to do, but once you&#8217;re done with work, you know, when you&#8217;re playing tennis, play tennis, focus on the next point, not thinking about like, oh, what you didn&#8217;t do, what you need to do tomorrow. Otherwise, you&#8217;re going to be terrible at tennis, and it&#8217;s going to be way harder for you to fall asleep. So be present. You know, leave things in one activity for that activity and go back to it when the time comes, but don&#8217;t deal with it while you&#8217;re doing something else. Number three is people have a tendency to procrastinate. And, it&#8217;s very easy to put off things. So, to get things done, actually set deadlines. With short time fuses. I put it as a deliverable for myself in, in my calendar and I&#8217;ll talk about how I manage calendar on soon in order to get things on, you know, if I want to write a blog post, I&#8217;ll actually block time my calendar for writing the blog post and make sure that it, that, that it&#8217;s that it&#8217;s deliver it on time this way I can publish it on time because we live in a world where we&#8217;re constantly bombarded with information. It&#8217;s actually good to take time off, right? Like, yeah. If you are doing, you are not thinking. And so, it is good to have time to be reflective. I try to have Fridays where I have much fewer meetings than other days, or ideally no meetings. That doesn&#8217;t always plan out that way, and I try not to work weekends these days. But actually having time to think and reflect is very important. In fact, my entire life is structured around, okay, when I&#8217;m in New York for like a one month or two months, it’s all on all the time, be it intellectual salons, dinners, etc. And then when I go to Turks and Caicos, because in the evenings there&#8217;s nothing social for me to do there, that&#8217;s when I&#8217;m more reflective. I read, I write, I publish many more blog posts, I, and I&#8217;m trying to be more thoughtful. Next point is limit meetings. I think that&#8217;s a generally accepted rule, but meetings need to have a purpose. Like if you&#8217;re taking a meeting, you need to know what, why you&#8217;re meeting, who you&#8217;re meeting with, what you&#8217;re trying to get out of it. So, it needs to be a clear agenda. It should have as few people as possible in the meeting. And I try to keep them to 30 minutes or less. Now, I&#8217;ve realized that when I&#8217;m evaluating a startup, 30 minutes is usually too short, so it&#8217;s more an hour that I block just to be safe and make sure I have the time to go in enough depth to make a proper investment decision. But in general, the tip is keep meeting short and, and try to get to the point of them. And as a rule, what I&#8217;m do, what I do is my meetings are back-to-back in 30-minute increments. So, in a given day, I could have 14 meetings. If someone shows up 15 minutes late, they only get 15 minutes. If they show up 31 minutes late, they get no minutes. I&#8217;m not, I&#8217;m going to be on time for every one of the meetings. I think punctuality is a mark of respect, and you want to be on time. And in fact, the number one complaint many founders have of VCs is they don&#8217;t respect their times when they&#8217;re late. Show up actually one to two minutes early to every meeting. And respect and respect the time to the other. And so, if you show up 31 minutes late, you aren&#8217;t going to be rescheduled for a future date, and maybe never rescheduled, depending on how I feel and why it happened. Next point is make very quick decisions, right? It&#8217;s better to make a quick decision and be wrong because you can course correct. Then don&#8217;t look for perfection. It&#8217;s definitely true in, in business settings. In startups where you&#8217;d rather make a decision, throw the spaghetti on the wall. See if the spaghetti is sticking and if not, you know move on and try something else. Time blocking, so what I do, and I, I will demonstrate that shortly with an example day in my calendar, is everything is in my calendar. So, if I need to do emails, it&#8217;s in the calendar. If I need if I&#8217;m going to go to the gym, and in fact if it&#8217;s there, it gets done. If it&#8217;s not in the calendar, it does not exist. Next point is more tactical. You want to be focused and present in whatever activity you, you are doing. And so all notifications should be off. So, my phone does not ring, does not vibrate, doesn&#8217;t have anything showing up on the screen ever. It&#8217;s on permanent do not disturb. The, you cannot get through to me from that perspective. So, if I want to go check messages, I will proactively at a time that I choose. Go to check my Instagram or my WhatsApp or my text messages. But even vibration, which feels perhaps as in intrusive, if the phone is in your pocket and it vibrates, it takes your attention away from what you&#8217;re doing, and all of a sudden you have, you know, FOMO. It&#8217;s like, Ooh, what is it that I&#8217;m receiving? What is it I should be checking? So, you should not be getting any pop ups, notifications on anything. New emails coming in should not be bumping, beeping. Nothing should beep. Nothing should vibrate. Nothing should, should show up in any way, shape, or form. Now, if you have kids and you&#8217;re worried that they need to be reached by the school or whatever, you can create a rule where even though you&#8217;re in do not disturb two, three or four people create a very big list. Otherwise, it defeats the purpose of this can get through to you. And I do have that in my case, given that father is going to school, but in general, you don&#8217;t want any distractions whatsoever. Again, as I mentioned earlier, humans suck at multitasking. You want to be monotasking. If I block an hour for emails, I&#8217;m doing emails then. I don&#8217;t want to be doing anything else. If I&#8217;m on a call, I want to be present and focused on my call and taking notes and thinking not being doing other things. Otherwise, you&#8217;re not going to have the most thoughtful analysis and presence for whatever it is you&#8217;re doing. Next point is general life advice, you know, and basically you want to be in life penny foolish and pound wise. So, you want to be extraordinarily careful on large decisions, on large purchases, things that are going to impact you financially. So, buying a house renting something that perhaps is too expensive for you, buying a car, and definitely avoid luxury items. They&#8217;re pointless, you know. I don&#8217;t have a watch. I have a smart watch, but I don&#8217;t have like any luxury items like art, etc. They don&#8217;t bring me pleasure. They&#8217;re not really useful. I&#8217;d rather splurge on experiences when travel with like friends and family rather than, than physical goods in general, which probably makes a lot of sense. And, last but not least, you know, you need probably way fewer items than you think you do. And that means it is very healthy, at least once a year do a pruning. I just give away things I don&#8217;t use. So, every spring, I do a spring cleaning, where most of the things I haven&#8217;t been wearing, clothes wise, for instance, I will give away to charity. You know, if you&#8217;re not using it, most likely not going to continue using it, you will not miss it. And so you lead a lighter life. I wouldn&#8217;t try to avoid purchasing things in the first place to avoid this, but regardless, very healthy to do on a general basis. Now let&#8217;s talk about, like, much more specific, how to, I mean, doing what I&#8217;ve just described makes you more productive already, and not consuming any news saves you a lot of time, but how do you, like, multiply your horsepower in general? This brings me to point number two. So, what&#8217;s actually helped me the most, by far, is outsourcing. I outsource. everything I can in life and everything that, that I don&#8217;t love doing. Now, you may think, hey, I can type faster than my assistant. Why would I want an assistant? Well, if you&#8217;ve studied economics at all and Ricardian theory of comparative advantage, is even if you are better than your assistant at everything that she does, because you make more doing whatever it is your core activity is, you&#8217;re better off still having it. Still, still having an assistant, even though you may be better than her at her tasks. And that&#8217;s okay. Now, the key superpower we&#8217;ve found and discovered is using remote assistance, especially in the Philippines, which we&#8217;ve been working with for, like, probably around 20 years here at FJ Labs. And well, personally, and then at FJ Labs in the last decade, we have 10 of them at FJ Labs, and I have a personal dedicated virtual assistant. I use YRA, but a friend of mine who&#8217;s a genius at outsourcing. His name is Jonathan Swanson. He built Thumbtack. He had like thousands of like people in the Philippines for Thumbtack just created a company called Athena actually to help people become master delegators as well. So, these two companies are great. YRA is about $1,500 a month full time. And so, this is someone extremely qualified working at your hours, whatever time zone you&#8217;re in, in English. And Athena I think is about 3, 000 a month. But you can also buy quarter time or half time. And I&#8217;m going to show you that you can outsource a lot more than you think. So, in my case I have a dedicated assistant, her name is Rose. Probably not a real name, but that&#8217;s okay. Maybe a team and not one person, that&#8217;s also okay. And actually, the funny thing is, I&#8217;ve actually never spoken to her on the phone. I’ve, I don&#8217;t know what she looks like. And, I&#8217;ve never even interviewed her. The way I recruit people, in general well, in YRA, they just find someone for you, and then you decide if you like them or not, and then you, and then you decide, and if you&#8217;re not happy, they&#8217;ll change. But when I hire people in Upwork or elsewhere, which I will describe later for the other activities that I outsource, I usually hire like 10 people for the same task given that it&#8217;s like a buck an hour or 2 an hour. It&#8217;s not a big deal. And then I see the one I like best, and then I keep that person for the rest of these tasks, not just this time, but on a recurring basis. And so that process works reasonably well. It saves you a lot of time of having to do interviews and filtering. So, work outsourcing. Now, a lot of this is probably going to be more basic, but basically this is an example of the email Rose sends me every day at the end of the day of what she did during the day. So, it shows all the pending meetings that she has yet to confirm and schedule, and then number two, all the confirmed meetings. That she scheduled she in that same email, and she also covers all the personal tasks, etc. So, it&#8217;s an email that she sends me daily of all the things she did for me. And during the day, we typically interact by a combination of WhatsApp and email on things to be done, whether they&#8217;re urgent or, you know, things that can be scheduled for a later day. Every day, and this is a prototypical example of what a day looks like for me. She sends me my calendar for the next day. Now, if I know what it&#8217;s about, she doesn&#8217;t put more details, just a zoom link. You know, so Zimozi is my Indian team that helps me with my blog from a design perspective or coding perspective and with Trident&#8217;s website. We&#8217;re doing a monthly check in to see how things are going. We&#8217;re currently launching, that was the 9 am. meeting. We&#8217;re currently launching a new incubation company and so that&#8217;s the 10 am. meeting, doesn&#8217;t need more detail. Quick check in with Martin, he&#8217;s on a 30-minute call, that&#8217;s the founder of Mundi, we&#8217;re checking out how things are going. And then for Midas, this is meeting. I added myself to the calendar, which is why there&#8217;s no context. But I was meeting, I think, potential employee or potential partner, and then I have a bunch of meetings with, I think, VCs or partners for Midas. And then later on with my co-founding partner at FJ Labs, Jose, to discuss different things. See how the rest of the day goes. So, you see, it&#8217;s kind of like back-to-back to back to 9 to 10 to 11, 11 30 to 12 30 to 1 15. VC meeting for Midas, which is the new stablecoin or yield bearing stablecoin that I&#8217;m currently launching to try to compete with USDC, USDT. Another. Then I&#8217;m meeting a founder actually at my place just to catch up. Like she, she left her old company. She is thinking what to do next. And so, it&#8217;s interesting to figure out and see if I can help her and also think through what she should be doing. Is she creating a new company? Should we be investing there? Etcetera. And that is full context. Same thing. Meeting another VC for Midas at 2 pm. 3 pm, meeting another founder to get an update on what they&#8217;re up to and how they&#8217;re doing more fundraising, founder calls, and then going to a speaker event for a speech I was giving the next day at the Transatlantic Leadership Forum. And then I&#8217;m playing paddle from 9pm to 11pm with my brother, Olivier. So, everything is in here, whether I&#8217;m doing a meditation, whether I I&#8217;m playing tennis or paddle. Everything is the agenda, and this way I have a clear action plan for the day. And that is sent the night before when Rose signs off at like 6 or 7 pm. every day. Perhaps the place or the thing that you can outsource way more than you think is actually your personal life. So Rose, in addition to managing my business life, manages my personal life. So, here&#8217;s a few examples. In New York, I love hosting salons and, and founder dinners, intellectual dinners, etc. So, I have a list of a whole bunch of people that I invite for different dates. And so, we will discuss who we&#8217;re inviting. She&#8217;ll send the invites and then we&#8217;ll create, create a, an email with like this venue, some of your dietary restrictions. These are the topics. And the topics are far ranging. It could be like, oh, how do we reinvent politics for the 21st century? What are the ethics and morality of torture? What or even personal, like, you know if you were to write a, a book on any 72-hour period of your life, what 72 hours would it be? So, we track, I mean, she tracks who the, the guest replies are. We try to be eight for these dinners. But we also do these things with you know, founder dinners, et cetera, on a regular basis. I host multiple dinners a week. I hosted a post exit founder dinner last night, for instance doing another dinner tonight. Next thing is, there are a lot of things that take a lot of your time. You know, so for instance, if you want to book doctor&#8217;s appointments, if you want to fill in all the forms. On medical forms, I&#8217;d rather do it ahead of time. She can do all that for me. And these things you have to wait online, wait on the call, etc. She can pretend to be me. She has a Google phone number in the Philippines, so she has a U.S. phone number. So, for instance, T-Mobile had disconnected my international data. It took her four hours on the phone with repeated calls to fix it, but she was able to fix it. Again, it&#8217;s four hours of my life that I would have never gotten back, and I&#8217;m very grateful that she is actually in a position to do that. Same thing, she books my meditations, she blocks all my gyms and, and, and buys whatever the trainer needs to buy. And for tennis, like, she knows I like tennis. So, if I&#8217;m traveling to a new location, and there&#8217;s tennis or paddle, she will look at all the clubs around me, look at availability, find either people at my level, or book me lessons. This way, already for two, three times a week, wherever I&#8217;m going, I already have tennis organized. And I don&#8217;t need to do anything. I didn&#8217;t pick the club, I didn&#8217;t call them, I didn&#8217;t find the partners. Everything&#8217;s organized. In the calendar, I guess I&#8217;m not doing it more right now, but in the past, I even asked for things like dating where with my assistant back in the day when I, when I was on online dating apps. I first like we did a call. We&#8217;re like, okay, this, these are the people I like or don&#8217;t like. So, this is I would swipe right or left. Now use a VPN, connect as me, and you can swipe for me. Then, okay, this is how I, and, and then she would do it. And we would agree on. Course correct, what made sense or not, then she would look at how I would chat and she would replicate that. And then finally, I&#8217;m like, okay, I&#8217;m happy to go on a date, you know, once a week, Friday and maybe whatever, Tuesday, twice a week 8 pm, or 7 pm, or 9 pm. Here&#8217;s the slots in the calendar. Go and book them. And so, she would like then swipe for me. match me with a potential date, schedule the date, it&#8217;d be in the calendar, and then the day before, I would look at, like, the profile of the person that she matched me with, and I&#8217;d decide if I&#8217;m interested in going or not, right? Like, if you&#8217;re trying to go on online dating, at the end of the day, the rest is not interesting. The only thing you want to know is, do you like the person you&#8217;re meeting? So let&#8217;s get to a meeting as fast as possible. So, if you can avoid the entire tedium of swiping, chatting, etc., and get directly to the last point, great. And if I disagreed with a choice, you know, I said, no, I don&#8217;t actually like this person for whatever reason, which of course corrects her. She would just cancel the date and that was it. And so, it didn&#8217;t take any time for me, other than showing up at the date, which was always literally in the bar across the street from where I live, at whatever the set time was. And so even an activity that seems to take a lot of people a lot of time, was de minimis from a time perspective for me because it was all done for me and it worked extremely well Now as many of you know, I love writing. I love writing on my blog. I Blog in a regular basis. I share things about my life now. I do the writing myself because I love it, I do the research, etc. But the rest that is and many about it, which is actually putting in a WordPress replicating on soft stack creating the newsletter sending the newsletter All of that, she does for me and again, saves a huge amount of time. Write my, the value creation is in the creative genius of writing and what I want to share and thinking, etc. Not at all in the admin type things. You know, let&#8217;s go to WordPress and, and, and upload it and send it et cetera. So, I like the writing, not that other part, and she does that for me as well. And by the way, all this is one person doing all of us. She buys things for Angel, my dog. She will also research, like, entry requirements, and I get passports for a dog. She will buy things if I need for Fafa. She there&#8217;s an app that the school, the Equal has, which is amazing, where there&#8217;s all the photos of the day. She will download the photos. She’ll like, pay the nannies, like, everything needs to be done. But, like, even researching things, like, oh, how do I get someone a birth certificate or a passport? You know, she will research, which is also a massive time saver. By the way, noticing all the questions that people were asking, I will address them at the end, one by one. So, we&#8217;ll do kind of a Q&amp; A at the end of when I&#8217;m done presenting everything here. So, she signs documents for me. But the documents I would say that are not the most important ones, right? I, if I rented a, a house, you know, rental agreement or need to do KYC, so things like that, that are not really important, that I don&#8217;t need to be doing myself. She has my digital signature. I say, okay, sign this. Poof work. I, for, she has actually, also probably worth mentioning, she has access to my email and she has access to my credit card. But she has one credit card, and so what I can do is every month I can log in on that one credit card and see where the purchases are and make sure everything&#8217;s okay. So that&#8217;s the safety control mechanism if you want. But she has access to my email and she&#8217;s like, all the legal documents are sent to legal, so I don&#8217;t need to deal with them. All the all things that look like spam are moved in a folder called potential spam. So again, I don&#8217;t need to deal with them. But I am the one replying to my own emails because many of them need my thoughtfulness. But she will, you know, if I need to find out how to get a police form for a friend, for some whatever reason or KYC someone asks, she will like to figure out how to get the data and, and help me get it. So again, online. General admin docs, etc. Now, continuing on like things that most people don&#8217;t outsource that they probably should is like figuring out how to have a more rich life and wherever you live. And so, for instance, in New York, I love magic. I love Broadway. I love off Broadway. I love comedy clubs and you don&#8217;t want once you&#8217;ve done the basics like going further off the beaten field, you know, going to House of Yes for a dirty circus show or whatever. We&#8217;re going to company 14 in Bushwick to see the there are various shows. And so, I have her before I go to new city task. We&#8217;re like, what are the things that are happening right now? So, this is an example of, Oh, and actually, might as well, there&#8217;s a lot of chat here, so might as well add the chats. And this way the community can see the conversation that&#8217;s going on. So this is an example of when I came in September to New York, she researched all the different musicals that were like Broadway, Off Broadway that are in, A bit off the beaten path, including reviews, suggesting the ones I would like, the nice I could do. And from there, I actually ended up booking multiple shows. I, I took my son to a balloon museum, which is so much fun. I&#8217;ll be posting the photos of that on Instagram in a few days. Took my son to a train show at the New York Botanical Gardens. I went to see like an off Broadway, like, musical parody of Friends. She ordered my, like, Halloween costume. They&#8217;re like, there&#8217;s so much that you can ask for us to make sure that your life is rich, as rich as possible. And in New York, I try, there&#8217;s so much to be done that you can have a very rich life. Again, New York is my haven of, like, social, artistic, professional endeavors. And things like, you know, conferences I need to go to. Same thing. She&#8217;ll send the bio. She&#8217;ll show me the agenda. She&#8217;ll add it on my calendar and make sure that, that, that I show up. Next thing is she helped me create my 50th birthday invites, so I&#8217;m celebrating my 50th birthday next august 3rd in 2024 and so help design the invite on paperless posts, we&#8217;re sending it, we&#8217;re tracking who&#8217;s coming, we&#8217;re figuring out like all, how many rooms we need, where et cetera. And so, she helped design it. She said it. She&#8217;s tracking the replies to make sure that everything is structured correctly. But even for that, for instance, I also hired a party planner to help me with like the vision of the night and what&#8217;s going on and everything happening. So, I don&#8217;t need to deal with it. All the amenities things, from that perspective, now I also have a travel agent for booking flights, but beyond the travel agent, Rose will help me on like everything around. How do I get there? Hotel rooms getting upgraded, getting reimbursed. So, Burning Man this year was supposed to fly out. On Sunday, but of course it was muddy, so it got canceled. So, I walked out of Burning Man, like getting reimbursed for the flight that I didn&#8217;t take and, you know, adding Heli skiing to the agenda, notifying people that FJ Labs are not working these days. All these things, you know, need to be done. And again, none of them seem particularly big, but they add up. And the more of these things you ask for us, the more free time you have, to do what you want. Now, you can have, beyond Rose, as I said, I already have a travel agent. I have a party planner. But I hire other people for other tasks. So, every year, for instance, I like to create, and maybe let&#8217;s just go to me here. I like to create an album. This is a photo album of the, of what happened during the year. It starts with a timeline, with every date chronological from beginning of the year to the end. And then for each section, there is photos of, of, of what&#8217;s going on. And it&#8217;s a beautiful album, it&#8217;s a paper, it&#8217;s a memento to the year. Now the reason I do that is parents don&#8217;t deal with digital very well. And, and actually creating the album allows you to relive the year. So, I love it, it&#8217;s all over my library, I give it to my mom, I give it to my dad. They, they love it, it&#8217;s a way to connect with the story I have. And so, I went on Upwork. I created a post saying, hey, I need someone to help me with this. And I got a lot of replies. As I said, I hired, I hired like 10 people to do the job. And ultimately, one person in Bangladesh, was the best for these and I, and, and, and one, well, originally someone in Russia, but then I couldn&#8217;t pay them anymore because of the sanctions. So, someone in Bangladesh. So, the way we work together is. Actually, let me take a step back of how I organize my, my photos. So let me share my screen again. Not necessarily the easiest to see. Let&#8217;s see if I could go full screen. Okay, so during the year, and this is all the photos I&#8217;ve taken during the year, you see all the dates, you know, January 1 to February 22, February 23 to February 27. For each of the locations I am, I create a folder. And in that folder, I have a subcategory of what&#8217;s going on there. Cross country skiing, February heli skiing, FJ Labs, etc. Which can then be used to create subsections in the album. And so, I don&#8217;t do, and by the way, I do this along the year as the year is coming along. So, if you wait until the end of the year, you won&#8217;t remember anything. Creating this structure will be impossible. So, I take the photos of my phone. I get photos from my friends through AirDrop or whatever. And then I, I create the folder. So, for instance, I already have in 2024, January 1 to January 7, Turks and Caicos is where I was. And now January 7 to January 14 in New York, where I am currently, where I&#8217;m uploading photos little by little. And I delete them from my phone once I&#8217;ve uploaded them. So, this is all in Dropbox. Then I share the Dropbox link let&#8217;s go back to 2022, because that was the example I gave you with my, Charmin, who&#8217;s currently in Bangladesh. And then we have interactions on it. So, she does a first pass as to what she thinks makes the most sense. And let me go back here and go back to full screen. Okay, perfect. So, she does a first pass and let&#8217;s go back here, see if this can read. Yeah. And then after she gives me the first pass, I give her a lot of feedback. You know, date format looks wrong or, oh, I don&#8217;t like this photo. So, for each page, there&#8217;ll be like, Photo 6. It&#8217;s like, oh, replace photo 1, replace photo 2. Oh, I look fat. I don&#8217;t like this angle. This is not that interesting. Oh, you&#8217;re forgetting something. I don&#8217;t like the quote. Whatever it may be. And so, this is, I&#8217;m the creative director for, for this endeavor. It takes a lot of iteration. I&#8217;m currently working, for instance, on the 2023 album. Which I hope will be done in a few weeks or a month, which I will then gift to my parents, but also put my coffee shop coffee desk and you saw the result of it is after many iterations, the album that I showed you with the timeline and photos again, no one needs to do this and not everyone used to do this, but I find that it&#8217;s an amazing way to relive the year. And it&#8217;s an amazing gift to give to your parents who love it or are not great with digital and giving them a link on whatever Dropbox. I do the same for videos I create. I&#8217;m going to share a video. So, at the end of the year, I create a video. Now I will play an example of that video. So, I will go, oh, one minute and 15 change this. One minute 17 do this. It&#8217;s the same thing. I found someone on out on. And I found someone on Upwork, and we edit videos. Again, someone other than Rose. This is what it looks like. I&#8217;ll give you a quick example. Let me minimize this. Let me give you a quick example of what that looks like. &nbsp;Let’s see, 20 videos, pretty cool. Year in review video. Let me make sure there&#8217;s no sound because it&#8217;s copyrighted music. I don&#8217;t want to get a copyright strike. Perfect. So, let me play a few seconds of this. Maybe I&#8217;ll make it even full screen. And same thing, it follows the year, so it starts in January, in this case I was in Rubble Soak. Shows, it&#8217;s set to music. It shows the adventure and then it goes through the rest of my year and I play that at the family gatherings at the end of the year. I send the family, I send the friends and family, et cetera. And it&#8217;s pretty amazing. You know, you see the first increment, but then it ultimately it totally moves to, you know, I was at the upfront summit, and then I go and hosted things and then the covid, etc. Pause this video here, and we can go back to the next type of things that I outsource. Let&#8217;s go back to this. And let&#8217;s go back to the presentation. Okay, so next phase of things that I outsource. Now, I realize this next phase is not necessarily possible for everyone. I am extraordinarily privileged from a financial perspective to be in a position to outsource things in the offline world. Now, the online world, I think it&#8217;s with, it&#8217;s within reach for most people. As I said, it&#8217;s like 1500 a month. And 1500 a month to outsource as much as I&#8217;ve outsourced is actually pretty extraordinary. W when you, the bang for your buck that you get is amazing. And I&#8217;ve gotten more out of doing things online with Upwork and your remote assistant, etc. than you know, with in person assistance from that perspective. That said, in at FJ Labs we have an office manager that does a lot of the offline things, but. For the things I described the virtual assistants of the Philippines are actually better. As I said, I&#8217;m also in a privileged position to outsource things in my offline life. Now, this is way more expensive and so not. within reach for everyone. But I have an estate manager. This is Paul. We&#8217;ve been working together now for 80 years. And in addition to being an estate manager, he&#8217;s a chef. In fact, I&#8217;ve organized it. That&#8217;s very often. The same manager is the chef and does anything. So, he manages all the other property managers. I have three properties. I&#8217;ll go through that shortly. He drives me, if need be, organizes like the housekeeping staff. If I&#8217;m hosting a dinner, if it&#8217;s small dinner, I&#8217;ll just cook and take care of it himself. But he will hire waiters, if we&#8217;re catering, you hire the caterer, like anything, like getting, car insurance, car maintenance, picking up packages, dealing with the mail, anything that&#8217;s like in person. Now, in my case, I don&#8217;t actually like cooking. So, for me, I want to outsource it and I tell them to have, he knows my, I don&#8217;t also plan my meals. I don&#8217;t tell them, oh, this is what I want to eat. It&#8217;s like, these are the things I like. Just go, go for it. Be creative. Feed me healthy food that, that I&#8217;m going to like. He doesn&#8217;t run the menus by me, he just does it. And I trust him to do things I like, and if I don&#8217;t like it, you know, I&#8217;m just actually going to, to give him feedback. Now, I have this kind of setup for each of my three locations. I have three core locations where I spend my time. And for each of them, I have a property manager who also is a chef and manages the rest of the staff, handles the licenses because I sublet them on Airbnb if I can, which I can&#8217;t in New York or Revelstoke, but I can in Turks and Caicos. And their goal is to delight me and or whatever guests I have, be they my family or renters from the Airbnb equivalent. Now the reason I have three homes is I&#8217;ve made a decision to structure my life in a pretty nontraditional way. Two realizations. Realization number one is each city has a very best moment of time to live in. So, New York is extraordinary in the, in the spring and in the fall, right? Like you want to be in New York in September and October, in April, in May, and maybe the first half of June. It is way less compelling in the summer. It&#8217;s too hot, it&#8217;s humid, it&#8217;s way less compelling, and like January, February, December. And so, I try to go to the places where there&#8217;s, where it&#8217;s the best time to be there. So, my year is typically structured with January, February in Revelstoke in British Columbia, where I like to go backcountry skiing on weekends, and, and snowshoeing, and ice climbing, and dock sliding, et cetera, but it&#8217;s mostly a brand backcountry skiing, heli skiing. March I go to Turks and Caicos to thaw and like kite surf and play tennis and play paddle, et cetera. As I said, April, May, June in the New York area, and then I start heading to Nice to see my family in the south of France. Before usually going for my birthday in, in Turks and Caicos, and then all of August I go to Revelstoke in the mountain where I like to go mountain biking and hiking and rock climbing, etc. Then I go to Burning Man, and again, September, October, New York, and then November, December, Turks. Though, to be exact, I usually go to Turks until December 26, and then New Year&#8217;s I spend in Revelstoke. That&#8217;s why I have snow for, for New Year&#8217;s and in the holiday season, in addition to having the sun. Now, in addition to that, every year I like to add a two-week trip somewhere where that is new and, and, and a massive adventure like Antarctica in 2023, that is often off grid and adventurous, you know, where I&#8217;m like just a backpack and a tent and a water filtration system. Beyond that, so that, that&#8217;s core setup. And beyond the fact that each place has a best time or location to be there. My perspective is that each, you want your work life balance. And so, New York, as I mentioned earlier, is a place of professional, social, artistic, intellectual, it is busy 24/7. I&#8217;m going out. I&#8217;m meeting friends. I&#8217;m hosting dinners. I&#8217;m going to events with founders. It is so busy that after a month or two, I am completely burnt out. And I&#8217;m tired and I need a place to recharge. Now, in Revelstoke and Turks, I&#8217;m not on vacation. I actually work during the day. So, Revelstoke, typically, I will only do the backcountry skiing, etc. on the weekends. And or if there&#8217;s a day off, like this month, we have two days off in January. So, I&#8217;m taking the, and I think there&#8217;s a Friday and a Monday. And I&#8217;m heli skiing those days in addition to the weekends. And same thing in Turks, I&#8217;ll work during the day, but when the day ends, whatever time that may be, I&#8217;ll go kitesurf and play tennis and play paddle and read and write and meditate. And so, the you know, New York I&#8217;m doing, and in Revelstoke and Turks and Caicos, I&#8217;m being healthy, I&#8217;m being reflective. And it&#8217;s a combination of a place where I&#8217;ll either be alone, to recharge my social batteries, or I will bring a huge gathering or spattering of friends and family. So, for instance this year, and I&#8217;ll go back to for a quick second if it&#8217;ll open to my blog. I brought 50 people; I brought 50 people for Christmas and New Year&#8217;s which was like the gathering of my family. Yep, and this is. This is our new year photo. 50 people of both the family I have and the family I choose. Which has been absolutely amazing. Like, going back here. So, it&#8217;s kind of like the life setup in terms of like moving around. So, continuing of the things I outsource. I also outsource the, so I&#8217;ve separated for Triton, for instance, which is rented out when I&#8217;m not there and generates millions of revenues a year, the guest services local in person versus reservations. So, I have a reservation manager, Rae-Anne, who helps like create the pricing manage the different channels and do all the reservation part of the experience until it is Handed over to Lori and her team to do the actual guest services experience. She also usually or sometimes has someone from YRA to help. With the work that she needs to do. As you know, I got a dog this year, Angel. And for Angel, for at least for the first few years, given how busy I am otherwise, especially in New York, I have a full-time dog walker, dog trainer, travels with me everywhere, takes care of Angel, gets the vaccines up to date. Yeah, it gets all the papers and everything that needs to be done. And that&#8217;s Mike. And it helps, especially when you live in a place, you know, like New York and when I&#8217;m busy in New York obviously when I&#8217;m in Turks and rubble, so, you know, Angel can be roaming free and we can be playing all day, but even then, I want her to be very well trained. I want to be able to walk with her off leash and her not to, and just follow the directions. If I want her to play, she goes play, and if I want her to come back and pay attention off leash, regardless of distractions, squirrels, other dogs, cars, whatever, that she listens. And so, I want her to be very well trained, and Mike is amazing for that. So, nannies, actually before I talk nannies, maybe I&#8217;ll go back to the, the, the travel setup for a second. Now that I have a son who&#8217;s starting to go to school, instead of doing two-month, I don&#8217;t want to be away from him too long. I&#8217;m actually making sure that, A, obviously we spend all of our vacations together, and when we&#8217;re in New York, we&#8217;re together all the time. But when I go to like Turks, let&#8217;s say, December 1 to 15, it&#8217;s like two weeks, I&#8217;ll still spend a week in New York. To make sure that I&#8217;m around them at the right time. So, I&#8217;m changing the, even though it&#8217;s a bit more travel, I&#8217;m changing the two months, two months to more like two weeks, three weeks, one week, two weeks, et cetera, to make sure I spend more time with them. So nanny setup. So we wanted coverage seven days a week from 7:45 am to 7:45 pm. So, we found, a bunch of nannies on care.com mostly, some Facebook groups as well. The core mission or the core vision was that one of the nannies to be. In fluent accent less French who can travel internationally, so I have a passport, and can drive which obviously creates a number of limitations. And the reason for the French, by the way, is obviously I&#8217;m French. My family mostly is French speaking. We live in New York, so he&#8217;s going to be getting English. In general, even though he&#8217;s in a bilingual school called the École, which is absolutely amazing. It&#8217;s like the Rigor of the French system with creativity and public speaking and teamwork of the American system, because school, TV, friends, whatever, and living in the US is in English. I figured, let&#8217;s have the nannies only speak French to him. Now, what I have the nannies do is, when we travel, it&#8217;s only one nanny that travels with us. And, but if it&#8217;s multiple weeks long, maybe they&#8217;ll swap. There&#8217;s a WhatsApp group for the nannies to coordinate between each other. So, the reason it&#8217;s four of them, by the way, and you can meet them here, you can see their little bios and who&#8217;s doing how many days, etc. As they, well, French nannies, I guess, don&#8217;t want to work too many hours in general. And so this is kind of the amount of hours they wanted to work. So, someone would work once a day, two days a week. And so actually having four part time who agree between themselves, who&#8217;s traveling, who&#8217;s taking what days, et cetera works really well to give us full coverage without any issues. They&#8217;re paid on a per hour basis, or an hourly basis based on the hours worked. So, there&#8217;s a Westside group, they coordinate, they train they tell each other what happened before, what needs to happen. And they have a calendar called Cozi where all the doctor&#8217;s appointments, et cetera, that they populate, and they know what tasks need to be done. And they do everything from preparing one meal a day to buying groceries. Well, diapers not really needed anymore, but medicine, bath supplies, I mean, whatever needs to be taken care of. They do in addition to taking care of Francois, picking him out of school, dropping off at school, et cetera. Now, in addition to that, Let&#8217;s say there&#8217;s a date night or I need to go out or whatever, and I need coverage beyond 7:45 pm. Add the slot requests and the calendar and they between themselves agree who&#8217;s going to take it. So again, it doesn&#8217;t require me to do anything. Now realize this is a pretty expensive proposition because I have essentially seven-day coverage 12 hours a day. There is a cheaper way for people to do this. Which is if you have an au pair, now an au pair, the issue is a, they need to live with you, so you need to have room for them, which is not viable for everyone, and typically it&#8217;s only one or two years, and the number of hours they work is capped. So, what you can do for you to be a cheaper alternative than this is au pair plus daycare. If you do au pair plus daycare, you can get something not quite as bespoke, but rather effective for a fraction of the cost of what I&#8217;m describing here. Now I have a nanny handbook, which shows all the rules. You know, you need to speak to them only in French. When my daughter&#8217;s coming, you&#8217;ll only speak to her in French. What you need to cook. What Francois likes et cetera. So, everything is kind of like explained in the nanny handbook. This is only two pages of it, but it&#8217;s actually like whatever 20-page handbook that&#8217;s prepared for any new nanny to be on boarded automatically and be able to be effective. So that&#8217;s basically it in terms of what I have towards how it&#8217;s outsourced, which is way more in general than you think you can. So let me go cover some of the questions that were asked. And take it from there. Okay if you&#8217;d like agendas for the startups, you&#8217;re interested in investing in so the time is managed properly. Question from Payum. So, I don&#8217;t need an agenda for the startup. I&#8217;m investing. I&#8217;m going, I&#8217;m considering investing in as long as I have the deck ahead of time and I&#8217;ve read and I&#8217;ve reviewed it. So, I&#8217;ve won the deck for sure, because I want to make sure that I&#8217;m ready and I&#8217;ve prepared. So, when I typically take second calls, which is what I usually do, I have read the first debrief. And so I&#8217;m not going to have the founders re repeat the full story over again, over and over again. As a founder, when I was raising money, it drove me crazy that VCs regularly would be just making me repeat the same story over and over again. I&#8217;m like, do you not guys not read each other&#8217;s notes? Do you not want to go deeper into it? It feels it felt shallow every time. And so, I will read the debrief by the first debrief of whomever wrote in the took the first call on the team. I will read the deck and I&#8217;m going to go straight into Q and A. I don&#8217;t need the entire story repeated to me, which I think is also a courtesy of the founder, but it also leads to a deeper, meaningful interaction. So, no agenda other than that. Let&#8217;s see. What else? How do you quantify like time saved? How to be sure that scheduling actions do not consume as much time as you would have not outsource the task itself? I mean for low value task. I don&#8217;t quantify it. I can feel it and how much time I have to do the things I love. You know, so for instance it&#8217;s not all that hard to buy things on Amazon, but if I have like 20 things to buy, it&#8217;s way easier to like, you know, send Rose. Oh, buy this, this, this, this, this, the link and like she deals with that. It&#8217;s not a huge amount of time, but like little by little it adds up. So, I&#8217;m not quantifying it. In general, I just realized that in a given year, I can do so much and so much more than most people because I am fully levered up. The other, you know, I guess, superpower user of outsource people, Jonathan Swanson from Thumbtack or formerly Thumbtack, now creating Athena. I think we&#8217;re going to do a joint session. We&#8217;re going to like see our best practices and see if we can learn anything from each other. To figure out what, if anything else, we should be doing and whether or not it&#8217;s worth quantifying. At the end of the day, I&#8217;m not doing this to be more productive, as I said, which is why I&#8217;m not trying to quantify it. I&#8217;m doing this because I want to lead an amazing, fulfilled life. And so, for me, the proof is in the pudding. If I&#8217;m actually spending my time with my son and playing video games and reading books and doing things I love doing rather than things I don&#8217;t like doing, It means it&#8217;s working. And so that&#8217;s kind of the way I think about it. Not reading news. What are your favorite analyst&#8217;s source of insights? So, I love Noahpinion. Noah Smith. Let me let me share that here. He&#8217;s on Substack. Let&#8217;s see. Noah Pinion. Of course, I have my microphone in front of me, so. Oof. Oof. Thanks. So, of course, we share a lot of, like, similar. Oh, wait, I need to share my screen. We share a lot of, like, similar, philosophical alignment in terms of, like, techno optimism and, and we&#8217;re both economists by formation, so I read, I read Noahpinion. I think it&#8217;s really interesting and the other things I&#8217;m the members of or I don&#8217;t know if they&#8217;re a actually, let&#8217;s see ergo, maybe it&#8217;s a consultancy, okay, maybe doing this live is not the best, which we&#8217;ll see. Yeah, so this group and they have like a lot of thoughtful analysis of what&#8217;s going on and everything from politics, geopolitics, macroeconomics, et cetera. Actually, talking about it for a quick second, when it comes to politics, I don&#8217;t really follow it. Because if I, if I take a step back. I don&#8217;t think it matters all that much. And actually I would argue politics have been, in a way the political system in the U. S. which seems so broken, and like the making of the sausage is awful, actually kind of works. You know, if I go to the 1950s and I&#8217;m like And I&#8217;m a Democrat and I&#8217;m like, Oh, what do I want to see in 70 years? You know, so in 2023, I want desegregation. I want women in the workforce. I want general, I want like IVF and the pill and a lot of like these social, socially liberal trends that have actually happened. And yes, it and flows and there&#8217;s setbacks in the Roe v. Wade, etc. But for the general part, it actually, if that&#8217;s what you wanted, you&#8217;ve gotten it, right? And we&#8217;re seeing right now like drug legalization etc. Or at least decriminalization. And if you&#8217;re a Republican and you&#8217;re like, well, I want the, and you&#8217;re in the 1950s and I want a lower marginal tax rates and less regulation of industries like airlines, et cetera, the reality is you kind of got that as well. And so over the long period of time, this isn&#8217;t works, but the day to day is acrimonious and awful and it&#8217;s not that relevant. It doesn&#8217;t change my life in any way, shape or form. So following politics is literally, it&#8217;s like negative entertainment. It&#8217;s like a form of religion. People follow it. And they feel so passionately about things that I think, ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, don&#8217;t matter all that much, right? As a kid, my ambition was to be in politics because I looked at, like, the people that impacted the world in the past, like Augustus, or Octavian, or Alexander Hamilton. But in the world we live in, politics really doesn&#8217;t change all that things too much and I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s a bug, I think it&#8217;s a feature. I think the founding fathers created a system that was balanced where it made things hard to change out of by design. And, and so it takes a long time to get there. But I think ultimately you get the right outcomes with like yeah, populous here and there and things that ebb and flow, but it gets there. I mean, Churchill once famously said that the U. S. can be counted on doing the right thing after all other options have been tested and I think that tends to be very true but ultimately does get there after many, many mistakes and meanderings. And so I&#8217;m profoundly optimistic, actually, on the fact that we will get ultimately the right outcomes, even though the day to day can feel weird and scary, etc. But, by the way, isn&#8217;t that much more acrimonious than the past? I mean, you need to remember, the U. S. had a full-blown civil war. We had political opponents that used to shoot each other in duels. I mean, I&#8217;m very, you know, sad, like, that Alexander Hamilton died in a duel back in the day. We had, like, massive, civil rights riots race riots. We had an entire war movement with riots. If anything, it&#8217;s less violent today than it was. 30, 40 years ago. And so it feels worse, but I think it may very well be recency bias. And so yeah, don&#8217;t follow politics. Waste of time. Don&#8217;t follow news. Focus on things you can control in your life that make you happy and focus on positive things. Because if you take a step back, most things are amazing and like getting better every day. And, and when I look at the life we led, like, when I was a kid and today so many things have gotten better and cheaper. So, I&#8217;m profoundly grateful and optimistic to grateful to be living now and optimistic about the future. So Thomas is asking me if I worry about potential fraud, given that she&#8217;s access to my information, emails, etcetera. The reason I don&#8217;t worry very much is first of all, she doesn&#8217;t have access to she has a credit card to pay, but that&#8217;s it, right? She doesn&#8217;t have my she can&#8217;t send wires. She doesn&#8217;t have access to my banking information. And in credit card, you&#8217;re not with a credit card, you are not liable for credit card fraud. And so all I need to do is every month go through the credit card receipts, make sure I approve of all the credit card purchases. And if not, I dispute them and then see where they came from which has happened multiple times, but not actually from my assistant, from people like, you know, somehow getting a credit card number and trying to buy things with that. But actually, the credit card company is reasonably good at detecting weird patterns or behavior and blocking transactions. And regardless, they reimburse you when fraud happens. So hasn&#8217;t been an issue. So yeah, it doesn&#8217;t really have access to anything other than that credit card, which is kind of itself a control mechanism. And in terms of emails, you know, most things that are really secure, you use a ledger or a YubiKey or a two-factor authentication, right? Like email doesn&#8217;t really give you access to these things. So, all of my really secure things are fine. And, and if I think of the cost benefit analysis, the risk of fraud versus the time I&#8217;m saving, it&#8217;s completely worth it. And also, I don&#8217;t give her access to email directly, I think there&#8217;s a way to delegate so she can reply on my behalf and see emails or whatever. I&#8217;m not the one who set it up, it&#8217;s my good friend William, I don&#8217;t know exactly how it is, but it works pretty well. I&#8217;m thinking of another question that was sent ahead of the episode by Saeed Jabbar. How do you learn how to break into flow states as well? Perhaps, a I think I&#8217;ll do another episode on flow states, but obviously part of the objective of these things to be present and to be in a position to get into flow states. And so, for me, it&#8217;s combination of meditating and I have a meditation practice. It&#8217;s 20 minutes a day, sometimes 30 minutes that I do every day that I will share in probably an upcoming episode of like, what is my meditation practice? And maybe I&#8217;ll broaden it to flow states because flow states you can get through mastery, right? Like I would argue possibly in a flow state right now presenting this. I could be in a flow state playing tennis or kite surfing. So if you&#8217;re really good at something and you like it, You can enter a flow state through the mastery of that. You can get through flow states through meditation, you can get in flow states through psychedelics, which I like partake in several times a year. Not often, but like, you know, with set intentions, setting, you know, like LSD or psilocybin, or it could be an amazing way to do that. So, I will do another episode, I think, on flow states, meditation practice. And cover that there, but perhaps the way it relates to this episode is this episode is how do you free up time to do other things? And one of those things you can do is actually get in a flow state, see what other questions we have. Okay, Charaf from DHARMA, a portfolio company, well hi Sharaf, I&#8217;m glad to be an investor. So transparent and super helpful. Do you ever get professional imposter syndrome choosing to live with such radical transparency and need and with what makes you personally happy? I&#8217;ve never had imposer syndrome. So maybe this is like, takes us to a different topic on like happiness in general. Many people I talk to, they have this, like, little voice in their shoulder, which is like, Oh, you&#8217;re not good enough. You&#8217;re not this enough. You&#8217;re not smart enough. You&#8217;re, you don&#8217;t belong here. If anything, as a kid, I was really Sheldon Cooper and in college, for sure, Sheldon Cooper. I had the opposite problems. Like I, I believe you thought I belong there even when I zero. So, for me, it was more like, Oh, obviously I&#8217;m amazing. I&#8217;m extraordinary. Everything&#8217;s. And so, I never had imposter syndrome. From that perspective, I felt I belong. Now, the difference is, as a kid, it was delusional. I thought I knew everything. And then, of course, as you get older, you realize how little you know. And once you fall flat on your feet on your face and you get your teeth kicked in, you realize that how little, you know, and you approach life with way more humility. I was a definitely arrogant before and now I&#8217;ve come to realize how little I know, but I know some things and that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m trying to share here. Now the beauty or not the beauty is like I&#8217;m actually not famous, right? Like it doesn&#8217;t sharing all these things is my way of giving back to founders and people out there want to live a better life. But I&#8217;m and it connects to those it connects with and it&#8217;s a very small subset of people. I don&#8217;t have a publicist I&#8217;m not trying to be famous I&#8217;m not trying to be a public person. I like sharing what I learn, and it helps the people it hurts. But I am not going, I don&#8217;t want to be, I don&#8217;t want to have the public profile to be Elon. I could argue I have more impact on the world than Elon, in terms of like, changing the lives of people today, right? Like I&#8217;m an investor in 1100 companies. They&#8217;re highly deflationary. They touch the lives of billions. You know, how many people have gone in space with SpaceX so far? Yes, it makes you dream, but it&#8217;s not changing the lives of people on a day-to-day basis. You know, millions of people make a living off of OLX, the company I built. And to me, that&#8217;s real impact. Both are useful in their own way. But regardless of impact, would I want to be a public persona? And the answer is no. I have exactly the level of visibility I want to have where Marketplace founders come to me for advice and come to me for investment. And I can raise funds to do whatever I need, but I don&#8217;t want more. More than that would probably be an impediment on my quality of life. I can lead the life I lead with no restrictions. I don&#8217;t need bodyguards, no one bothers me, no one recognizes me. Being anonymous is amazing. So, I share out of love for writing, speaking, sharing, learning. It&#8217;s also a way, like kind of part of the reason I write publicly is it&#8217;s a way to think through and for myself and to learn what I&#8217;ve learned. It structures my thoughts. So, as I think through what things I want to do in the future, I usually write them down. I weigh the pros and cons and publishing them leads to conversations, which I think are interesting. But because I&#8217;m not popular, I&#8217;m not famous, and I have no intention of being famous. This works, and it&#8217;s okay to be transparent. Now, it&#8217;d be possibly different if I, you know, if I was walking down the street, people would mob me, or I&#8217;d go to restaurants, or whatever, it&#8217;d be, it&#8217;d be an inconvenience and lower my quality of life, then I wouldn&#8217;t do it. But as is where it&#8217;s just sharing life lessons, it works and it has not impacted me, at all. And by the way, I like doing this. Like, I get pleasure out of, like, sharing, speaking, thinking and I&#8217;m very good at it. Like, as I said, it&#8217;s possibly one of the ways in which I&#8217;m in a flow state. I love writing, love speaking, and it comes very naturally to me. You know, none of this is scripted. Like, if you look at the speech, I gave at the Transatlantic Forum on the 15-minute speech with no pauses, no hums, no has, no hesitations. And I just gave it and the speaking of it came to me naturally. Now, of course, practice makes perfect. I practiced that many times. I had to learn the quote by Mark Twain, but it ultimately worked. Okay, next question. So, Sam on YouTube what&#8217;s the craziest thing you&#8217;ve outsourced? I mentioned earlier, it&#8217;s a, I outsource my dating life where I train my assistant to swipe for me on like Bumble and Raya. I showed her, okay, these are the people I like, okay, now for one hour, then, or 30 minutes, then, okay, you do it, okay, I agree, I disagree, so we iterated, get to the point of 95%, then I&#8217;m like, hey, we match, this is how I would chat with this person now you do it, and then, okay, I agree, this is how I would speak, okay, now here&#8217;s my schedule for the next few weeks set up a date, these days, these days, these days, and she would go ahead and schedule dates with people, and the only thing I needed to do would show up on the date with obviously I would have a printout beforehand of like who the person is, what we talked about. And if I didn&#8217;t like the person because she chose incorrectly, A will refine the process on a go forward basis. But B, I would just say cancel the date. And so, it took no time for me. And the date will always be at the bar literally across the street, actually from where I live here, like literally across the street behind me. So it takes very, very little time. Thomas, one more question regarding the virtual assistants. How well does it work with their support in countries with other languages? So, the Filipino assistants don&#8217;t speak French. So, she uses Google Translate. So, if you&#8217;re in France or French, I would use a different company. I don&#8217;t know what company to recommend. I&#8217;m sure one exists. Maybe they can find someone who&#8217;s French speaking. I didn&#8217;t ask them. Most of my interactions were in English. And for the things that are in French, I do get emails in French. I think she uses Google Translate and it&#8217;s good enough. So, but I&#8217;m, the model I&#8217;m sure works and I&#8217;m sure there are people probably in, I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s Algeria or Morocco or Tunisia that do these types of things for French speaking people. Regarding outsourcing, what are the two companies that you mentioned? Let me reshare my screen for a quick second up to the presentation. And maybe I&#8217;ll full screen it while we&#8217;re at it so you can look at it. But the two companies, I actually, I&#8217;ll full screen it for a second. Poof. YRA, it&#8217;s literally, it&#8217;s yourremoteassistant.com. So put it maybe here up. Voila! They have several hundred of them. We have 10 of them directly. Let me go back to the presentation. Oops, wrong window. Up, up. And the other one is Athena, which I mentioned is the Jonathan Swanson. Company from Thumbtack, who&#8217;s a master outsourcer. They&#8217;re more expensive, possibly a higher end. I have not tried them, but I trust Athena Virtual Assistant. Let&#8217;s try that. Oof. And voila. These are the two. I have not used Athena, but I, as I said, I trust Jonathan to do this to me, to be amazing at this and to make sure that it works very well. Okay. Going back to the questions. Okay what did you have these Thank you for this transmission? Super clear. Thank you. Okay. I think I kind of covered everything in terms of why to do it. What to do with the time you&#8217;ve had when you can ask for us. what? And I How not to follow the news, etc. And so, I&#8217;ll take it from there. Thank you for joining this show. I think I&#8217;ll do another show on flow state, my meditation practice, because it&#8217;s rather productive. It&#8217;s not a point to be productive, but it doesn&#8217;t take that much time, and works rather well for me at some point in the future. And yeah, we&#8217;ll take it from there. So, thank you all for watching, and I will be posting this, including the presentation on my blog, probably next week so you can rewatch it and have access to the direct PowerPoint, and I&#8217;m available as usual for questions by email. Thank you. Thank you all of you.

2024-01-09T15:24:17

2024-01-09T15:24:17

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=22100

2024-02-05T10:47:31

2024-02-05T10:47:31

2023-an-angel-is-born

publish

post

https://fabricegrinda.com/2023-an-angel-is-born/

2023: An Angel is Born

<p>After the passing of my beloved Rottweiler <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/it-was-bagheeras-world-we-just-lived-in-it/" data-type="link" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/it-was-bagheeras-world-we-just-lived-in-it/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bagheera</a>, it took me a long time to be ready for another dog. In the same Ayahuasca ceremony during which my grandmother Françoise convinced me to have kids, I was visited by two white German shepherds. I had a fascination for John Snow’s white dire wolf, Ghost, but did not know the breed existed. From that moment on I knew I was meant to have one. My great friend <a href="https://www.amandapustilnik.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Amanda</a> helped research the best breeders. &nbsp;After careful consideration, including interviewing many owners, I selected <a href="https://www.braeheadwhiteshepherds.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Breahead White Shepherds</a>.</p> <p>What followed was years of impatiently waiting for my puppy to be born. In 2023, the stars aligned, and she was born June 13. I picked her up on August 5, the best birthday present ever! She fit right in with Fafa and the Grindaverse and it’s been an amazing love story since. As a side note, it’s shocking how quickly she is growing!</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2000" height="584" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Angel-is-born.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22425" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Angel-is-born.png 2000w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Angel-is-born-768x224.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Angel-is-born-1536x449.png 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Angel-is-born-1200x350.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Angel-is-born-1320x385.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p></p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Fafa &amp; Angel in Revelstoke #SHORTS" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VaR5H3I7Sh8?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>Other than that, the year was filled with adventure. The year started with a bang as <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/team-extreme-in-antarctica/" target="_blank" data-type="link" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/team-extreme-in-antarctica/" rel="noreferrer noopener">I spent the first two weeks in Antarctica skiing to the South Pole</a>. It was significantly harder than I ever expected and the hardest adventure I had ever been on. I had to pull a 100-pound sled 8 hours a day at 10,000 feet of altitude at a -30 degree temperature with -50 wind chill, in addition to having to set up and pack up the camp daily.</p> <p>I came out of the experience with an overwhelming feeling of gratitude. I felt immense gratitude for the disconnection I experienced during these two weeks. I felt gratitude to have the ability to have such a unique experience in such a unique landscape. I felt the most gratitude to my family and my extended family in the Grindaverse for putting up with me and supporting me on all my crazy adventures.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Team Extreme in Antarctica" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VbtOFMsCjuc?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>I then went to Turks to thaw and host the FJ Labs bi-annual retreat. I had lost over 20 pounds during the expedition and was grateful to be reunited with all the extraordinary luxuries of life in the 21^st century that we take for granted: electricity, toilets, running water, showers, and delicious fresh meals!</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2000" height="584" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Tawing-in-Turks.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22411" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Tawing-in-Turks.png 2000w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Tawing-in-Turks-768x224.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Tawing-in-Turks-1536x449.png 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Tawing-in-Turks-1200x350.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Tawing-in-Turks-1320x385.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>I then went on a winter adventure in Revelstoke. Fafa loved riding the gondola and the magic carpet and I loved backcountry skiing on weekends.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2000" height="584" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Revelstoke-An-angel-is-born.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22427" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Revelstoke-An-angel-is-born.png 2000w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Revelstoke-An-angel-is-born-768x224.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Revelstoke-An-angel-is-born-1536x449.png 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Revelstoke-An-angel-is-born-1200x350.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Revelstoke-An-angel-is-born-1320x385.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>As per usual, I spent late June and early July in Nice visiting my family. I spent time in Saint-Paul de Vence, Auron and Saint-Tropez visiting my parents, aunt and uncle, brother and nephew. I also had the opportunity to host a fun <a href="https://www.frenchfounders.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">French Founders</a> event at the villa I had rented in Villefranche.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2400" height="700" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Nice.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22417" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Nice.png 2400w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Nice-768x224.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Nice-1536x448.png 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Nice-2048x597.png 2048w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Nice-1200x350.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Nice-1320x385.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>I then headed to Revelstoke for summer mountain adventures with tons of hiking, mountain biking, and standup paddle boarding. This summer was even more special as I built a padel court and a remote-controlled race car track on my property leading to infinite fun.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2400" height="700" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Reve-1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22429" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Reve-1.png 2400w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Reve-1-768x224.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Reve-1-1536x448.png 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Reve-1-2048x597.png 2048w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Reve-1-1200x350.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Reve-1-1320x385.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2000" height="516" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Reve-2.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22413" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Reve-2.png 2000w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Reve-2-768x198.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Reve-2-1536x396.png 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Reve-2-1200x310.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Reve-2-1320x341.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>I then made my annual pilgrimage to Burning Man. I experienced it in three distinct parts. In the first I explored with my 77-year-old mom. We bonded and chatted for hours. It took a lot of effort to have her there, and it was a real privilege to be able to experience the burn with her. She absolutely loved it. In the second I connected with some of my best friends including my best friend of 35 years. In the third I observed the community rise to the occasion and help each other out. The core principles of radical self-reliance and gifting were on display as everyone helped each other out to deal with the rain and mud. It was the literal opposite of Lord of the Flies and led to quieter, more intimate moments with friends that were just as meaningful if not more so than a regular burn would have been. In other words, it was one of the best burns ever.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2400" height="700" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Burning-Man.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22419" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Burning-Man.png 2400w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Burning-Man-768x224.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Burning-Man-1536x448.png 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Burning-Man-2048x597.png 2048w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Burning-Man-1200x350.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Burning-Man-1320x385.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>It’s been a blast to see Fafa grow up so much over the last year. He looks exactly like me at the same age with the same uncanny ability to hyper focus on something. He speaks clearly in both French and English. As always, he loves trains, planes, and automobiles and we have a blast playing together. He started the 2s program at <a href="https://www.theecole.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Ecole</a> which is the perfect school for us with the rigor of the French school system combined with the team building, public speaking, and creativity of the American system.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2400" height="1400" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Fafa-1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22423" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Fafa-1.png 2400w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Fafa-1-768x448.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Fafa-1-1536x896.png 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Fafa-1-2048x1195.png 2048w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Fafa-1-1200x700.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Fafa-1-1320x770.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>The fall also saw me head to Venice for the first time. I then went to my good friend Kevin Ryan’s 60^th birthday party in Ibiza, before coming back for an epic Halloween party in NY dressed as Hugh Hefner.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2400" height="700" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Venise.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22415" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Venise.png 2400w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Venise-768x224.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Venise-1536x448.png 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Venise-2048x597.png 2048w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Venise-1200x350.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Venise-1320x385.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>I then headed to Turks for the year end holidays as has become tradition in the family. I finally got around to starting to wing foil. I am also grateful that my brother Olivier brought a fitness and tennis coach which turned the vacation into a Fabrice bootcamp. We averaged 207 minutes of exercise per day, peaking at 333 minutes one day dramatically improving my fitness and mobility on the padel court.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2000" height="584" src="http://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Turks-1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-22421" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Turks-1.png 2000w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Turks-1-768x224.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Turks-1-1536x449.png 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Turks-1-1200x350.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Turks-1-1320x385.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-11 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:100%"></div> </div> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Padel time 💪🎾" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bdSsvY-V_bI?start=1&#038;feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>This year we had the biggest Grindaverse reunion ever with 50 attendees for New Year. I even met a few amazing cousins I had never met before. I am glad my brother Christopher was able to come for part of it. My brother Olivier and I took the opportunity to play a film on the family history featuring our notable ancestors that we had commissioned. It was a beautiful love letter to our parents, and to the family at large. It celebrated their contributions and allowed us to express our gratitude for the role they played in getting us where we are. We stand on the shoulders of giants.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1000" height="600" src="http://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/grinda.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-22145" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/grinda.jpg 1000w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/grinda-768x461.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>Professionally, 2023 continued to be extraordinarily busy. FJ Labs closed its third fund of $290 million in March. We correctly called <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/welcome-to-the-everything-bubble/" target="_blank" data-type="link" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/welcome-to-the-everything-bubble/" rel="noreferrer noopener">the bubble in 2021</a> and suggested people pursue exits then. We continued to be contrarian in 2023. &nbsp;We decided to invest aggressively as everyone else was retrenching, focusing on asset light businesses raising at least two years of cash.</p> <p>We feel it’s the best time to invest. Valuations are more reasonable. Founders are focused on cash burn and unit economics. There is much less competition. In the same way that the most interesting companies of the 2010s were built or came of age in the 2008 – 2012 timeframe (Uber, Airbnb, Twilio, Instagram, WhatsApp), I suspect that the most interesting companies of the 2020s will come out of the 2022 &#8211; 2024 timeframe.</p> <p>For the most part we are focusing on B2B marketplaces and the digitization of B2B supply chains and avoiding the bubble in AI. I will detail our current investment thesis in an upcoming blog post, but you can hear it both in the keynote I gave on the state of entrepreneurship at the <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/transatlantic-leadership-forum-keynote-the-state-of-entrepreneurship/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Transatlantic Leadership Forum</a> at Goldman Sachs in the fall and in the masterclasses I gave respectively with <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/masterclass-with-everything-marketplaces/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Everything Marketplaces</a> and <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/marketplace-masterclass-at-founders-network/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Founders Network</a>.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Transatlantic Leadership Forum Keynote: The State of Entrepreneurship" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5zEd_DlX7uY?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>Overall, FJ Labs continued to rock. The team grew to 34 people. We added two analysts as part of an inaugural two-year analyst class and seasoned CFO, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/alebowits" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Ariel Lebowits</a> what had been my CFO had Zingy and OLX. We deployed $73 million. We made 190 start-up investments, 89 first time investments and 101 follow-on investments. We also continued to deploy our liquid crypto strategy during the crypto winter investing in 30 liquid crypto companies.</p> <p>For the first time the number of follow-on investments exceeded the number of new investments. This is up from the historical average of 35% of investments being follow-ons. The growing portfolio accounts for part of this increase as we are seeing more opportunities to support our existing founders. The macro environment also played a role as many portfolio companies decided to raise extension rounds to shore up runway, growth and unit economics to weather this challenging time. Despite the macro, we were fortunate to successfully exit several of our positions, including the secondary sale of Yassir, and the acquisition and AdoreMe by Victoria’s Secret.</p> <p>Since Jose and I started angel investing 25 years ago, we invested in 1098 unique companies, had 365 exits (including partial exits), and currently have 839 active unique company investments. We had realized returns of 37% IRR and a 3.7x average multiple. In total, we deployed $603M of which $178M was provided by Jose and me.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1000" height="400" src="http://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/fjlabs.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-22146" style="object-fit:cover" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/fjlabs.jpg 1000w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/fjlabs-768x307.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>In addition to redesigning large sections of this blog, I wrote a fair amount in 2023. My best articles were:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/timing-is-everything/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Timing is Everything</a></li> <li><a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/the-value-of-ignorance/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Value of Ignorance</a></li> <li><a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/macroeconomic-update-i-remain-significantly-more-bearish-than-consensus/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Macroeconomic Update: I remain significantly more bearish than consensus!</a></li> </ul> <p>I was less prolific with Playing with Unicorns as I did not have my streaming gear for large portions of the year. However, I had a fascinating conversation with my good friend <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-42-kevin-ryan-unicorn-builder/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Kevin Ryan</a>. Fafa also made a guest appearance on my <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-41-ask-me-anything/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Ask Me Anything</a> episode in February that was very well received.</p> <p>Instead, I appeared on other podcasts, notably detailing the intricacies of building a fund on <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/1947-rise-interview-how-we-built-fj-labs/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">1947 Rise</a>, and discussing everything and anything (adventure travel, risk taking, spirituality, startups and much more) with my good friend <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/super-fun-interview-by-robin-haak/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Robin Haak</a>.</p> <p>As usual, I was a very prolific reader. My favorite books were:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IC8VF10/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Endurance: Shackleton&#8217;s Incredible Voyage</a> (which I read while in Antarctica!)</li> <li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0B1BTJLJN/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09JBCGQB8/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: A Novel</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08LN9G74S/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Nightfall and Other Stories</a> by Isaac Asimov</li> </ul> <p>My guilty pleasure of the year was the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0B9KVXCQ6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Starter Villain</a> by John Scalzi.</p> <p>Most of my personal predictions for 2023 came true. I got Angel. I loved Antarctica. I took my mom to Burning Man. I started wing foiling. Fafa and I had countless fun adventures. We had a blowout Grindaverse party at the end of the year. &nbsp;</p> <p>My macroeconomic predictions proved overly bearish. Despite the fastest increase in interest rates in 30 years and a full-blown recession in the tech sector, the economy at large did well with strong wage growth, low unemployment, and declining inflation. I remain more bearish than consensus:</p> <ul> <li>Commercial real estate is headed for a major crisis.</li> <li>The commercial real estate crisis will exacerbate the banking crisis.</li> <li>Consumer debt is at an all-time high.</li> <li>Corporate debt refinancings will be expensive and difficult.</li> <li>The PMI is below 50.</li> <li>The yield curve is inverted.</li> <li>People are finally coming to terms with the fact that rates will be higher for longer.</li> <li>Political and geopolitical turmoil is not abating.</li> </ul> <p>However, I see the world in probabilistic terms and the probability of a recession is lower now than it was a year ago (though I still ascribe a 40% probability to it, not the 5% that seems consensus). With inflation increasingly under control, the Fed should start lowering rates in the second half of the year. We may yet have a soft landing, a feat only achieved once in the last 60 years.</p> <p>In the long term, a dollar crisis is looming given our unsustainable government deficits and increasing debt-to-GDP, but I suspect the day of reckoning for the US is over 5 years away with other fiat currency crisis playing out before then.</p> <p>There is plenty to be optimistic about. We are still at the beginning of the technology revolution with minimal penetration of technology in most B2B supply chains and government. We are seeing continued progress in AI, batteries, space, robots, and vaccines. Adoption of solar power and electric cars is continuing unabated. We may very well be on the eve of a technology led deflationary productivity revolution that will transform our lives for the better while helping us address the challenges of our time: inequality of opportunity and climate change. I suspect that it will take over 5 years for AI driven productivity improvements to be noticed because it will take a while to be adopted in large enterprises and government, but I am hopeful that it will happen.</p> <p>On a personal level, I am excited for 2024. My daughter Amélie, named after my mother’s grandmother, should join the ever-expanding Grindaverse in February. She will be the first granddaughter for my parents, and I cannot wait to meet her. I am looking forward to more crazy adventures with François and Angel. I am still hoping to convince François to ride on my back while I am kitesurfing. Next August, I am turning 50 and am looking forward to celebrating with all my friends and family in Turks &amp; Caicos. The year will end with our typical family gathering in Turks &amp; Caicos for Christmas, but for a change, I will head to Revelstoke for a snowy New Year in a more intimate setting.</p> <p>Happy New Year!</p>

<p>After the passing of my beloved Rottweiler Bagheera, it took me a long time to be ready for &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/2023-an-angel-is-born/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;2023: An Angel is Born&#8221;</span></a></p>

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2023: An Angel is Born. Categories - Featured Posts, Year in Review, Year in Review. Date-Posted - 2024-01-09T15:24:17 . After the passing of my beloved Rottweiler Bagheera, it took me a long time to be ready for another dog. In the same Ayahuasca ceremony during which my grandmother Françoise convinced me to have kids, I was visited by two white German shepherds. I had a fascination for John Snow’s white dire wolf, Ghost, but did not know the breed existed. From that moment on I knew I was meant to have one. My great friend Amanda helped research the best breeders. &nbsp;After careful consideration, including interviewing many owners, I selected Breahead White Shepherds. What followed was years of impatiently waiting for my puppy to be born. In 2023, the stars aligned, and she was born June 13. I picked her up on August 5, the best birthday present ever! She fit right in with Fafa and the Grindaverse and it’s been an amazing love story since. As a side note, it’s shocking how quickly she is growing! Other than that, the year was filled with adventure. The year started with a bang as I spent the first two weeks in Antarctica skiing to the South Pole. It was significantly harder than I ever expected and the hardest adventure I had ever been on. I had to pull a 100-pound sled 8 hours a day at 10,000 feet of altitude at a -30 degree temperature with -50 wind chill, in addition to having to set up and pack up the camp daily. I came out of the experience with an overwhelming feeling of gratitude. I felt immense gratitude for the disconnection I experienced during these two weeks. I felt gratitude to have the ability to have such a unique experience in such a unique landscape. I felt the most gratitude to my family and my extended family in the Grindaverse for putting up with me and supporting me on all my crazy adventures. I then went to Turks to thaw and host the FJ Labs bi-annual retreat. I had lost over 20 pounds during the expedition and was grateful to be reunited with all the extraordinary luxuries of life in the 21st century that we take for granted: electricity, toilets, running water, showers, and delicious fresh meals! I then went on a winter adventure in Revelstoke. Fafa loved riding the gondola and the magic carpet and I loved backcountry skiing on weekends. As per usual, I spent late June and early July in Nice visiting my family. I spent time in Saint-Paul de Vence, Auron and Saint-Tropez visiting my parents, aunt and uncle, brother and nephew. I also had the opportunity to host a fun French Founders event at the villa I had rented in Villefranche. I then headed to Revelstoke for summer mountain adventures with tons of hiking, mountain biking, and standup paddle boarding. This summer was even more special as I built a padel court and a remote-controlled race car track on my property leading to infinite fun. I then made my annual pilgrimage to Burning Man. I experienced it in three distinct parts. In the first I explored with my 77-year-old mom. We bonded and chatted for hours. It took a lot of effort to have her there, and it was a real privilege to be able to experience the burn with her. She absolutely loved it. In the second I connected with some of my best friends including my best friend of 35 years. In the third I observed the community rise to the occasion and help each other out. The core principles of radical self-reliance and gifting were on display as everyone helped each other out to deal with the rain and mud. It was the literal opposite of Lord of the Flies and led to quieter, more intimate moments with friends that were just as meaningful if not more so than a regular burn would have been. In other words, it was one of the best burns ever. It’s been a blast to see Fafa grow up so much over the last year. He looks exactly like me at the same age with the same uncanny ability to hyper focus on something. He speaks clearly in both French and English. As always, he loves trains, planes, and automobiles and we have a blast playing together. He started the 2s program at The Ecole which is the perfect school for us with the rigor of the French school system combined with the team building, public speaking, and creativity of the American system. The fall also saw me head to Venice for the first time. I then went to my good friend Kevin Ryan’s 60th birthday party in Ibiza, before coming back for an epic Halloween party in NY dressed as Hugh Hefner. I then headed to Turks for the year end holidays as has become tradition in the family. I finally got around to starting to wing foil. I am also grateful that my brother Olivier brought a fitness and tennis coach which turned the vacation into a Fabrice bootcamp. We averaged 207 minutes of exercise per day, peaking at 333 minutes one day dramatically improving my fitness and mobility on the padel court. This year we had the biggest Grindaverse reunion ever with 50 attendees for New Year. I even met a few amazing cousins I had never met before. I am glad my brother Christopher was able to come for part of it. My brother Olivier and I took the opportunity to play a film on the family history featuring our notable ancestors that we had commissioned. It was a beautiful love letter to our parents, and to the family at large. It celebrated their contributions and allowed us to express our gratitude for the role they played in getting us where we are. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Professionally, 2023 continued to be extraordinarily busy. FJ Labs closed its third fund of $290 million in March. We correctly called the bubble in 2021 and suggested people pursue exits then. We continued to be contrarian in 2023. &nbsp;We decided to invest aggressively as everyone else was retrenching, focusing on asset light businesses raising at least two years of cash. We feel it’s the best time to invest. Valuations are more reasonable. Founders are focused on cash burn and unit economics. There is much less competition. In the same way that the most interesting companies of the 2010s were built or came of age in the 2008 – 2012 timeframe (Uber, Airbnb, Twilio, Instagram, WhatsApp), I suspect that the most interesting companies of the 2020s will come out of the 2022 &#8211; 2024 timeframe. For the most part we are focusing on B2B marketplaces and the digitization of B2B supply chains and avoiding the bubble in AI. I will detail our current investment thesis in an upcoming blog post, but you can hear it both in the keynote I gave on the state of entrepreneurship at the Transatlantic Leadership Forum at Goldman Sachs in the fall and in the masterclasses I gave respectively with Everything Marketplaces and Founders Network. Overall, FJ Labs continued to rock. The team grew to 34 people. We added two analysts as part of an inaugural two-year analyst class and seasoned CFO, Ariel Lebowits what had been my CFO had Zingy and OLX. We deployed $73 million. We made 190 start-up investments, 89 first time investments and 101 follow-on investments. We also continued to deploy our liquid crypto strategy during the crypto winter investing in 30 liquid crypto companies. For the first time the number of follow-on investments exceeded the number of new investments. This is up from the historical average of 35% of investments being follow-ons. The growing portfolio accounts for part of this increase as we are seeing more opportunities to support our existing founders. The macro environment also played a role as many portfolio companies decided to raise extension rounds to shore up runway, growth and unit economics to weather this challenging time. Despite the macro, we were fortunate to successfully exit several of our positions, including the secondary sale of Yassir, and the acquisition and AdoreMe by Victoria’s Secret. Since Jose and I started angel investing 25 years ago, we invested in 1098 unique companies, had 365 exits (including partial exits), and currently have 839 active unique company investments. We had realized returns of 37% IRR and a 3.7x average multiple. In total, we deployed $603M of which $178M was provided by Jose and me. In addition to redesigning large sections of this blog, I wrote a fair amount in 2023. My best articles were: Timing is Everything The Value of Ignorance Macroeconomic Update: I remain significantly more bearish than consensus! I was less prolific with Playing with Unicorns as I did not have my streaming gear for large portions of the year. However, I had a fascinating conversation with my good friend Kevin Ryan. Fafa also made a guest appearance on my Ask Me Anything episode in February that was very well received. Instead, I appeared on other podcasts, notably detailing the intricacies of building a fund on 1947 Rise, and discussing everything and anything (adventure travel, risk taking, spirituality, startups and much more) with my good friend Robin Haak. As usual, I was a very prolific reader. My favorite books were: Endurance: Shackleton&#8217;s Incredible Voyage (which I read while in Antarctica!) Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: A Novel Nightfall and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov My guilty pleasure of the year was the Starter Villain by John Scalzi. Most of my personal predictions for 2023 came true. I got Angel. I loved Antarctica. I took my mom to Burning Man. I started wing foiling. Fafa and I had countless fun adventures. We had a blowout Grindaverse party at the end of the year. &nbsp; My macroeconomic predictions proved overly bearish. Despite the fastest increase in interest rates in 30 years and a full-blown recession in the tech sector, the economy at large did well with strong wage growth, low unemployment, and declining inflation. I remain more bearish than consensus: Commercial real estate is headed for a major crisis. The commercial real estate crisis will exacerbate the banking crisis. Consumer debt is at an all-time high. Corporate debt refinancings will be expensive and difficult. The PMI is below 50. The yield curve is inverted. People are finally coming to terms with the fact that rates will be higher for longer. Political and geopolitical turmoil is not abating. However, I see the world in probabilistic terms and the probability of a recession is lower now than it was a year ago (though I still ascribe a 40% probability to it, not the 5% that seems consensus). With inflation increasingly under control, the Fed should start lowering rates in the second half of the year. We may yet have a soft landing, a feat only achieved once in the last 60 years. In the long term, a dollar crisis is looming given our unsustainable government deficits and increasing debt-to-GDP, but I suspect the day of reckoning for the US is over 5 years away with other fiat currency crisis playing out before then. There is plenty to be optimistic about. We are still at the beginning of the technology revolution with minimal penetration of technology in most B2B supply chains and government. We are seeing continued progress in AI, batteries, space, robots, and vaccines. Adoption of solar power and electric cars is continuing unabated. We may very well be on the eve of a technology led deflationary productivity revolution that will transform our lives for the better while helping us address the challenges of our time: inequality of opportunity and climate change. I suspect that it will take over 5 years for AI driven productivity improvements to be noticed because it will take a while to be adopted in large enterprises and government, but I am hopeful that it will happen. On a personal level, I am excited for 2024. My daughter Amélie, named after my mother’s grandmother, should join the ever-expanding Grindaverse in February. She will be the first granddaughter for my parents, and I cannot wait to meet her. I am looking forward to more crazy adventures with François and Angel. I am still hoping to convince François to ride on my back while I am kitesurfing. Next August, I am turning 50 and am looking forward to celebrating with all my friends and family in Turks &amp; Caicos. The year will end with our typical family gathering in Turks &amp; Caicos for Christmas, but for a change, I will head to Revelstoke for a snowy New Year in a more intimate setting. Happy New Year!

2023-12-19T14:41:48

2023-12-19T14:41:48

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=22061

2023-12-19T14:41:49

2023-12-19T14:41:49

marketplace-masterclass-at-founders-network

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https://fabricegrinda.com/marketplace-masterclass-at-founders-network/

Marketplace Masterclass at Founders Network

<p>I was invited by <a href="https://foundersnetwork.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Founders Network</a> to share what I learned over the years building and investing in marketplaces. </p> <p>I covered: </p> <ul> <li>How to build marketplaces.</li> <li>Biggest mistakes marketplace founders make.</li> <li>The metrics required to raise capital at various stages.</li> <li>What FJ Labs&#8217; current thesis is.</li> </ul> <p>We then did a super fun rapid fire Q&amp;A with the participants discussing everything and anything. </p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Marketplace Startups Masterclass with Fabrice Grinda of FJ Labs (December 12, 2023)" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BmtXbpf3684?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>Founders Network is a peer-mentorship group of 650+ members across 25 chapters with a global audience of more than 300,000. For the past decade, they&#8217;ve been providing startup founders with opportunities to learn from entrepreneurs via they monthly global keynotes.</p>

<p>I was invited by Founders Network to share what I learned over the years building and investing in &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/marketplace-masterclass-at-founders-network/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Marketplace Masterclass at Founders Network&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Marketplace Masterclass at Founders Network. Categories - Speeches. Date-Posted - 2023-12-19T14:41:48 . I was invited by Founders Network to share what I learned over the years building and investing in marketplaces. I covered: How to build marketplaces. Biggest mistakes marketplace founders make. The metrics required to raise capital at various stages. What FJ Labs&#8217; current thesis is. We then did a super fun rapid fire Q&amp;A with the participants discussing everything and anything. Founders Network is a peer-mentorship group of 650+ members across 25 chapters with a global audience of more than 300,000. For the past decade, they&#8217;ve been providing startup founders with opportunities to learn from entrepreneurs via they monthly global keynotes.

2023-12-12T14:42:28

2023-12-12T14:42:28

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=22042

2024-01-25T23:58:29

2024-01-25T23:58:29

transatlantic-leadership-forum-keynote-the-state-of-entrepreneurship

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https://fabricegrinda.com/transatlantic-leadership-forum-keynote-the-state-of-entrepreneurship/

Transatlantic Leadership Forum Keynote: The State of Entrepreneurship

<p>I had the pleasure to be invited by <a href="https://www.frenchfounders.com/" data-type="link" data-id="https://www.frenchfounders.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Frenchfounders</a> to speak at this year’s <a href="https://tlf.frenchfounders.com/" data-type="link" data-id="https://tlf.frenchfounders.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Transatlantic Leadership </a><a href="https://tlf.frenchfounders.com/" target="_blank" data-type="link" data-id="https://tlf.frenchfounders.com/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Forum</a> hosted by Goldman Sachs. The event brought together over 500 leaders to explore themes of sustainable futures, technological advancements, and economic transatlantic collaboration.</p> <p>I shared my perspective on the state of entrepreneurship. I covered where we stand in the macro cycle, its impact on entrepreneurship, my thoughts on AI as an investment opportunity, and FJ Labs’ current thesis.</p> <p>Given how many times I was asked the question, it’s worth noting that I spoke without a teleprompter or notes. Practice makes perfect!</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Transatlantic Leadership Forum Keynote: The State of Entrepreneurship" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5zEd_DlX7uY?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>Here is a transcript of the speech for your reading pleasure.</p> <p>It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. Charles Dickens words could actually not be more apt to describe the situation we find ourselves in today as founders and as VCs.</p> <p>When it comes to tech, we seem to be stuck between the dichotomy and the crazy contrast between the irrational exuberance in AI and the fundamental inability to raise capital in every other category of tech, both as GPs trying to raise money from LPs and as founders trying to raise money. The economy seems to be teetering between different alternatives, unclear of where it&#8217;s going to settle between inflationary access, total collapse, and perhaps, hopefully, a soft landing.</p> <p>And so, in these times of uncertainty, I want to take a few minutes to reflect on where we are and where we&#8217;re headed, especially when it comes to entrepreneurship. I want to first touch for a few minutes on the macro. Now, in the long run, the macro doesn&#8217;t matter because the trend of history is for unabated economic growth driven by productivity to exceed it.</p> <p>In over 100 years, it&#8217;s irrelevant. But in the short term, there are periods of time where the macro trumps the micro. In 2021, because of overly loose fiscal and monetary policy, basically all asset classes correlated to one on the way up. People did not differentiate good assets from the bad, and everything became overvalued.</p> <p>And that was true of real estate, stocks, of bonds, of tech, publics, privates, NFTs, SPACs, you name it. After the fastest raise in interest rates in history, the value of growth assets, especially, let&#8217;s say, less valuable publicly traded tech companies, fell by 80 percent or more for the most part. And there&#8217;s been a funnel of repricing, and now all assets correlated to one on the way down, and often the baby was thrown away with bathwater.</p> <p>Today, most people believe that we&#8217;re in the post macro phase. Perhaps we are headed for a soft landing. But before I touch upon where we are in tech, I want to take a moment to consider that perhaps we&#8217;re not, the game is not over yet. In the last 70 years, there&#8217;s only been one time that we&#8217;ve had a soft landing, which was in 93 and 94.</p> <p>And when I look at the underlying economic data, it gives me pause or concern. There&#8217;s about a trillion dollars of commercial real estate refinancing that needs to happen 2024. And with low occupation and a high interest rates, many of these projects are not financially viable. The building that my venture fund, works out of went bankrupt who was taken over by the bank, and I suspect that it&#8217;s an auger of things to come.</p> <p>Banks are likely to be recipient of these low yielding assets at a moment where their deposit base is shrinking faster than ever before. Depositors are correctly concluding that they&#8217;re better off moving into high yielding, safer T bills than leaving money in their bank account. As a result, bank balance sheets are collapsing, which is going to shrink commercial lending.</p> <p>There&#8217;s about 500 billion plus of S&amp;P 500 refinancing the need to be happening in the next year every year for the next few years and much higher rates, which will shrink corporate profits. The U.S. Consumer is actually in dire straits. The high savings rate of the covid era is actually being depleted.</p> <p>We have now higher debt than ever before in every major category. Higher mortgage, higher U.S. auto loans, student debt and credit card debt. Rates are now at the highest in the last 15 years for all these categories. Delinquencies are currently higher in credit card debt than they were in the Great Recession.</p> <p>And 70 percent of millennials and Gen Z live paycheck to paycheck. The general sentiments in manufacturing services are also very negative. The PMI is at 46.7, 79% of the time has been below 47 in the US, it&#8217;s led to recession.</p> <p>We have managers of the companies not realizing that rates are going to be higher for longer, and therefore delaying investment because many projects are no longer viable. And the geopolitical environment is also very bearish in the sense that normally do we have a seeming limitless quagmire continuing in Ukraine and Russia.</p> <p>But at the same time, we have a beginning of a hot conflict in the Middle East, and likely, or at the very least possibly, a conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and Serbia and Kosovo. In addition to that, the yield curve is currently negative. It&#8217;s been the most inverted it&#8217;s been since 1982. And the only time in the last 70 years that a yield curve inversion has not led to a recession was in 1966.</p> <p>So, all that to say that I&#8217;m rather more bearish than the consensus. Now, these things are probabilistic. It doesn&#8217;t mean it will happen. But as I think through as a founder and as a venture, venture investor, what this means, in my toggle of greed to fear, it&#8217;s toggled to fear. As a GP in a venture fund, I&#8217;m writing smaller checks. I have a higher standard. I&#8217;m extending the runway not to be going to market in the next few years.</p> <p>As a founder, you should be focusing on your unit economics, extending runway, decreasing your burn and making sure that your default alive. In 2023, though, we&#8217;ve invested in over 150 companies, and I can tell you that it&#8217;s been really hard for companies to raise. And so, the line or sentence of the year might be that the flat extension to the last round, meaning same valuation as two years ago is the new up round. And the up rounds are far and few between outside of AI, which I will touch upon shortly.</p> <p>But despite all this gloom and gloom, you know, the macro doesn&#8217;t last forever. On average, recessions have lasted 12 months and the longest one in the last seven years has been 18 months. And actually, paradoxically, I would argue that today is the very best time in recent history to both build a startup and/or invest in a startup. Yes, valuations have reset. So right now, we&#8217;re seeing pre seed valuations about 5 pre, raising 1.</p> <p>Seed valuations, let&#8217;s say you&#8217;re doing 30k a month in MRR, 150k in GMV if you&#8217;re a marketplace. You&#8217;re raising 3 at 10 pre, 13 post. And, Series A valuations of like seven at 23 pre when you&#8217;re doing 150K MRR, and 500K plus in GMV. These are significantly down from where they were in 21, 22, but we&#8217;re back to the medians of 2016, 2019.</p> <p>Now what&#8217;s interesting is, despite the fact that as a founder, raising at a lower valuation, and most likely it&#8217;ll take longer to scale your business, and most likely your exit multiple will be lower. This is actually a better time to be building a company than two years ago. You can take your time, focus on your economics, focus on your burn, and make sure you build a viable business.</p> <p>And most importantly, you&#8217;re not facing as much competition as you were. In 2021, if you were building a company that was interesting, you probably had 20 very well-funded competitors doing the same thing, forcing you to do things that were uneconomic. Today, if you win the category, if you&#8217;re in a category, you&#8217;re facing few competitions, you&#8217;re likely to win the entire category, leading to extraordinary exits.</p> <p>In the 2020s, the 2010s, the very best companies were invested in, in 08, 09, 010, 011. Airbnb, Uber, Instagram, WhatsApp, all weren&#8217;t built in that time period. I suspect that the very best companies of the 2020s will have been built or come of age in the 22, 23, or 24. So right now is an amazing time both to be a founder and to be an investor to the extent you have the dry powder and you&#8217;re investing in or building an acid light businesses where you get to the metrics that I highlighted before for your next round and where you&#8217;re not going to market for the next two years. So, make sure you have two years of cash.</p> <p>Now what to focus on? Clearly the buzzword of the year has been AI. And everyone&#8217;s been extraordinarily excited about AI, and in many cases with good reason. What you can do with GPT, or with Tome and Beautiful for presentations, or, with MidJourney for graphics and others is extraordinary.</p> <p>But as an allocator of capital, I need to think through, you know, what are the returns I&#8217;m going to be getting in the investments I&#8217;m making? And right now, it really feels that you&#8217;re at the very top, or maybe even past the top of the hype cycle when it comes to AI. Now, I do not underestimate the impact AI will allow in the world.</p> <p>Like every other tech that came before, I suspect we&#8217;re overestimating its impact in the short term, and massively underestimating the impact in 10, 15, 20 years. In the late 90s, when the first bubble came of age, people thought the Internet would change everything immediately. They were right that it did change everything 20 years later.</p> <p>But the first bubble, of course, laid the foundations for the success to come. So right now, when I&#8217;m seeing all these billions of dollars of investments in non-differentiated LLM models at very high valuations with no moats and no business models, I suspect that many of these will fail and will not be great for the investors.</p> <p>That said, will be amazing for consumers. It&#8217;s not a safe. Don&#8217;t do you know AI every company we invested in essentially is an AI company. Everyone&#8217;s using AI to lower cost of development. to do customer service and to improve user interfaces. But I would focus on vertical AI applications, on proprietary data sets, and categories where people are willing to pay.</p> <p>You know, we&#8217;ve invested in a company like Numerai, which is an AI stock market, or a stock event market evaluation engine where people upload their models, and then it picks the best ones to create a fund out of it. Or company like Anduril, which uses AI for defense applications, or existing companies are using AI to improve user interfaces.</p> <p>We&#8217;re investors in a French company called PhotoRoom, which basically you take a photo, it identifies the item based on what you&#8217;re selling, it&#8217;ll change the background, increase the sell through rate, absolutely crushing it. One of our portfolio companies, a company called Rebag, which is a handbag marketplace selling 2,000-euro type handbags. If you take a photo of the handbag, it&#8217;ll tell you if it&#8217;s real or fake, the model will auto populate category, title, description, and price, and your handbag is sold in minutes. Compare that to the traditional process for selling items on normal marketplaces like eBay.</p> <p>Now, I&#8217;m telling you that on average, don&#8217;t focus actually on AI, what is it that I&#8217;m most excited about today? And the reality is we&#8217;re at the very beginning of the tech revolution.</p> <p>You know, if you look at the consumer world, you have these extraordinary user experiences. On Amazon, things are delivered the same day if you&#8217;re in a city like New York. I mean, that&#8217;s mind bogglingly epic. Uber, Airbnb, it&#8217;s amazing. In the business world, though, we&#8217;re in the dark ages. Relationships are managed by email or text. If you want to order petrochemicals, there&#8217;s no catalog. Not only is there no catalog, there&#8217;s no price on the catalog. There&#8217;s no connectivity to the factory to understand manufacturing capacity. There&#8217;s no way to order online. There&#8217;s no payments, there&#8217;s no tracking, there&#8217;s no insurance, and there&#8217;s no financing. All of these could be different companies. So, what we&#8217;ve been focusing on is digitizing the B2B world, where we&#8217;re at sub 1 percent penetration in trillion-dollar categories.</p> <p>So, five subcategories. One is creating supply chains and bringing supply chains online for all the inputs. So, a company like Knowde for petrochemicals. Metaloop in Austria for steel. Schutfflix, a company in Germany for gravel, which is a three-sided marketplace between the queries, the truck drivers, and the construction sites.</p> <p>And you can do this across every single input, be they finished or raw. Number two, we&#8217;ve been helping small businesses compete with the large chains. You know, imagine you started a small business. You didn&#8217;t get into it because you like managing people, and doing accounting, and getting a POS, et cetera.</p> <p>You know, if you create a pizzeria, it&#8217;s because you like cooking pizza. If you own a small coffee shop, it&#8217;s because you like being a barista and talking to your customers. So, we&#8217;re investors in companies like Slice, which helps the mom-and-pop pizzerias compete with Domino&#8217;s by creating the websites, answering comments in Google and Yelp and TripAdvisor, doing online delivery for them, um, providing the POS.</p> <p>Or Odeko, which helps coffee shops compete with, with Starbucks by replenishing their inventory, giving them general purchasing power, volume. And they have super high NPS because they have the keys. They go in at night and replenish the inventory and don&#8217;t bother people. And we do this in every category.</p> <p>A company like Jobox for locksmith, a company like Fresha for barbershops, and the list goes on.</p> <p>Number three, big trend that I&#8217;m focusing on, is French shoring. Everyone needs to be moving for geopolitical reasons and economic reasons, their supply chains out of China, especially into India. And so, we&#8217;ve been helping SMB mom and pop manufacturers in India sell into the West.</p> <p>Again, the SMB owner of a factory in India, he wants to manufacture. He doesn&#8217;t want to be answering RFQs and doing prototyping and dealing with invoicing and shipping and insurance. So, we&#8217;re doing it for them with a variety of marketplaces for linen, for apparel, for ceramics, for every major vertical you can imagine.</p> <p>And we&#8217;re investing in labor marketplace is to support these we&#8217;re investors in a company like JobandTalent, which is providing blue collar workers in Europe, or TrustedHealth, which is providing nurses in hospitals in the US.</p> <p>And fifth, last but not least, and things we&#8217;re interested in, and then I&#8217;ll touch upon other things. We&#8217;re investors in, in the infrastructure layer that supports all of these. So, a company like Flexport, which is a digital freight forwarder helping connect the world, shipping, because if you&#8217;re shipping or selling something from a factory in India, you have like a trucker to a warehouse, to a container ship, to another trucker, to another distribution point, all the way to the end customer.</p> <p>And these historically have not been integrated. Or ShipBob, which is a warehouse picker, packer, last mile delivery company for online and offline retailers. Beyond that, I&#8217;m seeing extraordinary opportunities. It’s giving me hope that we&#8217;re going to rise up to the challenge of the 21st century.</p> <p>And clearly, we&#8217;re facing inequality of opportunity, the mental and physical well-being crisis, and climate change. And in all of these, I&#8217;m seeing startups address the problems at hand. In the climate transition, today, solar plus batteries has become price competitive with all other forms, to the point that penetration is increasing faster than ever before. You don&#8217;t notice it yet because it&#8217;s from a low base, but it&#8217;s growing exponentially. And because efficiency and prices continue to decrease, the energy transition will happen within the next 20 to 30 years for sure. I&#8217;m so profoundly optimistic. And when you see what&#8217;s being in the labs developed in the labs right now at the battery level, it&#8217;s extraordinary.</p> <p>Likewise, we&#8217;re investors in a company called Figure AI, which does humanoid robots, replacing humans in last mile warehouses for picking and packing. Again, it&#8217;s massively deflationary, in fact, all the things I just described are massively deflationary. By definition, they are inclusionary. They will increase people&#8217;s purchasing power.</p> <p>But it&#8217;s massively deflationary, improves quality of life for humans by replacing humans who are doing tasks they should not be doing that are highly repetitive and manual. We&#8217;re investors in a brain computer interface company called Paradromics, which gives hope to tetraplegics or people with Lockton Syndrome by allowing them to use their brain to communicate with the rest of the world.</p> <p>So, all that to say that all of us here today, as founders, as investors, we&#8217;re extraordinarily privileged to be in a position to bring about a better world of tomorrow. A world that is environmentally sustainable, of equality of opportunity, and of plenty.</p> <p>Thank you.</p>

<p>I had the pleasure to be invited by Frenchfounders to speak at this year’s Transatlantic Leadership Forum hosted &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/transatlantic-leadership-forum-keynote-the-state-of-entrepreneurship/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Transatlantic Leadership Forum Keynote: The State of Entrepreneurship&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Transatlantic Leadership Forum Keynote: The State of Entrepreneurship. Categories - Speeches. Date-Posted - 2023-12-12T14:42:28 . I had the pleasure to be invited by Frenchfounders to speak at this year’s Transatlantic Leadership Forum hosted by Goldman Sachs. The event brought together over 500 leaders to explore themes of sustainable futures, technological advancements, and economic transatlantic collaboration. I shared my perspective on the state of entrepreneurship. I covered where we stand in the macro cycle, its impact on entrepreneurship, my thoughts on AI as an investment opportunity, and FJ Labs’ current thesis. Given how many times I was asked the question, it’s worth noting that I spoke without a teleprompter or notes. Practice makes perfect! Here is a transcript of the speech for your reading pleasure. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. Charles Dickens words could actually not be more apt to describe the situation we find ourselves in today as founders and as VCs. When it comes to tech, we seem to be stuck between the dichotomy and the crazy contrast between the irrational exuberance in AI and the fundamental inability to raise capital in every other category of tech, both as GPs trying to raise money from LPs and as founders trying to raise money. The economy seems to be teetering between different alternatives, unclear of where it&#8217;s going to settle between inflationary access, total collapse, and perhaps, hopefully, a soft landing. And so, in these times of uncertainty, I want to take a few minutes to reflect on where we are and where we&#8217;re headed, especially when it comes to entrepreneurship. I want to first touch for a few minutes on the macro. Now, in the long run, the macro doesn&#8217;t matter because the trend of history is for unabated economic growth driven by productivity to exceed it. In over 100 years, it&#8217;s irrelevant. But in the short term, there are periods of time where the macro trumps the micro. In 2021, because of overly loose fiscal and monetary policy, basically all asset classes correlated to one on the way up. People did not differentiate good assets from the bad, and everything became overvalued. And that was true of real estate, stocks, of bonds, of tech, publics, privates, NFTs, SPACs, you name it. After the fastest raise in interest rates in history, the value of growth assets, especially, let&#8217;s say, less valuable publicly traded tech companies, fell by 80 percent or more for the most part. And there&#8217;s been a funnel of repricing, and now all assets correlated to one on the way down, and often the baby was thrown away with bathwater. Today, most people believe that we&#8217;re in the post macro phase. Perhaps we are headed for a soft landing. But before I touch upon where we are in tech, I want to take a moment to consider that perhaps we&#8217;re not, the game is not over yet. In the last 70 years, there&#8217;s only been one time that we&#8217;ve had a soft landing, which was in 93 and 94. And when I look at the underlying economic data, it gives me pause or concern. There&#8217;s about a trillion dollars of commercial real estate refinancing that needs to happen 2024. And with low occupation and a high interest rates, many of these projects are not financially viable. The building that my venture fund, works out of went bankrupt who was taken over by the bank, and I suspect that it&#8217;s an auger of things to come. Banks are likely to be recipient of these low yielding assets at a moment where their deposit base is shrinking faster than ever before. Depositors are correctly concluding that they&#8217;re better off moving into high yielding, safer T bills than leaving money in their bank account. As a result, bank balance sheets are collapsing, which is going to shrink commercial lending. There&#8217;s about 500 billion plus of S&amp;P 500 refinancing the need to be happening in the next year every year for the next few years and much higher rates, which will shrink corporate profits. The U.S. Consumer is actually in dire straits. The high savings rate of the covid era is actually being depleted. We have now higher debt than ever before in every major category. Higher mortgage, higher U.S. auto loans, student debt and credit card debt. Rates are now at the highest in the last 15 years for all these categories. Delinquencies are currently higher in credit card debt than they were in the Great Recession. And 70 percent of millennials and Gen Z live paycheck to paycheck. The general sentiments in manufacturing services are also very negative. The PMI is at 46.7, 79% of the time has been below 47 in the US, it&#8217;s led to recession. We have managers of the companies not realizing that rates are going to be higher for longer, and therefore delaying investment because many projects are no longer viable. And the geopolitical environment is also very bearish in the sense that normally do we have a seeming limitless quagmire continuing in Ukraine and Russia. But at the same time, we have a beginning of a hot conflict in the Middle East, and likely, or at the very least possibly, a conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and Serbia and Kosovo. In addition to that, the yield curve is currently negative. It&#8217;s been the most inverted it&#8217;s been since 1982. And the only time in the last 70 years that a yield curve inversion has not led to a recession was in 1966. So, all that to say that I&#8217;m rather more bearish than the consensus. Now, these things are probabilistic. It doesn&#8217;t mean it will happen. But as I think through as a founder and as a venture, venture investor, what this means, in my toggle of greed to fear, it&#8217;s toggled to fear. As a GP in a venture fund, I&#8217;m writing smaller checks. I have a higher standard. I&#8217;m extending the runway not to be going to market in the next few years. As a founder, you should be focusing on your unit economics, extending runway, decreasing your burn and making sure that your default alive. In 2023, though, we&#8217;ve invested in over 150 companies, and I can tell you that it&#8217;s been really hard for companies to raise. And so, the line or sentence of the year might be that the flat extension to the last round, meaning same valuation as two years ago is the new up round. And the up rounds are far and few between outside of AI, which I will touch upon shortly. But despite all this gloom and gloom, you know, the macro doesn&#8217;t last forever. On average, recessions have lasted 12 months and the longest one in the last seven years has been 18 months. And actually, paradoxically, I would argue that today is the very best time in recent history to both build a startup and/or invest in a startup. Yes, valuations have reset. So right now, we&#8217;re seeing pre seed valuations about 5 pre, raising 1. Seed valuations, let&#8217;s say you&#8217;re doing 30k a month in MRR, 150k in GMV if you&#8217;re a marketplace. You&#8217;re raising 3 at 10 pre, 13 post. And, Series A valuations of like seven at 23 pre when you&#8217;re doing 150K MRR, and 500K plus in GMV. These are significantly down from where they were in 21, 22, but we&#8217;re back to the medians of 2016, 2019. Now what&#8217;s interesting is, despite the fact that as a founder, raising at a lower valuation, and most likely it&#8217;ll take longer to scale your business, and most likely your exit multiple will be lower. This is actually a better time to be building a company than two years ago. You can take your time, focus on your economics, focus on your burn, and make sure you build a viable business. And most importantly, you&#8217;re not facing as much competition as you were. In 2021, if you were building a company that was interesting, you probably had 20 very well-funded competitors doing the same thing, forcing you to do things that were uneconomic. Today, if you win the category, if you&#8217;re in a category, you&#8217;re facing few competitions, you&#8217;re likely to win the entire category, leading to extraordinary exits. In the 2020s, the 2010s, the very best companies were invested in, in 08, 09, 010, 011. Airbnb, Uber, Instagram, WhatsApp, all weren&#8217;t built in that time period. I suspect that the very best companies of the 2020s will have been built or come of age in the 22, 23, or 24. So right now is an amazing time both to be a founder and to be an investor to the extent you have the dry powder and you&#8217;re investing in or building an acid light businesses where you get to the metrics that I highlighted before for your next round and where you&#8217;re not going to market for the next two years. So, make sure you have two years of cash. Now what to focus on? Clearly the buzzword of the year has been AI. And everyone&#8217;s been extraordinarily excited about AI, and in many cases with good reason. What you can do with GPT, or with Tome and Beautiful for presentations, or, with MidJourney for graphics and others is extraordinary. But as an allocator of capital, I need to think through, you know, what are the returns I&#8217;m going to be getting in the investments I&#8217;m making? And right now, it really feels that you&#8217;re at the very top, or maybe even past the top of the hype cycle when it comes to AI. Now, I do not underestimate the impact AI will allow in the world. Like every other tech that came before, I suspect we&#8217;re overestimating its impact in the short term, and massively underestimating the impact in 10, 15, 20 years. In the late 90s, when the first bubble came of age, people thought the Internet would change everything immediately. They were right that it did change everything 20 years later. But the first bubble, of course, laid the foundations for the success to come. So right now, when I&#8217;m seeing all these billions of dollars of investments in non-differentiated LLM models at very high valuations with no moats and no business models, I suspect that many of these will fail and will not be great for the investors. That said, will be amazing for consumers. It&#8217;s not a safe. Don&#8217;t do you know AI every company we invested in essentially is an AI company. Everyone&#8217;s using AI to lower cost of development. to do customer service and to improve user interfaces. But I would focus on vertical AI applications, on proprietary data sets, and categories where people are willing to pay. You know, we&#8217;ve invested in a company like Numerai, which is an AI stock market, or a stock event market evaluation engine where people upload their models, and then it picks the best ones to create a fund out of it. Or company like Anduril, which uses AI for defense applications, or existing companies are using AI to improve user interfaces. We&#8217;re investors in a French company called PhotoRoom, which basically you take a photo, it identifies the item based on what you&#8217;re selling, it&#8217;ll change the background, increase the sell through rate, absolutely crushing it. One of our portfolio companies, a company called Rebag, which is a handbag marketplace selling 2,000-euro type handbags. If you take a photo of the handbag, it&#8217;ll tell you if it&#8217;s real or fake, the model will auto populate category, title, description, and price, and your handbag is sold in minutes. Compare that to the traditional process for selling items on normal marketplaces like eBay. Now, I&#8217;m telling you that on average, don&#8217;t focus actually on AI, what is it that I&#8217;m most excited about today? And the reality is we&#8217;re at the very beginning of the tech revolution. You know, if you look at the consumer world, you have these extraordinary user experiences. On Amazon, things are delivered the same day if you&#8217;re in a city like New York. I mean, that&#8217;s mind bogglingly epic. Uber, Airbnb, it&#8217;s amazing. In the business world, though, we&#8217;re in the dark ages. Relationships are managed by email or text. If you want to order petrochemicals, there&#8217;s no catalog. Not only is there no catalog, there&#8217;s no price on the catalog. There&#8217;s no connectivity to the factory to understand manufacturing capacity. There&#8217;s no way to order online. There&#8217;s no payments, there&#8217;s no tracking, there&#8217;s no insurance, and there&#8217;s no financing. All of these could be different companies. So, what we&#8217;ve been focusing on is digitizing the B2B world, where we&#8217;re at sub 1 percent penetration in trillion-dollar categories. So, five subcategories. One is creating supply chains and bringing supply chains online for all the inputs. So, a company like Knowde for petrochemicals. Metaloop in Austria for steel. Schutfflix, a company in Germany for gravel, which is a three-sided marketplace between the queries, the truck drivers, and the construction sites. And you can do this across every single input, be they finished or raw. Number two, we&#8217;ve been helping small businesses compete with the large chains. You know, imagine you started a small business. You didn&#8217;t get into it because you like managing people, and doing accounting, and getting a POS, et cetera. You know, if you create a pizzeria, it&#8217;s because you like cooking pizza. If you own a small coffee shop, it&#8217;s because you like being a barista and talking to your customers. So, we&#8217;re investors in companies like Slice, which helps the mom-and-pop pizzerias compete with Domino&#8217;s by creating the websites, answering comments in Google and Yelp and TripAdvisor, doing online delivery for them, um, providing the POS. Or Odeko, which helps coffee shops compete with, with Starbucks by replenishing their inventory, giving them general purchasing power, volume. And they have super high NPS because they have the keys. They go in at night and replenish the inventory and don&#8217;t bother people. And we do this in every category. A company like Jobox for locksmith, a company like Fresha for barbershops, and the list goes on. Number three, big trend that I&#8217;m focusing on, is French shoring. Everyone needs to be moving for geopolitical reasons and economic reasons, their supply chains out of China, especially into India. And so, we&#8217;ve been helping SMB mom and pop manufacturers in India sell into the West. Again, the SMB owner of a factory in India, he wants to manufacture. He doesn&#8217;t want to be answering RFQs and doing prototyping and dealing with invoicing and shipping and insurance. So, we&#8217;re doing it for them with a variety of marketplaces for linen, for apparel, for ceramics, for every major vertical you can imagine. And we&#8217;re investing in labor marketplace is to support these we&#8217;re investors in a company like JobandTalent, which is providing blue collar workers in Europe, or TrustedHealth, which is providing nurses in hospitals in the US. And fifth, last but not least, and things we&#8217;re interested in, and then I&#8217;ll touch upon other things. We&#8217;re investors in, in the infrastructure layer that supports all of these. So, a company like Flexport, which is a digital freight forwarder helping connect the world, shipping, because if you&#8217;re shipping or selling something from a factory in India, you have like a trucker to a warehouse, to a container ship, to another trucker, to another distribution point, all the way to the end customer. And these historically have not been integrated. Or ShipBob, which is a warehouse picker, packer, last mile delivery company for online and offline retailers. Beyond that, I&#8217;m seeing extraordinary opportunities. It’s giving me hope that we&#8217;re going to rise up to the challenge of the 21st century. And clearly, we&#8217;re facing inequality of opportunity, the mental and physical well-being crisis, and climate change. And in all of these, I&#8217;m seeing startups address the problems at hand. In the climate transition, today, solar plus batteries has become price competitive with all other forms, to the point that penetration is increasing faster than ever before. You don&#8217;t notice it yet because it&#8217;s from a low base, but it&#8217;s growing exponentially. And because efficiency and prices continue to decrease, the energy transition will happen within the next 20 to 30 years for sure. I&#8217;m so profoundly optimistic. And when you see what&#8217;s being in the labs developed in the labs right now at the battery level, it&#8217;s extraordinary. Likewise, we&#8217;re investors in a company called Figure AI, which does humanoid robots, replacing humans in last mile warehouses for picking and packing. Again, it&#8217;s massively deflationary, in fact, all the things I just described are massively deflationary. By definition, they are inclusionary. They will increase people&#8217;s purchasing power. But it&#8217;s massively deflationary, improves quality of life for humans by replacing humans who are doing tasks they should not be doing that are highly repetitive and manual. We&#8217;re investors in a brain computer interface company called Paradromics, which gives hope to tetraplegics or people with Lockton Syndrome by allowing them to use their brain to communicate with the rest of the world. So, all that to say that all of us here today, as founders, as investors, we&#8217;re extraordinarily privileged to be in a position to bring about a better world of tomorrow. A world that is environmentally sustainable, of equality of opportunity, and of plenty. Thank you.

2023-12-05T14:39:30

2023-12-05T14:39:30

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2023-12-05T14:39:31

2023-12-05T14:39:31

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https://fabricegrinda.com/1947-rise-interview-how-we-built-fj-labs/

1947 Rise Interview: How we built FJ Labs

<p>I had the pleasure of speaking with <a href="https://shivasinghsangwan.notion.site/shivasinghsangwan/Shiva-Singh-Sangwan-6536680ff9f845e4b7b2c36af7ad5f8b" target="_blank" data-type="link" data-id="https://www.linkedin.com/in/shiva-singh-sangwan-44138688/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Shiva Singh Sangwan</a> of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@1947rise" data-type="link" data-id="https://www.youtube.com/@1947rise" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">1947 Rise</a>. We discussed the intricacies of building a fund. We covered why building a fund is akin to building a startup, why we are bullish on India, and why our diversified strategy is the most effective.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="How Fabrice Grinda Built FJ Labs into the World&#039;s Most Active VC Fund | 1947 VC" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AKNKKbOooSk?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>Timeline:</p> <p>00:00: Top Moments.</p> <p>00:34: Intro for Pod with Fabrice.</p> <p>01:57: FJ Labs founding story.</p> <p>04:57: Portfolio and fund model evolved through experience and learning.</p> <p>07:59: Success factors for a $290 million fund.</p> <p>09:45: Potential changes for the third fund if starting a new fund.</p> <p>12:15: LP relationship-building strategies.</p> <p>16:38: Effective pre-fundraising relationship building.</p> <p>18:31: Evolution in deal sourcing.</p> <p>25:27: Challenges in building a venture fund.</p> <p>27:05:&nbsp; Investment thesis for India.</p> <p>31:08: Pros and cons of starting a fund.</p> <p>33:54: Importance of brand building for deal flow.</p> <p>35:17: Typical day routine.</p> <p>37:14: His obsession outside of work.</p> <p>38:25: Recent personal mindset changes.</p> <p>41:32: Who is Fabrice outside of work?</p> <p>If you prefer, you can listen to the episode in the embedded podcast player.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-wp-embed is-provider-anchor-fm-inc wp-block-embed-anchor-fm-inc"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe class="wp-embedded-content" sandbox="allow-scripts" security="restricted" title="84: How Fabrice Grinda Built FJ Labs into the World&#039;s Most Active VC Fund | 1947 VC by 1947 Rise" src="https://anchor.fm/1947-rise/embed/episodes/84-How-Fabrice-Grinda-Built-FJ-Labs-into-the-Worlds-Most-Active-VC-Fund--1947-VC-e2ck0ms#?secret=TqNKzzmc0v" data-secret="TqNKzzmc0v" height="102px" width="400px" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe> </div></figure> <p>In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify: <br><a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/0FUZzpSSSeTx0XOHt7pt0d?si=hLAmrdtGQ3y22NUzzhl-Zg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://open.spotify.com/episode/0FUZzpSSSeTx0XOHt7pt0d?si=hLAmrdtGQ3y22NUzzhl-Zg</a></p>

<p>I had the pleasure of speaking with Shiva Singh Sangwan of 1947 Rise. We discussed the intricacies of &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/1947-rise-interview-how-we-built-fj-labs/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;1947 Rise Interview: How we built FJ Labs&#8221;</span></a></p>

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1947 Rise Interview: How we built FJ Labs. Categories - FJ Labs, Interviews &amp; Fireside Chats. Date-Posted - 2023-12-05T14:39:30 . I had the pleasure of speaking with Shiva Singh Sangwan of 1947 Rise. We discussed the intricacies of building a fund. We covered why building a fund is akin to building a startup, why we are bullish on India, and why our diversified strategy is the most effective. Timeline: 00:00: Top Moments. 00:34: Intro for Pod with Fabrice. 01:57: FJ Labs founding story. 04:57: Portfolio and fund model evolved through experience and learning. 07:59: Success factors for a $290 million fund. 09:45: Potential changes for the third fund if starting a new fund. 12:15: LP relationship-building strategies. 16:38: Effective pre-fundraising relationship building. 18:31: Evolution in deal sourcing. 25:27: Challenges in building a venture fund. 27:05:&nbsp; Investment thesis for India. 31:08: Pros and cons of starting a fund. 33:54: Importance of brand building for deal flow. 35:17: Typical day routine. 37:14: His obsession outside of work. 38:25: Recent personal mindset changes. 41:32: Who is Fabrice outside of work? If you prefer, you can listen to the episode in the embedded podcast player. In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0FUZzpSSSeTx0XOHt7pt0d?si=hLAmrdtGQ3y22NUzzhl-Zg

2023-11-21T15:00:26

2023-11-21T15:00:26

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=21938

2023-11-21T16:57:32

2023-11-21T16:57:32

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https://fabricegrinda.com/super-fun-interview-by-robin-haak/

Super Fun Interview by Robin Haak

<p class="has-small-font-size"><em>Photo by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/chris_michel/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Christopher Michel</a></em></p> <p>I had the pleasure of being interviewed by my good friend <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/robinhaak/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Robin Haak</a>. We had a super wide ranging conversation covering everything from adventure travel to risk taking in general, spirituality, startups and much more. </p> <p>By way of background, Robin is the Founder and Solo General Partner at <a href="https://robincap.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Robin Capital</a>. He is a former General Partner at Revaia, First-Time €250 Million growth fund in Paris. He&#8217;s a serial entrepreneur: he co-founded Axel Springer Plug and Play, Jobspotting, Wo\men Inc., and built SmartRecruiters, a profitable US unicorn in San Francisco. He invested in over 75 companies, including 5 unicorns, with the first check-in N26, and others like Algolia, Aircall, Frontify, and more. He&#8217;s also a member of the advisory board at Stepstone.</p> <p>You can read the background of how we met <a href="https://mailchi.mp/robincap.com/the-fabrice-grinda-story?e=a019a5b12c" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">here</a> and find the original post of the interview at <a href="https://robincap.com/blog/fabrice-grinda" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://robincap.com/blog/fabrice-grinda" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://robincap.com/blog/fabrice-grinda</a></p> <p>Happy watching or reading.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="The Fabrice Grinda Story" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9xML0VdRRLw?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p></p> <p><strong>Robin: So, let’s start, I saw that you recently went to Antarctica. Tell us about it. I think Colin O’Brady was the first one to go and do this. I was watching him speak about it on stage and then I saw that you’d done it.</strong></p> <p>Fabrice:</p> <p>So, first let me tell you a bit about me. I like to do these crazy adventure travel type trips, where I&#8217;m alone off grid, and I take my backpack, my sleeping bag, and my water filtration system and a knife. And I have mostly done these trips in warm weather environments, like Hawaii, or in Costa Rica, or in various rain forests and jungles around the world alone, with a friend, or with a guide or a team.</p> <p>Two years ago I was contacted by Kevin Ryan, who&#8217;s obviously another unicorn founder and an amazing New York Tech founder. And he said hey, I’ve been asked to sponsor this scientific expedition. And the objective of the scientific expedition is to find out if there&#8217;s a way to predict who&#8217;s going to do well in these extreme environments ahead of time, because in 2016/17, there was a team of British Army Reserves that completed a 67 day expedition from the Hercules Inlet via the South Pole to the Shackleton Glacier, and despite the fact that they were all young and super fit, they didn&#8217;t do particularly well, in fact many of them failed and didn&#8217;t make it.</p> <p>He asked me, is there a way to sponsor a similar expedition where we have a group of 50% male 50% female, some people on a vegan diet and some people not on a vegan diet. And we&#8217;re doing two tasks, one is the full 60 days and the other one is the last degree for two weeks. As a sponsor, you can join this part of the expedition in the last degree and it&#8217;s like two weeks on the ice fully disconnected. And I thought, this is right up my alley.</p> <p>I was invited by a good friend who I thought I would enjoy my time with, so I&#8217;m like okay, let&#8217;s do it. And you know, it’s less than 200 kilometers so I&#8217;m like oh, this is not going to be really hard. You know, I could walk 20-30k, or even 40k a day, right, like wow, yeah, for days. I was really wrong. This was one of the hardest things I&#8217;ve ever done.</p> <p>So first of all, it took a fair amount of training. In the spring of 2022, I went to a place in Norway to actually train. You pull a 100 pound Pulk, which is a sled that you use to carry your food, your tent, your fuel etc. You need to learn to walk with it. You need to learn to make your tent, you need to learn to melt the ice to make your food and a bunch of other skills that quite frankly, you wouldn&#8217;t have to use anywhere else especially with this kind of equipment.</p> <p>You need very specialized equipment to deal with what is a negative 30 temperature but feels like negative 50. And you don’t just need different layers, you need things when you&#8217;re resting and when you&#8217;re not resting, and so you need to buy the equipment that has been tested to make sure it fits and it works.</p> <p>So in January, we put December 30 2020 to fly to Chile and actually spent time with the team. That&#8217;s a team of 10 people with three guides for the last degree and there was a separate team doing the full 50 or 60 day walk from the coast to the pole. They had done this before. Most of the guys have done this many times before. The guides are there seasonally and the season is very short. The season is mid November to mid January. We were actually part of the very tail end so it&#8217;s a very short summer, which is the warmest and best weather time to do this. It&#8217;s also light 24/7.</p> <p>So, we then flew from Podesta, the southernmost tip of Chile to a staging area called Union Glacier Station in Antarctica. And we got everything ready. And from there, we flew to where we started our walk. We started the walk and it was way harder than I thought it would be because it&#8217;s a combination of starting at 10,000 feet altitude or 3000 meters which is reasonably high and has low oxygen and you exercise 24/7.</p> <p>Eight hours a day more than eight hours a day you&#8217;re doing eight stints of one hour you walk for 15 minutes, you stop for 10 minutes to rest, and you eat, and you do that eight times. You have to eat. If you don&#8217;t eat, you&#8217;re gonna pass out because you&#8217;re using up 7500 calories a day. I lost half a pound a day, every day that I was there, despite eating 6000 calories a day. And, you walk 40,000 steps a day. And then when you finish the day, you need to make your camp plan for tents, make a ditch and melt the ice, so you&#8217;re exhausted.</p> <p>So it&#8217;s super cold and super hard. Way harder than I thought. But ultimately, it was an amazing exercise. Especially as there were a few things that you don’t really get to do in this modern age.</p> <p>It’s all about disconnection, right? We all live in a world that&#8217;s hyper connected. It&#8217;s very rare that you have two weeks with no cell phone, no news, no WhatsApp, no emails, no calls, no nothing. And, in Antarctica you’re either alone or with your friends. I would talk for one or two hours a day with amazing people and build amazing relationships, or I’d just be alone with my thoughts.</p> <p>So it kind of felt and I don&#8217;t know if you know what a Vipassana meditation retreat is, but it kind of felt like an act of Vipassana meditation retreat. And it was an exercise in aloneness, and gratitude. I just took the mantras, I did meditation, and I felt extreme infinite gratitude to be in this environment, with my team and I was grateful to have my friends and a team of workers that can support me. Who allowed me to do this and doesn’t need me to be there at all times.</p> <p>I have a family that&#8217;s there for me and my friends and my crazy endeavors, and I have such gratitude to be able to experience something so unique, where there&#8217;s literally nothing I mean, it&#8217;s infinite ice and white in every direction, and there&#8217;s no life.</p> <p>There&#8217;s nothing I mean, it has downsides. It means you need to poop in a plastic bag in negative 50 degrees and carry your poop with you for two weeks, which is not the most pleasant thing I&#8217;ve ever done. It&#8217;s extraordinarily exhausting, but it was amazing. And yeah. I think it&#8217;s a real privilege. It was an amazing silent meditation and amazing bonding experience with people in the team, and with the friends that I made that went on this trip with me. Having done it, I&#8217;m definitely not doing it again. It was one of the hardest things I&#8217;ve ever done, including creating a startup and running it for, you know, decades. And yeah, amazing. So I think my next adventure is going to be a warm weather adventure. And I haven&#8217;t decided what it is. I&#8217;m not doing this again.</p> <p><strong>Robin: When you start a start-up, you know that it&#8217;s hard, but not that hard, right? In this particular case, I&#8217;m pretty sure you knew that it would be very hard, no?</strong></p> <p>Fabrice: I didn&#8217;t think it was gonna be that hard. Actually, no, it was way harder than I expected. Okay, no, it was exactly like a start-up. I did not know what I was doing. I did not know what I was getting myself into. I didn&#8217;t have the right equipment for it. I had to learn along the way, you know, it was exactly like a start-up.</p> <p><strong>Robin: And do you then think you think this is DNA? Or do you think it&#8217;s cognitive i.e. how you grew up? This is also a question in start-ups, right? But also here, you must be, to a certain point, a bit crazy to do it, right? What is the thing that makes humans become founders, but also do this kind of exercise for fun?</strong></p> <p>Fabrice: Yeah, I&#8217;m gonna answer the question with a few things I&#8217;ve learned. You can always push yourself more than you think you can. And I think that&#8217;s true. In every environment, you can go to the gym and lift more than you think. You can push yourself more in this environment while walking, or in a start-up, you can work 100 plus hours a week for years on end. If you really have to, like if push comes to shove, you’re always able to push yourself more.</p> <p>Now, not everyone is made of that same stuff. And in fact, the objective of this of the study was to find out who actually makes it who doesn&#8217;t, i.e., can you tell ahead of time based on their physiology, blood tests, etc, and their DNA and their personal mental profile?</p> <p>Clearly, there&#8217;s one thing I think founders have in common is that we&#8217;re more tolerant to risk than most. I&#8217;m not saying we&#8217;re risk seeking, right, like it&#8217;s always on a risk adjusted basis. And in fact, I don&#8217;t think we take that many risks as start-up founders. But I think by taking a bit more risk than most people, we are highly rewarded.</p> <p>I love these types of extremes. I think I like it. I definitely have a predisposition for it. I like it in work, you know, building start-ups, and in life like extreme heavy skiing, kite surfing, being an adrenaline junkie, and these sports that make you feel the most alive. I like being on the verge and feeling a sense of purpose, accomplishment and meaning that is unparalleled.</p> <p>Now, not everyone is wired that way. Some people don&#8217;t like it. So, where does it come from? That’s unclear, yeah. I&#8217;m not even sure it&#8217;s nature or nurture, I think it may just just be a random number generator X Factor. You know, look, if you have three siblings in a family – they can all end up being completely different despite having the same genes, same nature, growing up in the same environment, the same nurture, the same parents, the same teaching philosophy, and yet they&#8217;re completely different. And so I suspect that there&#8217;s this other X factor that makes a subset of the population more risk taking, thrill seeking and adrenaline junkie ish, but also more optimistic.</p> <p>I think the other characteristic that defines founders, and for people with these things is feeling optimistic that the odds don&#8217;t apply to you, right? For example, the five year survival rate of a start-up is like 5%. So you have a 95% chance of failure after five years. And so you have to be delusional enough to believe that you can change these odds, and you&#8217;re gonna make it happen. And if you have that level of confidence in yourself and ability and optimism, it probably applies to other things like skiing. It&#8217;s dangerous, but not for me. I&#8217;m so good. I&#8217;m gonna do it, it&#8217;s gonna be fun and it won&#8217;t be dangerous. It’s the same with kitesurfing. And the same with all the crazy shit I do. I used to go kart race as well, motorbike race, and play paintball, remember…</p> <p><strong>Robin: Yeah, I remember you had a paintball field in New York when I visited you twice…</strong></p> <p>Fabrice: Yeah exactly…</p> <p><strong>Robin: So, yeah, you were talking about the grit, resilience, optimism needed for this Antarctica expedition. You said the British army guys didn’t perform as well as expected.</strong></p> <p>Fabrice: Because they&#8217;re 25. And they&#8217;re super fit. So you would have thought that they would have done well. So here&#8217;s the lessons we learned from this. On average, women did better than men. Because women have a bit more body fat than men. And when they were walking, they would burn fat and not muscle. And so, when you start burning muscle, your body fully shuts down. So, on average, women did better than men. Number two, you could not be on a vegan diet in an extreme environment. After a week, everyone who had a vegan diet basically died they literally either gave up or switched to a non vegan diet.</p> <p><strong>Robin: Yeah, even Mike Tyson switches before fights from vegan back to meat…</strong></p> <p>Fabrice: Yeah. So it&#8217;s okay. In a normal, safe, boring environment, you know, you&#8217;re OK in a city where you&#8217;re burning 2000 calories a day. But it doesn&#8217;t work when you&#8217;re burning 7500 calories a day. And so that was another interesting lesson. And by the way, within a week, it was clear, like, it was like, the guys on the vegan diet were just falling apart and dying. So they didn&#8217;t want to go any further, so they either switched or dropped off.</p> <p>Again, if you&#8217;re living in a city, and you can take supplements, etc. then maybe it&#8217;s not a big deal. But, you know, if you&#8217;re in an extreme environment, it doesn&#8217;t work. And by the way, if you go back 20,000 years, we were all omnivores, right. Like we were hunting the mammoth and we&#8217;d have feast and famine. We were on the Paleo diet if you want, and we needed a little bit of everything. But that was found in nature including, you know, deer and mammoth and whatever else that we would be interested in fascinating because you could find them and eat like a king. And then you know, for three days, you&#8217;d be hunting the next bit of food until you caught one.</p> <p><strong>Robin: I’ve got one more thing. It&#8217;s so interesting to hear. And, you have to think of two more questions. One is, because I think people would love to hear if you have a certain point of fear before you do something like this. Will I make it or not? What if the helicopter has to pick me up? There must have been a certain amount of fear before you started. And so my first question for the people who may read this, is how do you overcome fear?</strong></p> <p><strong>And two, there is Will Smith, who knows why he&#8217;s more successful, right? He says he&#8217;s not more beautiful, and he&#8217;s not stronger. He&#8217;s not everything, but he says, “the only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I&#8217;m not afraid to die on a treadmill” and this is similar. “</strong><strong><em>The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I&#8217;m not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be out-worked, period. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me, you might be all of those things you got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there&#8217;s two things: You&#8217;re getting off first, or I&#8217;m going to die. It&#8217;s really that simple, right?”&nbsp;</em></strong><strong>Will Smith</strong></p> <p><strong>So the one is, one is overcoming fear and starting and the other one is endurance while you&#8217;re in it, bracing pain, so maybe you could speak to these two things.</strong></p> <p>Fabrice: For the first point, I&#8217;m not sure I&#8217;m the right person to speak to this, because fear is not a feeling I have often, if ever, experienced in any context. Frankly, I don&#8217;t remember the last time we&#8217;ve been afraid of anything.</p> <p><strong>Robin: This means you went there (Antarctica) and you had zero fear that maybe you would have to get a helicopter to pick you up or something like a Plan B?</strong></p> <p>Fabrice: Yeah, there was a Plan B. You can get an emergency evacuation. Look. Here&#8217;s why I never had fear. Imagine, my first start-up essentially failed, right? Like I went from zero to hero back to zero again when the tech bubble bursts. And so I went from being worth, on paper, hundreds of millions to being bankrupt overnight. But I didn&#8217;t fear that, I mean, what&#8217;s the worst that&#8217;s gonna happen to me? You know, I&#8217;m top of my class at Princeton, I used to work at McKinsey. I&#8217;m gonna get a job at Goldman private equity or I&#8217;m gonna work in McKinsey. I&#8217;m gonna run digital media.</p> <p><strong>Robin: But you could have died in Antarctica, no?</strong></p> <p>Fabrice: You know, it did go wrong, my body failed, I had to be evacuated. But I also have confidence if I have infinite belief, which goes to point number two and my resilience and grit. Like, I will stay on the treadmill as long as it takes to get there and I had no question in my mind that regardless of how much pain and suffering I needed to endure, I was going to make it and so I didn&#8217;t even consider the alternative. Like it didn&#8217;t add on I was like, it&#8217;s not within the realm of possibility. Failure is not an option.</p> <p><strong>Robin: This is my last question around your expedition. Thank you so much for sharing the experiences. So, you talked about gratitude and you talked about Vipassana and, so, is there some belief in the divine or anything you rely on when you do these kinds of things that’s higher?</strong></p> <p>Yes, I have a meditation practice where I meditate daily. Frankly, this just reinforces the way I&#8217;m built. I&#8217;ve already built optimism and gratitude and I just reinforce that through singing the mantras and moving energy within me etc. I think its these moments when you you feel like you&#8217;re communing with the divine.</p> <p>I&#8217;ve experienced more psychedelic experiences and in these moment moments of silent meditations I think. At silent retreats I don&#8217;t feel like competing with the divine. I don&#8217;t become one with whatever the universal source or energy and by the way. It doesn&#8217;t feel religious in that traditional way. It wouldn&#8217;t be anything close to Christianity.</p> <p><strong>Robin: Is there a sense of unity that we are all one, and that all things are connected that you feel in these deep experiences?</strong></p> <p>Fabrice: Absolutely. But I wouldn&#8217;t call it religious in the traditional sense. Is there a sensation of something greater than oneself and universal? Absolutely. But you know, I wouldn&#8217;t call it anything. It doesn’t fit the descriptions of any of the religions I can think of including Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. It’s pretty much all of these things and under the traditions from Kabbalah, to Tantra to Taoism are things I&#8217;ve read and and I&#8217;ve implemented elements of these into my personal practice.</p> <p>The only moments where I feel connected to everything are when I take whatever psilocybin or magic mushrooms or acid or Ayahuasca. I can recreate a lot of these experiences through pure meditation but it&#8217;s not the same. It doesn&#8217;t feel like I&#8217;m completely connected in the way that your individuality disappears right, like the entity disappears, and you have like an ego death and you become one with everything.</p> <p><strong>Robin: That’s interesting because earlier you spoke about daily gratitude and now you&#8217;re talking about the ego. When it comes to the ego, most people think that having an ego means you like being superior but just to clarify for everyone, you&#8217;re talking about breaking the ego so that you come back to the pure you where you can connect to everything right?</strong></p> <p>Fabrice: Yeah, but to be specific, I am in this form and body. I&#8217;m Fabrice who&#8217;s the tech founder and as all these other characteristics, and you&#8217;re very aware of what that identity is. There are moments in these more spiritual practices where you forget you&#8217;re in that individuality and you become one with everything. And that&#8217;s why you get the sense of unity. Where we are all connected, and we&#8217;re all the same. And I don&#8217;t mean that just as whole humans I feel that same way about all plants and all animals and rocks and wood and everything basically all things created in this universe feel like they come from the same underlying source. That&#8217;s that again, I don&#8217;t think it resembles anything that you read in any of the Testaments old or new or any of the religious writings.</p> <p><strong>Robin: Let me change the topic now. I remember we had an interview when I was working with Jobspotting 10 years ago. It was about becoming a founder and you stumbled into it. And grit is the common denominator. So yeah, I would love it if you could tell me about yourself.</strong></p> <p>Fabrice: Sure, so I’m French. I was originally born, and I grew up, in Nice in the south of France, which is the most beautiful place in the world. You can play tennis every day, go skiing every weekend, eat delicious food etc.</p> <p>But, in 1984, at the tender age of 10, I got my first PC. And it was love at first click, I know that we were meant to be together forever. And, from learning programming, I started building PCs, I ran a bulletin board service. So kind of like a system that people can connect to by modem and get answers through the internet. It was like a silo, well, islands. And it was super fun. And I became a fan of the two big tech founders, or maybe of the ‘80s, which were obviously Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. And then Michael Dell in the early ‘90s. And it was obvious to me that my destiny was going to be in tech.</p> <p>Now, what&#8217;s interesting is, I didn&#8217;t do any of this because I thought about what made sense based on a Macroeconomic analysis of the future. No, it was my hobby. And I got lucky that my hobby became a multi trillion dollar category, which led me years later to be at the right time, the right place with the right skills in ‘92.</p> <p>In ‘92, I went to college at Princeton. I was 17 and I studied economics and math, which I felt were the most useful things for me to learn at that point in time, and I finished off my class by building a computer export business from the US to Europe, which allowed me to pay for college.</p> <p>I left Princeton at 21 in ‘96, and I was shy, introverted and had never managed a team. So, then I went to McKinsey and Company for two years. It was kind of like business school except they pay you and I learned all the things I needed to learn. Like how to work in a team, how to interact with people that don&#8217;t necessarily have the same IQ by explaining complex concepts in simple ways. I improved my oral and written communication skills. I worked on my public speaking sales, which led me to build my first venture backed tech start-up back in ‘98.</p> <p>At 23, I went on to build the “eBay of Europe”, raised 63 million venture money and had 150 employees in five countries. It was really like 10 million a month in GMV. And for a hot minute, I felt like I was on top of the world.</p> <p>But then, of course, the bubble burst, I lost everything. And then, in 2001 I was humbled and I had to decide what to do next. And I realized, you know what, I didn&#8217;t do this for the money anyway. I like creating something out of nothing. I like the zero to one. I see myself as a tech founder. And this is the most fun thing I wanted I could be doing. And yeah, I will be a big business, the fact that there&#8217;s no money in it doesn&#8217;t matter. This is what I meant to be doing. I&#8217;m going to be doing it.</p> <p>So I went out. So the constraints I had then was that I needed to build a company that can be profitable, quickly, without VC money. In 2001, given the venture ecosystem, it died. So I went on to build a ringtone company called Zingy. Now, I didn&#8217;t feel any particular affinity for ringtones. It was a means to an end, in that I was able to be a tech founder. And I needed to be able to do it with no capital.</p> <p>I saw that it was profitable in Europe and in Asia. And that there was an open opportunity in the US. So I launched Zingy in July 2001 in New York. And it was extremely difficult the first few years. I mean, there was no way to connect with the carriers. There was no way to deal with them. There was no delivery, the music licenses were almost impossible to get. And it was like an infinite slog, I mean, I lived in New York essentially on $2 a day for two years. I slept on a couch in the office. We rented the office, so I could only afford four pieces of ramen noodles per day. I invested every last penny I had. I borrowed $100,000 on my credit cards, I missed payroll 27 times. It was extraordinarily tough, but ultimately grabbed the victory from the jaws of defeat when on August 15 2003, we became profitable.</p> <p>And from there it became a rocketship. So revenues were $1 million in 2002, to $5 million in 2003, then $50M in 2004 and $400M in 2005. I sold the company because I had learned my lesson from the bubble bursting. It was better to do it too early than too late. And I sold it for $80 million in the summer of 2004. I stayed on as CEO actually for 18 months, because I&#8217;ve never been part of a publicly traded company before. It&#8217;s actually interesting.</p> <p>I left in late 2005 to go and create my next company and probably should have taken a vacation between the three companies. I didn&#8217;t take a single day off, Which, admittedly, is probably a mistake. But I was in my 20s. At that point, I sold the last company when I was 29. So at 30 and leave to go build the next company. And what&#8217;s interesting, by the way, is that the most meaningful point in my life is not the day I sold the company and made like 40 million bucks as a 29 year old. It&#8217;s the day we became profitable. Because the day we became profitable, we became masters of our own destiny.</p> <p>And I knew that at that point, we were saved and we could do whatever we needed to do to go forward. The day we sold frankly, I was so busy because we were growing. We were like a total rocket ship. You know, I thought that we would continue to live in my studio apartment. With the money, I bought some tennis rackets, a TV and an Xbox. That was all I needed. And I kept living in the same apartment for like three more years because I was just too busy.</p> <p>And then went on to build OLX and OLX took me back to my first love of marketplaces and network effect businesses. And it is the largest classified site in the world today. It&#8217;s what Craigslist should have been if it was made in the right way, meaning that it uses pre-moderated content, it’s mobile first, friendly to women who were the primary decision makers in all household purchases, and is a leader now in every emerging market. OLX now has 11,000 employees in 30 countries. It&#8217;s the leader in Brazil and online America and India, Pakistan, all Southeast Asia, in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, all of Eastern Europe and the UAE and all the Middle East. And in Portugal. I sold the company back in 2010.</p> <p>And actually, again, I stayed for three years with the buyer. But it was interesting, they gave me a billion dollars to play with to go in, you know, grow it, buy the competitors, merge with them and do all the fun things.</p> <p>Then in 2013, even though I was on top of the world, I was like, you know, I like to zero to one. I want to go back to zero. And so I left OLX in 2013, gave all my physical non-financial possessions to charity and went down to 50 items. I started couchsurfing and sleeping on friend’s couches, living in Airbnbs, like literally, I had nothing left. I had no house, no car, everything I owned I could fit in my backpack or my tennis bag. I started thinking about what to do next, and I realized that I like building companies and I like investing in companies.</p> <p>That’s when, together with my business partner Jose, I created FJ Labs. Jose was also a co founder of the eBay of Latin America, which I helped co-found back in ‘99 with an Alec Oxenford, who was the other co founder, who became my co-CEO at OLX. So I&#8217;ve known them both since ‘99.</p> <p>I&#8217;d already pooled my angel investing with Jose for many, many, many years. And so, in 2013 we created FJ Labs, which was really a holding company. And then we started being approached by third parties who wanted exposure to marketplaces. We raised our first external capital of 50 million with one LP in 2016 and deployed on June 16 2017.</p> <p>Then in 2018, we took our fund to 175 million with like 20 LPs and then we just closed in March of 2023. Fund 390 million with like, 50 LPs. And basically what FJ Labs is – it&#8217;s a fund that invests in marketplaces. I have always worked in tech businesses, but the nuances are that we really behave like Angel investors.</p> <p>This is like Angel investing on a venture scale. That’s what Jose and I were doing. We don&#8217;t lead and we don&#8217;t price. We don&#8217;t take board seats. We decided to win our meetings, whether or not we invest. And we tried to be super helpful to the founders both on strategy, but perhaps most importantly, in fundraising, which is very valuable in this environment.</p> <p>What we do is highly differentiated. Frankly, no one follows the strategy of specificity to the marketplaces and network effects. We decide in our one-to-one meetings in one week if we should invest or not, and it&#8217;s taken on a life of its own. We now have 1100 investments. We&#8217;ve had over 300 exits. And that&#8217;s what we’ve got after 26 years, since we were Angel investing since the very beginning.</p> <p>We have a 40% realized IRR, I think it&#8217;s 39% of the exact on, on the 300 plus exits. And we have a team of over 30 people, including 1111 people on the basketball team. So it&#8217;s really grown and taken to life on its own. And it&#8217;s doing really well. And it&#8217;s been super fun. And in a way, building a fund from scratch is kind of like another start-up, you know, I just went on to build a new company, basically.</p> <p><strong>Robin: Yeah, running a fund is very much like running a start-up, especially if you have always been an entrepreneur.</strong></p> <p>Fabrice: Yes if you have a fund, you&#8217;re an entrepreneur, I mean, it&#8217;s all the same things, building a team building culture, raising money, running a P&amp;l. That&#8217;s exactly like running a company. So, again, if I joined Sequoia or Basler, or whatever, then I would just be a VC. But here we&#8217;re building a company. And I hope to create something that is a legacy institution that will outlast me.</p> <p>That way, OLX outlasts me. But we&#8217;re also pretty different and very entrepreneurial beyond the fact that we&#8217;re entrepreneurs building a fund. Right now I&#8217;m personally cobuilding. I mean, I’, the Executive Chairman and co-founder but it&#8217;s like the company I&#8217;ve been leading called Midas, which is a yield bearing stable coin, backed by US Treasuries. And I&#8217;m spending half my time on that too.</p> <p><strong>Robin: Yes, I heard about that on another podcast, and we won’t go into it here, because when we will, then we will go down the rabbit hole. But it&#8217;s super, it&#8217;s super interesting. You and your co-founder have a very unique situation. And for that reason I mean, I joined and I met a couple of the people that you work with, and I really like all of them and your co-founder, especially too, and I love this entrepreneurial spirit. What do you think other than this investment strategy and being an angel, this particular about funds?</strong></p> <p>Fabrice: You mean how we evaluate?</p> <p><strong>Robin: Yes, I think you&#8217;re one of my favorite investors in the world. And obviously OLX is the number one go-to marketplace. But I don&#8217;t think that people who don&#8217;t know what I know, amazing you are. You&#8217;re very different from any other investors. Right. So can you speak on that question?</strong></p> <p>Yeah, I mean, first of all, as I said, we behave like angel investors, right. So, we do a few things very differently. One is, if you look at our deal flow, we get about 300 deals a week, but 100 come from other VCs. So, every 12 weeks, we share deals with the top 100 VCs in the world in every category, and every industry. And we have back 2000 founders, and we&#8217;d love 100 companies, and they sent us deals, that&#8217;s another 100. And when we have a cold inbound, we actually look at it. So the conversion rate is lower. About a third of the deals we get is 14% the deals we do, but we will reply to everyone. We will tell people, and no VCs don&#8217;t have this ethos of transparency. Get back to people in a timely manner and tell them yes or no and why. And, you know, it&#8217;s about scope. If it&#8217;s too early, the valuation is too high. We didn&#8217;t like you know, we don&#8217;t think you have the right team to execute on best, like full transparency, both in the yeses in the nose.</p> <p>We evaluate companies on four selection criteria. Do we like the team? Do we like the unit economics? We&#8217;re very unit economic driven. Do we like the terms? And we&#8217;re price sensitive. We have a very clear sense of what is fair. And we&#8217;re going to tell them where they fall on that yesterday. And obviously we say no to 98 to 99% of the companies we see. But that transparency and turnaround I think is very unique. And then the reason or value add like many VCs will promise what they&#8217;ll do for you, as a founder will help you and they want or we know what we can&#8217;t do worst of all funds.</p> <p>You know, we&#8217;re 300 million AUM we can&#8217;t afford we&#8217;re not we don&#8217;t have psychiatrists, recruiters, headhunters, whatever, like we bite the one thing we know how to do very well is we will help you fundraise we don&#8217;t lead so we can act and art because we&#8217;re sharing deals with the top 100 VCs in the world. Every 12 weeks, they want differentiated deal flow. So we will take the very top 25 -30% of the companies in the portfolio, and we will introduce them to the right VCs. And this is when when VCs love it, they see differentiated deal flow, founders love it, they get to talk to Bessemer and Sequoia and Andreessen, we love it, the companies get funded and in return, we get invited to the best deals with the other VCs. It&#8217;s highly, highly differentiated.</p> <p>But I think all of us are differentiated. We&#8217;re not ownership sensitive. We give you full transparency of where we sit, where you stand. And we tell you where you stand. Even if you&#8217;d like us to help you raise the next round and we don&#8217;t believe you&#8217;re ready, we&#8217;ll tell you what needs to change. And also, we&#8217;ve been operators before, so we know what it&#8217;s like to operate and what difficulties you might face, and we can give you the proper advice. And then we can give you the proactive advice for fundraising. Sequoia is never going to introduce you to Andreessen, because they see themselves as competitors, we see ourselves as friends for everyone, we will help, we will introduce to you whoever you need to be introduced to to get funded.</p> <p><strong>Robin: So, if I would like to work at FJ labs, what is the criteria?</strong></p> <p>Fabrice: I mean, the problem is, it&#8217;s mostly driven by whether we have an opening. Or an opening in an associated role. But we do have a two year analyst program. And so, if &nbsp;you&#8217;re graduating from college, we look for super smart, super ambitious, super thoughtful people. Someone who has strong opinions held loosely, and is willing to change their mind. Someone data driven and who has ideally worked in startups before.</p> <p>We&#8217;re all nerds, we&#8217;re all kind of weird. We&#8217;re all video game players that code. So we look for people that are gonna fit our culture and you know, we&#8217;re highly diverse. Well, we&#8217;re highly diverse in backgrounds, gender, racial mix, etc. We&#8217;re not diverse in the fact that we&#8217;re all high IQ, all highly driven.</p> <p><strong>Robin: Understood. Maybe we take the other side, the LP view? Let&#8217;s be nerdy here. And let me put it in a challenging way, if you have no stake in ownership and the recent fund is 250 million, it&#8217;s probably harder to get good returns, no?</strong></p> <p>Fabrice: Oh, absolutely not. There are a lot of studies out there that show that the more diversified your fund is the higher your returns. So with that in mind, we have constantly had a 39% IRR for 26 years, including a range of investment at 4x the return basically across everything – cycle, time, category, geography etc. Because if we’re going to have 6 or 700 companies, we will all do well in the end. Yes, venture follows a power law. So, you want to be in the top 20 companies and we will be in them. But we are never going to have 10x ones. Right? Because obviously, if you have 10 companies and one is 100x. The other nine are zeros, you have a 10x month. We will never have that. But, because of our discipline on valuation, and the fact that we’re selling secondaries all the way up. And, we have very high DPI, we’re the highest DPI fund out there at the seed or pre-seed stage. Because we sell on the way up, we sell our winners, which is basically the complete anti VC strategy. We will always be at three, four upfront. Excellent.</p> <p>So, over 20 years, we&#8217;re going to be at top 5% if not top 1% over each fund. We&#8217;re going to be a top quartile fund. We&#8217;ll never be top decile because we&#8217;ll never be a 10x fund. But we&#8217;ll never not return capital. Our returns are outstanding. Like I&#8217;ll stack them against anyone else out there. Diversification means you will do well. And there&#8217;s a lot of data on why the more diversified you are, the better you do. Even though we don&#8217;t have ownership requirements. We don&#8217;t require many of the rights that other people do it we&#8217;re not on the board. We actually think being of the board is a both a waste of time.</p> <p><strong>Robin: So, let’s start from scratch, what does your portfolio look like?</strong></p> <p>Fabrice: We are 70% seed A, 20% B and about 10% pre-seed. We are very rarely pre-seed. And the reason we&#8217;re not pre-seed is that we don&#8217;t invest in competitors. And we don&#8217;t want to place a bet on a category until we think there&#8217;s an emerging winner. Sometimes the original winner is at seed. Sometimes it&#8217;s at A, sometimes at B, sometimes it&#8217;s later, but like pre-seed we might have seven companies doing the same thing. With great teams coming at us, it&#8217;s hard for us to make a bet. The only exception to the pre-seed side is if you’re a second time founder or we&#8217;ve worked with you on something before and now you’re doing something new. In that case we&#8217;ll probably back you unconditionally.</p> <p>We cover every vertical, every industry, every geography. So we&#8217;re 55% US, in Canada we’re 25%, Western Europe – 10%, and 10% in the rest of the world, i.e. Brazil, India, Vietnam, Philippines, Namibia, Nigeria. I mean, it really is the rest of world. And every industry.</p> <p>We have a specialization on network effect businesses and marketplaces and the core thesis these days is mostly around B2B marketplaces, but we’re not limited to it. There are five sub-pieces of B2B marketplaces like inputs like digitizing offline supply chains, so you know for petrochemicals, steel, gravel, whatever. Helping SMBs compete with large chains and SMB enablement, writ large. Number three, friend-shoring and moving supply chains from China mostly to India. So it&#8217;s like India to India, or India to the rest of the world. Number four is B2B labor marketplaces to support all of these. And number five, is the infrastructure. So last mile, sort of logistics companies like Flexport, or shipbob, and things like that, that support all of these different marketplaces.</p> <p>But we will do more than that. We have a policy whereby if you&#8217;re a founder that has done right by us, and you&#8217;ve had an amazing exit with us, and we backed your first company, no matter what you do in your second company, no matter the valuation, no matter whatever, you get a check.</p> <p>So, we backed the founders of Vettery, they sold the company to Adecco for over 100 million and we made 8.3x. In a couple of years, we were very happy. The founder then went on to build an electric flying taxi company called Archer and he got a check. He took that public, sold it and now he&#8217;s building a humanoid robot company to put robots in factories. Of course, I have zero expertise in this area and you gotta check, but I didn&#8217;t even take an evaluation call, I just sent the money. I did not listen to the pitch, I did not read the deck, I cannot evaluate it, I have no skills to evaluate it, but he got the check. And that&#8217;s true of many of the non traditional investments we&#8217;ve made.</p> <p><strong>Robin: So, let’s move on to the last chapter. Jose also said this, but it&#8217;s true because I read all your blog posts. And you told me that when you talk about something you might go to bed and then three days later you write something down. That’s what I feel when I read about your macro, macro is your hobby, right?</strong></p> <p>Fabrice: Yeah, it’s definitely a hobby.</p> <p><strong>Robin: So there were two blog posts that are related to one another. I think one is from Harvard a year ago where you were projecting where we are going and why now is the best time to invest in an early stage startup and you had an assumption and then there&#8217;s one very recent where you speak at a global economics conference about different threats. You spoke about why you think that we may not get a soft landing and you go into the importance of purchasing power. You go into depth, you go into the threats of global warming, and so on. So, now I would love to hear your thoughts on the one global thing you should do with your cash right now.</strong></p> <p>Fabrice: Yeah, so the reason I&#8217;m more bearish than consensus on macro economics is because it’s the one thing I&#8217;ve been constantly right about for the last year. Actually let me take a step back in February 2021. I wrote a blog post entitled “Welcome to the Everything Bubble”. I said that overly loose fiscal monetary policy, the zero interest rates, negative real rates, everything&#8217;s overvalued. And I mean, everything. Real Estate, crypto, and FTS late stage.</p> <p>Everything is overvalued. If it&#8217;s not bolted to the ground, sell it, which clearly was the correct recommendation and we listened to our own advice. We sold as many secondaries as we could. Which of course, is a fraction of what we wanted because we&#8217;re in private markets and you need to be a buyer. And we were very proactive in selling in 2021.</p> <p>I wrote the next few blog posts. This one is “welcome to the great unknown” and the one after that is called “winter is coming”, where I correctly predicted that interest rates would go a lot higher than people expected and for a lot longer, right, like, whatever the first blog post, people thought that the terminal rate of the Fed funds rate will be 3.6%. And I&#8217;m like, I think it&#8217;s gonna go above five, which has proven to be true. People thought rates would have started declining this year, and I thought it would continue to go higher. And I think now rates are gonna stay higher longer than people expected. And this will become the new normal.</p> <p>I also predicted a year ahead ago that Credit Suisse would default. And they defaulted. As part of the things that I&#8217;d see. So where do I see the risk right now? One is that the consumer is exhausted, and the US savings rate is at a low point. Credit card balances are at the highest level ever. As interest rates are rising, mortgage payments, as a percentage of income, are at the highest level ever. The percentage of people living paycheck to paycheck is worse than it&#8217;s ever been. The amount of people needing help from their parents is high too. So the consumer is exhausted. And I think we&#8217;re going to finally see that consumer growth that was driving a lot of the economy slow down.</p> <p>Number two, commercial real estate is about to hit a wall between 500 billion to 800 billion a year for commercial real estate refinancing. So when people buy commercial real estate it is financed over 30 years, but in three tranches, and it&#8217;s fully refinanced at the end of 10 years. So you have 800 billion in refinancings that happen at the end of each year, and that&#8217;s happening now at significantly higher rates than it was before. This obviously means a lot of these commercial real estate projects, especially with 50%, occupancy or less, are gonna go under, and they&#8217;re gonna be taken over by banks, which would be a disaster.</p> <p>This is also true by the way of the s&amp;p 500. As in general, you have all these companies that borrow cheaply, during the last few years that are refinancing now. They are in much higher debt and at a much higher rate, which is going to decrease profitability.</p> <p>We have a massively inverted yield curve right now, which has been a predictor at times of a recession. The only time it wasn&#8217;t was in 1966. Also, by the way, in the last 70 years, we&#8217;ve only had one soft landing, which was ‘93 and ‘94. So the probability that we get a soft landing instead of a recession where you raise rates as high as you have right now, at the fastest speed rate ever, well, it&#8217;s unlikely, it&#8217;s only happened once.</p> <p>And I guess last but not least, geopolitically. I could very well see you know, Azerbaijan invade Armenia. Serbia to invade Kosovo, the continuing crisis in Ukraine is gonna last forever, keeping food and oil prices high. And plus, of course, now you have Israel and in Palestine, so geopolitical turmoil is increasing.</p> <p>It&#8217;s hard to imagine, with all of this, that we&#8217;re gonna have a soft landing. That said, my personal analysis of this remains – this is the very best time to invest in early stage start-ups. Right now, all the posers, the people that were getting rich, quick, are no longer building start-ups. So the bankers, the consultants, lawyers, the doctors, etc. Right now you have the true believers.</p> <p>They&#8217;re building companies, yes, they&#8217;re raising money, it&#8217;s hard to raise capital, you raise a lower valuation, you probably exit at a lower valuation. But you&#8217;re careful with your cash, with burn, with unit economics, and you&#8217;re building a much more sustainable company. You&#8217;re facing way less competition. In 2021, if you had a good idea, you were facing 7-20 other people doing the exact same thing with a lot of money. Now you have one or two. When you win, you&#8217;re gonna win the entire category. And even though the extra votes will be lower, you&#8217;re going to do amazingly well.</p> <p>And so if I think in the last decade, the very best time to invest was in 2008, 2009, 2010, you know, companies like Instagram, WhatsApp, Uber, Airbnb all came in the 2000s.</p> <p>Actually, when was the best time the best actually? Oh, 2001, 2002, 2004. And so I am willing to bet that the very best time to invest in startups for the 2020s will have been 2022, 2023 and 2024. And you&#8217;re obviously gonna know at the end of the decade in the early 2030s, or at the end of the 2020s. But now, it&#8217;s an amazing time. Early stage and late stage have not repriced and you&#8217;re seeing a lot of structure. So, seed A, even B, is an amazing time to be investing.</p> <p>And, where to hold cash? It&#8217;s easy. There&#8217;s one answer and one answer. Do not invest in stocks today. Do not invest in bonds. Do not invest in real estate. Anything else. Everything else you have a high risk of falling. Put it in early stage tech startups, barbell strategy, the seed to lab type of portfolios.</p> <p><strong>Robin: And maybe become an LP in venture funds or become an angel, right?</strong></p> <p>Fabrice: LPs are so pro cyclical. It drives me crazy. And in 2021 you had all these people with money in VC, when it was the worst time to have money in VC. Today if you&#8217;re a GP trying to raise money, you&#8217;re struggling like hell, because everyone is over committed. No one has cash today is the time to be deploying. Yeah, absolutely. If you have cash today, this time be investing in tech.</p> <p><strong>Robin: Then, my last question on the macro level is, just to give perspective, what do you think could happen if it&#8217;s not a soft landing? You know, like Michael Berry and a couple of others have a lot of shorts running until June next year. What do you think will happen if there’s a crash?</strong></p> <p>Fabrice: I think my timing is that there will be a recession in a year or so. And then the Fed will start cutting rates again. And I think we set the stage for, for recovery. And so actually, I think that&#8217;s why investing in it again, I&#8217;m talking about private assets, public assets. I mean, there&#8217;s been a run up recently because od AI etc. and I&#8217;m not a public market valuation expert, so not the right guy to talk about it.</p> <p>But there&#8217;s a fundamental difference between looking at everything that happens on the macro level and what Berry and the like, investors, are doing, betting on the prices of assets. In the real world, I think we’re going to have a recession, it&#8217;s likely that real estate and bonds, and defaults going up, and stocks falling. So I’m investing in start-ups and T bills to be clear. And nothing else. I have no starter bonds. And cash. You sell the T bills, and you use it as cash. Everything should be T bills or startups nothing else.</p> <p><strong>Robin: Wow, that was amazing! Thank you so much Fabrice.</strong></p> <p><strong>Top 10 Quotes:</strong></p> <ol> <li>On Antarctica: “It was one of the hardest things I&#8217;ve ever done, including creating a start-up and running it for decades.”</li> <li>On Antarctica: “Okay, it was exactly like a start-up. I did not know what I was doing.”</li> <li>On being a founder: “You can always push yourself more than you think you can.”</li> <li>On being a founder: “Clearly, there&#8217;s one thing I think founders have in common is that we&#8217;re more tolerant to risk than most.”</li> <li>On Antarctica: “Fear is not a feeling I have often, or if ever, experienced in any context. Frankly, I don&#8217;t remember the last time we&#8217;ve been afraid of anything.”</li> <li>On founding his first tech company: “At 23, I went on to build the “eBay of Europe”, raised 63 million venture money and had 150 employees in five countries. It was really like 10 million a month in GMV. And for a hot minute, I felt like I was on top of the world.”</li> <li>On being a tech founder: “I realized, you know what, I didn&#8217;t do this for the money anyway. I like creating something out of nothing. I like the zero to one.”</li> <li>On founding Zingy: “I lived in New York essentially on $2 a day for two years. Slept on a couch in the office. We rented the office, so I could only afford four pieces of ramen noodles per day. I invested every last penny I had. It was extraordinarily tough, but ultimately we grabbed the victory from the jaws of defeat when on August 15 2003, we became profitable.”</li> <li>“What&#8217;s interesting, is that the most meaningful point in my life is not the day I sold the company and made like 40 million bucks as a 29 year old. It&#8217;s the day we became profitable. Because the day we became profitable, we became masters of our own destiny.”</li> <li>“We have a policy whereby if you&#8217;re a founder that has done right by us, and you&#8217;ve had an amazing exit with us, and we backed your first company, no matter what you do in your second company, no matter the valuation, no matter whatever, you get a check.”</li> </ol> <p>If you prefer, you can listen to the episode in the embedded podcast player.</p> <iframe loading="lazy" src="https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/venturewithrobin/embed/episodes/The-Fabrice-Grinda-Story-e2c339h/a-aakhcdf" height="50%" width="1000px" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe> <p>In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify: <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/3CKURWiwPFqXkAxP4x6KjR?si=83f8a66492c24b87" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://open.spotify.com/episode/3CKURWiwPFqXkAxP4x6KjR?si=83f8a66492c24b87</a></p>

<p>Photo by Christopher Michel I had the pleasure of being interviewed by my good friend Robin Haak. We &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/super-fun-interview-by-robin-haak/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Super Fun Interview by Robin Haak&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Super Fun Interview by Robin Haak. Categories - Interviews &amp; Fireside Chats. Date-Posted - 2023-11-21T15:00:26 . Photo by Christopher Michel I had the pleasure of being interviewed by my good friend Robin Haak. We had a super wide ranging conversation covering everything from adventure travel to risk taking in general, spirituality, startups and much more. By way of background, Robin is the Founder and Solo General Partner at Robin Capital. He is a former General Partner at Revaia, First-Time €250 Million growth fund in Paris. He&#8217;s a serial entrepreneur: he co-founded Axel Springer Plug and Play, Jobspotting, Women Inc., and built SmartRecruiters, a profitable US unicorn in San Francisco. He invested in over 75 companies, including 5 unicorns, with the first check-in N26, and others like Algolia, Aircall, Frontify, and more. He&#8217;s also a member of the advisory board at Stepstone. You can read the background of how we met here and find the original post of the interview at https://robincap.com/blog/fabrice-grinda Happy watching or reading. Robin: So, let’s start, I saw that you recently went to Antarctica. Tell us about it. I think Colin O’Brady was the first one to go and do this. I was watching him speak about it on stage and then I saw that you’d done it. Fabrice: So, first let me tell you a bit about me. I like to do these crazy adventure travel type trips, where I&#8217;m alone off grid, and I take my backpack, my sleeping bag, and my water filtration system and a knife. And I have mostly done these trips in warm weather environments, like Hawaii, or in Costa Rica, or in various rain forests and jungles around the world alone, with a friend, or with a guide or a team. Two years ago I was contacted by Kevin Ryan, who&#8217;s obviously another unicorn founder and an amazing New York Tech founder. And he said hey, I’ve been asked to sponsor this scientific expedition. And the objective of the scientific expedition is to find out if there&#8217;s a way to predict who&#8217;s going to do well in these extreme environments ahead of time, because in 2016/17, there was a team of British Army Reserves that completed a 67 day expedition from the Hercules Inlet via the South Pole to the Shackleton Glacier, and despite the fact that they were all young and super fit, they didn&#8217;t do particularly well, in fact many of them failed and didn&#8217;t make it. He asked me, is there a way to sponsor a similar expedition where we have a group of 50% male 50% female, some people on a vegan diet and some people not on a vegan diet. And we&#8217;re doing two tasks, one is the full 60 days and the other one is the last degree for two weeks. As a sponsor, you can join this part of the expedition in the last degree and it&#8217;s like two weeks on the ice fully disconnected. And I thought, this is right up my alley. I was invited by a good friend who I thought I would enjoy my time with, so I&#8217;m like okay, let&#8217;s do it. And you know, it’s less than 200 kilometers so I&#8217;m like oh, this is not going to be really hard. You know, I could walk 20-30k, or even 40k a day, right, like wow, yeah, for days. I was really wrong. This was one of the hardest things I&#8217;ve ever done. So first of all, it took a fair amount of training. In the spring of 2022, I went to a place in Norway to actually train. You pull a 100 pound Pulk, which is a sled that you use to carry your food, your tent, your fuel etc. You need to learn to walk with it. You need to learn to make your tent, you need to learn to melt the ice to make your food and a bunch of other skills that quite frankly, you wouldn&#8217;t have to use anywhere else especially with this kind of equipment. You need very specialized equipment to deal with what is a negative 30 temperature but feels like negative 50. And you don’t just need different layers, you need things when you&#8217;re resting and when you&#8217;re not resting, and so you need to buy the equipment that has been tested to make sure it fits and it works. So in January, we put December 30 2020 to fly to Chile and actually spent time with the team. That&#8217;s a team of 10 people with three guides for the last degree and there was a separate team doing the full 50 or 60 day walk from the coast to the pole. They had done this before. Most of the guys have done this many times before. The guides are there seasonally and the season is very short. The season is mid November to mid January. We were actually part of the very tail end so it&#8217;s a very short summer, which is the warmest and best weather time to do this. It&#8217;s also light 24/7. So, we then flew from Podesta, the southernmost tip of Chile to a staging area called Union Glacier Station in Antarctica. And we got everything ready. And from there, we flew to where we started our walk. We started the walk and it was way harder than I thought it would be because it&#8217;s a combination of starting at 10,000 feet altitude or 3000 meters which is reasonably high and has low oxygen and you exercise 24/7. Eight hours a day more than eight hours a day you&#8217;re doing eight stints of one hour you walk for 15 minutes, you stop for 10 minutes to rest, and you eat, and you do that eight times. You have to eat. If you don&#8217;t eat, you&#8217;re gonna pass out because you&#8217;re using up 7500 calories a day. I lost half a pound a day, every day that I was there, despite eating 6000 calories a day. And, you walk 40,000 steps a day. And then when you finish the day, you need to make your camp plan for tents, make a ditch and melt the ice, so you&#8217;re exhausted. So it&#8217;s super cold and super hard. Way harder than I thought. But ultimately, it was an amazing exercise. Especially as there were a few things that you don’t really get to do in this modern age. It’s all about disconnection, right? We all live in a world that&#8217;s hyper connected. It&#8217;s very rare that you have two weeks with no cell phone, no news, no WhatsApp, no emails, no calls, no nothing. And, in Antarctica you’re either alone or with your friends. I would talk for one or two hours a day with amazing people and build amazing relationships, or I’d just be alone with my thoughts. So it kind of felt and I don&#8217;t know if you know what a Vipassana meditation retreat is, but it kind of felt like an act of Vipassana meditation retreat. And it was an exercise in aloneness, and gratitude. I just took the mantras, I did meditation, and I felt extreme infinite gratitude to be in this environment, with my team and I was grateful to have my friends and a team of workers that can support me. Who allowed me to do this and doesn’t need me to be there at all times. I have a family that&#8217;s there for me and my friends and my crazy endeavors, and I have such gratitude to be able to experience something so unique, where there&#8217;s literally nothing I mean, it&#8217;s infinite ice and white in every direction, and there&#8217;s no life. There&#8217;s nothing I mean, it has downsides. It means you need to poop in a plastic bag in negative 50 degrees and carry your poop with you for two weeks, which is not the most pleasant thing I&#8217;ve ever done. It&#8217;s extraordinarily exhausting, but it was amazing. And yeah. I think it&#8217;s a real privilege. It was an amazing silent meditation and amazing bonding experience with people in the team, and with the friends that I made that went on this trip with me. Having done it, I&#8217;m definitely not doing it again. It was one of the hardest things I&#8217;ve ever done, including creating a startup and running it for, you know, decades. And yeah, amazing. So I think my next adventure is going to be a warm weather adventure. And I haven&#8217;t decided what it is. I&#8217;m not doing this again. Robin: When you start a start-up, you know that it&#8217;s hard, but not that hard, right? In this particular case, I&#8217;m pretty sure you knew that it would be very hard, no? Fabrice: I didn&#8217;t think it was gonna be that hard. Actually, no, it was way harder than I expected. Okay, no, it was exactly like a start-up. I did not know what I was doing. I did not know what I was getting myself into. I didn&#8217;t have the right equipment for it. I had to learn along the way, you know, it was exactly like a start-up. Robin: And do you then think you think this is DNA? Or do you think it&#8217;s cognitive i.e. how you grew up? This is also a question in start-ups, right? But also here, you must be, to a certain point, a bit crazy to do it, right? What is the thing that makes humans become founders, but also do this kind of exercise for fun? Fabrice: Yeah, I&#8217;m gonna answer the question with a few things I&#8217;ve learned. You can always push yourself more than you think you can. And I think that&#8217;s true. In every environment, you can go to the gym and lift more than you think. You can push yourself more in this environment while walking, or in a start-up, you can work 100 plus hours a week for years on end. If you really have to, like if push comes to shove, you’re always able to push yourself more. Now, not everyone is made of that same stuff. And in fact, the objective of this of the study was to find out who actually makes it who doesn&#8217;t, i.e., can you tell ahead of time based on their physiology, blood tests, etc, and their DNA and their personal mental profile? Clearly, there&#8217;s one thing I think founders have in common is that we&#8217;re more tolerant to risk than most. I&#8217;m not saying we&#8217;re risk seeking, right, like it&#8217;s always on a risk adjusted basis. And in fact, I don&#8217;t think we take that many risks as start-up founders. But I think by taking a bit more risk than most people, we are highly rewarded. I love these types of extremes. I think I like it. I definitely have a predisposition for it. I like it in work, you know, building start-ups, and in life like extreme heavy skiing, kite surfing, being an adrenaline junkie, and these sports that make you feel the most alive. I like being on the verge and feeling a sense of purpose, accomplishment and meaning that is unparalleled. Now, not everyone is wired that way. Some people don&#8217;t like it. So, where does it come from? That’s unclear, yeah. I&#8217;m not even sure it&#8217;s nature or nurture, I think it may just just be a random number generator X Factor. You know, look, if you have three siblings in a family – they can all end up being completely different despite having the same genes, same nature, growing up in the same environment, the same nurture, the same parents, the same teaching philosophy, and yet they&#8217;re completely different. And so I suspect that there&#8217;s this other X factor that makes a subset of the population more risk taking, thrill seeking and adrenaline junkie ish, but also more optimistic. I think the other characteristic that defines founders, and for people with these things is feeling optimistic that the odds don&#8217;t apply to you, right? For example, the five year survival rate of a start-up is like 5%. So you have a 95% chance of failure after five years. And so you have to be delusional enough to believe that you can change these odds, and you&#8217;re gonna make it happen. And if you have that level of confidence in yourself and ability and optimism, it probably applies to other things like skiing. It&#8217;s dangerous, but not for me. I&#8217;m so good. I&#8217;m gonna do it, it&#8217;s gonna be fun and it won&#8217;t be dangerous. It’s the same with kitesurfing. And the same with all the crazy shit I do. I used to go kart race as well, motorbike race, and play paintball, remember… Robin: Yeah, I remember you had a paintball field in New York when I visited you twice… Fabrice: Yeah exactly… Robin: So, yeah, you were talking about the grit, resilience, optimism needed for this Antarctica expedition. You said the British army guys didn’t perform as well as expected. Fabrice: Because they&#8217;re 25. And they&#8217;re super fit. So you would have thought that they would have done well. So here&#8217;s the lessons we learned from this. On average, women did better than men. Because women have a bit more body fat than men. And when they were walking, they would burn fat and not muscle. And so, when you start burning muscle, your body fully shuts down. So, on average, women did better than men. Number two, you could not be on a vegan diet in an extreme environment. After a week, everyone who had a vegan diet basically died they literally either gave up or switched to a non vegan diet. Robin: Yeah, even Mike Tyson switches before fights from vegan back to meat… Fabrice: Yeah. So it&#8217;s okay. In a normal, safe, boring environment, you know, you&#8217;re OK in a city where you&#8217;re burning 2000 calories a day. But it doesn&#8217;t work when you&#8217;re burning 7500 calories a day. And so that was another interesting lesson. And by the way, within a week, it was clear, like, it was like, the guys on the vegan diet were just falling apart and dying. So they didn&#8217;t want to go any further, so they either switched or dropped off. Again, if you&#8217;re living in a city, and you can take supplements, etc. then maybe it&#8217;s not a big deal. But, you know, if you&#8217;re in an extreme environment, it doesn&#8217;t work. And by the way, if you go back 20,000 years, we were all omnivores, right. Like we were hunting the mammoth and we&#8217;d have feast and famine. We were on the Paleo diet if you want, and we needed a little bit of everything. But that was found in nature including, you know, deer and mammoth and whatever else that we would be interested in fascinating because you could find them and eat like a king. And then you know, for three days, you&#8217;d be hunting the next bit of food until you caught one. Robin: I’ve got one more thing. It&#8217;s so interesting to hear. And, you have to think of two more questions. One is, because I think people would love to hear if you have a certain point of fear before you do something like this. Will I make it or not? What if the helicopter has to pick me up? There must have been a certain amount of fear before you started. And so my first question for the people who may read this, is how do you overcome fear? And two, there is Will Smith, who knows why he&#8217;s more successful, right? He says he&#8217;s not more beautiful, and he&#8217;s not stronger. He&#8217;s not everything, but he says, “the only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I&#8217;m not afraid to die on a treadmill” and this is similar. “The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I&#8217;m not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be out-worked, period. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me, you might be all of those things you got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there&#8217;s two things: You&#8217;re getting off first, or I&#8217;m going to die. It&#8217;s really that simple, right?”&nbsp;Will Smith So the one is, one is overcoming fear and starting and the other one is endurance while you&#8217;re in it, bracing pain, so maybe you could speak to these two things. Fabrice: For the first point, I&#8217;m not sure I&#8217;m the right person to speak to this, because fear is not a feeling I have often, if ever, experienced in any context. Frankly, I don&#8217;t remember the last time we&#8217;ve been afraid of anything. Robin: This means you went there (Antarctica) and you had zero fear that maybe you would have to get a helicopter to pick you up or something like a Plan B? Fabrice: Yeah, there was a Plan B. You can get an emergency evacuation. Look. Here&#8217;s why I never had fear. Imagine, my first start-up essentially failed, right? Like I went from zero to hero back to zero again when the tech bubble bursts. And so I went from being worth, on paper, hundreds of millions to being bankrupt overnight. But I didn&#8217;t fear that, I mean, what&#8217;s the worst that&#8217;s gonna happen to me? You know, I&#8217;m top of my class at Princeton, I used to work at McKinsey. I&#8217;m gonna get a job at Goldman private equity or I&#8217;m gonna work in McKinsey. I&#8217;m gonna run digital media. Robin: But you could have died in Antarctica, no? Fabrice: You know, it did go wrong, my body failed, I had to be evacuated. But I also have confidence if I have infinite belief, which goes to point number two and my resilience and grit. Like, I will stay on the treadmill as long as it takes to get there and I had no question in my mind that regardless of how much pain and suffering I needed to endure, I was going to make it and so I didn&#8217;t even consider the alternative. Like it didn&#8217;t add on I was like, it&#8217;s not within the realm of possibility. Failure is not an option. Robin: This is my last question around your expedition. Thank you so much for sharing the experiences. So, you talked about gratitude and you talked about Vipassana and, so, is there some belief in the divine or anything you rely on when you do these kinds of things that’s higher? Yes, I have a meditation practice where I meditate daily. Frankly, this just reinforces the way I&#8217;m built. I&#8217;ve already built optimism and gratitude and I just reinforce that through singing the mantras and moving energy within me etc. I think its these moments when you you feel like you&#8217;re communing with the divine. I&#8217;ve experienced more psychedelic experiences and in these moment moments of silent meditations I think. At silent retreats I don&#8217;t feel like competing with the divine. I don&#8217;t become one with whatever the universal source or energy and by the way. It doesn&#8217;t feel religious in that traditional way. It wouldn&#8217;t be anything close to Christianity. Robin: Is there a sense of unity that we are all one, and that all things are connected that you feel in these deep experiences? Fabrice: Absolutely. But I wouldn&#8217;t call it religious in the traditional sense. Is there a sensation of something greater than oneself and universal? Absolutely. But you know, I wouldn&#8217;t call it anything. It doesn’t fit the descriptions of any of the religions I can think of including Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. It’s pretty much all of these things and under the traditions from Kabbalah, to Tantra to Taoism are things I&#8217;ve read and and I&#8217;ve implemented elements of these into my personal practice. The only moments where I feel connected to everything are when I take whatever psilocybin or magic mushrooms or acid or Ayahuasca. I can recreate a lot of these experiences through pure meditation but it&#8217;s not the same. It doesn&#8217;t feel like I&#8217;m completely connected in the way that your individuality disappears right, like the entity disappears, and you have like an ego death and you become one with everything. Robin: That’s interesting because earlier you spoke about daily gratitude and now you&#8217;re talking about the ego. When it comes to the ego, most people think that having an ego means you like being superior but just to clarify for everyone, you&#8217;re talking about breaking the ego so that you come back to the pure you where you can connect to everything right? Fabrice: Yeah, but to be specific, I am in this form and body. I&#8217;m Fabrice who&#8217;s the tech founder and as all these other characteristics, and you&#8217;re very aware of what that identity is. There are moments in these more spiritual practices where you forget you&#8217;re in that individuality and you become one with everything. And that&#8217;s why you get the sense of unity. Where we are all connected, and we&#8217;re all the same. And I don&#8217;t mean that just as whole humans I feel that same way about all plants and all animals and rocks and wood and everything basically all things created in this universe feel like they come from the same underlying source. That&#8217;s that again, I don&#8217;t think it resembles anything that you read in any of the Testaments old or new or any of the religious writings. Robin: Let me change the topic now. I remember we had an interview when I was working with Jobspotting 10 years ago. It was about becoming a founder and you stumbled into it. And grit is the common denominator. So yeah, I would love it if you could tell me about yourself. Fabrice: Sure, so I’m French. I was originally born, and I grew up, in Nice in the south of France, which is the most beautiful place in the world. You can play tennis every day, go skiing every weekend, eat delicious food etc. But, in 1984, at the tender age of 10, I got my first PC. And it was love at first click, I know that we were meant to be together forever. And, from learning programming, I started building PCs, I ran a bulletin board service. So kind of like a system that people can connect to by modem and get answers through the internet. It was like a silo, well, islands. And it was super fun. And I became a fan of the two big tech founders, or maybe of the ‘80s, which were obviously Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. And then Michael Dell in the early ‘90s. And it was obvious to me that my destiny was going to be in tech. Now, what&#8217;s interesting is, I didn&#8217;t do any of this because I thought about what made sense based on a Macroeconomic analysis of the future. No, it was my hobby. And I got lucky that my hobby became a multi trillion dollar category, which led me years later to be at the right time, the right place with the right skills in ‘92. In ‘92, I went to college at Princeton. I was 17 and I studied economics and math, which I felt were the most useful things for me to learn at that point in time, and I finished off my class by building a computer export business from the US to Europe, which allowed me to pay for college. I left Princeton at 21 in ‘96, and I was shy, introverted and had never managed a team. So, then I went to McKinsey and Company for two years. It was kind of like business school except they pay you and I learned all the things I needed to learn. Like how to work in a team, how to interact with people that don&#8217;t necessarily have the same IQ by explaining complex concepts in simple ways. I improved my oral and written communication skills. I worked on my public speaking sales, which led me to build my first venture backed tech start-up back in ‘98. At 23, I went on to build the “eBay of Europe”, raised 63 million venture money and had 150 employees in five countries. It was really like 10 million a month in GMV. And for a hot minute, I felt like I was on top of the world. But then, of course, the bubble burst, I lost everything. And then, in 2001 I was humbled and I had to decide what to do next. And I realized, you know what, I didn&#8217;t do this for the money anyway. I like creating something out of nothing. I like the zero to one. I see myself as a tech founder. And this is the most fun thing I wanted I could be doing. And yeah, I will be a big business, the fact that there&#8217;s no money in it doesn&#8217;t matter. This is what I meant to be doing. I&#8217;m going to be doing it. So I went out. So the constraints I had then was that I needed to build a company that can be profitable, quickly, without VC money. In 2001, given the venture ecosystem, it died. So I went on to build a ringtone company called Zingy. Now, I didn&#8217;t feel any particular affinity for ringtones. It was a means to an end, in that I was able to be a tech founder. And I needed to be able to do it with no capital. I saw that it was profitable in Europe and in Asia. And that there was an open opportunity in the US. So I launched Zingy in July 2001 in New York. And it was extremely difficult the first few years. I mean, there was no way to connect with the carriers. There was no way to deal with them. There was no delivery, the music licenses were almost impossible to get. And it was like an infinite slog, I mean, I lived in New York essentially on $2 a day for two years. I slept on a couch in the office. We rented the office, so I could only afford four pieces of ramen noodles per day. I invested every last penny I had. I borrowed $100,000 on my credit cards, I missed payroll 27 times. It was extraordinarily tough, but ultimately grabbed the victory from the jaws of defeat when on August 15 2003, we became profitable. And from there it became a rocketship. So revenues were $1 million in 2002, to $5 million in 2003, then $50M in 2004 and $400M in 2005. I sold the company because I had learned my lesson from the bubble bursting. It was better to do it too early than too late. And I sold it for $80 million in the summer of 2004. I stayed on as CEO actually for 18 months, because I&#8217;ve never been part of a publicly traded company before. It&#8217;s actually interesting. I left in late 2005 to go and create my next company and probably should have taken a vacation between the three companies. I didn&#8217;t take a single day off, Which, admittedly, is probably a mistake. But I was in my 20s. At that point, I sold the last company when I was 29. So at 30 and leave to go build the next company. And what&#8217;s interesting, by the way, is that the most meaningful point in my life is not the day I sold the company and made like 40 million bucks as a 29 year old. It&#8217;s the day we became profitable. Because the day we became profitable, we became masters of our own destiny. And I knew that at that point, we were saved and we could do whatever we needed to do to go forward. The day we sold frankly, I was so busy because we were growing. We were like a total rocket ship. You know, I thought that we would continue to live in my studio apartment. With the money, I bought some tennis rackets, a TV and an Xbox. That was all I needed. And I kept living in the same apartment for like three more years because I was just too busy. And then went on to build OLX and OLX took me back to my first love of marketplaces and network effect businesses. And it is the largest classified site in the world today. It&#8217;s what Craigslist should have been if it was made in the right way, meaning that it uses pre-moderated content, it’s mobile first, friendly to women who were the primary decision makers in all household purchases, and is a leader now in every emerging market. OLX now has 11,000 employees in 30 countries. It&#8217;s the leader in Brazil and online America and India, Pakistan, all Southeast Asia, in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, all of Eastern Europe and the UAE and all the Middle East. And in Portugal. I sold the company back in 2010. And actually, again, I stayed for three years with the buyer. But it was interesting, they gave me a billion dollars to play with to go in, you know, grow it, buy the competitors, merge with them and do all the fun things. Then in 2013, even though I was on top of the world, I was like, you know, I like to zero to one. I want to go back to zero. And so I left OLX in 2013, gave all my physical non-financial possessions to charity and went down to 50 items. I started couchsurfing and sleeping on friend’s couches, living in Airbnbs, like literally, I had nothing left. I had no house, no car, everything I owned I could fit in my backpack or my tennis bag. I started thinking about what to do next, and I realized that I like building companies and I like investing in companies. That’s when, together with my business partner Jose, I created FJ Labs. Jose was also a co founder of the eBay of Latin America, which I helped co-found back in ‘99 with an Alec Oxenford, who was the other co founder, who became my co-CEO at OLX. So I&#8217;ve known them both since ‘99. I&#8217;d already pooled my angel investing with Jose for many, many, many years. And so, in 2013 we created FJ Labs, which was really a holding company. And then we started being approached by third parties who wanted exposure to marketplaces. We raised our first external capital of 50 million with one LP in 2016 and deployed on June 16 2017. Then in 2018, we took our fund to 175 million with like 20 LPs and then we just closed in March of 2023. Fund 390 million with like, 50 LPs. And basically what FJ Labs is – it&#8217;s a fund that invests in marketplaces. I have always worked in tech businesses, but the nuances are that we really behave like Angel investors. This is like Angel investing on a venture scale. That’s what Jose and I were doing. We don&#8217;t lead and we don&#8217;t price. We don&#8217;t take board seats. We decided to win our meetings, whether or not we invest. And we tried to be super helpful to the founders both on strategy, but perhaps most importantly, in fundraising, which is very valuable in this environment. What we do is highly differentiated. Frankly, no one follows the strategy of specificity to the marketplaces and network effects. We decide in our one-to-one meetings in one week if we should invest or not, and it&#8217;s taken on a life of its own. We now have 1100 investments. We&#8217;ve had over 300 exits. And that&#8217;s what we’ve got after 26 years, since we were Angel investing since the very beginning. We have a 40% realized IRR, I think it&#8217;s 39% of the exact on, on the 300 plus exits. And we have a team of over 30 people, including 1111 people on the basketball team. So it&#8217;s really grown and taken to life on its own. And it&#8217;s doing really well. And it&#8217;s been super fun. And in a way, building a fund from scratch is kind of like another start-up, you know, I just went on to build a new company, basically. Robin: Yeah, running a fund is very much like running a start-up, especially if you have always been an entrepreneur. Fabrice: Yes if you have a fund, you&#8217;re an entrepreneur, I mean, it&#8217;s all the same things, building a team building culture, raising money, running a P&amp;l. That&#8217;s exactly like running a company. So, again, if I joined Sequoia or Basler, or whatever, then I would just be a VC. But here we&#8217;re building a company. And I hope to create something that is a legacy institution that will outlast me. That way, OLX outlasts me. But we&#8217;re also pretty different and very entrepreneurial beyond the fact that we&#8217;re entrepreneurs building a fund. Right now I&#8217;m personally cobuilding. I mean, I’, the Executive Chairman and co-founder but it&#8217;s like the company I&#8217;ve been leading called Midas, which is a yield bearing stable coin, backed by US Treasuries. And I&#8217;m spending half my time on that too. Robin: Yes, I heard about that on another podcast, and we won’t go into it here, because when we will, then we will go down the rabbit hole. But it&#8217;s super, it&#8217;s super interesting. You and your co-founder have a very unique situation. And for that reason I mean, I joined and I met a couple of the people that you work with, and I really like all of them and your co-founder, especially too, and I love this entrepreneurial spirit. What do you think other than this investment strategy and being an angel, this particular about funds? Fabrice: You mean how we evaluate? Robin: Yes, I think you&#8217;re one of my favorite investors in the world. And obviously OLX is the number one go-to marketplace. But I don&#8217;t think that people who don&#8217;t know what I know, amazing you are. You&#8217;re very different from any other investors. Right. So can you speak on that question? Yeah, I mean, first of all, as I said, we behave like angel investors, right. So, we do a few things very differently. One is, if you look at our deal flow, we get about 300 deals a week, but 100 come from other VCs. So, every 12 weeks, we share deals with the top 100 VCs in the world in every category, and every industry. And we have back 2000 founders, and we&#8217;d love 100 companies, and they sent us deals, that&#8217;s another 100. And when we have a cold inbound, we actually look at it. So the conversion rate is lower. About a third of the deals we get is 14% the deals we do, but we will reply to everyone. We will tell people, and no VCs don&#8217;t have this ethos of transparency. Get back to people in a timely manner and tell them yes or no and why. And, you know, it&#8217;s about scope. If it&#8217;s too early, the valuation is too high. We didn&#8217;t like you know, we don&#8217;t think you have the right team to execute on best, like full transparency, both in the yeses in the nose. We evaluate companies on four selection criteria. Do we like the team? Do we like the unit economics? We&#8217;re very unit economic driven. Do we like the terms? And we&#8217;re price sensitive. We have a very clear sense of what is fair. And we&#8217;re going to tell them where they fall on that yesterday. And obviously we say no to 98 to 99% of the companies we see. But that transparency and turnaround I think is very unique. And then the reason or value add like many VCs will promise what they&#8217;ll do for you, as a founder will help you and they want or we know what we can&#8217;t do worst of all funds. You know, we&#8217;re 300 million AUM we can&#8217;t afford we&#8217;re not we don&#8217;t have psychiatrists, recruiters, headhunters, whatever, like we bite the one thing we know how to do very well is we will help you fundraise we don&#8217;t lead so we can act and art because we&#8217;re sharing deals with the top 100 VCs in the world. Every 12 weeks, they want differentiated deal flow. So we will take the very top 25 -30% of the companies in the portfolio, and we will introduce them to the right VCs. And this is when when VCs love it, they see differentiated deal flow, founders love it, they get to talk to Bessemer and Sequoia and Andreessen, we love it, the companies get funded and in return, we get invited to the best deals with the other VCs. It&#8217;s highly, highly differentiated. But I think all of us are differentiated. We&#8217;re not ownership sensitive. We give you full transparency of where we sit, where you stand. And we tell you where you stand. Even if you&#8217;d like us to help you raise the next round and we don&#8217;t believe you&#8217;re ready, we&#8217;ll tell you what needs to change. And also, we&#8217;ve been operators before, so we know what it&#8217;s like to operate and what difficulties you might face, and we can give you the proper advice. And then we can give you the proactive advice for fundraising. Sequoia is never going to introduce you to Andreessen, because they see themselves as competitors, we see ourselves as friends for everyone, we will help, we will introduce to you whoever you need to be introduced to to get funded. Robin: So, if I would like to work at FJ labs, what is the criteria? Fabrice: I mean, the problem is, it&#8217;s mostly driven by whether we have an opening. Or an opening in an associated role. But we do have a two year analyst program. And so, if &nbsp;you&#8217;re graduating from college, we look for super smart, super ambitious, super thoughtful people. Someone who has strong opinions held loosely, and is willing to change their mind. Someone data driven and who has ideally worked in startups before. We&#8217;re all nerds, we&#8217;re all kind of weird. We&#8217;re all video game players that code. So we look for people that are gonna fit our culture and you know, we&#8217;re highly diverse. Well, we&#8217;re highly diverse in backgrounds, gender, racial mix, etc. We&#8217;re not diverse in the fact that we&#8217;re all high IQ, all highly driven. Robin: Understood. Maybe we take the other side, the LP view? Let&#8217;s be nerdy here. And let me put it in a challenging way, if you have no stake in ownership and the recent fund is 250 million, it&#8217;s probably harder to get good returns, no? Fabrice: Oh, absolutely not. There are a lot of studies out there that show that the more diversified your fund is the higher your returns. So with that in mind, we have constantly had a 39% IRR for 26 years, including a range of investment at 4x the return basically across everything – cycle, time, category, geography etc. Because if we’re going to have 6 or 700 companies, we will all do well in the end. Yes, venture follows a power law. So, you want to be in the top 20 companies and we will be in them. But we are never going to have 10x ones. Right? Because obviously, if you have 10 companies and one is 100x. The other nine are zeros, you have a 10x month. We will never have that. But, because of our discipline on valuation, and the fact that we’re selling secondaries all the way up. And, we have very high DPI, we’re the highest DPI fund out there at the seed or pre-seed stage. Because we sell on the way up, we sell our winners, which is basically the complete anti VC strategy. We will always be at three, four upfront. Excellent. So, over 20 years, we&#8217;re going to be at top 5% if not top 1% over each fund. We&#8217;re going to be a top quartile fund. We&#8217;ll never be top decile because we&#8217;ll never be a 10x fund. But we&#8217;ll never not return capital. Our returns are outstanding. Like I&#8217;ll stack them against anyone else out there. Diversification means you will do well. And there&#8217;s a lot of data on why the more diversified you are, the better you do. Even though we don&#8217;t have ownership requirements. We don&#8217;t require many of the rights that other people do it we&#8217;re not on the board. We actually think being of the board is a both a waste of time. Robin: So, let’s start from scratch, what does your portfolio look like? Fabrice: We are 70% seed A, 20% B and about 10% pre-seed. We are very rarely pre-seed. And the reason we&#8217;re not pre-seed is that we don&#8217;t invest in competitors. And we don&#8217;t want to place a bet on a category until we think there&#8217;s an emerging winner. Sometimes the original winner is at seed. Sometimes it&#8217;s at A, sometimes at B, sometimes it&#8217;s later, but like pre-seed we might have seven companies doing the same thing. With great teams coming at us, it&#8217;s hard for us to make a bet. The only exception to the pre-seed side is if you’re a second time founder or we&#8217;ve worked with you on something before and now you’re doing something new. In that case we&#8217;ll probably back you unconditionally. We cover every vertical, every industry, every geography. So we&#8217;re 55% US, in Canada we’re 25%, Western Europe – 10%, and 10% in the rest of the world, i.e. Brazil, India, Vietnam, Philippines, Namibia, Nigeria. I mean, it really is the rest of world. And every industry. We have a specialization on network effect businesses and marketplaces and the core thesis these days is mostly around B2B marketplaces, but we’re not limited to it. There are five sub-pieces of B2B marketplaces like inputs like digitizing offline supply chains, so you know for petrochemicals, steel, gravel, whatever. Helping SMBs compete with large chains and SMB enablement, writ large. Number three, friend-shoring and moving supply chains from China mostly to India. So it&#8217;s like India to India, or India to the rest of the world. Number four is B2B labor marketplaces to support all of these. And number five, is the infrastructure. So last mile, sort of logistics companies like Flexport, or shipbob, and things like that, that support all of these different marketplaces. But we will do more than that. We have a policy whereby if you&#8217;re a founder that has done right by us, and you&#8217;ve had an amazing exit with us, and we backed your first company, no matter what you do in your second company, no matter the valuation, no matter whatever, you get a check. So, we backed the founders of Vettery, they sold the company to Adecco for over 100 million and we made 8.3x. In a couple of years, we were very happy. The founder then went on to build an electric flying taxi company called Archer and he got a check. He took that public, sold it and now he&#8217;s building a humanoid robot company to put robots in factories. Of course, I have zero expertise in this area and you gotta check, but I didn&#8217;t even take an evaluation call, I just sent the money. I did not listen to the pitch, I did not read the deck, I cannot evaluate it, I have no skills to evaluate it, but he got the check. And that&#8217;s true of many of the non traditional investments we&#8217;ve made. Robin: So, let’s move on to the last chapter. Jose also said this, but it&#8217;s true because I read all your blog posts. And you told me that when you talk about something you might go to bed and then three days later you write something down. That’s what I feel when I read about your macro, macro is your hobby, right? Fabrice: Yeah, it’s definitely a hobby. Robin: So there were two blog posts that are related to one another. I think one is from Harvard a year ago where you were projecting where we are going and why now is the best time to invest in an early stage startup and you had an assumption and then there&#8217;s one very recent where you speak at a global economics conference about different threats. You spoke about why you think that we may not get a soft landing and you go into the importance of purchasing power. You go into depth, you go into the threats of global warming, and so on. So, now I would love to hear your thoughts on the one global thing you should do with your cash right now. Fabrice: Yeah, so the reason I&#8217;m more bearish than consensus on macro economics is because it’s the one thing I&#8217;ve been constantly right about for the last year. Actually let me take a step back in February 2021. I wrote a blog post entitled “Welcome to the Everything Bubble”. I said that overly loose fiscal monetary policy, the zero interest rates, negative real rates, everything&#8217;s overvalued. And I mean, everything. Real Estate, crypto, and FTS late stage. Everything is overvalued. If it&#8217;s not bolted to the ground, sell it, which clearly was the correct recommendation and we listened to our own advice. We sold as many secondaries as we could. Which of course, is a fraction of what we wanted because we&#8217;re in private markets and you need to be a buyer. And we were very proactive in selling in 2021. I wrote the next few blog posts. This one is “welcome to the great unknown” and the one after that is called “winter is coming”, where I correctly predicted that interest rates would go a lot higher than people expected and for a lot longer, right, like, whatever the first blog post, people thought that the terminal rate of the Fed funds rate will be 3.6%. And I&#8217;m like, I think it&#8217;s gonna go above five, which has proven to be true. People thought rates would have started declining this year, and I thought it would continue to go higher. And I think now rates are gonna stay higher longer than people expected. And this will become the new normal. I also predicted a year ahead ago that Credit Suisse would default. And they defaulted. As part of the things that I&#8217;d see. So where do I see the risk right now? One is that the consumer is exhausted, and the US savings rate is at a low point. Credit card balances are at the highest level ever. As interest rates are rising, mortgage payments, as a percentage of income, are at the highest level ever. The percentage of people living paycheck to paycheck is worse than it&#8217;s ever been. The amount of people needing help from their parents is high too. So the consumer is exhausted. And I think we&#8217;re going to finally see that consumer growth that was driving a lot of the economy slow down. Number two, commercial real estate is about to hit a wall between 500 billion to 800 billion a year for commercial real estate refinancing. So when people buy commercial real estate it is financed over 30 years, but in three tranches, and it&#8217;s fully refinanced at the end of 10 years. So you have 800 billion in refinancings that happen at the end of each year, and that&#8217;s happening now at significantly higher rates than it was before. This obviously means a lot of these commercial real estate projects, especially with 50%, occupancy or less, are gonna go under, and they&#8217;re gonna be taken over by banks, which would be a disaster. This is also true by the way of the s&amp;p 500. As in general, you have all these companies that borrow cheaply, during the last few years that are refinancing now. They are in much higher debt and at a much higher rate, which is going to decrease profitability. We have a massively inverted yield curve right now, which has been a predictor at times of a recession. The only time it wasn&#8217;t was in 1966. Also, by the way, in the last 70 years, we&#8217;ve only had one soft landing, which was ‘93 and ‘94. So the probability that we get a soft landing instead of a recession where you raise rates as high as you have right now, at the fastest speed rate ever, well, it&#8217;s unlikely, it&#8217;s only happened once. And I guess last but not least, geopolitically. I could very well see you know, Azerbaijan invade Armenia. Serbia to invade Kosovo, the continuing crisis in Ukraine is gonna last forever, keeping food and oil prices high. And plus, of course, now you have Israel and in Palestine, so geopolitical turmoil is increasing. It&#8217;s hard to imagine, with all of this, that we&#8217;re gonna have a soft landing. That said, my personal analysis of this remains – this is the very best time to invest in early stage start-ups. Right now, all the posers, the people that were getting rich, quick, are no longer building start-ups. So the bankers, the consultants, lawyers, the doctors, etc. Right now you have the true believers. They&#8217;re building companies, yes, they&#8217;re raising money, it&#8217;s hard to raise capital, you raise a lower valuation, you probably exit at a lower valuation. But you&#8217;re careful with your cash, with burn, with unit economics, and you&#8217;re building a much more sustainable company. You&#8217;re facing way less competition. In 2021, if you had a good idea, you were facing 7-20 other people doing the exact same thing with a lot of money. Now you have one or two. When you win, you&#8217;re gonna win the entire category. And even though the extra votes will be lower, you&#8217;re going to do amazingly well. And so if I think in the last decade, the very best time to invest was in 2008, 2009, 2010, you know, companies like Instagram, WhatsApp, Uber, Airbnb all came in the 2000s. Actually, when was the best time the best actually? Oh, 2001, 2002, 2004. And so I am willing to bet that the very best time to invest in startups for the 2020s will have been 2022, 2023 and 2024. And you&#8217;re obviously gonna know at the end of the decade in the early 2030s, or at the end of the 2020s. But now, it&#8217;s an amazing time. Early stage and late stage have not repriced and you&#8217;re seeing a lot of structure. So, seed A, even B, is an amazing time to be investing. And, where to hold cash? It&#8217;s easy. There&#8217;s one answer and one answer. Do not invest in stocks today. Do not invest in bonds. Do not invest in real estate. Anything else. Everything else you have a high risk of falling. Put it in early stage tech startups, barbell strategy, the seed to lab type of portfolios. Robin: And maybe become an LP in venture funds or become an angel, right? Fabrice: LPs are so pro cyclical. It drives me crazy. And in 2021 you had all these people with money in VC, when it was the worst time to have money in VC. Today if you&#8217;re a GP trying to raise money, you&#8217;re struggling like hell, because everyone is over committed. No one has cash today is the time to be deploying. Yeah, absolutely. If you have cash today, this time be investing in tech. Robin: Then, my last question on the macro level is, just to give perspective, what do you think could happen if it&#8217;s not a soft landing? You know, like Michael Berry and a couple of others have a lot of shorts running until June next year. What do you think will happen if there’s a crash? Fabrice: I think my timing is that there will be a recession in a year or so. And then the Fed will start cutting rates again. And I think we set the stage for, for recovery. And so actually, I think that&#8217;s why investing in it again, I&#8217;m talking about private assets, public assets. I mean, there&#8217;s been a run up recently because od AI etc. and I&#8217;m not a public market valuation expert, so not the right guy to talk about it. But there&#8217;s a fundamental difference between looking at everything that happens on the macro level and what Berry and the like, investors, are doing, betting on the prices of assets. In the real world, I think we’re going to have a recession, it&#8217;s likely that real estate and bonds, and defaults going up, and stocks falling. So I’m investing in start-ups and T bills to be clear. And nothing else. I have no starter bonds. And cash. You sell the T bills, and you use it as cash. Everything should be T bills or startups nothing else. Robin: Wow, that was amazing! Thank you so much Fabrice. Top 10 Quotes: On Antarctica: “It was one of the hardest things I&#8217;ve ever done, including creating a start-up and running it for decades.” On Antarctica: “Okay, it was exactly like a start-up. I did not know what I was doing.” On being a founder: “You can always push yourself more than you think you can.” On being a founder: “Clearly, there&#8217;s one thing I think founders have in common is that we&#8217;re more tolerant to risk than most.” On Antarctica: “Fear is not a feeling I have often, or if ever, experienced in any context. Frankly, I don&#8217;t remember the last time we&#8217;ve been afraid of anything.” On founding his first tech company: “At 23, I went on to build the “eBay of Europe”, raised 63 million venture money and had 150 employees in five countries. It was really like 10 million a month in GMV. And for a hot minute, I felt like I was on top of the world.” On being a tech founder: “I realized, you know what, I didn&#8217;t do this for the money anyway. I like creating something out of nothing. I like the zero to one.” On founding Zingy: “I lived in New York essentially on $2 a day for two years. Slept on a couch in the office. We rented the office, so I could only afford four pieces of ramen noodles per day. I invested every last penny I had. It was extraordinarily tough, but ultimately we grabbed the victory from the jaws of defeat when on August 15 2003, we became profitable.” “What&#8217;s interesting, is that the most meaningful point in my life is not the day I sold the company and made like 40 million bucks as a 29 year old. It&#8217;s the day we became profitable. Because the day we became profitable, we became masters of our own destiny.” “We have a policy whereby if you&#8217;re a founder that has done right by us, and you&#8217;ve had an amazing exit with us, and we backed your first company, no matter what you do in your second company, no matter the valuation, no matter whatever, you get a check.” If you prefer, you can listen to the episode in the embedded podcast player. In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3CKURWiwPFqXkAxP4x6KjR?si=83f8a66492c24b87

2023-11-15T15:26:06

2023-11-15T15:26:06

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=21818

2023-11-17T17:01:28

2023-11-17T17:01:28

2023-holiday-gadget-gift-guide

publish

post

https://fabricegrinda.com/2023-holiday-gadget-gift-guide/

2023 Holiday Gadget Gift Guide

<p>As the holiday season is fast approaching, I wanted to share my recommendations for the year. Let me start by saying that I stand by all my recommendations from the <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/2022-holiday-gadget-gift-guide/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/2022-holiday-gadget-gift-guide/" rel="noreferrer noopener">2022 Holiday Gift Guide</a>. If you are looking for a monitor, TV, ultra-light travel laptop, laser projector, office chair and/or essentially anything you need for your home office setup, refer to that guide as I am only reviewing new gadgets for this year and have not updated my core setup.</p> <p><strong>Gaming Laptop: Lenovo 16&#8243; Legion Pro 7i 16IRX8H Gaming Laptop</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="328" height="328" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/image.png" alt="" class="wp-image-21819"/></figure></div> <p>I mostly travel with the incredible <a href="https://www.lg.com/us/laptops/lg-17z90r-a.adb9u1-gram-laptop" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.lg.com/us/laptops/lg-17z90r-a.adb9u1-gram-laptop" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">LG Gram 17”</a>. It weighs 3 pounds which is insane for a 17” notebook and essentially has infinite battery life. It only costs $1,899 with 32Gb of Ram and a 2Tb SSD and has a respectable NVIDIA 3050 GPU. As impressive as that is, you cannot game with it. If I am travelling somewhere for an extended period and want to be able to game, I take the <a href="https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1745683-REG/lenovo_82wq002rus_16_legion_pro_7.html" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1745683-REG/lenovo_82wq002rus_16_legion_pro_7.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Lenovo 16” Legion Pro 7i 16IRX8H</a>. It’s insanely powerful. The centerpiece is a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 with 12Gb of GDDR5 VRAM. It powers a really nice 16” 2560*1600 240Hz IPS display and can essentially run any game you can imagine to its full potential for a very reasonable $2,099. Obviously, it does not have great battery life and it weighs 6.2 pounds, so I only travel with it if I am going somewhere for a long time and essentially use it as a desktop replacement. When I am not traveling, it’s setup as a companion gaming PC for when friends come over and we play co-op online. For $400 more you can get the <a href="https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1745684-REG/lenovo_82wq002tus_16_legion_pro_7.html" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1745684-REG/lenovo_82wq002tus_16_legion_pro_7.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">4090 version</a> which is also an amazing deal for what it is, but overkill for most.</p> <p><strong>Headphone: SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless Multi-System Gaming Headset</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="258" height="404" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/image-1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-21820"/></figure></div> <p>The <a href="https://www.amazon.com/HyperX-Cloud-Wireless-Detachable-Cancelling/dp/B08NTYB4M7/ref=sr_1_3?crid=1CL2E55JXJI4Q&amp;keywords=cloud+ii+wireless&amp;qid=1699933928&amp;sprefix=cloud+II+wi%2Caps%2C129&amp;sr=8-3" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.amazon.com/HyperX-Cloud-Wireless-Detachable-Cancelling/dp/B08NTYB4M7/ref=sr_1_3?crid=1CL2E55JXJI4Q&amp;keywords=cloud+ii+wireless&amp;qid=1699933928&amp;sprefix=cloud+II+wi%2Caps%2C129&amp;sr=8-3" rel="noreferrer noopener">HyperX Cloud II Wireless headphones</a> I recommended last year are great. They are inexpensive at $109 and have amazing sound and noise cancelling microphone so you can take calls in noisy environments. However, they are reasonably bulky and hard to travel with. Also, because they do not support Bluetooth, they don’t work with your cell phone so they are really only for your PC &amp; PS5.</p> <p>Given how much I travel, I decided to splurge for the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09ZWCYQTX/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&amp;th=1" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09ZWCYQTX/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&amp;th=1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro</a>. The sound is amazing, and they have an all-important noise cancelling microphone that allows me to take calls in super noisy environments (e.g.; airports and train stations) with no one on Zoom hearing any background noise. They are compact and with a retractable microphone and rotating earcups they fit nicely in my <a href="https://www.ebags.com/backpacks/laptop/pro-slim-laptop-backpack/117775XXXX.html?dwvar_117775XXXX_color=Solid%20Black&amp;cgidmaster=backpacks-bags-laptop" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.ebags.com/backpacks/laptop/pro-slim-laptop-backpack/117775XXXX.html?dwvar_117775XXXX_color=Solid%20Black&amp;cgidmaster=backpacks-bags-laptop" rel="noreferrer noopener">eBags Pro Slim Backpack</a>. I leave the connector box and extra battery with my desktop setup and just connect the headset via Bluetooth to my iPhone and notebook when traveling. The Bluetooth connection is a bit finicky. It took me a while to figure out that I had to keep my finger pressed on the Bluetooth button for a long time every time I wanted to connect to a device that I had already paired, but other than that they are amazing. My only real criticism is their price. At $319, they are very expensive.</p> <p><strong>Drone: DJI Air 3</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="560" height="432" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/image-2.png" alt="" class="wp-image-21821"/></figure></div> <p>When my trusty Skydio 2+ met its demise in a kiteboarding incident, I was hoping that <a href="https://www.skydio.com/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.skydio.com/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Skydio</a> was going to announce the Skydio 3 at their event this past September. Unfortunately, they decided to exit the consumer market to focus on the professional market.</p> <p>I tested a variety of drones to replace it. Ultimately it came down to the <a href="https://www.dji.com/mavic-3-pro" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.dji.com/mavic-3-pro" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">DJI Mavic Pro 3</a>, <a href="https://www.dji.com/air-3" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.dji.com/air-3" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Air 3</a>, and <a href="https://www.dji.com/mini-4-pro" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.dji.com/mini-4-pro" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mini 4 Pro</a>. It’s important to note that I mostly use them in automatic follow mode which DJI calls Active Track and Spotlight when I kite surf and heli-ski. The Skydio does a better job than any of these drones, but as these are the best of the rest, so they must do for now.</p> <p>Ultimately, I picked the Air 3 because I did not need all the features of the much more expensive Mavic Pro 3. I hesitated to with the Mini 4 Pro which has a really cool ActiveTrack 360 feature and is significantly more compact. However, because it’s more compact it handles strong winds less well. The Air 3 and Mavic Pro 3 can both handle winds of up to 27 mph making them the logical choice for filming kite surfing.</p> <p>The drone films in a gorgeous 4K at 60 fps. You can pick one of two cameras to film with either with a wide angle at 1x or medium with a 3x optical zoom. The flight time is super impressive at 46 minutes, and you can fly up to 32 km.</p> <p>I highly recommend that you opt for the <a href="https://store.dji.com/product/dji-air-3?vid=143271" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://store.dji.com/product/dji-air-3?vid=143271" rel="noreferrer noopener">DJI Air 3 Fly More Combo</a> with two extra batteries and the DJI RC 2 remote for $1,549. The remote with the built-in screen is infinitely more convenient than having to mess with attaching your phone to the remote.</p> <p>The drone is not perfect and there are a few annoying features. You can’t take photos while you are filming. You must either film or take photos. You can’t switch camera while filming. You must stop filming to go from the wide angle to the 3x camera or vice versa. As aforementioned, ActiveTrack and Spotlight are not as good as the Skydio tracking mode. That said, for now this is as good as it gets.</p> <p><strong>Charging Station: 8 in 1 Wireless Charging Station</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="528" height="528" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/image-3.png" alt="" class="wp-image-21822"/></figure></div> <p>There are many options out there, most of which are rather expensive. I opted for this no-brand option on <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09X9XSZH2?psc=1&amp;ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09X9XSZH2?psc=1&amp;ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details" rel="noreferrer noopener">Amazon</a>&nbsp; because it includes a wireless charger for your iPhone, Apple Watch, a charger for your AirPods, 2 USB-C ports, and 3 USB ports all for $49.</p> <p>My only criticism is that you must mount your existing Apple Watch charger into it, but for the price, I really can’t complain. I put it on my nightstand and literally charge all my devices with it: iPad, Kindle, iPhone, AirPods, Arctis headphones, Apple Watch and much more!</p> <p><strong>Video Games: Gears 5: Hivebusters, God of War Ragnarök, and Age of Empires IV: The Sultans Ascend</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Screenshot-2023-11-14-at-4.04.42-PM.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-21853" width="592" height="277" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Screenshot-2023-11-14-at-4.04.42-PM.jpg 1446w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Screenshot-2023-11-14-at-4.04.42-PM-768x359.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Screenshot-2023-11-14-at-4.04.42-PM-1200x561.jpg 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Screenshot-2023-11-14-at-4.04.42-PM-1320x617.jpg 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 592px) 85vw, 592px" /></figure></div> <p>I love third-person action-adventure games like <strong>The Last of Us</strong>, <strong>Drake Unchartered</strong>, or <strong>Tomb Raider</strong>. The only thing I like more in the genre is a co-op action-adventure game. Last year my brother and I finished <strong>Elden Ring</strong> in co-op, which scratched that itch (yes, I realize that technically it’s a Souls style game). A few years ago, I finished <strong><a href="https://www.gearsofwar.com/games/gears-5/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.gearsofwar.com/games/gears-5/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Gears 5</a></strong> with my brother and a friend. Unbeknownst to us, they released an expansion: <strong><a href="https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/store/gears-5-hivebusters/9nb77cw5j1tt" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/store/gears-5-hivebusters/9nb77cw5j1tt" rel="noreferrer noopener">Gears 5: Hivebusters</a></strong>. It’s a great expansion to the game and I am having a blast playing the co-op campaign with two friends in my man cave / console gaming room.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="636" height="476" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/image-12.png" alt="" class="wp-image-21854"/></figure></div> <p><strong><a href="https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/god-of-war-ragnarok/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/god-of-war-ragnarok/" rel="noreferrer noopener">God of War Ragnarök</a>, </strong>the latest entry in the God of War franchise, is my 2023 replacement for Elden Ring despite the lack of multiplayer. The story picks up where God of War left off after Kratos and his son Atreus’ journey through Scandinavia. The graphics are amazing, and the story is super compelling even though the game play and level design is way more linear than in a game like Elden Ring. My only gripe is that found Atreus’ personality grating, but it’s a minor quibble in what is otherwise a masterpiece.</p> <p>As I mentioned in last year’s gadget guide, I fell in love with the Age of Empires franchise all over again with the release of <strong><a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1466860/Age_of_Empires_IV_Anniversary_Edition/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1466860/Age_of_Empires_IV_Anniversary_Edition/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Age of Empires IV</a> </strong>with its improved graphics and quality of life improvements. My love for the game has only deepened as the developers kept improving it, adding all the features that were missing at launch, and balancing the game extremely well. I even managed to get to Conqueror I and be in the top 1,000 players in the world in multiplayer which is a testament to my appreciation for the game and the tons of real time strategy playing I did in my younger years. They just released <strong><a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1959430/Age_of_Empires_IV__The_Sultans_Ascend/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1959430/Age_of_Empires_IV__The_Sultans_Ascend/" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Sultans Ascend</a> </strong>expansion making an already great game even better with 2 full new civilizations, 4 new variant civilizations, and even more quality of life improvements (e.g., reworking walls).</p> <p>I realize that the game of the year is <strong><a href="https://baldursgate3.game/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://baldursgate3.game/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Baldur’s Gate 3</a></strong>, but it was just released and with a 100-hour playthrough time, I won’t get to it until 2024. It will be vying for my attention with Elden Ring’s expansion <strong>Shadow of the Erdtree</strong>. BTW this is the reason I am reviewing Ragnarök in 2023 despite it being technically a late 2022 game. I needed to finish Elden Ring first and I do not have the time to game more than a few hours per week.</p> <p><strong>Ear Plugs: Loop Switch</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/image-13.png" alt="" class="wp-image-21855" width="174" height="164"/></figure></div> <p>Hearing loss significantly increases one’s risk of dementia. Given the number of environments we find ourselves in that are extremely loud I find the <a href="https://us.loopearplugs.com/products/switch/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://us.loopearplugs.com/products/switch/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Loop Switch</a> to be a life saver.</p> <p>It has three modes which allow you to adapt to the situation you find yourself in:</p> <ul> <li>Quiet: maximum noise reduction to let you focus and give you peace and quiet.</li> <li>Experience: Reduce the volume while keeping sound quality clear (e.g., music festivals and parties).</li> <li>Engage: It reduces background noise while keeping speech clear for easier conversations.</li> </ul> <p>Note that I recommend getting them in pink as they blend better with your skin color.</p> <p><strong>RC Truck: Traxxas XRT &amp; X-Maxx</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/image-14.png" alt="" class="wp-image-21856" width="556" height="230" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/image-14.png 936w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/image-14-768x317.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 556px) 85vw, 556px" /></figure></div> <p>I grew up doing acrobatics competitions with RC planes and racing RC cars. My love for it has not abated. In fact, I ended up building a RC track at my house in Revelstoke. I opted to buy the <a href="https://traxxas.com/products/landing/xrt/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://traxxas.com/products/landing/xrt/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Traxxas XRT</a> &amp; <a href="https://traxxas.com/products/landing/x-maxx/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://traxxas.com/products/landing/x-maxx/" rel="noreferrer noopener">X-Maxx</a>. At 1/5 and 1/6 scale respectively they are enormous, so much so, that my track is too small for them. I will rework it next summer.<br><br>The trucks are super-fast and super fun, and most importantly given the number of beginners I have driving them, they are super sturdy. They are both amazing. The XRT is clearly the better, faster truck, and is more predictable to drive, but the X-Maxx feels more fun to drive. I can’t recommend them enough.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Racing the Traxxas XRT &amp; X-Maxx on my home made track in Revelstoke" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/osf0S9pOPYc?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p><strong>Ice Bath: The Plunge All-In or The Odin</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Screenshot-2023-11-14-at-4.12.44-PM.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-21866" width="581" height="181" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Screenshot-2023-11-14-at-4.12.44-PM.jpg 1570w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Screenshot-2023-11-14-at-4.12.44-PM-768x239.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Screenshot-2023-11-14-at-4.12.44-PM-1536x477.jpg 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Screenshot-2023-11-14-at-4.12.44-PM-1200x373.jpg 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Screenshot-2023-11-14-at-4.12.44-PM-1320x410.jpg 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 581px) 85vw, 581px" /></figure></div> <p>I have been meaning to install an outdoor ice bath at my house in Turks &amp; Caicos for use after our intense tennis and padel matches, before hopping into the hot tub. I wanted one that was automatic (where you don’t need to put ice cubes in the water to cool it down), self-contained, and easy to use and maintain.</p> <p>The best reviewed cold plunge is the <a href="https://plunge.com/products/plunge-all-in" data-type="URL" data-id="https://plunge.com/products/plunge-all-in" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Plunge All-In</a> but aesthetically it did not fit with the brown wooden deck around my hot tub. As a result, I chose the <a href="https://odinplunge.com/products/hot-tub" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://odinplunge.com/products/hot-tub" rel="noreferrer noopener">Odin XL </a>instead. It’s great and looks fantastic. My only gripe is that it took months to be delivered as it’s built and shipped from Australia, but if you are patient, it’s worth it!</p> <p><strong>Mobile Roaming Solution: Airalo</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/image-17.png" alt="" class="wp-image-21868" width="468" height="208" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/image-17.png 936w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/image-17-768x341.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 468px) 85vw, 468px" /></figure></div> <p>T-Mobile is by far the best mobile operator if you travel internationally. They offer extensive free 5G in many places, inexpensive data passes, unlimited free texting, and calls at $0.25 per minute. This is substantially cheaper than anything on offer from all other operators. Sadly, if you travel internationally too much, T-Mobile also blocks your international data access. After this happened to me in September, I considered switching operator, but none of them were compelling.</p> <p>Ultimately, I encountered <a href="https://www.airalo.com/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.airalo.com/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Airalo</a>. It allows you to install an eSIM in your phone and buy data packages at reasonable rates in almost all geographies. It’s what I used in my most recent trip to Europe and am currently using in Turks &amp; Caicos.</p> <p>It’s exactly what I was looking for and works exactly as advertised. It’s a lifesaver for those of us who travel extensively around the world. I cannot recommend it enough.</p>

<p>As the holiday season is fast approaching, I wanted to share my recommendations for the year. Let me &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/2023-holiday-gadget-gift-guide/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;2023 Holiday Gadget Gift Guide&#8221;</span></a></p>

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2023 Holiday Gadget Gift Guide. Categories - Tech Gadgets. Date-Posted - 2023-11-15T15:26:06 . As the holiday season is fast approaching, I wanted to share my recommendations for the year. Let me start by saying that I stand by all my recommendations from the 2022 Holiday Gift Guide. If you are looking for a monitor, TV, ultra-light travel laptop, laser projector, office chair and/or essentially anything you need for your home office setup, refer to that guide as I am only reviewing new gadgets for this year and have not updated my core setup. Gaming Laptop: Lenovo 16&#8243; Legion Pro 7i 16IRX8H Gaming Laptop I mostly travel with the incredible LG Gram 17”. It weighs 3 pounds which is insane for a 17” notebook and essentially has infinite battery life. It only costs $1,899 with 32Gb of Ram and a 2Tb SSD and has a respectable NVIDIA 3050 GPU. As impressive as that is, you cannot game with it. If I am travelling somewhere for an extended period and want to be able to game, I take the Lenovo 16” Legion Pro 7i 16IRX8H. It’s insanely powerful. The centerpiece is a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 with 12Gb of GDDR5 VRAM. It powers a really nice 16” 2560*1600 240Hz IPS display and can essentially run any game you can imagine to its full potential for a very reasonable $2,099. Obviously, it does not have great battery life and it weighs 6.2 pounds, so I only travel with it if I am going somewhere for a long time and essentially use it as a desktop replacement. When I am not traveling, it’s setup as a companion gaming PC for when friends come over and we play co-op online. For $400 more you can get the 4090 version which is also an amazing deal for what it is, but overkill for most. Headphone: SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless Multi-System Gaming Headset The HyperX Cloud II Wireless headphones I recommended last year are great. They are inexpensive at $109 and have amazing sound and noise cancelling microphone so you can take calls in noisy environments. However, they are reasonably bulky and hard to travel with. Also, because they do not support Bluetooth, they don’t work with your cell phone so they are really only for your PC &amp; PS5. Given how much I travel, I decided to splurge for the SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro. The sound is amazing, and they have an all-important noise cancelling microphone that allows me to take calls in super noisy environments (e.g.; airports and train stations) with no one on Zoom hearing any background noise. They are compact and with a retractable microphone and rotating earcups they fit nicely in my eBags Pro Slim Backpack. I leave the connector box and extra battery with my desktop setup and just connect the headset via Bluetooth to my iPhone and notebook when traveling. The Bluetooth connection is a bit finicky. It took me a while to figure out that I had to keep my finger pressed on the Bluetooth button for a long time every time I wanted to connect to a device that I had already paired, but other than that they are amazing. My only real criticism is their price. At $319, they are very expensive. Drone: DJI Air 3 When my trusty Skydio 2+ met its demise in a kiteboarding incident, I was hoping that Skydio was going to announce the Skydio 3 at their event this past September. Unfortunately, they decided to exit the consumer market to focus on the professional market. I tested a variety of drones to replace it. Ultimately it came down to the DJI Mavic Pro 3, Air 3, and Mini 4 Pro. It’s important to note that I mostly use them in automatic follow mode which DJI calls Active Track and Spotlight when I kite surf and heli-ski. The Skydio does a better job than any of these drones, but as these are the best of the rest, so they must do for now. Ultimately, I picked the Air 3 because I did not need all the features of the much more expensive Mavic Pro 3. I hesitated to with the Mini 4 Pro which has a really cool ActiveTrack 360 feature and is significantly more compact. However, because it’s more compact it handles strong winds less well. The Air 3 and Mavic Pro 3 can both handle winds of up to 27 mph making them the logical choice for filming kite surfing. The drone films in a gorgeous 4K at 60 fps. You can pick one of two cameras to film with either with a wide angle at 1x or medium with a 3x optical zoom. The flight time is super impressive at 46 minutes, and you can fly up to 32 km. I highly recommend that you opt for the DJI Air 3 Fly More Combo with two extra batteries and the DJI RC 2 remote for $1,549. The remote with the built-in screen is infinitely more convenient than having to mess with attaching your phone to the remote. The drone is not perfect and there are a few annoying features. You can’t take photos while you are filming. You must either film or take photos. You can’t switch camera while filming. You must stop filming to go from the wide angle to the 3x camera or vice versa. As aforementioned, ActiveTrack and Spotlight are not as good as the Skydio tracking mode. That said, for now this is as good as it gets. Charging Station: 8 in 1 Wireless Charging Station There are many options out there, most of which are rather expensive. I opted for this no-brand option on Amazon&nbsp; because it includes a wireless charger for your iPhone, Apple Watch, a charger for your AirPods, 2 USB-C ports, and 3 USB ports all for $49. My only criticism is that you must mount your existing Apple Watch charger into it, but for the price, I really can’t complain. I put it on my nightstand and literally charge all my devices with it: iPad, Kindle, iPhone, AirPods, Arctis headphones, Apple Watch and much more! Video Games: Gears 5: Hivebusters, God of War Ragnarök, and Age of Empires IV: The Sultans Ascend I love third-person action-adventure games like The Last of Us, Drake Unchartered, or Tomb Raider. The only thing I like more in the genre is a co-op action-adventure game. Last year my brother and I finished Elden Ring in co-op, which scratched that itch (yes, I realize that technically it’s a Souls style game). A few years ago, I finished Gears 5 with my brother and a friend. Unbeknownst to us, they released an expansion: Gears 5: Hivebusters. It’s a great expansion to the game and I am having a blast playing the co-op campaign with two friends in my man cave / console gaming room. God of War Ragnarök, the latest entry in the God of War franchise, is my 2023 replacement for Elden Ring despite the lack of multiplayer. The story picks up where God of War left off after Kratos and his son Atreus’ journey through Scandinavia. The graphics are amazing, and the story is super compelling even though the game play and level design is way more linear than in a game like Elden Ring. My only gripe is that found Atreus’ personality grating, but it’s a minor quibble in what is otherwise a masterpiece. As I mentioned in last year’s gadget guide, I fell in love with the Age of Empires franchise all over again with the release of Age of Empires IV with its improved graphics and quality of life improvements. My love for the game has only deepened as the developers kept improving it, adding all the features that were missing at launch, and balancing the game extremely well. I even managed to get to Conqueror I and be in the top 1,000 players in the world in multiplayer which is a testament to my appreciation for the game and the tons of real time strategy playing I did in my younger years. They just released The Sultans Ascend expansion making an already great game even better with 2 full new civilizations, 4 new variant civilizations, and even more quality of life improvements (e.g., reworking walls). I realize that the game of the year is Baldur’s Gate 3, but it was just released and with a 100-hour playthrough time, I won’t get to it until 2024. It will be vying for my attention with Elden Ring’s expansion Shadow of the Erdtree. BTW this is the reason I am reviewing Ragnarök in 2023 despite it being technically a late 2022 game. I needed to finish Elden Ring first and I do not have the time to game more than a few hours per week. Ear Plugs: Loop Switch Hearing loss significantly increases one’s risk of dementia. Given the number of environments we find ourselves in that are extremely loud I find the Loop Switch to be a life saver. It has three modes which allow you to adapt to the situation you find yourself in: Quiet: maximum noise reduction to let you focus and give you peace and quiet. Experience: Reduce the volume while keeping sound quality clear (e.g., music festivals and parties). Engage: It reduces background noise while keeping speech clear for easier conversations. Note that I recommend getting them in pink as they blend better with your skin color. RC Truck: Traxxas XRT &amp; X-Maxx I grew up doing acrobatics competitions with RC planes and racing RC cars. My love for it has not abated. In fact, I ended up building a RC track at my house in Revelstoke. I opted to buy the Traxxas XRT &amp; X-Maxx. At 1/5 and 1/6 scale respectively they are enormous, so much so, that my track is too small for them. I will rework it next summer.The trucks are super-fast and super fun, and most importantly given the number of beginners I have driving them, they are super sturdy. They are both amazing. The XRT is clearly the better, faster truck, and is more predictable to drive, but the X-Maxx feels more fun to drive. I can’t recommend them enough. Ice Bath: The Plunge All-In or The Odin I have been meaning to install an outdoor ice bath at my house in Turks &amp; Caicos for use after our intense tennis and padel matches, before hopping into the hot tub. I wanted one that was automatic (where you don’t need to put ice cubes in the water to cool it down), self-contained, and easy to use and maintain. The best reviewed cold plunge is the Plunge All-In but aesthetically it did not fit with the brown wooden deck around my hot tub. As a result, I chose the Odin XL instead. It’s great and looks fantastic. My only gripe is that it took months to be delivered as it’s built and shipped from Australia, but if you are patient, it’s worth it! Mobile Roaming Solution: Airalo T-Mobile is by far the best mobile operator if you travel internationally. They offer extensive free 5G in many places, inexpensive data passes, unlimited free texting, and calls at $0.25 per minute. This is substantially cheaper than anything on offer from all other operators. Sadly, if you travel internationally too much, T-Mobile also blocks your international data access. After this happened to me in September, I considered switching operator, but none of them were compelling. Ultimately, I encountered Airalo. It allows you to install an eSIM in your phone and buy data packages at reasonable rates in almost all geographies. It’s what I used in my most recent trip to Europe and am currently using in Turks &amp; Caicos. It’s exactly what I was looking for and works exactly as advertised. It’s a lifesaver for those of us who travel extensively around the world. I cannot recommend it enough.

2023-10-05T14:08:19

2023-10-05T14:08:19

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=21557

2023-10-05T14:18:29

2023-10-05T14:18:29

macroeconomic-update-i-remain-significantly-more-bearish-than-consensus

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post

https://fabricegrinda.com/macroeconomic-update-i-remain-significantly-more-bearish-than-consensus/

Macroeconomic Update: I remain significantly more bearish than consensus!

<p>Of late recessionary talk has cooled off. Jerome Powell and the Fed are no longer expecting a recession. The consensus is for the US to have a soft-landing allowing core inflation to go back down to 2% by 2025 while avoiding a downturn. While I hope for this outcome to happen, I find it unlikely as this feat was technically only achieved once in the last 60 years in 1993-1994.</p> <p>Many areas give me cause for concern.</p> <p>1. <strong>Commercial real estate is headed for a major crisis.</strong></p> <p>Commercial real estate is typically financed in tranches. There is a 30-year amortization but financed in 10-year increments. When you buy the building, you finance it in such a way that you pay down 1/3 in the first decade with a balloon payment for the remaining 2/3s due at the end of the decade. You then refinance this 2/3s, paying down another 1/3 over another 10 years. You do it again a decade later.</p> <p>When the big balloon payments come due, if occupation is low while interest rates are high (today’s conditions), the economics may no longer work. Why refinance at high rates for a low yielding asset. Investors risk walking away, handing the assets over to the bank.</p> <p>With $1 trillion of commercial real estate loans coming due by the end of 2024, there is a major crisis headed our way. While anecdotal, FJ Labs’ building default and take over by the bank seems an augur of things to come.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Picture1.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-21570" width="702" height="434"/></figure></div> <p>2. <strong>The commercial real estate crisis will exacerbate the banking crisis.</strong></p> <p>The commercial real estate crisis is going to saddle banks with low yielding assets. This is happening while bank deposits are continuing to contract at an unprecedented rate as depositors seek higher yields in safer assets such as treasury bills which will continue to depress commercial lending.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Picture2.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-21571" width="715" height="406" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Picture2.jpg 1430w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Picture2-768x436.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Picture2-1200x681.jpg 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Picture2-1320x750.jpg 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p>3. <strong>The U.S. Consumer is in dire straits.</strong></p> <p>All debt balances are at a record high:</p> <ul> <li>Household Debt: $17.1 trillion</li> <li>Mortgage Debt: $12.0 trillion</li> <li>Auto Loans: $1.6 trillion</li> <li>Credit Card Debt: $1.0 trillion</li> <li>Student Loan Debt:&nbsp; $1.6 trillion</li> </ul> <p>Interest rates are higher than they’ve been in 15 years:</p> <ul> <li>Credit Card Debt: 25%</li> <li>New Car Loans: 14%</li> <li>Used Car Loans: 9%</li> <li>30Y Mortgage: 7.5%</li> </ul> <p><strong>a. Credit Card balances are at 20-year highs while credit card interest rates are skyrocketing.</strong></p> <p>While the overall debt level is reported in nominal numbers which paints a slight worse picture than reality, the situation seems dire:</p> <ul> <li>The number of Americans rolling credit card debt from month-to-month is now higher than the number of people paying their bills in full for the first time ever.</li> <li>The default rate on credit card loans from small lenders is now higher than during the dot com bubble, financial crisis, and Covid-19.</li> </ul> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Picture3.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-21573" width="627" height="435" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Picture3.jpg 1197w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Picture3-768x533.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Picture4.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-21574" width="633" height="474"/></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Picture5.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-21575" width="715" height="338" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Picture5.jpg 1430w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Picture5-768x363.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Picture5-1200x566.jpg 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Picture5-1320x623.jpg 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p></p> <p><strong>b.</strong> <strong>70% of Gen Z &amp; Millennials are now living paycheck-to-paycheck and over 50% are still somewhat or very financially dependent on their parents.</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Picture6.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-21576" width="715" height="339"/></figure></div> <p>4. <strong>Corporate debt refinancings will be expensive and difficult.</strong></p> <p>Between $500 and $850 billion of corporate debt needs to be refinanced every year by Fortune 500 companies during the next 5 years at significantly higher rates than in the past 15 years.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Picture7.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-21577" width="575" height="434"/></figure></div> <p>5. <strong>The Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) is contracting globally and nearing pre-recessionary levels where PMI drops below 50.</strong></p> <p>The direction of economic trends in the manufacturing and services sector is negative. This is happening simultaneously in all major economies.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/8-Large.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-21590" width="636" height="640" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/8-Large.jpeg 1272w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/8-Large-768x773.jpeg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/8-Large-1200x1208.jpeg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p>In the US we are at 46.4. 79% of the times the PMI went below 47, we ended up in a recession.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/9-Large.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-21591" width="640" height="446" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/9-Large.jpeg 1280w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/9-Large-768x535.jpeg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/9-Large-1200x835.jpeg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p>6. <strong>The yield curve is deeply inverted.</strong></p> <p>It’s rare for ten-year treasury rates to be lower than the 3-month treasury rates. The yield curve inverted before every recession that started in the last 70 years except in 1966. <strong>It’s currently more deeply inverted than it’s been since 1982.</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/10-Large.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-21592" width="640" height="447" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/10-Large.jpeg 1280w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/10-Large-768x536.jpeg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/10-Large-1200x838.jpeg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p>7. <strong>People are finally coming to terms with the fact that rates will be higher for longer.</strong></p> <p>In early 2022 when people were still underwriting terminal rates of 3.6%, I argued that rates were likely going to top 5% and stay higher for much longer than people suspected in order to tame inflation. Between the last two FOMC meetings I’ve seen a drastic shift in market expectations. Markets were expecting a full 1% rate cut by next year and are now expecting half that. The new median feds fund rate projection is for 5.1% in 2024 and 3.9% in 2025. Given the higher discount rate, many fewer projects are being greenlit.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11-Large.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-21593" width="640" height="586" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11-Large.jpeg 1280w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11-Large-768x703.jpeg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11-Large-1200x1099.jpeg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p>8. <strong>Political and geopolitical turmoil is not abating.</strong></p> <p>The political environment is exacerbating economic uncertainty. A US government shut down looks likely in November with continued turmoil over the 2024 elections. Russia and Ukraine are in a war of attrition with the quagmire likely lasting years keeping energy and food prices high for years to come.</p> <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p> <p>I realize that pessimists sound smarter than optimists, but with so many indicators flashing red I find it extremely unlikely that we will have a soft landing. A recession seems like the far more likely scenario and as such we should brace ourselves for a difficult 12 months.</p> <p>While in the short term the macro trumps the micro with markets not differentiating good companies from the bad ones, in the long run the wheat will be separated from the chaff. It also bears to remember that the average recession since 1950 only lasted 10 months with the longest lasting 18 months. As such, 2025 onwards should be rosier especially as we should be starting to see the beginnings of the productivity revolution and deflation brought about by the AI revolution and digitization of B2B supply chains. It won’t quite be the exuberance of the last decades given that interest rates won’t be nearly as low as they were and that we have not yet addressed our excessive sovereign debt and unsustainable government spending, but it will feel brighter than our gloomy present.</p> <p>Until then it will pay to remain prudent in our personal and professional endeavors to ready ourselves to start being aggressive and taking risks at the very moment when everyone else thinks that all hope is lost.</p>

<p>Of late recessionary talk has cooled off. Jerome Powell and the Fed are no longer expecting a recession. &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/macroeconomic-update-i-remain-significantly-more-bearish-than-consensus/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Macroeconomic Update: I remain significantly more bearish than consensus!&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Macroeconomic Update: I remain significantly more bearish than consensus!. Categories - Political Economy. Date-Posted - 2023-10-05T14:08:19 . Of late recessionary talk has cooled off. Jerome Powell and the Fed are no longer expecting a recession. The consensus is for the US to have a soft-landing allowing core inflation to go back down to 2% by 2025 while avoiding a downturn. While I hope for this outcome to happen, I find it unlikely as this feat was technically only achieved once in the last 60 years in 1993-1994. Many areas give me cause for concern. 1. Commercial real estate is headed for a major crisis. Commercial real estate is typically financed in tranches. There is a 30-year amortization but financed in 10-year increments. When you buy the building, you finance it in such a way that you pay down 1/3 in the first decade with a balloon payment for the remaining 2/3s due at the end of the decade. You then refinance this 2/3s, paying down another 1/3 over another 10 years. You do it again a decade later. When the big balloon payments come due, if occupation is low while interest rates are high (today’s conditions), the economics may no longer work. Why refinance at high rates for a low yielding asset. Investors risk walking away, handing the assets over to the bank. With $1 trillion of commercial real estate loans coming due by the end of 2024, there is a major crisis headed our way. While anecdotal, FJ Labs’ building default and take over by the bank seems an augur of things to come. 2. The commercial real estate crisis will exacerbate the banking crisis. The commercial real estate crisis is going to saddle banks with low yielding assets. This is happening while bank deposits are continuing to contract at an unprecedented rate as depositors seek higher yields in safer assets such as treasury bills which will continue to depress commercial lending. 3. The U.S. Consumer is in dire straits. All debt balances are at a record high: Household Debt: $17.1 trillion Mortgage Debt: $12.0 trillion Auto Loans: $1.6 trillion Credit Card Debt: $1.0 trillion Student Loan Debt:&nbsp; $1.6 trillion Interest rates are higher than they’ve been in 15 years: Credit Card Debt: 25% New Car Loans: 14% Used Car Loans: 9% 30Y Mortgage: 7.5% a. Credit Card balances are at 20-year highs while credit card interest rates are skyrocketing. While the overall debt level is reported in nominal numbers which paints a slight worse picture than reality, the situation seems dire: The number of Americans rolling credit card debt from month-to-month is now higher than the number of people paying their bills in full for the first time ever. The default rate on credit card loans from small lenders is now higher than during the dot com bubble, financial crisis, and Covid-19. b. 70% of Gen Z &amp; Millennials are now living paycheck-to-paycheck and over 50% are still somewhat or very financially dependent on their parents. 4. Corporate debt refinancings will be expensive and difficult. Between $500 and $850 billion of corporate debt needs to be refinanced every year by Fortune 500 companies during the next 5 years at significantly higher rates than in the past 15 years. 5. The Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) is contracting globally and nearing pre-recessionary levels where PMI drops below 50. The direction of economic trends in the manufacturing and services sector is negative. This is happening simultaneously in all major economies. In the US we are at 46.4. 79% of the times the PMI went below 47, we ended up in a recession. 6. The yield curve is deeply inverted. It’s rare for ten-year treasury rates to be lower than the 3-month treasury rates. The yield curve inverted before every recession that started in the last 70 years except in 1966. It’s currently more deeply inverted than it’s been since 1982. 7. People are finally coming to terms with the fact that rates will be higher for longer. In early 2022 when people were still underwriting terminal rates of 3.6%, I argued that rates were likely going to top 5% and stay higher for much longer than people suspected in order to tame inflation. Between the last two FOMC meetings I’ve seen a drastic shift in market expectations. Markets were expecting a full 1% rate cut by next year and are now expecting half that. The new median feds fund rate projection is for 5.1% in 2024 and 3.9% in 2025. Given the higher discount rate, many fewer projects are being greenlit. 8. Political and geopolitical turmoil is not abating. The political environment is exacerbating economic uncertainty. A US government shut down looks likely in November with continued turmoil over the 2024 elections. Russia and Ukraine are in a war of attrition with the quagmire likely lasting years keeping energy and food prices high for years to come. Conclusion I realize that pessimists sound smarter than optimists, but with so many indicators flashing red I find it extremely unlikely that we will have a soft landing. A recession seems like the far more likely scenario and as such we should brace ourselves for a difficult 12 months. While in the short term the macro trumps the micro with markets not differentiating good companies from the bad ones, in the long run the wheat will be separated from the chaff. It also bears to remember that the average recession since 1950 only lasted 10 months with the longest lasting 18 months. As such, 2025 onwards should be rosier especially as we should be starting to see the beginnings of the productivity revolution and deflation brought about by the AI revolution and digitization of B2B supply chains. It won’t quite be the exuberance of the last decades given that interest rates won’t be nearly as low as they were and that we have not yet addressed our excessive sovereign debt and unsustainable government spending, but it will feel brighter than our gloomy present. Until then it will pay to remain prudent in our personal and professional endeavors to ready ourselves to start being aggressive and taking risks at the very moment when everyone else thinks that all hope is lost.

2023-10-04T15:32:16

2023-10-04T15:32:16

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=21384

2024-01-18T16:12:06

2024-01-18T16:12:06

fj-labs-q3-update

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https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-q3-update/

FJ Labs Q3 2023 Update

<p>Friends of FJ Labs,</p> <p>With summer behind us, the team was eager to ramp up investing activities, events, and podcast content these past few months. We are excited to share our recent notable updates in this quarter’s digest!</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-text-color has-dark-gray-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-dark-gray-background-color has-background my-separator is-style-wide"/> <h1 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-center" style="font-size:52px">LATEST UPDATES</h1> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-text-color has-dark-gray-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-dark-gray-background-color has-background my-separator is-style-wide"/> <p><strong>FJ continues to top “most active” early-stage investor lists in Q3</strong></p> <p>According to private market investing platform,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.signalrank.co/dl/da19fa" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">SignalRank,</a>&nbsp;as of July 2023,&nbsp;<strong>FJ Labs was the most active Series A investor YTD and among the top ten at seed.</strong>&nbsp;Extremely grateful to our trusted network of VC managers for sending us their best marketplace deals, and to our exceptional investment team for systematically processing hundreds of opportunities each week!</p> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-12 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow"><div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-2.png" alt="" class="wp-image-21330" width="400" height="376" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-2.png 1115w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-2-768x723.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 400px) 85vw, 400px" /></figure></div></div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow"><div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-3.png" alt="" class="wp-image-21331" width="400" height="378" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-3.png 1125w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-3-768x726.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 400px) 85vw, 400px" /></figure></div></div> </div> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-text-color has-dark-gray-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-dark-gray-background-color has-background my-separator is-style-wide"/> <h1 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-center" style="font-size:52px">BY THE NUMBERS</h1> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-text-color has-dark-gray-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-dark-gray-background-color has-background my-separator is-style-wide"/> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="768" height="128" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/By-the-Numbers-768x408-1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-21522"/></figure></div> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-text-color has-dark-gray-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-dark-gray-background-color has-background my-separator is-style-wide"/> <h1 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-center" style="font-size:52px">PORTFOLIO NEWS</h1> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-text-color has-dark-gray-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-dark-gray-background-color has-background my-separator is-style-wide"/> <p>FJ Labs incubation company,<strong>&nbsp;Mundi,&nbsp;</strong>raised a $15M Series A-2 led by Haymaker Ventures and unveils a multi-product platform for cross-border trade (<a href="https://latamlist.com/mundi-raises-15m-to-enhance-user-experience/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://latamlist.com/mundi-raises-15m-to-enhance-user-experience/" rel="noreferrer noopener">LatamList</a>)</p> <p>B2B payments platform,&nbsp;<strong>Slope</strong>, closed a $30M round led by Union Square Ventures with participation from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexyork/2023/09/27/payments-startup-slope-raises-30-million-from-sam-altman-and-others-to-ramp-up-ai-tools/?sh=fa6bcfc54e5f" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Forbes</a>)</p> <p>Berlin-based EV marketplace startup,&nbsp;<strong>Cardino,&nbsp;</strong>raised a €1M pre-seed round and launched its new online platform, enabling EV sellers to auction their cars to dealerships (<a href="https://tech.eu/2023/09/18/cardino-raises-1m-and-launches-new-c2b-ev-auction-site/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">TechEu</a>)</p> <p><strong>Metaloop</strong>,&nbsp;a seven-year-old Austrian company that connects scrap metal sellers with buyers, raised a €16M Series A led by FirstMark Capital (<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/18/scrap-metal-trading-marketplace-metaloop-raises-17m/?guccounter=1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">TechCrunch</a>)</p> <p>Paris-based<strong>&nbsp;Fairlyne</strong>&nbsp;raised a €2.7M seed round to turn non-refundable tickets into resalable fares, led by Speedinvest (<a href="https://www.eu-startups.com/2023/07/paris-based-fairlyne-bags-e2-7-million-to-turn-non-refundable-tickets-into-resalable-fares/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">EU-Startups</a>)</p> <p>Online grocery delivery platform,&nbsp;<strong>JOKR</strong>, raised a $50M Series D financing at a post-money valuation of $800M (<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/20/jokr-series-d-instant-grocery-delivery/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">TechCrunch</a>)</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-text-color has-dark-gray-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-dark-gray-background-color has-background is-style-wide"/> <h1 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-center" style="font-size:52px">EVENTS</h1> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-text-color has-dark-gray-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-dark-gray-background-color has-background my-separator is-style-wide"/> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-13 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-center is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:365px"><div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-5.png" alt="" class="wp-image-21336" width="365" height="227" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-5.png 2046w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-5-768x479.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-5-1536x958.png 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-5-1200x748.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-5-1320x823.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 365px) 85vw, 365px" /></figure></div></div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow"> <div class="wp-block-group is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container"> <p class="has-text-align-center event" style="font-size:15px">Earlier this summer, we hosted our bi-annual brainstorm offsite at Fabrice’s home in Turks &amp; Caicos. These events serve as invaluable time for the entire investment team and friends of the firm to discuss the current state of the venture market, marketplace megatrends, and ideas that excite us.</p> </div></div> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-14 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-center is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:365px"><div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1600" height="1200" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-6.png" alt="" class="wp-image-21337" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-6.png 1600w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-6-768x576.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-6-1536x1152.png 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-6-1200x900.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-6-1320x990.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div></div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow"> <p class="has-text-align-center" style="font-size:15px">Alongside our friends at Speedinvest, FJ Labs proudly co-sponsored this year’s Marketplace Conference in Berlin. Jose gave the closing keynote address in which he discussed notable marketplace trends and the shifting fundraising landscape. Later in the evening, we enjoyed an intimate dinner with a select group of our Europe-based founders and investors.</p> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-15 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-center is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:365px"><div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="768" height="576" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-7-edited-1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-21430"/></figure></div></div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow"> <p class="has-text-align-center" style="font-size:15px">Our second “Friends of FJ Labs” event took place in New York earlier this month. This most recent installment featured an evening of padel in Williamsburg followed by dinner and great conversation at Fabrice’s place on the Lower East Side. (Fun fact: Fabrice first&nbsp;<a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/padel-the-future-of-tennis/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">blogged</a>&nbsp;about padel back in 2006!)</p> </div> </div> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-text-color has-white-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-white-background-color has-background is-style-wide"/> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-text-color has-medium-gray-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-medium-gray-background-color has-background is-style-wide"/> <h1 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-center" style="font-size:52px">TEAM NEWS</h1> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-text-color has-medium-gray-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-medium-gray-background-color has-background is-style-wide"/> <p>Please join us in congratulating Matt &amp; Cami on their recent promotions!</p> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-16 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow"><div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-8.png" alt="" class="wp-image-21340" width="273" height="273"/></figure></div> <p class="has-text-align-center"><strong>Matthew Stone&nbsp;</strong>was recently promoted to COO. Since 2019, Matt has seamlessly overseen our Operations and Legal teams, two functions that are core to FJ’s high-volume investment strategy. Matt began his career in GE’s Financial Management Program, and most recently worked as a Senior Director at FTI Consulting.</p> </div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow"><div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-9.png" alt="" class="wp-image-21341" width="273" height="273"/></figure></div> <p class="has-text-align-center"><strong>Camila Bustamante</strong>&nbsp;was recently promoted to Associate. Since joining FJ Labs in 2020, Camila has run point on developing core theses in climate tech, mental health investing, and the creator economy. She has also been instrumental in managing our deal pipeline (for which we receive 150+ inbound deals per week!).</p> </div> </div> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-text-color has-white-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-white-background-color has-background is-style-wide"/> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-text-color has-dark-gray-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-dark-gray-background-color has-background is-style-wide"/> <h1 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-center" style="font-size:52px">MEDIA &amp; MORE</h1> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-text-color has-dark-gray-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-dark-gray-background-color has-background is-style-wide"/> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-17 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-center is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:365px"><div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1673" height="768" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-12.png" alt="" class="wp-image-21345" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-12.png 1673w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-12-768x353.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-12-1536x705.png 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-12-1200x551.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-12-1320x606.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div></div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow"> <p class="has-text-align-center" style="font-size:15px">If you haven’t already, make sure to check out Fabrice’s&nbsp;recent appearance on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94vVodLisBY" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Everything Marketplaces</a>&nbsp;in which he details his experience building OLX, what we at FJ Labs look for when investing in marketplace startups, the rise of B2B marketplaces, fundraising tips, and more!</p> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-18 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-center is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:365px"><div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1264" height="670" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-13.png" alt="" class="wp-image-21346" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-13.png 1264w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-13-768x407.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-13-1200x636.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div></div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow"> <p class="has-text-align-center" style="font-size:15px">Fabrice’s latest Playing with Unicorns episode features a&nbsp;<a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-43-julio-vasconcellos-and-the-state-of-latin-american-tech/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">conversation with Julio Vasconcellos</a>,&nbsp;founder of Atlantico, &nbsp;a leading early-stage venture fund in Latin America. Julio discusses why he built Atlantico to focus on Series A investing in LatAm and the significant investment potential he sees in the region today</p> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-19 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-center is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:365px"><div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="222" height="223" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-14.png" alt="" class="wp-image-21347"/></figure></div></div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow"> <p class="has-text-align-center" style="font-size:15px">Matias’&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/@sobremesapodcast" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Sobremesa</a>&nbsp;series features informal chats with up-and-coming tech entrepreneurs. &nbsp;Recent guests include&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgIz62I7fNg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Jack Greco</a>, a prolific angel investor and entrepreneur who built a multibillion dollar company, ACV Auctions, and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjzRX4y01ZI" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjzRX4y01ZI" rel="noreferrer noopener">Emily McAteer</a>, founder of Odyssey Energy Solutions, who this year raised a $15M Series A led by Union Square Ventures.&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-text-color has-medium-gray-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-medium-gray-background-color has-background is-style-wide"/> <p><strong>And for more team writing…</strong></p> <p>Check out this quick and fun post from Fabrice,&nbsp;<a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/the-value-of-ignorance/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/the-value-of-ignorance/" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Value of Ignorance</a>,&nbsp;where he explains why one doesn’t need to know everything before starting their entrepreneurial journey.</p>

<p>Friends of FJ Labs, With summer behind us, the team was eager to ramp up investing activities, events, &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-q3-update/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;FJ Labs Q3 2023 Update&#8221;</span></a></p>

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FJ Labs Q3 2023 Update. Categories - FJ Labs. Date-Posted - 2023-10-04T15:32:16 . Friends of FJ Labs, With summer behind us, the team was eager to ramp up investing activities, events, and podcast content these past few months. We are excited to share our recent notable updates in this quarter’s digest! LATEST UPDATES FJ continues to top “most active” early-stage investor lists in Q3 According to private market investing platform,&nbsp;SignalRank,&nbsp;as of July 2023,&nbsp;FJ Labs was the most active Series A investor YTD and among the top ten at seed.&nbsp;Extremely grateful to our trusted network of VC managers for sending us their best marketplace deals, and to our exceptional investment team for systematically processing hundreds of opportunities each week! BY THE NUMBERS PORTFOLIO NEWS FJ Labs incubation company,&nbsp;Mundi,&nbsp;raised a $15M Series A-2 led by Haymaker Ventures and unveils a multi-product platform for cross-border trade (LatamList) B2B payments platform,&nbsp;Slope, closed a $30M round led by Union Square Ventures with participation from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (Forbes) Berlin-based EV marketplace startup,&nbsp;Cardino,&nbsp;raised a €1M pre-seed round and launched its new online platform, enabling EV sellers to auction their cars to dealerships (TechEu) Metaloop,&nbsp;a seven-year-old Austrian company that connects scrap metal sellers with buyers, raised a €16M Series A led by FirstMark Capital (TechCrunch) Paris-based&nbsp;Fairlyne&nbsp;raised a €2.7M seed round to turn non-refundable tickets into resalable fares, led by Speedinvest (EU-Startups) Online grocery delivery platform,&nbsp;JOKR, raised a $50M Series D financing at a post-money valuation of $800M (TechCrunch) EVENTS Earlier this summer, we hosted our bi-annual brainstorm offsite at Fabrice’s home in Turks &amp; Caicos. These events serve as invaluable time for the entire investment team and friends of the firm to discuss the current state of the venture market, marketplace megatrends, and ideas that excite us. Alongside our friends at Speedinvest, FJ Labs proudly co-sponsored this year’s Marketplace Conference in Berlin. Jose gave the closing keynote address in which he discussed notable marketplace trends and the shifting fundraising landscape. Later in the evening, we enjoyed an intimate dinner with a select group of our Europe-based founders and investors. Our second “Friends of FJ Labs” event took place in New York earlier this month. This most recent installment featured an evening of padel in Williamsburg followed by dinner and great conversation at Fabrice’s place on the Lower East Side. (Fun fact: Fabrice first&nbsp;blogged&nbsp;about padel back in 2006!) TEAM NEWS Please join us in congratulating Matt &amp; Cami on their recent promotions! Matthew Stone&nbsp;was recently promoted to COO. Since 2019, Matt has seamlessly overseen our Operations and Legal teams, two functions that are core to FJ’s high-volume investment strategy. Matt began his career in GE’s Financial Management Program, and most recently worked as a Senior Director at FTI Consulting. Camila Bustamante&nbsp;was recently promoted to Associate. Since joining FJ Labs in 2020, Camila has run point on developing core theses in climate tech, mental health investing, and the creator economy. She has also been instrumental in managing our deal pipeline (for which we receive 150+ inbound deals per week!). MEDIA &amp; MORE If you haven’t already, make sure to check out Fabrice’s&nbsp;recent appearance on&nbsp;Everything Marketplaces&nbsp;in which he details his experience building OLX, what we at FJ Labs look for when investing in marketplace startups, the rise of B2B marketplaces, fundraising tips, and more! Fabrice’s latest Playing with Unicorns episode features a&nbsp;conversation with Julio Vasconcellos,&nbsp;founder of Atlantico, &nbsp;a leading early-stage venture fund in Latin America. Julio discusses why he built Atlantico to focus on Series A investing in LatAm and the significant investment potential he sees in the region today Matias’&nbsp;Sobremesa&nbsp;series features informal chats with up-and-coming tech entrepreneurs. &nbsp;Recent guests include&nbsp;Jack Greco, a prolific angel investor and entrepreneur who built a multibillion dollar company, ACV Auctions, and&nbsp;Emily McAteer, founder of Odyssey Energy Solutions, who this year raised a $15M Series A led by Union Square Ventures.&nbsp; And for more team writing… Check out this quick and fun post from Fabrice,&nbsp;The Value of Ignorance,&nbsp;where he explains why one doesn’t need to know everything before starting their entrepreneurial journey.

2023-09-20T14:01:30

2023-09-20T14:01:30

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=21297

2023-09-20T14:01:31

2023-09-20T14:01:31

picard-season-3-is-fantastic-and-a-must-watch-for-star-trek-the-next-generation-fans-but-skip-seasons-1-and-2

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Picard Season 3 is fantastic and a must watch for Star Trek: The Next Generation fans (but skip seasons 1 and 2)!

<p></p> <p>I was in college for the final years of <em>Star Trek: The Next Generation</em> and awaited eagerly every new episode. I loved the show’s core themes of optimism and exploration by a highly competent crew making reasonable judgement calls under pressure.</p> <p>In the last two decades, however, I felt that Star Trek had lost its way. Nothing annoyed me more than <em>Discovery</em> which was a woke disaster which openly rejected stalwart Star Trek traditions like competence, diplomacy, real-sounding science, and a proper chain of command.</p> <p><em>Picard</em> seasons 1 and 2 fell prey to a common disease I observed when reboots are made bringing back the old cast. The heroes of our past, Rocky, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Picard, or even the women from Sex and the City are typically depicted as lonely, depressed, and moribund having lost their joie de vivre and having forgotten the lessons life taught them along the way. That is not at all how we fans imagine those heroes aging. We imagine them aging gracefully and stoically providing wisdom and support to those around them and still kicking ass in their own way albeit more with their presence, intellect, and experience than their physicality.</p> <p>I suppose that the writers depict them this way to make room for their supposed replacements who are younger, cheaper, and typically more diverse characters who are portrayed as capable and flawless typically from the get-go. The issue is that because these characters face no real challenges, they come across as arrogant and the entire exercise feels trite with our heroes made to appear weak only to make their heirs look good. That’s why Rey, Captain Marvel, Michael, or Helena don’t connect with audiences. They don’t go on a hero’s journey. That’s not to say diversity is bad, it’s just that the characters must be well written. It’s way more compelling if they face real challenges and learn lessons along the way which is why Ripley, Sarrah Connor and even Kitty Softpaws make for amazing strong female leads.</p> <p><em>Picard</em> seasons 1 and 2 had all those flaws, but season 3 is different. I suspect that the writers were replaced, and the new writers clearly knew, respected, and loved the source material. It takes a few episodes for the adventure to get under and to rectify many of the mistakes of the first two seasons, starting with making Picard himself be competent rather than impotent, but once it gets going it rekindles the flame of <em>The Next Generation</em>. Picard Season 3 is really a new season of <em>The Next Generation</em>. The entire cast is essentially brought back together. It is a nostalgia trip, but it is much more than that as the story works, and the characters’ age is an integral part of the plot. In fact, the show was so good I am tempted to check out <em>Star Trek: Strange New Worlds</em>.</p> <p>Ultimately, <em>Picard</em> season 3 is the perfect end to <em>The Next Generation</em>, making it perhaps the only TV show to have ever had two perfect endings.</p>

<p>I was in college for the final years of Star Trek: The Next Generation and awaited eagerly every &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/picard-season-3-is-fantastic-and-a-must-watch-for-star-trek-the-next-generation-fans-but-skip-seasons-1-and-2/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Picard Season 3 is fantastic and a must watch for Star Trek: The Next Generation fans (but skip seasons 1 and 2)!&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Picard Season 3 is fantastic and a must watch for Star Trek: The Next Generation fans (but skip seasons 1 and 2)!. Categories - Movies &amp; TV Shows. Date-Posted - 2023-09-20T14:01:30 . I was in college for the final years of Star Trek: The Next Generation and awaited eagerly every new episode. I loved the show’s core themes of optimism and exploration by a highly competent crew making reasonable judgement calls under pressure. In the last two decades, however, I felt that Star Trek had lost its way. Nothing annoyed me more than Discovery which was a woke disaster which openly rejected stalwart Star Trek traditions like competence, diplomacy, real-sounding science, and a proper chain of command. Picard seasons 1 and 2 fell prey to a common disease I observed when reboots are made bringing back the old cast. The heroes of our past, Rocky, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Picard, or even the women from Sex and the City are typically depicted as lonely, depressed, and moribund having lost their joie de vivre and having forgotten the lessons life taught them along the way. That is not at all how we fans imagine those heroes aging. We imagine them aging gracefully and stoically providing wisdom and support to those around them and still kicking ass in their own way albeit more with their presence, intellect, and experience than their physicality. I suppose that the writers depict them this way to make room for their supposed replacements who are younger, cheaper, and typically more diverse characters who are portrayed as capable and flawless typically from the get-go. The issue is that because these characters face no real challenges, they come across as arrogant and the entire exercise feels trite with our heroes made to appear weak only to make their heirs look good. That’s why Rey, Captain Marvel, Michael, or Helena don’t connect with audiences. They don’t go on a hero’s journey. That’s not to say diversity is bad, it’s just that the characters must be well written. It’s way more compelling if they face real challenges and learn lessons along the way which is why Ripley, Sarrah Connor and even Kitty Softpaws make for amazing strong female leads. Picard seasons 1 and 2 had all those flaws, but season 3 is different. I suspect that the writers were replaced, and the new writers clearly knew, respected, and loved the source material. It takes a few episodes for the adventure to get under and to rectify many of the mistakes of the first two seasons, starting with making Picard himself be competent rather than impotent, but once it gets going it rekindles the flame of The Next Generation. Picard Season 3 is really a new season of The Next Generation. The entire cast is essentially brought back together. It is a nostalgia trip, but it is much more than that as the story works, and the characters’ age is an integral part of the plot. In fact, the show was so good I am tempted to check out Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Ultimately, Picard season 3 is the perfect end to The Next Generation, making it perhaps the only TV show to have ever had two perfect endings.

2023-09-12T14:29:11

2023-09-12T14:29:11

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=21203

2023-09-12T14:29:12

2023-09-12T14:29:12

episode-43-julio-vasconcellos-and-the-state-of-latin-american-tech

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Episode 43: Julio Vasconcellos and the state of Latin American tech

<p>I had the pleasure of receiving Julio Vasconcellos on the show. Julio is the Founder and Managing Partner of <a href="https://www.atlantico.vc/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.atlantico.vc/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Atlantico</a>, a leading early-stage venture fund in Latin America. It was Julio&#8217;s role as the inaugural Facebook employee for Latin America that initiated his path in the startup world in the region after starting his career in Silicon Valley. He later co-founded Peixe Urbano, scaling it to over 1,200 employees and $100M+ in revenue. After a startup rollercoaster ride with multiple near-death experiences, Julio sold the company to Baidu, and went on to join Benchmark Capital as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. There, he met Scott Belsky and the two went on to co-found Prefer in San Francisco which Benchmark backed, as they had with Peixe Urbano.</p> <p>Alongside his entrepreneurial journey, Julio has been investing for over a decade. Starting as a seed investor, he co-founded Graph Ventures with fellow colleagues from Facebook and Stanford. Later, he helped co-found <a href="https://canary.com.br/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://canary.com.br/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Canary</a>, the leading seed-stage fund in Latin America. In 2020, Julio returned to Brazil to found Atlantico and focus on early-stage venture investing.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Episode 43: Julio Vasconcellos and the state of Latin American tech?" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CFRjspdAdIo?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>We covered:</p> <ul> <li>His history and path into tech.</li> <li>His transition from entrepreneur to investor.</li> <li>Why he built Atlantico to focus on Series A investing in Latin America.</li> <li>The significant investment potential within Latin America today.</li> </ul> <p>The session was super interactive with lots of audience questions and participation. We also dug deeper on the latest findings on the region based on Atlantico’s recently launched <a href="https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffabricegrinda.com%2F%3Fmailpoet_router%26endpoint%3Dtrack%26action%3Dclick%26data%3DWyI0MTMiLCI1Y2E2OWEiLCIxNzg4IiwiNjBlY2UxY2YzZjY2IixmYWxzZV0&amp;data=05%7C01%7Cfabrice%40grinda.org%7Ca80c8b696b6e42b74edf08dbae1fcd90%7Cd69a202a6ce24679993d72da8866b988%7C0%7C0%7C638295223876775602%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&amp;sdata=zhbPKmk7JI35yJDxb795pHgyD6upLgRoqw%2FgHecXOs0%3D&amp;reserved=0" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Latin America Digital Transformation Report 2023</a> focusing on the the five tectonic shifts they identified:</p> <ol type="1"> <li><strong>Latin America is the Engine of the World:</strong></li> </ol> <p>LatAm is an unexpected winner in a polarized world. For the first time in 20 years, Mexico has overtaken China as the #1 US trade partner. LatAm commodities are critical for the clean-energy transition and facing increasing demand.</p> <ol type="1" start="2"> <li><strong>Digital Democratization is a Reality:</strong></li> </ol> <p>LatAm is caught up on digital access. Internet penetration reached 78% on average in 2022 (and as high as 90%), coming close to high-income countries with mobile is closing the e-commerce gap.</p> <ol type="1" start="3"> <li><strong>Renewal of the Entrepreneurship Spirit:</strong></li> </ol> <p>LatAm has a history of doing more with less. With 1/25th the VC funding of India (as a % of GDP), LatAm produced more $1Bn+ exits and 20% more equity value.</p> <ol type="1" start="4"> <li><strong>Money Goes Super Digital:</strong></li> </ol> <p>Brazil&#8217;s Pix is a global phenomenon. Pix usage is 2x that of India&#8217;s UPI (per capita) and used twice as often as cash for in-person payments.</p> <ol type="1" start="5"> <li><strong>AI is the Great Equalizer:</strong></li> </ol> <p>LatAm is welcoming AI with open arms. Funding and adoption of AI by companies started 6 months behind the US but is rapidly accelerating. Education, healthcare, legal are all getting an AI push. Startups are rapidly tooling up to address inefficiencies and low-hanging opportunities in&nbsp;these&nbsp;sectors.</p> <p>If you prefer, you can listen to the episode in the embedded podcast player.</p> <figure><iframe loading="lazy" title="Libsyn Player" style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/27991290/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/forward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/000000/" height="90" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen=""></iframe></figure> <p>In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on:</p> <ul> <li>iTunes: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/43-julio-vasconcellos-and-the-state-of-latin-american-tech/id1532336635?i=1000627376859" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/43-julio-vasconcellos-and-the-state-of-latin-american-tech/id1532336635?i=1000627376859</a></li> <li>Spotify: <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/24eC0ehhrOPjqV6hOdZb1v?si=84a74a9f3f634102" data-type="URL" data-id="https://open.spotify.com/episode/24eC0ehhrOPjqV6hOdZb1v?si=84a74a9f3f634102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://open.spotify.com/episode/24eC0ehhrOPjqV6hOdZb1v?si=84a74a9f3f634102</a></li> </ul>

<p>I had the pleasure of receiving Julio Vasconcellos on the show. Julio is the Founder and Managing Partner &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-43-julio-vasconcellos-and-the-state-of-latin-american-tech/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Episode 43: Julio Vasconcellos and the state of Latin American tech&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Episode 43: Julio Vasconcellos and the state of Latin American tech. Categories - Playing with Unicorns. Date-Posted - 2023-09-12T14:29:11 . I had the pleasure of receiving Julio Vasconcellos on the show. Julio is the Founder and Managing Partner of Atlantico, a leading early-stage venture fund in Latin America. It was Julio&#8217;s role as the inaugural Facebook employee for Latin America that initiated his path in the startup world in the region after starting his career in Silicon Valley. He later co-founded Peixe Urbano, scaling it to over 1,200 employees and $100M+ in revenue. After a startup rollercoaster ride with multiple near-death experiences, Julio sold the company to Baidu, and went on to join Benchmark Capital as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. There, he met Scott Belsky and the two went on to co-found Prefer in San Francisco which Benchmark backed, as they had with Peixe Urbano. Alongside his entrepreneurial journey, Julio has been investing for over a decade. Starting as a seed investor, he co-founded Graph Ventures with fellow colleagues from Facebook and Stanford. Later, he helped co-found Canary, the leading seed-stage fund in Latin America. In 2020, Julio returned to Brazil to found Atlantico and focus on early-stage venture investing. We covered: His history and path into tech. His transition from entrepreneur to investor. Why he built Atlantico to focus on Series A investing in Latin America. The significant investment potential within Latin America today. The session was super interactive with lots of audience questions and participation. We also dug deeper on the latest findings on the region based on Atlantico’s recently launched Latin America Digital Transformation Report 2023 focusing on the the five tectonic shifts they identified: Latin America is the Engine of the World: LatAm is an unexpected winner in a polarized world. For the first time in 20 years, Mexico has overtaken China as the #1 US trade partner. LatAm commodities are critical for the clean-energy transition and facing increasing demand. Digital Democratization is a Reality: LatAm is caught up on digital access. Internet penetration reached 78% on average in 2022 (and as high as 90%), coming close to high-income countries with mobile is closing the e-commerce gap. Renewal of the Entrepreneurship Spirit: LatAm has a history of doing more with less. With 1/25th the VC funding of India (as a % of GDP), LatAm produced more $1Bn+ exits and 20% more equity value. Money Goes Super Digital: Brazil&#8217;s Pix is a global phenomenon. Pix usage is 2x that of India&#8217;s UPI (per capita) and used twice as often as cash for in-person payments. AI is the Great Equalizer: LatAm is welcoming AI with open arms. Funding and adoption of AI by companies started 6 months behind the US but is rapidly accelerating. Education, healthcare, legal are all getting an AI push. Startups are rapidly tooling up to address inefficiencies and low-hanging opportunities in&nbsp;these&nbsp;sectors. If you prefer, you can listen to the episode in the embedded podcast player. In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on: iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/43-julio-vasconcellos-and-the-state-of-latin-american-tech/id1532336635?i=1000627376859 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/24eC0ehhrOPjqV6hOdZb1v?si=84a74a9f3f634102

2023-08-22T15:00:52

2023-08-22T15:00:52

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=20705

2023-08-22T15:00:53

2023-08-22T15:00:53

fj-labs-liquid-crypto-data-due-diligence

publish

post

https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-liquid-crypto-data-due-diligence/

FJ Labs’ Liquid Crypto Data Due Diligence

<p><em>How FJ Labs uses data to make capital allocation decisions in the liquid crypto market.</em></p> <p>As discussed in a previous post, FJ Labs has allocated $30m of the core fund to a liquid crypto strategy. Our investment process is comprised of both an evaluation phase and a data due diligence phase. The below post outlines how we approach the data aggregation and discovery.</p> <p><strong>Regression</strong></p> <p>After we have discussed an asset in our investment committee, we move it from the “Research” phase to the “Data Due Diligence” phase of our process. Before creating our dashboards for each vertical, we first define which key metric categories matter if we want to track growth and competitive position within a given vertical.</p> <p>To do this, we regress a robust set of independent variables against the change in asset price for every asset in a given vertical. These independent variables are shown below, and comprise both macro and project specific factors.</p> <p>*Note – the below analysis provides only a high-level example of our strategy. In practice we use a different, far more robust, set of independent variables for each vertical.</p> <p><strong>Macro Data Set</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="650" height="374" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Macro-Data-Set-1.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-20784"/></figure></div> <p><strong>Crypto Metric Data Set</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="650" height="836" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Crypto-Metric-Data-Set-3.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-20785"/></figure></div> <p>The output of these regression models provide insight into which fundamental metrics are most significant for each crypto vertical we invest in. These variables then inform which data we track for each of our crypto vertical dashboards.</p> <p><strong>Real-Time Data Insights</strong></p> <p>In the crypto space, most code is open source and everything that happens on the blockchain is transparent (barring zk and other technical obfuscation). This means that, with sophisticated data science capabilities, we can aggregate the most relevant metrics for each vertical we invest in, and track these metrics over time to better understand how use of different blockchains and decentralized applications evolve over time.</p> <p>For each vertical, we create a suite of data dashboards, which provide a comprehensive view of activity for that vertical, and a fundamental source of truth upon which we can base our investment and trade management decisions.</p> <p>Below we will provide an example of how we use these dashboards to make data-driven decisions around capital allocation and investment sizing for the “Layer 2” vertical.</p> <p>*Note – The below data dashboard case study focuses on the Layer-2 vertical for Ethereum. After completing this dashboard build, we realized the data insights would be valuable to the broader Ethereum community. We applied for and received an Ethereum Foundation grant to build out the interface and open-source the dashboard. The resulting interface can be found at <a href="https://www.growthepie.xyz/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.growthepie.xyz/" rel="noreferrer noopener">growthepie.xyz</a>. Enjoy!</p> <p><strong>A Layer 2 Case Study</strong></p> <p>With the proliferation of Layer 2 execution environments, decentralized applications that were formerly built on the Ethereum base chain have migrated to Layer 2 execution environments for faster settlement times and lower fees.</p> <p>One type of Layer 2 execution environment is “Optimistic Rollups”, the leaders of which are Arbitrum and Optimism.</p> <p>The first step in our analysis involves aggregating and cleaning data across Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Optimism to create a high-level view of how these different ecosystems are growing or contracting relative to one another.</p> <p><strong>Ethereum</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Ethereum-2.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-20789" width="728" height="229" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Ethereum-2.jpg 1278w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Ethereum-2-768x242.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Ethereum-2-1200x377.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p><strong>Arbitrum</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Arbitrum.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-20770" width="770" height="531" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Arbitrum.jpg 1540w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Arbitrum-768x530.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Arbitrum-1536x1059.jpg 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Arbitrum-1200x828.jpg 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Arbitrum-1320x910.jpg 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p><strong>Optimism</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Optimistic.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-20771" width="771" height="505" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Optimistic.jpg 1542w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Optimistic-768x503.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Optimistic-1536x1006.jpg 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Optimistic-1200x786.jpg 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Optimistic-1320x865.jpg 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p><strong>Deriving Insights and Making Capital Allocation Decisions</strong></p> <p>Using the insights from these dashboards, we can determine which of these layer 2 ecosystems is growing fastest across the metrics that we think matter for this vertical. Once we make an investment decision, we can also track these investments and compare their fundamental metrics to other assets in the same vertical. Through this process we can stay exposed to the projects with the most promising metrics in each vertical we invest in.</p> <p><strong>Expanding Our Analysis Across All Ecosystems</strong></p> <p>Using the same process shown above for Layer 2s, we have built a set of high-level key metric views and fine-grained analysis dashboards for all of the verticals we track across the crypto space (currently 19 verticals).</p> <p>As the space grows, and activity gravitates toward different ecosystems and execution environments, we believe we will be able to make more rigorous, data-driven capital allocation decisions in advance of price movements across multiple verticals.</p>

<p>How FJ Labs uses data to make capital allocation decisions in the liquid crypto market. As discussed in &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-liquid-crypto-data-due-diligence/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;FJ Labs’ Liquid Crypto Data Due Diligence&#8221;</span></a></p>

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FJ Labs’ Liquid Crypto Data Due Diligence. Categories - Crypto/Web3, FJ Labs. Date-Posted - 2023-08-22T15:00:52 . How FJ Labs uses data to make capital allocation decisions in the liquid crypto market. As discussed in a previous post, FJ Labs has allocated $30m of the core fund to a liquid crypto strategy. Our investment process is comprised of both an evaluation phase and a data due diligence phase. The below post outlines how we approach the data aggregation and discovery. Regression After we have discussed an asset in our investment committee, we move it from the “Research” phase to the “Data Due Diligence” phase of our process. Before creating our dashboards for each vertical, we first define which key metric categories matter if we want to track growth and competitive position within a given vertical. To do this, we regress a robust set of independent variables against the change in asset price for every asset in a given vertical. These independent variables are shown below, and comprise both macro and project specific factors. *Note – the below analysis provides only a high-level example of our strategy. In practice we use a different, far more robust, set of independent variables for each vertical. Macro Data Set Crypto Metric Data Set The output of these regression models provide insight into which fundamental metrics are most significant for each crypto vertical we invest in. These variables then inform which data we track for each of our crypto vertical dashboards. Real-Time Data Insights In the crypto space, most code is open source and everything that happens on the blockchain is transparent (barring zk and other technical obfuscation). This means that, with sophisticated data science capabilities, we can aggregate the most relevant metrics for each vertical we invest in, and track these metrics over time to better understand how use of different blockchains and decentralized applications evolve over time. For each vertical, we create a suite of data dashboards, which provide a comprehensive view of activity for that vertical, and a fundamental source of truth upon which we can base our investment and trade management decisions. Below we will provide an example of how we use these dashboards to make data-driven decisions around capital allocation and investment sizing for the “Layer 2” vertical. *Note – The below data dashboard case study focuses on the Layer-2 vertical for Ethereum. After completing this dashboard build, we realized the data insights would be valuable to the broader Ethereum community. We applied for and received an Ethereum Foundation grant to build out the interface and open-source the dashboard. The resulting interface can be found at growthepie.xyz. Enjoy! A Layer 2 Case Study With the proliferation of Layer 2 execution environments, decentralized applications that were formerly built on the Ethereum base chain have migrated to Layer 2 execution environments for faster settlement times and lower fees. One type of Layer 2 execution environment is “Optimistic Rollups”, the leaders of which are Arbitrum and Optimism. The first step in our analysis involves aggregating and cleaning data across Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Optimism to create a high-level view of how these different ecosystems are growing or contracting relative to one another. Ethereum Arbitrum Optimism Deriving Insights and Making Capital Allocation Decisions Using the insights from these dashboards, we can determine which of these layer 2 ecosystems is growing fastest across the metrics that we think matter for this vertical. Once we make an investment decision, we can also track these investments and compare their fundamental metrics to other assets in the same vertical. Through this process we can stay exposed to the projects with the most promising metrics in each vertical we invest in. Expanding Our Analysis Across All Ecosystems Using the same process shown above for Layer 2s, we have built a set of high-level key metric views and fine-grained analysis dashboards for all of the verticals we track across the crypto space (currently 19 verticals). As the space grows, and activity gravitates toward different ecosystems and execution environments, we believe we will be able to make more rigorous, data-driven capital allocation decisions in advance of price movements across multiple verticals.

2023-08-15T15:09:15

2023-08-15T15:09:15

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=20803

2023-08-18T17:03:40

2023-08-18T17:03:40

masterclass-with-everything-marketplaces

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post

https://fabricegrinda.com/masterclass-with-everything-marketplaces/

Masterclass with Everything Marketplaces

<p>I had a fun group chat led by <a href="https://twitter.com/Yoroomie" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mike Williams</a> on <a href="https://www.everythingmarketplaces.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Everything Marketplaces</a>.</p> <p>We covered:</p> <ul> <li>My previous operator experience &amp; key learnings from OLX.</li> <li>An overview of FJ Labs as a leading early-stage venture fund that&#8217;s backed over 1,000+ startups.</li> <li>What we look for in marketplaces that we invest in.</li> <li>Marketplace metrics &amp; benchmarks for the Seed stage when fundraising today.</li> <li>Trends with the rise of B2B marketplaces.</li> <li>The biggest mistakes that early-stage marketplace founders often make.</li> <li>Fundraising tips.</li> <li>Much more!</li> </ul> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-rich is-provider-embed-handler wp-block-embed-embed-handler wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="EM Group Chat #138: Leading Marketplace &amp; Investor Insights With Fabrice Grinda From FJ Labs" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/94vVodLisBY?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94vVodLisBY&amp;t=6s" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">0:06</a>&nbsp;Intro<br>‍<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94vVodLisBY&amp;t=79s" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">1:19</a>&nbsp;Fabrice&#8217;s background<br>‍<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94vVodLisBY&amp;t=249s" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">4:09</a>&nbsp;Fabrice&#8217;s experience scaling OLX &amp; key learnings<br>‍<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94vVodLisBY&amp;t=528s" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">8:48</a>&nbsp;An overview of FJ Labs as a leading early stage venture fund<br>‍<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94vVodLisBY&amp;t=642s" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">10:42</a>&nbsp;The metrics &amp; benchmarks for Pre-Seed &amp; Seed stage marketplaces<br>‍<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94vVodLisBY&amp;t=811s" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">13:31</a>&nbsp;Trends with the rise of B2B marketplaces &amp; marketplace design changing<br>‍<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94vVodLisBY&amp;t=1071s" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">17:51</a>&nbsp;How investors evaluate B2B marketplaces at the earliest stages<br>‍<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94vVodLisBY&amp;t=1194s" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">19:54</a>&nbsp;The geographies that FJ Labs invests in &amp; opportunities for marketplaces in emerging markets<br>‍<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94vVodLisBY&amp;t=1303s" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">21:43</a>&nbsp;Mistakes that early stage marketplace founders often make<br>‍<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94vVodLisBY&amp;t=1468s" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">24:28</a>&nbsp;Fundraising tips for early stage marketplace founders<br>‍<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94vVodLisBY&amp;t=1677s" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">27:57</a>&nbsp;Group Q&amp;A on using supply to help drive marketplace demand<br>‍<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94vVodLisBY&amp;t=1846s" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">30:46</a>&nbsp;Group Q&amp;A on B2B marketplaces starting out with a narrow vertical focus vs. being more horizontal<br>‍<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94vVodLisBY&amp;t=2004s" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">33:24</a>&nbsp;Group Q&amp;A on opportunities for marketplaces to leverage AI<br>‍<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94vVodLisBY&amp;t=2315s" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">38:35</a>&nbsp;Group Q&amp;A on metrics &amp; benchmarks that investors use the evaluate marketplaces at the Series A stage<br>‍<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94vVodLisBY&amp;t=2469s" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">41:09</a>&nbsp;Parting marketplace advice</p>

<p>I had a fun group chat led by Mike Williams on Everything Marketplaces. We covered: 0:06&nbsp;Intro‍1:19&nbsp;Fabrice&#8217;s background‍4:09&nbsp;Fabrice&#8217;s experience &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/masterclass-with-everything-marketplaces/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Masterclass with Everything Marketplaces&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Masterclass with Everything Marketplaces. Categories - Interviews &amp; Fireside Chats, Marketplaces. Date-Posted - 2023-08-15T15:09:15 . I had a fun group chat led by Mike Williams on Everything Marketplaces. We covered: My previous operator experience &amp; key learnings from OLX. An overview of FJ Labs as a leading early-stage venture fund that&#8217;s backed over 1,000+ startups. What we look for in marketplaces that we invest in. Marketplace metrics &amp; benchmarks for the Seed stage when fundraising today. Trends with the rise of B2B marketplaces. The biggest mistakes that early-stage marketplace founders often make. Fundraising tips. Much more! 0:06&nbsp;Intro‍1:19&nbsp;Fabrice&#8217;s background‍4:09&nbsp;Fabrice&#8217;s experience scaling OLX &amp; key learnings‍8:48&nbsp;An overview of FJ Labs as a leading early stage venture fund‍10:42&nbsp;The metrics &amp; benchmarks for Pre-Seed &amp; Seed stage marketplaces‍13:31&nbsp;Trends with the rise of B2B marketplaces &amp; marketplace design changing‍17:51&nbsp;How investors evaluate B2B marketplaces at the earliest stages‍19:54&nbsp;The geographies that FJ Labs invests in &amp; opportunities for marketplaces in emerging markets‍21:43&nbsp;Mistakes that early stage marketplace founders often make‍24:28&nbsp;Fundraising tips for early stage marketplace founders‍27:57&nbsp;Group Q&amp;A on using supply to help drive marketplace demand‍30:46&nbsp;Group Q&amp;A on B2B marketplaces starting out with a narrow vertical focus vs. being more horizontal‍33:24&nbsp;Group Q&amp;A on opportunities for marketplaces to leverage AI‍38:35&nbsp;Group Q&amp;A on metrics &amp; benchmarks that investors use the evaluate marketplaces at the Series A stage‍41:09&nbsp;Parting marketplace advice

2023-08-08T13:57:16

2023-08-08T13:57:16

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=20496

2023-08-08T21:17:38

2023-08-08T21:17:38

fj-labs-liquid-crypto-evaluation-process

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https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-liquid-crypto-evaluation-process/

FJ Labs’ Liquid Crypto Evaluation Process

<p><em>How FJ Labs uses a VC lens to make capital allocation decisions in the liquid crypto market.</em></p> <p>As discussed in a previous post, FJ Labs has allocated $30m of the core fund to a liquid crypto strategy. Throughout this post we will elaborate on these unique elements and discuss how we adapt a traditional VC investment approach to allocate to this emerging asset class.</p> <p><strong>The Process</strong></p> <p>The goal of our process is to take in the total investable landscape of crypto assets and output the best possible diversified portfolio of high quality, early-stage crypto projects and protocols. Once we make an investment, we monitor these projects real-time through a suite of proprietary dashboards and make changes to our portfolio based on persistent growth or contraction in theses underlying metrics.</p> <p>This consists of three distinct phases:&nbsp;</p> <ul> <li>Research (purple)</li> <li>Data Due Diligence (blue)</li> <li>Investment (green)</li> </ul> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2560" height="599" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Token-Review-Machine-Token-Status-Flow-2-1-scaled.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-20659" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Token-Review-Machine-Token-Status-Flow-2-1-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Token-Review-Machine-Token-Status-Flow-2-1-768x180.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Token-Review-Machine-Token-Status-Flow-2-1-1536x359.jpg 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Token-Review-Machine-Token-Status-Flow-2-1-2048x479.jpg 2048w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Token-Review-Machine-Token-Status-Flow-2-1-1200x281.jpg 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Token-Review-Machine-Token-Status-Flow-2-1-1320x309.jpg 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure> <p><strong>Filter</strong></p> <p>Currently there are 22,932 unique crypto assets, 99% of which are (or should be) entirely worthless. To reduce this total investable landscape, we first apply a coarse filter that truncates the list based on quantitative metrics such as market cap, fully diluted value, token issuance, trading volume, and token distribution. We then qualitatively backfill this list with compelling early-stage tokens that might have been removed by our coarse quantitative filter.</p> <p><strong>Vertical Segmentation</strong></p> <p>We then segment the token landscape into distinct verticals, around which we have an internal thesis. For example, if we are interested in exposure to DeFi DEXs, we will aggregate projects such as Uniswap, Curve, Sushiswap, Orca, Pancakeswap, and Balancer, amongst others. This delineation accomplishes a few goals:</p> <ol type="1"> <li>It lets us look at a vertical in aggregate, and select the most compelling projects in each vertical.</li> <li>It provides the competitive landscape against which we can track growth of specific projects, intra-vertical.</li> <li>It provides the basis of our regression analysis and data dashboarding (more on this later).</li> </ol> <p><strong>Research</strong></p> <p>At this point, we have a rough idea of which projects warrant a deep dive for each unique vertical, and we proceed with thorough diligence. For each token, we conduct a 10-20 page writeup that follows a formulaic template to comprehensively asses the project. To date we have done 97 10-20 page token writeups.</p> <p><strong>Investment Committee</strong></p> <p>After we conduct all writeups on a certain vertical, we organize them and pitch the most compelling projects to the FJ Labs Token Investment Committee. Since we assess all projects for a certain vertical together, we can more easily compare the merits of each. After debating the team, product, traction, value accrual mechanism, and token economics of these projects, we move toward a final decision:</p> <ol type="1"> <li>Should we invest in this vertical?</li> <li>If yes, which project(s) in this vertical are most compelling?</li> <li>What are the unknowns and what further research (if any) must be done?</li> <li>What are the key metrics we should focus on to track the evolving dynamics for each vertical?</li> <li>What is a reasonable fair price for this asset (from both top down and bottom up)?</li> <li>Where should we be a buyer?</li> <li>Where should we be a seller?</li> </ol> <p>In the next post, we will outline how we add a layer of data insights to our evaluation process to both stress-test our investment decision and to manage our liquid portfolio.</p>

<p>How FJ Labs uses a VC lens to make capital allocation decisions in the liquid crypto market. As &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-liquid-crypto-evaluation-process/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;FJ Labs’ Liquid Crypto Evaluation Process&#8221;</span></a></p>

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FJ Labs’ Liquid Crypto Evaluation Process. Categories - Crypto/Web3, FJ Labs. Date-Posted - 2023-08-08T13:57:16 . How FJ Labs uses a VC lens to make capital allocation decisions in the liquid crypto market. As discussed in a previous post, FJ Labs has allocated $30m of the core fund to a liquid crypto strategy. Throughout this post we will elaborate on these unique elements and discuss how we adapt a traditional VC investment approach to allocate to this emerging asset class. The Process The goal of our process is to take in the total investable landscape of crypto assets and output the best possible diversified portfolio of high quality, early-stage crypto projects and protocols. Once we make an investment, we monitor these projects real-time through a suite of proprietary dashboards and make changes to our portfolio based on persistent growth or contraction in theses underlying metrics. This consists of three distinct phases:&nbsp; Research (purple) Data Due Diligence (blue) Investment (green) Filter Currently there are 22,932 unique crypto assets, 99% of which are (or should be) entirely worthless. To reduce this total investable landscape, we first apply a coarse filter that truncates the list based on quantitative metrics such as market cap, fully diluted value, token issuance, trading volume, and token distribution. We then qualitatively backfill this list with compelling early-stage tokens that might have been removed by our coarse quantitative filter. Vertical Segmentation We then segment the token landscape into distinct verticals, around which we have an internal thesis. For example, if we are interested in exposure to DeFi DEXs, we will aggregate projects such as Uniswap, Curve, Sushiswap, Orca, Pancakeswap, and Balancer, amongst others. This delineation accomplishes a few goals: It lets us look at a vertical in aggregate, and select the most compelling projects in each vertical. It provides the competitive landscape against which we can track growth of specific projects, intra-vertical. It provides the basis of our regression analysis and data dashboarding (more on this later). Research At this point, we have a rough idea of which projects warrant a deep dive for each unique vertical, and we proceed with thorough diligence. For each token, we conduct a 10-20 page writeup that follows a formulaic template to comprehensively asses the project. To date we have done 97 10-20 page token writeups. Investment Committee After we conduct all writeups on a certain vertical, we organize them and pitch the most compelling projects to the FJ Labs Token Investment Committee. Since we assess all projects for a certain vertical together, we can more easily compare the merits of each. After debating the team, product, traction, value accrual mechanism, and token economics of these projects, we move toward a final decision: Should we invest in this vertical? If yes, which project(s) in this vertical are most compelling? What are the unknowns and what further research (if any) must be done? What are the key metrics we should focus on to track the evolving dynamics for each vertical? What is a reasonable fair price for this asset (from both top down and bottom up)? Where should we be a buyer? Where should we be a seller? In the next post, we will outline how we add a layer of data insights to our evaluation process to both stress-test our investment decision and to manage our liquid portfolio.

2023-08-01T13:48:15

2023-08-01T13:48:15

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=20471

2023-08-01T13:48:16

2023-08-01T13:48:16

the-value-of-ignorance

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post

https://fabricegrinda.com/the-value-of-ignorance/

The Value of Ignorance

<p>&nbsp;“They did not know it was impossible so they did it.” Mark Twain’s quote resonates with me. As much as we encourage founders to <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-10-validating-your-startup-idea/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-10-validating-your-startup-idea/" rel="noreferrer noopener">validate their startup idea</a> in an extremely rigorous way, you do not need to validate everything ahead of time as long as you believe you will figure out how to deal with whatever challenge comes your way.</p> <p><strong>Aucland</strong></p> <p>Aucland was my first venture backed startup. It was an eBay of France and Southern Europe. Prior to launching I did a fundamental analysis of eBay’s S-1 to validate product market fit. I felt that as long as the idea was proven in the US, it could be adapted to work in Europe as humans all essentially want the same thing: to communicate, be entertained and have a sense of purpose. My analysis of the S-1 gave me confidence that the business was viable. In sharp contrast to almost all the other businesses I researched, eBay had over 60% gross margin and was already profitable. This was enough for me to quit my job at McKinsey, sell my apartment, and embark on my first large scale entrepreneurial journey in July 1998 at the age of 23.</p> <p>The list of the things I did not know was endless:</p> <ul> <li>I had never raised money from VCs, did not know any VCs, or to approach them. Knowing what I know now, I realize how naïve my approach was of just sending them cold emails with a massive 80-page vertical business plan attached rather than being introduced by mutual connections and attaching a deck. As I was getting nowhere, I ended up just launching, executing, getting some visibility, and ultimately VCs reached out to me.</li> <li>I did not realize that all the infrastructure required to launch as startup was lacking and that we essentially needed to create our own data center to host our servers. In a way it was a massive distraction from building the product of the startup I was meant to be building, but as a hardware nerd, I loved putting together the extremely powerful servers we used to host Aucland.</li> <li>I had never recruited anyone before and made every hiring mistake possible. Not finding a front-end developer I liked, I even taught myself HTML and CSS to code the front end in a way I found aesthetically pleasing.</li> <li>I did not expect the extent of the legal challenges we would face:<ul><li>The French had given a monopoly on auctions to government licensed auctioneers or “commissaires priseurs” and got sued for violating their monopoly. The case went all the way to the European Union which ultimately overturned their monopoly.</li></ul><ul><li>I had not my mandatory military service because I was in the US for college and McKinsey. I had to fight off their attempt to arrest me on national interest reasons as I was employing over 100 people doing $10M per month in sales which was deemed more valuable to France than essentially cleaning toilets for 12 months for 100 euros per month (the military does not value you and makes you do extraordinarily menial tasks).</li></ul><ul><li>Incorporating in France was significantly slower and more bureaucratic than expected.</li></ul> <ul> <li>Letting go of wrong hires proved insanely complex as well.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> <p><strong>Zingy</strong></p> <p>Despite the Internet bubble bursting, I wanted to remain an entrepreneur and was willing to compromise on what I was building to continue my entrepreneurial journey. Venture capital had essentially disappeared from the ecosystem so I needed an idea that was capital efficient and could reach profitability rapidly. The only tech idea that seemed to be profitable at the time in Europe and Asia was selling ringtones for the Nokia phones of yore. The US market was years behind the European market. It was fragmented between countless operators using different technologies (CDMA, TMDA, iDen, GSM). Text messaging was not standard on any carrier. Even if you had a text messaging subscription you could not text between carriers. However, I had no doubt the US would follow the same path as the rest of the world and that eventually carrier billing and cross-carrier messaging would be possible. I did not know how long it would take, but that’s a risk I was willing to take. I spoke to the company best positioned to launch a competing service as they had carrier connections and had just raised $18 million, Upoc, but upon ascertaining they were not interested, I launched Zingy.</p> <p>Once again, the list of things I did not know was endless. I had never listened to music before and did not even know what music we should be attempting to license. However, it was not hard to find cooler people to deal with the issue. The more fundamental problem was that the licensing mechanism for songs was unknown. In France you could go to one agency, la <a href="https://www.sacem.fr/en" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">SACEM</a> and get a blanket license for all songs. The US had a similar agency for mechanical rights called <a href="https://www.harryfox.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Harry Fox Agency</a>, which kept telling me they would eventually be able to license ringtones to me, but never managed to secure those rights. Worse no database existed to tell us who owned the rights to what songs. It took us years to figure out which singers worked with which song writers who worked with which lawyers and were represented by which publisher. It was an extraordinarily arduous detective task that ironically was accelerated when we made mistakes and would be sued for the statutory $250,000 per download penalty. I recall with glee the shock on the lawyer’s face when I would meet with them after they were suing me for billions expressing excitement at the fact we were finally talking and could license the song properly. We settled all the suits and ended up being the only ones fully licensed when the time came which turned out to be a massive barrier to entry, but it took years to get there.</p> <p>Likewise, with no open content delivery networks we had no way of delivering our ringtones to the cell phone operators for the first few years of our operations. We literally hacked into the networks of GSM &amp; TDMA operators in the early days to deliver our content. It took us nearly two years to get our first carrier deal – attending every trade show, establishing our presence and credibility, essentially bribing MSN to work with us until the fateful day we got a cold inbound call from Motorola which then led to a deal with Nextel and ultimately to all carriers.</p> <p><strong>OLX</strong></p> <p>After I left Zingy, I decided to return to my first love: marketplaces. After being rebuffed in my attempts to buy and/or run Craigslist, I decided to build a better, pre-moderated and mobile friendly, version of Craigslist for the rest of the world: <a href="https://www.olx.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">OLX</a>.</p> <p>It was obvious that the opportunity was very large, and I had a good understanding of how to build liquidity in marketplaces. However, that knowledge was dwarfed by the scale of the things I did not know. When we launched, we did not appreciate the importance of SEO. We had raised $10 million and were able to scale traffic quickly through paid marketing. However, it’s only after we acquired another classified site, MundoAnuncio, whose entire traffic was SEO generated, that we realized the potential for free traffic that classified sites had as every ad could be indexed. When we made the acquisition, none of our content was indexed. Upon realizing the potential of SEO, we created a dedicated SEO product and tech team and essentially fully re-architected the site to be SEO friendly. While ultimately, we focused on user experience and branding, SEO alone brought us to over 100 million unique visitors per month which created the foundation for what was to come.</p> <p>The other we were unaware of was the presence of a deadly competitor. Being based in New York, I had a US centric approach to the world and focused on Craigslist which was not a threat as they did not ambition to conquer the world. I had also analyzed all the markets we were going after: Brazil, Portugal, India, Pakistan, Eastern Europe, and the local competition was not relevant. However, I was unaware of the existence of a Norwegian publicly traded competitor that owned extremely successful classified sites in Northern Europe called Schibsted (now also called Adevinta). A few years in as I became aware of their existence, I assumed we would live in peaceful co-existence as they owned Western Europe and the Nordics while we owned emerging markets. Sadly, egged on by Telenor with which they created a joint venture, they attacked us in our two core markets first, Brazil and Portugal, starting a multiyear war which saw us collectively spend $500 million in marketing until we finally merged in our favor. This war sent me into the arms of Naspers as I needed the capital to fund the battle. They were great in their supportiveness and willingness to be aggressive, but it also sadly led me to lose control over my baby.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p> <p>If there is a common theme in all three stories is that there were many more unknowns than knowns when launching these three startups. That’s ok. Once validating that the opportunity is large and attractive, if you feel compelled to do something, just do it! Trust you will figure things out along the way. As the quote, usually misattributed to Goethe, goes: “Whatever you dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it!”</p>

<p>&nbsp;“They did not know it was impossible so they did it.” Mark Twain’s quote resonates with me. As &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/the-value-of-ignorance/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;The Value of Ignorance&#8221;</span></a></p>

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The Value of Ignorance. Categories - Business Musings, Personal Musings. Date-Posted - 2023-08-01T13:48:15 . &nbsp;“They did not know it was impossible so they did it.” Mark Twain’s quote resonates with me. As much as we encourage founders to validate their startup idea in an extremely rigorous way, you do not need to validate everything ahead of time as long as you believe you will figure out how to deal with whatever challenge comes your way. Aucland Aucland was my first venture backed startup. It was an eBay of France and Southern Europe. Prior to launching I did a fundamental analysis of eBay’s S-1 to validate product market fit. I felt that as long as the idea was proven in the US, it could be adapted to work in Europe as humans all essentially want the same thing: to communicate, be entertained and have a sense of purpose. My analysis of the S-1 gave me confidence that the business was viable. In sharp contrast to almost all the other businesses I researched, eBay had over 60% gross margin and was already profitable. This was enough for me to quit my job at McKinsey, sell my apartment, and embark on my first large scale entrepreneurial journey in July 1998 at the age of 23. The list of the things I did not know was endless: I had never raised money from VCs, did not know any VCs, or to approach them. Knowing what I know now, I realize how naïve my approach was of just sending them cold emails with a massive 80-page vertical business plan attached rather than being introduced by mutual connections and attaching a deck. As I was getting nowhere, I ended up just launching, executing, getting some visibility, and ultimately VCs reached out to me. I did not realize that all the infrastructure required to launch as startup was lacking and that we essentially needed to create our own data center to host our servers. In a way it was a massive distraction from building the product of the startup I was meant to be building, but as a hardware nerd, I loved putting together the extremely powerful servers we used to host Aucland. I had never recruited anyone before and made every hiring mistake possible. Not finding a front-end developer I liked, I even taught myself HTML and CSS to code the front end in a way I found aesthetically pleasing. I did not expect the extent of the legal challenges we would face:The French had given a monopoly on auctions to government licensed auctioneers or “commissaires priseurs” and got sued for violating their monopoly. The case went all the way to the European Union which ultimately overturned their monopoly.I had not my mandatory military service because I was in the US for college and McKinsey. I had to fight off their attempt to arrest me on national interest reasons as I was employing over 100 people doing $10M per month in sales which was deemed more valuable to France than essentially cleaning toilets for 12 months for 100 euros per month (the military does not value you and makes you do extraordinarily menial tasks).Incorporating in France was significantly slower and more bureaucratic than expected. Letting go of wrong hires proved insanely complex as well. Zingy Despite the Internet bubble bursting, I wanted to remain an entrepreneur and was willing to compromise on what I was building to continue my entrepreneurial journey. Venture capital had essentially disappeared from the ecosystem so I needed an idea that was capital efficient and could reach profitability rapidly. The only tech idea that seemed to be profitable at the time in Europe and Asia was selling ringtones for the Nokia phones of yore. The US market was years behind the European market. It was fragmented between countless operators using different technologies (CDMA, TMDA, iDen, GSM). Text messaging was not standard on any carrier. Even if you had a text messaging subscription you could not text between carriers. However, I had no doubt the US would follow the same path as the rest of the world and that eventually carrier billing and cross-carrier messaging would be possible. I did not know how long it would take, but that’s a risk I was willing to take. I spoke to the company best positioned to launch a competing service as they had carrier connections and had just raised $18 million, Upoc, but upon ascertaining they were not interested, I launched Zingy. Once again, the list of things I did not know was endless. I had never listened to music before and did not even know what music we should be attempting to license. However, it was not hard to find cooler people to deal with the issue. The more fundamental problem was that the licensing mechanism for songs was unknown. In France you could go to one agency, la SACEM and get a blanket license for all songs. The US had a similar agency for mechanical rights called The Harry Fox Agency, which kept telling me they would eventually be able to license ringtones to me, but never managed to secure those rights. Worse no database existed to tell us who owned the rights to what songs. It took us years to figure out which singers worked with which song writers who worked with which lawyers and were represented by which publisher. It was an extraordinarily arduous detective task that ironically was accelerated when we made mistakes and would be sued for the statutory $250,000 per download penalty. I recall with glee the shock on the lawyer’s face when I would meet with them after they were suing me for billions expressing excitement at the fact we were finally talking and could license the song properly. We settled all the suits and ended up being the only ones fully licensed when the time came which turned out to be a massive barrier to entry, but it took years to get there. Likewise, with no open content delivery networks we had no way of delivering our ringtones to the cell phone operators for the first few years of our operations. We literally hacked into the networks of GSM &amp; TDMA operators in the early days to deliver our content. It took us nearly two years to get our first carrier deal – attending every trade show, establishing our presence and credibility, essentially bribing MSN to work with us until the fateful day we got a cold inbound call from Motorola which then led to a deal with Nextel and ultimately to all carriers. OLX After I left Zingy, I decided to return to my first love: marketplaces. After being rebuffed in my attempts to buy and/or run Craigslist, I decided to build a better, pre-moderated and mobile friendly, version of Craigslist for the rest of the world: OLX. It was obvious that the opportunity was very large, and I had a good understanding of how to build liquidity in marketplaces. However, that knowledge was dwarfed by the scale of the things I did not know. When we launched, we did not appreciate the importance of SEO. We had raised $10 million and were able to scale traffic quickly through paid marketing. However, it’s only after we acquired another classified site, MundoAnuncio, whose entire traffic was SEO generated, that we realized the potential for free traffic that classified sites had as every ad could be indexed. When we made the acquisition, none of our content was indexed. Upon realizing the potential of SEO, we created a dedicated SEO product and tech team and essentially fully re-architected the site to be SEO friendly. While ultimately, we focused on user experience and branding, SEO alone brought us to over 100 million unique visitors per month which created the foundation for what was to come. The other we were unaware of was the presence of a deadly competitor. Being based in New York, I had a US centric approach to the world and focused on Craigslist which was not a threat as they did not ambition to conquer the world. I had also analyzed all the markets we were going after: Brazil, Portugal, India, Pakistan, Eastern Europe, and the local competition was not relevant. However, I was unaware of the existence of a Norwegian publicly traded competitor that owned extremely successful classified sites in Northern Europe called Schibsted (now also called Adevinta). A few years in as I became aware of their existence, I assumed we would live in peaceful co-existence as they owned Western Europe and the Nordics while we owned emerging markets. Sadly, egged on by Telenor with which they created a joint venture, they attacked us in our two core markets first, Brazil and Portugal, starting a multiyear war which saw us collectively spend $500 million in marketing until we finally merged in our favor. This war sent me into the arms of Naspers as I needed the capital to fund the battle. They were great in their supportiveness and willingness to be aggressive, but it also sadly led me to lose control over my baby.&nbsp; Conclusion If there is a common theme in all three stories is that there were many more unknowns than knowns when launching these three startups. That’s ok. Once validating that the opportunity is large and attractive, if you feel compelled to do something, just do it! Trust you will figure things out along the way. As the quote, usually misattributed to Goethe, goes: “Whatever you dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it!”

2023-06-27T14:11:42

2023-06-27T14:11:42

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=20059

2023-06-27T14:11:43

2023-06-27T14:11:43

fj-labs-liquid-crypto-strategy

publish

post

https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-liquid-crypto-strategy/

FJ Labs’ Liquid Crypto Strategy

<p>As discussed in a previous post, <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-investment-strategy/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-investment-strategy/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FJ Labs’ Investment Strategy</a>, we take a unique, high-velocity angel investment approach to early-stage VC:</p> <ul> <li>We evaluate 40-50 deals per week,</li> <li>We invest based on two 60-minute calls,</li> <li>We do not lead, and</li> <li>We do not take board seats.</li> </ul> <p>As a result, our portfolio consists of over 1,000 companies that span multiple investment stages, geographies, and industries in marketplaces and network effect businesses. Crypto is the ultimate network effect business. FJ Labs has been making private crypto investments since its inception as referenced in <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-crypto-credentials/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FJ Labs’ Crypto Credentials</a>. For example, we were early investors in <a href="https://www.animocabrands.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Animoca</a> and <a href="https://figment.io/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://figment.io/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Figment</a>.</p> <p>Concurrent to the core fund, I have been an active crypto investor since 2016. Considering this, we devised a strategy to incorporate liquid crypto into FJ Labs’ most recent fund by approaching it with a VC lens. In 2022, we hired <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/chriskeshian" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.linkedin.com/in/chriskeshian" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Chris Keshian</a> to establish a more formal process around the liquid crypto investment activities Chris and I were pursuing individually, and to bring them into the fund. Chris has been an investor and trader in the crypto space since 2013. In 2014, Chris co-founded the first fiat gateway onto Ethereum, and in 2016 he co-founded a long/short crypto-focused hedge fund. While at MIT, Chris created a unique method to value cryptocurrencies using regression and real-time fundamental metrics, which serves as the basis of our liquid strategy. Chris writes extensively about his views on the crypto markets on his <a href="https://www.keshian.com/writing" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.keshian.com/writing" rel="noreferrer noopener">blog</a>.</p> <p>Our strategy is to make long-only investments in projects we like using a similar lens that we use on the private side (team, market, business, valuation), but with the benefit of being liquid and having full data transparency. In upcoming blog posts, we will detail our full data collection and evaluation processes.</p> <p>We believe now is the best time to pursue a liquid crypto strategy for a few reasons:</p> <ul> <li>Crypto has never gone through a macro risk-off moment. Since these assets are still viewed as the riskiest portion of an investor’s portfolio, and because they are liquid, they are the first to get sold in an environment like this.</li> <li>The implosion of multiple funds, centralized lenders, and high-profile exchanges have further exacerbated the downside move across this space.</li> <li>The regulatory headwinds in the United States are the icing on the cake and have been the final shoe to drop in a year of negative news and sentiment surrounding this asset class.</li> <li>Since this is still a highly correlated asset class, the great projects with real revenue and sticky users sell off just as hard as the projects that have no real merit.</li> </ul> <p>We believe that the above factors, combined with our proprietary evaluation process, have provided a unique opportunity to realize venture returns in this emerging asset class.</p> <p>We recently closed <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-closes-260m-third-fund/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-closes-260m-third-fund/" rel="noreferrer noopener">FJ Labs III</a> and are early in our deployment period. We have made 12 liquid crypto investments so far and will continue to opportunistically invest in the strategy mimicking our diversified FJ Labs’ core investment strategy. We are optimistic that the asset class can boost FJ Labs’ core returns with limited downside.</p>

<p>As discussed in a previous post, FJ Labs’ Investment Strategy, we take a unique, high-velocity angel investment approach &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-liquid-crypto-strategy/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;FJ Labs’ Liquid Crypto Strategy&#8221;</span></a></p>

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FJ Labs’ Liquid Crypto Strategy. Categories - Crypto/Web3, FJ Labs. Date-Posted - 2023-06-27T14:11:42 . As discussed in a previous post, FJ Labs’ Investment Strategy, we take a unique, high-velocity angel investment approach to early-stage VC: We evaluate 40-50 deals per week, We invest based on two 60-minute calls, We do not lead, and We do not take board seats. As a result, our portfolio consists of over 1,000 companies that span multiple investment stages, geographies, and industries in marketplaces and network effect businesses. Crypto is the ultimate network effect business. FJ Labs has been making private crypto investments since its inception as referenced in FJ Labs’ Crypto Credentials. For example, we were early investors in Animoca and Figment. Concurrent to the core fund, I have been an active crypto investor since 2016. Considering this, we devised a strategy to incorporate liquid crypto into FJ Labs’ most recent fund by approaching it with a VC lens. In 2022, we hired Chris Keshian to establish a more formal process around the liquid crypto investment activities Chris and I were pursuing individually, and to bring them into the fund. Chris has been an investor and trader in the crypto space since 2013. In 2014, Chris co-founded the first fiat gateway onto Ethereum, and in 2016 he co-founded a long/short crypto-focused hedge fund. While at MIT, Chris created a unique method to value cryptocurrencies using regression and real-time fundamental metrics, which serves as the basis of our liquid strategy. Chris writes extensively about his views on the crypto markets on his blog. Our strategy is to make long-only investments in projects we like using a similar lens that we use on the private side (team, market, business, valuation), but with the benefit of being liquid and having full data transparency. In upcoming blog posts, we will detail our full data collection and evaluation processes. We believe now is the best time to pursue a liquid crypto strategy for a few reasons: Crypto has never gone through a macro risk-off moment. Since these assets are still viewed as the riskiest portion of an investor’s portfolio, and because they are liquid, they are the first to get sold in an environment like this. The implosion of multiple funds, centralized lenders, and high-profile exchanges have further exacerbated the downside move across this space. The regulatory headwinds in the United States are the icing on the cake and have been the final shoe to drop in a year of negative news and sentiment surrounding this asset class. Since this is still a highly correlated asset class, the great projects with real revenue and sticky users sell off just as hard as the projects that have no real merit. We believe that the above factors, combined with our proprietary evaluation process, have provided a unique opportunity to realize venture returns in this emerging asset class. We recently closed FJ Labs III and are early in our deployment period. We have made 12 liquid crypto investments so far and will continue to opportunistically invest in the strategy mimicking our diversified FJ Labs’ core investment strategy. We are optimistic that the asset class can boost FJ Labs’ core returns with limited downside.

2023-05-23T13:37:08

2023-05-23T13:37:08

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=19995

2023-11-17T13:53:35

2023-11-17T13:53:35

timing-is-everything

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post

https://fabricegrinda.com/timing-is-everything/

Timing is Everything

<p>“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” As a tech enthusiast, entrepreneur, and investor, I live this temporal disjuncture every day. I am privileged to see technologies when they are in their infancy. It allows me to be able to make accurate predictions of how the world is going to play out. In other words, I live in your future. While my predictions have mostly come true, I have been spectacularly wrong about the speed of technological adoption and disruption. I have repeatedly overestimated how quickly we adopt technology.</p> <p>Timing matters tremendously. Companies like Pets.com, an online retailer of pet food and accessories, and Webvan, an online grocer, failed spectacularly during the dot com bubble. Ironically, 20 years later companies offering similar products like <a href="https://www.chewy.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.chewy.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Chewy.com</a> and <a href="https://www.instacart.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.instacart.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Instacart</a> are doing very well. The ideas were sound. However, the market was lacking a lot of the infrastructure, technologies, and demand to make them viable at the time. The same is true for many ideas that failed in the dot com bust but are now successful: video streaming, online gaming, local delivery, and countless others.</p> <p>I observed countless such temporal gaps. The graphic interface and mouse were invented in the 1960s but were only popularized by the Apple Macintosh in 1984. You can see an image of Douglas Engelbart’s prototype mouse from 1964 below.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/image-1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19997" width="350" height="233"/></figure></div> <p>In the 1980s I was playing with my PC in France and connecting to Bulletin Board Services via modem while the rest of France was using the Minitel. In the early 1990s at Princeton, I was privileged to have high speed Internet directly in my dorm room while the world was connecting via slow dial-up. In both cases it felt obvious to me that PCs and broadband were the future. That notion faced significant push back. Most argued that they were too complicated and expensive, conveniently ignoring that technology is extremely deflationary and keeps improving and simplifying. I was right; however, it took decades for that vision to play out.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/image-2.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19998" width="245" height="288"/></figure></div> <p>In the early 1990s I told my dad not to invest in AOL because dialup was bound to disappear. Dial-up revenues still accounted for 45% of AOL revenues by 2004! Likewise, I told my dad not to invest in Netflix’s IPO in 2002 because the 50% margin would compress as the switch to broadband would mean they would have to transition into streaming and away from shipping DVDs by post. As result they would have to license content from others and/or produce content, both of which would be a very different business from the one they were in. DVD volumes first fell in 2011 (and they nailed the transition). In both cases I was right, but again a decade off on the timing.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screenshot-2023-05-22-at-10.22.12-AM.png" alt="" class="wp-image-20003" width="812" height="280" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screenshot-2023-05-22-at-10.22.12-AM.png 1624w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screenshot-2023-05-22-at-10.22.12-AM-768x265.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screenshot-2023-05-22-at-10.22.12-AM-1536x530.png 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screenshot-2023-05-22-at-10.22.12-AM-1200x414.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screenshot-2023-05-22-at-10.22.12-AM-1320x455.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p>As a busy professional in New York, I never learned to cook and was a very early adopter of Seamless Web in 2005. Loving the convenience and diversity, I made investing in online food delivery marketplaces one of my priorities. FJ Labs now has 83 investments in Foodtech. In 2010, Jose and I invested in Lieferheld, a food delivery company in Germany that ultimately turned into <a href="https://www.deliveryhero.com/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.deliveryhero.com/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Delivery Hero</a>, a global leader in food delivery. The company went public in 2017. I usually sell my stock in companies when it goes public, but I was so bullish on the future of food delivery that I held my stock. Many people are skeptical, and the market cap of the company has fallen from a high of $30 billion to $10 billion. It is true that today the online food delivery experience is limited and mediocre. You are mostly sold unhealthy fast food, at high prices, with high delivery costs, and delivery times of 30 minutes or more. However, I can imagine a future when the food is made in low-cost ghost kitchens, covering all food allergies and food quality, prepared in less than 3 minutes because it’s optimized for delivery, with low delivery costs thanks to autonomy – be it drones in the suburbs or autonomous delivery vehicles, where the food is delivered in less than 15 minutes. In this world, it makes no sense to cook as it would cost more for you to purchase the groceries and make your meal than to order online, not even taking into consideration the opportunity cost of your time. It might not even make sense for people to have kitchens in cities with expensive real estate like New York. This is not to say that cooking will disappear. Some people love cooking and will continue doing it, but for most it might be relegated to something we do on special occasions. In that world I can see a large part of the $800 billion in grocery sales in the US to move to online food delivery. It’s one of the reasons I remain so bullish on Delivery Hero and food delivery writ large, but it is taking a lot longer to play out than I expected.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screenshot-2023-05-22-at-10.22.24-AM.png" alt="" class="wp-image-20004" width="841" height="332" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screenshot-2023-05-22-at-10.22.24-AM.png 1682w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screenshot-2023-05-22-at-10.22.24-AM-768x303.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screenshot-2023-05-22-at-10.22.24-AM-1536x606.png 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screenshot-2023-05-22-at-10.22.24-AM-1200x474.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screenshot-2023-05-22-at-10.22.24-AM-1320x521.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>In 2012, I had the opportunity to invest in Uber at a $2 billion valuation. While evaluating the investment I worried that self-driving cars would eliminate their moat of having a critical mass of drivers. We are now over a decade later and self-driving cars are still not common. I’ve witnessed electric self-flying vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft fly successfully. I profitably invested in <a href="https://www.archer.com/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.archer.com/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Archer</a> early in its journey, yet commercial flights are still years away. In both cases they seem inevitable, albeit still far away from reality.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screenshot-2023-05-22-at-10.22.36-AM.png" alt="" class="wp-image-20005" width="892" height="226" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screenshot-2023-05-22-at-10.22.36-AM.png 1784w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screenshot-2023-05-22-at-10.22.36-AM-768x195.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screenshot-2023-05-22-at-10.22.36-AM-1536x389.png 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screenshot-2023-05-22-at-10.22.36-AM-1200x304.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screenshot-2023-05-22-at-10.22.36-AM-1320x334.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>In the past few years, I’ve witnessed wonderful advances in technology. At a mental health conference, I observed a paraplegic who, through hundreds of electrodes implanted in his brain, could control his wheelchair, his artificial arm and could even perceive touch, pressure, and temperature. A patient with locked-in syndrome was able to have full blown conversations with his wife purely through his thoughts. The software even deciphered a made-up word they only used between them.</p> <p>Considering this, it’s not hard to imagine a world where we are no longer hunched over our cell phones, looking at a small screen, typing at limited speeds, but instead use our thoughts to control a device whose display is overlayed on our field of vision through intelligent contact lenses or glasses that have lasers writing on our retinas. In this world, the digital will blend seamlessly into the real world. We will have technologically enabled telepathy, automatic recognition of people we meet with a summary of our past encounters and the names of their spouses and children. We will access whatever information we need seamlessly. This will represent a fundamental platform shift and it’s not obvious that the legacy smartphone winners, Apple, Google and Samsung would be the winners in this new world. This will disrupt a multi-trillion-dollar industry.</p> <p>I can’t wait for this world to be upon us, but I suspect we are over a decade away from realizing that vision. It’s unclear whether we will be able to achieve the same success in mind reading absent “wetware” or surgically implanting electrodes on our brains. It will take time for people to get comfortable with the idea of doing that. Likewise intelligent contact lenses and glasses with lasers writing on our retinas are in their infancy. This future is inevitable, yet far away.</p> <p>Solar costs and battery have declined so rapidly it’s easy to imagine a wonderful future with no greenhouse gas emissions coming from energy production, currently 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions, powering electric cars and trucks, currently representing 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions.</p> <p>Solar is now the cheapest form of electricity production.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/image-6.png" alt="" class="wp-image-20007" width="380" height="587"/></figure></div> <p>It’s declining in price faster than even the most optimistic projections allowed for.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/image-7.png" alt="" class="wp-image-20008" width="480" height="286" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/image-7.png 782w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/image-7-768x458.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 480px) 85vw, 480px" /></figure></div> <p>The cost of batteries, measured in dollars per kWh stored, has fallen by a factor of 42 since 1991 and by a factor of 2.5 since 2010.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/image-8.png" alt="" class="wp-image-20009" width="420" height="389"/></figure></div> <p>In 2021, solar power accounted for 3.6% of global electricity generation and electric cars accounted for 14% of new car sales. Given how humans are bad at understanding exponential growth, I believe that by 2030 most car sales will be electric and 15% of energy production will be solar, making me way more optimistic than current forecasts, but I can also see how it might take a decade longer 🙂</p> <p>I suspect something similar is happening with AI which seems to be near the peak of its hype cycle. Everyone in my little tech echo chamber is worried about tech disrupting their industry. Chat GPT is the fastest product in history to reach 100 million users.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/image-9.png" alt="" class="wp-image-20010" width="468" height="306" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/image-9.png 936w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/image-9-768x502.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 468px) 85vw, 468px" /></figure></div> <p>Many of the interactions are magical and I use them daily. You should definitely try the following products:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://openai.com/product/gpt-4" data-type="URL" data-id="https://openai.com/product/gpt-4" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Chat GPT4</a> (now available on iOS) and <a href="https://bard.google.com/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://bard.google.com/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bard</a> are amazing for research, conversations, and written creative endeavors. Remember that they are meant to be creative and will invent or “hallucinate” a lot of answers so be very careful what you use them for. The genius is in the prompts you enter. Make sure to check the results.</li> <li><a href="https://tome.app/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://tome.app/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Tome</a> and <a href="https://www.beautiful.ai/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.beautiful.ai/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Beautiful</a> help you make presentations quickly.</li> <li><a href="https://openai.com/product/dall-e-2" data-type="URL" data-id="https://openai.com/product/dall-e-2" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">DALL-E2</a> and <a href="https://www.midjourney.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.midjourney.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Midjourney</a> create art and images from text. Midjourney is more sophisticated but requires using Discord and specific syntax.</li> <li><a href="https://runwayml.com/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://runwayml.com/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Runway</a> produces video from text which was used by Oscars Best Picture winner <em>Everything Everywhere All At Once</em>.</li> <li><a href="https://www.usegalileo.ai/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.usegalileo.ai/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Galileo</a> generates graphic designs editable in Figma based on text prompts.</li> <li><a href="https://www.khanacademy.org/khan-labs" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.khanacademy.org/khan-labs" rel="noreferrer noopener">Khanmigo</a> is a tutoring AI that uses the Socratic method of verifying that kids understand the concepts they are being taught rather than just giving them the answer.</li> <li>NFX published a more exhaustive list of the <a href="https://www.nfx.com/post/generative-ai-hot-75-list" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.nfx.com/post/generative-ai-hot-75-list" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">top 75 generative AI startups</a> that cover many other use cases.</li> </ul> <p>The tools are useful today. I used Bard, Chat GPT, Tome, and Midjourney to create various elements of this blog post, but the tools are far from perfect. They give you elements and starting points but require significant edits and work. I would say the tools are 70% of the way there, but they definitely increase your productivity.</p> <p>While this is great for consumers and fast-moving startups, I suspect it will take years and possibly a decade for generative AI to really revolutionize most industries.&nbsp; What would it take for you to be willing to trust a medical diagnostic from AI? In mission critical environments, errors can be catastrophic and it’s going to take a lot more effort to make sure they are 99% accurate, let alone 99.99999% accurate and 80/20 rule on effort very much applies.</p> <p>It’s one of the reasons we are not investing in generalist generative AI startups. They have no real moat, countless competitors, and uncertain business models, not to mention insane valuations driven by all the hype. This reminds me of the early years of search engines where Alta Vista, Excite and others were duking it out. Google won despite being very late to the party. The same thing happened in social networks with Friendster, Tagged, Hi5, MySpace and countless others competing until Facebook took over.</p> <p>We are way more interested in vertical applications of AI using proprietary data, providing pickets and shovels to the AI arms race, or simply marketplaces using AI to improve their user experiences with personalized product recommendations, automated fraud prevention, dynamic pricing, automated product descriptions and automated customer service.</p> <p>Here are a few examples from our portfolio:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://superfocus.ai/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://superfocus.ai/" rel="noreferrer noopener">SuperFocus</a> creates LLM AI&#8217;s using enterprises’ private data, stored securely in a separate memory module outside of the LLM, to stop hallucination.</li> <li><a href="https://www.anduril.com/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.anduril.com/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Anduril</a> creates autonomous systems that provide persistent awareness and security across land, sea, and air.</li> <li><a href="https://numer.ai/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://numer.ai/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Numerai</a> is a hedge fund that predicts the stock market using AI.</li> <li><a href="https://proper.ai/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://proper.ai/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Proper</a> is an AI powered property management software.</li> <li><a href="https://www.photoroom.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.photoroom.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Photoroom</a> creates the best background for your photo to increase sell through rate online.</li> <li>The handbag marketplace <a href="https://www.rebag.com" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.rebag.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rebag</a> uses its AI, <a href="https://www.rebag.com/clair/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.rebag.com/clair/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Clair</a>, to identify the handbag, give you its history, and give you its value. You basically take one photo, and you are done. Compare that to the complexity of selling on a site like eBay where you need to take lots of photos, write a title and a description, select a category, and set a price in the hope of selling the item.</li> </ul> <p>Regardless of the timing, I am beyond excited for the potential of AI. It&#8217;s about to unleash a wave of growth unto the world as everyone will become significantly more productive. Moreover, it will fundamentally democratize startup creation by virtually eliminating both the cost and technical requirements of software creation. This will let loose a massive wave of innovation as people from all walks of life, educational background, and geographies, who heretofore could not join the startup revolution will unleash their creativity unto the world.</p> <p>I am not sure if there is a real takeaway or “so what” from this blog post. It’s an observation that, like many other technologists I know (the amazing <a href="https://lauderpartners.com/bio_gary.html" data-type="URL" data-id="https://lauderpartners.com/bio_gary.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Gary Lauder</a> made a similar assertion recently which truly resonated), I am rather good at predicting how the future of technology will play out. However, because I can easily imagine this future, I believe it will happen very soon, while culture and institutions move slowly, and things end up playing out over decades. As a friend told me: “entrepreneurs confuse the present with the future. Their conception of it is so realistic that they often think they’re already there.” Perhaps as my thoughts on AI are highlighting, I am now correcting for that in my investing behavior, if not in my fundamental optimism.</p> <p>I don’t know how long it’s going to take for all the things I laid out to play out: high quality food delivered in 15 minutes at your doorstep for less than you can buy it at the grocery store, self-driving vehicles, VOTL aircraft, the advent of mind reading and augmented reality (AR), the greening of the electricity grid and our transportation system, and a wonderful explosion in productivity and human creativity due to AI. However, I take comfort in the knowledge that it will happen. I cannot wait for that day to come and am beyond excited for the future we are building!</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/AdobeStock_531525105-scaled.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-20032" width="640" height="427" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/AdobeStock_531525105-scaled.jpeg 2560w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/AdobeStock_531525105-768x512.jpeg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/AdobeStock_531525105-1536x1024.jpeg 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/AdobeStock_531525105-2048x1365.jpeg 2048w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/AdobeStock_531525105-1200x800.jpeg 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/AdobeStock_531525105-1320x880.jpeg 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div>

<p>“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” As a tech enthusiast, entrepreneur, and investor, I &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/timing-is-everything/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Timing is Everything&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Timing is Everything. Categories - Business Musings, Entrepreneurship, Featured Posts, Musings, Personal Musings. Date-Posted - 2023-05-23T13:37:08 . “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” As a tech enthusiast, entrepreneur, and investor, I live this temporal disjuncture every day. I am privileged to see technologies when they are in their infancy. It allows me to be able to make accurate predictions of how the world is going to play out. In other words, I live in your future. While my predictions have mostly come true, I have been spectacularly wrong about the speed of technological adoption and disruption. I have repeatedly overestimated how quickly we adopt technology. Timing matters tremendously. Companies like Pets.com, an online retailer of pet food and accessories, and Webvan, an online grocer, failed spectacularly during the dot com bubble. Ironically, 20 years later companies offering similar products like Chewy.com and Instacart are doing very well. The ideas were sound. However, the market was lacking a lot of the infrastructure, technologies, and demand to make them viable at the time. The same is true for many ideas that failed in the dot com bust but are now successful: video streaming, online gaming, local delivery, and countless others. I observed countless such temporal gaps. The graphic interface and mouse were invented in the 1960s but were only popularized by the Apple Macintosh in 1984. You can see an image of Douglas Engelbart’s prototype mouse from 1964 below. In the 1980s I was playing with my PC in France and connecting to Bulletin Board Services via modem while the rest of France was using the Minitel. In the early 1990s at Princeton, I was privileged to have high speed Internet directly in my dorm room while the world was connecting via slow dial-up. In both cases it felt obvious to me that PCs and broadband were the future. That notion faced significant push back. Most argued that they were too complicated and expensive, conveniently ignoring that technology is extremely deflationary and keeps improving and simplifying. I was right; however, it took decades for that vision to play out. In the early 1990s I told my dad not to invest in AOL because dialup was bound to disappear. Dial-up revenues still accounted for 45% of AOL revenues by 2004! Likewise, I told my dad not to invest in Netflix’s IPO in 2002 because the 50% margin would compress as the switch to broadband would mean they would have to transition into streaming and away from shipping DVDs by post. As result they would have to license content from others and/or produce content, both of which would be a very different business from the one they were in. DVD volumes first fell in 2011 (and they nailed the transition). In both cases I was right, but again a decade off on the timing. As a busy professional in New York, I never learned to cook and was a very early adopter of Seamless Web in 2005. Loving the convenience and diversity, I made investing in online food delivery marketplaces one of my priorities. FJ Labs now has 83 investments in Foodtech. In 2010, Jose and I invested in Lieferheld, a food delivery company in Germany that ultimately turned into Delivery Hero, a global leader in food delivery. The company went public in 2017. I usually sell my stock in companies when it goes public, but I was so bullish on the future of food delivery that I held my stock. Many people are skeptical, and the market cap of the company has fallen from a high of $30 billion to $10 billion. It is true that today the online food delivery experience is limited and mediocre. You are mostly sold unhealthy fast food, at high prices, with high delivery costs, and delivery times of 30 minutes or more. However, I can imagine a future when the food is made in low-cost ghost kitchens, covering all food allergies and food quality, prepared in less than 3 minutes because it’s optimized for delivery, with low delivery costs thanks to autonomy – be it drones in the suburbs or autonomous delivery vehicles, where the food is delivered in less than 15 minutes. In this world, it makes no sense to cook as it would cost more for you to purchase the groceries and make your meal than to order online, not even taking into consideration the opportunity cost of your time. It might not even make sense for people to have kitchens in cities with expensive real estate like New York. This is not to say that cooking will disappear. Some people love cooking and will continue doing it, but for most it might be relegated to something we do on special occasions. In that world I can see a large part of the $800 billion in grocery sales in the US to move to online food delivery. It’s one of the reasons I remain so bullish on Delivery Hero and food delivery writ large, but it is taking a lot longer to play out than I expected. In 2012, I had the opportunity to invest in Uber at a $2 billion valuation. While evaluating the investment I worried that self-driving cars would eliminate their moat of having a critical mass of drivers. We are now over a decade later and self-driving cars are still not common. I’ve witnessed electric self-flying vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft fly successfully. I profitably invested in Archer early in its journey, yet commercial flights are still years away. In both cases they seem inevitable, albeit still far away from reality. In the past few years, I’ve witnessed wonderful advances in technology. At a mental health conference, I observed a paraplegic who, through hundreds of electrodes implanted in his brain, could control his wheelchair, his artificial arm and could even perceive touch, pressure, and temperature. A patient with locked-in syndrome was able to have full blown conversations with his wife purely through his thoughts. The software even deciphered a made-up word they only used between them. Considering this, it’s not hard to imagine a world where we are no longer hunched over our cell phones, looking at a small screen, typing at limited speeds, but instead use our thoughts to control a device whose display is overlayed on our field of vision through intelligent contact lenses or glasses that have lasers writing on our retinas. In this world, the digital will blend seamlessly into the real world. We will have technologically enabled telepathy, automatic recognition of people we meet with a summary of our past encounters and the names of their spouses and children. We will access whatever information we need seamlessly. This will represent a fundamental platform shift and it’s not obvious that the legacy smartphone winners, Apple, Google and Samsung would be the winners in this new world. This will disrupt a multi-trillion-dollar industry. I can’t wait for this world to be upon us, but I suspect we are over a decade away from realizing that vision. It’s unclear whether we will be able to achieve the same success in mind reading absent “wetware” or surgically implanting electrodes on our brains. It will take time for people to get comfortable with the idea of doing that. Likewise intelligent contact lenses and glasses with lasers writing on our retinas are in their infancy. This future is inevitable, yet far away. Solar costs and battery have declined so rapidly it’s easy to imagine a wonderful future with no greenhouse gas emissions coming from energy production, currently 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions, powering electric cars and trucks, currently representing 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Solar is now the cheapest form of electricity production. It’s declining in price faster than even the most optimistic projections allowed for. The cost of batteries, measured in dollars per kWh stored, has fallen by a factor of 42 since 1991 and by a factor of 2.5 since 2010. In 2021, solar power accounted for 3.6% of global electricity generation and electric cars accounted for 14% of new car sales. Given how humans are bad at understanding exponential growth, I believe that by 2030 most car sales will be electric and 15% of energy production will be solar, making me way more optimistic than current forecasts, but I can also see how it might take a decade longer 🙂 I suspect something similar is happening with AI which seems to be near the peak of its hype cycle. Everyone in my little tech echo chamber is worried about tech disrupting their industry. Chat GPT is the fastest product in history to reach 100 million users. Many of the interactions are magical and I use them daily. You should definitely try the following products: Chat GPT4 (now available on iOS) and Bard are amazing for research, conversations, and written creative endeavors. Remember that they are meant to be creative and will invent or “hallucinate” a lot of answers so be very careful what you use them for. The genius is in the prompts you enter. Make sure to check the results. Tome and Beautiful help you make presentations quickly. DALL-E2 and Midjourney create art and images from text. Midjourney is more sophisticated but requires using Discord and specific syntax. Runway produces video from text which was used by Oscars Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All At Once. Galileo generates graphic designs editable in Figma based on text prompts. Khanmigo is a tutoring AI that uses the Socratic method of verifying that kids understand the concepts they are being taught rather than just giving them the answer. NFX published a more exhaustive list of the top 75 generative AI startups that cover many other use cases. The tools are useful today. I used Bard, Chat GPT, Tome, and Midjourney to create various elements of this blog post, but the tools are far from perfect. They give you elements and starting points but require significant edits and work. I would say the tools are 70% of the way there, but they definitely increase your productivity. While this is great for consumers and fast-moving startups, I suspect it will take years and possibly a decade for generative AI to really revolutionize most industries.&nbsp; What would it take for you to be willing to trust a medical diagnostic from AI? In mission critical environments, errors can be catastrophic and it’s going to take a lot more effort to make sure they are 99% accurate, let alone 99.99999% accurate and 80/20 rule on effort very much applies. It’s one of the reasons we are not investing in generalist generative AI startups. They have no real moat, countless competitors, and uncertain business models, not to mention insane valuations driven by all the hype. This reminds me of the early years of search engines where Alta Vista, Excite and others were duking it out. Google won despite being very late to the party. The same thing happened in social networks with Friendster, Tagged, Hi5, MySpace and countless others competing until Facebook took over. We are way more interested in vertical applications of AI using proprietary data, providing pickets and shovels to the AI arms race, or simply marketplaces using AI to improve their user experiences with personalized product recommendations, automated fraud prevention, dynamic pricing, automated product descriptions and automated customer service. Here are a few examples from our portfolio: SuperFocus creates LLM AI&#8217;s using enterprises’ private data, stored securely in a separate memory module outside of the LLM, to stop hallucination. Anduril creates autonomous systems that provide persistent awareness and security across land, sea, and air. Numerai is a hedge fund that predicts the stock market using AI. Proper is an AI powered property management software. Photoroom creates the best background for your photo to increase sell through rate online. The handbag marketplace Rebag uses its AI, Clair, to identify the handbag, give you its history, and give you its value. You basically take one photo, and you are done. Compare that to the complexity of selling on a site like eBay where you need to take lots of photos, write a title and a description, select a category, and set a price in the hope of selling the item. Regardless of the timing, I am beyond excited for the potential of AI. It&#8217;s about to unleash a wave of growth unto the world as everyone will become significantly more productive. Moreover, it will fundamentally democratize startup creation by virtually eliminating both the cost and technical requirements of software creation. This will let loose a massive wave of innovation as people from all walks of life, educational background, and geographies, who heretofore could not join the startup revolution will unleash their creativity unto the world. I am not sure if there is a real takeaway or “so what” from this blog post. It’s an observation that, like many other technologists I know (the amazing Gary Lauder made a similar assertion recently which truly resonated), I am rather good at predicting how the future of technology will play out. However, because I can easily imagine this future, I believe it will happen very soon, while culture and institutions move slowly, and things end up playing out over decades. As a friend told me: “entrepreneurs confuse the present with the future. Their conception of it is so realistic that they often think they’re already there.” Perhaps as my thoughts on AI are highlighting, I am now correcting for that in my investing behavior, if not in my fundamental optimism. I don’t know how long it’s going to take for all the things I laid out to play out: high quality food delivered in 15 minutes at your doorstep for less than you can buy it at the grocery store, self-driving vehicles, VOTL aircraft, the advent of mind reading and augmented reality (AR), the greening of the electricity grid and our transportation system, and a wonderful explosion in productivity and human creativity due to AI. However, I take comfort in the knowledge that it will happen. I cannot wait for that day to come and am beyond excited for the future we are building!

2023-05-09T16:09:57

2023-05-09T16:09:57

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=19964

2023-05-09T16:09:58

2023-05-09T16:09:58

kaiju-preservation-society-is-a-super-fun-quick-read

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Kaiju Preservation Society is a super fun quick read

<p>I am huge fan of John Scalzi’s books, especially the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Old-Mans-War-John-Scalzi/dp/0765348276" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>Old Man’s War</em></a> series so it was with delight and anticipation that I checked out his latest book <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Kaiju-Preservation-Society-John-Scalzi-ebook/dp/B0927B1P8L/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2L0RKBX9KB6TQ&amp;keywords=kaiju+preservation+society&amp;qid=1683391322&amp;s=books&amp;sprefix=kaiju+pre%2Cstripbooks%2C62&amp;sr=1-1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Kaiju Preservation Society</a></em>.</p> <p>Scalzi was trying to write a more complex book but was hit by writer’s block during COVID until he turned his attention to this book which flowed out of him. The story takes place in a world where giant monsters known as kaiju roam the Earth in an alternate dimension, and humanity has figured out a way to preserve and protect them in designated areas. It’s a short, witty and funny (especially for anyone who ever worked in a tech startup) novella.</p> <p>It does not have the depth and world building of John Scalzi’s other novels, but it’s so much fun that it does not need to. The characters in the story are well-drawn and likable, particularly protagonist Rob, who finds himself working for the titular Kaiju Preservation Society after a series of unfortunate events. The interactions between Rob and the kaiju are both humorous and touching, and the novella&#8217;s ending is both satisfying and thought-provoking.</p> <p>Overall, Kaiju Preservation Society is a must-read for fans of Scalzi&#8217;s work and anyone who loves a fast paced good sci-fi story with heart.</p>

<p>I am huge fan of John Scalzi’s books, especially the Old Man’s War series so it was with &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/kaiju-preservation-society-is-a-super-fun-quick-read/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Kaiju Preservation Society is a super fun quick read&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Kaiju Preservation Society is a super fun quick read. Categories - Books. Date-Posted - 2023-05-09T16:09:57 . I am huge fan of John Scalzi’s books, especially the Old Man’s War series so it was with delight and anticipation that I checked out his latest book Kaiju Preservation Society. Scalzi was trying to write a more complex book but was hit by writer’s block during COVID until he turned his attention to this book which flowed out of him. The story takes place in a world where giant monsters known as kaiju roam the Earth in an alternate dimension, and humanity has figured out a way to preserve and protect them in designated areas. It’s a short, witty and funny (especially for anyone who ever worked in a tech startup) novella. It does not have the depth and world building of John Scalzi’s other novels, but it’s so much fun that it does not need to. The characters in the story are well-drawn and likable, particularly protagonist Rob, who finds himself working for the titular Kaiju Preservation Society after a series of unfortunate events. The interactions between Rob and the kaiju are both humorous and touching, and the novella&#8217;s ending is both satisfying and thought-provoking. Overall, Kaiju Preservation Society is a must-read for fans of Scalzi&#8217;s work and anyone who loves a fast paced good sci-fi story with heart.

2023-04-25T14:08:41

2023-04-25T14:08:41

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=19792

2023-11-17T13:53:25

2023-11-17T13:53:25

team-extreme-in-antarctica

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https://fabricegrinda.com/team-extreme-in-antarctica/

Team Extreme in Antarctica

<p>Eighteen months ago, I was contacted by my good friend <a href="https://alleycorp.com/companies/kevin-ryan/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://alleycorp.com/companies/kevin-ryan/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Kevin Ryan</a> who invited me to join him on a scientific expedition skiing to the South Pole. In exchange for sponsoring the expedition a select crew of sponsors got to tag along and partake in the adventure. He was looking for the Venn diagram intersection of the people who could afford it, were fit enough to do it, and just as importantly would be interested in such a crazy adventure. I must admit I was not quite sure what the trip entailed but being a sucker for adventure and new experiences I immediately signed up. This turned out to lead to the most extraordinary of adventures.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-rich is-provider-embed-handler wp-block-embed-embed-handler wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Team Extreme in Antarctica" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VbtOFMsCjuc?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>The expedition started with training in Finse, Norway in March 2022. There were plenty of skills to learn: how to pack our sleds, assemble our tents facing the wind, melt snow to cook our meals, even learn how to walk with these special skis with half skins to be able to pull our 100-pound sleds. Perhaps most importantly we needed to acquire and learn to use all the equipment we would need for the expedition. You can see the seemingly infinite list on pages 34-46 of the instruction pack embedded below. As you can imagine given the expected cold layering up and down effectively is key.</p> <div id="wppdfemb-frame-container-19798"><iframe id="wppdf-emb-iframe-19798" scrolling="no" data-pdf-index="3" class="pdfembed-iframe nonfullscreen" style="border: none; width:100%; max-width: 100%; min-height: 1000px;" src="https://fabricegrinda.com?pdfID=19798&#038;url=https%3A%2F%2Ffabricegrinda.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2023%2F04%2FSki_Last_Degree_Final_Pack.pdf&#038;index=3" ></iframe></div> <p>It&#8217;s during the training that I met <a href="https://www.150health.com/dr-jack-kreindler" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.150health.com/dr-jack-kreindler" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dr. Jack Kreindler </a>. He was one of the scientists who came up with the idea for the expedition as a scientific research study. It stemmed from a 2017 (all men) and 2019 (all women) British coast-to-pole military expedition during which many of the super fit male soldiers in the first expedition struggled, while the all-women group did well. They showed early evidence that women did better than men because they lost less muscle mass. Dr. Jack and colleagues wondered if there was a way to tell what caused this difference and to know ahead of time who was going to do well or not in such hyper-endurance challenges using wearables.&nbsp; This new study, the Interdisciplinary South Pole Innovation &amp; Research Expedition, was the largest of its kind in extreme environments. It was composed of two teams: a 10-person team doing the 60-day 1100 km coast-to-pole expedition <a href="https://www.inspire22.co.uk/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.inspire22.co.uk/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">INSPIRE-22</a>, mostly military types, half female and half male, half on a vegan diet and half on an omnivore diet. The other INSPIRE Last Degree 23 composed of a team of eight sponsors and two scientists including Dr. Jack and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/freeflyryan/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.instagram.com/freeflyryan/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dr. Ryan Jackson</a>, skiing the Last Degree, 111 km unacclimatised going from 89 degrees south to 90 degrees south. This also allowed the team to test how quickly our bodies adjust to this extreme environment given that we would be on the ice for 10 days relative to the 60 days of the coast-to-pole team. Our challenge was made more difficult by the fact that we started at a 10,000 feet elevation while they started at sea level and would get the opportunity to adjust to the altitude over time.</p> <iframe loading="lazy" style="display:block;margin:auto;" width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wXlzqnEnVxM" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen=""></iframe> <p><br>The training involved skiing up to 16 miles or 25 km per day while pulling a 100-pound sled in blizzard conditions, sleeping in freezing tents, eating dehydrated food, with only a shovel as a restroom. It was painful, cold, and difficult, and yet I loved it. Many questioned why I was doing something so challenging, which prompted a period of reflection as to my motivations. Ultimately, it culminated in the blog post <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/why/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/why/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Why? </a>where I articulated why I love putting myself in challenging situations, depriving myself of the very things I am thankful for, and risking losing it all.</p> <p>I recommend you read the entire post, but the quick summary is as follows:</p> <ol type="1"> <li>A love for flow states.</li> <li>A sense of meaning ingrained in the human condition.</li> <li>Gratitude practice.</li> <li>An openness to serendipity.</li> <li>New learnings.</li> <li>Clarity of thought.</li> <li>Staying grounded.</li> </ol> <p>My conclusion from the training was that the expedition would be very challenging, but doable. I decided to make sure I was in great shape before heading to Antarctica. I started doing strength training three times a week, did 2-3 hours of exercising per day, almost every day, mostly kiting and padel in November and December, and lost 25 pounds.</p> <p>I flew to New York to Santiago the night of December 30^th and continued to Punta Arenas the morning of December 31^st. Punta Arenas is Southernmost part of Chile and serves as the pre-staging area for expeditions. It’s there that I met the other team members for the last degree:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://pluralplatform.com/the-peers/taavet-hinrikus/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://pluralplatform.com/the-peers/taavet-hinrikus/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Taavet Hinrikus</a>, founder of <a href="https://www.plural.vc/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.plural.vc/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Plural </a>and <a href="https://wise.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://wise.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Transferwise</a>.</li> <li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jena-daniels/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jena-daniels/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Jena Daniels</a>, VP at <a href="https://www.medable.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.medable.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Medable</a>.</li> <li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/arnisozols/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.linkedin.com/in/arnisozols/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Arnis Ozols</a>, co-founder of <a href="https://www.alephholding.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.alephholding.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Aleph</a>.</li> <li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivan-cenci-750ba357/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivan-cenci-750ba357/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Ivan Cenci</a>, general manager of <a href="https://www.empatica.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.empatica.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Empatica</a>.</li> <li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/berdigans/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.linkedin.com/in/berdigans/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">James Berdigans</a>, founder of <a href="https://printify.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://printify.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Printify</a>.</li> <li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolas-ryan-schreiber/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolas-ryan-schreiber/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Nicolas Ryan-Schreiber</a>, founder of <a href="https://aym.world/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://aym.world/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Aym</a> and Kevin Ryan’s son.</li> </ul> <p>In total there were 10 of us and were joined by three guides who would lead the expedition. I must admit that I thought it odd that we needed to be in Punta Arenas on December 31^st rather than with our families, but the window for a polar expedition is very brief given how short the polar summer is. Every year they set up the camp at Union Glacier mid-November, only to take everything down again January 20^th. During that time frame <a href="https://antarctic-logistics.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://antarctic-logistics.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ALE</a> flies 500 people to go on expedition and can only accommodate 70 guests at a time, leading to a compressed schedule.</p> <p>Punta Arenas is a mining town of 125,000, but I suspect that many people don’t live there full time as the city was entirely deserted. I often felt as though I was in The Last of Us given how empty the streets were. There were also no new year celebrations other than the muted horns from the transport ships at midnight.</p> <p>Regardless, I was happy to meet my expedition mates. During the next three days, we did daily COVID tests, checked our gear, made final equipment purchases, and did a battery of blood tests to get a baseline for where we stood prior to the expedition. We were also fitted with blood glucose monitors, Empatica medical devices and Oura rings.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Punta-Arenas-Slide-Fabrice-Grinda.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19808" width="990" height="675" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Punta-Arenas-Slide-Fabrice-Grinda.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Punta-Arenas-Slide-Fabrice-Grinda-768x524.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Punta-Arenas-Slide-Fabrice-Grinda-1200x818.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>On January 3, we finally flew to Union Glacier station in Antarctica which was our staging area for the expedition. We bid our farewells to civilization and boarded ALE’s Boeing 757. As we neared Antarctica, they turned off the heat in the plane to get us accustomed to the temperature on arrival. The most impressive part of the flight was the landing on the blue ice runway.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/757-on-ice-Antartica.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19810" width="990" height="675" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/757-on-ice-Antartica.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/757-on-ice-Antartica-768x524.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/757-on-ice-Antartica-1200x818.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>Upon arrival, we were transported on tracked vehicles to the station. The station has 35 two-person tents for guests, tents for the staff as well as all the necessary support infrastructure: a dining hall, meeting hall, a pantry, medical station etc.</p> <p>Upon seeing the infrastructure, I started to appreciate why Antarctica is so expensive. The season is only 2 months long. Everything must be assembled and de-assembled every year. All the food and staff must be flown in, and all waste is flown out, including all human waste.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Glacier-Station.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19812" width="990" height="557" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Glacier-Station.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Glacier-Station-768x432.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Glacier-Station-1200x675.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>Union Glacier itself was quite pleasant. We were staying in large pre-installed tents that have foldable beds you can put your sleeping bag on. It&#8217;s in the western part of Antarctica on 1,500 meters (1 mile) of ice. Relative to the polar plateau, the weather was a balmy -5 degrees.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/union-glacier-station-and-map.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19871" width="990" height="371" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/union-glacier-station-and-map.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/union-glacier-station-and-map-768x288.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/union-glacier-station-and-map-1200x450.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>It attracts a lot of adventurers preparing for various expeditions. Through sheer serendipity I ran into my friend <a href="https://www.instagram.com/chris_michel/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.instagram.com/chris_michel/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Chris Michel</a>, photographer extraordinaire whom you can thank for many of the more <a href="https://www.christophermichel.com/Travel/ALE-2023/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">beautiful photos</a> in this post. I also ran into <a href="http://www.alexhonnold.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="http://www.alexhonnold.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Alex Honnold</a> of<a href="https://films.nationalgeographic.com/free-solo" data-type="URL" data-id="https://films.nationalgeographic.com/free-solo" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> Free Solo</a> fame.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="660" height="372" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Alex-Honnold.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19816"/></figure></div> <p>While at Union Glacier, we did a refresher on our training. We then picked 10 days of food for the expedition consisting of two high calorie rehydrated meals per day (breakfast and dinner) and enough snacks to get us through 8 rest stops, during which we must eat, per day. We packed our sleds and awaited favorable weather conditions to start our journey.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Picking-food-antartica.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19819" width="990" height="448" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Picking-food-antartica.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Picking-food-antartica-768x347.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Picking-food-antartica-1200x543.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>While waiting for the expedition to begin, we did a fat bike tour. We did a hike to “Elephant Head”. We also watched ALE’s Ilyushin IL-76 Russian transport plane land on the blue ice which was rather impressive.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Elephant-head-and-plane-on-ice.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19874" width="990" height="371" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Elephant-head-and-plane-on-ice.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Elephant-head-and-plane-on-ice-768x288.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Elephant-head-and-plane-on-ice-1200x450.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>The weather finally cleared on January 6, and we were set to embark on our expedition. We loaded our gear on a DC3 from 1942 and were dropped off at 89 degrees south to begin our journey. The time had come. Our lifeline to civilization now gone, we were henceforth left to our own devices. We could only rely on ourselves for the days to come. All the problems of the world at bay, only one thing mattered: reaching the pole safe and sound.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/being-dropped-off-antartica.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19824" width="990" height="675" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/being-dropped-off-antartica.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/being-dropped-off-antartica-768x524.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/being-dropped-off-antartica-1200x818.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>Antarctica is the land of superlatives. It’s the highest, coldest, and driest continent. Nowhere is it more apparent than on the polar plateau with 10,000 feet of ice below your feet and a seeming infinity of whiteness in every direction. It often feels as though you are walking on clouds.</p> <p>The first day we decided to only do two legs before setting camp to acclimate to the altitude and conditions. On the second day we did 6 legs before settling into a routine of 8 legs per day. The schedule was as follows: we would wake up at 7 am, have breakfast, pack our camp into our sleds, then ski for 50 minutes, then take a 10-minute break 8 times in a row, averaging 13 miles per day, before setting up camp again, having dinner and settling in for the night.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/camp-break-rest-2.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19877" width="990" height="591" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/camp-break-rest-2.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/camp-break-rest-2-768x458.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/camp-break-rest-2-1200x716.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>For the last frontier we were skiing 69 miles or 111 km to the pole. When we learnt it was that short, Kevin and I thought it would be super easy, barely an inconvenience, and that we would be done in 5 days. We did not understand why we were planning to take up to 10 days. After all we routinely hike 15-20 miles in a day carrying our camping gear.</p> <p>Needless to say, our expectations were way off. It was significantly harder than we ever expected and definitely the hardest adventure either of us had ever been on. I suppose it’s due to a combination of factors: the altitude, the exertion of doing an activity we are not familiar with, pulling a 100-pound sled, and the cold. The temperature was a constant -30 degrees whether day or night and required constant care to make sure we were not cold, but also that we did not sweat during the walking section which would lead us to freeze during the breaks. The dry -30 was reasonably easy to manage, but what would alter the conditions dramatically was whether there was wind or not. Several of the days we had wind essentially straight into us bringing the windchill to -50. In these conditions you cannot expose any skin as it would lead to frostbite and the potential loss of limbs.</p> <p>The first few days I struggled to keep my fingers warm. They were always in dire pain and burning. However, as I learnt, pain is your friend as it means blood is still reaching your extremities. It’s when you stop feeling the pain that you are actually in trouble. In one of the other groups, one of the guests forgot to bring up his fly after peeing. They had to cut off three inches from his penis.</p> <p>The tents were shockingly warm. It’s incredible that these two thin layers of fabric could keep us warm and safe in such a hostile environment. I suppose we were helped by the constant sun that heated them up. The only night I was cold was on a foggy day which blocked off the sun. The tent never warmed up and I had to rely on the special -45 sleeping bag, my body heat, and a few hot water bottles that I put in the sleeping bag to stay warm.</p> <p>As the days progressed a few things became apparent. The entire experience felt like Groundhog Day or The Day After Tomorrow. In many ways the days were identical to each other. It was the same agenda, with the same group of people, in the same setting, with no communications to the outside world. Like in those movies, we improved day after day. It took us less and less time to pack up the camp in the morning and set it up in the evenings. We learnt which clothes to wear and what to eat. To keep my fingers warm I found which liners, when mixed with hand warmers and my mittens worked best. You also must eat every hour to not become hypoglycemic and not lose too much weight. The first few days I struggled as my protein bars and chocolate were so frozen, I could not bite into them. I realized I had to keep my snack for the next stop in my mittens during the walking session. This combined well with soft high calorie gummies and the two Gatorade powder packs I put in my hot water bottle daily. Despite eating 5,000+ calories per day we still lost around a pound per day of body weight. Even the toilet situation became more manageable. Because of the dryness and lack of life, we had to poop in a plastic bag that we carried with us the entire trip. We could also only make 2 pee holes per day and use a pee bottle the rest of the time. Pooping in a plastic bag while literally freezing your ass off is rather unpleasant. Worse, because we are carrying it with us our sled barely got lighter as we progressed. However, as with most things in life we got used to it and improved.</p> <p>It was interesting to observe that we all struggled in different ways and at different times. The first few days two of the crewmembers suffered from altitude sickness. Some had food poisoning. Many of us struggled to keep our hands warm or goggles not fogged up which made those days painful. Nicholas did not feel hungry one day and did not eat for a few stops which led him to becoming hypoglycemic. He describes that day as the most difficult he ever faced in his entire life. He made it through with sheer grit and willpower, and promptly passed out once we reached camp. I remember finding the windy and foggy days particularly painful. I also felt exhausted for legs 5 through 8 almost every day.</p> <iframe loading="lazy" style="display:block; margin:auto;" width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JkyZ34WSDiE" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> <p><br>If there was a common theme that emerged from all this is, it’s that we have the ability to push ourselves way beyond what we think our limit is. At some point or another, we all exceeded our physical abilities and dipped into the well of mental fortitude, grit, tenacity, and resilience. Making it to the end of the day was an exercise in mind over matter. It also goes to show how team spirit works as none of us wanted to let the others down by not making it or slowing the group down. We also all supported each other in our times of need.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/exercices-calories-burnt.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19834" width="990" height="446" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/exercices-calories-burnt.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/exercices-calories-burnt-768x346.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/exercices-calories-burnt-1200x541.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>With infinite relief. We reached the pole on the 7^th day of the expedition. It could not have come a day too soon. I am so happy we did not have to do three more days on the ice. I had feared the expedition would be too short. It was perfect. It was long enough to bond with each other, face adversity and rise to the challenge.</p> <p>We had a blast at the pole. We took infinite pictures both at the geographic south pole and at the mirrored globe that is the representation of the South Pole installed by the countries that have a permanent base there. By comparison, the magnetic south pole moves every year and is thousands of miles away. We enjoyed the heated tents and the delicious food at South Pole station, happy to leave our astronaut food behind us. Even the porta-potties were a welcome relief!</p> <p>That night turned into a night of drunken debauchery, or at least as bacchanal as one can get when surrounded by a team of men and one woman who have not showered or shaved in 10 days while exercising 8+ hours per day. However, tame it was, it was the perfect way to blow off steam and celebrate our success.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/South-Pole.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19837" width="990" height="647" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/South-Pole.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/South-Pole-768x502.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/South-Pole-1200x785.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>I had originally considered snow kiting from the pole to Hercules station at the coast alone with a guide. That’s 700 miles or 1,130 km and up to two weeks more of expedition depending on the wind. I am beyond happy I did not opt for that option as I was exhausted. Instead, we flew from the pole to Union Glacier station the next day on route back to Punta Arenas the day after.&nbsp;</p> <p>I took the time to reflect on the trip. I felt so much pride and relief at succeeding, and I wondered if I would have opted to go had I known how difficult it was going to be. Like Kevin, I think ultimately the answer would have been yes given all the learnings, the sense of purpose, and gratitude we felt from the experience. In life we value the things that we fight for and ultimately succeed in getting. This was a perfect example of that.</p> <iframe loading="lazy" style="display:block; margin:auto;" width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3B40tbmLYcg" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> <p><br>The overwhelming feeling, I came out of the experience with was one of gratitude. I felt immense gratitude for the disconnection I experienced during these two weeks. It’s extraordinarily rare in this hyper connected world not to have news, WhatsApp, email or any scheduled meetings. While we spoke with our teammates at times, we were alone with our thoughts for extended periods of time making it feel like an active silent Vipassana retreat. I used many of the legs of the trip to sing mantras, meditate, and be present. I used others to daydream and came away with countless ideas.</p> <p>I felt gratitude to have the ability to have such a unique experience in such a unique landscape. I appreciate how rare it is for people to do this and how special it is. I felt gratitude for the new connections I made. I spent a few hours every day chatting with my team members. Over the course of the expedition, I had meaningful conversations with every one of them and even got to know Kevin and Jack much better than I did before. This was further accentuated by the fact we decided to swap tentmate every night. I also felt boundless gratitude for my teammates and team leaders for the support they gave me when I was struggling.</p> <p>I felt gratitude for the modern equipment we were using. I read <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Endurance-Shackletons-Incredible-Alfred-Lansing-ebook/dp/B00IC8VF10/ref=sr_1_1?hvadid=598573443564&amp;hvdev=c&amp;hvlocint=9031968&amp;hvlocphy=9070244&amp;hvnetw=g&amp;hvqmt=e&amp;hvrand=2764869355413032951&amp;hvtargid=kwd-301617576888&amp;hydadcr=15305_13557257&amp;keywords=shackleton+endurance+book&amp;qid=1682285970&amp;sr=8-1" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.amazon.com/Endurance-Shackletons-Incredible-Alfred-Lansing-ebook/dp/B00IC8VF10/ref=sr_1_1?hvadid=598573443564&amp;hvdev=c&amp;hvlocint=9031968&amp;hvlocphy=9070244&amp;hvnetw=g&amp;hvqmt=e&amp;hvrand=2764869355413032951&amp;hvtargid=kwd-301617576888&amp;hydadcr=15305_13557257&amp;keywords=shackleton+endurance+book&amp;qid=1682285970&amp;sr=8-1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Endurance</a>, the book about Shackelton’s incredible voyage while I was skiing the last degree. I am beyond grateful I was doing this with 2023 gear and not 1915 gear! Coming back to civilization I felt so much gratitude for the little things in life we take for granted but are so magical. Indoor plumbing must be one of the greatest inventions ever, even more so when combined with hot water! Also, it’s mind boggling that we can just go to a restaurant and order delicious food. We are beyond privileged. We just need to take the time to realize it and appreciate it. Perhaps losing the things we take for granted once in a while reminds us of how amazing our lives truly are.</p> <p>I felt grateful to my colleagues at FJ Labs who picked up the slack while I was away, and to all of you who encourage me and inspire me to go further.&nbsp; I felt the most gratitude to my family and my extended family in the Grindaverse for putting up with me and supporting me on all my crazy adventures. I missed Francois, or “Fafa” as he likes to call himself, enormously, but was so happy to be reunited with him and to tell him all about my adventure. I look forward to going on many adventures with him in the future.</p> <p>All that to say: <strong>thank you!</strong></p>

<p>Eighteen months ago, I was contacted by my good friend Kevin Ryan who invited me to join him &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/team-extreme-in-antarctica/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Team Extreme in Antarctica&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Team Extreme in Antarctica. Categories - Featured Posts, Musings, Travels. Date-Posted - 2023-04-25T14:08:41 . Eighteen months ago, I was contacted by my good friend Kevin Ryan who invited me to join him on a scientific expedition skiing to the South Pole. In exchange for sponsoring the expedition a select crew of sponsors got to tag along and partake in the adventure. He was looking for the Venn diagram intersection of the people who could afford it, were fit enough to do it, and just as importantly would be interested in such a crazy adventure. I must admit I was not quite sure what the trip entailed but being a sucker for adventure and new experiences I immediately signed up. This turned out to lead to the most extraordinary of adventures. The expedition started with training in Finse, Norway in March 2022. There were plenty of skills to learn: how to pack our sleds, assemble our tents facing the wind, melt snow to cook our meals, even learn how to walk with these special skis with half skins to be able to pull our 100-pound sleds. Perhaps most importantly we needed to acquire and learn to use all the equipment we would need for the expedition. You can see the seemingly infinite list on pages 34-46 of the instruction pack embedded below. As you can imagine given the expected cold layering up and down effectively is key. It&#8217;s during the training that I met Dr. Jack Kreindler . He was one of the scientists who came up with the idea for the expedition as a scientific research study. It stemmed from a 2017 (all men) and 2019 (all women) British coast-to-pole military expedition during which many of the super fit male soldiers in the first expedition struggled, while the all-women group did well. They showed early evidence that women did better than men because they lost less muscle mass. Dr. Jack and colleagues wondered if there was a way to tell what caused this difference and to know ahead of time who was going to do well or not in such hyper-endurance challenges using wearables.&nbsp; This new study, the Interdisciplinary South Pole Innovation &amp; Research Expedition, was the largest of its kind in extreme environments. It was composed of two teams: a 10-person team doing the 60-day 1100 km coast-to-pole expedition INSPIRE-22, mostly military types, half female and half male, half on a vegan diet and half on an omnivore diet. The other INSPIRE Last Degree 23 composed of a team of eight sponsors and two scientists including Dr. Jack and Dr. Ryan Jackson, skiing the Last Degree, 111 km unacclimatised going from 89 degrees south to 90 degrees south. This also allowed the team to test how quickly our bodies adjust to this extreme environment given that we would be on the ice for 10 days relative to the 60 days of the coast-to-pole team. Our challenge was made more difficult by the fact that we started at a 10,000 feet elevation while they started at sea level and would get the opportunity to adjust to the altitude over time. The training involved skiing up to 16 miles or 25 km per day while pulling a 100-pound sled in blizzard conditions, sleeping in freezing tents, eating dehydrated food, with only a shovel as a restroom. It was painful, cold, and difficult, and yet I loved it. Many questioned why I was doing something so challenging, which prompted a period of reflection as to my motivations. Ultimately, it culminated in the blog post Why? where I articulated why I love putting myself in challenging situations, depriving myself of the very things I am thankful for, and risking losing it all. I recommend you read the entire post, but the quick summary is as follows: A love for flow states. A sense of meaning ingrained in the human condition. Gratitude practice. An openness to serendipity. New learnings. Clarity of thought. Staying grounded. My conclusion from the training was that the expedition would be very challenging, but doable. I decided to make sure I was in great shape before heading to Antarctica. I started doing strength training three times a week, did 2-3 hours of exercising per day, almost every day, mostly kiting and padel in November and December, and lost 25 pounds. I flew to New York to Santiago the night of December 30th and continued to Punta Arenas the morning of December 31st. Punta Arenas is Southernmost part of Chile and serves as the pre-staging area for expeditions. It’s there that I met the other team members for the last degree: Taavet Hinrikus, founder of Plural and Transferwise. Jena Daniels, VP at Medable. Arnis Ozols, co-founder of Aleph. Ivan Cenci, general manager of Empatica. James Berdigans, founder of Printify. Nicolas Ryan-Schreiber, founder of Aym and Kevin Ryan’s son. In total there were 10 of us and were joined by three guides who would lead the expedition. I must admit that I thought it odd that we needed to be in Punta Arenas on December 31st rather than with our families, but the window for a polar expedition is very brief given how short the polar summer is. Every year they set up the camp at Union Glacier mid-November, only to take everything down again January 20th. During that time frame ALE flies 500 people to go on expedition and can only accommodate 70 guests at a time, leading to a compressed schedule. Punta Arenas is a mining town of 125,000, but I suspect that many people don’t live there full time as the city was entirely deserted. I often felt as though I was in The Last of Us given how empty the streets were. There were also no new year celebrations other than the muted horns from the transport ships at midnight. Regardless, I was happy to meet my expedition mates. During the next three days, we did daily COVID tests, checked our gear, made final equipment purchases, and did a battery of blood tests to get a baseline for where we stood prior to the expedition. We were also fitted with blood glucose monitors, Empatica medical devices and Oura rings. On January 3, we finally flew to Union Glacier station in Antarctica which was our staging area for the expedition. We bid our farewells to civilization and boarded ALE’s Boeing 757. As we neared Antarctica, they turned off the heat in the plane to get us accustomed to the temperature on arrival. The most impressive part of the flight was the landing on the blue ice runway. Upon arrival, we were transported on tracked vehicles to the station. The station has 35 two-person tents for guests, tents for the staff as well as all the necessary support infrastructure: a dining hall, meeting hall, a pantry, medical station etc. Upon seeing the infrastructure, I started to appreciate why Antarctica is so expensive. The season is only 2 months long. Everything must be assembled and de-assembled every year. All the food and staff must be flown in, and all waste is flown out, including all human waste. Union Glacier itself was quite pleasant. We were staying in large pre-installed tents that have foldable beds you can put your sleeping bag on. It&#8217;s in the western part of Antarctica on 1,500 meters (1 mile) of ice. Relative to the polar plateau, the weather was a balmy -5 degrees. It attracts a lot of adventurers preparing for various expeditions. Through sheer serendipity I ran into my friend Chris Michel, photographer extraordinaire whom you can thank for many of the more beautiful photos in this post. I also ran into Alex Honnold of Free Solo fame. While at Union Glacier, we did a refresher on our training. We then picked 10 days of food for the expedition consisting of two high calorie rehydrated meals per day (breakfast and dinner) and enough snacks to get us through 8 rest stops, during which we must eat, per day. We packed our sleds and awaited favorable weather conditions to start our journey. While waiting for the expedition to begin, we did a fat bike tour. We did a hike to “Elephant Head”. We also watched ALE’s Ilyushin IL-76 Russian transport plane land on the blue ice which was rather impressive. The weather finally cleared on January 6, and we were set to embark on our expedition. We loaded our gear on a DC3 from 1942 and were dropped off at 89 degrees south to begin our journey. The time had come. Our lifeline to civilization now gone, we were henceforth left to our own devices. We could only rely on ourselves for the days to come. All the problems of the world at bay, only one thing mattered: reaching the pole safe and sound. Antarctica is the land of superlatives. It’s the highest, coldest, and driest continent. Nowhere is it more apparent than on the polar plateau with 10,000 feet of ice below your feet and a seeming infinity of whiteness in every direction. It often feels as though you are walking on clouds. The first day we decided to only do two legs before setting camp to acclimate to the altitude and conditions. On the second day we did 6 legs before settling into a routine of 8 legs per day. The schedule was as follows: we would wake up at 7 am, have breakfast, pack our camp into our sleds, then ski for 50 minutes, then take a 10-minute break 8 times in a row, averaging 13 miles per day, before setting up camp again, having dinner and settling in for the night. For the last frontier we were skiing 69 miles or 111 km to the pole. When we learnt it was that short, Kevin and I thought it would be super easy, barely an inconvenience, and that we would be done in 5 days. We did not understand why we were planning to take up to 10 days. After all we routinely hike 15-20 miles in a day carrying our camping gear. Needless to say, our expectations were way off. It was significantly harder than we ever expected and definitely the hardest adventure either of us had ever been on. I suppose it’s due to a combination of factors: the altitude, the exertion of doing an activity we are not familiar with, pulling a 100-pound sled, and the cold. The temperature was a constant -30 degrees whether day or night and required constant care to make sure we were not cold, but also that we did not sweat during the walking section which would lead us to freeze during the breaks. The dry -30 was reasonably easy to manage, but what would alter the conditions dramatically was whether there was wind or not. Several of the days we had wind essentially straight into us bringing the windchill to -50. In these conditions you cannot expose any skin as it would lead to frostbite and the potential loss of limbs. The first few days I struggled to keep my fingers warm. They were always in dire pain and burning. However, as I learnt, pain is your friend as it means blood is still reaching your extremities. It’s when you stop feeling the pain that you are actually in trouble. In one of the other groups, one of the guests forgot to bring up his fly after peeing. They had to cut off three inches from his penis. The tents were shockingly warm. It’s incredible that these two thin layers of fabric could keep us warm and safe in such a hostile environment. I suppose we were helped by the constant sun that heated them up. The only night I was cold was on a foggy day which blocked off the sun. The tent never warmed up and I had to rely on the special -45 sleeping bag, my body heat, and a few hot water bottles that I put in the sleeping bag to stay warm. As the days progressed a few things became apparent. The entire experience felt like Groundhog Day or The Day After Tomorrow. In many ways the days were identical to each other. It was the same agenda, with the same group of people, in the same setting, with no communications to the outside world. Like in those movies, we improved day after day. It took us less and less time to pack up the camp in the morning and set it up in the evenings. We learnt which clothes to wear and what to eat. To keep my fingers warm I found which liners, when mixed with hand warmers and my mittens worked best. You also must eat every hour to not become hypoglycemic and not lose too much weight. The first few days I struggled as my protein bars and chocolate were so frozen, I could not bite into them. I realized I had to keep my snack for the next stop in my mittens during the walking session. This combined well with soft high calorie gummies and the two Gatorade powder packs I put in my hot water bottle daily. Despite eating 5,000+ calories per day we still lost around a pound per day of body weight. Even the toilet situation became more manageable. Because of the dryness and lack of life, we had to poop in a plastic bag that we carried with us the entire trip. We could also only make 2 pee holes per day and use a pee bottle the rest of the time. Pooping in a plastic bag while literally freezing your ass off is rather unpleasant. Worse, because we are carrying it with us our sled barely got lighter as we progressed. However, as with most things in life we got used to it and improved. It was interesting to observe that we all struggled in different ways and at different times. The first few days two of the crewmembers suffered from altitude sickness. Some had food poisoning. Many of us struggled to keep our hands warm or goggles not fogged up which made those days painful. Nicholas did not feel hungry one day and did not eat for a few stops which led him to becoming hypoglycemic. He describes that day as the most difficult he ever faced in his entire life. He made it through with sheer grit and willpower, and promptly passed out once we reached camp. I remember finding the windy and foggy days particularly painful. I also felt exhausted for legs 5 through 8 almost every day. If there was a common theme that emerged from all this is, it’s that we have the ability to push ourselves way beyond what we think our limit is. At some point or another, we all exceeded our physical abilities and dipped into the well of mental fortitude, grit, tenacity, and resilience. Making it to the end of the day was an exercise in mind over matter. It also goes to show how team spirit works as none of us wanted to let the others down by not making it or slowing the group down. We also all supported each other in our times of need. With infinite relief. We reached the pole on the 7th day of the expedition. It could not have come a day too soon. I am so happy we did not have to do three more days on the ice. I had feared the expedition would be too short. It was perfect. It was long enough to bond with each other, face adversity and rise to the challenge. We had a blast at the pole. We took infinite pictures both at the geographic south pole and at the mirrored globe that is the representation of the South Pole installed by the countries that have a permanent base there. By comparison, the magnetic south pole moves every year and is thousands of miles away. We enjoyed the heated tents and the delicious food at South Pole station, happy to leave our astronaut food behind us. Even the porta-potties were a welcome relief! That night turned into a night of drunken debauchery, or at least as bacchanal as one can get when surrounded by a team of men and one woman who have not showered or shaved in 10 days while exercising 8+ hours per day. However, tame it was, it was the perfect way to blow off steam and celebrate our success. I had originally considered snow kiting from the pole to Hercules station at the coast alone with a guide. That’s 700 miles or 1,130 km and up to two weeks more of expedition depending on the wind. I am beyond happy I did not opt for that option as I was exhausted. Instead, we flew from the pole to Union Glacier station the next day on route back to Punta Arenas the day after.&nbsp; I took the time to reflect on the trip. I felt so much pride and relief at succeeding, and I wondered if I would have opted to go had I known how difficult it was going to be. Like Kevin, I think ultimately the answer would have been yes given all the learnings, the sense of purpose, and gratitude we felt from the experience. In life we value the things that we fight for and ultimately succeed in getting. This was a perfect example of that. The overwhelming feeling, I came out of the experience with was one of gratitude. I felt immense gratitude for the disconnection I experienced during these two weeks. It’s extraordinarily rare in this hyper connected world not to have news, WhatsApp, email or any scheduled meetings. While we spoke with our teammates at times, we were alone with our thoughts for extended periods of time making it feel like an active silent Vipassana retreat. I used many of the legs of the trip to sing mantras, meditate, and be present. I used others to daydream and came away with countless ideas. I felt gratitude to have the ability to have such a unique experience in such a unique landscape. I appreciate how rare it is for people to do this and how special it is. I felt gratitude for the new connections I made. I spent a few hours every day chatting with my team members. Over the course of the expedition, I had meaningful conversations with every one of them and even got to know Kevin and Jack much better than I did before. This was further accentuated by the fact we decided to swap tentmate every night. I also felt boundless gratitude for my teammates and team leaders for the support they gave me when I was struggling. I felt gratitude for the modern equipment we were using. I read Endurance, the book about Shackelton’s incredible voyage while I was skiing the last degree. I am beyond grateful I was doing this with 2023 gear and not 1915 gear! Coming back to civilization I felt so much gratitude for the little things in life we take for granted but are so magical. Indoor plumbing must be one of the greatest inventions ever, even more so when combined with hot water! Also, it’s mind boggling that we can just go to a restaurant and order delicious food. We are beyond privileged. We just need to take the time to realize it and appreciate it. Perhaps losing the things we take for granted once in a while reminds us of how amazing our lives truly are. I felt grateful to my colleagues at FJ Labs who picked up the slack while I was away, and to all of you who encourage me and inspire me to go further.&nbsp; I felt the most gratitude to my family and my extended family in the Grindaverse for putting up with me and supporting me on all my crazy adventures. I missed Francois, or “Fafa” as he likes to call himself, enormously, but was so happy to be reunited with him and to tell him all about my adventure. I look forward to going on many adventures with him in the future. All that to say: thank you!

2023-03-21T10:38:00

2023-03-21T10:38:00

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=19692

2023-03-21T16:39:23

2023-03-21T16:39:23

fred-the-vampire-accountant-is-a-fantastic-read

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Fred The Vampire Accountant is a fantastic read

<p>I was first introduced to the genre of horror comedy with the <a href="https://a.co/d/6R82Fut" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://a.co/d/6R82Fut" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bill the Vampire series</a> by Rick Gualtieri. Bill the Vampire is the story of a video game playing nerd turned vampire who ends up being a video game playing nerd vampire rather than the suave sexy vampire of lore. The first few books made me laugh more than any book I probably ever read and I definitely recommend that series. However, little by little as the stakes got higher I found that it lost its comedic touches and never reached the heights of the first 2 or 3 books.</p> <p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074CDD67Y?binding=paperback&amp;ref=dbs_m_mng_rwt_sft_tpbk_tkin" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074CDD67Y?binding=paperback&amp;ref=dbs_m_mng_rwt_sft_tpbk_tkin" rel="noreferrer noopener">Fred The Vampire Accountant</a> falls into the same genre. The series as a whole is better than the Bill the Vampire series. The world building is fantastic and I loved learning of the different species and interactions between them with dragons, demons, therians, fey and more. The humor is genuinely witty and never feels forced and over-the-top.</p> <p>Ultimately the series is an ode to friendship, the family you chose, and the power of good intentions. I loved seeing Fred build his clan little by little. The interactions between the clan members are heartfelt and touching. They always have each other’s back and their relationship shines as a beacon of what people can accomplish when they overcome differences in backgrounds and race.</p> <p>If you are into fantasy, the series is well worth reading!</p>

<p>I was first introduced to the genre of horror comedy with the Bill the Vampire series by Rick &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/fred-the-vampire-accountant-is-a-fantastic-read/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Fred The Vampire Accountant is a fantastic read&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Fred The Vampire Accountant is a fantastic read. Categories - Books. Date-Posted - 2023-03-21T10:38:00 . I was first introduced to the genre of horror comedy with the Bill the Vampire series by Rick Gualtieri. Bill the Vampire is the story of a video game playing nerd turned vampire who ends up being a video game playing nerd vampire rather than the suave sexy vampire of lore. The first few books made me laugh more than any book I probably ever read and I definitely recommend that series. However, little by little as the stakes got higher I found that it lost its comedic touches and never reached the heights of the first 2 or 3 books. Fred The Vampire Accountant falls into the same genre. The series as a whole is better than the Bill the Vampire series. The world building is fantastic and I loved learning of the different species and interactions between them with dragons, demons, therians, fey and more. The humor is genuinely witty and never feels forced and over-the-top. Ultimately the series is an ode to friendship, the family you chose, and the power of good intentions. I loved seeing Fred build his clan little by little. The interactions between the clan members are heartfelt and touching. They always have each other’s back and their relationship shines as a beacon of what people can accomplish when they overcome differences in backgrounds and race. If you are into fantasy, the series is well worth reading!

2023-03-17T16:07:21

2023-03-17T16:07:21

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=19699

2023-10-11T14:05:07

2023-10-11T14:05:07

episode-42-kevin-ryan-unicorn-builder

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Episode 42: Kevin Ryan, Unicorn Builder

<p>I had the pleasure of being joined by my good friend Kevin Ryan. He’s often been called the “Godfather of NYC tech.” Kevin is one of the leading internet entrepreneurs and investors in New York. He is a co-founder of MongoDB, Business Insider, Gilt Groupe, Zola, and Nomad Health, and founds new companies with AlleyCorp every year. Earlier in his career, Kevin helped to grow DoubleClick first as President and then as CEO, leading their growth from a 20-person startup to a publicly traded global leader with over 1,500 employees, through IPO in 1998 and acquisition by Google in 2007.</p> <p>Kevin is also on the Board of Tech:NYC, Vice Chairman of The Partnership for New York City, a member of the CFR Committee on Foreign Affairs, and Director Emeritus for Human Rights Watch. Kevin previously served on the boards of the Yale Corporation and INSEAD.</p> <p>It&#8217;s also worth mentioning Kevin is the one who convinced me to go to Antarctica with him.</p> <p>We covered:</p> <ul> <li>His history and path into tech.</li> <li>How he built so many successful companies with Alley Corp.</li> <li>Lessons learned along the way.</li> <li>His general life philosophy and perspective on Antarctica, Burning Man, psychedelics and much more.</li> </ul> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Episode 42 Kevin Ryan Unicorn Builder" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FN9y5uYFXFk?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>If you prefer, you can listen to the episode in the embedded podcast player.</p> <figure><iframe loading="lazy" title="Libsyn Player" style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/26258907/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/forward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/000000/" height="90" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen=""></iframe></figure> <p>In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on:</p> <p>iTunes: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/42-kevin-ryan-unicorn-builder/id1532336635?i=1000604649511" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/42-kevin-ryan-unicorn-builder/id1532336635?i=1000604649511</a></p> <p>Spotify: <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/77lGAvOKboJxeh38K1OgJv?si=1b92e60770dc47c9" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://open.spotify.com/episode/3eFWBpWvpgp99L7P4wqxt9?si=0398e27d782d4f4e</a></p>

<p>I had the pleasure of being joined by my good friend Kevin Ryan. He’s often been called the &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-42-kevin-ryan-unicorn-builder/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Episode 42: Kevin Ryan, Unicorn Builder&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Episode 42: Kevin Ryan, Unicorn Builder. Categories - Playing with Unicorns. Date-Posted - 2023-03-17T16:07:21 . I had the pleasure of being joined by my good friend Kevin Ryan. He’s often been called the “Godfather of NYC tech.” Kevin is one of the leading internet entrepreneurs and investors in New York. He is a co-founder of MongoDB, Business Insider, Gilt Groupe, Zola, and Nomad Health, and founds new companies with AlleyCorp every year. Earlier in his career, Kevin helped to grow DoubleClick first as President and then as CEO, leading their growth from a 20-person startup to a publicly traded global leader with over 1,500 employees, through IPO in 1998 and acquisition by Google in 2007. Kevin is also on the Board of Tech:NYC, Vice Chairman of The Partnership for New York City, a member of the CFR Committee on Foreign Affairs, and Director Emeritus for Human Rights Watch. Kevin previously served on the boards of the Yale Corporation and INSEAD. It&#8217;s also worth mentioning Kevin is the one who convinced me to go to Antarctica with him. We covered: His history and path into tech. How he built so many successful companies with Alley Corp. Lessons learned along the way. His general life philosophy and perspective on Antarctica, Burning Man, psychedelics and much more. If you prefer, you can listen to the episode in the embedded podcast player. In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on: iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/42-kevin-ryan-unicorn-builder/id1532336635?i=1000604649511 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3eFWBpWvpgp99L7P4wqxt9?si=0398e27d782d4f4e

2023-02-14T15:09:27

2023-02-14T15:09:27

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=19647

2023-02-14T15:09:28

2023-02-14T15:09:28

episode-41-ask-me-anything

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Episode 41: Ask Me Anything

<p>It had been over a year since we did the last Ask Me Anything (AMA) so the time had come. As requested by the audience, my son François joined us for the first part of the show. He was his usual epic self: calm, poised, and playing along cutely. His presence clearly played a part in the success of the episode which was one of the most watched ever across all the platforms and was by far the most interactive episode ever with 137 live comments in addition to dozens of questions submitted ahead of time!</p> <p>The audience’s questions fell into 5 categories: Antarctica, Marketplaces, Startups, Macro, and Other (life decisions, books, etc.) which I covered in turn.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Episode 41: Ask Me Anything" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lBHJQlG4o7E?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p><strong>Antarctica:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Was that frostbite on my nose? (02:14.5)</li> <li>Do I still have my fingers? (04:40.4)</li> <li>Is there a noticeable climate change? (06:18.5)</li> <li>What was the most intense experience there? (07:51.2)</li> <li>For anyone thinking of following in your footsteps in Antarctica, what would your advice be? What would you have done differently to prep while there, etc.? (13:26.0)</li> <li>Is there a way to do a similar trip on a budget? (16:19.4)</li> <li>What&#8217;s your next big adventure trip? (18:28.5)</li> <li>What&#8217;s your motivation for pushing your body to limits? (21:31.8)</li> </ul> <p><strong>Marketplaces:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Marketplace and FinTech trends. What is it like to be an angel investor during this macroeconomic downturn? (23.18.5)</li> <li>Why doesn&#8217;t OLX have a feature such as Kijiji&#8217;s to notify me when new ads are posted. I&#8217;m a customer and a big fan of OLX Brazil, but the lack of this feature drives me nuts and forces me to scrape this website. Use daily, using third party services. Why don&#8217;t most other marketplaces offer it? (27:03.3)</li> <li>In the real estate market, what are the PropTech models that are functioning? (28:51.3)</li> <li>Thoughts regarding healthcare marketplaces, especially what could be fulfilled via a DAO? (31:29.29)</li> <li>How would you define a marketplace at the highest degree of complexity? (33:11.0)</li> <li>Thoughts on investing in organic product marketplaces? (35:02.7)</li> <li>How to prepare investors for the time it takes to build two-sided marketplaces? (36.21.6)</li> <li>Are you an Amazon Prime member? What do you think of RX fasts? $5 per month for unlimited generic medications. (37:25.4)</li> <li>What do you think of marketplaces like Upwork in different verticals? (38:45.1)</li> <li>Online C2C marketplace for books: “Vinted for Books”. What do you think of the idea? How can I validate the unit economics? (40:44.7)</li> <li>Do you think the prevalence of unicorns with fully distributed remote teams will increase dramatically in the next two to three years? (44:59.1)</li> <li>For which applications do you think AI and Web3 will merge first? (47:16.3)</li> </ul> <p><strong>Startups:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Do you support emerging fund managers, what advice would you give to us? (49:32.5)</li> <li>Would you be interested in investing in a French impact startup that will revolutionize urban mobility? (51:15.9)</li> <li>Where the current market conditions for FinTech startups (52:36.3)</li> <li>How fast will VC investing recover given there are hundreds of billions of dollars on the sidelines? (54:28.9)</li> <li>My thoughts about seeing capital holders push maturity requirements down on earlier stage startups: pre-seed VCs and angels demanding traction like revenue or user growth (56:30.7)</li> <li>What are you recommending portfolio companies do for 2023 and 2024? (58:45.6)</li> <li>Are you familiar with video on demand market? Any thoughts on that? Where would you see opportunities? (01:00:22.3)</li> <li>Which new payment companies are going to scale/win in the platform market? (01:00:57.7)</li> <li>What emerges in the meantime from a payment perspective? (01:01:56.9)</li> </ul> <p><strong>Macro:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Outside of investing in private markets, how are you deploying your personal capital against this macro environment? (01:02:26.7)</li> <li>What is your prediction for when the residential real estate market bottoms out in the US? (01:07:46.8)</li> <li>What percentage do I keep in crypto? (01:09:54.9)</li> </ul> <p><strong>Other:</strong></p> <ul> <li>What are the most extreme sports that Francois did? (01:15:43.6)</li> <li>I grew up in France. Why did I leave the US for college rather than staying in France for it? (01:17:41.3)</li> <li>What drives you? What do you do? (01:19:30.5)</li> <li>What question have you never been asked that you believe someone should have asked you by now? (01:20:54.2)</li> <li>Why did you leave Silicon Cabarete? (01:22:20.8)</li> <li>Was your trip (to Antartica) inspired by the book Great Choice by Jim Collins? (01:29:10.9)</li> <li>What are you reading now? Recommend a good book. (01:30:44.3)</li> <li>How do you manage family life, venture time and work commitment? (01:31:37.6)</li> <li>Comment on going in the Tim Ferris podcast. (01:33:20.1)</li> <li>How do you manage to read 1500 books per year? (01:33:44.0)</li> <li>What was my fundamental inspiration behind starting OLX? (01:34:33.4)</li> <li>What&#8217;s easier, a product meeting or your son&#8217;s bedtime? (01:35:55.5)</li> <li>What’s your advice to get referrals to VCs? (01:37:32.7)</li> <li>Thoughts on bringing back Silicon Cabarete (01:37:51.1)</li> <li>Would you rather build an island somewhere in the ocean? (01:38:04.1)</li> <li>Why do you believe that a team is better than a solo entrepreneur to start a business? (01:39:25.3)</li> <li>What do you think of Jordan Peterson? (01:40:26.1)</li> <li>Antarctica: do you know of Richard Bird’s expeditions? (01:41:27.7)</li> <li>Do you do gut-based product or do you follow the validation mode of product development? (01:44:05.6)</li> <li>Do you ever invest in single founders? (01:44:52.1)</li> <li>List of books prioritized (01:45:05.5)</li> <li>With reference to your career or personal experience, what do you consider having been your most significant mistakes and have you learned from them? (01:46:47.3)</li> </ul> <p>If you prefer, you can listen to the episode in the embedded podcast player.</p> <figure><iframe loading="lazy" title="Libsyn Player" style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/25905687/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/forward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/000000/" height="90" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen=""></iframe></figure> <p>In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on:</p> <p>iTunes: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-41-ask-me-anything/id1532336635?i=1000599245484" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-41-ask-me-anything/id1532336635?i=1000599245484</a></p> <p>Spotify: <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/3eFWBpWvpgp99L7P4wqxt9?si=0398e27d782d4f4e" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://open.spotify.com/episode/3eFWBpWvpgp99L7P4wqxt9?si=0398e27d782d4f4e</a></p>

<p>It had been over a year since we did the last Ask Me Anything (AMA) so the time &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-41-ask-me-anything/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Episode 41: Ask Me Anything&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Episode 41: Ask Me Anything. Categories - Playing with Unicorns. Date-Posted - 2023-02-14T15:09:27 . It had been over a year since we did the last Ask Me Anything (AMA) so the time had come. As requested by the audience, my son François joined us for the first part of the show. He was his usual epic self: calm, poised, and playing along cutely. His presence clearly played a part in the success of the episode which was one of the most watched ever across all the platforms and was by far the most interactive episode ever with 137 live comments in addition to dozens of questions submitted ahead of time! The audience’s questions fell into 5 categories: Antarctica, Marketplaces, Startups, Macro, and Other (life decisions, books, etc.) which I covered in turn. Antarctica: Was that frostbite on my nose? (02:14.5) Do I still have my fingers? (04:40.4) Is there a noticeable climate change? (06:18.5) What was the most intense experience there? (07:51.2) For anyone thinking of following in your footsteps in Antarctica, what would your advice be? What would you have done differently to prep while there, etc.? (13:26.0) Is there a way to do a similar trip on a budget? (16:19.4) What&#8217;s your next big adventure trip? (18:28.5) What&#8217;s your motivation for pushing your body to limits? (21:31.8) Marketplaces: Marketplace and FinTech trends. What is it like to be an angel investor during this macroeconomic downturn? (23.18.5) Why doesn&#8217;t OLX have a feature such as Kijiji&#8217;s to notify me when new ads are posted. I&#8217;m a customer and a big fan of OLX Brazil, but the lack of this feature drives me nuts and forces me to scrape this website. Use daily, using third party services. Why don&#8217;t most other marketplaces offer it? (27:03.3) In the real estate market, what are the PropTech models that are functioning? (28:51.3) Thoughts regarding healthcare marketplaces, especially what could be fulfilled via a DAO? (31:29.29) How would you define a marketplace at the highest degree of complexity? (33:11.0) Thoughts on investing in organic product marketplaces? (35:02.7) How to prepare investors for the time it takes to build two-sided marketplaces? (36.21.6) Are you an Amazon Prime member? What do you think of RX fasts? $5 per month for unlimited generic medications. (37:25.4) What do you think of marketplaces like Upwork in different verticals? (38:45.1) Online C2C marketplace for books: “Vinted for Books”. What do you think of the idea? How can I validate the unit economics? (40:44.7) Do you think the prevalence of unicorns with fully distributed remote teams will increase dramatically in the next two to three years? (44:59.1) For which applications do you think AI and Web3 will merge first? (47:16.3) Startups: Do you support emerging fund managers, what advice would you give to us? (49:32.5) Would you be interested in investing in a French impact startup that will revolutionize urban mobility? (51:15.9) Where the current market conditions for FinTech startups (52:36.3) How fast will VC investing recover given there are hundreds of billions of dollars on the sidelines? (54:28.9) My thoughts about seeing capital holders push maturity requirements down on earlier stage startups: pre-seed VCs and angels demanding traction like revenue or user growth (56:30.7) What are you recommending portfolio companies do for 2023 and 2024? (58:45.6) Are you familiar with video on demand market? Any thoughts on that? Where would you see opportunities? (01:00:22.3) Which new payment companies are going to scale/win in the platform market? (01:00:57.7) What emerges in the meantime from a payment perspective? (01:01:56.9) Macro: Outside of investing in private markets, how are you deploying your personal capital against this macro environment? (01:02:26.7) What is your prediction for when the residential real estate market bottoms out in the US? (01:07:46.8) What percentage do I keep in crypto? (01:09:54.9) Other: What are the most extreme sports that Francois did? (01:15:43.6) I grew up in France. Why did I leave the US for college rather than staying in France for it? (01:17:41.3) What drives you? What do you do? (01:19:30.5) What question have you never been asked that you believe someone should have asked you by now? (01:20:54.2) Why did you leave Silicon Cabarete? (01:22:20.8) Was your trip (to Antartica) inspired by the book Great Choice by Jim Collins? (01:29:10.9) What are you reading now? Recommend a good book. (01:30:44.3) How do you manage family life, venture time and work commitment? (01:31:37.6) Comment on going in the Tim Ferris podcast. (01:33:20.1) How do you manage to read 1500 books per year? (01:33:44.0) What was my fundamental inspiration behind starting OLX? (01:34:33.4) What&#8217;s easier, a product meeting or your son&#8217;s bedtime? (01:35:55.5) What’s your advice to get referrals to VCs? (01:37:32.7) Thoughts on bringing back Silicon Cabarete (01:37:51.1) Would you rather build an island somewhere in the ocean? (01:38:04.1) Why do you believe that a team is better than a solo entrepreneur to start a business? (01:39:25.3) What do you think of Jordan Peterson? (01:40:26.1) Antarctica: do you know of Richard Bird’s expeditions? (01:41:27.7) Do you do gut-based product or do you follow the validation mode of product development? (01:44:05.6) Do you ever invest in single founders? (01:44:52.1) List of books prioritized (01:45:05.5) With reference to your career or personal experience, what do you consider having been your most significant mistakes and have you learned from them? (01:46:47.3) If you prefer, you can listen to the episode in the embedded podcast player. In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on: iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-41-ask-me-anything/id1532336635?i=1000599245484 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3eFWBpWvpgp99L7P4wqxt9?si=0398e27d782d4f4e

2023-01-31T14:51:28

2023-01-31T14:51:28

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=19612

2023-04-25T17:28:53

2023-04-25T17:28:53

fj-labs-2022-year-in-review

publish

post

https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-2022-year-in-review/

FJ Labs 2022 Year in Review

<div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1170" height="8232" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/FJ-Labs_2022_Annual-Infographic-updated-2.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19627" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/FJ-Labs_2022_Annual-Infographic-updated-2.png 1170w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/FJ-Labs_2022_Annual-Infographic-updated-2-768x5404.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/FJ-Labs_2022_Annual-Infographic-updated-2-291x2048.png 291w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div>

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FJ Labs 2022 Year in Review. Categories - FJ Labs. Date-Posted - 2023-01-31T14:51:28 .

2023-01-26T13:52:15

2023-01-26T13:52:15

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=19594

2023-04-24T06:44:56

2023-04-24T06:44:56

fj-labs-closes-260m-third-fund

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post

https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-closes-260m-third-fund/

FJ Labs closes $260M third fund

<p><em>By <a href="https://techcrunch.com/author/connie-loizos/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Connie Loizos</a></em> <em>reproduced from</em> <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/25/most-active-investor-fj-labs-closes-on-260m-across-two-new-vehicles/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/25/most-active-investor-fj-labs-closes-on-260m-across-two-new-vehicles/" rel="noreferrer noopener">TechCrunch</a></p> <p id="speakable-summary">Fabrice Grinda says he never intended to run a venture firm. He just really (really) enjoyed angel investing. In fact, by late 2013, when he was on the verge of selling the global classifieds marketplace&nbsp;<a href="https://www.olx.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">OLX</a>&nbsp;— his third business — he says he had already written checks to more than 150 startups with his longtime friend, serial entrepreneur <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jose-marin-093121/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Jose Marin</a>. “We’d been working together forever. It was really a family office that was angel investing at a massive scale,” Grinda recalls.</p> <p>Noting that flurry of checks, potential LPs, including strategic investors, family offices, and founders began to express an interest in investing with them.&nbsp; By 2016, a Norwegian telecom company Telenor offered to provide exclusive funding to the duo, giving them $50 million to invest toward that end.</p> <p>Fast forward, and their outfit, FJ Labs, has evolved from a two-man outfit to a sprawling firm with 34 employees, including eight investors and four “full-blown partners.” It began to grow in earnest in 2018, when LPs committed to invest $175 million with the outfit. Now, Grinda is announcing that FJ Labs has garnered $260 million in capital commitments across a pre-seed fund and an opportunity-style “Series B and beyond” fund, with backing from family offices, institutional investors, and a wide array of founders, including of LinkedIn, PayPal, Supercell, Transferwise, MongoDB and Wayfair.</p> <p>Indeed, over time, FJ Labs has come to look less like a “lab” and more like a traditional venture firm, though Grinda rejects the comparison.</p> <p>“We are a venture fund,” he says, but one that does “angel investing at venture scale,” he insists. “We don’t lead. We don’t price. We don’t take board seats. We decide after two one-hour meetings over the course of a week whether we’ll invest or not because we have extraordinary pattern recognition that allows us to decide extremely quickly.”</p> <p>It sounds high risk, yet FJ Labs has results to show for its approach. Among its many investments, for example, it has bet early on outfits that have ballooned over time, including Alibaba, Coupang, Flexport, and Delivery Hero.</p> <p>Focusing on marketplaces and network effects businesses — which Grinda knows well — certainly helps. So does the portfolio that FJ Labs has built over time, which includes 900 active investments as part of what Grinda describes as the “world’s largest marketplace portfolio.” (Pitchbook data supports that FJ Labs was the&nbsp;<a href="https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/global-league-tables-q3-2022" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">most active venture outfit</a>&nbsp;globally in the third quarter of last year.)</p> <p>It all builds on itself like its own kind of flywheel, Grinda suggests, pointing to the firm’s deal flow to underscore the point. Through FJ Labs’s 900 companies, it has connections to roughly 2,000 founders, and they “come back for their next companies, and send us their friends and employees,” says Grinda.</p> <p>Similarly, because FJ Labs is a “source of differentiated deal flow for the VCs, they invite us to their deals,” he says.</p> <p>FJ Labs will get bigger still if everything goes as planned. Grinda says that the “idea is to create an institution that is going to be a legacy and “be around “for decades.”</p> <p>It’s hard to imagine that Grinda, who is&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/fashion/a-curious-midlife-crisis-for-a-tech-entrepreneur.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">famously itinerant</a>, could stick with venture capital so long. But he says to believe it. Right now there are three problems FJ Labs would like to help address, while also making money, and none of them are minor. The first is inequality of opportunity, the second is climate change, and the third is the “mental and physical well-being crisis.”</p> <p>One related bet is on User Interviews, a seven-year-old Brooklyn startup that helps user experience researchers source study participants across different demographics and behavioral criteria. (TechCrunch covered its newest funding&nbsp;<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/20/user-interviews-which-helps-companies-recruit-survey-participants-raises-27-5m/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">here</a>.)</p> <p>Other startups don’t easily fit into one of those three buckets, including Gravitics, a one-year-old Seattle startup that is developing living and work modules for space travel and that announced a $20 million round last year. (We covered&nbsp;<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/17/gravitics-space-stations/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">that round</a>, too.)</p> <p>Apparently, if there is a web3 angle, that also works. Just yesterday, a year-old London-based blockchain infrastructure company said it has&nbsp;<a href="https://siliconangle.com/2023/01/23/private-blockchain-sharding-startup-calimero-raises-8-5m/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">$8.5 million</a>&nbsp;in seed funding to build private sharding capabilities for blockchain networks, with participation from FJ Labs.</p> <p>A lot of the firm’s bets boil down to what FJ Labs’s perspective on what the future of humanity looks like, offers Grinda. “We have a perspective on the future of food, automobiles, real estate, work . . . we’re trying to solve the world’s problems; we’re also thesis driven.”</p> <p><em>You can find out more about what FJ Labs is funding and why from a&nbsp;<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/16/the-most-active-global-vc-firm-on-deal-terms-fatality-rates-and-the-drawbacks-of-credit-lines/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">story we published</a>&nbsp;last month about the outfit, before FJ Labs closed its newest funds.</em></p>

<p>By Connie Loizos reproduced from TechCrunch Fabrice Grinda says he never intended to run a venture firm. He &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-closes-260m-third-fund/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;FJ Labs closes $260M third fund&#8221;</span></a></p>

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FJ Labs closes $260M third fund. Categories - FJ Labs. Date-Posted - 2023-01-26T13:52:15 . By Connie Loizos reproduced from TechCrunch Fabrice Grinda says he never intended to run a venture firm. He just really (really) enjoyed angel investing. In fact, by late 2013, when he was on the verge of selling the global classifieds marketplace&nbsp;OLX&nbsp;— his third business — he says he had already written checks to more than 150 startups with his longtime friend, serial entrepreneur Jose Marin. “We’d been working together forever. It was really a family office that was angel investing at a massive scale,” Grinda recalls. Noting that flurry of checks, potential LPs, including strategic investors, family offices, and founders began to express an interest in investing with them.&nbsp; By 2016, a Norwegian telecom company Telenor offered to provide exclusive funding to the duo, giving them $50 million to invest toward that end. Fast forward, and their outfit, FJ Labs, has evolved from a two-man outfit to a sprawling firm with 34 employees, including eight investors and four “full-blown partners.” It began to grow in earnest in 2018, when LPs committed to invest $175 million with the outfit. Now, Grinda is announcing that FJ Labs has garnered $260 million in capital commitments across a pre-seed fund and an opportunity-style “Series B and beyond” fund, with backing from family offices, institutional investors, and a wide array of founders, including of LinkedIn, PayPal, Supercell, Transferwise, MongoDB and Wayfair. Indeed, over time, FJ Labs has come to look less like a “lab” and more like a traditional venture firm, though Grinda rejects the comparison. “We are a venture fund,” he says, but one that does “angel investing at venture scale,” he insists. “We don’t lead. We don’t price. We don’t take board seats. We decide after two one-hour meetings over the course of a week whether we’ll invest or not because we have extraordinary pattern recognition that allows us to decide extremely quickly.” It sounds high risk, yet FJ Labs has results to show for its approach. Among its many investments, for example, it has bet early on outfits that have ballooned over time, including Alibaba, Coupang, Flexport, and Delivery Hero. Focusing on marketplaces and network effects businesses — which Grinda knows well — certainly helps. So does the portfolio that FJ Labs has built over time, which includes 900 active investments as part of what Grinda describes as the “world’s largest marketplace portfolio.” (Pitchbook data supports that FJ Labs was the&nbsp;most active venture outfit&nbsp;globally in the third quarter of last year.) It all builds on itself like its own kind of flywheel, Grinda suggests, pointing to the firm’s deal flow to underscore the point. Through FJ Labs’s 900 companies, it has connections to roughly 2,000 founders, and they “come back for their next companies, and send us their friends and employees,” says Grinda. Similarly, because FJ Labs is a “source of differentiated deal flow for the VCs, they invite us to their deals,” he says. FJ Labs will get bigger still if everything goes as planned. Grinda says that the “idea is to create an institution that is going to be a legacy and “be around “for decades.” It’s hard to imagine that Grinda, who is&nbsp;famously itinerant, could stick with venture capital so long. But he says to believe it. Right now there are three problems FJ Labs would like to help address, while also making money, and none of them are minor. The first is inequality of opportunity, the second is climate change, and the third is the “mental and physical well-being crisis.” One related bet is on User Interviews, a seven-year-old Brooklyn startup that helps user experience researchers source study participants across different demographics and behavioral criteria. (TechCrunch covered its newest funding&nbsp;here.) Other startups don’t easily fit into one of those three buckets, including Gravitics, a one-year-old Seattle startup that is developing living and work modules for space travel and that announced a $20 million round last year. (We covered&nbsp;that round, too.) Apparently, if there is a web3 angle, that also works. Just yesterday, a year-old London-based blockchain infrastructure company said it has&nbsp;$8.5 million&nbsp;in seed funding to build private sharding capabilities for blockchain networks, with participation from FJ Labs. A lot of the firm’s bets boil down to what FJ Labs’s perspective on what the future of humanity looks like, offers Grinda. “We have a perspective on the future of food, automobiles, real estate, work . . . we’re trying to solve the world’s problems; we’re also thesis driven.” You can find out more about what FJ Labs is funding and why from a&nbsp;story we published&nbsp;last month about the outfit, before FJ Labs closed its newest funds.

2023-01-18T15:41:12

2023-01-18T15:41:12

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=19566

2023-01-19T15:08:08

2023-01-19T15:08:08

my-conversation-with-ludvig-sunstom-on-25-minuter-fabrice-grinda-angel-investor-extraordinaire-and-polymath

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https://fabricegrinda.com/my-conversation-with-ludvig-sunstom-on-25-minuter-fabrice-grinda-angel-investor-extraordinaire-and-polymath/

My conversation with Ludvig Sunström on 25 Minuter: Fabrice Grinda: Angel Investor Extraordinaire and Polymath

<p><em>By <a href="https://startgainingmomentum.com/author/ludvigsunstrom/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Ludvig Sunström</a> reproduced from<a href="https://startgainingmomentum.com/fabrice-grinda/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://startgainingmomentum.com/fabrice-grinda/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> StartGainingMomentum</a></em></p> <p>This is a summary of my conversation with Fabrice Grinda for&nbsp;<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/se/podcast/25-minuter/id1055040822?l=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">25 Minuter Podcast</a>, in which we covered topics such as marketplace companies, angel investing, how to know a lot about many things, decision making, self-improvement and book recommendations.</p> <p>(Be sure to check out the resources in the bottom.)</p> <figure><iframe loading="lazy" title="Libsyn Player" style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/25476519/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/backward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/87A93A/" height="90" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen=""></iframe></figure> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Highlights / Summary:</h3> <p><strong>Becoming a Polymath:</strong></p> <p>Having many interests and reading broadly from an early age.</p> <p>Reading 50-100 books per year.</p> <p><strong>How does he select new projects to work on?</strong></p> <p>Mostly by focusing on what is interesting and makes him curious. Years of entrepreneurship and investing have given him Expert Pattern Recognition.</p> <p><strong>Why are marketplace companies good?</strong></p> <p>Because they tend towards winner-takes-all, for the category, assuming there is a network effect.</p> <p><strong>Advice for angel investing:</strong></p> <p>It is important to specialize and find your niche; but your niche can be broader than commonly assumed. For example, while Fabrice specializes in companies with a marketplace business model, there are many&nbsp;types&nbsp;of marketplace companies (horizontal, verticals, “pick”, B2B) and there are many&nbsp;industries&nbsp;(musical instruments, staples, logistics, food delivery, chemicals, steel, crypto, beauty, etc…) and there are also many different&nbsp;countries<em>.&nbsp;</em>Therefore, he is left with a large range of potential companies to invest in.</p> <p><strong>What marketplace company would Fabrice start if he were 25-30 years?</strong></p> <p>Hard to say, because the largest categories have been taken. But as an investor, the most compelling opportunities are currently in the B2B verticals (within a large, fragmented, industry). Good case studies include:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.flexport.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Flexport</a>&nbsp;(logistics — all industries need it)</li> <li><a href="https://www.knowde.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Knowde</a>&nbsp;(matches chemical suppliers)</li> <li><a href="https://reibus.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Reibus</a>&nbsp;(matches steel supplier)</li> </ul> <p><em>But these marketplace companies are very hard for a young entrepreneur to start</em>, because it takes a lot of industry expertise and reputation to build them; without that, it’s difficult to get the industry players to join the platform.</p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> <p>The founder of Reibus bought a billion dollars of steel before starting the company.&nbsp; The founder of Knowde came from the industry.</p> </blockquote> <p>A more general piece of advice would be to look at what the big problems are and how they intersect with your skill set.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://i0.wp.com/startgainingmomentum.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/venndiagram.png?resize=300%2C195&amp;ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-19599" width="400" height="260"/></figure></div> <p><strong>9 Macro Factors for 2023-2024:</strong></p> <ol> <li>Interest rates may go higher and for longer than expected</li> <li>The strong dollar is creating a sovereign debt crisis in emerging markets</li> <li>There is a new euro crisis looming.</li> <li>Real estate prices should continue to fall</li> <li>If gas prices go high again, Germany will have a recession</li> <li>There is a banking crisis on the horizon</li> <li>There is structurally higher geopolitical risk</li> <li>Ukraine and Russia will keep grain, gas, and oil prices high</li> <li>China is no longer a force for economic growth and disinflation</li> </ol> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> <p>People are pretty bearish right now, but I think the consensus is wrong in&nbsp;<em>not being bearish enough.</em></p> <p>Any one of these nine factors would be enough to create a global recession. What worries me is that most of them are playing out simultaneously suggesting that a replay of the Great Recession of 2007-2008 may be in store.</p> <p>There is also a massive overhang in Crypto with Genesis, DCG, and possibly Binance.</p> </blockquote> <p>(Ludvig: My personal belief is that point #1: is especially true.)</p> <p><strong>But this is good for angel investing</strong></p> <p>The best investments in the past 10+ years were made around 2008-2009. For the coming decade or so, the equivalent will likely be investments made during Covid 2020 and in 2023-24.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice’s current portfolio allocation:</strong></p> <p>20% cash, 70% early-stage tech startups, 10% real estate.</p> <p><strong>More on Macro: Can the deflationary force of digitization outweigh the inflationary force of higher energy prices?</strong></p> <p>Not in the short-term. The geopolitical risk is bad. But over the long-run, yes.</p> <p><strong>Which companies may have increased adoption since Covid?</strong></p> <p>Food delivery and eCommerce had the biggest boost.</p> <p>There was a supply crunch, followed by excess demand. Now there is too much competition for a lot of the things that boomed during Covid.</p> <p>Overall: Very bullish on food delivery (as a category) over the coming 10 years.</p> <p><strong>Thoughts on Ai right now?</strong></p> <p>It appears to be early-to-mid in the Hype Cycle:</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19572" width="400" height="261"/></figure></div> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> <p>I don’t invest in Ai, but the companies I invest in apply it…. I think it [Ai] will become commoditized.</p> </blockquote> <p>Most likely, the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/producer_surplus.asp" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/producer_surplus.asp" rel="noreferrer noopener">value-added/producer surplus</a>&nbsp;will go to Internet companies. But not necessarily to investors in Ai companies.</p> <p><strong>Big areas where digitization have yet to have a big impact, but will in another 10 or so years</strong></p> <p>Public services.</p> <p>Healthcare.</p> <p>The education system.</p> <p><strong>Why are they slow to change?</strong></p> <p>Due to regulation.</p> <p><strong>His decision making framework:</strong></p> <p>Be extremely deliberate about the most important decisions. These type of decisions may only happen once every couple of years. Before making them, consider doing the following:</p> <p>(1)&nbsp;Write yourself an honest letter/email:&nbsp; What am I happy with? What am I unhappy with? What are all the options, and how can my life be different? (Job, relationship, country). List all available options without limiting yourself.</p> <p>(2)&nbsp;Share the letter with close friends/advisors:&nbsp; Ask: (a) If it were them, what would they do?&nbsp; (b) Knowing you, if they were you, what would they do?</p> <p>(3)&nbsp;Try: After getting feedback and ideas, give it a try.</p> <p>(4)&nbsp;Assess &amp; iterate: What worked? What did not work? Do more of what worked and less of what didn’t.</p> <p><strong>How to lead an Epic Life:</strong></p> <p>If you are a knowledge worker, sitting in front of the computer every day, try doing outdoor activities. And if possible, have vacations where you completely disconnect for a week or two, no cell phone, just alone with your thoughts, getting in tune with your intuition.</p> <p><strong>Vision: 100 years in the future:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Atomic printer: Giving you all essential things you need (food, clothes, toilet paper, etc)</li> <li>You will have more free time</li> <li>New status roles will be created</li> <li>People will still chase status roles, but a larger percentage of the population will pursue their innate interests</li> </ul> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Resources:</h3> <p>Books recommended in the episode:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hero-Two-Worlds-Lafayette-Revolution-ebook/dp/B08KRH1VG3/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3OD7TIHKYJ70B&amp;keywords=a%2Bhero%2Bof%2Btwo%2Bworlds&amp;qid=1672607614&amp;sprefix=a%2Bhero%2Bof%2Btwo%2Bworld%252Caps%252C204&amp;sr=8-1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A Hero of Two Worlds</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/King-Warrior-Magician-Lover-Rediscovering/dp/0062506064/ref=sr_1_1?crid=IWHXMHMSX1Z6&amp;keywords=king%2Bwarrior%2Bmagician%2Blover&amp;qid=1672607579&amp;s=books&amp;sprefix=warrior%2Bmag%252Cstripbooks-intl-ship%252C163&amp;sr=1-1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">King, Warrior, Magician, Lover</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Project-Hail-Mary-Andy-Weir/dp/0593135202" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Project Hail Mary</a></li> <li><a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/category/books/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">More book recommendations (by Fabrice)</a></li> </ul> <p>Fabrice’s website:</p> <p><a href="https://www.FabriceGrinda.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://www.FabriceGrinda.com</a></p> <p>FJ Labs portfolio:</p> <p><a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/portfolio/">https://fabricegrinda.com/portfolio/</a></p> <p>Some great articles of his:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/a-framework-for-making-important-decisions-step-1-3/%20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A Framework for making important decisions</a>&nbsp;(Read all four parts)</li> <li><a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/winter-is-coming/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Winter is coming</a>&nbsp;(on macro)</li> </ul> <p>Here are some articles if you want to understand his investing methodology for marketplace companies:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/how-fj-labs-evaluates-startups/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">How FJ Labs evaluates Startups</a></li> <li><a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/investing-in-the-things-that-build-our-world/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Investing in the things that build our world</a></li> <li><a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/transcript-of-all-things-marketplaces/%20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">All things Marketplaces</a></li> <li><a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/the-latest-trend-in-marketplaces/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The latest trends in marketplaces (2019 – but still current)</a></li> </ul> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Additional information: On Marketplaces</h3> <p>We do talk quite a bit about marketplace companies (running them and investing in them) but not as much as I had hoped for. Therefore I will share a brief summary below.</p> <p><strong>The (r)evolutions of marketplace companies:</strong></p> <p>The Big Bang Beginning: It started with Horizontal marketplaces (having multiple categories by virtue of being first: eBay, Amazon, Craigslist).</p> <p><strong>(1)</strong>&nbsp;Verticalization of marketplaces:&nbsp;After the first ones got all the volume, new companies had to specialize in one niche category. A profitable one. After conquering that category, they can expand TAM by creating additional services for the existing customer base.</p> <p><strong>(2)&nbsp;</strong>Managed marketplaces:&nbsp;“Marketplace pick model” – meaning the marketplace picks the supplier for you. For example, Uber picks a driver nearby you, for you. Provides value for both consumer and service-providers. Consumers don’t have to select the provider, and the service-provider can get more customers (effortless lead-generation, even if the take-rate is high, so most will agree). But this requires a superior matching algorithm. (This is what Fabrice referenced when he said “our companies apply Ai”.)</p> <p><strong>(3)</strong>&nbsp;B2B Marketplaces:&nbsp; Either in a large industry that has been slow to adopt online technology, or in supply chains within a large industry. Online B2B should have happened 10 years ago, it’s just that B2B tends to be family-owned by Boomers, without technological know-how, or there is a strong history and direct relationship between&nbsp;Producer › Reseller › Customer.&nbsp;They could do it more efficiently (cheaper) by skipping the middleman (Reseller) but due to having a many-year long relationship with the Reseller, they won’t do it easily. Overcoming this obstacle requires a better customer experience, and a founder with a strong track-record from the existing industry.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">My Final Take on Digitization</h3> <p>Europe’s population:</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19574" width="658" height="354" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-1.png 1024w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-1-768x413.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p>Africa’s population:</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-2.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19575" width="658" height="354" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-2.png 1024w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-2-768x413.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">[Pictures from:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.yardeni.com/pub/globalpop.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Yardeni Research</a>.]</figcaption></figure></div> <p>Europe’s population is going down.</p> <p>Africa’s population is going up.</p> <p>African countries have nowhere near European countries’ spending power, but on the positive side they have fewer established systems (so there is less resistance to behavioral change).</p> <p>This should increase the total addressable market for all things online and marketplaces, including:</p> <ul> <li>Online education</li> <li>eCommerce</li> <li>Digital payments / Crypto</li> <li>Online dating</li> </ul> <p>It’s 5-8 years early.</p> <p>But it will become a tailwind for digitization.</p> <figure><iframe loading="lazy" title="Libsyn Player" style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/25476519/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/backward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/87A93A/" height="90" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen=""></iframe></figure> <p>In addition to the embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on:</p> <ul> <li>iTunes: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/se/podcast/fabrice-grinda-angel-investor-extraordinaire-and/id1055040822?i=1000591859874" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://podcasts.apple.com/se/podcast/fabrice-grinda-angel-investor-extraordinaire-and/id1055040822?i=1000591859874" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://podcasts.apple.com/se/podcast/fabrice-grinda-angel-investor-extraordinaire</a></li> <li>Spotify: <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/5UOz01dSg6JXiSg7I8jZr5?si=46INk5JZTKSBb2xB-tbT2w&amp;nd=1" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://open.spotify.com/episode/5UOz01dSg6JXiSg7I8jZr5?si=46INk5JZTKSBb2xB-tbT2w&amp;nd=1" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://open.spotify.com/episode/5UOz01dSg6JXiSg7I8jZr5</a></li> </ul>

<p>By Ludvig Sunström reproduced from StartGainingMomentum This is a summary of my conversation with Fabrice Grinda for&nbsp;25 Minuter &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/my-conversation-with-ludvig-sunstom-on-25-minuter-fabrice-grinda-angel-investor-extraordinaire-and-polymath/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;My conversation with Ludvig Sunström on 25 Minuter: Fabrice Grinda: Angel Investor Extraordinaire and Polymath&#8221;</span></a></p>

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My conversation with Ludvig Sunström on 25 Minuter: Fabrice Grinda: Angel Investor Extraordinaire and Polymath. Categories - Interviews &amp; Fireside Chats. Date-Posted - 2023-01-18T15:41:12 . By Ludvig Sunström reproduced from StartGainingMomentum This is a summary of my conversation with Fabrice Grinda for&nbsp;25 Minuter Podcast, in which we covered topics such as marketplace companies, angel investing, how to know a lot about many things, decision making, self-improvement and book recommendations. (Be sure to check out the resources in the bottom.) Highlights / Summary: Becoming a Polymath: Having many interests and reading broadly from an early age. Reading 50-100 books per year. How does he select new projects to work on? Mostly by focusing on what is interesting and makes him curious. Years of entrepreneurship and investing have given him Expert Pattern Recognition. Why are marketplace companies good? Because they tend towards winner-takes-all, for the category, assuming there is a network effect. Advice for angel investing: It is important to specialize and find your niche; but your niche can be broader than commonly assumed. For example, while Fabrice specializes in companies with a marketplace business model, there are many&nbsp;types&nbsp;of marketplace companies (horizontal, verticals, “pick”, B2B) and there are many&nbsp;industries&nbsp;(musical instruments, staples, logistics, food delivery, chemicals, steel, crypto, beauty, etc…) and there are also many different&nbsp;countries.&nbsp;Therefore, he is left with a large range of potential companies to invest in. What marketplace company would Fabrice start if he were 25-30 years? Hard to say, because the largest categories have been taken. But as an investor, the most compelling opportunities are currently in the B2B verticals (within a large, fragmented, industry). Good case studies include: Flexport&nbsp;(logistics — all industries need it) Knowde&nbsp;(matches chemical suppliers) Reibus&nbsp;(matches steel supplier) But these marketplace companies are very hard for a young entrepreneur to start, because it takes a lot of industry expertise and reputation to build them; without that, it’s difficult to get the industry players to join the platform. The founder of Reibus bought a billion dollars of steel before starting the company.&nbsp; The founder of Knowde came from the industry. A more general piece of advice would be to look at what the big problems are and how they intersect with your skill set. 9 Macro Factors for 2023-2024: Interest rates may go higher and for longer than expected The strong dollar is creating a sovereign debt crisis in emerging markets There is a new euro crisis looming. Real estate prices should continue to fall If gas prices go high again, Germany will have a recession There is a banking crisis on the horizon There is structurally higher geopolitical risk Ukraine and Russia will keep grain, gas, and oil prices high China is no longer a force for economic growth and disinflation People are pretty bearish right now, but I think the consensus is wrong in&nbsp;not being bearish enough. Any one of these nine factors would be enough to create a global recession. What worries me is that most of them are playing out simultaneously suggesting that a replay of the Great Recession of 2007-2008 may be in store. There is also a massive overhang in Crypto with Genesis, DCG, and possibly Binance. (Ludvig: My personal belief is that point #1: is especially true.) But this is good for angel investing The best investments in the past 10+ years were made around 2008-2009. For the coming decade or so, the equivalent will likely be investments made during Covid 2020 and in 2023-24. Fabrice’s current portfolio allocation: 20% cash, 70% early-stage tech startups, 10% real estate. More on Macro: Can the deflationary force of digitization outweigh the inflationary force of higher energy prices? Not in the short-term. The geopolitical risk is bad. But over the long-run, yes. Which companies may have increased adoption since Covid? Food delivery and eCommerce had the biggest boost. There was a supply crunch, followed by excess demand. Now there is too much competition for a lot of the things that boomed during Covid. Overall: Very bullish on food delivery (as a category) over the coming 10 years. Thoughts on Ai right now? It appears to be early-to-mid in the Hype Cycle: I don’t invest in Ai, but the companies I invest in apply it…. I think it [Ai] will become commoditized. Most likely, the&nbsp;value-added/producer surplus&nbsp;will go to Internet companies. But not necessarily to investors in Ai companies. Big areas where digitization have yet to have a big impact, but will in another 10 or so years Public services. Healthcare. The education system. Why are they slow to change? Due to regulation. His decision making framework: Be extremely deliberate about the most important decisions. These type of decisions may only happen once every couple of years. Before making them, consider doing the following: (1)&nbsp;Write yourself an honest letter/email:&nbsp; What am I happy with? What am I unhappy with? What are all the options, and how can my life be different? (Job, relationship, country). List all available options without limiting yourself. (2)&nbsp;Share the letter with close friends/advisors:&nbsp; Ask: (a) If it were them, what would they do?&nbsp; (b) Knowing you, if they were you, what would they do? (3)&nbsp;Try: After getting feedback and ideas, give it a try. (4)&nbsp;Assess &amp; iterate: What worked? What did not work? Do more of what worked and less of what didn’t. How to lead an Epic Life: If you are a knowledge worker, sitting in front of the computer every day, try doing outdoor activities. And if possible, have vacations where you completely disconnect for a week or two, no cell phone, just alone with your thoughts, getting in tune with your intuition. Vision: 100 years in the future: Atomic printer: Giving you all essential things you need (food, clothes, toilet paper, etc) You will have more free time New status roles will be created People will still chase status roles, but a larger percentage of the population will pursue their innate interests Resources: Books recommended in the episode: A Hero of Two Worlds King, Warrior, Magician, Lover Project Hail Mary More book recommendations (by Fabrice) Fabrice’s website: https://www.FabriceGrinda.com FJ Labs portfolio: https://fabricegrinda.com/portfolio/ Some great articles of his: A Framework for making important decisions&nbsp;(Read all four parts) Winter is coming&nbsp;(on macro) Here are some articles if you want to understand his investing methodology for marketplace companies: How FJ Labs evaluates Startups Investing in the things that build our world All things Marketplaces The latest trends in marketplaces (2019 – but still current) Additional information: On Marketplaces We do talk quite a bit about marketplace companies (running them and investing in them) but not as much as I had hoped for. Therefore I will share a brief summary below. The (r)evolutions of marketplace companies: The Big Bang Beginning: It started with Horizontal marketplaces (having multiple categories by virtue of being first: eBay, Amazon, Craigslist). (1)&nbsp;Verticalization of marketplaces:&nbsp;After the first ones got all the volume, new companies had to specialize in one niche category. A profitable one. After conquering that category, they can expand TAM by creating additional services for the existing customer base. (2)&nbsp;Managed marketplaces:&nbsp;“Marketplace pick model” – meaning the marketplace picks the supplier for you. For example, Uber picks a driver nearby you, for you. Provides value for both consumer and service-providers. Consumers don’t have to select the provider, and the service-provider can get more customers (effortless lead-generation, even if the take-rate is high, so most will agree). But this requires a superior matching algorithm. (This is what Fabrice referenced when he said “our companies apply Ai”.) (3)&nbsp;B2B Marketplaces:&nbsp; Either in a large industry that has been slow to adopt online technology, or in supply chains within a large industry. Online B2B should have happened 10 years ago, it’s just that B2B tends to be family-owned by Boomers, without technological know-how, or there is a strong history and direct relationship between&nbsp;Producer › Reseller › Customer.&nbsp;They could do it more efficiently (cheaper) by skipping the middleman (Reseller) but due to having a many-year long relationship with the Reseller, they won’t do it easily. Overcoming this obstacle requires a better customer experience, and a founder with a strong track-record from the existing industry. My Final Take on Digitization Europe’s population: Africa’s population: [Pictures from:&nbsp;Yardeni Research.] Europe’s population is going down. Africa’s population is going up. African countries have nowhere near European countries’ spending power, but on the positive side they have fewer established systems (so there is less resistance to behavioral change). This should increase the total addressable market for all things online and marketplaces, including: Online education eCommerce Digital payments / Crypto Online dating It’s 5-8 years early. But it will become a tailwind for digitization. In addition to the embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on: iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/se/podcast/fabrice-grinda-angel-investor-extraordinaire Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5UOz01dSg6JXiSg7I8jZr5

2022-12-31T17:23:49

2022-12-31T17:23:49

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=19474

2023-11-10T05:39:15

2023-11-10T05:39:15

2022-the-importance-of-family

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https://fabricegrinda.com/2022-the-importance-of-family/

2022: The Importance of Family

<p>I am blessed with an amazing family which comprises of both the family I have and the family I chose (amazing friends who might as well be family). We are the Grindaverse and I am privileged to be one of its members. We spend our time supporting each other and co-creating amazing memories and experiences full of laughter, joy and unconditional love.&nbsp;</p> <p>2022 kept reinforcing the importance of this family and not to take it for granted. I temporarily put my life on hold March through June and moved to Nice to help my father prepare and deal with his cancer treatment. I am glad to report that thanks to his resilience, loving family, guardian angels, and the wonders of immunotherapy, he made a full recovery.</p> <p>General health issues small and large plagued my family members. It was a good reminder to be present and spend time with them. I am also glad to report that they are all doing better. I did take advantage of the extended time in my hometown in Nice, the first time I had done that in years, to spend meaningful time with my friends and family in the region.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Nice.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19493" width="990" height="296" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Nice.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Nice-768x229.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Nice-1200x358.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>While there my brother Olivier and I did two weeks of training at the <a href="https://www.mouratoglou.com/en/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.mouratoglou.com/en/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mouratoglou Tennis Academy</a> in Sophia Antipolis which was fun, challenging, and a great brotherly bonding time. We also played in a few padel tournaments and even won one. We also had a blast playing and finishing <a href="https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/elden-ring-review-death-of-the-wild/1900-6417832/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/elden-ring-review-death-of-the-wild/1900-6417832/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Elden Ring</a> together.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/mouratoglou-ete.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19510" width="990" height="296" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/mouratoglou-ete.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/mouratoglou-ete-768x229.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/mouratoglou-ete-1200x358.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>I also got the opportunity to bond with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_P._Ryan" data-type="URL" data-id="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_P._Ryan" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Kevin Ryan&#8217;s</a> family in Provence. This was one of the highlights of my year and was an amazingly needed moment of respite from dealing with my family’s health issues. I am beyond grateful to have been so welcome by his family.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/provence-2.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19517" width="990" height="296" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/provence-2.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/provence-2-768x229.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/provence-2-1200x358.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>Prior to my stint in France, the year started amazingly well. Having just purchased a chalet in Revelstoke via FaceTime, as I explained in <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/2021-best-year-ever/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/2021-best-year-ever/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">2021: Best Year Ever!</a>, I spent the first two months of the year there. I hosted countless ski buddies, heli-skied like crazy, and even hosted FJ Labs’ bi-annual brainstorm there.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/revelstoke.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19514" width="990" height="591" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/revelstoke.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/revelstoke-768x458.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/revelstoke-1200x716.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>After that I headed out to Norway to train for my upcoming January 2023 polar expedition in Antarctica. Kevin Ryan invited me to join him in sponsoring <a href="https://www.inspire22.co.uk/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.inspire22.co.uk/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">INSPIRE 22</a>, a research expedition spending 50+ days on the ice from the shore to the pole, hiking 1,100 km from Hercules Inlet to the South Pole. They are studying the impact of gender and diet in extreme conditions. As sponsors we get to join for the last 10 days of the trip.</p> <p>I headed to Finse, Norway, to train. I must admit it was unlike anything I had done before. While I have done a lot of survival training in tropical climes, dealing with the cold brought an entirely new component to it. I had to buy an ungodly amount of specialized gear. I then had to learn to use it:</p> <ul> <li>Pack my pulk (the sled) with my tent, sleeping bag, food, propane tanks to melt the snow for water, and all my gear.</li> <li>Pull said 130-pound pulk with special skis with half skins.</li> <li>Assemble a tent facing the wind with mittens on in -30 conditions.</li> <li>Melt snow for drinking water and cooking rehydrated meals.</li> <li>Generally dealing with the cold and snow in a very unfamiliar environment.</li> </ul> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/finse-2.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19521" width="990" height="296" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/finse-2.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/finse-2-768x229.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/finse-2-1200x358.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>While in the region I decided to hop over to Sweden to heli-ski in Niekhu. While on the way there I spent the night in the ice hotel in Kiruna. François loved both experiences and was extremely partial to the heli-skiing cooing and singing along the faster I went. He only expressed displeasure when I slowed down or stopped.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/sweden.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19523" width="990" height="296" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/sweden.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/sweden-768x229.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/sweden-1200x358.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>I never spent much time in the mountains in the summer. Given that I was already in France, I decided to check out the gorgeous mountains of Saint Moritz and to go canyoning in the Gorges du Verdon. After that I headed to Revelstoke to see what I thought of it in the summer. I loved it and intend to go back every August. It was a month-long multi-sport adventure of intense mountain biking, hiking, standup paddle boarding, and ATVs in a gorgeous setting. It felt like a bootcamp, but I had an absolute blast.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/st-moritz.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19525" width="990" height="296" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/st-moritz.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/st-moritz-768x229.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/st-moritz-1200x358.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>I was excited that Burning Man came back in 2022 after a two-year hiatus. This year was special to me as I went with my brother Olivier for whom it was the first time. I loved showing him the ropes, meandering through the art, and generally further connecting with him.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/burning-man.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19527" width="990" height="296" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/burning-man.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/burning-man-768x229.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/burning-man-1200x358.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>I finally moved back in my apartment in New York in September after years of renovations due to water damage. I am happy to have put this behind me and to finally be home. The apartment really feels like home and plays a meaningful role in my work/life balance allowing me to balance the intense intellectual, social, professional, and artistic life of New York, with a more athletic and spiritual life in Turks &amp; Caicos and Revelstoke. It was an absolute delight to be able to host intellectual salons again and had the privilege of hosting amazing people like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman" data-type="URL" data-id="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Daniel Kahneman</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stiglitz" data-type="URL" data-id="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stiglitz" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Joe Stiglitz</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Thompson_(editor)" data-type="URL" data-id="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Thompson_(editor)" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Nicholas Thompson</a>. To my great pleasure, padel finally arrived in New York. I spent countless hours at <a href="https://www.padel.haus/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Padel Haus</a> which is conveniently located 12 minutes from my place.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/new-york.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19529" width="990" height="296" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/new-york.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/new-york-768x229.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/new-york-1200x358.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>I returned to Turks for November and December, joined by a super fun rotating cast of characters to kite, play padel, tennis, and generally be merry. The Grindaverse started arriving on December 10 with my parents, uncle, middle brother Chris, and cousins, before being joined by other family members with kids December 16 onwards. Even though this is the third year we do this, this year felt special. It’s so rare that with 30 people there is no drama, but instead gratitude and love. It made my year to see everyone healthy and happy and hope that even more members of the Grindaverse will make it next year!</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/turks.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19532" width="990" height="675" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/turks.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/turks-768x524.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/turks-1200x818.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>I can’t write a blog post on the importance of family without mentioning how amazing it’s been to have François in my life and to watch him grow up. I assumed that I would not enjoy the first two years of his life as he would not be very interactive. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am loving every minute of it: seeing him learn to crawl, take his first steps, start running around like crazy, learning new words and concepts at an incredible pace, all of it. He’s also extremely communicative and expressive and it’s very easy to understand exactly what he wants. I can spend hours with him just rolling a car between us or watching him play. I suppose it also helps that I seem to have won the baby lottery. He’s incredibly agreeable, never cries, sleeps through the night, and is seemingly always happy.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/francois.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19534" width="990" height="647" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/francois.jpg 1320w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/francois-768x502.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/francois-1200x785.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>Professionally, 2022 continued to be extraordinarily busy. We correctly called that a bubble was inflating in 2021 and spent a lot of that year pursuing exit opportunities. In 2022, as everyone else was retrenching, we decided to be contrarian and to invest aggressively.</p> <p>Overall, FJ Labs continued to rock. 2022 was our most prolific year ever. The team grew to 32 people, adding key roles like Head of Investor Relations and Head of Portfolio. We deployed $100 million. We made 308 investments, 182 first time investments and 126 follow-on investments. We had 33 exits, of which 16 were successful, including the secondary sales of <a href="https://www.animocabrands.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.animocabrands.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Animoca</a> and <a href="https://clear.co/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://clear.co/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Clearco</a>, and the acquisitions of <a href="https://www.tcgplayer.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.tcgplayer.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">TCGPlayer</a> by eBay, <a href="https://www.viajanet.com.br/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.viajanet.com.br/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Viajanet</a> by Despegar and <a href="https://www.adoreme.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.adoreme.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">AdoreMe</a> by Victoria&#8217;s Secret. AdoreMe was a special one for us as it was the first company we formally incubated and was genesis of our EIR (Entrepreneur in Residence) program.</p> <p>Since Jose and I started angel investing 24 years ago, we invested in 989 unique companies, had 266 exits (including partial exits), and currently have 749 active unique company investments. We had realized returns of 39% IRR and a 4.0x average multiple. In total, we deployed $530M of which $173M was provided by Jose and me.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/fj-labs2.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19539" width="970" height="545" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/fj-labs2.jpg 1961w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/fj-labs2-768x431.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/fj-labs2-1536x862.jpg 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/fj-labs2-1200x674.jpg 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/fj-labs2-1320x741.jpg 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>I often felt inspired to write in 2022. I refocused on macroeconomic issues as we entered a period where macro trumped micro. I also wrote on why I do many of the things I do. My best articles were:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/the-great-unknown/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/the-great-unknown/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Great Unknown</a></li> <li><a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/why/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/why/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Why</a></li> <li><a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-purpose/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-purpose/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FJ Labs’ Purpose</a></li> <li><a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/winter-is-coming/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/winter-is-coming/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Winter is Coming</a></li> </ul> <p>I was less prolific with Playing with Unicorns as I did not have my streaming gear while I was in France taking care of my dad. However, I loved doing a deep dive into the <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-39-simpl-and-the-indian-fintech-ecosystem/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-39-simpl-and-the-indian-fintech-ecosystem/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Indian fintech ecosystem</a>. I also had a fascinating conversation with my friend <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-40-oskar-hartmann-unicorn-accumulator/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-40-oskar-hartmann-unicorn-accumulator/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Oskar Hartmann</a>.</p> <p>As usual, I was a very prolific reader. My favorite books were:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hero-Two-Worlds-Lafayette-Revolution/dp/154173033X" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.amazon.com/Hero-Two-Worlds-Lafayette-Revolution/dp/154173033X" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/King-Warrior-Magician-Lover-Rediscovering/dp/0062506064/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=king+warrior+magician+lover&amp;qid=1672237533&amp;s=books&amp;sprefix=lover+magi%2Cstripbooks%2C58&amp;sr=1-1" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.amazon.com/King-Warrior-Magician-Lover-Rediscovering/dp/0062506064/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=king+warrior+magician+lover&amp;qid=1672237533&amp;s=books&amp;sprefix=lover+magi%2Cstripbooks%2C58&amp;sr=1-1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine</a></li> </ul> <p>My guilty pleasure of the year was the sci-fi soap opera series <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B099LJNCHQ?ref_=dbs_m_mng_rwt_calw_tkin_0&amp;storeType=ebooks&amp;qid=1672237564&amp;sr=1-1" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B099LJNCHQ?ref_=dbs_m_mng_rwt_calw_tkin_0&amp;storeType=ebooks&amp;qid=1672237564&amp;sr=1-1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Backyard Starship</a>. </p> <p>My 2022 predictions were hit or miss. I correctly predicted that late-stage tech valuations would correct and that the bubble in art NFTs would burst. I thought crypto would be exposed to the US macroeconomic environment and endogenous shocks, but worried about Tether rather than Terra and FTX.</p> <p>I also discounted the probability of war in Ukraine. I wrote that “an accident with China over Taiwan or Russia over Ukraine, while low probability, remains a possibility,” but did not think it was going to happen.</p> <p>In late 2021, I wondered whether the fact that the consensus was bearish meant that in fact we would not be able to control inflation while keeping unemployment low. However, I did a hard pivot during the course of the year and concluded that the consensus was not bearish enough. As I highlighted in <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/winter-is-coming/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/winter-is-coming/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Winter is Coming</a>, there are now nine factors that are driving my bearishness:</p> <ol type="1"> <li>Rates may go higher than people expect for longer than people expect.</li> <li>The strong dollar is creating a sovereign debt crisis in emerging markets.</li> <li>High natural gas prices are going to cause a recession in Germany.</li> <li>There is a new euro crisis looming.</li> <li>There is a banking crisis on the horizon.</li> <li>Real estate prices are about to fall.</li> <li>The continued conflict in Ukraine and Russia will keep grain, gas, and oil prices high.</li> <li>China is no longer a force for economic growth and disinflation.</li> <li>There is structurally higher geopolitical risk</li> </ol> <p>Any one of these nine factors would be enough to create a global recession. What worries me is that they are all happening and playing out simultaneously suggesting that a replay of the Great Recession of 2007-2008 may be in store.</p> <p>I am generally the most optimistic person in the room, and I have not been this bearish since 2006. I still think in probabilistic terms, but now I think the probability of a severe recession trumps the probability of a mild recession, which in turn trumps any optimistic outcome.</p> <p>For the sake of completion, it’s worth mentioning the things that would make me re-assess my probability weighing towards more optimistic outcomes. If the Ukraine / Russia conflict came to a definite end, with inflation tamed, I would become way more sanguine.</p> <p>I am also extremely bearish on crypto in the short term. While 2022 was an annus horribilis, several Damocles swords still hang over crypto:</p> <ul> <li>The potential bankruptcy of Genesis and its ramifications on DCG and GBTC.</li> <li>The viability of Binance either regulatorily or economically.</li> <li>Continued concerns over Tether.</li> </ul> <p>We remain extremely bullish on the potential for blockchain technology but are waiting on the sidelines for clarity on some of the issues above and for the macro to settle before moving more aggressively into the market. We correctly exited most of our positions between November 2021 and January 2022 and are now sitting on 96% cash on our crypto strategy. I suspect that we will re-enter once some of my concerns play out, interest rates start declining, and as we approach the next BTC halving in mid-2024.</p> <p>Despite my general macro bearishness, I am extremely bullish on early-stage startups. Valuations are reasonable. Founders are focusing on their unit economics. They are limiting cash burn to not have to go to market for at least two years. Startups face lower customer acquisition costs and much less competition. While exits will be delayed and exit multiples lower than in the past few years, this should be compensated by lower entry prices and the fact that winners will win their entire category.</p> <p>The macro that matters for these startups is the one 6-8 years from now when they are seeking exits, rather than the current environment. For now, all that matters is that they raise enough cash and grow enough to get their next fundraise.</p> <p>It pays to be contrarian and to invest when everyone else is retrenching. The best startup investments of the last decade were made between 2008 and 2011 (Uber, Airbnb, Whatsapp, Instagram), and I suspect that the most interesting investments of the 2020s will be made between 2022 and 2024.</p> <p>Moreover, we are still at the beginning of the technology revolution. I am excited that we are in a position to bring to bear the deflationary power of technology to the categories heretofore untouched by the technology revolution: B2B, education, health care, and public services, while continuing to make renewables cheaper and viable to address the climate crisis.</p> <p>I am extremely grateful for the year I had. I am beyond happy that every one of my family members got healthy and that I was still able to go on amazing adventures, do meaningful work, and was able to bring the Grindaverse together for the holidays.</p> <p>I am excited for 2023. The year should start with a bang as I will be embarking on my trek to the South Pole which will involve totally disconnecting from the world at large for two weeks, which is something I have never done in my life. I expect it to be physically challenging, spiritually awakening, and both an amazing time alone with my thoughts, and a bonding experience with my teammates. Beyond that I am planning to take my mother to Burning Man which I am convinced she will love. I just need to build an appropriate art car to take her around. I am also looking forward to further crazy adventures with François. I am currently scheming to find a way to attach him to my back while I am kitesurfing, which I am sure will horrify his grandmother. Beyond that, I am planning to learn to wingfoil. I am also hoping that the Grindaverse will expand by at least one new member as I hope to finally welcome Angel, a white German Shepherd, in the family in the spring of 2023.</p> <p>The year should end with another family gathering. This time my Turks stint won’t be abbreviated by a polar adventure. I am keeping <a href="https://tritonluxuryvilla.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://tritonluxuryvilla.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Triton</a> until January which should allow more of the family members with kids to make the trip from Europe. I look forward to regaling them with a film on the family history. Olivier and I commissioned the film as a present to the family. The film will feature our notable ancestors in addition to being a love letter to our parents, brother Christopher, and to the family at large. It celebrates their contributions and is way for us to express our gratitude for the role they played in helping us become the men we became.</p> <p>Here is to a fantastic 2023. Happy New Year!</p>

<p>I am blessed with an amazing family which comprises of both the family I have and the family &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/2022-the-importance-of-family/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;2022: The Importance of Family&#8221;</span></a></p>

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2022: The Importance of Family. Categories - Featured Posts, Year in Review, Year in Review. Date-Posted - 2022-12-31T17:23:49 . I am blessed with an amazing family which comprises of both the family I have and the family I chose (amazing friends who might as well be family). We are the Grindaverse and I am privileged to be one of its members. We spend our time supporting each other and co-creating amazing memories and experiences full of laughter, joy and unconditional love.&nbsp; 2022 kept reinforcing the importance of this family and not to take it for granted. I temporarily put my life on hold March through June and moved to Nice to help my father prepare and deal with his cancer treatment. I am glad to report that thanks to his resilience, loving family, guardian angels, and the wonders of immunotherapy, he made a full recovery. General health issues small and large plagued my family members. It was a good reminder to be present and spend time with them. I am also glad to report that they are all doing better. I did take advantage of the extended time in my hometown in Nice, the first time I had done that in years, to spend meaningful time with my friends and family in the region. While there my brother Olivier and I did two weeks of training at the Mouratoglou Tennis Academy in Sophia Antipolis which was fun, challenging, and a great brotherly bonding time. We also played in a few padel tournaments and even won one. We also had a blast playing and finishing Elden Ring together. I also got the opportunity to bond with Kevin Ryan&#8217;s family in Provence. This was one of the highlights of my year and was an amazingly needed moment of respite from dealing with my family’s health issues. I am beyond grateful to have been so welcome by his family. Prior to my stint in France, the year started amazingly well. Having just purchased a chalet in Revelstoke via FaceTime, as I explained in 2021: Best Year Ever!, I spent the first two months of the year there. I hosted countless ski buddies, heli-skied like crazy, and even hosted FJ Labs’ bi-annual brainstorm there. After that I headed out to Norway to train for my upcoming January 2023 polar expedition in Antarctica. Kevin Ryan invited me to join him in sponsoring INSPIRE 22, a research expedition spending 50+ days on the ice from the shore to the pole, hiking 1,100 km from Hercules Inlet to the South Pole. They are studying the impact of gender and diet in extreme conditions. As sponsors we get to join for the last 10 days of the trip. I headed to Finse, Norway, to train. I must admit it was unlike anything I had done before. While I have done a lot of survival training in tropical climes, dealing with the cold brought an entirely new component to it. I had to buy an ungodly amount of specialized gear. I then had to learn to use it: Pack my pulk (the sled) with my tent, sleeping bag, food, propane tanks to melt the snow for water, and all my gear. Pull said 130-pound pulk with special skis with half skins. Assemble a tent facing the wind with mittens on in -30 conditions. Melt snow for drinking water and cooking rehydrated meals. Generally dealing with the cold and snow in a very unfamiliar environment. While in the region I decided to hop over to Sweden to heli-ski in Niekhu. While on the way there I spent the night in the ice hotel in Kiruna. François loved both experiences and was extremely partial to the heli-skiing cooing and singing along the faster I went. He only expressed displeasure when I slowed down or stopped. I never spent much time in the mountains in the summer. Given that I was already in France, I decided to check out the gorgeous mountains of Saint Moritz and to go canyoning in the Gorges du Verdon. After that I headed to Revelstoke to see what I thought of it in the summer. I loved it and intend to go back every August. It was a month-long multi-sport adventure of intense mountain biking, hiking, standup paddle boarding, and ATVs in a gorgeous setting. It felt like a bootcamp, but I had an absolute blast. I was excited that Burning Man came back in 2022 after a two-year hiatus. This year was special to me as I went with my brother Olivier for whom it was the first time. I loved showing him the ropes, meandering through the art, and generally further connecting with him. I finally moved back in my apartment in New York in September after years of renovations due to water damage. I am happy to have put this behind me and to finally be home. The apartment really feels like home and plays a meaningful role in my work/life balance allowing me to balance the intense intellectual, social, professional, and artistic life of New York, with a more athletic and spiritual life in Turks &amp; Caicos and Revelstoke. It was an absolute delight to be able to host intellectual salons again and had the privilege of hosting amazing people like Daniel Kahneman, Joe Stiglitz, and Nicholas Thompson. To my great pleasure, padel finally arrived in New York. I spent countless hours at Padel Haus which is conveniently located 12 minutes from my place. I returned to Turks for November and December, joined by a super fun rotating cast of characters to kite, play padel, tennis, and generally be merry. The Grindaverse started arriving on December 10 with my parents, uncle, middle brother Chris, and cousins, before being joined by other family members with kids December 16 onwards. Even though this is the third year we do this, this year felt special. It’s so rare that with 30 people there is no drama, but instead gratitude and love. It made my year to see everyone healthy and happy and hope that even more members of the Grindaverse will make it next year! I can’t write a blog post on the importance of family without mentioning how amazing it’s been to have François in my life and to watch him grow up. I assumed that I would not enjoy the first two years of his life as he would not be very interactive. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am loving every minute of it: seeing him learn to crawl, take his first steps, start running around like crazy, learning new words and concepts at an incredible pace, all of it. He’s also extremely communicative and expressive and it’s very easy to understand exactly what he wants. I can spend hours with him just rolling a car between us or watching him play. I suppose it also helps that I seem to have won the baby lottery. He’s incredibly agreeable, never cries, sleeps through the night, and is seemingly always happy. Professionally, 2022 continued to be extraordinarily busy. We correctly called that a bubble was inflating in 2021 and spent a lot of that year pursuing exit opportunities. In 2022, as everyone else was retrenching, we decided to be contrarian and to invest aggressively. Overall, FJ Labs continued to rock. 2022 was our most prolific year ever. The team grew to 32 people, adding key roles like Head of Investor Relations and Head of Portfolio. We deployed $100 million. We made 308 investments, 182 first time investments and 126 follow-on investments. We had 33 exits, of which 16 were successful, including the secondary sales of Animoca and Clearco, and the acquisitions of TCGPlayer by eBay, Viajanet by Despegar and AdoreMe by Victoria&#8217;s Secret. AdoreMe was a special one for us as it was the first company we formally incubated and was genesis of our EIR (Entrepreneur in Residence) program. Since Jose and I started angel investing 24 years ago, we invested in 989 unique companies, had 266 exits (including partial exits), and currently have 749 active unique company investments. We had realized returns of 39% IRR and a 4.0x average multiple. In total, we deployed $530M of which $173M was provided by Jose and me. I often felt inspired to write in 2022. I refocused on macroeconomic issues as we entered a period where macro trumped micro. I also wrote on why I do many of the things I do. My best articles were: The Great Unknown Why FJ Labs’ Purpose Winter is Coming I was less prolific with Playing with Unicorns as I did not have my streaming gear while I was in France taking care of my dad. However, I loved doing a deep dive into the Indian fintech ecosystem. I also had a fascinating conversation with my friend Oskar Hartmann. As usual, I was a very prolific reader. My favorite books were: Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine My guilty pleasure of the year was the sci-fi soap opera series Backyard Starship. My 2022 predictions were hit or miss. I correctly predicted that late-stage tech valuations would correct and that the bubble in art NFTs would burst. I thought crypto would be exposed to the US macroeconomic environment and endogenous shocks, but worried about Tether rather than Terra and FTX. I also discounted the probability of war in Ukraine. I wrote that “an accident with China over Taiwan or Russia over Ukraine, while low probability, remains a possibility,” but did not think it was going to happen. In late 2021, I wondered whether the fact that the consensus was bearish meant that in fact we would not be able to control inflation while keeping unemployment low. However, I did a hard pivot during the course of the year and concluded that the consensus was not bearish enough. As I highlighted in Winter is Coming, there are now nine factors that are driving my bearishness: Rates may go higher than people expect for longer than people expect. The strong dollar is creating a sovereign debt crisis in emerging markets. High natural gas prices are going to cause a recession in Germany. There is a new euro crisis looming. There is a banking crisis on the horizon. Real estate prices are about to fall. The continued conflict in Ukraine and Russia will keep grain, gas, and oil prices high. China is no longer a force for economic growth and disinflation. There is structurally higher geopolitical risk Any one of these nine factors would be enough to create a global recession. What worries me is that they are all happening and playing out simultaneously suggesting that a replay of the Great Recession of 2007-2008 may be in store. I am generally the most optimistic person in the room, and I have not been this bearish since 2006. I still think in probabilistic terms, but now I think the probability of a severe recession trumps the probability of a mild recession, which in turn trumps any optimistic outcome. For the sake of completion, it’s worth mentioning the things that would make me re-assess my probability weighing towards more optimistic outcomes. If the Ukraine / Russia conflict came to a definite end, with inflation tamed, I would become way more sanguine. I am also extremely bearish on crypto in the short term. While 2022 was an annus horribilis, several Damocles swords still hang over crypto: The potential bankruptcy of Genesis and its ramifications on DCG and GBTC. The viability of Binance either regulatorily or economically. Continued concerns over Tether. We remain extremely bullish on the potential for blockchain technology but are waiting on the sidelines for clarity on some of the issues above and for the macro to settle before moving more aggressively into the market. We correctly exited most of our positions between November 2021 and January 2022 and are now sitting on 96% cash on our crypto strategy. I suspect that we will re-enter once some of my concerns play out, interest rates start declining, and as we approach the next BTC halving in mid-2024. Despite my general macro bearishness, I am extremely bullish on early-stage startups. Valuations are reasonable. Founders are focusing on their unit economics. They are limiting cash burn to not have to go to market for at least two years. Startups face lower customer acquisition costs and much less competition. While exits will be delayed and exit multiples lower than in the past few years, this should be compensated by lower entry prices and the fact that winners will win their entire category. The macro that matters for these startups is the one 6-8 years from now when they are seeking exits, rather than the current environment. For now, all that matters is that they raise enough cash and grow enough to get their next fundraise. It pays to be contrarian and to invest when everyone else is retrenching. The best startup investments of the last decade were made between 2008 and 2011 (Uber, Airbnb, Whatsapp, Instagram), and I suspect that the most interesting investments of the 2020s will be made between 2022 and 2024. Moreover, we are still at the beginning of the technology revolution. I am excited that we are in a position to bring to bear the deflationary power of technology to the categories heretofore untouched by the technology revolution: B2B, education, health care, and public services, while continuing to make renewables cheaper and viable to address the climate crisis. I am extremely grateful for the year I had. I am beyond happy that every one of my family members got healthy and that I was still able to go on amazing adventures, do meaningful work, and was able to bring the Grindaverse together for the holidays. I am excited for 2023. The year should start with a bang as I will be embarking on my trek to the South Pole which will involve totally disconnecting from the world at large for two weeks, which is something I have never done in my life. I expect it to be physically challenging, spiritually awakening, and both an amazing time alone with my thoughts, and a bonding experience with my teammates. Beyond that I am planning to take my mother to Burning Man which I am convinced she will love. I just need to build an appropriate art car to take her around. I am also looking forward to further crazy adventures with François. I am currently scheming to find a way to attach him to my back while I am kitesurfing, which I am sure will horrify his grandmother. Beyond that, I am planning to learn to wingfoil. I am also hoping that the Grindaverse will expand by at least one new member as I hope to finally welcome Angel, a white German Shepherd, in the family in the spring of 2023. The year should end with another family gathering. This time my Turks stint won’t be abbreviated by a polar adventure. I am keeping Triton until January which should allow more of the family members with kids to make the trip from Europe. I look forward to regaling them with a film on the family history. Olivier and I commissioned the film as a present to the family. The film will feature our notable ancestors in addition to being a love letter to our parents, brother Christopher, and to the family at large. It celebrates their contributions and is way for us to express our gratitude for the role they played in helping us become the men we became. Here is to a fantastic 2023. Happy New Year!

2022-12-27T15:21:05

2022-12-27T15:21:05

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=19452

2023-02-12T22:30:18

2023-02-12T22:30:18

episode-40-oskar-hartmann-unicorn-accumulator

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https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-40-oskar-hartmann-unicorn-accumulator/

Episode 40: Oskar Hartmann, Unicorn Accumulator

<p>This week, I had the pleasure of chatting with my good friend Oskar Hartmann. He’s had the most incredible unicorn experience:</p> <ul> <li>He was part of 10% of all German unicorns</li> <li>Made a $300M mistake on Ozon</li> <li>Managed to make money on Fab.com despite it going from $1.5B in value to $0 in 6 months</li> <li>Why selling at the point of maximum secondary liquidity is probably a bad time to sell</li> <li>Much more!</li> </ul> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Episode 40: Oskar Hartmann, Unicorn Accumulator" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lH8GwF6g970?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>You can listen to the full episode in the embedded podcast player.</p> <figure><iframe loading="lazy" title="Libsyn Player" style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/25905687/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/forward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/000000/" height="90" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen=""></iframe></figure> <p>In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on:</p> <ul> <li>iTunes: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/40-oskar-hartmann-unicorn-accumulator/id1532336635?i=1000590793233" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/40-oskar-hartmann-unicorn-accumulator</a></li> <li>Spotify: <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/0HsjgSUuIS9ncqzzh2rpWg?si=c86548efa63649ae" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://open.spotify.com/episode/0HsjgSUuIS9ncqzzh2rpWg</a></li> </ul>

<p>This week, I had the pleasure of chatting with my good friend Oskar Hartmann. He’s had the most &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-40-oskar-hartmann-unicorn-accumulator/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Episode 40: Oskar Hartmann, Unicorn Accumulator&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Episode 40: Oskar Hartmann, Unicorn Accumulator. Categories - Playing with Unicorns. Date-Posted - 2022-12-27T15:21:05 . This week, I had the pleasure of chatting with my good friend Oskar Hartmann. He’s had the most incredible unicorn experience: He was part of 10% of all German unicorns Made a $300M mistake on Ozon Managed to make money on Fab.com despite it going from $1.5B in value to $0 in 6 months Why selling at the point of maximum secondary liquidity is probably a bad time to sell Much more! You can listen to the full episode in the embedded podcast player. In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on: iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/40-oskar-hartmann-unicorn-accumulator Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0HsjgSUuIS9ncqzzh2rpWg

2022-12-22T14:59:11

2022-12-22T14:59:11

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=19440

2022-12-28T02:05:23

2022-12-28T02:05:23

episode-39-simpl-and-the-indian-fintech-ecosystem

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Episode 39: Simpl and the Indian Fintech Ecosystem

<p>On this week’s episode I had the pleasure of welcoming Nitya Sharma, co-founder and CEO of <a href="https://getsimpl.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://getsimpl.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Simpl</a>, to conclude our mini-series on the Indian tech scene. We had a fascinating conversation on the state of Indian Fintech, which in many ways is more advanced than the US. I am beyond impressed by the free C2C / B2B / B2C instantaneous real time payments allowed by UPI and the business models that emerge when you can do free microtransactions. I wish the West had the equivalent of India’s UPI (or Brazil’s Pix). I am also beyond impressed by what Nitya has built with Simpl, which I hope will be a Unicorn soon!</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Episode 39: The Indian FinTech Ecosystem" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GoF5r4M1lt8?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>In this episode we cover:</p> <ul> <li>Why Nitya returned to India after beginning his career in the US</li> <li>The importance of cash on delivery in India</li> <li>How Simpl’s underwriting works and their impressive scale</li> <li>The magic of UPI</li> <li>The extraordinary progress India has made in the last 15 years</li> </ul> <p>You can listen to the full episode in the embedded podcast player.</p> <figure><iframe loading="lazy" title="Libsyn Player" style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/25388214/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/forward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/000000/" height="90" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen=""></iframe></figure> <p>In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on:</p> <ul> <li>iTunes: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/39-simpl-and-the-indian-fintech-ecosystem/id1532336635?i=1000590789620" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/39-simpl-and-the-indian-fintech-ecosystem/id1532336635?i=1000590789620" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/39-simpl-and-the-indian-fintech-ecosystem/</a></li> <li>Spotify: <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/6MdtVLMwgGVlAW9KL2f2SL?si=fac3b7a6d1dd4647" data-type="URL" data-id="https://open.spotify.com/episode/6MdtVLMwgGVlAW9KL2f2SL?si=fac3b7a6d1dd4647" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://open.spotify.com/episode/simpl-and-the-Indian-Fintech-Ecosystem</a></li> </ul>

<p>On this week’s episode I had the pleasure of welcoming Nitya Sharma, co-founder and CEO of Simpl, to &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-39-simpl-and-the-indian-fintech-ecosystem/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Episode 39: Simpl and the Indian Fintech Ecosystem&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Episode 39: Simpl and the Indian Fintech Ecosystem. Categories - Playing with Unicorns. Date-Posted - 2022-12-22T14:59:11 . On this week’s episode I had the pleasure of welcoming Nitya Sharma, co-founder and CEO of Simpl, to conclude our mini-series on the Indian tech scene. We had a fascinating conversation on the state of Indian Fintech, which in many ways is more advanced than the US. I am beyond impressed by the free C2C / B2B / B2C instantaneous real time payments allowed by UPI and the business models that emerge when you can do free microtransactions. I wish the West had the equivalent of India’s UPI (or Brazil’s Pix). I am also beyond impressed by what Nitya has built with Simpl, which I hope will be a Unicorn soon! In this episode we cover: Why Nitya returned to India after beginning his career in the US The importance of cash on delivery in India How Simpl’s underwriting works and their impressive scale The magic of UPI The extraordinary progress India has made in the last 15 years You can listen to the full episode in the embedded podcast player. In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on: iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/39-simpl-and-the-indian-fintech-ecosystem/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/simpl-and-the-Indian-Fintech-Ecosystem

2022-12-17T23:02:23

2022-12-17T23:02:23

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=19420

2022-12-19T14:59:49

2022-12-19T14:59:49

deal-terms-fatality-rates-and-the-drawbacks-of-credit-lines-a-view-from-todays-most-active-vc-firm

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https://fabricegrinda.com/deal-terms-fatality-rates-and-the-drawbacks-of-credit-lines-a-view-from-todays-most-active-vc-firm/

TechCrunch Interview: Deal terms, fatality rates and the drawbacks of credit lines; a view from today’s most active VC firm

<p><em>By <a href="https://techcrunch.com/author/connie-loizos/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Connie Loizos</a>, reproduced from <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/16/the-most-active-global-vc-firm-on-deal-terms-fatality-rates-and-the-drawbacks-of-credit-lines/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">TechCrunch</a></em></p> <p>Yesterday, we had the chance to catch up with Fabrice Grinda, a French, New York-based serial entrepreneur who co-founded the free classifieds site OLX — now owned by Prosus — and who has in recent years been building up his venture firm,&nbsp;<a href="https://fjlabs.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fjlabs.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FJ Labs</a>. He often likens the outfit to an angel investor “at scale,” saying that like a lot of angel investors, “We don’t lead, we don’t price, we don’t take board seats. We decide after two one-hour meetings over the course of a week whether we invest or not.”</p> <p>The outfit, which Grinda co-founded with entrepreneur Jose Marin, has certainly been busy. Though its debut fund was relatively small — it raised $50 million from a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.telenor.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">single limited partner</a>&nbsp;in 2016 — Grinda says that FJ Labs is now backed by a wide array of investors and has invested in 900 companies around the world by writing them checks of between $250,000 and $500,000 for a stake of typically 1% to 3% in each.</p> <p>In fact, the data provider PitchBook recently ranked FJ Labs the&nbsp;<a href="https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/global-league-tables-q3-2022" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">most active venture outfit</a>&nbsp;globally, just ahead of the international outfit SOSV. (You can see Pitchbook’s rankings at page bottom.)</p> <p>Yesterday, Grinda suggested that the firm could become even more active in 2023, now that the market has cooled and founders are more interested in FJ Lab’s biggest promise to them — that it will get them follow-on funding come hell or high water through its worldwide connections. Excerpts from our wide-ranging chat with Grinda follow, edited lightly for length.</p> <p><strong>TC: You’re making so many bets for very small stakes. Meanwhile you’ve bet on companies like Flexport that have raised a lot of money. You’re not getting washed out of these deals as they raise round after round from other investors?</strong></p> <p>FC: It’s true that you sometimes go from 2% to 1% to 0.5%. But as long as a company exits at 100 times that value, say we put in $250,000 and it becomes $20 million, that’s totally fine. It doesn’t bother me if we get diluted on the way up.</p> <p><strong>When making as many bets as FJ Labs does, conflicts of interest seem inevitable. What’s your policy on funding companies that might compete with one another?</strong></p> <p>We avoid investing in competitors. Sometimes we bet on the right or the wrong horse and it’s okay. We made our bet. The only case where it does happen is if we invest in two companies that are not competitive that are doing different things, but one of them pivots into the market of the other. But otherwise we have a very Chinese Wall policy. We don’t share any data from one company to the others, not even abstracted.</p> <p>We&nbsp;<em>will</em>&nbsp;invest in the same idea in different geographies, but we will clear it by the founder first because, to your point, there are many companies that attract the same markets. In fact, we may not take a call when a company is in the pre-seed or seed-stage or even A stage if there are seven companies doing the same thing. We’re like, ‘You know what? We’re not comfortable making the bet now, because if we make a bet now, it’s our horse in the race forever.’</p> <p><strong>You mentioned not having or wanting board seats. Given what we’re seen at FTX and other startups that don’t appear to have enough experienced VCs involved, why is this your policy?</strong></p> <p>First of all, I think most people are good-intentioned and trustworthy so I don’t focus on protecting the downside. The downside is that a company goes to zero and the upside is that it goes to 100 or 1,000 and will pay for the losses. Are there cases where there has been fraud in lining the numbers? Yes, but would I have identified it if I sat on the board? I think the answer is no, because VCs do rely on numbers given to them by the founder and what if someone’s giving you numbers that are wrong? It’s not as though the board members of these companies would identify it.</p> <p>My choice not to be on boards is actually also a reflection of my personal history. When I was running board meetings as a founder, I did feel they were a useful reporting function, but I didn’t feel they were the most interesting strategic conversations. Many of the most interesting conversations happened with other VCs or founders who had nothing to do with my company. So our approach is that if you as a founder want advice or feedback, we are there for you, though you need to reach out. I find that leads to more interesting and honest conversations than when you’re in a formal board meeting, which feels stifled.</p> <p><strong>The market has changed, a lot of late-stage investment has dried up. How active would you say some of these same investors are in earlier-stage deals?</strong></p> <p>They’re writing some checks, but not very many checks. Either way, it’s not competitive with [FJ Labs] because these guys are writing a $7 million or a $10 million Series A check. The median seed [round] we see is $3 million at a pre-money valuation of $9 million and $12 million post [money valuation], and we’re writing $250,000 checks as part of that. When you have a $1 billion or $2 billion fund, you aren’t going to be playing in that pool. It’s too many deals you’d need to do to deploy that capital.</p> <p><strong>Are you finally seeing an impact on seed-stage sizes and valuations owing to the broader downturn? It obviously hit the later-stage companies much faster.</strong></p> <p>We’re seeing a lot of companies that would have liked to raise a subsequent round — that have the traction that would have easily justified a new outside round a year or two or three years ago — having to instead raise a flat, internal round as an extension to their last round. We just invested in a company’s A3 round — so three extensions at the same price. Sometimes we give these companies a 10% or 15% or 20% bump to reflect the fact that they’ve grown. But these startups have grown 3x, 4x, 5x since their last round and they are still raising flat, so there has been massive multiples compression.</p> <p><strong>What about fatality rates? So many companies raised money at overly rich valuations last year and the year before. What are you seeing in your own portfolio?</strong></p> <p>Historically, we’ve made money on about 50% of the deals we’ve invested in, which amounts to 300 exits and we’ve made money because we’ve been price sensitive. But fatality is increasing. We’re seeing a lot of ‘acqui-hires,’ and companies maybe selling for less money than was raised. But many of the companies still have cash until next year, and so I suspect that the real wave of fatalities will arrive in the middle of next year. The activity we’re seeing right now is consolidation, and it’s the weaker players in our portfolio that are being acquired. I saw one this morning where we got like 88% back, another that delivered 68%, and another where we got between 1 and 1.5x of our money back. So that wave is coming, but it’s six to nine months away.</p> <p><strong>How do you feel about debt? I sometimes worry about founders getting in over their heads, thinking it’s comparatively safe money.</strong></p> <p>Typically startups don’t [secure] debt until their A and B rounds, so the issue is usually not the venture debt. The issue is more the credit lines, which, depending on the business you’re in, you should totally use. If you’re a lender for instance and you do factoring, you’re not going to be lending off the balance sheet. That’s not scalable. As you grow your loan book, you would need infinite equity capital, which would dilute you to zero. What usually happens if you’re a lending business is you initially lend off the balance sheet, then you get some family offices, some hedge funds, and eventually a bank line of credit, and it gets cheaper and cheaper and scales.</p> <p>The issue is in a rising-rate environment, and an environment where perhaps the underlying credit scores — the models that you use — are not as high and not as successful as you’d think. Those lines get pulled, and your business can be at risk [as a result]. So I think a lot of the fintech companies that are dependent on these credit lines may be facing an existential risk as a result. It’s not because they took on more debt; it’s because the credit lines they used might be revoked.</p> <p>Meanwhile, inventory-based businesses [could also be in trouble]. With a direct-to-consumer business, again, you don’t want to be using equity to buy inventory, so you use credit, and that makes sense. As long as you have a viable business model, people will give you debt to finance your inventory. But again, the cost of that debt is going up because the interest rates are going up. And because the underwriters are becoming more careful, they may decrease your line, in which case your ability to grow is basically shrinking. So companies that depend on that to grow quickly are going to see themselves extremely constrained and are going to have a hard time on a go-forward basis.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Picture1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19422" width="1860" height="1334" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Picture1.png 1860w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Picture1-768x551.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Picture1-1536x1102.png 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Picture1-1200x861.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Picture1-1320x947.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p></p>

<p>By Connie Loizos, reproduced from TechCrunch Yesterday, we had the chance to catch up with Fabrice Grinda, a &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/deal-terms-fatality-rates-and-the-drawbacks-of-credit-lines-a-view-from-todays-most-active-vc-firm/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;TechCrunch Interview: Deal terms, fatality rates and the drawbacks of credit lines; a view from today’s most active VC firm&#8221;</span></a></p>

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TechCrunch Interview: Deal terms, fatality rates and the drawbacks of credit lines; a view from today’s most active VC firm. Categories - Interviews &amp; Fireside Chats. Date-Posted - 2022-12-17T23:02:23 . By Connie Loizos, reproduced from TechCrunch Yesterday, we had the chance to catch up with Fabrice Grinda, a French, New York-based serial entrepreneur who co-founded the free classifieds site OLX — now owned by Prosus — and who has in recent years been building up his venture firm,&nbsp;FJ Labs. He often likens the outfit to an angel investor “at scale,” saying that like a lot of angel investors, “We don’t lead, we don’t price, we don’t take board seats. We decide after two one-hour meetings over the course of a week whether we invest or not.” The outfit, which Grinda co-founded with entrepreneur Jose Marin, has certainly been busy. Though its debut fund was relatively small — it raised $50 million from a&nbsp;single limited partner&nbsp;in 2016 — Grinda says that FJ Labs is now backed by a wide array of investors and has invested in 900 companies around the world by writing them checks of between $250,000 and $500,000 for a stake of typically 1% to 3% in each. In fact, the data provider PitchBook recently ranked FJ Labs the&nbsp;most active venture outfit&nbsp;globally, just ahead of the international outfit SOSV. (You can see Pitchbook’s rankings at page bottom.) Yesterday, Grinda suggested that the firm could become even more active in 2023, now that the market has cooled and founders are more interested in FJ Lab’s biggest promise to them — that it will get them follow-on funding come hell or high water through its worldwide connections. Excerpts from our wide-ranging chat with Grinda follow, edited lightly for length. TC: You’re making so many bets for very small stakes. Meanwhile you’ve bet on companies like Flexport that have raised a lot of money. You’re not getting washed out of these deals as they raise round after round from other investors? FC: It’s true that you sometimes go from 2% to 1% to 0.5%. But as long as a company exits at 100 times that value, say we put in $250,000 and it becomes $20 million, that’s totally fine. It doesn’t bother me if we get diluted on the way up. When making as many bets as FJ Labs does, conflicts of interest seem inevitable. What’s your policy on funding companies that might compete with one another? We avoid investing in competitors. Sometimes we bet on the right or the wrong horse and it’s okay. We made our bet. The only case where it does happen is if we invest in two companies that are not competitive that are doing different things, but one of them pivots into the market of the other. But otherwise we have a very Chinese Wall policy. We don’t share any data from one company to the others, not even abstracted. We&nbsp;will&nbsp;invest in the same idea in different geographies, but we will clear it by the founder first because, to your point, there are many companies that attract the same markets. In fact, we may not take a call when a company is in the pre-seed or seed-stage or even A stage if there are seven companies doing the same thing. We’re like, ‘You know what? We’re not comfortable making the bet now, because if we make a bet now, it’s our horse in the race forever.’ You mentioned not having or wanting board seats. Given what we’re seen at FTX and other startups that don’t appear to have enough experienced VCs involved, why is this your policy? First of all, I think most people are good-intentioned and trustworthy so I don’t focus on protecting the downside. The downside is that a company goes to zero and the upside is that it goes to 100 or 1,000 and will pay for the losses. Are there cases where there has been fraud in lining the numbers? Yes, but would I have identified it if I sat on the board? I think the answer is no, because VCs do rely on numbers given to them by the founder and what if someone’s giving you numbers that are wrong? It’s not as though the board members of these companies would identify it. My choice not to be on boards is actually also a reflection of my personal history. When I was running board meetings as a founder, I did feel they were a useful reporting function, but I didn’t feel they were the most interesting strategic conversations. Many of the most interesting conversations happened with other VCs or founders who had nothing to do with my company. So our approach is that if you as a founder want advice or feedback, we are there for you, though you need to reach out. I find that leads to more interesting and honest conversations than when you’re in a formal board meeting, which feels stifled. The market has changed, a lot of late-stage investment has dried up. How active would you say some of these same investors are in earlier-stage deals? They’re writing some checks, but not very many checks. Either way, it’s not competitive with [FJ Labs] because these guys are writing a $7 million or a $10 million Series A check. The median seed [round] we see is $3 million at a pre-money valuation of $9 million and $12 million post [money valuation], and we’re writing $250,000 checks as part of that. When you have a $1 billion or $2 billion fund, you aren’t going to be playing in that pool. It’s too many deals you’d need to do to deploy that capital. Are you finally seeing an impact on seed-stage sizes and valuations owing to the broader downturn? It obviously hit the later-stage companies much faster. We’re seeing a lot of companies that would have liked to raise a subsequent round — that have the traction that would have easily justified a new outside round a year or two or three years ago — having to instead raise a flat, internal round as an extension to their last round. We just invested in a company’s A3 round — so three extensions at the same price. Sometimes we give these companies a 10% or 15% or 20% bump to reflect the fact that they’ve grown. But these startups have grown 3x, 4x, 5x since their last round and they are still raising flat, so there has been massive multiples compression. What about fatality rates? So many companies raised money at overly rich valuations last year and the year before. What are you seeing in your own portfolio? Historically, we’ve made money on about 50% of the deals we’ve invested in, which amounts to 300 exits and we’ve made money because we’ve been price sensitive. But fatality is increasing. We’re seeing a lot of ‘acqui-hires,’ and companies maybe selling for less money than was raised. But many of the companies still have cash until next year, and so I suspect that the real wave of fatalities will arrive in the middle of next year. The activity we’re seeing right now is consolidation, and it’s the weaker players in our portfolio that are being acquired. I saw one this morning where we got like 88% back, another that delivered 68%, and another where we got between 1 and 1.5x of our money back. So that wave is coming, but it’s six to nine months away. How do you feel about debt? I sometimes worry about founders getting in over their heads, thinking it’s comparatively safe money. Typically startups don’t [secure] debt until their A and B rounds, so the issue is usually not the venture debt. The issue is more the credit lines, which, depending on the business you’re in, you should totally use. If you’re a lender for instance and you do factoring, you’re not going to be lending off the balance sheet. That’s not scalable. As you grow your loan book, you would need infinite equity capital, which would dilute you to zero. What usually happens if you’re a lending business is you initially lend off the balance sheet, then you get some family offices, some hedge funds, and eventually a bank line of credit, and it gets cheaper and cheaper and scales. The issue is in a rising-rate environment, and an environment where perhaps the underlying credit scores — the models that you use — are not as high and not as successful as you’d think. Those lines get pulled, and your business can be at risk [as a result]. So I think a lot of the fintech companies that are dependent on these credit lines may be facing an existential risk as a result. It’s not because they took on more debt; it’s because the credit lines they used might be revoked. Meanwhile, inventory-based businesses [could also be in trouble]. With a direct-to-consumer business, again, you don’t want to be using equity to buy inventory, so you use credit, and that makes sense. As long as you have a viable business model, people will give you debt to finance your inventory. But again, the cost of that debt is going up because the interest rates are going up. And because the underwriters are becoming more careful, they may decrease your line, in which case your ability to grow is basically shrinking. So companies that depend on that to grow quickly are going to see themselves extremely constrained and are going to have a hard time on a go-forward basis.

2022-11-23T22:51:55

2022-11-23T22:51:55

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=19347

2022-11-24T17:32:12

2022-11-24T17:32:12

2022-holiday-gadget-gift-guide

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https://fabricegrinda.com/2022-holiday-gadget-gift-guide/

2022 Holiday Gadget Gift Guide

<p>It is that time of the year again, so I am sharing my recommendations for all gadget lovers of the world to be happy this holiday season. Note that the cover picture above is my Turks setup which includes the ASUS ROG Swift OLED PG48UQ, the Apple Watch Ultra, Ledger Nano X, HyperX Cloud Flight S, Herman Miller Embody Gaming Chair, Blue Yeti X, and earHero.</p> <p><strong>Computer Monitor: Asus ROG Swift OLED PG48UQ or PG42UQ</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="315" height="236" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture1.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19349"/></figure></div> <p>I have been a fan of OLED TVs since they first released with their deep blacks and extraordinary image quality. I pined for 4K OLED gaming monitors to be released. I even used a LG 48” TV as a monitor for a while but found it unwieldy and the glossy finish was too reflective for work. This is where the <a href="https://rog.asus.com/monitors/above-34-inches/rog-swift-oled-pg48uq-model/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://rog.asus.com/monitors/above-34-inches/rog-swift-oled-pg48uq-model/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Asus ROG OLED PG48UQ </a> and <a href="https://rog.asus.com/monitors/above-34-inches/rog-swift-oled-pg42uq-model/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://rog.asus.com/monitors/above-34-inches/rog-swift-oled-pg42uq-model/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">PG42UQ</a> come into play. They are extraordinary. The image quality is second to none. The monitors are super-fast with 0.1ms grey-to-grey response time and overclockable 138Hz refresh rate. The special matte coating leads to less glare and fewer distractions. They are definitely the monitor to get. Note that both are identical, and you should get the one that fits your desk. If you have a very deep desk, get the 48”, otherwise get the 42”.</p> <p>I also considered the Odyssey Ark 55” curved monitor, but for some reason did not love the curvature of the screen. Perhaps it was just too big relative to where I was sitting, but it did not feel comfortable. It’s also outrageously expensive at $2,799 vs. $1,499 and $1,399 for the ROG monitors. Note that I do not like ultrawide monitors with 21:9 or 32:9 formats like the <a href="https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/monitors/gaming/49--odyssey-g95na-gaming-dqhd-led-monitor-ls49ag952nnxza/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/monitors/gaming/49--odyssey-g95na-gaming-dqhd-led-monitor-ls49ag952nnxza/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Samsung Odyssey Neo G9</a> because I do not find them tall enough to be comfortable for work. Those typically come with a 1,440 vertical resolution. I much prefer the 16:9 format with 2,160 of vertical resolution. I would consider a curved ultrawide version of the ROG monitors, but only if they were as tall as their 16:9 counterparts with 2160 of vertical resolution (say 5,120 x 2,160 vs. the 5,120 x 1,440 of the Neo G9).</p> <p>The best deal in 48” OLED monitors is the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/AORUS-Monitor-3840x2160-Display-Response/dp/B09886GDFD/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=aorus%2B48%2Boled&amp;qid=1669306463&amp;sprefix=aorus%2B48%2Caps%2C201&amp;sr=8-2&amp;ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.2b70bf2b-6730-4ccf-ab97-eb60747b8daf&amp;th=1" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.amazon.com/AORUS-Monitor-3840x2160-Display-Response/dp/B09886GDFD/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=aorus%2B48%2Boled&amp;qid=1669306463&amp;sprefix=aorus%2B48%2Caps%2C201&amp;sr=8-2&amp;ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.2b70bf2b-6730-4ccf-ab97-eb60747b8daf&amp;th=1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">AORUS FO48U</a> at $779. I did not play with it so cannot recommend it, but by all accounts, it’s a worthy alternative. Note that it has a glossy finish so would probably not be ideal in an office environment but would be great for gaming in a dark room. I use my monitors for both work and play and they need to function in bright rooms.</p> <p><strong>TV: LG C2 77-inch evo OLED TV</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture3.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19351" width="398" height="264"/></figure></div> <p>The <a href="https://www.lg.com/us/tvs/lg-oled77c2pua" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.lg.com/us/tvs/lg-oled77c2pua" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">LG C2 77-inch evo OLED TV </a> is the best high-end TV for the money. The TV combines stunning picture quality with terrific gaming prowess. I prefer the C2 to the higher-end G2 as I can’t tell the difference between them. However, I prefer the C2 to the lower-end B2 especially with HDR as it gets brighter and highlights pop more. The C2 also has better gradient handling, resulting in less distracting banding. The 77” is currently on sale for $2,499 and the 65” for $1,699. Both are amazing buys and when it comes with TVs, bigger is better! However, the 83” sells for $3,999 and is not worth it.</p> <p><strong>Soundbar: Sonos Arc</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture18.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19382" width="312" height="66"/></figure></div> <p>It would be shame to have an amazing TV like the LG C2, without amazing sound. That’s where the <a href="https://www.sonos.com/en/shop/arc" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.sonos.com/en/shop/arc" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Sonos Arc</a> comes in. It’s a gorgeous soundbar offering premium surround sound without the need for supplementary speakers. It’s super easy to setup. It sounds incredible and it often feels like the sound is coming at you from all angles. I also do not think you need a subwoofer with the Arc as there is more than enough powerful bass to feel the on-screen explosions. It’s the perfect complement for your TV.</p> <p><strong>Projector: Epson EpiqVision Ultra LS800 Ultra Short-Throw Laser Projector</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture4.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19352" width="304" height="115" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture4.jpg 1036w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture4-768x289.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 304px) 85vw, 304px" /></figure></div> <p>Two years ago, I recommended the <a href="https://www.optoma.com/in/product/p2/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.optoma.com/in/product/p2/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Optoma CinemaX P2</a>. Sadly, the salt and humidity in the air of Turks and Caicos killed it so I went projector shopping again. I ultimately settled on the <a href="https://epson.com/epiqvision-ultra-laser-projection-tv" data-type="URL" data-id="https://epson.com/epiqvision-ultra-laser-projection-tv" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Epson EpiqVision Ultra LS800</a>. It’s amazing and a huge step up from the Optoma P2. It’s incredibly bright with 4,000 lumens (vs. 3,000). It can display images up to 150” (vs 120”). It has by far the shortest input lag of any projector in its class making it the only ultra-short-throw projector I would recommend for gaming. It’s super easy to setup. It has amazing sound with two full-range 5-watt speakers and a 10-watt subwoofer in a package that is essentially an integrated soundbar given the LS800’s width. In fact, it’s so good, I don’t use external speakers with it. It’s the ultra-short-throw projector to get.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture-3.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19377" width="512" height="384" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture-3.jpg 2048w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture-3-768x576.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture-3-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture-3-1200x900.jpg 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture-3-1320x990.jpg 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 512px) 85vw, 512px" /></figure></div> <p><strong>Streaming Device: Apple TV 4K</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture5.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19353" width="349" height="347" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture5.jpg 804w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture5-768x764.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 349px) 85vw, 349px" /></figure></div> <p>Modern TVs like the LG C2 do not need a streaming device as it’s simpler to use the built-in apps especially since they now support Airplay. However, the Epson Ultra LS800 does not have a RJ-45 jack. In Turks I only have the VPN with a US IP address (to be able to watch US shows) on the wired network. As a result, I got the brand-new <a href="https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-4k/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-4k/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Apple TV 4K</a> with Ethernet and 128Gb of storage and use it to stream on the Epson.</p> <p>It&#8217;s expensive for what it is, but it’s the one of the best streaming devices on the market especially if you are used to Apple user interfaces and its ecosystem. The A15 Bionic chip makes it blisteringly quick which addresses one of my key criticisms of prior iterations.</p> <p>If you prefer the Apple UX/UI and want a modern streaming device, you cannot go wrong with this one.</p> <p><strong>Notebook: LG Gram 17 Ultra-Slim PRO</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture6.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19354" width="423" height="281" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture6.jpg 1036w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture6-768x510.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 423px) 85vw, 423px" /></figure></div> <p>I switched to the <a href="https://www.lg.com/us/laptops/lg-17z90q-r.apb9u1" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.lg.com/us/laptops/lg-17z90q-r.apb9u1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">LG Gram 17</a> a few years ago to use when I travel, and I never looked back. It’s by far the lightest 17” notebook on the market at just over 3 pounds. The power adapter is exceedingly small and light. I regularly get over 10 hours per charge and feel like I never need to charge it.</p> <p>My only gripes were that it was underpowered, but they addressed the issue with the 2022 version. It now comes with 32Gb of RAM, a 2TB SSD and a GeForce RTX 2050 graphics card. This is the notebook to get. Note that I do not game on it, as I have desktops with much more powerful graphics cards at my homes. I used to recommend gaming laptops, but they run ridiculously hot, the battery life is extremely limited (under 2 hours), and they are bulkier than I would like. However, if you want a notebook that you can game and work on there are great options from MSI and Asus.</p> <p><strong>Console: Xbox X &amp; PS5 </strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture8.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19356" width="408" height="255"/></figure></div> <p>It was hard to recommend buying them until this year as they were both really hard to find and you had to massively overpay if you wanted them. Moreover, the lack of amazing new games did not make them a must buy. However, with the release of Elden Ring, it became imperative that I buy them as I prefer to play third person action role playing games (RPGs) on console than on PC. Luckily, this coincided with the consoles becoming more available.</p> <p>If you can afford it, I would get both. The <a href="https://www.xbox.com/en-US/consoles/xbox-series-x" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.xbox.com/en-US/consoles/xbox-series-x" rel="noreferrer noopener">Xbox X</a> is marginally more powerful and has slightly better graphics as a result. I also like the feel of the Xbox controller better in my hands. However, the PS5’s controller is objectively better and there are better first party games on the <a href="https://www.playstation.com/en-us/ps5/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.playstation.com/en-us/ps5/" rel="noreferrer noopener">PS5</a> right now. I typically play games available on both consoles, like Call of Duty, on the Xbox. The exception is Elden Ring which for some reason looks marginally better on the PS5.</p> <p>My biggest gripe remains the dearth of games I want to play on them. Once I finish a game, they gather dust for months while I await the release of the next game that interests me. Right now, I am about to play <a href="https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/god-of-war-ragnarok/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/god-of-war-ragnarok/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">God of War Ragnarök</a> which requires a PS5. I am eagerly awaiting the release of GTA 6, new Naughty Dog games, Starfield and many others, but who knows when they will release.</p> <p>BTW do not allow cross-play with PC users when playing on console. A keyboard and mouse are just far more precise and it will ruin your gaming experience.</p> <p><strong>Video Games: Elden Ring &amp; Age of Empires 4</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture7-1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19355" width="410" height="252"/></figure></div> <p>I have a been a fan of real time strategy (RTS) games since the release of <em>Dune 2</em> in 1992 and of the <em>Age of Empires</em> franchise specifically for 25 years. A year ago, Microsoft released <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1466860/Age_of_Empires_IV_Anniversary_Edition/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1466860/Age_of_Empires_IV_Anniversary_Edition/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Age of Empires IV</a>. With much improved graphics and gameplay mechanics, I fell in love with the series all over again. It has been a lot of fun play online with my friends. Admittedly the game was not polished upon release and was missing many features. All of these have been addressed and the game is now well balanced and in a very good place. It’s the best RTS on the market right now and I encourage you to try it.</p> <p>Likewise, I have been a huge fan of From Software Souls games for a long time. However, their linear design and extremely challenging difficulty level made it hard to recommend to normies. <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1245620/ELDEN_RING/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1245620/ELDEN_RING/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Elden Ring</a> changes that. By combining the Souls formula with a gorgeous open world, From Software has created a masterpiece. If a boss is too strong for you, you can just bypass it and explore the rest of the world until you leveled up enough to take it on. The lore and story are riveting, and as per usual you are not spoon-fed anything. You get to figure out the story and decide where to go and what to do next. Expect to die many times as you “git gud,” but the sense of accomplishment from finally defeating that foe will make it all worth it. The multiplayer system, while still clunky, is the best in the series, and I was able to essentially play the entire game in co-op with my brother which was super fun. Note if you are new to Souls games I would recommend starting as an Astrologer which is the easiest class to play. We played through the game in about 100 hours and there are hundreds of other hours of content awaiting us. I can’t wait for the DLC to come out.</p> <p><strong>Fitness Tracker: Apple Watch Ultra</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="189" height="223" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture9.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19357"/></figure></div> <p>I have been part of the Fitbit ecosystem for years. I used the <a href="https://www.fitbit.com/global/us/products/trackers/charge5?sku=421BKBK" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.fitbit.com/global/us/products/trackers/charge5?sku=421BKBK" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Fitbit Charge 5</a> since it came out (and the Charge 4 and 3 before then). I love the Charge 5 because of its simplicity and 7-day battery life. However, what has been annoying me continuously is that they keep breaking on me. I break at least 5 per year. I suspect that they do not like all the water I subject them to through kite surfing, and my daily hot tub and hot bath ritual. Alternatively, perhaps it does not like my adventures in the extreme cold. Fitbit replaces them for free every time, but it’s a pain in the neck to deal with..</p> <p>When my Fitbit Charge 5 broke (yet again) a few weeks ago, I bit the bullet and bought the <a href="https://www.apple.com/apple-watch-ultra/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.apple.com/apple-watch-ultra/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Apple Watch Ultra</a>. I don’t love that the battery only lasts a day, so I charge it while I am working at my computer to make sure it has enough battery life to track my sleep. So far, I am very happy with it. It feels very sturdy, albeit a bit heavy, but the fitness, sleep and health tracking functions are second to none.</p> <p>I will be putting it through its paces with lots of kitesurfing, extreme skiing, and my upcoming trip to Antarctica. Based on what I have seen so far, I think it’s going to be the watch for me for a very long time, or at least until the next version comes out 😉</p> <p><strong>Ride On Remote Controlled Car: 4WD Can-Am from CarTots</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture10.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19358" width="312" height="312"/></figure></div> <p>This is the perfect gadget for anyone with kids ages 0-5. François absolutely adores being driven in them. I bought a few of these for New York, Turks, and Revelstoke. You can fit two kids in them. You can drive them yourself with the remote, or when they are old enough, they can drive themselves with the functioning gas pedal and steering wheel.</p> <p>The <a href="https://www.cartots.com/products/can-am-24v-remote-control-ride-on-sxs-2-seater-with-4-motor-4wd" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.cartots.com/products/can-am-24v-remote-control-ride-on-sxs-2-seater-with-4-motor-4wd" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">4WD Can-Am</a> is by far the best car I tested. It’s the most robust and can handle difficult terrain. I drove it on gravel and sand uphill and downhill with no issues. You can play music on it, and it has two batteries giving it the best battery life of the cars in its class.</p> <p>With one of these, your progeny will be the cool kid on the block.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Photo-Nov-20-2022-1-27-16-PM-1.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19400" width="510" height="314" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Photo-Nov-20-2022-1-27-16-PM-1.jpg 1019w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Photo-Nov-20-2022-1-27-16-PM-1-768x473.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 510px) 85vw, 510px" /></figure></div> <p><strong>Crypto: Ledger Nano X</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture13.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19360" width="154" height="205"/></figure></div> <p>The downfall of FTX has strengthened the notion of “not your keys, not your coins” and the purpose and viability of DeFi in general. Most people should just buy and hold some BTC or ETH on Coinbase which is a regulated exchange. However, if you are more sophisticated, I would highly recommend you do self-custody with a <a href="https://shop.ledger.com/products/ledger-nano-x" data-type="URL" data-id="https://shop.ledger.com/products/ledger-nano-x" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Nano Ledger X</a>. </p> <p>I won’t lie that it’s a pain to setup. It’s an even bigger pain to use as you need to re-authenticate yourself continuously even with the longest setting, and you must manually verify every transaction, but that’s the entire point: better safe than sorry.</p> <p>Note that I would only recommend this for technically savvy users who are doing more than just holding BTC and ETH on Coinbase which I consider to be an easier, safe, and viable alternative. However, at this point, I would NOT hold any coins on any centralized exchanges unless they are regulated and audited. I would not even trust <a href="https://www.binance.com/en" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.binance.com/en" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Binance</a>, though I have no indications they have done anything wrong with customer deposits.</p> <p>Also note that you need to be extremely thoughtful about what you do with your recovery phrase in case you lose your Ledger. I keep mine split between different safes at different locations with different people who can access each of them, not that this matters much at this point as I sold most of my crypto between November 2021 and January 2022.</p> <p><strong>Wireless Headphones: HyperX Cloud II Wireless</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture14.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19361" width="256" height="230"/></figure></div> <p>I have been a fan of HyperX headphones for a very long time. They are incredibly comfortable, the sound quality is amazing, they block out external noises effectively and most importantly for me the microphone is noise cancelling allowing you to be able to Zoom from noisy environments without anyone on the call noticing. I recently upgraded all my headphones to the wireless version because I like to walk around during calls as I feel the blood flowing through my brain allows me to think better, not to mention it’s healthier. At my desk I use the <a href="https://hyperx.com/collections/gaming-headsets/products/hyperx-cloud-ii-wireless?variant=41031690879133" data-type="URL" data-id="https://hyperx.com/collections/gaming-headsets/products/hyperx-cloud-ii-wireless?variant=41031690879133" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cloud II Wireless</a>. I like that it’s USB-C and love the feel on my ears.</p> <p>I travel with the <a href="https://hyperx.com/collections/gaming-headsets/products/hyperx-cloud-flight-s?variant=41031678820509" data-type="URL" data-id="https://hyperx.com/collections/gaming-headsets/products/hyperx-cloud-flight-s?variant=41031678820509" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">HyperX Cloud Flight S</a> because you can rotate the earcups which allows the headset to fit better in my eBags <a href="https://www.ebags.com/backpacks-bags/laptop-backpacks/pro-slim-laptop-backpack/117775XXXX.html?dwvar_117775XXXX_color=Solid%20Black&amp;cgidmaster=backpacks-bags-laptop" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.ebags.com/backpacks-bags/laptop-backpacks/pro-slim-laptop-backpack/117775XXXX.html?dwvar_117775XXXX_color=Solid%20Black&amp;cgidmaster=backpacks-bags-laptop" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Pro Slim Laptop Backpack</a>.</p> <p>My only gripe with them is that they don’t support Bluetooth. You must use their USB dongle which works on PCs and the PS5. However, on my iPhone, I must connect the dongle to a lightning to USB connector, which works, but is far from ideal.</p> <p><strong>Chair: Herman Miller Embody Gaming Chair</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture15.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19362" width="198" height="304"/></figure></div> <p>I have been a huge fan of Herman Miller chairs, starting with the Aeron, before switching to the Embody years ago because I found it more comfortable. It’s an amazing chair and I love the gaming trim. It’s currently on sale <a href="https://store.hermanmiller.com/gaming-chairs/embody-gaming-chair/100160889.html?lang=en_US" data-type="URL" data-id="https://store.hermanmiller.com/gaming-chairs/embody-gaming-chair/100160889.html?lang=en_US" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">on sale</a> so I bought a few for every place I live and work in.</p> <p><strong>Streaming Microphone: Blue Yeti X</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture16.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-19363" width="103" height="267"/></figure></div> <p>As I embarked on my <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/playing-with-unicorns/)" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/playing-with-unicorns/)" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Playing with Unicorns</a> journey, I tested numerous microphones and headphones. Ultimately, I settled on the<a href="https://www.bluemic.com/en-us/products/yeti-x/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.bluemic.com/en-us/products/yeti-x/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> Blue Yeti X</a>. The sound quality is excellent, and it is easy to setup and install.</p> <p><strong>Streaming Earphones: earHero</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture17.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19364" width="254" height="217"/></figure></div> <p>The <a href="https://earhero.com/product/earhero-worlds-most-comfortable-earphone-kit-for-law-enforcement/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://earhero.com/product/earhero-worlds-most-comfortable-earphone-kit-for-law-enforcement/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">earHero earphones</a> are a great complement for the Blue Yeti X. They are invisible. No one can see you are wearing them, and they allow you to avoid noise pollution from your speakers into the microphone.</p>

<p>It is that time of the year again, so I am sharing my recommendations for all gadget lovers &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/2022-holiday-gadget-gift-guide/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;2022 Holiday Gadget Gift Guide&#8221;</span></a></p>

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2022 Holiday Gadget Gift Guide. Categories - Tech Gadgets. Date-Posted - 2022-11-23T22:51:55 . It is that time of the year again, so I am sharing my recommendations for all gadget lovers of the world to be happy this holiday season. Note that the cover picture above is my Turks setup which includes the ASUS ROG Swift OLED PG48UQ, the Apple Watch Ultra, Ledger Nano X, HyperX Cloud Flight S, Herman Miller Embody Gaming Chair, Blue Yeti X, and earHero. Computer Monitor: Asus ROG Swift OLED PG48UQ or PG42UQ I have been a fan of OLED TVs since they first released with their deep blacks and extraordinary image quality. I pined for 4K OLED gaming monitors to be released. I even used a LG 48” TV as a monitor for a while but found it unwieldy and the glossy finish was too reflective for work. This is where the Asus ROG OLED PG48UQ and PG42UQ come into play. They are extraordinary. The image quality is second to none. The monitors are super-fast with 0.1ms grey-to-grey response time and overclockable 138Hz refresh rate. The special matte coating leads to less glare and fewer distractions. They are definitely the monitor to get. Note that both are identical, and you should get the one that fits your desk. If you have a very deep desk, get the 48”, otherwise get the 42”. I also considered the Odyssey Ark 55” curved monitor, but for some reason did not love the curvature of the screen. Perhaps it was just too big relative to where I was sitting, but it did not feel comfortable. It’s also outrageously expensive at $2,799 vs. $1,499 and $1,399 for the ROG monitors. Note that I do not like ultrawide monitors with 21:9 or 32:9 formats like the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 because I do not find them tall enough to be comfortable for work. Those typically come with a 1,440 vertical resolution. I much prefer the 16:9 format with 2,160 of vertical resolution. I would consider a curved ultrawide version of the ROG monitors, but only if they were as tall as their 16:9 counterparts with 2160 of vertical resolution (say 5,120 x 2,160 vs. the 5,120 x 1,440 of the Neo G9). The best deal in 48” OLED monitors is the AORUS FO48U at $779. I did not play with it so cannot recommend it, but by all accounts, it’s a worthy alternative. Note that it has a glossy finish so would probably not be ideal in an office environment but would be great for gaming in a dark room. I use my monitors for both work and play and they need to function in bright rooms. TV: LG C2 77-inch evo OLED TV The LG C2 77-inch evo OLED TV is the best high-end TV for the money. The TV combines stunning picture quality with terrific gaming prowess. I prefer the C2 to the higher-end G2 as I can’t tell the difference between them. However, I prefer the C2 to the lower-end B2 especially with HDR as it gets brighter and highlights pop more. The C2 also has better gradient handling, resulting in less distracting banding. The 77” is currently on sale for $2,499 and the 65” for $1,699. Both are amazing buys and when it comes with TVs, bigger is better! However, the 83” sells for $3,999 and is not worth it. Soundbar: Sonos Arc It would be shame to have an amazing TV like the LG C2, without amazing sound. That’s where the Sonos Arc comes in. It’s a gorgeous soundbar offering premium surround sound without the need for supplementary speakers. It’s super easy to setup. It sounds incredible and it often feels like the sound is coming at you from all angles. I also do not think you need a subwoofer with the Arc as there is more than enough powerful bass to feel the on-screen explosions. It’s the perfect complement for your TV. Projector: Epson EpiqVision Ultra LS800 Ultra Short-Throw Laser Projector Two years ago, I recommended the Optoma CinemaX P2. Sadly, the salt and humidity in the air of Turks and Caicos killed it so I went projector shopping again. I ultimately settled on the Epson EpiqVision Ultra LS800. It’s amazing and a huge step up from the Optoma P2. It’s incredibly bright with 4,000 lumens (vs. 3,000). It can display images up to 150” (vs 120”). It has by far the shortest input lag of any projector in its class making it the only ultra-short-throw projector I would recommend for gaming. It’s super easy to setup. It has amazing sound with two full-range 5-watt speakers and a 10-watt subwoofer in a package that is essentially an integrated soundbar given the LS800’s width. In fact, it’s so good, I don’t use external speakers with it. It’s the ultra-short-throw projector to get. Streaming Device: Apple TV 4K Modern TVs like the LG C2 do not need a streaming device as it’s simpler to use the built-in apps especially since they now support Airplay. However, the Epson Ultra LS800 does not have a RJ-45 jack. In Turks I only have the VPN with a US IP address (to be able to watch US shows) on the wired network. As a result, I got the brand-new Apple TV 4K with Ethernet and 128Gb of storage and use it to stream on the Epson. It&#8217;s expensive for what it is, but it’s the one of the best streaming devices on the market especially if you are used to Apple user interfaces and its ecosystem. The A15 Bionic chip makes it blisteringly quick which addresses one of my key criticisms of prior iterations. If you prefer the Apple UX/UI and want a modern streaming device, you cannot go wrong with this one. Notebook: LG Gram 17 Ultra-Slim PRO I switched to the LG Gram 17 a few years ago to use when I travel, and I never looked back. It’s by far the lightest 17” notebook on the market at just over 3 pounds. The power adapter is exceedingly small and light. I regularly get over 10 hours per charge and feel like I never need to charge it. My only gripes were that it was underpowered, but they addressed the issue with the 2022 version. It now comes with 32Gb of RAM, a 2TB SSD and a GeForce RTX 2050 graphics card. This is the notebook to get. Note that I do not game on it, as I have desktops with much more powerful graphics cards at my homes. I used to recommend gaming laptops, but they run ridiculously hot, the battery life is extremely limited (under 2 hours), and they are bulkier than I would like. However, if you want a notebook that you can game and work on there are great options from MSI and Asus. Console: Xbox X &amp; PS5 It was hard to recommend buying them until this year as they were both really hard to find and you had to massively overpay if you wanted them. Moreover, the lack of amazing new games did not make them a must buy. However, with the release of Elden Ring, it became imperative that I buy them as I prefer to play third person action role playing games (RPGs) on console than on PC. Luckily, this coincided with the consoles becoming more available. If you can afford it, I would get both. The Xbox X is marginally more powerful and has slightly better graphics as a result. I also like the feel of the Xbox controller better in my hands. However, the PS5’s controller is objectively better and there are better first party games on the PS5 right now. I typically play games available on both consoles, like Call of Duty, on the Xbox. The exception is Elden Ring which for some reason looks marginally better on the PS5. My biggest gripe remains the dearth of games I want to play on them. Once I finish a game, they gather dust for months while I await the release of the next game that interests me. Right now, I am about to play God of War Ragnarök which requires a PS5. I am eagerly awaiting the release of GTA 6, new Naughty Dog games, Starfield and many others, but who knows when they will release. BTW do not allow cross-play with PC users when playing on console. A keyboard and mouse are just far more precise and it will ruin your gaming experience. Video Games: Elden Ring &amp; Age of Empires 4 I have a been a fan of real time strategy (RTS) games since the release of Dune 2 in 1992 and of the Age of Empires franchise specifically for 25 years. A year ago, Microsoft released Age of Empires IV. With much improved graphics and gameplay mechanics, I fell in love with the series all over again. It has been a lot of fun play online with my friends. Admittedly the game was not polished upon release and was missing many features. All of these have been addressed and the game is now well balanced and in a very good place. It’s the best RTS on the market right now and I encourage you to try it. Likewise, I have been a huge fan of From Software Souls games for a long time. However, their linear design and extremely challenging difficulty level made it hard to recommend to normies. Elden Ring changes that. By combining the Souls formula with a gorgeous open world, From Software has created a masterpiece. If a boss is too strong for you, you can just bypass it and explore the rest of the world until you leveled up enough to take it on. The lore and story are riveting, and as per usual you are not spoon-fed anything. You get to figure out the story and decide where to go and what to do next. Expect to die many times as you “git gud,” but the sense of accomplishment from finally defeating that foe will make it all worth it. The multiplayer system, while still clunky, is the best in the series, and I was able to essentially play the entire game in co-op with my brother which was super fun. Note if you are new to Souls games I would recommend starting as an Astrologer which is the easiest class to play. We played through the game in about 100 hours and there are hundreds of other hours of content awaiting us. I can’t wait for the DLC to come out. Fitness Tracker: Apple Watch Ultra I have been part of the Fitbit ecosystem for years. I used the Fitbit Charge 5 since it came out (and the Charge 4 and 3 before then). I love the Charge 5 because of its simplicity and 7-day battery life. However, what has been annoying me continuously is that they keep breaking on me. I break at least 5 per year. I suspect that they do not like all the water I subject them to through kite surfing, and my daily hot tub and hot bath ritual. Alternatively, perhaps it does not like my adventures in the extreme cold. Fitbit replaces them for free every time, but it’s a pain in the neck to deal with.. When my Fitbit Charge 5 broke (yet again) a few weeks ago, I bit the bullet and bought the Apple Watch Ultra. I don’t love that the battery only lasts a day, so I charge it while I am working at my computer to make sure it has enough battery life to track my sleep. So far, I am very happy with it. It feels very sturdy, albeit a bit heavy, but the fitness, sleep and health tracking functions are second to none. I will be putting it through its paces with lots of kitesurfing, extreme skiing, and my upcoming trip to Antarctica. Based on what I have seen so far, I think it’s going to be the watch for me for a very long time, or at least until the next version comes out 😉 Ride On Remote Controlled Car: 4WD Can-Am from CarTots This is the perfect gadget for anyone with kids ages 0-5. François absolutely adores being driven in them. I bought a few of these for New York, Turks, and Revelstoke. You can fit two kids in them. You can drive them yourself with the remote, or when they are old enough, they can drive themselves with the functioning gas pedal and steering wheel. The 4WD Can-Am is by far the best car I tested. It’s the most robust and can handle difficult terrain. I drove it on gravel and sand uphill and downhill with no issues. You can play music on it, and it has two batteries giving it the best battery life of the cars in its class. With one of these, your progeny will be the cool kid on the block. Crypto: Ledger Nano X The downfall of FTX has strengthened the notion of “not your keys, not your coins” and the purpose and viability of DeFi in general. Most people should just buy and hold some BTC or ETH on Coinbase which is a regulated exchange. However, if you are more sophisticated, I would highly recommend you do self-custody with a Nano Ledger X. I won’t lie that it’s a pain to setup. It’s an even bigger pain to use as you need to re-authenticate yourself continuously even with the longest setting, and you must manually verify every transaction, but that’s the entire point: better safe than sorry. Note that I would only recommend this for technically savvy users who are doing more than just holding BTC and ETH on Coinbase which I consider to be an easier, safe, and viable alternative. However, at this point, I would NOT hold any coins on any centralized exchanges unless they are regulated and audited. I would not even trust Binance, though I have no indications they have done anything wrong with customer deposits. Also note that you need to be extremely thoughtful about what you do with your recovery phrase in case you lose your Ledger. I keep mine split between different safes at different locations with different people who can access each of them, not that this matters much at this point as I sold most of my crypto between November 2021 and January 2022. Wireless Headphones: HyperX Cloud II Wireless I have been a fan of HyperX headphones for a very long time. They are incredibly comfortable, the sound quality is amazing, they block out external noises effectively and most importantly for me the microphone is noise cancelling allowing you to be able to Zoom from noisy environments without anyone on the call noticing. I recently upgraded all my headphones to the wireless version because I like to walk around during calls as I feel the blood flowing through my brain allows me to think better, not to mention it’s healthier. At my desk I use the Cloud II Wireless. I like that it’s USB-C and love the feel on my ears. I travel with the HyperX Cloud Flight S because you can rotate the earcups which allows the headset to fit better in my eBags Pro Slim Laptop Backpack. My only gripe with them is that they don’t support Bluetooth. You must use their USB dongle which works on PCs and the PS5. However, on my iPhone, I must connect the dongle to a lightning to USB connector, which works, but is far from ideal. Chair: Herman Miller Embody Gaming Chair I have been a huge fan of Herman Miller chairs, starting with the Aeron, before switching to the Embody years ago because I found it more comfortable. It’s an amazing chair and I love the gaming trim. It’s currently on sale on sale so I bought a few for every place I live and work in. Streaming Microphone: Blue Yeti X As I embarked on my Playing with Unicorns journey, I tested numerous microphones and headphones. Ultimately, I settled on the Blue Yeti X. The sound quality is excellent, and it is easy to setup and install. Streaming Earphones: earHero The earHero earphones are a great complement for the Blue Yeti X. They are invisible. No one can see you are wearing them, and they allow you to avoid noise pollution from your speakers into the microphone.

2022-11-18T16:48:14

2022-11-18T16:48:14

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2023-11-17T13:49:57

2023-11-17T13:49:57

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https://fabricegrinda.com/winter-is-coming/

Winter is coming!

<p>I have been putting a lot of thought into macro considerations of late. There are time periods when macro trumps micro. In those moments, all asset classes correlate to 1 on the way up in moments of exuberance. Due diligence goes out the window and markets do not differentiate amazing companies from clunkers. Likewise, all asset classes correlate to 1 on the way down in depressed times. The market throws out the baby with the bath water.</p> <p>We have been living in such times for the last 18 months. In February 2021, I argued in <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/welcome-to-the-everything-bubble/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/welcome-to-the-everything-bubble/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Welcome to the Everything Bubble</a> that negative real rates with aggressive expansionary fiscal policies were fueling a bubble across every asset class and that it was time to sell overvalued assets aggressively. In March of this year in <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/the-great-unknown/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/the-great-unknown/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Great Unknown</a>, I argued that people were significantly underestimating the risks to the global economy. Those risks have only increased since.</p> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-20 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:20%"></div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow"> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-tiktok wp-block-embed-tiktok"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <blockquote class="tiktok-embed" cite="https://www.tiktok.com/@20vc_tok/video/7095411174233099526" data-video-id="7095411174233099526" data-embed-from="oembed" style="max-width: 605px;min-width: 325px;" > <section> <a target="_blank" title="@20vc_tok" href="https://www.tiktok.com/@20vc_tok?refer=embed" rel="noopener">@20vc_tok</a> <p><a title="1" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/1?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#1</a> angel investor in the world <a title="fabricegrinda" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/fabricegrinda?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#FabriceGrinda</a> explains why <a title="recession" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/recession?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#recession</a> is so likely <a title="2022" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/2022?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#2022</a> <a title="economy" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/economy?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#economy</a> <a title="investor" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/investor?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#investor</a> <a title="investors" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/investors?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#investors</a> <a title="fjlabs" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/fjlabs?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#FJLabs</a> <a title="20vc" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/20vc?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#20VC</a> <a title="harrystebbings" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/harrystebbings?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#HarryStebbings</a></p> <a target="_blank" title="♬ Violin - Grooving Gecko" href="https://www.tiktok.com/music/Violin-6732129806218954753?refer=embed" rel="noopener">♬ Violin &#8211; Grooving Gecko</a> </section> </blockquote> <script async src="https://www.tiktok.com/embed.js"></script> </div></figure> </div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:20%"></div> </div> <p>Being bearish about the global economy is consensus right now. As usual, I am contrarian, but in this case, my contrarian take is that the consensus is not bearish enough. Most people are underwriting some form of soft landing or mild recession in 2023. We are far from being in the valley of despair where all hope has been lost. Any news that is less bad than expected sees the market rip. This happened last week when the CPI print came in at 7.7% instead of 7.9%, or when people greeted the news of a potential slowdown in the rate of increase in rates with exuberance. Mind you, inflation remains stubbornly high, and rates are still going up even if the rate of increase might decline (e.g., the second derivative is negative, but the first derivative is still positive).</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="597" height="458" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture1-1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19257"/></figure></div> <p>There are nine factors that are driving my bearishness.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. <strong>Rates may go higher than people expect for longer than people expect</strong></h3> <p>Until the September 20-21 FOMC meeting people were underwriting a US Fed Funds rate peaking at 3.5%. It’s currently 3.75% to 4% and expected to peak at 4.6% in 2023 before declining again.</p> <p>Earlier this year I fretted that no one was considering the consequences of rates above 5% as they did not consider it within the realm of possibility. This is one area where the consensus has been repeatedly wrong over the last year.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture2-1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19259" width="602" height="380"/></figure></div> <p>With inflation remaining stubbornly high and showing signs of becoming structural as workers start requesting wage increases in line with expected higher inflation, rates may have to be significantly higher for longer than people expect. I would not be surprised if rates ultimately reached 5.5% or more and stayed high well into 2024 or longer.</p> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-21 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:30%"></div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow"> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Could the Fed raise interest rates to 20% ??" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tKHgFRamWuE?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> </div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:30%"></div> </div> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. <strong>The strong dollar is creating a sovereign debt crisis in emerging markets</strong></h3> <p>Most emerging markets have their debt priced in dollars but have their tax revenues in their local currency. Increased rates in the US, combined with very high inflation, and often self-inflicted economic mistakes is seeing the dollar strengthen dramatically.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture3-1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19261" width="609" height="342" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture3-1.png 1430w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture3-1-768x432.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture3-1-1200x675.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture3-1-1320x742.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p>This increase is putting many emerging markets in a precarious position. Sri Lanka has already defaulted. Ghana and Pakistan look to be next with many others under pressure.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. <strong>High gas prices are going to cause a recession in Germany</strong></h3> <p>Germany’s business model for the last few decades has been to build things with cheap Russian gas and to export them to China. This business model is coming under pressure on both sides. The shutting down of Nordstream by Russia may leave Germany without enough gas both to heat its population and fuel its gas dependent heavy industry. Rationing and increased prices will cause a recession in Germany in 2023 with estimates ranging from a 0.4% to 7.9% GDP contraction depending on the duration and severity of the winter.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">4. <strong>There is a new euro crisis looming</strong></h3> <p>Greece almost took down the euro in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007-2008. The fiscal position of many European countries, especially in the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain) is now significantly worse than it was back then.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture4-1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19263" width="607" height="403"/></figure></div> <p>The level of indebtment is such that it would not take a very large increase in their borrowing costs for these countries to become insolvent. The biggest risk probably comes from Italy whose debt to GDP ratio now exceeds 150% and whose economy is ten times larger than Greece’s. Worse the country elected a far-right nationalist government which may not find many friendly faces in Europe, especially as Germany is in the midst of an energy crisis.</p> <p>I suspect that when the crisis happens Europe will do whatever it takes to preserve the euro, but that the process will be extremely painful.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">5. <strong>There is a banking crisis on the horizon</strong></h3> <p>Earlier this year I predicted that Credit Suisse and possibly UBS could default bringing down Switzerland with it. These banks have found themselves at the epicenter of every recent international debacle involving bad lending, e.g., Archegos , Greensil , Luckin Coffee, etc. Foreign currency denominated loans by themselves amount to ~400% of Swiss GDP. Officially, Swiss banking system assets are ~ 4.7x GDP but this excludes off balance sheet assets. Including these suggests a ratio of ~9.5x 10x is more accurate.</p> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-22 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:20%"></div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow"> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-tiktok wp-block-embed-tiktok"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <blockquote class="tiktok-embed" cite="https://www.tiktok.com/@20vc_tok/video/7095560238253870342" data-video-id="7095560238253870342" data-embed-from="oembed" style="max-width: 605px;min-width: 325px;" > <section> <a target="_blank" title="@20vc_tok" href="https://www.tiktok.com/@20vc_tok?refer=embed" rel="noopener">@20vc_tok</a> <p>Could <a title="switzerland" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/switzerland?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#Switzerland</a> default on their debt? <a title="fabricegrinda" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/fabricegrinda?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#FabriceGrinda</a> on <a title="20vc" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/20vc?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#20VC</a> with HarryStebbings. <a title="swisseconomy" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/swisseconomy?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#swisseconomy</a> <a title="creditsuisse" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/creditsuisse?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#creditsuisse</a> <a title="archegos" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/archegos?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#archegos</a> <a title="greensill" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/greensill?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#greensill</a> <a title="iceland" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/iceland?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#iceland</a> <a title="recession2022" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/recession2022?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#recession2022</a> <a title="economics" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/economics?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#economics</a> <a title="venturecapital" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/venturecapital?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#venturecapital</a> <a title="zurich" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/zurich?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#zurich</a> <a title="swissbank" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/swissbank?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#swissbank</a></p> <a target="_blank" title="♬ Suspense, horror, piano and music box - takaya" href="https://www.tiktok.com/music/Suspense-horror-piano-and-music-box-6817193198436255745?refer=embed" rel="noopener">♬ Suspense, horror, piano and music box &#8211; takaya</a> </section> </blockquote> <script async src="https://www.tiktok.com/embed.js"></script> </div></figure> </div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:20%"></div> </div> <p>Since then, the market has come to realize the weakness at Credit Suisse.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture5.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19265" width="620" height="377" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture5.png 1143w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture5-768x467.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p>European banks are generally in a weak position. They own a lot of government debt, which would expose them to a possible debt restructuring in the PIGS. They have issued mortgages with little collateral at extremely low rates and will suffer from rate increases and real estate price declines.</p> <p>Moreover, they have not built significant reserves as their US counterparts have. Should there be a full-blown crisis of confidence it’s not hard to imagine the entire banking system seizing up as banks try to avoid counterparty risk leading to a massive financial crisis.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">6. <strong>Real estate prices are about to fall</strong></h3> <p>Like all other asset classes real estate saw a massive run up in prices in the past decade. Real estate is now overvalued in most places in the US and worldwide.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture6.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19266" width="609" height="485" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture6.png 863w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture6-768x611.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p>Contrarily to other asset classes, real estate prices have not yet adjusted despite mortgage rates increasing from 2.5% to 7% in the last 18 months. It takes a while for sellers to adjust their price expectations, so liquidity first dries up, then prices fall.</p> <p>Prices have already fallen upwards of 7% in the last 3 months in cities like Austin, Texas. I would not be surprised if we saw national declines of upwards of 15% in the next 24 months.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture7.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19267" width="604" height="346"/></figure></div> <p>This is happening globally. New Zealand house prices are down 10.9% in the last 11 months. Sweden is expected to see home prices drop 20% from their peak. Canada and the UK seem particularly vulnerable as most consumers have variable rate mortgages are exposed to the significant increase in rates. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">7. <strong>Continued conflict in Ukraine and Russia will keep grain, gas, and oil prices high</strong></h3> <p>There is no end in sight for the conflict. While it continues grain, gas, and oil prices will remain high given, keeping inflation high irrespective of interest rate levels given that the price is driven by supply constraints rather than high demand.</p> <p>This does not even take into consideration what would happen should a tactical nuke be used during the conflict, the consequences of which would be unimaginable.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">8. <strong>China is no longer a force for economic growth and disinflation</strong></h3> <p>For decades, China was one of the driving forces of global economic growth and disinflation. The world greatly benefited from China’s ability to manufacture at low cost and at scale helping keep inflation in check.</p> <p>This is no longer true. Xi Jinping’s incompetent management of the Chinese economy with its zero-covid policy, anti-tech regulation, and generally anti-capitalistic policies have crushed economic growth in the country.</p> <p>Moreover, his jingoistic policies are leading to a decoupling of China and the West and a de-integration of supply chains. The process of moving these supply chains to India, Indonesia, Mexico, or back onshore, is inflationary as the world loses out from the specialization and the economies of scale it had benefited from during the past 30 years.</p> <p>On the bright side, most military experts suggest that China will not have the amphibious capacity to invade Taiwan for the next five years. While this geopolitical Damocles sword still hangs over the global economy, it feels like the day of reckoning is not yet at hand.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">9. <strong>Structurally higher geopolitical risk</strong></h3> <p>The post Cold War entente is breaking down. We are entering a new Cold War in which the West is arrayed against China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. The Ukraine conflict is making this dynamic crystal clear. Russia is fighting with Iranian made drones, North Korean made artillery, and with China&#8217;s Xi having Putin&#8217;s back at the UN as well as on the world stage. </p> <p>This new Cold War could result in awful outcomes in any number of ways: </p> <ul> <li>Nuclear conflict or a dirty bomb or an accident at the nuclear power station in Ukraine. </li> <li>War in Taiwan.</li> <li>Escalating cyber attacks on infrastructure in the West.</li> <li>The use of technology to destabilize Western democracies, e.g., Russian and Chinese election trolling here in the US.</li> </ul> <p>All of this makes the world a less stable place, erodes the rule of law, and increases the risk of catastrophic left tail outcomes.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Conclusion</strong></h2> <p>Any one of these nine factors would be enough to create a global recession. What worries me is that they are all happening and playing out simultaneously suggesting that a replay of the Great Recession of 2007-2008 may be in store.</p> <p>I am generally the most optimistic person in the room, and I have not been this bearish since 2006. I still think in probabilistic terms, but now I think the probability of a severe recession trumps the probability of a mild recession, which in turn trumps any optimistic outcome.</p> <p>For the sake of completion, it’s worth mentioning the things that would make me re-assess my probability weighing towards more optimistic outcomes. If the Ukraine / Russia conflict came to a definite end, with inflation tamed, I would become way more sanguine. Likewise, China has the potential to spring a pleasant surprise in 2023 by tweaking its covid rules and addressing its housing crash.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>What to do about it</strong></h2> <p>Despite the high inflation, I would sell assets that are still reasonably priced or when bear market rallies occur to build up US dollar cash reserves to invest at deflated prices in the coming crisis. Should I be wrong in my read, I suspect that asset prices will not have recovered, and you can always re-enter at prices similar to those when you exited. The moment I would re-enter the market, especially with risk assets, is when rates started declining again. </p> <p>However, if I am right, most asset classes will become very interesting with distressed assets becoming particularly compelling. This will be the first bona fide distress cycle since 2008-2009. I expect there will be plenty of opportunities in distressed bonds, real estate and even crypto. </p> <p>The exception to this rule is if you have a 30-year fixed mortgage at very low rates on your real estate. In this case, you are better off keeping your real estate even if prices decline 15-20%, because at the current 7% mortgage rates, your ability to buy real estate will have been impaired by up to 50% depending on how low the rates you were paying were. Moreover, inflation is currently above the rates you are paying, decreasing your debt load in real terms.</p> <p>I would also decrease your annual expenditures to build up a cash reserves in case the recession leads you to lose your job. Repay all variable high interest loans, such as credit card debt, but keep low interest debt.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>History trumps macro</strong></h2> <p>In the meantime, the only place to invest right now is in early-stage private tech startups. Early-stage valuations are reasonable. Founders are focusing on their unit economics. They are limiting cash burn to not have to go to market for at least two years. Startups face lower customer acquisition costs and much less competition. While exits will be delayed and exit multiples lower than in the past few years, this should be compensated by lower entry prices and the fact that winners will win their entire category. </p> <p>The macro that matters for these startups is the one 6-8 years from now when they are seeking exits, rather than the current environment. For now all that matters is that they raise enough cash and grow enough to get their next fundraise so avoid capital intensive industries for now. </p> <p>The best startup investments of the last decade were made between 2008 and 2011 (Uber, Airbnb, Whatsapp, Instagram), and I suspect that the most interesting investments of the 2020s will be made between 2022 and 2024.</p> <p>In the long run, history trumps macro. I remain extremely optimistic about the future of the world and the economy. Since 1950, the 11 recessions have lasted between two and 18 months, with an average duration of 10 months. We will come out of this. Moreover, if you take a step back, the last 200 years have been a history of technological progress and innovation that have led to improvements in the human condition despite numerous wars and recessions.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-tiktok wp-block-embed-tiktok"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <blockquote class="tiktok-embed" cite="https://www.tiktok.com/@20vc_tok/video/7096134571707714822" data-video-id="7096134571707714822" data-embed-from="oembed" style="max-width: 605px;min-width: 325px;" > <section> <a target="_blank" title="@20vc_tok" href="https://www.tiktok.com/@20vc_tok?refer=embed" rel="noopener">@20vc_tok</a> <p>What trends break through recessions? <a title="recessionproof" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/recessionproof?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#recessionproof</a> <a title="futureproof" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/futureproof?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#futureproof</a> <a title="fabricegrinda" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/fabricegrinda?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#FabriceGrinda</a> <a title="techtrends" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/techtrends?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#techtrends</a> <a title="technology" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/technology?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#technology</a> <a title="macroeconomics" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/macroeconomics?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#macroeconomics</a> <a title="fjlabs" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/fjlabs?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#FJLabs</a> <a title="harrystebbings" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/harrystebbings?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#HarryStebbings</a> <a title="20vc" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/20vc?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#20VC</a> <a title="techhistory" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/techhistory?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#techhistory</a> <a title="futureinvestements" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/futureinvestements?refer=embed" rel="noopener">#futureinvestements</a></p> <a target="_blank" title="♬ Stories 2 - Danilo Stankovic" href="https://www.tiktok.com/music/Stories-2-6777279827805390850?refer=embed" rel="noopener">♬ Stories 2 &#8211; Danilo Stankovic</a> </section> </blockquote> <script async src="https://www.tiktok.com/embed.js"></script> </div></figure> <p>Because of technology the average household in the West has a quality of life unimaginable to the kings of yesteryear. Because of economies of scale, network effects, positive feedback loops in knowledge and manufacturing (also referred to as learning curves), and entrepreneurs’ desire to address the largest possible market and impact the world as massively as possible, new technologies rapidly democratize.</p> <p>This has led to a massive increase in equality of outcomes. 100 years ago, only the rich went on vacation, had a means of transportation, indoor plumbing, or electricity. Today in the West almost everyone has electricity, a car, a computer, and a smartphone. Almost everyone goes on vacation and can afford to fly. We take for granted that we can travel to the other side of the world in hours and that we have access to the sum total of humanity’s knowledge in our pockets in addition to having free global video communications. A poor famer in India with a smartphone has more access to information and communications than the president of the United States had a mere 30 years ago. These are remarkable feats.</p> <p>Despite all this progress, we are still at the very beginning of the technology revolution. The largest sectors of the economy have not been digitized yet: public services, health care, or education. Most supply chains remain offline. Their digitalization will make them more efficient and be deflationary, which in turn will be inclusionary.</p> <p>At FJ Labs, we are meeting so many extraordinary founders tackling the problems of the 21^st century, climate change, inequality of opportunity, and the physical and mental well-being crisis, that we are optimistic that humanity will rise to the challenges of our time.</p> <p>Having read the macro tea leaves correctly and sold as much of our late-stage and crypto positions as we could in 2021, we find ourselves in a cash rich position with only 25% of our fund deployed. As contrarians, we are now investing extremely aggressively in asset light businesses and are extremely privileged to be in position to help build a better world of tomorrow, a world of equality of opportunity and of plenty that is socially conscious and environmentally sustainable.</p> <p>The next few years are going to be tough, but now is the best time to build, and we will come out of this stronger and better than ever.</p>

<p>I have been putting a lot of thought into macro considerations of late. There are time periods when &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/winter-is-coming/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Winter is coming!&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Winter is coming!. Categories - The Economy, Political Economy. Date-Posted - 2022-11-18T16:48:14 . I have been putting a lot of thought into macro considerations of late. There are time periods when macro trumps micro. In those moments, all asset classes correlate to 1 on the way up in moments of exuberance. Due diligence goes out the window and markets do not differentiate amazing companies from clunkers. Likewise, all asset classes correlate to 1 on the way down in depressed times. The market throws out the baby with the bath water. We have been living in such times for the last 18 months. In February 2021, I argued in Welcome to the Everything Bubble that negative real rates with aggressive expansionary fiscal policies were fueling a bubble across every asset class and that it was time to sell overvalued assets aggressively. In March of this year in The Great Unknown, I argued that people were significantly underestimating the risks to the global economy. Those risks have only increased since. @20vc_tok #1 angel investor in the world #FabriceGrinda explains why #recession is so likely #2022 #economy #investor #investors #FJLabs #20VC #HarryStebbings ♬ Violin &#8211; Grooving Gecko Being bearish about the global economy is consensus right now. As usual, I am contrarian, but in this case, my contrarian take is that the consensus is not bearish enough. Most people are underwriting some form of soft landing or mild recession in 2023. We are far from being in the valley of despair where all hope has been lost. Any news that is less bad than expected sees the market rip. This happened last week when the CPI print came in at 7.7% instead of 7.9%, or when people greeted the news of a potential slowdown in the rate of increase in rates with exuberance. Mind you, inflation remains stubbornly high, and rates are still going up even if the rate of increase might decline (e.g., the second derivative is negative, but the first derivative is still positive). There are nine factors that are driving my bearishness. 1. Rates may go higher than people expect for longer than people expect Until the September 20-21 FOMC meeting people were underwriting a US Fed Funds rate peaking at 3.5%. It’s currently 3.75% to 4% and expected to peak at 4.6% in 2023 before declining again. Earlier this year I fretted that no one was considering the consequences of rates above 5% as they did not consider it within the realm of possibility. This is one area where the consensus has been repeatedly wrong over the last year. With inflation remaining stubbornly high and showing signs of becoming structural as workers start requesting wage increases in line with expected higher inflation, rates may have to be significantly higher for longer than people expect. I would not be surprised if rates ultimately reached 5.5% or more and stayed high well into 2024 or longer. 2. The strong dollar is creating a sovereign debt crisis in emerging markets Most emerging markets have their debt priced in dollars but have their tax revenues in their local currency. Increased rates in the US, combined with very high inflation, and often self-inflicted economic mistakes is seeing the dollar strengthen dramatically. This increase is putting many emerging markets in a precarious position. Sri Lanka has already defaulted. Ghana and Pakistan look to be next with many others under pressure. 3. High gas prices are going to cause a recession in Germany Germany’s business model for the last few decades has been to build things with cheap Russian gas and to export them to China. This business model is coming under pressure on both sides. The shutting down of Nordstream by Russia may leave Germany without enough gas both to heat its population and fuel its gas dependent heavy industry. Rationing and increased prices will cause a recession in Germany in 2023 with estimates ranging from a 0.4% to 7.9% GDP contraction depending on the duration and severity of the winter. 4. There is a new euro crisis looming Greece almost took down the euro in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007-2008. The fiscal position of many European countries, especially in the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain) is now significantly worse than it was back then. The level of indebtment is such that it would not take a very large increase in their borrowing costs for these countries to become insolvent. The biggest risk probably comes from Italy whose debt to GDP ratio now exceeds 150% and whose economy is ten times larger than Greece’s. Worse the country elected a far-right nationalist government which may not find many friendly faces in Europe, especially as Germany is in the midst of an energy crisis. I suspect that when the crisis happens Europe will do whatever it takes to preserve the euro, but that the process will be extremely painful. 5. There is a banking crisis on the horizon Earlier this year I predicted that Credit Suisse and possibly UBS could default bringing down Switzerland with it. These banks have found themselves at the epicenter of every recent international debacle involving bad lending, e.g., Archegos , Greensil , Luckin Coffee, etc. Foreign currency denominated loans by themselves amount to ~400% of Swiss GDP. Officially, Swiss banking system assets are ~ 4.7x GDP but this excludes off balance sheet assets. Including these suggests a ratio of ~9.5x 10x is more accurate. @20vc_tok Could #Switzerland default on their debt? #FabriceGrinda on #20VC with HarryStebbings. #swisseconomy #creditsuisse #archegos #greensill #iceland #recession2022 #economics #venturecapital #zurich #swissbank ♬ Suspense, horror, piano and music box &#8211; takaya Since then, the market has come to realize the weakness at Credit Suisse. European banks are generally in a weak position. They own a lot of government debt, which would expose them to a possible debt restructuring in the PIGS. They have issued mortgages with little collateral at extremely low rates and will suffer from rate increases and real estate price declines. Moreover, they have not built significant reserves as their US counterparts have. Should there be a full-blown crisis of confidence it’s not hard to imagine the entire banking system seizing up as banks try to avoid counterparty risk leading to a massive financial crisis. 6. Real estate prices are about to fall Like all other asset classes real estate saw a massive run up in prices in the past decade. Real estate is now overvalued in most places in the US and worldwide. Contrarily to other asset classes, real estate prices have not yet adjusted despite mortgage rates increasing from 2.5% to 7% in the last 18 months. It takes a while for sellers to adjust their price expectations, so liquidity first dries up, then prices fall. Prices have already fallen upwards of 7% in the last 3 months in cities like Austin, Texas. I would not be surprised if we saw national declines of upwards of 15% in the next 24 months. This is happening globally. New Zealand house prices are down 10.9% in the last 11 months. Sweden is expected to see home prices drop 20% from their peak. Canada and the UK seem particularly vulnerable as most consumers have variable rate mortgages are exposed to the significant increase in rates. 7. Continued conflict in Ukraine and Russia will keep grain, gas, and oil prices high There is no end in sight for the conflict. While it continues grain, gas, and oil prices will remain high given, keeping inflation high irrespective of interest rate levels given that the price is driven by supply constraints rather than high demand. This does not even take into consideration what would happen should a tactical nuke be used during the conflict, the consequences of which would be unimaginable. 8. China is no longer a force for economic growth and disinflation For decades, China was one of the driving forces of global economic growth and disinflation. The world greatly benefited from China’s ability to manufacture at low cost and at scale helping keep inflation in check. This is no longer true. Xi Jinping’s incompetent management of the Chinese economy with its zero-covid policy, anti-tech regulation, and generally anti-capitalistic policies have crushed economic growth in the country. Moreover, his jingoistic policies are leading to a decoupling of China and the West and a de-integration of supply chains. The process of moving these supply chains to India, Indonesia, Mexico, or back onshore, is inflationary as the world loses out from the specialization and the economies of scale it had benefited from during the past 30 years. On the bright side, most military experts suggest that China will not have the amphibious capacity to invade Taiwan for the next five years. While this geopolitical Damocles sword still hangs over the global economy, it feels like the day of reckoning is not yet at hand. 9. Structurally higher geopolitical risk The post Cold War entente is breaking down. We are entering a new Cold War in which the West is arrayed against China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. The Ukraine conflict is making this dynamic crystal clear. Russia is fighting with Iranian made drones, North Korean made artillery, and with China&#8217;s Xi having Putin&#8217;s back at the UN as well as on the world stage. This new Cold War could result in awful outcomes in any number of ways: Nuclear conflict or a dirty bomb or an accident at the nuclear power station in Ukraine. War in Taiwan. Escalating cyber attacks on infrastructure in the West. The use of technology to destabilize Western democracies, e.g., Russian and Chinese election trolling here in the US. All of this makes the world a less stable place, erodes the rule of law, and increases the risk of catastrophic left tail outcomes. Conclusion Any one of these nine factors would be enough to create a global recession. What worries me is that they are all happening and playing out simultaneously suggesting that a replay of the Great Recession of 2007-2008 may be in store. I am generally the most optimistic person in the room, and I have not been this bearish since 2006. I still think in probabilistic terms, but now I think the probability of a severe recession trumps the probability of a mild recession, which in turn trumps any optimistic outcome. For the sake of completion, it’s worth mentioning the things that would make me re-assess my probability weighing towards more optimistic outcomes. If the Ukraine / Russia conflict came to a definite end, with inflation tamed, I would become way more sanguine. Likewise, China has the potential to spring a pleasant surprise in 2023 by tweaking its covid rules and addressing its housing crash. What to do about it Despite the high inflation, I would sell assets that are still reasonably priced or when bear market rallies occur to build up US dollar cash reserves to invest at deflated prices in the coming crisis. Should I be wrong in my read, I suspect that asset prices will not have recovered, and you can always re-enter at prices similar to those when you exited. The moment I would re-enter the market, especially with risk assets, is when rates started declining again. However, if I am right, most asset classes will become very interesting with distressed assets becoming particularly compelling. This will be the first bona fide distress cycle since 2008-2009. I expect there will be plenty of opportunities in distressed bonds, real estate and even crypto. The exception to this rule is if you have a 30-year fixed mortgage at very low rates on your real estate. In this case, you are better off keeping your real estate even if prices decline 15-20%, because at the current 7% mortgage rates, your ability to buy real estate will have been impaired by up to 50% depending on how low the rates you were paying were. Moreover, inflation is currently above the rates you are paying, decreasing your debt load in real terms. I would also decrease your annual expenditures to build up a cash reserves in case the recession leads you to lose your job. Repay all variable high interest loans, such as credit card debt, but keep low interest debt. History trumps macro In the meantime, the only place to invest right now is in early-stage private tech startups. Early-stage valuations are reasonable. Founders are focusing on their unit economics. They are limiting cash burn to not have to go to market for at least two years. Startups face lower customer acquisition costs and much less competition. While exits will be delayed and exit multiples lower than in the past few years, this should be compensated by lower entry prices and the fact that winners will win their entire category. The macro that matters for these startups is the one 6-8 years from now when they are seeking exits, rather than the current environment. For now all that matters is that they raise enough cash and grow enough to get their next fundraise so avoid capital intensive industries for now. The best startup investments of the last decade were made between 2008 and 2011 (Uber, Airbnb, Whatsapp, Instagram), and I suspect that the most interesting investments of the 2020s will be made between 2022 and 2024. In the long run, history trumps macro. I remain extremely optimistic about the future of the world and the economy. Since 1950, the 11 recessions have lasted between two and 18 months, with an average duration of 10 months. We will come out of this. Moreover, if you take a step back, the last 200 years have been a history of technological progress and innovation that have led to improvements in the human condition despite numerous wars and recessions. @20vc_tok What trends break through recessions? #recessionproof #futureproof #FabriceGrinda #techtrends #technology #macroeconomics #FJLabs #HarryStebbings #20VC #techhistory #futureinvestements ♬ Stories 2 &#8211; Danilo Stankovic Because of technology the average household in the West has a quality of life unimaginable to the kings of yesteryear. Because of economies of scale, network effects, positive feedback loops in knowledge and manufacturing (also referred to as learning curves), and entrepreneurs’ desire to address the largest possible market and impact the world as massively as possible, new technologies rapidly democratize. This has led to a massive increase in equality of outcomes. 100 years ago, only the rich went on vacation, had a means of transportation, indoor plumbing, or electricity. Today in the West almost everyone has electricity, a car, a computer, and a smartphone. Almost everyone goes on vacation and can afford to fly. We take for granted that we can travel to the other side of the world in hours and that we have access to the sum total of humanity’s knowledge in our pockets in addition to having free global video communications. A poor famer in India with a smartphone has more access to information and communications than the president of the United States had a mere 30 years ago. These are remarkable feats. Despite all this progress, we are still at the very beginning of the technology revolution. The largest sectors of the economy have not been digitized yet: public services, health care, or education. Most supply chains remain offline. Their digitalization will make them more efficient and be deflationary, which in turn will be inclusionary. At FJ Labs, we are meeting so many extraordinary founders tackling the problems of the 21st century, climate change, inequality of opportunity, and the physical and mental well-being crisis, that we are optimistic that humanity will rise to the challenges of our time. Having read the macro tea leaves correctly and sold as much of our late-stage and crypto positions as we could in 2021, we find ourselves in a cash rich position with only 25% of our fund deployed. As contrarians, we are now investing extremely aggressively in asset light businesses and are extremely privileged to be in position to help build a better world of tomorrow, a world of equality of opportunity and of plenty that is socially conscious and environmentally sustainable. The next few years are going to be tough, but now is the best time to build, and we will come out of this stronger and better than ever.

2022-11-07T20:51:47

2022-11-07T20:51:47

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=19228

2022-11-18T10:55:12

2022-11-18T10:55:12

investing-in-the-things-that-build-our-world

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https://fabricegrinda.com/investing-in-the-things-that-build-our-world/

Investing in the things that build our world

<p><em>By <a href="https://twitter.com/matiasbarbero13" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Matias Barbero</a> and Fabrice Grinda</em></p> <p>Those of us building and investing in tech spend most of our time thinking about the future. We ponder the impossible, the cutting edge, even the esoteric: software, artificial intelligence, crypto, asset-light services delivered through digital apps. Mars and outer space might often represent a larger share of one’s daily musings than dull terrestrial matters. Yet here we are. We live on planet Earth. We inhabit the physical world, at least for now! Almost everything we do in our daily lives involves &#8211; directly or indirectly &#8211; tangible materials, machinery, chemicals, etc. We want to push the boundaries of how our world currently works by digitizing legacy industries and making them more efficient. All of this is deflationary, making goods cheaper for everybody, which in turn is inclusionary, aligning with our overarching <a href="https://www.fjlabs.com/fj-labs-purpose/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">purpose</a> as investors.</p> <p>The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. That’s true for different industries, as it is for different countries around the globe. Consumer marketplaces have a huge head start over their B2B counterparts, for example. There are also varying levels of tech adoption across geographies. B2B marketplaces have been at the core of FJ Labs’ thesis in recent years and are one of the best tools with which entrepreneurs can take on the challenges and limitations present in the physical realm.</p> <p>Within our B2B marketplace thesis, we focus on many different verticals, including staffing, FMCG, wholesale commerce, and others. Today we want to zoom into one of the categories: marketplaces dealing inputs and raw materials, or put differently, the things that build our physical world. This excludes other very compelling B2B marketplace categories such as staffing and labor, food and beverages, services, logistics, and many others.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19230" width="806" height="316" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture1.png 1075w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture1-768x301.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p>Let’s double click on the focus of this post: inputs and raw materials. They all deal with physical components and help build our world, in the most literal sense. Under this definition, some of what we consider “inputs” could be deemed by others as “outputs” too, but for today’s purpose we view things like precision parts and heavy machinery as key “inputs” in the value chain that build the most prevalent things in our world.</p> <p>We could look at this thesis from two different dimensions (see table below): A. Across different categories such as raw materials, precision parts, or heavy machinery, and B. Across different verticals like construction, agriculture, and many others. Note that through this lens Boom &amp; Bucket, for instance, belongs both to the ‘heavy machinery’ category and the ‘construction’ vertical.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture2.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19231" width="842" height="289" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture2.png 1122w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture2-768x264.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>Let’s use the “raw materials” category as an example. Besides steel and chemicals, there could also be marketplaces for concrete, sand and gravel, minerals, among others. There are still many other companies to be built in each category and across verticals. We’re excited to see the creativity with which entrepreneurs tackle each of these.</p> <p>We will cover two companies that are disrupting their respective industries: Reibus and Knowde. These are just two case studies we’ll be using today to highlight and layout important points within this broader thesis, but we see lots of opportunities ahead and we’ll conclude with some insights and comments for entrepreneurs to consider when exploring them.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>My Chemical Romance</strong></h3> <div style="height:0px" aria-hidden="true" class="wp-block-spacer"></div> <div style="height:0px" aria-hidden="true" class="wp-block-spacer"></div> <div style="height:0px" aria-hidden="true" class="wp-block-spacer"></div> <p>The chemical industry is ~$5 trillion in size and supports roughly 25% of the world’s GPD. The vast majority of the chemicals manufactured are used to make every physical product we love. If you’re reading this from an iPhone, if you’re wearing your favorite Nike’s today, or if you’re enjoying your midday salad, all roads will lead to chemicals in some way or another.</p> <p>You would think that such an important industry would be supported by the latest technology, with streamlined and efficient internal processes to ensure a key layer in the world’s supply chain runs smoothly. But stakeholders in the chemical industry are operating the same way they did 100 years ago: sellers are offline and have not caught up with ecommerce advances, the buying process is extremely inefficient with transactions done over phone calls and emails, and product information is ridiculously opaque, lost in static pdf documents and a fragmented supply base.</p> <p>Our portfolio company <a href="https://www.knowde.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Knowde</a> is out to solve this by bringing the entire buying experience online. They are building a Shopify and Amazon hybrid model whereby sellers can create their online storefronts with ecommerce, payments, and fulfilment capabilities while aggregating the collective supply under the Knowde umbrella so buyers can have a one-stop-shop for their chemicals.</p> <p>There are different tactical ways in which a B2B marketplace can go about their go-to-market strategy; Knowde chose to start by tackling the opacity of the chemicals market through a relentless focus on search and discovery.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture3.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19232" width="757" height="274" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture3.png 936w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture3-768x277.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p>In practice, this means laying the groundwork of what will later become a fully online transactional marketplace. Until there’s enough liquidity on the supply side to ensure smooth transactions, the initial business model is predominantly based on storefronts monetized through SaaS in lieu of the traditional marketplace take rate.</p> <p>This hyper-focus is yielding impressive results for Knowde as they are currently adding around 5 new suppliers per day (!) to their platform. To put matters into perspective, there are ~15k total global sellers and ~8k of them already have a live storefront with Knowde. This is roughly half of the world’s supply in one platform. Once they become the de facto industry destination for suppliers, there’s a clear path to keep upgrading key accounts into paid subscriptions and ultimately enabling online transactions, among many other value-added services.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Pedal to the Metal</strong></h3> <p>We can’t have a proper conversation about the things that build our world without a word on steel. This raw material is as prevalent as it gets. From forks and knives to NYC’s skyscrapers; from refrigerators and washing machines to cargo ships cruising around the world. Since the late 19^th century, steel has become a synonym for our modern infrastructure.</p> <p>Manufacturers and distributors transact steel (think sheets, coils, bars coming out of steel mills) with OEMs who then use it to manufacture components and end products.</p> <p>Another trillion-dollar global industry (starting to see the common appeal here?) fraught with inefficiencies and lack of innovation. There are structural issues coming from decades of stale and offline processes, exacerbated by logistical headaches proper of a heavy product that is expensive to move.</p> <p><a href="https://reibus.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Reibus</a>, one of FJ’s portfolio companies in this category, is a B2B marketplace servicing the industrial metals industry (mainly steel and aluminum) with purpose-built features for both buyers and sellers. What does this mean concretely? They provide much more than just a matching platform: Reibus embeds fintech (financing, payment options, etc.) and logistics capabilities (digital brokerage, shipment dashboard, etc.). They are a heavily managed SaaS-enabled marketplace.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture4.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19233" width="692" height="496" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture4.png 1076w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Picture4-768x550.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p>Industry stakeholders were quick to adopt Reibus’ hands-on marketplace. Founded in 2018, Reibus has scaled in-platform transactions to several hundred million in annual GMV, with plenty of room to grow as they are still a tiny fraction of the offline market.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong><strong>Building inputs &amp; raw materials B2B marketplaces</strong></strong></h3> <p>We’re truly excited about this opportunity to invest in the things that build our world and think there are many unexplored avenues for future entrepreneurs to start new B2B marketplaces aligned with this input &amp; raw materials thesis. As discussed at the beginning of this post, there are countless areas to explore and we see a lots of openings across both categories and verticals, and even geographic arbitrage plays.</p> <p>It’s important to bear in mind, though, that not every industry will be suited for a marketplace model, and that certain conditions and core strengths will play an important role in the success of these ventures.</p> <ol> <li><strong>Founder-market-fit matters:</strong> B2B marketplaces benefit from having at least one founder who is a true industry insider. They lived through the pain points in the industry and have been deeply frustrated by them. They would ideally combine this first-hand industry knowledge with a co-founder and/or founding team member that could think from first principles on how to best design frameworks to dramatically improve the current experience. They also have the credibility to convince existing players to change their processes. Just to name some examples, John Armstrong, Reibus’ CEO, had bought $1bn+ of materials before starting his tech entrepreneurial journey, and Knowde’s CEO, Ali Amin-Javaheri, spent 10+ years working for ChemPoint, an incumbent in the space he began to disrupt right after he left.</li> <li><strong>Marketplace dynamics</strong>: Ask yourself if the buyer and seller base is fragmented enough. This is true for most marketplaces but especially true in B2B where many verticals are concentrated on the supply side. The more concentrated the industry, the harder it is to have a meaningful take rate. In fact, you may be merely a distributor for a few incumbents rather than a real marketplace if the market is concentrated enough. The incentive and easiness to circumvent your platform would also be higher. &nbsp;</li> <li><strong>Find your unlock</strong>: Aggregation is often not sufficient. The platform should quickly focus on value-added services to create strong value propositions for both supply and demand. Founders need to figure out which specific services or features will unlock the greatest amount of liquidity for the marketplace. For Knowde, it was solving discovery and price opacity with information locked into siloed pdfs. For Reibus, it was offering financing and logistics services.</li> <li><strong>Different paths to start monetizing</strong>: Charging a take rate on each transaction is the classic way a marketplace can begin to generate revenue, but it shouldn’t necessarily be the first choice in the monetization toolkit, and it’s certainly not the only one. In some cases, you cannot charge a take rate right away and must find alternatives. Reibus, which leverages real material pricing in commodities to facilitate their RFQ process, was able to have a take rate from the get-go, but that would not have worked for Knowde, which needed to bring discovery online first, hence a SaaS business model made more sense in the beginning.</li> <li><strong>Juice up the blended take rate:</strong> It’s often hard to take more than 1-3% in B2B marketplaces. As a result, they may also monetize through SaaS subscription or listing fees instead of, or in addition to a take rate. Moreover, revenues are usually complemented by offering and monetizing additional services: advertising/placement, financing, insurance, logistics are all options. Once network effects kick in, a mix of business models can create a multiplier effect on net revenues. Many end up being able to increase their blended revenues to 10% of GMV as a result of the monetization diversity.</li> <li><strong>Geographic arbitrage:</strong> For certain businesses, you can bring an idea from one country to another. This arbitrage is not always going to be possible in B2B marketplaces for inputs and raw materials as some of the markets are truly global in nature, likely leading to global winners. Does this mean that there couldn’t be an “X model for Y country” play? No, but it’s less obvious than with other categories within the B2B marketplace realm (e.g., FMCG products, fresh food, labor, etc.). This is driven by how local the supply is, how transportable the good is, and the extent to which the price is set locally. The market for oil for instance is global – with a fungible, interchangeable commodity that can be easily transported and has a global price. Natural gas on the other hand is local, with prices that vary by region based on local supply and market conditions suggesting that regional players can emerge. That said, even if dealing with mostly global supply, startups in other regions might have a window of opportunity to focus on local differentiated supply, especially on the long tail, and compete before potentially stepping into someone else’s shoes.</li> </ol> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong><strong>Inputs &amp; raw materials: investing in the things that build our world</strong></strong></h3> <p>Marketplaces have had many evolutions over the years. B2B marketplaces are now in their infancy but poised to catch up with the digitalization of their B2C counterparts. As a result, as counter intuitive as it sounds, we believe that many of the best opportunities lie in forgotten old industries.</p> <p>We’ve been actively investing in the inputs and raw materials category and looking forward to meeting entrepreneurs thinking about these big challenges with deep industry knowledge and innovative approaches. The future of the things that build our world is only getting started.</p>

<p>By Matias Barbero and Fabrice Grinda Those of us building and investing in tech spend most of our &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/investing-in-the-things-that-build-our-world/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Investing in the things that build our world&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Investing in the things that build our world. Categories - FJ Labs. Date-Posted - 2022-11-07T20:51:47 . By Matias Barbero and Fabrice Grinda Those of us building and investing in tech spend most of our time thinking about the future. We ponder the impossible, the cutting edge, even the esoteric: software, artificial intelligence, crypto, asset-light services delivered through digital apps. Mars and outer space might often represent a larger share of one’s daily musings than dull terrestrial matters. Yet here we are. We live on planet Earth. We inhabit the physical world, at least for now! Almost everything we do in our daily lives involves &#8211; directly or indirectly &#8211; tangible materials, machinery, chemicals, etc. We want to push the boundaries of how our world currently works by digitizing legacy industries and making them more efficient. All of this is deflationary, making goods cheaper for everybody, which in turn is inclusionary, aligning with our overarching purpose as investors. The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. That’s true for different industries, as it is for different countries around the globe. Consumer marketplaces have a huge head start over their B2B counterparts, for example. There are also varying levels of tech adoption across geographies. B2B marketplaces have been at the core of FJ Labs’ thesis in recent years and are one of the best tools with which entrepreneurs can take on the challenges and limitations present in the physical realm. Within our B2B marketplace thesis, we focus on many different verticals, including staffing, FMCG, wholesale commerce, and others. Today we want to zoom into one of the categories: marketplaces dealing inputs and raw materials, or put differently, the things that build our physical world. This excludes other very compelling B2B marketplace categories such as staffing and labor, food and beverages, services, logistics, and many others. Let’s double click on the focus of this post: inputs and raw materials. They all deal with physical components and help build our world, in the most literal sense. Under this definition, some of what we consider “inputs” could be deemed by others as “outputs” too, but for today’s purpose we view things like precision parts and heavy machinery as key “inputs” in the value chain that build the most prevalent things in our world. We could look at this thesis from two different dimensions (see table below): A. Across different categories such as raw materials, precision parts, or heavy machinery, and B. Across different verticals like construction, agriculture, and many others. Note that through this lens Boom &amp; Bucket, for instance, belongs both to the ‘heavy machinery’ category and the ‘construction’ vertical. Let’s use the “raw materials” category as an example. Besides steel and chemicals, there could also be marketplaces for concrete, sand and gravel, minerals, among others. There are still many other companies to be built in each category and across verticals. We’re excited to see the creativity with which entrepreneurs tackle each of these. We will cover two companies that are disrupting their respective industries: Reibus and Knowde. These are just two case studies we’ll be using today to highlight and layout important points within this broader thesis, but we see lots of opportunities ahead and we’ll conclude with some insights and comments for entrepreneurs to consider when exploring them. My Chemical Romance The chemical industry is ~$5 trillion in size and supports roughly 25% of the world’s GPD. The vast majority of the chemicals manufactured are used to make every physical product we love. If you’re reading this from an iPhone, if you’re wearing your favorite Nike’s today, or if you’re enjoying your midday salad, all roads will lead to chemicals in some way or another. You would think that such an important industry would be supported by the latest technology, with streamlined and efficient internal processes to ensure a key layer in the world’s supply chain runs smoothly. But stakeholders in the chemical industry are operating the same way they did 100 years ago: sellers are offline and have not caught up with ecommerce advances, the buying process is extremely inefficient with transactions done over phone calls and emails, and product information is ridiculously opaque, lost in static pdf documents and a fragmented supply base. Our portfolio company Knowde is out to solve this by bringing the entire buying experience online. They are building a Shopify and Amazon hybrid model whereby sellers can create their online storefronts with ecommerce, payments, and fulfilment capabilities while aggregating the collective supply under the Knowde umbrella so buyers can have a one-stop-shop for their chemicals. There are different tactical ways in which a B2B marketplace can go about their go-to-market strategy; Knowde chose to start by tackling the opacity of the chemicals market through a relentless focus on search and discovery. In practice, this means laying the groundwork of what will later become a fully online transactional marketplace. Until there’s enough liquidity on the supply side to ensure smooth transactions, the initial business model is predominantly based on storefronts monetized through SaaS in lieu of the traditional marketplace take rate. This hyper-focus is yielding impressive results for Knowde as they are currently adding around 5 new suppliers per day (!) to their platform. To put matters into perspective, there are ~15k total global sellers and ~8k of them already have a live storefront with Knowde. This is roughly half of the world’s supply in one platform. Once they become the de facto industry destination for suppliers, there’s a clear path to keep upgrading key accounts into paid subscriptions and ultimately enabling online transactions, among many other value-added services. Pedal to the Metal We can’t have a proper conversation about the things that build our world without a word on steel. This raw material is as prevalent as it gets. From forks and knives to NYC’s skyscrapers; from refrigerators and washing machines to cargo ships cruising around the world. Since the late 19th century, steel has become a synonym for our modern infrastructure. Manufacturers and distributors transact steel (think sheets, coils, bars coming out of steel mills) with OEMs who then use it to manufacture components and end products. Another trillion-dollar global industry (starting to see the common appeal here?) fraught with inefficiencies and lack of innovation. There are structural issues coming from decades of stale and offline processes, exacerbated by logistical headaches proper of a heavy product that is expensive to move. Reibus, one of FJ’s portfolio companies in this category, is a B2B marketplace servicing the industrial metals industry (mainly steel and aluminum) with purpose-built features for both buyers and sellers. What does this mean concretely? They provide much more than just a matching platform: Reibus embeds fintech (financing, payment options, etc.) and logistics capabilities (digital brokerage, shipment dashboard, etc.). They are a heavily managed SaaS-enabled marketplace. Industry stakeholders were quick to adopt Reibus’ hands-on marketplace. Founded in 2018, Reibus has scaled in-platform transactions to several hundred million in annual GMV, with plenty of room to grow as they are still a tiny fraction of the offline market. Building inputs &amp; raw materials B2B marketplaces We’re truly excited about this opportunity to invest in the things that build our world and think there are many unexplored avenues for future entrepreneurs to start new B2B marketplaces aligned with this input &amp; raw materials thesis. As discussed at the beginning of this post, there are countless areas to explore and we see a lots of openings across both categories and verticals, and even geographic arbitrage plays. It’s important to bear in mind, though, that not every industry will be suited for a marketplace model, and that certain conditions and core strengths will play an important role in the success of these ventures. Founder-market-fit matters: B2B marketplaces benefit from having at least one founder who is a true industry insider. They lived through the pain points in the industry and have been deeply frustrated by them. They would ideally combine this first-hand industry knowledge with a co-founder and/or founding team member that could think from first principles on how to best design frameworks to dramatically improve the current experience. They also have the credibility to convince existing players to change their processes. Just to name some examples, John Armstrong, Reibus’ CEO, had bought $1bn+ of materials before starting his tech entrepreneurial journey, and Knowde’s CEO, Ali Amin-Javaheri, spent 10+ years working for ChemPoint, an incumbent in the space he began to disrupt right after he left. Marketplace dynamics: Ask yourself if the buyer and seller base is fragmented enough. This is true for most marketplaces but especially true in B2B where many verticals are concentrated on the supply side. The more concentrated the industry, the harder it is to have a meaningful take rate. In fact, you may be merely a distributor for a few incumbents rather than a real marketplace if the market is concentrated enough. The incentive and easiness to circumvent your platform would also be higher. &nbsp; Find your unlock: Aggregation is often not sufficient. The platform should quickly focus on value-added services to create strong value propositions for both supply and demand. Founders need to figure out which specific services or features will unlock the greatest amount of liquidity for the marketplace. For Knowde, it was solving discovery and price opacity with information locked into siloed pdfs. For Reibus, it was offering financing and logistics services. Different paths to start monetizing: Charging a take rate on each transaction is the classic way a marketplace can begin to generate revenue, but it shouldn’t necessarily be the first choice in the monetization toolkit, and it’s certainly not the only one. In some cases, you cannot charge a take rate right away and must find alternatives. Reibus, which leverages real material pricing in commodities to facilitate their RFQ process, was able to have a take rate from the get-go, but that would not have worked for Knowde, which needed to bring discovery online first, hence a SaaS business model made more sense in the beginning. Juice up the blended take rate: It’s often hard to take more than 1-3% in B2B marketplaces. As a result, they may also monetize through SaaS subscription or listing fees instead of, or in addition to a take rate. Moreover, revenues are usually complemented by offering and monetizing additional services: advertising/placement, financing, insurance, logistics are all options. Once network effects kick in, a mix of business models can create a multiplier effect on net revenues. Many end up being able to increase their blended revenues to 10% of GMV as a result of the monetization diversity. Geographic arbitrage: For certain businesses, you can bring an idea from one country to another. This arbitrage is not always going to be possible in B2B marketplaces for inputs and raw materials as some of the markets are truly global in nature, likely leading to global winners. Does this mean that there couldn’t be an “X model for Y country” play? No, but it’s less obvious than with other categories within the B2B marketplace realm (e.g., FMCG products, fresh food, labor, etc.). This is driven by how local the supply is, how transportable the good is, and the extent to which the price is set locally. The market for oil for instance is global – with a fungible, interchangeable commodity that can be easily transported and has a global price. Natural gas on the other hand is local, with prices that vary by region based on local supply and market conditions suggesting that regional players can emerge. That said, even if dealing with mostly global supply, startups in other regions might have a window of opportunity to focus on local differentiated supply, especially on the long tail, and compete before potentially stepping into someone else’s shoes. Inputs &amp; raw materials: investing in the things that build our world Marketplaces have had many evolutions over the years. B2B marketplaces are now in their infancy but poised to catch up with the digitalization of their B2C counterparts. As a result, as counter intuitive as it sounds, we believe that many of the best opportunities lie in forgotten old industries. We’ve been actively investing in the inputs and raw materials category and looking forward to meeting entrepreneurs thinking about these big challenges with deep industry knowledge and innovative approaches. The future of the things that build our world is only getting started.

2022-10-14T14:21:23

2022-10-14T14:21:23

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=19185

2022-10-14T15:17:23

2022-10-14T15:17:23

episode-38-the-indian-tech-ecosystem-fjlabs-thesis

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Episode 38: The Indian Tech Ecosystem &#038; FJ Labs’ Thesis in the region

<p>This week we are covering the state of the Indian tech ecosystem. We are joined by <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukeskertich/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Luke Skertich</a>, senior associate at FJ Labs, who is leading the charge with our Indian investments.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Episode 38: The Indian Tech Ecosystem and FJ Labs’ Thesis in the region" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7eZGQXPYT2Y?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Key takeaways</h3> <p>In this episode, we cover:</p> <ul><li>The history of India’s tech ecosystem and the recent explosion in unicorns</li><li>Why we are short term pessimistic, but medium and long term super bullish<ul><li>Supply chains are moving to India</li></ul><ul><li>The government is investing aggressively</li></ul><ul><li>UPI is revolutionizing payments</li></ul><ul><li>GDP per capita is growing</li></ul><ul><li>Tech talent is on the rise</li></ul></li><li>Why we are focusing on Picks and Shovels, Financial Infrastructure, and B2B Marketplaces</li></ul> <p>You can listen to the full episode in the embedded podcast player.</p> <figure><iframe loading="lazy" title="Libsyn Player" style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/24678288/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/forward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/000000/" height="90" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen=""></iframe></figure> <p>In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on:</p> <ul><li>iTunes: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/38-the-indian-tech-ecosystem-fj-labs-thesis-in-the-region/id1532336635?i=1000582565182" data-type="URL" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://podcasts.apple.com/</a><a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/0fjjXdleeVxkoEEZkrvpmh" data-type="URL" data-id="https://open.spotify.com/episode/0fjjXdleeVxkoEEZkrvpmh" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">episode-38-the-indian-tech-ecosystem-fjlabs-thesis</a></li><li>Spotify:&nbsp;<a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/0fjjXdleeVxkoEEZkrvpmh" data-type="URL" data-id="https://open.spotify.com/episode/0fjjXdleeVxkoEEZkrvpmh" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://open.spotify.com/episode-38-the-indian-tech-ecosystem-fjlabs-thesis</a></li></ul>

<p>This week we are covering the state of the Indian tech ecosystem. We are joined by Luke Skertich, &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-38-the-indian-tech-ecosystem-fjlabs-thesis/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Episode 38: The Indian Tech Ecosystem &#038; FJ Labs’ Thesis in the region&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Episode 38: The Indian Tech Ecosystem &#038; FJ Labs’ Thesis in the region. Categories - Playing with Unicorns. Date-Posted - 2022-10-14T14:21:23 . This week we are covering the state of the Indian tech ecosystem. We are joined by Luke Skertich, senior associate at FJ Labs, who is leading the charge with our Indian investments. Key takeaways In this episode, we cover: The history of India’s tech ecosystem and the recent explosion in unicornsWhy we are short term pessimistic, but medium and long term super bullishSupply chains are moving to IndiaThe government is investing aggressivelyUPI is revolutionizing paymentsGDP per capita is growingTech talent is on the riseWhy we are focusing on Picks and Shovels, Financial Infrastructure, and B2B Marketplaces You can listen to the full episode in the embedded podcast player. In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on: iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/episode-38-the-indian-tech-ecosystem-fjlabs-thesisSpotify:&nbsp;https://open.spotify.com/episode-38-the-indian-tech-ecosystem-fjlabs-thesis

2022-10-10T16:13:42

2022-10-10T16:13:42

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=19157

2022-10-10T16:16:01

2022-10-10T16:16:01

episode-37-building-indias-76th-unicorn

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Episode 37: Building India&#8217;s 76th Unicorn &#038; the Indian car market at large

<p>After a long hiatus to take care of my ailing dad, who is fortunately fully recovered, I am back! For this episode and the next two, I am focusing on the Indian tech scene which has really come into its own in the last few years. In this week’s episode, it’s my pleasure to chat with Niraj Singh, founder and CEO of Spinny, the leading used car retailing platform in India and a unicorn in its own right.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Episode 37: Building India&#039;s 76th Unicorn &amp; the Indian car market at large" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CiuGWtELOrk?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Key takeaways</h3> <p>In this episode, we cover:</p> <ul><li>Niraj’s path to creating Spinny, including creating two much less successful startups right out of college</li><li>The differences between the US &amp; Indian car markets</li><li>Spinny’s unique solution to the market considering the specifics of the market</li><li>Spinny’s ambitions on a go forward basis</li><li>The impact, if any, of the massive global multiple compression in comps like Carvana and Cazoo</li><li>The state of Indian tech market</li></ul> <p>You can listen to the full episode in the embedded podcast player.</p> <figure><iframe loading="lazy" title="Libsyn Player" style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/24640560/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/forward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/000000/" height="90" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen=""></iframe></figure> <p>In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on:</p> <ul><li>iTunes: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/37-building-indias-76th-unicorn-the-indian-car-market/id1532336635?i=1000582159181" data-type="URL" data-id="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/37-building-indias-76th-unicorn-the-indian-car-market/id1532336635?i=1000582159181" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://podcasts.apple.com/episode-37-building-indias-76th-unicorn-the-indian-car-market-at-large</a> </li><li>Spotify:&nbsp;<a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/1GAvnyl6wQk0HQ9tqf21Dx?si=8da62006cf39462f" data-type="URL" data-id="https://open.spotify.com/episode/1GAvnyl6wQk0HQ9tqf21Dx?si=8da62006cf39462f" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://open.spotify.com/episode-37-building-indias-76th-unicorn-the-indian-car-market-at-large</a></li></ul> <p>My apologies if I don’t have the same usual pep and spunk on this video as I usually do, but I was really sick with COVID when I did the interview. Thanks to Niraj for joining and putting up with me!</p>

<p>After a long hiatus to take care of my ailing dad, who is fortunately fully recovered, I am &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-37-building-indias-76th-unicorn/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Episode 37: Building India&#8217;s 76th Unicorn &#038; the Indian car market at large&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Episode 37: Building India&#8217;s 76th Unicorn &#038; the Indian car market at large. Categories - Playing with Unicorns. Date-Posted - 2022-10-10T16:13:42 . After a long hiatus to take care of my ailing dad, who is fortunately fully recovered, I am back! For this episode and the next two, I am focusing on the Indian tech scene which has really come into its own in the last few years. In this week’s episode, it’s my pleasure to chat with Niraj Singh, founder and CEO of Spinny, the leading used car retailing platform in India and a unicorn in its own right. Key takeaways In this episode, we cover: Niraj’s path to creating Spinny, including creating two much less successful startups right out of collegeThe differences between the US &amp; Indian car marketsSpinny’s unique solution to the market considering the specifics of the marketSpinny’s ambitions on a go forward basisThe impact, if any, of the massive global multiple compression in comps like Carvana and CazooThe state of Indian tech market You can listen to the full episode in the embedded podcast player. In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on: iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/episode-37-building-indias-76th-unicorn-the-indian-car-market-at-large Spotify:&nbsp;https://open.spotify.com/episode-37-building-indias-76th-unicorn-the-indian-car-market-at-large My apologies if I don’t have the same usual pep and spunk on this video as I usually do, but I was really sick with COVID when I did the interview. Thanks to Niraj for joining and putting up with me!

2022-09-06T13:33:06

2022-09-06T13:33:06

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=18903

2023-11-17T13:48:43

2023-11-17T13:48:43

fj-labs-purpose

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FJ Labs’ Purpose

<p><a href="https://www.fjlabs.com" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.fjlabs.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FJ Labs’</a> purpose is to improve the human condition through technology.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Technology led growth</strong></h3> <p>Technology has been the primary driver of the extraordinary transformation in quality of life over the past 200 years. Until 200 years ago, the history of the human condition was one of struggle and stagnation. Most people were farmers working over 60 hours a week to barely make ends meet, going hungry multiple times per year.</p> <p>Starting with the first industrial revolution, we saw an explosion in technology-led human productivity fundamentally changing quality of life for the better. For each key invention like the steam engine, the light bulb, cars, planes, instant photography, or the transistor, entrepreneurs like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Herb Kelleher, Edwin Land, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs commercialized it transforming human life as we know it.&nbsp;As a result, GDP per capita exploded.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-0.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-18995" width="624" height="332"/></figure></div> <p>In 1820, 89% of the world lived in extreme poverty. Today it’s 10%. Over a billion people came out of poverty in China and India alone in the last 40 years. Most people now live in democracy.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18978" width="1242" height="478" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-1.png 1242w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-1-768x296.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-1-1200x462.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>In 1820, live expectancy was 29, today it is 72. In 1820, the world literacy rate was at 12%, today it is 86%.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-2.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18980" width="1280" height="452" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-2.png 1280w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-2-768x271.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-2-1200x424.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <div style="height:0px" aria-hidden="true" class="wp-block-spacer"></div> <div style="height:0px" aria-hidden="true" class="wp-block-spacer"></div> <div style="height:0px" aria-hidden="true" class="wp-block-spacer"></div> <p>In 1870, the average workweek was over 60 hours, today it is 38.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-5.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-18912" width="554" height="391"/></figure></div> <p>Because of technology the average household in the West has a quality of life unimaginable to the kings of yesteryear. For each new technology, there is a short period during which only the Gordon Gekkos of the world have access to it. Multi thousand-dollar cell phone from the late 1980s are such an example with their enormous form factor, 30 minutes of battery life, awful voice quality, while costing several dollars per minute of talk time. However, because of economies of scale, network effects, positive feedback loops in knowledge and manufacturing (also referred to as learning curves), and entrepreneurs’ desire to address the largest possible market and impact the world as massively as possible, these new technologies rapidly democratize.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-6.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-18914" width="715" height="505" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-6.jpg 1430w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-6-768x542.jpg 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-6-1200x847.jpg 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-6-1320x931.jpg 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p>This has led to a massive increase in equality of outcomes. 100 years ago, only the rich went on vacation, had a means of transportation, indoor plumbing, or electricity. Today in the West almost everyone has electricity, a car, a computer, and a smartphone. Almost everyone goes on vacation and can afford to fly. We take for granted that we can travel to the other side of the world in hours and that we have access to the sum total of humanity&#8217;s knowledge in our pockets in addition to having free global video communications. A poor farmer in India with a smartphone has more access to information and communications than the president of the United States had a mere 30 years ago. These are remarkable feats.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Challenges Remain</strong></h3> <p>Despite all this progress, we still face tremendous challenges. Three fundamental problems come to mind:</p> <ul> <li>Inequality of opportunity</li> <li>The mental and physical wellbeing crisis</li> <li>Climate change</li> </ul> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Inequality of Opportunity</strong></h3> <p>We still have miles to go on equality. In the US white men make 23% more than white women, 30% more than black men, and 39% more than black women, a difference that persists even when accounting for education differences.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-7.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-18915" width="500" height="366"/></figure></div> <p>12% of Americans still live in poverty.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-8.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-18916" width="702" height="386" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-8.jpg 936w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-8-768x423.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p>It’s expensive to be poor and you often end up paying more than the middle class and the rich. The poor can’t afford a security deposit on rent and often must rent by the night. They can’t afford transportation, storage or the upfront commitment so pay more for food as bodegas are up to 37% more expensive than Costco. The poor are penalized by the financial system for being poor with fees such as $12 / month if your account balance is below $1,500. As a result, 25% of US households are unbanked or underbanked, further shutting them out of wealth generation systems like the stock market.</p> <p>The poor attend bad public schools and are treated in bad hospitals and must commute hours every day via unreliable public transportation.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-9.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-18918" width="935" height="583" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-9.jpg 935w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-9-768x479.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>Social mobility has declined. Whereas 90% of children born after World War 2 could expect to earn more than their parents this has declined to 50% for children born in the 1980s.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-10.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-18919" width="542" height="358"/></figure></div> <p>This is caused by locally concentrated growth where a few cities have captured much of the newly created wealth. However, those cities have overly restrictive zoning laws preventing an increase in supply. For instance, in 80% of San Francisco it’s illegal to build apartment buildings.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-3.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18981" width="1029" height="405" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-3.png 1029w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-3-768x302.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>This has led to dramatic increase in rent in these cities.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-4.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18982" width="919" height="218" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-4.png 1225w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-4-768x182.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-4-1200x284.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>This is to the point it has become unaffordable to live there as rent increased significantly more than income.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-15.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-18924" width="729" height="530"/></figure></div> <p>As a result, only 10% of workers are moving for new positions, down from 40% in the 1980s preventing workers from moving from low growth areas to high growth areas.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-16.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-18925" width="461" height="301" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-16.jpg 922w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-16-768x501.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 461px) 85vw, 461px" /></figure></div> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>The mental and physical wellbeing crisis</strong></h3> <p>Most of the US population is overweight and 33% is obese.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-9.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18984" width="836" height="292" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-9.png 836w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-9-768x268.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p>In turn obesity increases risk factors for most diseases.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-5.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18985" width="660" height="512" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-5.png 880w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-5-768x595.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p>On top of that Americans struggle with mental health and are reporting declining happiness.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-6.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18986" width="1058" height="547" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-6.png 1058w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-6-768x397.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <div style="height:0px" aria-hidden="true" class="wp-block-spacer"></div> <p>There has also been a massive increase in opioid addiction and deaths.</p> <div style="height:0px" aria-hidden="true" class="wp-block-spacer"></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-20.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-18929" width="558" height="336"/></figure></div> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Climate Change</strong></h3> <p>Climate change is an existential threat. The amount of energy accumulating in the oceans is equivalent to detonating&nbsp;five Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs per second, every second over the past 25 years. If aliens showed up and started dropping 5 nukes a second on Earth, we would drop everything to deal with it. However, because this process is largely invisible, we have been complacent.</p> <p>As a result, more than 1 million species are at risk of extinction by climate change.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-21.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-18930" width="1099" height="616" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-21.jpg 1099w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-21-768x430.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>If greenhouse gasses continue to get pumped into the atmosphere at the current rate, most of the Arctic basin will be&nbsp;ice-free in September by 2040.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-22.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-18931" width="1185" height="672" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-22.jpg 1185w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-22-768x436.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>The 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-23.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-18932" width="656" height="369" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-23.jpg 875w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-23-768x432.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Entrepreneurs and VCs are solutionists</strong></h3> <p>Governments are structurally incapable of addressing the challenges of our time. It’s up to entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to rise to the challenge. We are solutionists. We see broken user experiences and extractive business models and attack them with all our grit and tenacity, harnessing the deflationary and transformational power of technology to succeed. &nbsp;</p> <p>At FJ Labs, we believe in human ingenuity and back it with the full weight of our resources and knowhow. There are countless problems to solve, and we want to back all the founders attacking these problems. It’s the reason we invest in so many startups. I suppose it’s also reflection of our personality as entrepreneurs and investors. We are eternally curious and want to play a role in enacting all the positive transformations we can.</p> <p>Note that because we mostly invest in marketplaces, people mistakenly assume that our purpose is to invest in marketplaces. That is not the case. Marketplaces are the tool by which we achieve our purpose, the means to our end.</p> <p>The reason we invest in marketplaces is that they are a particularly effective tool for finding solutions to the world’s problems. They are capital efficient, winner takes most, highly scalable and work well within the established venture capital structure and timing with defined round sizes and time horizons in the context of 10-year funds with 3-year deployment periods. In addition to that, I studied market design in college and have been building and investing in marketplaces for 24 years giving us deep knowledge and pattern recognition of the model.</p> <p>Other business models can be successful, but we find them less compelling. Hardware is capital intensive and tends to see compressing margins as competitors enter the space. Infrastructure and deep tech are extraordinarily capital intensive and have long time horizons making it harder to learn from experience. They also don’t resonate with us nearly as much.</p> <p>Historically, FJ Labs mostly tackled inequality of opportunity by investing in startups that make things cheaper, which is inclusionary. For instance, B2B marketplaces, our current bread and butter, digitize legacy industries and make them more efficient. <a href="https://www.flexport.com" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.flexport.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Flexport</a>, which digitizes supply chains, <a href="https://www.chiper.co" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.chiper.co" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Chiper</a>, which helps corner stores source more efficiently, and <a href="https://reibus.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://reibus.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Reibus</a>, a marketplace for buying and selling steel and other metals, are all great examples of this.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-10.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18997" width="624" height="342"/></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-11.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18998" width="624" height="343"/></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-12.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18999" width="624" height="317"/></figure></div> <p>We also back startups that address broken user experiences and underserved markets. <a href="https://www.sayrhino.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.sayrhino.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rhino</a>, which offers an alternative to security deposits for renters, or <a href="https://en.comun.app/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://en.comun.app/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Comun</a>, the neobank for Hispanics, are good examples of this.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-7.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18987" width="923" height="229" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-7.png 923w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-7-768x191.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <p>Of late, we’ve been privileged to be able to expand our mandate to cover the mental and physical wellbeing crisis with investments in the likes of <a href="https://www.atai.life/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.atai.life/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ATAI</a>.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-26.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-18936" width="624" height="407"/></figure></div> <p>The biggest change covers the climate crisis. Historically, you needed hundreds of millions of dollars in investments to attack the issue. However, as solar and storage have become increasingly inexpensive, software is starting to play an ever-larger role allowing the venture capital model with its $1M pre-seed rounds, followed by $3M seed rounds 18 months later, $10M Series A rounds 18 months later and $20M Series B rounds 18 months later to be sufficient to build large companies. As a result, climate now falls within the purview of most venture capitalists.</p> <p>Moreover, the scale of the problem is only dwarfed by the size of the opportunity and our desire to make a dent. This has led us to make investments in the likes of <a href="https://leap.energy/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://leap.energy/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Leap</a>, a distributed energy exchange platform, and <a href="https://pachama.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://pachama.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Pachama</a>, a carbon capture analytics company.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-8.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18988" width="986" height="305" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-8.png 986w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-8-768x238.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /></figure></div> <div style="height:0px" aria-hidden="true" class="wp-block-spacer"></div> <p>In addition to directly tacking inequality of opportunity, the mental and physical wellbeing crisis, and climate change, we invest in companies that help support that mission. For instance, we support no-code and low-code startups that abstract the complexity of building and deploying software such as <a href="https://peerboard.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://peerboard.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Peerboard</a>, a low code solution to add community solutions to websites.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fj-labs-purpose-32.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-18973" width="624" height="348"/></figure></div> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Conclusion</strong></h3> <p>Overall, I am confident that we are going to rise to the challenges of our time. At FJ Labs, we are extremely privileged to be in position to help build a better world of tomorrow, a world of equality of opportunity and of plenty that is socially conscious and environmentally sustainable.</p>

<p>FJ Labs’ purpose is to improve the human condition through technology. Technology led growth Technology has been the &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-purpose/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;FJ Labs’ Purpose&#8221;</span></a></p>

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FJ Labs’ Purpose. Categories - FJ Labs, FJ Labs. Date-Posted - 2022-09-06T13:33:06 . FJ Labs’ purpose is to improve the human condition through technology. Technology led growth Technology has been the primary driver of the extraordinary transformation in quality of life over the past 200 years. Until 200 years ago, the history of the human condition was one of struggle and stagnation. Most people were farmers working over 60 hours a week to barely make ends meet, going hungry multiple times per year. Starting with the first industrial revolution, we saw an explosion in technology-led human productivity fundamentally changing quality of life for the better. For each key invention like the steam engine, the light bulb, cars, planes, instant photography, or the transistor, entrepreneurs like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Herb Kelleher, Edwin Land, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs commercialized it transforming human life as we know it.&nbsp;As a result, GDP per capita exploded. In 1820, 89% of the world lived in extreme poverty. Today it’s 10%. Over a billion people came out of poverty in China and India alone in the last 40 years. Most people now live in democracy. In 1820, live expectancy was 29, today it is 72. In 1820, the world literacy rate was at 12%, today it is 86%. In 1870, the average workweek was over 60 hours, today it is 38. Because of technology the average household in the West has a quality of life unimaginable to the kings of yesteryear. For each new technology, there is a short period during which only the Gordon Gekkos of the world have access to it. Multi thousand-dollar cell phone from the late 1980s are such an example with their enormous form factor, 30 minutes of battery life, awful voice quality, while costing several dollars per minute of talk time. However, because of economies of scale, network effects, positive feedback loops in knowledge and manufacturing (also referred to as learning curves), and entrepreneurs’ desire to address the largest possible market and impact the world as massively as possible, these new technologies rapidly democratize. This has led to a massive increase in equality of outcomes. 100 years ago, only the rich went on vacation, had a means of transportation, indoor plumbing, or electricity. Today in the West almost everyone has electricity, a car, a computer, and a smartphone. Almost everyone goes on vacation and can afford to fly. We take for granted that we can travel to the other side of the world in hours and that we have access to the sum total of humanity&#8217;s knowledge in our pockets in addition to having free global video communications. A poor farmer in India with a smartphone has more access to information and communications than the president of the United States had a mere 30 years ago. These are remarkable feats. Challenges Remain Despite all this progress, we still face tremendous challenges. Three fundamental problems come to mind: Inequality of opportunity The mental and physical wellbeing crisis Climate change Inequality of Opportunity We still have miles to go on equality. In the US white men make 23% more than white women, 30% more than black men, and 39% more than black women, a difference that persists even when accounting for education differences. 12% of Americans still live in poverty. It’s expensive to be poor and you often end up paying more than the middle class and the rich. The poor can’t afford a security deposit on rent and often must rent by the night. They can’t afford transportation, storage or the upfront commitment so pay more for food as bodegas are up to 37% more expensive than Costco. The poor are penalized by the financial system for being poor with fees such as $12 / month if your account balance is below $1,500. As a result, 25% of US households are unbanked or underbanked, further shutting them out of wealth generation systems like the stock market. The poor attend bad public schools and are treated in bad hospitals and must commute hours every day via unreliable public transportation. Social mobility has declined. Whereas 90% of children born after World War 2 could expect to earn more than their parents this has declined to 50% for children born in the 1980s. This is caused by locally concentrated growth where a few cities have captured much of the newly created wealth. However, those cities have overly restrictive zoning laws preventing an increase in supply. For instance, in 80% of San Francisco it’s illegal to build apartment buildings. This has led to dramatic increase in rent in these cities. This is to the point it has become unaffordable to live there as rent increased significantly more than income. As a result, only 10% of workers are moving for new positions, down from 40% in the 1980s preventing workers from moving from low growth areas to high growth areas. The mental and physical wellbeing crisis Most of the US population is overweight and 33% is obese. In turn obesity increases risk factors for most diseases. On top of that Americans struggle with mental health and are reporting declining happiness. There has also been a massive increase in opioid addiction and deaths. Climate Change Climate change is an existential threat. The amount of energy accumulating in the oceans is equivalent to detonating&nbsp;five Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs per second, every second over the past 25 years. If aliens showed up and started dropping 5 nukes a second on Earth, we would drop everything to deal with it. However, because this process is largely invisible, we have been complacent. As a result, more than 1 million species are at risk of extinction by climate change. If greenhouse gasses continue to get pumped into the atmosphere at the current rate, most of the Arctic basin will be&nbsp;ice-free in September by 2040. The 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years. Entrepreneurs and VCs are solutionists Governments are structurally incapable of addressing the challenges of our time. It’s up to entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to rise to the challenge. We are solutionists. We see broken user experiences and extractive business models and attack them with all our grit and tenacity, harnessing the deflationary and transformational power of technology to succeed. &nbsp; At FJ Labs, we believe in human ingenuity and back it with the full weight of our resources and knowhow. There are countless problems to solve, and we want to back all the founders attacking these problems. It’s the reason we invest in so many startups. I suppose it’s also reflection of our personality as entrepreneurs and investors. We are eternally curious and want to play a role in enacting all the positive transformations we can. Note that because we mostly invest in marketplaces, people mistakenly assume that our purpose is to invest in marketplaces. That is not the case. Marketplaces are the tool by which we achieve our purpose, the means to our end. The reason we invest in marketplaces is that they are a particularly effective tool for finding solutions to the world’s problems. They are capital efficient, winner takes most, highly scalable and work well within the established venture capital structure and timing with defined round sizes and time horizons in the context of 10-year funds with 3-year deployment periods. In addition to that, I studied market design in college and have been building and investing in marketplaces for 24 years giving us deep knowledge and pattern recognition of the model. Other business models can be successful, but we find them less compelling. Hardware is capital intensive and tends to see compressing margins as competitors enter the space. Infrastructure and deep tech are extraordinarily capital intensive and have long time horizons making it harder to learn from experience. They also don’t resonate with us nearly as much. Historically, FJ Labs mostly tackled inequality of opportunity by investing in startups that make things cheaper, which is inclusionary. For instance, B2B marketplaces, our current bread and butter, digitize legacy industries and make them more efficient. Flexport, which digitizes supply chains, Chiper, which helps corner stores source more efficiently, and Reibus, a marketplace for buying and selling steel and other metals, are all great examples of this. We also back startups that address broken user experiences and underserved markets. Rhino, which offers an alternative to security deposits for renters, or Comun, the neobank for Hispanics, are good examples of this. Of late, we’ve been privileged to be able to expand our mandate to cover the mental and physical wellbeing crisis with investments in the likes of ATAI. The biggest change covers the climate crisis. Historically, you needed hundreds of millions of dollars in investments to attack the issue. However, as solar and storage have become increasingly inexpensive, software is starting to play an ever-larger role allowing the venture capital model with its $1M pre-seed rounds, followed by $3M seed rounds 18 months later, $10M Series A rounds 18 months later and $20M Series B rounds 18 months later to be sufficient to build large companies. As a result, climate now falls within the purview of most venture capitalists. Moreover, the scale of the problem is only dwarfed by the size of the opportunity and our desire to make a dent. This has led us to make investments in the likes of Leap, a distributed energy exchange platform, and Pachama, a carbon capture analytics company. In addition to directly tacking inequality of opportunity, the mental and physical wellbeing crisis, and climate change, we invest in companies that help support that mission. For instance, we support no-code and low-code startups that abstract the complexity of building and deploying software such as Peerboard, a low code solution to add community solutions to websites. Conclusion Overall, I am confident that we are going to rise to the challenges of our time. At FJ Labs, we are extremely privileged to be in position to help build a better world of tomorrow, a world of equality of opportunity and of plenty that is socially conscious and environmentally sustainable.

2022-08-15T16:41:24

2022-08-15T16:41:24

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=18868

2022-08-23T15:23:50

2022-08-23T15:23:50

episode-36-building-a-web3-unicorn-with-lorien-gabel-figment

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https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-36-building-a-web3-unicorn-with-lorien-gabel-figment/

Episode 36: Building a Web3 Unicorn with Lorien Gabel (Figment)

<p>Lorien Gabel is the Co-Founder of Figment Network. He holds an LLB from Toronto’s Osgoode Hall Law School.</p> <p>In 1994, at the age of 24, 6 months into practicing law, Lorien quit to help his brother Matt run a bourgeoning internet company, Interlog. Over the next four years, they managed the growth of Interlog to over 150 employees, 65,000 customers and profitability. It was later acquired by a large multinational telecommunications company.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Episode 36: Building a Web3 Unicorn with Lorien Gabel (Figment)" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/j7qLEcxxxVg?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Key takeaways</h3> <ul><li>“Be an anti-institutionalist. Be a skeptic.” The goal is to find solutions to problems that institutions and crowds overlook.</li><li>Blockchain is a counter to over centralization by the government.</li><li>There will be an infinite demand for block space in the future. We’re going into multichain world. The question is, will there be 10 or 1000 blockchains.</li><li>Be intellectually curious because this will take you far especially in crypto.</li></ul> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Starting Figment</h3> <p>Lorien was intellectually intrigued by crypto but didn’t want start mining Bitcoin because he found it boring. So instead he attempted to start a crypto fund, but people didn’t want to give money to an inexperience investor. However, the people found his platform interesting and were willing to fund it.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Picture1.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-18870" width="602" height="339"/></figure></div> <p>This led to co-fouding Figment and betting on Proof of Stake (POS).</p> <p>In the early days, it was not obvious that POS would be successful. But now we’re witnessing many newer cryptos launching on POS.</p> <p>Since launch Figment has entered unicorn status with over 125+ employees.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Why Crypto?</h3> <p>There is an over-centralization problem both in tech and government.</p> <p>We see this in the continued de-dollarization for countries who thought they owned their dollar reserves. Or the recent example of the broken financial system in Canada, where certain citizen bank accounts were frozen. The marriage between governments and large institution is evidence for finding a better alternative.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Picture4.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-18872" width="602" height="397"/></figure></div> <p>This lack of ownership is an example for why cryptos can counter over-centralization.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Advice for people wanting to join crypto</h3> <p>Understand that both web2 and web3 will co-exist. There some projects which makes sense for web2 and not web3. Recognize this and it will help you wade through the noise.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Picture3.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-18871" width="602" height="357"/></figure></div> <p>Figment hires people who are not only talented and skilled but they have to demonstrate intellectual curiosity for the space. It’s intellectual curiosity that drives innovation. Hence in such a new space like crypto, it’s a must-have.</p> <p>Learn about the space by doing things. Having skin in the game is the fastest way to increase speed of learning. Start with places like <a href="https://rabbithole.gg/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://rabbithole.gg/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rabbit hole</a> where you can earn tokens through on-chain activity.</p> <p>You can listen to the full episode in the embedded podcast player.</p> <figure><iframe loading="lazy" title="Libsyn Player" style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/22503632/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/forward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/000000/" height="90" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen=""></iframe></figure> <p>In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on:</p> <ul><li>iTunes: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/36-building-a-web3-unicorn-with-lorien-gabel-figment/id1532336635?i=1000576160923" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/36-building-a-web3-unicorn-with-lorien-gabel-figment/id1532336635?i=1000576160923" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://podcasts.apple.com/episode-36-Building-a-Web3-Unicorn-with-Lorien-Gabel</a></li><li>Spotify:&nbsp;<a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/0RxF0QdzVdo97l1DgQTTqT" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://open.spotify.com/episode/0RxF0QdzVdo97l1DgQTTqT" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://open.spotify.com/episode-36-Building-a-Web3-Unicorn-with-Lorien-Gabel</a></li></ul> <p>Thanks to IJ Makan for helping write the episode summary.</p>

<p>Lorien Gabel is the Co-Founder of Figment Network. He holds an LLB from Toronto’s Osgoode Hall Law School. &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-36-building-a-web3-unicorn-with-lorien-gabel-figment/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Episode 36: Building a Web3 Unicorn with Lorien Gabel (Figment)&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Episode 36: Building a Web3 Unicorn with Lorien Gabel (Figment). Categories - Playing with Unicorns. Date-Posted - 2022-08-15T16:41:24 . Lorien Gabel is the Co-Founder of Figment Network. He holds an LLB from Toronto’s Osgoode Hall Law School. In 1994, at the age of 24, 6 months into practicing law, Lorien quit to help his brother Matt run a bourgeoning internet company, Interlog. Over the next four years, they managed the growth of Interlog to over 150 employees, 65,000 customers and profitability. It was later acquired by a large multinational telecommunications company. Key takeaways “Be an anti-institutionalist. Be a skeptic.” The goal is to find solutions to problems that institutions and crowds overlook.Blockchain is a counter to over centralization by the government.There will be an infinite demand for block space in the future. We’re going into multichain world. The question is, will there be 10 or 1000 blockchains.Be intellectually curious because this will take you far especially in crypto. Starting Figment Lorien was intellectually intrigued by crypto but didn’t want start mining Bitcoin because he found it boring. So instead he attempted to start a crypto fund, but people didn’t want to give money to an inexperience investor. However, the people found his platform interesting and were willing to fund it. This led to co-fouding Figment and betting on Proof of Stake (POS). In the early days, it was not obvious that POS would be successful. But now we’re witnessing many newer cryptos launching on POS. Since launch Figment has entered unicorn status with over 125+ employees. Why Crypto? There is an over-centralization problem both in tech and government. We see this in the continued de-dollarization for countries who thought they owned their dollar reserves. Or the recent example of the broken financial system in Canada, where certain citizen bank accounts were frozen. The marriage between governments and large institution is evidence for finding a better alternative. This lack of ownership is an example for why cryptos can counter over-centralization. Advice for people wanting to join crypto Understand that both web2 and web3 will co-exist. There some projects which makes sense for web2 and not web3. Recognize this and it will help you wade through the noise. Figment hires people who are not only talented and skilled but they have to demonstrate intellectual curiosity for the space. It’s intellectual curiosity that drives innovation. Hence in such a new space like crypto, it’s a must-have. Learn about the space by doing things. Having skin in the game is the fastest way to increase speed of learning. Start with places like Rabbit hole where you can earn tokens through on-chain activity. You can listen to the full episode in the embedded podcast player. In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on: iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/episode-36-Building-a-Web3-Unicorn-with-Lorien-GabelSpotify:&nbsp;https://open.spotify.com/episode-36-Building-a-Web3-Unicorn-with-Lorien-Gabel Thanks to IJ Makan for helping write the episode summary.

2022-08-12T22:23:56

2022-08-12T22:23:56

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=18862

2022-08-15T16:33:31

2022-08-15T16:33:31

episode-35-thoughts-on-the-market

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post

https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-35-thoughts-on-the-market/

Episode 35: Thoughts on the market

<p>Last February, I decided to reflect on the turmoil that had started to affect the public, crypto and private markets. This is the first time I focused on the topic. As a result, while articulate, and thoughtful, this episode served as a precursor for the more detailed and nuanced perspective I shared in <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/the-great-unknown/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/the-great-unknown/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Great Unknown</a> and my conversation with Harry Stebbings of 20VC: <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/wtf-is-going-on-3-outcomes-for-what-could-happen-from-here/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/wtf-is-going-on-3-outcomes-for-what-could-happen-from-here/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">WTF is going on?</a></p> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Episode 35: Thoughts on the market" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xO86JazrAxY?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>You can listen to the full episode in the embedded podcast player.</p> <figure><iframe loading="lazy" title="Libsyn Player" style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/22118804/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/forward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/000000/" height="90" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen=""></iframe></figure> <p>In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on:</p> <ul><li>iTunes: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ask-me-anything/id1532336635?i=1000550966782" data-type="URL" data-id="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ask-me-anything/id1532336635?i=1000550966782" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://podcasts.apple.com/episode-35-thoughts-on-the-market</a></li><li>Spotify: <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/6sfnxy29OCMnoy2MBiulhl?si=ok9G0RjKR5e1XnUbJ0zJ7Q" data-type="URL" data-id="https://open.spotify.com/episode/6sfnxy29OCMnoy2MBiulhl?si=ok9G0RjKR5e1XnUbJ0zJ7Q" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://open.spotify.com/episode-35-thoughts-on-the-market</a></li></ul>

<p>Last February, I decided to reflect on the turmoil that had started to affect the public, crypto and &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-35-thoughts-on-the-market/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Episode 35: Thoughts on the market&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Episode 35: Thoughts on the market. Categories - Playing with Unicorns. Date-Posted - 2022-08-12T22:23:56 . Last February, I decided to reflect on the turmoil that had started to affect the public, crypto and private markets. This is the first time I focused on the topic. As a result, while articulate, and thoughtful, this episode served as a precursor for the more detailed and nuanced perspective I shared in The Great Unknown and my conversation with Harry Stebbings of 20VC: WTF is going on? You can listen to the full episode in the embedded podcast player. In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on: iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/episode-35-thoughts-on-the-marketSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode-35-thoughts-on-the-market

2022-08-02T15:37:32

2022-08-02T15:37:32

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=18847

2022-08-16T17:29:54

2022-08-16T17:29:54

episode-34-ask-me-anything

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post

https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-34-ask-me-anything/

Episode 34: Ask Me Anything

<p>My apologies for the delay in summarizing the episode, but it’s been a very busy 9 months. Last December, I hosted a Ask Me Anything on Playing with Unicorns.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Episode 34: Ask Me Anything" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1T2ELRVJ5Hc?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>We covered:</p> <ul><li>The ideal DAO structure for venture investing [2:30]</li><li>Whether play to earn is a ponzi [3:11]</li><li>My most recommended book [5:03]</li><li>The problems with hardware investments [7:06]</li><li>My thoughts on Thrazio and FBA aggregators [9:04]</li><li>Will there be verticals of Thrazio? [11:03]</li><li>When to approach me and the best way to do it [11:40]</li><li>My thoughts on fractionalizing assets [12:35]</li><li>The possibility of me writing a book [14:28]</li><li>The best way to avoid negativity and unhappiness [16:42]</li><li>VC versus crowdfunding [20:21]</li><li>Debt funding [23:02]</li><li>FJ Labs’ EIR program plans for this year [23:30]</li><li>What to do and not to do for a team of French entrepreneurs raising a pre-seed in the US [27:18]</li><li>How soon do you think humans will be interplanetary? [29:05]</li><li>The existence of life outside of Earth in the universe [31:10]</li><li>My thoughts on the future of Europe and the EU [34:28]</li><li>My vision of the future of NFTs [39:29]</li><li>My thoughts on plant-based diet as a mega trend [43:32]</li><li>Returning to the “normal” way of living and working [46:50]</li><li>The rise of self-entrepreneurship and the passion economy [49:05]</li><li>The role of NFTs, its benefits in traditional media and content companies [51:25]</li><li>My perspective on universal basic income [53:34]</li><li>3 things I would focus on if I was leading the US [56:12]</li><li>Investing in a drone-delivery company [58:20]</li><li>My thoughts on Central Bank Digital Currencies [58:56]</li><li>Viewpoint on the next paradigm shift for gaming [1:01:24]</li><li>How big NFTs will be [1:03:49]</li><li>The impact of the pandemic on online consumption [1:04:20]</li><li>The importance of UX/UI when building a startup [1:05:27]</li><li>Social tokens and decentralized identity [1:06:44]</li></ul> <p>You can listen to the full episode in the embedded podcast player.</p> <figure><iframe loading="lazy" title="Libsyn Player" style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/22118231/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/forward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/000000/" height="90" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen=""></iframe></figure> <p>In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on:</p> <ul><li>iTunes: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ask-me-anything/id1532336635?i=1000550966782" data-type="URL" data-id="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ask-me-anything/id1532336635?i=1000550966782" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://podcasts.apple.com/episode-34-ask-me-anything</a></li><li>Spotify: <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/6sfnxy29OCMnoy2MBiulhl?si=ok9G0RjKR5e1XnUbJ0zJ7Q" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://open.spotify.com/episode/6sfnxy29OCMnoy2MBiulhl?si=ok9G0RjKR5e1XnUbJ0zJ7Q" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://open.spotify.com/episode-34-ask-me-anything</a></li></ul>

<p>My apologies for the delay in summarizing the episode, but it’s been a very busy 9 months. Last &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-34-ask-me-anything/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Episode 34: Ask Me Anything&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Episode 34: Ask Me Anything. Categories - Playing with Unicorns. Date-Posted - 2022-08-02T15:37:32 . My apologies for the delay in summarizing the episode, but it’s been a very busy 9 months. Last December, I hosted a Ask Me Anything on Playing with Unicorns. We covered: The ideal DAO structure for venture investing [2:30]Whether play to earn is a ponzi [3:11]My most recommended book [5:03]The problems with hardware investments [7:06]My thoughts on Thrazio and FBA aggregators [9:04]Will there be verticals of Thrazio? [11:03]When to approach me and the best way to do it [11:40]My thoughts on fractionalizing assets [12:35]The possibility of me writing a book [14:28]The best way to avoid negativity and unhappiness [16:42]VC versus crowdfunding [20:21]Debt funding [23:02]FJ Labs’ EIR program plans for this year [23:30]What to do and not to do for a team of French entrepreneurs raising a pre-seed in the US [27:18]How soon do you think humans will be interplanetary? [29:05]The existence of life outside of Earth in the universe [31:10]My thoughts on the future of Europe and the EU [34:28]My vision of the future of NFTs [39:29]My thoughts on plant-based diet as a mega trend [43:32]Returning to the “normal” way of living and working [46:50]The rise of self-entrepreneurship and the passion economy [49:05]The role of NFTs, its benefits in traditional media and content companies [51:25]My perspective on universal basic income [53:34]3 things I would focus on if I was leading the US [56:12]Investing in a drone-delivery company [58:20]My thoughts on Central Bank Digital Currencies [58:56]Viewpoint on the next paradigm shift for gaming [1:01:24]How big NFTs will be [1:03:49]The impact of the pandemic on online consumption [1:04:20]The importance of UX/UI when building a startup [1:05:27]Social tokens and decentralized identity [1:06:44] You can listen to the full episode in the embedded podcast player. In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on: iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/episode-34-ask-me-anythingSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode-34-ask-me-anything

2022-06-27T15:18:03

2022-06-27T15:18:03

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=18816

2023-04-25T09:25:09

2023-04-25T09:25:09

crypto-enabled-marketplaces

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https://fabricegrinda.com/crypto-enabled-marketplaces/

Crypto-Enabled Marketplaces

<p class="has-small-font-size"><em>By Fabrice Grinda and <a href="https://twitter.com/matiasbarbero13" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://twitter.com/matiasbarbero13" rel="noreferrer noopener">Matias Barbero</a></em></p> <p>As we covered in <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-crypto-credentials/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FJ Labs’ Crypto Credentials</a>, we’ve been putting a lot of thought into crypto marketplaces, especially on how traditional marketplace dynamics can change through the use of token incentives.</p> <p>There are crypto-focused and crypto-enabled marketplaces, which may or may not overlap. The former is a marketplace for crypto assets, while the latter is usually a non-crypto marketplace (all offline marketplaces for instance) that uses crypto mechanics. Crypto-enabled marketplaces do not require users to buy tokens to use the platform. The crypto elements are typically abstracted from the use of the platform to maximize adoption.</p> <p><a href="https://opensea.io/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Opensea</a>, one of the largest NFT marketplaces, falls into the first camp. Users trade crypto assets, NFTs, but its underlying mechanics are not that different from, say, eBay, a centralized C2C marketplace. By comparison, <a href="https://www.helium.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Helium</a>, is a two-sided marketplace connecting providers of wireless networks with buyers interested in using it to power different IoT devices. It deals with physical telecom equipment, not crypto assets, however, it uses token incentives making it crypto-enabled. At the intersection of this Venn diagram, we find projects such as Sushiswap or <a href="https://www.opyn.co/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Opyn</a>, a token exchange and defi derivatives platform, respectively, which use crypto mechanics to operate crypto-focused marketplaces.</p> <p>Today crypto-focused marketplaces are more common, but over time crypto-enabled marketplaces should become the far larger segment.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture2.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18818" width="468" height="231" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture2.png 936w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture2-768x379.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 468px) 85vw, 468px" /></figure></div> <p>In this post, we’re going to focus on crypto-enabled marketplaces and talk about how token incentives and crypto ecosystems can be very powerful tools for entrepreneurs building marketplaces. We will also highlight that using crypto mechanics should not be an end in itself and that token incentives have varying degrees of success based on the specifics of the marketplace.</p> <p>Much has been written about the marketplace´s chicken and egg problem, or how to bootstrap liquidity at inception when there are barely any users on either side. There are plenty of tactics and playbooks to kick-start feedback loops: spend lots of money on marketing, build a sales team, build a SaaS tool and give it away for free, focus relentlessly on the “hard side,” subsidize through coupons, referrals, among other things. Token incentives are one of the most interesting and unexplored options in today´s toolkit.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong><strong>Tokens to attract talent and have lower operating costs</strong></strong></h3> <p>In traditional marketplaces, startups must hire many richly compensated people in cash and equity to cover all of the functions of the company: product, development, sales, marketing, finance, customer care, etc.</p> <p>Crypto-enabled marketplaces can behave like open-source projects, outsourcing high-impact work to the community. You can end up with much larger virtual teams and scale a lot faster while having much lower fixed costs as you use the unsalaried community to do a lot of the heavy lifting.</p> <p>Given this lower cost structure, crypto-enabled marketplaces can often undercut traditional marketplaces in terms of take rate. For example, <a href="https://www.usebraintrust.com/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.usebraintrust.com/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Braintrust</a>, a crypto-enabled tech talent staffing marketplace, can charge clients an industry-low 10% fee. In fact, it actually pays their talent a negative take rate by rewarding them with tokens. Note that crypto elements are hidden form the demand side and there’s no mention of tokens or anything crypto focused: it’s all about hiring top quality talent.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture3.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18819" width="611" height="221" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture3.png 936w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture3-768x277.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div> <p>For contributors, the rewards are also more immediate than if they were employees in traditional companies. Tokens can vest sooner, and the liquidity event is much faster than with traditional tech companies which are taking longer and longer to go public.</p> <p>Users and contributors can not only be owners in an economic sense, but also from a voting and governance perspective. This decentralization of decision making, further aligns incentives and creates a setup of constant innovation that&#8217;s effectively managed by the community.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Tokens as a customer acquisition strategy</strong></h3> <p>Think about a traditional listing marketplace that’s just getting started. Buyers will not go to the platform as there are no items on sale, and sellers are not incentivized to participate as no one is there to purchase. As a result, startups often spend a large percentage of the funds they raise &nbsp;on sales and marketing to scale. Giving high token rewards early in the life of a marketplace can be a viable alternative. Note that token rewards should be highest when the overall value of the network is lowest; they come in to fill the &#8216;chicken and egg gap&#8217; from the get-go and should be tapered as the network effects kick in.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture4.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18820" width="533" height="341" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture4.png 1430w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture4-768x491.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture4-1200x767.png 1200w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture4-1320x844.png 1320w" sizes="(max-width: 533px) 85vw, 533px" /></figure></div> <p>With token incentives, marketplaces can bootstrap one or both sides of a marketplace without appealing to heavy discounts or exorbitant marketing expenses, achieving better unit economics through a lower CAC further allowing them to undercut traditional marketplaces with lower take rates. </p> <p>Instead of spending money in sales and marketing, you can provide rewards directly to the supply and demand sides of the marketplace. For instance, you can design the equivalent of giving stock options to early Uber drivers for joining the network, and for bringing other drivers and passengers.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Tokens to hyperscale</strong></h3> <p>In certain cases, you can use token rewards to hyperscale the marketplace. Common wisdom in Web2 marketplaces calls for focus on “atomic networks”, very specific and niche networks as opposed to broad and all-encompassing rollouts. Andrew Chen provides great examples in his Cold Start Problem <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cold-Start-Problem-Andrew-Chen/dp/0062969749" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">book</a>. He mentions Uber using a hyper-narrow atomic network in the beginning to create enough density before focusing on larger regions; something like “5pm at the Caltrain Station at 5^th and King Street”. Through a bottom-up approach, crypto marketplaces can be expansive and borderless while also reaching atomic networks at scale.</p> <p>Helium had been around for a while before it introduced token incentives in 2020. Its main premise is to deploy hotspots in people’s homes to create a wireless network in a decentralized manner. This feat would otherwise require billions of dollars in capex from a telecom company. The graph to the left shows the exponential growth in total hotspots installed to date driven by a token incentive mechanism. Nodes went from zero at the start of 2020 to 55k+ just 18 months later.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture5.1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18821" width="365" height="229" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture5.1.png 1268w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture5.1-768x482.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture5.1-1200x752.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 365px) 85vw, 365px" /></figure></div> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture5.2.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18822" width="365" height="229"/></figure></div> <h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>A word of caution</strong></h2> <p>Incentive mechanisms within a crypto ecosystem need to be well thought through to avoid attracting the wrong customers who are in it just for the rewards. Tokenomics can make or break a project. Web2 marketplaces also suffer from this practice when they rely too heavily on discounts to attract early customers. That said, with a robust design you can reward sticky behavior and benefit from healthier cohorts; those receiving the token incentives are enticed to let their rewards compound as they keep contributing towards an increasingly valuable network.</p> <p>Also consider a potential “endowment effect” at play. Through economic and voting power, tokens could imbue users and contributors with a sense of belonging, attributing more value to the network than what it would otherwise have.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Centralized, decentralized or hybrid?</strong></h3> <p>Crypto ecosystems are a powerful tool that could have varying degrees of effectiveness in different settings. Centralized marketplaces play an important role in verifying the quality of suppliers and consumers, providing customer service, improving the product, investing in alternative marketing channels, to name a few. Some (or even all) could be decentralized but that doesn’t mean there’s always a good reason to do so.</p> <p>Some entrepreneurs might choose to go fully decentralized, while others might remain centralized (and could co-exist with crypto equivalents). They could also go with a hybrid model: using token incentives for certain aspects of the business while running the rest in a centralized fashion and on Web2 rails. Taking it further, we shouldn’t expect only mere transitions from Web2 to Web3 marketplaces as crypto ecosystems will unleash new, unseen models that still cannot be mapped using today’s lens.</p> <p>An example of a hybrid model is our portfolio company <a href="https://delphia.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Delphia</a>, a mobile investment platform that uses customer data to better caliber its algorithm. In essence, Delphia is both a traditional fintech company, allowing retail investors to invest their money in an easy manner, and a conventional hedge fund, using data to power their predictive models. There is nothing decentralized or crypto in that.</p> <p>However, hedge funds typically buy data from data providers (not consumers directly), and this data quality doesn’t even come close to that of companies such as Facebook or Google. So, Delphia turned to tokens to incentivize their users to contribute personal data in exchange of token rewards. There’s an additional benefit: the larger the number of contributors, the better the algorithm will get, and the superior the investment returns of Delphia users will be. In this example, Delphia chose to use a crypto ecosystem only for sourcing data.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Factors to consider</strong></h3> <p>We can think of the degree of effectiveness of a crypto ecosystem, and more precisely, of token incentives along several spectra. Each spectrum can be looked at in a vacuum but, all these variables will all interact with each other which is why it’s hard to predict in which settings tokens could be more successful.</p> <p><em>Is your marketplaces demand or supply constrained?</em></p> <p>Most marketplaces are demand constrained. Supply is usually easier to acquire because it’s financially motivated to be on the platform. Even if there is no liquidity, if there is no cost to being on the platform, why not join? On top of that, acquiring the demand side typically involves paying the Google and Facebook “tax” of online marketing.</p> <p>However, there are many exceptions. <a href="https://www.rebag.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rebag</a>, one of our portfolio companies selling high end designer handbags, was famously supply constrained for most of its early history with 100% of the supply on the site selling out.</p> <p>Whichever case you fall into, figure out the more constrained part of your marketplace and focus incentives on that side.</p> <p><em>Are your users tech savvy?</em></p> <p>Given the technical complexity of the crypto space, to date the most successful crypto-enabled marketplaces have worked at incentivizing tech savvy contributors. Braintrust for instance uses tokens for its technically savvy developers (their supply side), but hides all mention of crypto from its demand side clients. In this case, the supply side is more likely to know how to handle and value the token incentives than the more traditional enterprise clients on the demand side.</p> <p><em>What’s the nature of the marketplace’s transaction / what’s being asked from the participants?</em></p> <p>On one side of the spectrum, we might have a very easy ask, like in Helium (“hey just buy a hotspot, install it, and forget about it while you earn tokens”). On the other side, you may have something like Masterclass, where celebrities need to put on a ton of effort to create and film the courses, so even if they get tokens in return, they may not bother. All else equal, tokens should become less effective as the effort required to participate in the marketplace increases.</p> <p><em>How homogeneous is the target supply/demand you want to attract?</em></p> <p>You could succeed at attracting hosts for your, say, crypto-enabled Airbnb, but what type of properties are they bringing on-line? There’s a wide dispersion of types of listings they could bring but not all will be useful for your target demand, which will result in no transactions, and churn on both sides.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>What’s next for crypto-enabled marketplaces?</strong></h3> <p>Marketplaces have been FJ Labs’ bread and butter since inception. Even though we started investing in crypto years ago, the industry’s maturity was such that we focused our efforts on other areas such the infrastructure layer, knowing it would take require some cycles before the timing was right for greater adoption of crypto-enabled marketplaces.</p> <p>However, we feel the time has finally come. There are several projects in this category already, and we are about to witness an explosion in the use of this model. We are beyond excited to see what entrepreneurs will build in this space!</p>

<p>By Fabrice Grinda and Matias Barbero As we covered in FJ Labs’ Crypto Credentials, we’ve been putting a &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/crypto-enabled-marketplaces/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Crypto-Enabled Marketplaces&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Crypto-Enabled Marketplaces. Categories - Crypto/Web3, Marketplaces. Date-Posted - 2022-06-27T15:18:03 . By Fabrice Grinda and Matias Barbero As we covered in FJ Labs’ Crypto Credentials, we’ve been putting a lot of thought into crypto marketplaces, especially on how traditional marketplace dynamics can change through the use of token incentives. There are crypto-focused and crypto-enabled marketplaces, which may or may not overlap. The former is a marketplace for crypto assets, while the latter is usually a non-crypto marketplace (all offline marketplaces for instance) that uses crypto mechanics. Crypto-enabled marketplaces do not require users to buy tokens to use the platform. The crypto elements are typically abstracted from the use of the platform to maximize adoption. Opensea, one of the largest NFT marketplaces, falls into the first camp. Users trade crypto assets, NFTs, but its underlying mechanics are not that different from, say, eBay, a centralized C2C marketplace. By comparison, Helium, is a two-sided marketplace connecting providers of wireless networks with buyers interested in using it to power different IoT devices. It deals with physical telecom equipment, not crypto assets, however, it uses token incentives making it crypto-enabled. At the intersection of this Venn diagram, we find projects such as Sushiswap or Opyn, a token exchange and defi derivatives platform, respectively, which use crypto mechanics to operate crypto-focused marketplaces. Today crypto-focused marketplaces are more common, but over time crypto-enabled marketplaces should become the far larger segment. In this post, we’re going to focus on crypto-enabled marketplaces and talk about how token incentives and crypto ecosystems can be very powerful tools for entrepreneurs building marketplaces. We will also highlight that using crypto mechanics should not be an end in itself and that token incentives have varying degrees of success based on the specifics of the marketplace. Much has been written about the marketplace´s chicken and egg problem, or how to bootstrap liquidity at inception when there are barely any users on either side. There are plenty of tactics and playbooks to kick-start feedback loops: spend lots of money on marketing, build a sales team, build a SaaS tool and give it away for free, focus relentlessly on the “hard side,” subsidize through coupons, referrals, among other things. Token incentives are one of the most interesting and unexplored options in today´s toolkit. Tokens to attract talent and have lower operating costs In traditional marketplaces, startups must hire many richly compensated people in cash and equity to cover all of the functions of the company: product, development, sales, marketing, finance, customer care, etc. Crypto-enabled marketplaces can behave like open-source projects, outsourcing high-impact work to the community. You can end up with much larger virtual teams and scale a lot faster while having much lower fixed costs as you use the unsalaried community to do a lot of the heavy lifting. Given this lower cost structure, crypto-enabled marketplaces can often undercut traditional marketplaces in terms of take rate. For example, Braintrust, a crypto-enabled tech talent staffing marketplace, can charge clients an industry-low 10% fee. In fact, it actually pays their talent a negative take rate by rewarding them with tokens. Note that crypto elements are hidden form the demand side and there’s no mention of tokens or anything crypto focused: it’s all about hiring top quality talent. For contributors, the rewards are also more immediate than if they were employees in traditional companies. Tokens can vest sooner, and the liquidity event is much faster than with traditional tech companies which are taking longer and longer to go public. Users and contributors can not only be owners in an economic sense, but also from a voting and governance perspective. This decentralization of decision making, further aligns incentives and creates a setup of constant innovation that&#8217;s effectively managed by the community. Tokens as a customer acquisition strategy Think about a traditional listing marketplace that’s just getting started. Buyers will not go to the platform as there are no items on sale, and sellers are not incentivized to participate as no one is there to purchase. As a result, startups often spend a large percentage of the funds they raise &nbsp;on sales and marketing to scale. Giving high token rewards early in the life of a marketplace can be a viable alternative. Note that token rewards should be highest when the overall value of the network is lowest; they come in to fill the &#8216;chicken and egg gap&#8217; from the get-go and should be tapered as the network effects kick in. With token incentives, marketplaces can bootstrap one or both sides of a marketplace without appealing to heavy discounts or exorbitant marketing expenses, achieving better unit economics through a lower CAC further allowing them to undercut traditional marketplaces with lower take rates. Instead of spending money in sales and marketing, you can provide rewards directly to the supply and demand sides of the marketplace. For instance, you can design the equivalent of giving stock options to early Uber drivers for joining the network, and for bringing other drivers and passengers. Tokens to hyperscale In certain cases, you can use token rewards to hyperscale the marketplace. Common wisdom in Web2 marketplaces calls for focus on “atomic networks”, very specific and niche networks as opposed to broad and all-encompassing rollouts. Andrew Chen provides great examples in his Cold Start Problem book. He mentions Uber using a hyper-narrow atomic network in the beginning to create enough density before focusing on larger regions; something like “5pm at the Caltrain Station at 5th and King Street”. Through a bottom-up approach, crypto marketplaces can be expansive and borderless while also reaching atomic networks at scale. Helium had been around for a while before it introduced token incentives in 2020. Its main premise is to deploy hotspots in people’s homes to create a wireless network in a decentralized manner. This feat would otherwise require billions of dollars in capex from a telecom company. The graph to the left shows the exponential growth in total hotspots installed to date driven by a token incentive mechanism. Nodes went from zero at the start of 2020 to 55k+ just 18 months later. A word of caution Incentive mechanisms within a crypto ecosystem need to be well thought through to avoid attracting the wrong customers who are in it just for the rewards. Tokenomics can make or break a project. Web2 marketplaces also suffer from this practice when they rely too heavily on discounts to attract early customers. That said, with a robust design you can reward sticky behavior and benefit from healthier cohorts; those receiving the token incentives are enticed to let their rewards compound as they keep contributing towards an increasingly valuable network. Also consider a potential “endowment effect” at play. Through economic and voting power, tokens could imbue users and contributors with a sense of belonging, attributing more value to the network than what it would otherwise have. Centralized, decentralized or hybrid? Crypto ecosystems are a powerful tool that could have varying degrees of effectiveness in different settings. Centralized marketplaces play an important role in verifying the quality of suppliers and consumers, providing customer service, improving the product, investing in alternative marketing channels, to name a few. Some (or even all) could be decentralized but that doesn’t mean there’s always a good reason to do so. Some entrepreneurs might choose to go fully decentralized, while others might remain centralized (and could co-exist with crypto equivalents). They could also go with a hybrid model: using token incentives for certain aspects of the business while running the rest in a centralized fashion and on Web2 rails. Taking it further, we shouldn’t expect only mere transitions from Web2 to Web3 marketplaces as crypto ecosystems will unleash new, unseen models that still cannot be mapped using today’s lens. An example of a hybrid model is our portfolio company Delphia, a mobile investment platform that uses customer data to better caliber its algorithm. In essence, Delphia is both a traditional fintech company, allowing retail investors to invest their money in an easy manner, and a conventional hedge fund, using data to power their predictive models. There is nothing decentralized or crypto in that. However, hedge funds typically buy data from data providers (not consumers directly), and this data quality doesn’t even come close to that of companies such as Facebook or Google. So, Delphia turned to tokens to incentivize their users to contribute personal data in exchange of token rewards. There’s an additional benefit: the larger the number of contributors, the better the algorithm will get, and the superior the investment returns of Delphia users will be. In this example, Delphia chose to use a crypto ecosystem only for sourcing data. Factors to consider We can think of the degree of effectiveness of a crypto ecosystem, and more precisely, of token incentives along several spectra. Each spectrum can be looked at in a vacuum but, all these variables will all interact with each other which is why it’s hard to predict in which settings tokens could be more successful. Is your marketplaces demand or supply constrained? Most marketplaces are demand constrained. Supply is usually easier to acquire because it’s financially motivated to be on the platform. Even if there is no liquidity, if there is no cost to being on the platform, why not join? On top of that, acquiring the demand side typically involves paying the Google and Facebook “tax” of online marketing. However, there are many exceptions. Rebag, one of our portfolio companies selling high end designer handbags, was famously supply constrained for most of its early history with 100% of the supply on the site selling out. Whichever case you fall into, figure out the more constrained part of your marketplace and focus incentives on that side. Are your users tech savvy? Given the technical complexity of the crypto space, to date the most successful crypto-enabled marketplaces have worked at incentivizing tech savvy contributors. Braintrust for instance uses tokens for its technically savvy developers (their supply side), but hides all mention of crypto from its demand side clients. In this case, the supply side is more likely to know how to handle and value the token incentives than the more traditional enterprise clients on the demand side. What’s the nature of the marketplace’s transaction / what’s being asked from the participants? On one side of the spectrum, we might have a very easy ask, like in Helium (“hey just buy a hotspot, install it, and forget about it while you earn tokens”). On the other side, you may have something like Masterclass, where celebrities need to put on a ton of effort to create and film the courses, so even if they get tokens in return, they may not bother. All else equal, tokens should become less effective as the effort required to participate in the marketplace increases. How homogeneous is the target supply/demand you want to attract? You could succeed at attracting hosts for your, say, crypto-enabled Airbnb, but what type of properties are they bringing on-line? There’s a wide dispersion of types of listings they could bring but not all will be useful for your target demand, which will result in no transactions, and churn on both sides. What’s next for crypto-enabled marketplaces? Marketplaces have been FJ Labs’ bread and butter since inception. Even though we started investing in crypto years ago, the industry’s maturity was such that we focused our efforts on other areas such the infrastructure layer, knowing it would take require some cycles before the timing was right for greater adoption of crypto-enabled marketplaces. However, we feel the time has finally come. There are several projects in this category already, and we are about to witness an explosion in the use of this model. We are beyond excited to see what entrepreneurs will build in this space!

2022-06-22T13:42:56

2022-06-22T13:42:56

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=18804

2022-06-22T16:45:56

2022-06-22T16:45:56

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The benefits of flexibility and reading the macro tea leaves in venture

<p>As I highlighted in <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-investment-strategy/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-investment-strategy/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FJ Labs’ Investment Strategy</a>, FJ Labs is stage agnostic, geography agnostic, and industry agnostic. In other words, we invest in any geography, in any industry, at any stage. That’s not to say there is no area of focus. We specialize in marketplace and network effect business models which represent over 70% of the investments we make. Moreover, most of our investments in terms of number of deals are at the Seed and Series A stage and in the US. In a way that is not surprising as there are more Seed deals than A deals, more A deals than B deals and so on and so forth. Also, we are a New York based fund and there are more startups created in the US than anywhere else.</p> <p>That said that flexibility has been extremely beneficial. When we identify trends, we typically invest in them in all geographies. We have also been able to adjust our strategy based on our reading of market conditions. For instance, we largely stopped investing in Russia after Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. We also stopped investing in Turkey after Erdogan became president.</p> <p>The place our reading of market conditions has expressed itself the most and in the percentage of capital we deployed late stage, Series C onwards. While we always invest in more early-stage deals, we often wrote large conviction checks in late-stage startups. As a result, most of the capital we deployed was sometimes in the late stage. In 2015 and 2016 over 60% of the capital we deployed was in the late stage. In 2019 and 2020 it was still 35%. In general, we feel that if the company is playing in a huge category, has a high probability of a 3x from our entry price and a reasonable probability of a 10x, it’s ok for us to enter at a multi-hundred million or even multi-billion valuation.</p> <p>To give you a few examples of late-stage investments, we invested large amounts in Alibaba at $4 / share or a $15 billion valuation. We started investing in Airbnb at a multi-billion valuation and continued all the way to $17 billion or so. We first invested in Farfetch at a multi-hundred million valuation.</p> <p>Sometimes we invest late-stage because we did not see the deal early, but more often than not it’s because we chose to wait until the company hit real product market fit with attractive unit economics at a reasonable valuation. For instance, we saw Coupang early but passed because they were following the Groupon model. Later they pivoted to becoming one of the companies vying to be Amazon of Korea. It’s only after they established themselves as the clear leader and hit a multibillion valuation that we pulled the trigger and started investing.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Reading the macro tea leaves</strong></h3> <p>In February 2021, I published my macro piece <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/welcome-to-the-everything-bubble/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/welcome-to-the-everything-bubble/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Welcome to the Everything Bubble!</a>. In it I argued that “The warning signs of market mania are everywhere. P/E ratios are high and climbing. Bitcoin rose 300% in a year. There is a deluge of SPAC IPOs. Real estate prices are rapidly rising. … It is unclear when the bubble will burst, but there are a few ways to be ready for when it bursts. … Right now, I am building my cash reserves while still investing. I particularly like the arbitrage of selling overvalued public tech stocks (or pre-IPO companies) and investing in somewhat less overvalued early-stage tech startups. I suspect having large cash reserves will come in handy at some point in the next few years.”</p> <p>At FJ Labs we took that warning to heart. We significantly decreased our investments in late-stage companies to 11% of startups and 23% of the capital deployed in 2021. Likewise in our new fund, FJ Labs III which we started deploying in July 2021 and spans 2021 and 2022, late-stage investments represent only 10% of the startups and 22% of the capital. Even then, we mostly invested in reasonably priced late-stage companies with strong balance sheets and good unit economics which were usually follow-ons in our best startups.</p> <p>We also sold secondaries in many of our late-stage companies. We loved the founders and the companies but felt it wise to de-risk our position and build up our cash reserves for the crisis to come. It is worth noting that we were usually begged by the founders and other investors to sell secondaries such that the new investors could reach their target ownership without diluting the founders too much.</p> <p>This is not to say we played this perfectly. We did not sell as much in secondaries as we wanted to. We also misplayed our public equity positions. Most of them fell 50% between IPO and the expiration of the lockup 6 months later. As we felt the valuation had corrected and we loved the management team and companies, we decided to hold on to most of the positions only for them to fall another 50% since then.</p> <p>However, we played our hand well and are entering this crisis in a position of strength. We deployed less than 25% of the $250M we have closed across our new funds for FJ Labs III. We plan on raising $400M+, at which point our 2021/Q1 2022 investments will only make up 15% of the investable capital in the fund giving us plenty of dry powder.</p> <p>The most iconic companies of the last decade were created during the Great Recession of 2008-2009: Uber, Airbnb, Whatsapp, Instagram and countless others. We expect that many of the most important companies of the coming decade will be created in the years to come. Considering the environment, the founders will build more sound companies raising the right amount of capital at reasonable valuations, taking care of their burn, and focusing on their unit economics. Because they will face less competition, they will benefit from lower customer acquisition costs and will be more likely to dominate their category.</p> <p>We beyond excited to invest in this coming generation of founders and startups whom we expect will rise to challenge of addressing the fundamental issues of our time: climate change, inequality of opportunity and social injustice, and the mental and physical wellbeing crisis.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture1-1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18806" width="624" height="758" srcset="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture1-1.png 1248w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture1-1-768x932.png 768w, https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture1-1-1200x1457.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /></figure></div>

<p>As I highlighted in FJ Labs’ Investment Strategy, FJ Labs is stage agnostic, geography agnostic, and industry agnostic. &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/the-benefits-of-flexibility-and-reading-the-macro-tea-leaves-in-venture/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;The benefits of flexibility and reading the macro tea leaves in venture&#8221;</span></a></p>

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The benefits of flexibility and reading the macro tea leaves in venture. Categories - FJ Labs. Date-Posted - 2022-06-22T13:42:56 . As I highlighted in FJ Labs’ Investment Strategy, FJ Labs is stage agnostic, geography agnostic, and industry agnostic. In other words, we invest in any geography, in any industry, at any stage. That’s not to say there is no area of focus. We specialize in marketplace and network effect business models which represent over 70% of the investments we make. Moreover, most of our investments in terms of number of deals are at the Seed and Series A stage and in the US. In a way that is not surprising as there are more Seed deals than A deals, more A deals than B deals and so on and so forth. Also, we are a New York based fund and there are more startups created in the US than anywhere else. That said that flexibility has been extremely beneficial. When we identify trends, we typically invest in them in all geographies. We have also been able to adjust our strategy based on our reading of market conditions. For instance, we largely stopped investing in Russia after Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. We also stopped investing in Turkey after Erdogan became president. The place our reading of market conditions has expressed itself the most and in the percentage of capital we deployed late stage, Series C onwards. While we always invest in more early-stage deals, we often wrote large conviction checks in late-stage startups. As a result, most of the capital we deployed was sometimes in the late stage. In 2015 and 2016 over 60% of the capital we deployed was in the late stage. In 2019 and 2020 it was still 35%. In general, we feel that if the company is playing in a huge category, has a high probability of a 3x from our entry price and a reasonable probability of a 10x, it’s ok for us to enter at a multi-hundred million or even multi-billion valuation. To give you a few examples of late-stage investments, we invested large amounts in Alibaba at $4 / share or a $15 billion valuation. We started investing in Airbnb at a multi-billion valuation and continued all the way to $17 billion or so. We first invested in Farfetch at a multi-hundred million valuation. Sometimes we invest late-stage because we did not see the deal early, but more often than not it’s because we chose to wait until the company hit real product market fit with attractive unit economics at a reasonable valuation. For instance, we saw Coupang early but passed because they were following the Groupon model. Later they pivoted to becoming one of the companies vying to be Amazon of Korea. It’s only after they established themselves as the clear leader and hit a multibillion valuation that we pulled the trigger and started investing. Reading the macro tea leaves In February 2021, I published my macro piece Welcome to the Everything Bubble!. In it I argued that “The warning signs of market mania are everywhere. P/E ratios are high and climbing. Bitcoin rose 300% in a year. There is a deluge of SPAC IPOs. Real estate prices are rapidly rising. … It is unclear when the bubble will burst, but there are a few ways to be ready for when it bursts. … Right now, I am building my cash reserves while still investing. I particularly like the arbitrage of selling overvalued public tech stocks (or pre-IPO companies) and investing in somewhat less overvalued early-stage tech startups. I suspect having large cash reserves will come in handy at some point in the next few years.” At FJ Labs we took that warning to heart. We significantly decreased our investments in late-stage companies to 11% of startups and 23% of the capital deployed in 2021. Likewise in our new fund, FJ Labs III which we started deploying in July 2021 and spans 2021 and 2022, late-stage investments represent only 10% of the startups and 22% of the capital. Even then, we mostly invested in reasonably priced late-stage companies with strong balance sheets and good unit economics which were usually follow-ons in our best startups. We also sold secondaries in many of our late-stage companies. We loved the founders and the companies but felt it wise to de-risk our position and build up our cash reserves for the crisis to come. It is worth noting that we were usually begged by the founders and other investors to sell secondaries such that the new investors could reach their target ownership without diluting the founders too much. This is not to say we played this perfectly. We did not sell as much in secondaries as we wanted to. We also misplayed our public equity positions. Most of them fell 50% between IPO and the expiration of the lockup 6 months later. As we felt the valuation had corrected and we loved the management team and companies, we decided to hold on to most of the positions only for them to fall another 50% since then. However, we played our hand well and are entering this crisis in a position of strength. We deployed less than 25% of the $250M we have closed across our new funds for FJ Labs III. We plan on raising $400M+, at which point our 2021/Q1 2022 investments will only make up 15% of the investable capital in the fund giving us plenty of dry powder. The most iconic companies of the last decade were created during the Great Recession of 2008-2009: Uber, Airbnb, Whatsapp, Instagram and countless others. We expect that many of the most important companies of the coming decade will be created in the years to come. Considering the environment, the founders will build more sound companies raising the right amount of capital at reasonable valuations, taking care of their burn, and focusing on their unit economics. Because they will face less competition, they will benefit from lower customer acquisition costs and will be more likely to dominate their category. We beyond excited to invest in this coming generation of founders and startups whom we expect will rise to challenge of addressing the fundamental issues of our time: climate change, inequality of opportunity and social injustice, and the mental and physical wellbeing crisis.

2022-06-13T16:31:38

2022-06-13T16:31:38

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=18785

2023-11-17T13:48:33

2023-11-17T13:48:33

fj-labs-crypto-credentials

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https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-crypto-credentials/

FJ Labs’ Crypto Credentials

<p>People do not realize how active <a href="https://fjlabs.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FJ Labs</a> is in the crypto/Web3 space. We are investors in 47 companies and are investing in both equity and tokens in up-and-coming crypto projects. In this post, I want to present how we became involved in crypto. In upcoming posts, we will cover our crypto strategy and our thoughts on crypto marketplaces.</p> <p>As I articulated in my 2017 post <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/some-thoughts-on-cryptocurrencies/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Some thoughts on cryptocurrencies</a>, my interest in crypto came from my exposure to Argentina with its repeated crisis. Being an avid gamer with powerful GPUs, I mined BTC out of intellectual curiosity in the early 2010s. Unfortunately, I did not take any of this particularly seriously and lost 100% of the BTC I ever mined as I did not remember where I stored them. I am pretty sure I lost more BTC than I currently own. Fortunately, I bought some on <a href="https://www.bitstamp.net/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">BitStamp</a> which I managed to sell before the last bubble burst in 2017.</p> <p>I was fortunate to read the tea leaves well enough to get out of the liquid market in time. As I wrote at the time: “I am extremely bullish on the future of the blockchain and cryptocurrencies. However, I also believe that most of the coins in existence today will go to 0. Many of them have no fundamental reason for being. The application they support does not fundamentally require a coin. Moreover, there is a large amount of fraud and frankly ludicrous projects that have ICO’d. ICOs will not replace venture capital. Only blockchain applications are being funded by ICOs and frankly most of the companies that ICO’d would not have been funded by proper investors. What is creating the frenzy in ICOs right now is a fundamental imbalance in supply and demand. You have large crypto holders in countries like China who are looking for assets to buy, the easiest of which are other crypto currencies. That bubble will eventually burst, though I am not foolish enough to begin to pretend to know when that will happen. Bubbles tend to last longer than people “in the know” suspect. When the Internet bubble burst, hundreds of companies failed. However, they left behind the infrastructure and some of the companies that ultimately led to the Internet revolution we are still experiencing today. The current crypto bubble will also burst. It will wipe out the value of many coins and companies, but it will have funded the creation of the building blocks of future successful crypto and blockchain applications.”</p> <p>At the time, we thought through what crypto marketplaces we should build or invest in, but most of the marketplaces we were presented with did not articulate well why they would benefit from decentralization and how they would use tokens to incentivize liquidity creation. In general, it felt extremely early. As a result, we ended up having an ad-hoc approach to crypto investing:</p> <ul> <li>We invested in our friends who were building crypto companies which led us to invest early in <a href="https://www.animocabrands.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Animoca</a>, <a href="https://www.figment.io/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Figment</a>, <a href="https://www.shipyardsoftware.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Shipyard</a>/<a href="https://clipper.exchange/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Clipper</a>, and <a href="https://zengo.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Zengo</a>.</li> <li>We invested thematically in megatrends we believed in. Having missed investing in the centralized exchange wave, we decided to invest in the best crypto onramps and offramps like <a href="https://www.moonpay.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Moonpay</a>, <a href="https://ramp.network/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Ramp</a> and <a href="https://www.sendwyre.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Wyre</a>.</li> <li>We invested in many companies providing infrastructure for building crypto applications.</li> <li>We invested, tactically, in the top crypto-native funds including <a href="https://multicoin.capital/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Multicoin</a> and <a href="https://www.libertuscapital.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Libertus</a> in 2017 and 2018 to get our practice off the ground and co-invest with them.</li> </ul> <p>Ultimately, crypto marketplaces emerged most explosively in decentralized finance. This makes sense, as programmable finance and code-based, disintermediated financial applications were always a natural teleological conclusion to programmable money. And, in hindsight, of course the first real crypto marketplace applications to emerge were crypto native rather than replacements of existing offline marketplaces. In 2020, with the emergence of the “DeFi Summer” decentralized finance applications started growing dramatically. It turns out that DeXes like <a href="https://uniswap.org/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://uniswap.org/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Uniswap</a> and <a href="https://sushi.com/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://sushi.com/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Sushi</a>, lending protocols like <a href="https://compound.finance/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://compound.finance/" rel="noreferrer noopener">COMP </a>and <a href="https://aave.com/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://aave.com/" rel="noreferrer noopener">AAVE</a>, and even insurance protocols like <a href="https://nexusmutual.io/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://nexusmutual.io/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Nexus Mutual</a> are all marketplaces. They are intermediaries between providers of liquidity and those who require liquidity. The same dynamics apply as in Web2 marketplaces making our expertise highly relevant. On top of that the rise of NFTs in 2021 led to insane growth at <a href="https://opensea.io/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">OpenSea</a>, another marketplace. Both trends brought our attention back to the space in a major way.</p> <p>Given how early we are in the Web3 space, there is no unifying theme to our investments. We’ve been investing at the intersection of fintech and crypto, exchanges, consumerization of crytpo, NFT marketplaces, tooling and infrastructure for crypto-native teams and DAOs. Of late we have been putting a lot of thought into:</p> <ul> <li>Bringing Web2 UX/UI expertise into Web3 which is something <a href="https://www.usebraintrust.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Braintrust</a> has done extremely well.</li> <li>Verticalizing <a href="https://opensea.io/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">OpenSea</a>. OpenSea is the eBay of Web3. It has a complex user interface and is not particularly well suited for certain verticals. The same way <a href="https://ebay.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">eBay</a> and <a href="https://craigslist.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Craigslist</a> were verticalized in Web2, it’s easy to imagine the emersion of an amazing vertical gaming NFT marketplace, or perhaps a <a href="https://zillow.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Zillow</a>/<a href="https://trulia.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Trulia</a> meets <a href="https://compass.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Compass</a> for metaverse properties, and many other vertical applications.</li> <li>Helping prepare for a cross-chain world with Layer 0s and bridges.</li> <li>Making crypto derivatives markets significantly larger than the spot markets.</li> </ul> <p>All in all, to date we invested in 47 crypto companies. All that to say that crypto is now near and dear to our hearts. I will share in upcoming blog posts how crypto falls into the FJ Labs portfolio and will cover best practices for building crypto marketplaces.</p> <p>If you are building something in the crypto space reach out. We would love to hear from you.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Picture1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18789" width="549" height="839"/></figure></div>

<p>People do not realize how active FJ Labs is in the crypto/Web3 space. We are investors in 47 &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/fj-labs-crypto-credentials/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;FJ Labs’ Crypto Credentials&#8221;</span></a></p>

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FJ Labs’ Crypto Credentials. Categories - Crypto/Web3, FJ Labs, FJ Labs. Date-Posted - 2022-06-13T16:31:38 . People do not realize how active FJ Labs is in the crypto/Web3 space. We are investors in 47 companies and are investing in both equity and tokens in up-and-coming crypto projects. In this post, I want to present how we became involved in crypto. In upcoming posts, we will cover our crypto strategy and our thoughts on crypto marketplaces. As I articulated in my 2017 post Some thoughts on cryptocurrencies, my interest in crypto came from my exposure to Argentina with its repeated crisis. Being an avid gamer with powerful GPUs, I mined BTC out of intellectual curiosity in the early 2010s. Unfortunately, I did not take any of this particularly seriously and lost 100% of the BTC I ever mined as I did not remember where I stored them. I am pretty sure I lost more BTC than I currently own. Fortunately, I bought some on BitStamp which I managed to sell before the last bubble burst in 2017. I was fortunate to read the tea leaves well enough to get out of the liquid market in time. As I wrote at the time: “I am extremely bullish on the future of the blockchain and cryptocurrencies. However, I also believe that most of the coins in existence today will go to 0. Many of them have no fundamental reason for being. The application they support does not fundamentally require a coin. Moreover, there is a large amount of fraud and frankly ludicrous projects that have ICO’d. ICOs will not replace venture capital. Only blockchain applications are being funded by ICOs and frankly most of the companies that ICO’d would not have been funded by proper investors. What is creating the frenzy in ICOs right now is a fundamental imbalance in supply and demand. You have large crypto holders in countries like China who are looking for assets to buy, the easiest of which are other crypto currencies. That bubble will eventually burst, though I am not foolish enough to begin to pretend to know when that will happen. Bubbles tend to last longer than people “in the know” suspect. When the Internet bubble burst, hundreds of companies failed. However, they left behind the infrastructure and some of the companies that ultimately led to the Internet revolution we are still experiencing today. The current crypto bubble will also burst. It will wipe out the value of many coins and companies, but it will have funded the creation of the building blocks of future successful crypto and blockchain applications.” At the time, we thought through what crypto marketplaces we should build or invest in, but most of the marketplaces we were presented with did not articulate well why they would benefit from decentralization and how they would use tokens to incentivize liquidity creation. In general, it felt extremely early. As a result, we ended up having an ad-hoc approach to crypto investing: We invested in our friends who were building crypto companies which led us to invest early in Animoca, Figment, Shipyard/Clipper, and Zengo. We invested thematically in megatrends we believed in. Having missed investing in the centralized exchange wave, we decided to invest in the best crypto onramps and offramps like Moonpay, Ramp and Wyre. We invested in many companies providing infrastructure for building crypto applications. We invested, tactically, in the top crypto-native funds including Multicoin and Libertus in 2017 and 2018 to get our practice off the ground and co-invest with them. Ultimately, crypto marketplaces emerged most explosively in decentralized finance. This makes sense, as programmable finance and code-based, disintermediated financial applications were always a natural teleological conclusion to programmable money. And, in hindsight, of course the first real crypto marketplace applications to emerge were crypto native rather than replacements of existing offline marketplaces. In 2020, with the emergence of the “DeFi Summer” decentralized finance applications started growing dramatically. It turns out that DeXes like Uniswap and Sushi, lending protocols like COMP and AAVE, and even insurance protocols like Nexus Mutual are all marketplaces. They are intermediaries between providers of liquidity and those who require liquidity. The same dynamics apply as in Web2 marketplaces making our expertise highly relevant. On top of that the rise of NFTs in 2021 led to insane growth at OpenSea, another marketplace. Both trends brought our attention back to the space in a major way. Given how early we are in the Web3 space, there is no unifying theme to our investments. We’ve been investing at the intersection of fintech and crypto, exchanges, consumerization of crytpo, NFT marketplaces, tooling and infrastructure for crypto-native teams and DAOs. Of late we have been putting a lot of thought into: Bringing Web2 UX/UI expertise into Web3 which is something Braintrust has done extremely well. Verticalizing OpenSea. OpenSea is the eBay of Web3. It has a complex user interface and is not particularly well suited for certain verticals. The same way eBay and Craigslist were verticalized in Web2, it’s easy to imagine the emersion of an amazing vertical gaming NFT marketplace, or perhaps a Zillow/Trulia meets Compass for metaverse properties, and many other vertical applications. Helping prepare for a cross-chain world with Layer 0s and bridges. Making crypto derivatives markets significantly larger than the spot markets. All in all, to date we invested in 47 crypto companies. All that to say that crypto is now near and dear to our hearts. I will share in upcoming blog posts how crypto falls into the FJ Labs portfolio and will cover best practices for building crypto marketplaces. If you are building something in the crypto space reach out. We would love to hear from you.

2022-06-07T12:51:42

2022-06-07T12:51:42

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=18778

2022-06-08T16:54:21

2022-06-08T16:54:21

stealing-fire-stealing-fire-how-to-harness-flow-states-for-performance

publish

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https://fabricegrinda.com/stealing-fire-stealing-fire-how-to-harness-flow-states-for-performance/

Stealing Fire: how to harness flow states for performance

<p></p> <p>The consensus has been that extreme performance requires the vaunted 10,000 hours of deliberate practice which require tremendous grit and determination. Authors Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal take us on a globe spanning adventure meeting with tech founders, Seal Team Six, Red Bull athletes and many more in search of a short cut for peak performance.</p> <p>The various groups they speak with use different approaches and techniques, but all come to the realization that such a shortcut exists: altered states of consciousness. These states are within our reach and the book covers many paths for entering them: transcendental meditation, flow dojo, psychedelics, Tantric sex, extreme sports, and others. They are all different modalities for achieving the same state.</p> <p>This book is a must read for anyone interested in neuroscience, self-improvement, or altered states of consciousness. My one nitpick would be that this book is written from a very masculine perspective in Tantric terms: it’s all about achieving a state of ecstasy for the purpose of performance. As I detail in <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/why/" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://fabricegrinda.com/why/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Why?</a> flow states and altered states of consciousness are worth pursuing for their own sake.</p>

<p>The consensus has been that extreme performance requires the vaunted 10,000 hours of deliberate practice which require tremendous &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/stealing-fire-stealing-fire-how-to-harness-flow-states-for-performance/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Stealing Fire: how to harness flow states for performance&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Stealing Fire: how to harness flow states for performance. Categories - Books. Date-Posted - 2022-06-07T12:51:42 . The consensus has been that extreme performance requires the vaunted 10,000 hours of deliberate practice which require tremendous grit and determination. Authors Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal take us on a globe spanning adventure meeting with tech founders, Seal Team Six, Red Bull athletes and many more in search of a short cut for peak performance. The various groups they speak with use different approaches and techniques, but all come to the realization that such a shortcut exists: altered states of consciousness. These states are within our reach and the book covers many paths for entering them: transcendental meditation, flow dojo, psychedelics, Tantric sex, extreme sports, and others. They are all different modalities for achieving the same state. This book is a must read for anyone interested in neuroscience, self-improvement, or altered states of consciousness. My one nitpick would be that this book is written from a very masculine perspective in Tantric terms: it’s all about achieving a state of ecstasy for the purpose of performance. As I detail in Why? flow states and altered states of consciousness are worth pursuing for their own sake.

2022-05-09T15:02:35

2022-05-09T15:02:35

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=18701

2022-05-25T07:23:39

2022-05-25T07:23:39

wtf-is-going-on-3-outcomes-for-what-could-happen-from-here

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https://fabricegrinda.com/wtf-is-going-on-3-outcomes-for-what-could-happen-from-here/

WTF Is Going On? 3 Outcomes for What Could Happen From Here; What Needs to Happen To Avoid Recession? Why Stagnation is Most Likely and What This Means for Startups and Venture

<p>I had the pleasure of chatting with Harry Stebbings of <a href="https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">20VC </a>about the current macro environment. In this far ranging conversation we discuss why a recession is the most likely outcome and what startups should do about it. I also explain how FJ Labs is investing through these market conditions, how we think about our rate of deployment, what segment of the market we’re most excited about, and how LPs should respond to these unusual times.</p> <p>20VC is one of the largest media assets in venture with over 100M downloads and guests including Daniel Ek, Bill Gurley and Doug Leone to name a few. 20VC is run by Harry Stebbings, last year Harry raised $140M to build the next great financial institution at the intersection of venture and media. 20VC&#8217;s early portfolio includes 9 unicorns from Linktree, Clubhouse, Hopin, <a href="https://remote.com/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://remote.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Remote.com</a>, AgentSync, Nex Health and Sorare to name a few.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="The Swiss Economy is a House of Cards | Fabrice Grinda Full Interview" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bu3PFHxlY2g?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>For a preview of the video:</p> <div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-23 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:40%"></div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow"> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-1-2 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Quick macro thought: we are going to have a recession" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pAEkjoz66RU?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> </div> <div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow" style="flex-basis:40%"></div> </div> <p>In Today&#8217;s Episode with Fabrice Grinda:</p> <p>1.) Everything Great Starts Small:</p> <ul><li>How did Fabrice make his way into the world of investing from founding 3 companies?</li><li>How does Fabrice feel about founders raising funds with external LPs?</li><li>Why does Fabrice feel that investing as an angel made him a better CEO?</li></ul> <p>2.) WTF is Going On: The Market Today</p> <ul><li>How does Fabrice assess what is happening in the market today?</li><li>What is causing the massive public market drops we are seeing?</li><li>How do inflation rates and interest rates have such an impact on where we are?</li><li>How much of this is a result of COVID, the shift to goods from services and supply chains?</li></ul> <p>3.) The Optimistic Case:</p> <ul><li>How does Fabrice think things could get better from here? What needs to happen?</li><li>What could the Fed do to enable this optimistic outcome to take place?</li><li>What would need to happen in geo-politics and Russia for this to happen?</li><li>What is the probability today of this optimistic case happening?</li></ul> <p>4.) The Great Stagnation:</p> <ul><li>How does Fabrice think the economy could go sideways from here?</li><li>What are the core drivers of this?</li><li>Why is this the most likely outcome of all? What is the probability of this happening?</li></ul> <p>5.) The Catastrophe:</p> <ul><li>How could this market get so much worse?</li><li>What level of interest rate change would cause this outcome to occur?</li><li>Why does Fabrice think that Switzerland is a &#8220;House of Cards&#8221;? What would this mean if Switzerland fell? What other European countries does Fabrice think are vulnerable?</li></ul> <p>6.) What this Means for Venture:</p> <ul><li>How will LPs respond to these differing situations?</li><li>How does this impact how Fabrice thinks about his rate of deployment?</li><li>What segment of the market is Fabrice most excited for; early or growth?</li></ul> <p>Mentioned in Today&#8217;s Episode with Fabrice Grinda:</p> <p>Fabrice&#8217;s Favorite Book: Sapiens: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari-ebook/dp/B00ICN066A/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2DTJFH6YH7XOF&amp;keywords=sapiens&amp;qid=1653462941&amp;sprefix=sapien%2Caps%2C172&amp;sr=8-1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A Brief History of Humankind</a></p> <p>In addition to the above Youtube video, you can also listen to the podcast on:</p> <ul><li>iTunes: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/20vc-wtf-is-going-on-3-outcomes-for-what-could-happen/id958230465?i=1000560033424" data-type="URL" data-id="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/20vc-wtf-is-going-on-3-outcomes-for-what-could-happen/id958230465?i=1000560033424" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://podcasts.apple.com/20VC-WTF-Is-Going-On-3-Outcomes-for-What-Could-Happen-From-Here</a></li><li>Spotify: <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/4LfwOP0b9RQdJFlMpsjypg?si=KjMjWeXOREiJK7suPck9Zg&amp;nd=1" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://open.spotify.com/episode/4LfwOP0b9RQdJFlMpsjypg?si=KjMjWeXOREiJK7suPck9Zg&amp;nd=1" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://open.spotify.com/20VC-WTF-Is-Going-On-3-Outcomes-for-What-Could-Happen-From-Here</a></li></ul>

<p>I had the pleasure of chatting with Harry Stebbings of 20VC about the current macro environment. In this &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/wtf-is-going-on-3-outcomes-for-what-could-happen-from-here/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;WTF Is Going On? 3 Outcomes for What Could Happen From Here; What Needs to Happen To Avoid Recession? Why Stagnation is Most Likely and What This Means for Startups and Venture&#8221;</span></a></p>

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WTF Is Going On? 3 Outcomes for What Could Happen From Here; What Needs to Happen To Avoid Recession? Why Stagnation is Most Likely and What This Means for Startups and Venture. Categories - FJ Labs, Political Economy. Date-Posted - 2022-05-09T15:02:35 . I had the pleasure of chatting with Harry Stebbings of 20VC about the current macro environment. In this far ranging conversation we discuss why a recession is the most likely outcome and what startups should do about it. I also explain how FJ Labs is investing through these market conditions, how we think about our rate of deployment, what segment of the market we’re most excited about, and how LPs should respond to these unusual times. 20VC is one of the largest media assets in venture with over 100M downloads and guests including Daniel Ek, Bill Gurley and Doug Leone to name a few. 20VC is run by Harry Stebbings, last year Harry raised $140M to build the next great financial institution at the intersection of venture and media. 20VC&#8217;s early portfolio includes 9 unicorns from Linktree, Clubhouse, Hopin, Remote.com, AgentSync, Nex Health and Sorare to name a few. For a preview of the video: In Today&#8217;s Episode with Fabrice Grinda: 1.) Everything Great Starts Small: How did Fabrice make his way into the world of investing from founding 3 companies?How does Fabrice feel about founders raising funds with external LPs?Why does Fabrice feel that investing as an angel made him a better CEO? 2.) WTF is Going On: The Market Today How does Fabrice assess what is happening in the market today?What is causing the massive public market drops we are seeing?How do inflation rates and interest rates have such an impact on where we are?How much of this is a result of COVID, the shift to goods from services and supply chains? 3.) The Optimistic Case: How does Fabrice think things could get better from here? What needs to happen?What could the Fed do to enable this optimistic outcome to take place?What would need to happen in geo-politics and Russia for this to happen?What is the probability today of this optimistic case happening? 4.) The Great Stagnation: How does Fabrice think the economy could go sideways from here?What are the core drivers of this?Why is this the most likely outcome of all? What is the probability of this happening? 5.) The Catastrophe: How could this market get so much worse?What level of interest rate change would cause this outcome to occur?Why does Fabrice think that Switzerland is a &#8220;House of Cards&#8221;? What would this mean if Switzerland fell? What other European countries does Fabrice think are vulnerable? 6.) What this Means for Venture: How will LPs respond to these differing situations?How does this impact how Fabrice thinks about his rate of deployment?What segment of the market is Fabrice most excited for; early or growth? Mentioned in Today&#8217;s Episode with Fabrice Grinda: Fabrice&#8217;s Favorite Book: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind In addition to the above Youtube video, you can also listen to the podcast on: iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/20VC-WTF-Is-Going-On-3-Outcomes-for-What-Could-Happen-From-HereSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/20VC-WTF-Is-Going-On-3-Outcomes-for-What-Could-Happen-From-Here

2022-04-14T20:09:10

2022-04-14T20:09:10

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=18674

2022-06-14T10:56:28

2022-06-14T10:56:28

episode-33-from-vc-to-web2-to-crypto-with-mark-lurie

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https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-33-from-vc-to-web2-to-crypto-with-mark-lurie/

Episode 33: From VC to Web2 to Crypto with Mark Lurie

<p>Mark Lurie is the CEO and co-founder of <a href="https://www.shipyardsoftware.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Shipyard Software</a>. Shipyard Software builds decentralized exchanges (DEX) for specific types of trades, traders, and instruments, starting with <a href="https://clipper.exchange/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Clipper</a>, a DEX with the best prices anywhere on retail trades</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Episode 33: From VC to Web2 to Crypto with Mark Lurie" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wzI8vPngdWI?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="top-takeaways"><strong>Key Takeaways</strong></h3> <ul><li>Learn to cold email. You only need one opportunity so don’t be afraid to take shots.</li><li>Crypto is so young that most components within Web3 could easily be improved. The impact of small product on UX is more dramatic in Web3.</li><li>Find out what makes you unique. Ask yourself what are my strengths, what are my interests, where are the overlaps?</li><li>Stay close to your customers, and listen to their pain points.</li></ul> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Starting a company</h3> <p>It’s not always rational to start a company. Often times it begins with a hunch. The most important thing is to choose an industry that interests you but one that is large. Start with a hypothesis and try to refute it.</p> <p>Most people overestimate the risk involved in entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is less risky because you grow faster. It’s an asymmetric bet. Even if you fail, if the market is large you’ll likely end up further than if you joined corporate.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Starting backwards</h3> <p>Mark started a software company after Grad school but soon realized he didn’t understand business. The best way to understand business is to see from the backend what makes them successful. For this reason, Mark joined Bessemer Ventures. There he learned why companies succeed and fail.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Why Crypto?</h3> <p>When Mark began using crypto he saw that crypto is just another way of doing all the things we do in real life. For Mark, crypto brought together tech, economics, history, and building the future into one.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Episode-33-From-VC-to-Web2-to-Crypto-with-Mark-Lurie-Picture-2.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18677" width="500" height="500"/></figure></div> <p>Crypto is still young. It’s where the internet was in 1995. The UX is terrible but the potentials are huge. Bringing normal users from Web2 to Web3 will be huge. But this requires bringing the best product practices from Web2 to Web3.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Why Shipyard</h3> <p>The first waves of DeX are one size fits all like Uniswap. Then the second waves are more specialized with more rigor.</p> <p>This is the verticalization of Uniswap similar to what we saw with the verticalization of Craigslist</p> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Episode-33-From-VC-to-Web2-to-Crypto-with-Mark-Lurie-Picture-3.png" alt="" class="wp-image-18678" width="602" height="241"/></figure></div> <p>You can listen to the full episode in the embedded podcast player.</p> <figure><iframe loading="lazy" title="Libsyn Player" style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/22116884/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/forward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/000000/" height="90" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen=""></iframe></figure> <p>In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on:</p> <ul><li>iTunes: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/from-vc-to-web2-to-crypto-with-mark-lurie/id1532336635?i=1000550966783" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/from-vc-to-web2-to-crypto-with-mark-lurie/id1532336635?i=1000550966783" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://podcasts.apple.com/From VC to Web2 to Crypto with Mark Lurie</a></li><li>Spotify: <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/1b1dbtOh92fN9eNSJmcTIe?si=71a03435161641cb" target="_blank" data-type="URL" data-id="https://open.spotify.com/episode/1b1dbtOh92fN9eNSJmcTIe?si=71a03435161641cb" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://open.spotify.com/From VC to Web2 to Crypto with Mark Lurie</a></li></ul> <p>Thanks to <a href="https://twitter.com/ijmakan" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">IJ Makan</a> for helping write the episode summary.</p>

<p>Mark Lurie is the CEO and co-founder of Shipyard Software. Shipyard Software builds decentralized exchanges (DEX) for specific &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-33-from-vc-to-web2-to-crypto-with-mark-lurie/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Episode 33: From VC to Web2 to Crypto with Mark Lurie&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Episode 33: From VC to Web2 to Crypto with Mark Lurie. Categories - Crypto/Web3, Playing with Unicorns. Date-Posted - 2022-04-14T20:09:10 . Mark Lurie is the CEO and co-founder of Shipyard Software. Shipyard Software builds decentralized exchanges (DEX) for specific types of trades, traders, and instruments, starting with Clipper, a DEX with the best prices anywhere on retail trades Key Takeaways Learn to cold email. You only need one opportunity so don’t be afraid to take shots.Crypto is so young that most components within Web3 could easily be improved. The impact of small product on UX is more dramatic in Web3.Find out what makes you unique. Ask yourself what are my strengths, what are my interests, where are the overlaps?Stay close to your customers, and listen to their pain points. Starting a company It’s not always rational to start a company. Often times it begins with a hunch. The most important thing is to choose an industry that interests you but one that is large. Start with a hypothesis and try to refute it. Most people overestimate the risk involved in entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is less risky because you grow faster. It’s an asymmetric bet. Even if you fail, if the market is large you’ll likely end up further than if you joined corporate. Starting backwards Mark started a software company after Grad school but soon realized he didn’t understand business. The best way to understand business is to see from the backend what makes them successful. For this reason, Mark joined Bessemer Ventures. There he learned why companies succeed and fail. Why Crypto? When Mark began using crypto he saw that crypto is just another way of doing all the things we do in real life. For Mark, crypto brought together tech, economics, history, and building the future into one. Crypto is still young. It’s where the internet was in 1995. The UX is terrible but the potentials are huge. Bringing normal users from Web2 to Web3 will be huge. But this requires bringing the best product practices from Web2 to Web3. Why Shipyard The first waves of DeX are one size fits all like Uniswap. Then the second waves are more specialized with more rigor. This is the verticalization of Uniswap similar to what we saw with the verticalization of Craigslist You can listen to the full episode in the embedded podcast player. In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on: iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/From VC to Web2 to Crypto with Mark LurieSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/From VC to Web2 to Crypto with Mark Lurie Thanks to IJ Makan for helping write the episode summary.

2022-04-07T12:27:19

2022-04-07T12:27:19

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=18660

2022-04-12T14:41:34

2022-04-12T14:41:34

episode-32-building-a-shipping-unicorn-with-laura-behrens-wu

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https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-32-building-a-shipping-unicorn-with-laura-behrens-wu/

Episode 32: Building a shipping unicorn with Laura Behrens Wu, Co-Founder &#038; CEO of Shippo

<p>Laura Behrens Wu (<a href="https://twitter.com/laurabehrenswu?lang=en" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">@LauraBehrensWu</a>) is the co-founder and CEO of Shippo. Shippo is an API-first company focused on building shipping for 21st-century e-commerce.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Episode 32: Laura Behrens Wu" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bUH69PqMYro?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>When Laura Behrens Wu launched her own e-commerce store in 2013, she discovered that shipping was difficult. This led her to build Shippo, where customers could select the best carriers for their packages.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="602" height="339" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Laura-Behrens-Wu-Picture1.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-18662"/></figure></div> <h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="top-takeaways"><strong>Top takeaways</strong></h3> <ul><li>Build something that’s a pain killer, not a vitamin. This means finding a true pain point and solving it.</li><li>Constantly seek new customer acquisition channels.</li><li>Keep in mind that people who succeed at corporations are not always successful at early-stage companies.</li><li>0-1 team members are not always the ones who will drive the company to 100x.</li></ul> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Keeping a pulse on customer needs</h3> <p>Early on it’s crucial that founders are involved with customer success because it helps you understand their customer pain points.</p> <p>This is how Laura and her co-founder, Simon Kreuz, learned that SMBs was Shippo’s main customer base because SMBs wanted better ways to compete against big companies.</p> <p>Shippo as a result doubled down on shippers and this allowed them to scale supply with increased demand.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">The effects of COVID lockdowns</h3> <p>During COVID, there was an influx of new customers as Brick-and-Mortar business went online. Shopping behaviors rapidly changed and fast-forwarded the shift to digital faster. This also impacted investors as more of them became interested in e-commerce businesses.</p> <p>As a result Shippo doubled the team in 2020, and then again in 2021. As founders, expanding your team requires both speed and precision. Remember not every successful person at a large corporation will thrive at early stage.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="600" height="300" src="https://fabricegrinda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Laura-Behrens-Wu-Picture3.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-18664"/></figure></div> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">The future of Shippo</h3> <p>Shippo has been US-centric up until now. But shipping is a global business, hence Shippo is strategically seeking to expand globally.</p> <p>You can listen to the full episode in the embedded podcast player.</p> <figure><iframe loading="lazy" title="Libsyn Player" style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/21271067/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/forward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/000000/" height="90" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen=""></iframe></figure> <p>In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on:</p> <ul><li>iTunes: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laura-behrens-wu/id1532336635?i=1000550957444" data-type="URL" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://podcasts.apple.com/laura-behrens-wu</a></li><li>Spotify: <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/3TvZwr0TLqzjWOAKF4sk9z?si=CITenUHiTKWFBWX_-6TNYg" data-type="URL" data-id="https://open.spotify.com/episode/3TvZwr0TLqzjWOAKF4sk9z?si=CITenUHiTKWFBWX_-6TNYg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://open.spotify.com/laura-behrens-wu</a></li></ul> <p>Thanks to <a href="https://twitter.com/ijmakan" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">IJ Makan</a> for helping write the episode summary.</p>

<p>Laura Behrens Wu (@LauraBehrensWu) is the co-founder and CEO of Shippo. Shippo is an API-first company focused on &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-32-building-a-shipping-unicorn-with-laura-behrens-wu/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Episode 32: Building a shipping unicorn with Laura Behrens Wu, Co-Founder &#038; CEO of Shippo&#8221;</span></a></p>

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Episode 32: Building a shipping unicorn with Laura Behrens Wu, Co-Founder &#038; CEO of Shippo. Categories - Playing with Unicorns. Date-Posted - 2022-04-07T12:27:19 . Laura Behrens Wu (@LauraBehrensWu) is the co-founder and CEO of Shippo. Shippo is an API-first company focused on building shipping for 21st-century e-commerce. When Laura Behrens Wu launched her own e-commerce store in 2013, she discovered that shipping was difficult. This led her to build Shippo, where customers could select the best carriers for their packages. Top takeaways Build something that’s a pain killer, not a vitamin. This means finding a true pain point and solving it.Constantly seek new customer acquisition channels.Keep in mind that people who succeed at corporations are not always successful at early-stage companies.0-1 team members are not always the ones who will drive the company to 100x. Keeping a pulse on customer needs Early on it’s crucial that founders are involved with customer success because it helps you understand their customer pain points. This is how Laura and her co-founder, Simon Kreuz, learned that SMBs was Shippo’s main customer base because SMBs wanted better ways to compete against big companies. Shippo as a result doubled down on shippers and this allowed them to scale supply with increased demand. The effects of COVID lockdowns During COVID, there was an influx of new customers as Brick-and-Mortar business went online. Shopping behaviors rapidly changed and fast-forwarded the shift to digital faster. This also impacted investors as more of them became interested in e-commerce businesses. As a result Shippo doubled the team in 2020, and then again in 2021. As founders, expanding your team requires both speed and precision. Remember not every successful person at a large corporation will thrive at early stage. The future of Shippo Shippo has been US-centric up until now. But shipping is a global business, hence Shippo is strategically seeking to expand globally. You can listen to the full episode in the embedded podcast player. In addition to the above Youtube video and embedded podcast player, you can also listen to the podcast on: iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/laura-behrens-wuSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/laura-behrens-wu Thanks to IJ Makan for helping write the episode summary.

2022-03-30T15:47:30

2022-03-30T15:47:30

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=18645

2022-10-10T09:39:42

2022-10-10T09:39:42

the-king-of-marketplaces-with-fabrice-grinda-of-fj-labs

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https://fabricegrinda.com/the-king-of-marketplaces-with-fabrice-grinda-of-fj-labs/

My conversation with Mark Peter Davis of Interplay

<p>I had a fun conversation with <a href="https://mpd.me/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mark Peter Davis</a> of <a href="https://www.interplay.vc/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Interplay</a> about my love of marketplaces and all things FJ Labs. The discussion was peppered with lots of entrepreneurial advice and thoughts on impact.</p> <p>Their Episode Description:</p> <p>This week I chatted with Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner at FJ Labs. FJ Labs is a VC that specializes in marketplaces and invests in every geography in every category at any stage. As Fabrice puts it they do angel investing at venture scale, meaning they don’t lead rounds but do a massive number of investments every year. Last year they made almost 200 investments.</p> <p>Fabrice is super interesting beyond being a VC. He’s been a serial entrepreneur for a couple of decades at this point and has interesting views on wealth and impact.</p> <p>He started what was essentially the ebay for Europe and then OLX, the Craigslist for the rest of the world.</p> <p>During our chat he shares some incredibly useful tips for entrepreneurs &#8211; especially for those who are interested in marketplaces. We talk all about his approach to venture capital, how FJ Labs operates and makes decisions and much more. Enjoy.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="The King of Marketplaces with Fabrice Grinda of FJ Labs" width="840" height="473" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vJ00ps8Uc54?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p><strong>Show Links:</strong></p> <ul><li>Follow us on Twitter:&nbsp;<a href="http://twitter.com/fabricegrinda" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">@fabricegrinda</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://twitter.com/mpd" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">@mpd</a></li><li>Guest Links:&nbsp;<a href="https://fjlabs.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FJ Labs</a></li><li>Guest Articles:&nbsp;<a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/episode-12-the-surprising-case-for-optimism-in-2020/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Pandemic, Populism and Policy Failure – The Surprising Case for Optimism in 2020</a></li><li>Podcast Links:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCua7T3uyg6IQeSbYyNKT_Iw" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">YouTube</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/mpd" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Twitter</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.facebook.com/innovationwithmpd" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Facebook</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/innovationwithmpd" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">LinkedIn</a></li></ul> <p><strong><em>Transcript&nbsp;</em></strong><em>(this is an automated transcript):</em></p> <p><strong>MPD</strong>: Fabric, thanks for being here.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;Thank you for having me.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;I&#8217;ve been very excited to have you on I think you&#8217;ve got a lot of wisdom and you do something that most people don&#8217;t do and that you practice radical candor. It feels like in everything, every time I&#8217;ve ever talked to.</p> <p>So I think we&#8217;re going to get into some really interesting topics today. And I think I have a feeling you&#8217;re going to share more than people normally comfortable with, which I think is very powerful. You&#8217;re going to help a lot of people. Let&#8217;s start though. Let&#8217;s level set this can you give an overview of FJ labs?</p> <p>I think people need to know what you&#8217;re doing for your day job before we extend beyond. Sure.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;So my current day job is to be the founding partner at FJ&nbsp;Labs which is a venture fund &#8211; actually it&#8217;s an accidental venture fund. It really came out of my angel investing activities while I was an interpreter.</p> <p>So for the last 24 years, I&#8217;ve been building companies, I&#8217;ve been running companies and. Other founders kept approaching me for me to invest some of them. And for the longest time I thought they were, should I be doing this right? Is it a distraction from my core mandate as a founder to be investing in other startups?</p> <p>And I&#8217;m like, if I can articulate lessons to learn to others it probably means I&#8217;ve internalized them. And so it&#8217;s okay. And meeting all these amazing founders beyond helping them realize their dreams is also an amazing way to keep my fingers on the pulse of the market. So by 2013, when I sold my last company, which by the way, was like dried or missing.</p> <p>I don&#8217;t know if you want to cover that until I went, the last company was real quick. So the last company was a company called oh blocks. It&#8217;s today, the biggest classified site of the world. It&#8217;s a 11,000 employees in 30 countries. It&#8217;s the leading classified site in Brazil and all black tem and Russia, Ukraine, all of these sued Europe and India, Pakistan of all the Southeast Asia and the UAE and all the middle east.</p> <p>And it&#8217;s basically what Craigslist would be or should be if it was running. By someone like me, meaning a modern UX UI, integrated payments and shipping and escrow. Exactly. No, no spam, no scab, no birders, et cetera. And actually targeting primarily women in a female friendly space, given that women are the primary decision makers in all household purchases.</p> <p>That companies like over 300 million new users of mothers is absolutely ginormous. And after I sold that already at 150 investments doing really well already pulled them with my current partner. And I was like, I like building companies like invest in companies. Let&#8217;s create a structure that allows me to do that.</p> <p>And I never really set out to build a venture funds. And I think by virtue of being visible, I started being approached by potential investors and said, Hey, we would like exposure to where you guys are doing. Do you mind if we co-invest with you? And so 2016, we took our first investor LP for 50 million, one LP outside of our own capital.</p> <p>Yeah, it&#8217;s again, what I be basically they&#8217;re people that had it, it&#8217;s a company called . They were a big telco in, in Norway. And they had backed my biggest competitor when I was running about locks and ultimately we fought a big war and we merged 51 for us, 49 for them. And by then we, all of this I&#8217;d like unwell.</p> <p>They&#8217;d made like a billion dollars and they ended up owning a whole bunch of classified assets around the world. And they were like, Hey, we love you. You&#8217;ve also made us a lot, lots of money. We&#8217;d like to understand what&#8217;s going on in marketplaces in the U S to either bring it to our markets or defend against disruption.</p> <p>And so it was really both strategic for them. And financial in 2018 we raise fund two and they&#8217;re like, Hey, if you want to bring other people on board, why not? And other people&#8217;s sorta approaching us. So we started getting like a lot of family offices that were being disrupted by tech and a lot of other strategics were interested in investing in the category.</p> <p>And so we finished deploying that and that was a hundred, 225 million finished uploading that in July of 2021. And then we close fund three, which would be like three, 400 million with either amazing founders that I&#8217;ve worked with forever, like Reed Hoffman, or, whatever Kevin, Ryan, or the founder of Wayfair or these family offices were actually strategics interested in either buying or investing leader seizures in the companies move us.</p> <p>So I guess w w. That was a long-winded way to answer your question. So my day job is running FJ labs. FJ labs is an a, a venture fund specializing in marketplaces. We invest in every geography in every category at every stage. But the focus is we really do angel investing at venture scale. We don&#8217;t lead, we don&#8217;t price.</p> <p>We don&#8217;t take board seats. We decide after two, one hour meetings, whether we invest or not with full transparency, we tell them why we&#8217;re investing, why we&#8217;re not investing what we need to change for us to change your mind. And we try to be as Frey, founder, friendly as possible. So we&#8217;re not setting the terms we decided very quickly.</p> <p>And we&#8217;re super prolific. To give you a sense of scale to date, we&#8217;ve invested in overheat 150 startups. Last year, we invested in 281 startups, so 180 new investments or 101 followups, and it&#8217;s a lot for a venture firm and it&#8217;s been going really well. We&#8217;ve had 265 exits and so far in a 45% realized I are.</p> <p>So things are good.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;That&#8217;s great. Okay. So what&#8217;s the typical investment profile. Cause when you say angel investing at a venture scale, I get the angel investing part that your, the process is less rigorous it&#8217;s you&#8217;re looking at more strategic elements rather than doing your own diligence.</p> <p>I get that nothing wrong with it. The question is when you say to venture scale, is that the reflection of the volume, the amount of capital you&#8217;re managing the volume, what is it? The check size?&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;Yeah the angel investing in venture skills really because of the overall. Capital deployment. We&#8217;re deploying a hundred million a year, 150 million a year potentially, but this funds which is way more than typical angels deploy.</p> <p>Now, the reason it&#8217;s still angel investing is writing small checks relative to the lead. We don&#8217;t want to compete with the top VCs in the world for allocation. We want to be their friends. In fact, most of the deals come from friendly VCs or sharing deals with us in return. Of course, we send them all of our deals.</p> <p>And so our pre-seed check size is going to be like 200 K or C check size, like 300 K or eCheck size is 3 25 or beyond words is 7 25. So it&#8217;s fixed check sizes that we&#8217;ll take lots of philosophers available and they&#8217;re always small relative to the lead. And that&#8217;s why it&#8217;s kind of angel investing in venture scale.</p> <p>But I&#8217;m more than happy to talk to you and walk you through the process of how we decide whether we invest or not. If you&#8217;ve&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;teed it up, let&#8217;s do it.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;Yeah. So actually, before I get to the process, I&#8217;ll walk me through the flow. These days, every week we get about 200 inbound deals and often many more than that.</p> <p>And they come from three sources, a third comes from the friendly VCs and every eight to 12 weeks, we sit down the top hundred VCs in the world, covering every siege, every category of geography and we share deal flow. And it goes from everyone the amplifies or whatever first submitted to the pre-seed stage with the.</p> <p>General catalyst, Bessemer Sequoia first walk in the middle, all the way to whatever the tigers at the leader stages, where we bring them all of our best seals. And in return Bain by to some of the deals where we have expertise. So mostly marketplaces about a third of the deal comes from fellow founders.</p> <p>So at this point we&#8217;ve backed almost 2000 founders in the 835 companies. And they come back for their next company. They send us their friends. They&#8217;ve sent us their employees to becoming founders and about a third of the deals come in cold. And it actually, we review even the cold inbound deals and that 16% of the investments we&#8217;ve made have come from cold.</p> <p>And some of the very best investments come from cold. So we get these seals they&#8217;re assigned randomly to one of the team members, unless someone says they want it. We we&#8217;re four partners, three associates, and one analysts. And we reviewed the deal we decide, is it appropriate or not for us or not?</p> <p>And usually about. Three quarters of them are not there. They&#8217;re amazing, but they&#8217;re not for us. They&#8217;re like biotech, hardware, space SAC, and we don&#8217;t feel that we have appropriate expertise. So we review and we, the other 50, we take a one hour call and that one hour call, we try to assess four things and that&#8217;s actually the evaluation criteria.</p> <p>Do we like the team? Do we like the business? Do we like the deal terms? And does it meet or pieces of where the world is heading? Now, let me double click on all four of these. Do we like the team. Every VC in the world will tell you. I only invest in extraordinary people. The thing is that&#8217;s extremely subjective.</p> <p>What is an amazing team? And we&#8217;ve actually looked and thought through what it meant for founders to be very successful for us. It&#8217;s someone who is both a visionary and an execution machine. And that means someone who is extremely eloquent and as extraordinary communication skills. But that&#8217;s not enough because if you only have that, maybe you build a you build a very large company, but one that&#8217;s not profitable or it doesn&#8217;t scale, et cetera, but that&#8217;s, that is necessary.</p> <p>It&#8217;s a necessary but insufficient condition. Because if you have an amazing, if you&#8217;re an amazing or rater or public speaker, you can attract better teams. You&#8217;re going to raise more money. You&#8217;re going to get better PR and you have better. But you also need to be able to execute. And we look at that, that we evaluated over the course of when our call is, how well do you understand the business, your hand?</p> <p>How well do you understand you did economics? And we want you to be able to articulate even pre-launch, we want you to have done the lending page analysis and done a customer, cocky a customer acquisition cost analysis, and compare that to look at what the average order value in the industry is.</p> <p>See what the net margin structure you&#8217;re expecting is. And you should be able to articulate that intelligently and the Venn diagram of people that are amazing storytellers and people that are amazing at execution is actually the intersection is very small and we want people that are both number two, Businesses that are compelling.</p> <p>And for and so for many, some VCs, by the way, number one is enough. And if you&#8217;re pre-seed, pre-launch obviously will, this is the most relevant metric once you&#8217;re post-launch actually we do care, but the other three number two is, do we like the business? Which means for us, is the category large enough?</p> <p>Or can it be larger enough through your execution and, or the unit economics is compelling and we are extraordinarily unit economic driven in marketplaces. And obviously this a little bit different if you&#8217;re in e-commerce is a little bit different if you&#8217;re in SAS. But we try to invest in businesses where you re.</p> <p>You&#8217;re fully loaded customer acquisition costs on a net contribution margin basis after six months. And we&#8217;ll use three X your CAC after 18 months now. And ideally we don&#8217;t know what the LTV to CAC is because you have negative churn. In which case, who knows it&#8217;s 10 to one, 20 to one, et cetera.</p> <p>And if your unit economics are underwater, which can happen, we want you to be able to articulate why with scale. They will automatically fix themselves. Maybe you&#8217;re in a food delivery business. And right now you&#8217;re doing one delivery per hour, you&#8217;re paying $15 an hour. Your delivery guy, your unit economics are under water, but the minute he does three deliveries an hour, it&#8217;s $5 a delivery.</p> <p>And it works. Something like that. Like I don&#8217;t, it should not require every story. The multi-payer so align for you now, economics to work. And we really care about that because otherwise you may build a very large business that doesn&#8217;t make any money, which in the long run doesn&#8217;t really work out. Number three, what are the deal terms?</p> <p>And we are. Yeah, nothing&#8217;s cheap and tough, but we want something that&#8217;s fair. In light of the size of the opportunity, the quality of the team, the traction that you have,&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;what is fair? How do you think about that?&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;So evaluations went up, especially in the late stage last year and, something I covered in one of my macro articles, but the median pre-seed the median valuations didn&#8217;t move up nearly as much as you might think.</p> <p>And crypto falls a little bit of time that route, but then the median pre-seed for us until 2020 was like three to five pre raising one. And last year went up to six, seven, but not that much more. And so if you&#8217;re, pre-seed raising a 30, more likely than not, we&#8217;re not going to do it. The median seed used to be like re three raising at eight and nine pre and last year we went up to 12 and that&#8217;s still reasonable for us and the median a, you used to be, you&#8217;re raising seven at 22 and iRacing 10 at three.</p> <p>And those are fair by our standard with relevant traction. So as your seed ran, we&#8217;re expecting you to have whatever, 150 key in GMV per month with a 10 50% take rate of the, a Rand, you&#8217;re doing 500 K in GMV and the B round, you&#8217;re doing 2 million GMV per month, more or less, it depends on the take rate you have, et cetera. Now there are exceptions, right? Like the rounds you&#8217;ve been reading about in the press are like, oh, they raise a $50 million series, a two 50 pre total, and these crazy. But yeah, we wouldn&#8217;t do those deals. There were amazing for the founders and the companies that actually I can make an argument.</p> <p>Many of the companies that dies because the company, the founders raise too much money at too high, a price. They don&#8217;t grow into that valuation. And that kills the companies because of like anti-pollution provisions and it one more Sudan, Rams. It&#8217;s really one of the top reasons companies die is founders raising too much money at too high a price.</p> <p>So we don&#8217;t do these deals. So the mean by the way is way higher than mean seed a and B is way higher than numbers I gave, but the media actually is not. And we&#8217;re so prolific. We have a good sense of where the market is. And so we stick to our with the exception that if you&#8217;re a returning founder for us, that has done well before we will back you, no matter what, no matter where you build, no matter the raise, et cetera, you don&#8217;t even need to take a call.</p> <p>We&#8217;ll just send you the check. And so we have done a few crazy deals by that&#8217;s the reason it, also many of those deals are out of scope for us. Like we had the founders of a. Vettery, which was a labor marketplace then decided to go. And we sold a deco for a hundred million made of whatever, 8.5 extra money.</p> <p>Everything was great. And then they went on to build Archer, which has an electric flying taxi company. And they&#8217;re like, we&#8217;re launching we&#8217;re pre-seed, 80 pre or whatever, a hundred pre. And we&#8217;re like, okay, here&#8217;s the check&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;is those is the re-upping founders, your lumps,&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;Ever increasing because we have 2000 founders, we backed, put it differently.</p> <p>30% of the portfolio is non marketplace. And many of those are the re-upping founders which is a good sign that they have they&#8217;re coming back and they would have worked with us. But we also do like tools around marketplaces, et cetera. And we&#8217;re doing a lot of stuff. That&#8217;s like an interest things that interest us, which actually leads me to selection criteria.</p> <p>Number four is your idea in line with our thesis of where the world is. And we are extraordinary thesis driven. We have a clear thesis on the future of finance, the future of food, the future of see the future of automotive, the future. And even within marketplaces, we have three core thesis on marketplaces that we look for and we want ideas that are in line with that.</p> <p>And in a way we&#8217;re also mission driven, right? The reason I&#8217;m a VC, the reason I&#8217;m an investor is I, the world is facing a number of fundamental problems. We&#8217;re facing a climate crisis. The, we have a social inequality and inequality of opportunity or social injustice. We have a mental and physical we&#8217;ll be in crisis.</p> <p>And the, I do not think that a. The political system is going to address any of these. And so it&#8217;s up to us as founders to use, to be solutionist to use technology, to find solutions to the world&#8217;s problems. And so it is mission driven from that perspective. I want to try to invest in companies, founders that are trying to address these fundamental problems.</p> <p>And by the way, the bigger, the problem, the bigger, the economic opportunity, and it fits better in a for-profit model because this actually ends up being more scalable and more effective. And here we have it. If we&#8217;d love the team, we&#8217;d love the business. We&#8217;d love the deal terms. And we think that the ideas in library, their thesis, we invest and we can decide that in one hour.</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;That&#8217;s great. What&#8217;s the what are the reasons why a founder should choose to work with you guys? This is my underhand pay.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;And take a swim, the were former founders. So we actually know what it&#8217;s like to operate a business and we can talk extremely intelligently about the complexities of operating a business.</p> <p>We&#8217;ve probably seen more marketplaces than anyone else either. And in addition to the fact that I run marketplace, I&#8217;ve run marketplaces for most of my life. And so when it comes to everything from like building liquidity, do you start with the supplier, the demand, should you go hyper-local or national or international?</p> <p>W should your rake be 5% of 1% of 20% you&#8217;d have, how do you measure it? Let&#8217;s see supply demand. We&#8217;re probably more. Versed. Any other investors out there in this category in terms of being able to help you and last but not least, we&#8217;re in an ma because we don&#8217;t lead and we don&#8217;t price. And we have these amazing connections with all the other VCs, we will get you funded.</p> <p>Like our superpower is we will get, if you need help raising your filling this round, we will do that for you. And more importantly, and most people do not need help raising a specific, the ran they&#8217;re typically talking to us about but if they, when they go to the a, when they go to the beach and they go to the sea, we will ensure them to whomever, like first of our grade lock and Driessen whomever is right for them.</p> <p>We will make the intros and is extremely valuable for them because it directs the fundraising and makes it a lot simpler. We will give them feedback on like them, but back on the pitch on the process. And it&#8217;s also super efficient because you&#8217;d we have 850 companies in the portfolio and yet.</p> <p>We&#8217;re often the most value added investor these founders have because we really focus on when to help them, we&#8217;ll do, we&#8217;ll help them right before they go fundraising the next ran and that&#8217;s the most valuable for them.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;Okay. So there, there is a implicit piece of this that I think is the most interesting.</p> <p>It&#8217;s the sheer volume of your portfolio, right? There are a couple of firms out there that have huge volumes Techstars. My buddy, over at David phone number Techstars has a huge volume. He&#8217;s had a very different model than you. You have a huge volume. It&#8217;s not as common. Most firms are going out there and targeting 25 deals in a portfolio.</p> <p>Is something there about what is your thinking around the optimal volume in a portfolio?&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;First of all this is a reflection of my personality and not there&#8217;s no intelligent portfolio construction. So I actually have done the research. And what is the ideal portfolio construction by the portfolio of F J labs is completely built.</p> <p>Bottom line. We meet people. If we&#8217;d like them, we invest. If we don&#8217;t like them, we don&#8217;t invest. And at the end of the year, the chips fall where they may, and it just so happens. Of course, there&#8217;s more seed deals and ideals, more aid deals and deals and CDLs, there&#8217;s more U S deals than European deals or European deals in India and Brazil deals.</p> <p>And so if you look at our portfolio for a number of deals for of, we&#8217;re mostly seated a then a few B&#8217;s and very few season and not too many pre CD there. And then we&#8217;re 55% us Canada. We&#8217;re 25% Europe. We&#8217;re 10% Brazil, India. We&#8217;re like the rest of the world and really all over the world.</p> <p>But it&#8217;s not by design. Now in terms of number of deals to answer your question specifically, is I diverged on portfolio construction. The I actually I think there are many problems to solve in the world and I like finding ways to address many of these because we choose not to compete with the major VCs.</p> <p>We could actually not run a concentrated portfolio. So first of all, by design, if I wanted to invest in 30 companies, I would need to be a lead and I would need to ride like five, 10, $15 million trucks. Then the entire strategy. Of working with the other VCs and being their friend and other competitor becomes invalidated.</p> <p>But more importantly, as a reflection of my personal philosophy, I just like, meeting lots of interesting people and being exposed to all these different areas. And I get I, now I have a great sense of what&#8217;s happening in like everything from climate to to automotive, to real estate.</p> <p>And I think it&#8217;s fascinating there also the corollaries between these other industries, which are the marketplace dynamics so much closer to people suspect. I find that fascinating. And so it&#8217;s more a reflection of my personality, but that said there is data, but what is the correct portfolio size and angel listed and analysis of what your return profile looks like based on the number of deals you have.</p> <p>And basically because venture follows a power law. The best deals return, do most of the returns you need to be in those best deals. And the best way to be in those best deals is essentially to be in every deal. And so the angel was study, which actually was published in peer reviewed and all that is the more diverse your professor of your portfolio, the higher your IRR and your returns that you should invest in all qualified.</p> <p>And they have a definition of what qualified beans deals possible. Now, the reason most VCs are not built that way by the way, is actually driven by the LPs. So LPs heat that diversity. Because they see their jobs as themselves picking the VCs that are more specialized. So the LPs are like, oh, I&#8217;m going to have this fund.</p> <p>That&#8217;s going to be my series, a B2B SAS company. I&#8217;m going to have this one. They&#8217;re going to be my series B DDC e-commerce in Europe, whatever. And they do, they&#8217;re like little funds of funds, strategy and fund that does all that for them. They really don&#8217;t like, because in a way it&#8217;s like the job they should be doing.</p> <p>And so LPs are not super keen on that diversified strategy. And so it wouldn&#8217;t work for most, but it really works. And the benefit is over longer periods of time. We&#8217;re always going to be in the title. That&#8217;s solid before now and anyone fund life, by the way, we&#8217;re never going to be top decile because if you imagine a fund, eh, is hyper concentrated, they do 10 investments.</p> <p>One of those is a hundred X. They&#8217;re going to be at a 10 X funds and they&#8217;re going to be topped us all, but they&#8217;re going to have massive variability, next fund they&#8217;re 10 may not hit and they made Richard money. And by the way, most VC funds actually don&#8217;t return cashflow cash money beyond the S and P the top Cortel does.</p> <p>And the top quartile is actually highly correlated over, over fund life by most do not it our case. We I&#8217;ve been, if you include all of my history as an angel investor and but not as a founder, right? I&#8217;m not including my benefit. The equity I got into companies I&#8217;ve founded on the 270 exits we&#8217;ve had a 45% realize I are over 24 years either.</p> <p>That&#8217;s I don&#8217;t know where that ranks. It has to be in the top 10%, maybe in the top 1% over that time, Peter.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;Given that you&#8217;re diversifying so much, is the core value add more sourcing or is it more deal selection? Because one of the things, theoretically, arguably the best portfolio is one investment, all the money in the world and the best company, the best returns, that&#8217;s it.</p> <p>But the presumption there is that someone could be a good enough deal picker and get access to it. The core issue for a lot of VCs is they&#8217;re not great deal pickers. So how do you think about this? Is that the message to LPs like, Hey look, we&#8217;re good deal pickers, but we really don&#8217;t have to be because we play the game so broadly.</p> <p>Is that part of the narrative for you?&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;Not really. So we were actually would argue we&#8217;re very good deal pickers. We will buy often. We will not be in the top 0.1% of deals by the way, because we&#8217;re so sensitive on price. And we&#8217;re so sensitive on unit economics, either like we would have passed the Facebook, we would have fastened Google because neither of them had business models when they launched, nor could they articulate where those models, the, those those models were.</p> <p>But we have a lot of singles and doubles and triples. So even though our portfolio is so broad, we&#8217;ve actually made money in over 50% of our exits which for a seed, mostly seed fund is extraordinary. Last year we had 41 exits, we made my name 24, we lost one in 17. And obviously you make a lot more on the 24th and you lose on the 17.</p> <p>So I think we were very good pickers, number one, but two, obviously our deal flow is amazing because we built a brand as these founder friendly. Guys who&#8217;ve decided after you investor died, who were super helpful. And if you&#8217;re doing anything marketplace related, by the way, marketplace, let me define it pretty widely as if you&#8217;re building something that&#8217;s an intermediary between a seller of something and an a at a buyer or something.</p> <p>And that thing could be anything. So to me, most of FinTech is the marketplace because, think of Clarita. It&#8217;s an intermediary between providers of capital. Typically the banks will give you the lines of credit and consumers that are borrowing. And many people wouldn&#8217;t think of it that way.</p> <p>But to me, those dynamics, if you&#8217;re matching sellers, the buyers, regardless of the category it falls in the marketplace definition for us, which is obviously why we can invest at 300 marketplaces in a year.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;Okay. So there&#8217;s a little bit of learning here. I think you&#8217;re a bit of a pioneer in this type of volume for something outside of an accelerator incubator model.</p> <p>Yeah. Whereas this model gone wrong that you had to correct. What did you learn along the way? That&#8217;s nuanced to not being a VC and not being an investor, but being a high volume VC or high volume investor,&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;The way luck what&#8217;s I don&#8217;t know if it has gone wrong in the sense that we can typically.</p> <p>First of all, I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s necessarily easily replicable by most because we are in extraordinary privileged position to answer also part of the previous question where the deals come to us, right? Like most associates and analysts and most VC firms spend their time like networking and finding deals.</p> <p>In our case, we&#8217;re like drinking at the fire hose of incoming deals and we&#8217;re reviewing the incoming deals and we would like to do more at boundaries, just we&#8217;re too busy, previewing main band. And we have the 200 Ben bands. We&#8217;d there&#8217;s. Yeah, we do miss seals as a result of that. So I D we are trying to change that to some extent, even though, so first of all, there&#8217;s the, part of the reason I can share my entire strategy online, including everything, the deal memos, the philosophy, et cetera, is even if you had all of it in your mind would encode it, even though probably hard to do without the 24 years of like ad bats of seeing 5,000 companies a year without a deal flow.</p> <p>So I really replicable now where it&#8217;s gone wrong. Yep. Sorry.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;And as I say, FJ labs is a&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;marketplace. Yes, we are our marketplace. Absolutely. We&#8217;re matching founders with money, from our LPs. And by the way, our LPs I&#8217;m the largest LP in the fund, right? Like about 450 million we&#8217;ve deployed to date, over a hundred million of that is my own money.</p> <p>Maybe one 50. I actually, haven&#8217;t tried to look at it too closely because this started as a frankly personal investments for my partner. I said myself again, the accidental VC thing. One more thing. I know, I didn&#8217;t answer the question. One more thing we do very differently by the way is the following.</p> <p>So we. We don&#8217;t reserve capital for follow-on. So we&#8217;ll invest that of whatever fund is currently active. The follow-ons. So we tell our, because we don&#8217;t always follow on we&#8217;ll evaluate follow-ons as though they were new investments, knowing what we know now, the company of the team would the terms, would we invest?</p> <p>And often the answer is we love the team. We&#8217;d love the company, but the valuation is insane, so we&#8217;re not taking our Paratas. And so we&#8217;re, we&#8217;ve been following on and maybe 33% of the deals. But as a result, it doesn&#8217;t make sense to reserve capital fellows in a fund. So we do it in other funds, which leads me to the issues in a way we face, right?</p> <p>Like the problems we face. As we have had a really hard time, much harder than ever to expected raising capital other than the capital that keep to us automatically. So we&#8217;ve had these LPs that are like friends. They&#8217;re like, here&#8217;s a check, they know&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;you were, I know your success,&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;those exactly, or strategics that we&#8217;ve worked with from across many years who want to exposure where we do or family offices.</p> <p>And so there, the capital&#8217;s come, but pitching institutional investors has been really so far. We don&#8217;t have a single institutional investment partner differently. They don&#8217;t love. Anything about what I just described the hyper diversification, because they feel that in a way it&#8217;s their job to find different funds that cover different areas and hyper diversification number of deals.</p> <p>They don&#8217;t like that. We&#8217;re multi-stage, they don&#8217;t like that real multi geography. They don&#8217;t like that. The follow on strategy is in whatever fund is currently active in which versus, having capital reserve followings in the original funds. And so all of that. And so it&#8217;s been, it&#8217;s taken way more time to raise capital than I would have liked.</p> <p>And also as a result, we&#8217;re proudly a much smaller fund that we should be. So right now, we&#8217;ve closed for student 10 million of the new fund and you find. It&#8217;s three to 500 million, five, really a hard cap. I would like to hit it, there&#8217;ll be at least 300 million and it&#8217;s been seven months.</p> <p>It&#8217;s mostly the existing investors. Re-upping yeah, there are new investors like founders that we&#8217;ve backed that have excess exited that are investing in it, et cetera. But again, we have, don&#8217;t have a single institutional investor in the fund because of all the reasons I, and I&#8217;d like to change that because the reality is we should probably, we could be a billion dollar fund with no problem.</p> <p>Despite the not leading, not pricing strategy with given the volume we have if you do, if I do intelligent portfolio structured, like what is the maximum size I can deploy at pre-seed without leading to 25 K or so maximum check size, I could deploy at seed without leading it&#8217;s four 50 at AA could probably write a million.</p> <p>That&#8217;d be, I could probably write 2 million and let&#8217;s see. It could be right, probably right. 5 million and up to 10 million in like the pre IPO Rams. And so if you look at all the deals last year, all the allocations we had, we could have deployed 350 million. And yet we didn&#8217;t have that level of capital.</p> <p>And so we only deploy a hundred million. So what we&#8217;ve done to not run out of money after a year because our LP base is not such that I can actually. Say, oh, instead of three years, we it&#8217;s just one year and now we are re-upping they don&#8217;t want that is at nor could I, because I&#8217;m the biggest art piece.</p> <p>It&#8217;s also driven by my personal cashflow. And so what we did instead is we men decrease her check sizes to not run out of capital. So currently, as I said, our HX size is 3 25 K. It could be a million or beach, X size is 7 25. It could be two and her and frankly, DHX license. So the 25 K and could be 10.</p> <p>And so that&#8217;s been an issue I&#8217;m trying to address it and we&#8217;ll see if we were successful in the future now, in terms of underlying performance and access to deals, et cetera, Matt, I think B hasn&#8217;t been too much of an issue, I guess the other issue, it&#8217;s something we&#8217;ve learned as we&#8217;ve had to build a very big ops team.</p> <p>The team we&#8217;re 30. Which is a lot of people are most people&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;doing, cause it sounds like 10 or so those are investment professionals. What do they, yeah,&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;so yeah. So four partners, three associates. Why now? So eight investment professionals we have two but then we have a big back office team or like the head of operations, the CFO the lawyer, the, all the accountants and the that are in the back office team.</p> <p>And then we have all the support team for them. So when&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;you say 200 deals a year, you mean 200 pounds of paperwork?&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;Yeah. Let&#8217;s do a lot to do. Yeah. Everything, stock, purchase agreements, follow ons, legal approvals, exit, there&#8217;s infinite back office work to do. And actually one more thing we haven&#8217;t done is we&#8217;re currently not gap dot a gap accounting, because like, how do you do gap accounting on.</p> <p>800 startups and we don&#8217;t even, we want to be the founder friendly guys and so doing an evaluation of each company in the portfolio when they&#8217;re like seed is a massive exercise that most, firms, which is another reason we haven&#8217;t been able raised institutional money. And maybe we need to have bite the bullet and do it.</p> <p>In fact, we&#8217;re currently talking to Mike CBO and YC and, people like that, like how do you guys do it? And we probably need to buy that bullet at some point. But yeah it&#8217;s a lot of the issues that like you don&#8217;t think about when you&#8217;re dealing, when we&#8217;re lower volume from,&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;okay, now you guys are the marketplace experts, and that&#8217;s very clear what are three rules of thumb that marketplace entrepreneurs listen to this need to know the things that are like, Hey, these are the baseline pro tips, right?</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;When you&#8217;re building your marketplace and you have your chicken neck problem the. Place to start is with supply because the sellers on the platform are financially motivated to be on the platform. And I would go to them and set said, low expectation and saying, Hey, we&#8217;re launching this. We&#8217;re free to launch at the beginning.</p> <p>And we take just a rake, a B in there, but here&#8217;s the key. And here&#8217;s the pro tip. It&#8217;s easy to have infinite supply, but if you&#8217;re drown your marketplace and infinite supply and you&#8217;d have demand for it, they&#8217;re all going to turn. They&#8217;re not going to be engaged. So when you launch, you curate the very best supply for it in one vertical, in one category, maybe even in one geography, like in one zip code, and then you find demand for that.</p> <p>And first of all, there are the very best. So you make sure they&#8217;re engaged. You make sure they understand where the product is. You understand what their needs. Then you find demand for them, whatever way it is. It could be sales driven. It could be marketing, it could be Google, it could be Facebook. And by the way, I actually like paid marketing to work because that means it&#8217;s scalable kind of infinitely you find demand and what you wanted to get to for that supply.</p> <p>And again, very limited supply, highly curated. You want to represent. If it&#8217;s an item for sale, you want the probability of the item for sale to be about 20, 25%. That&#8217;s when you have pretty good liquidity, if it&#8217;s a services business, you want to represent at least 20% of the revenues of that provider.</p> <p>And then once you have that at that scale, then you scale the supply up one more like whether it&#8217;s in the same zip code or gee sitter, adjacent category, and then you match. So you always, you start with supply, you bring them in and then you scale both always in parallel. A problem is it&#8217;s so easy to get supplied that you could launch.</p> <p>I could launch a locksmith marketplace and put every lots within New York on it, but then you have no demand for it. And so the supply is going to churn. There&#8217;s gonna be no engagement and the users, we awful, et cetera. So doing that is, is key. So that&#8217;s I guess somebody human mind or like magic trick number one, magic trick.</p> <p>Number two is, as you start thinking about. How do I monetize? How much do I charge? Who do I charge? And what is the correct percentages? Because you see marketplaces like stock photography, marketplaces that takes 75%. And then you have some B2B marketplaces where it&#8217;s essentially 0% rate or 0.1% because of extreme price sensitivity.</p> <p>And so the correct way to assess that is you look at the less toxicity of supply and the less, the city of demands and you take your rake on the more and elastic part of the curve. And the more elastic it is, the higher the rake is that turns out that in most cases you can take 10 to 20% from the supply side, but it&#8217;s not a hardest at roll.</p> <p>It really depends on how fragmented your supply and demand is. And by the way, the more fragmented it is, the better it is for you as the marketplace, right? If you&#8217;re in a market where there&#8217;s three or four suppliers and three or four consumers, You&#8217;re probably not a marketplace. You&#8217;re probably a distributor.</p> <p>And your ability to price and take margin is going to be very limited. And that&#8217;s why I be very careful of playing in like highly concentrated industries. It happened to me and not really a market place, but I was I ran a company that was selling ringtones to the mobile operators.</p> <p>And in the early days it was okay. But like between 2001, when I launched in 2005 and my mom, I sold in 2004, but 2005, when I left all the operators, consolidated merge with each other, like singular with, at and T Verizon with they&#8217;ll remember whom I&#8217;ll be like. And also when we went from. 50 customers.</p> <p>So four and on the music come to a five and on the music company side, they all merge with each other like BMG and whatever, and EMI and whomever. And they also went from like many to three or four. And so all of a sudden there were four and five and it wasn&#8217;t an issue until we had 50 million in annual revenues.</p> <p>But the minute we hit 50 million annual revenues, we started being seen by the VP level at these companies. And they started seeing us in their P and L and they started squeezing and squeezing. So in 2004, with my company, we did 50 million in revenues and 4 million in profits. In 2005, we did 200 million revenues and seven and eight in profits because they basically divided by our margin by three.</p> <p>And so that&#8217;s not a marketplace, you&#8217;re a distributor, you&#8217;re a facilitator, but it&#8217;s not a proper marketplace.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;Okay. So now you guys do more than invested FJ labs. I know this is evolving. You guys have been a studio, right? You&#8217;ve been building companies. You don&#8217;t talk about what you guys do when the method for it.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;Sure. The reason we were a studio is really, I say, bang. It&#8217;s what do I like to do? I like to build companies. I could invest in companies. I love that. And so every year we&#8217;d be coming up with ideas and it was like, try to build them either personally and go run them, which I did for a few of them or with entrepreneurs and residences.</p> <p>And we created through happenstance, a program that ended up being successful. So what happened is. I don&#8217;t even remember the year, maybe 2010 or 2011. This young founder reach out to me and he&#8217;s Hey, I&#8217;m McKinsey, Harvard business school. I am I&#8217;m at HBS right now, but I&#8217;ve raise 500 K and trying to build this company.</p> <p>And Eddie kept harassing me. The thing is I was running billing oil, super busy writing a relaxer. I&#8217;d like, so that 10,000 employees in 30 countries, and I was getting emails like that, like dozens every week. So I ignored him and ignored them. And one day he&#8217;s Hey, I&#8217;m at the door of your office, can we meet?</p> <p>And I&#8217;m like, okay, maybe I&#8217;ll beat him. Maybe I&#8217;ll leave. Let me be. And he was building like some sort of chat roulette for competitor, and I&#8217;m like, terrible idea. Won&#8217;t work return the money to your investors, call it a day and. Cultural back the next day. He&#8217;s oh, thank you for the radical honesty and candor to when I&#8217;ve been like honest with me.</p> <p>I talked to my investors, I offered to return the money and they said, no, let&#8217;s find an idea. And another idea. So now why don&#8217;t you and I look on fighting an idea together. I&#8217;d have I&#8217;d like to know the last thing I want to have time. And I kept saying, no, I kept saying no. Then he emailed me a check for $5,000.</p> <p>He&#8217;s I&#8217;m going to pay you $5,000 a month to work for you. And I&#8217;m like a fight. Keep your money. Yeah. You&#8217;re super motivated clearly. Let&#8217;s let&#8217;s see if we can do this. And in a way it it was useful because it forced me. The first thing I made him do is help me filter my inbound deal flow.</p> <p>And at that time it was 200 a week. It was like 40 a week. And I was like, can I teach someone else? Might Euro six K I could have fight how to evaluate a team, how to validate if the business attractive, what my thesis is what appropriate deal terms are. And can I have him, do that for me and not pass the next Uber and turns out that while he was useful, because it forced me to structure my thinking on what my Euro six were and teach them to him.</p> <p>And once he started seeing all the deal flow, he started getting ideas, sorta applying the same criteria to his own ideas. And then we started 50 ideas then became 10, then five and two, then one, then we pivoted and that company became adore me and adore me is a laundry DDC, commerce subscription company, both econ not which today is I don&#8217;t know, over 200 million revenues, I don&#8217;t know, 20 million tickets.</p> <p>It might be much more than that, but I&#8217;d like at least that and crushing it. And the last thing he did. And I told them too, it was like, find me your replacement. And so we started a program where we would go to the first year of business school at Harvard MIT, Wharton, Columbia, Stanford, we&#8217;d say, Hey, you&#8217;re S you&#8217;re going to join us.</p> <p>Full-time during the summer between your first and second year, half the summer, you&#8217;re going to be taught venture capital. Not because we want you to be VCs, but because we want you to see where the ideas are, how to pitch how to write a great effective deck and keep your pulse on the fingers of the market, your fingers on the pulse of the market.</p> <p>And number two, pap the summer, you&#8217;re going to be in the company we&#8217;re currently trying to build. So you understand what it&#8217;s like to be an early stage founder, that profile. So the reason we took these schools by the way, even. On average, we&#8217;d rather have people that don&#8217;t go to business school.</p> <p>It&#8217;s frankly, it&#8217;s just an easy filtering mechanism. And, but we only wanted people who wanted to be founders. And most of them, the profile was they were product managers or city managers of one of the larger marketplaces, like Instacart or Uber or or Airbnb. And they want to now go and do it on their own.</p> <p>And and there were an HBS like looking for ideas and maybe improving their skills that like finance, something like that. So they join us for the summer during their second year they&#8217;re part-time 15, 20 hours a week. Mostly helping us filter inbound deal flow. And then when we graduate.</p> <p>They become full-time EIRs meaning we pay them. I don&#8217;t know where the salary was, like maybe 135 K years. I&#8217;m like that to look for ideas with us, they look for their own ideas and we meet like on a weekly basis to iterate. Now, also every twice a year, we bring the entire team investment team, everyone like in the team together once in February and once in August and July, usually my house interest in kaikos who are in Canada.</p> <p>And we have to all come up with ideas that don&#8217;t exist in the world of tech that should and out of these. And we usually come up with like a hundred, a pop or 150 up opposite, two to 300 ideas a year of which they can actually go and go deeper and pick some of these et cetera. And we typically would take two weeks.</p> <p>I bet there&#8217;d be some churn because some people decided to build companies that were not, for us, some people decided they don&#8217;t want to be founders after all, et cetera. And we ended up building a lot of companies like that. We some successful some not so much. So we built a company called BP, which should have been Carvana, raise 150 million and was worth 700 million in like in famously blew up.</p> <p>We, the main mission is we try to have the founders fail fast. So we try to build a company. We build a company called punch show, which is like an entrenched company and it didn&#8217;t grow big enough. And so we decide close it, but then we&#8217;ve had a lot of companies that are really doing well. So we&#8217;re in Rebag, which is a handbag marketplace.</p> <p>I think they&#8217;re going to do 200 million of revenues this year and I&#8217;m like that that is that the founder is amazing. We were in properly, which is a Zillow Trulia meets compass meets a open door for Canada. Absolutely crushing it. Last round was like, multi hundred billion dollar valuation we&#8217;re investors&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;in that with you great company.</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;Yeah. Yeah. So I&#8217;m chairman of that one and unsure is one of the best a EIRs we&#8217;ve ever had also we&#8217;re the best founders we&#8217;ve ever had. The team is amazing. We&#8217;re in Mundey, which is a trade finance company between Mexico and the us helping us and B some Mexico export of the U S and there, they grew from zero to like tens of millions and originations in a year and a half.</p> <p>Like my, my, I know that it sends really definitely over 10 million might be over 20 million now. We&#8217;re in like Seafair, a marketplace for helping shipping companies find seafarers, a work rise for shipping where we&#8217;re in a umami card versus vertical. And grocer in the Asian category, we&#8217;ve created Milko, which is a kind of Shopify for restaurants, helping people build digital brands in food and helping them operate restaurants operate better and more effectively.</p> <p>Many of these that actually I ran one of them for a while, actually to 2014, 2015, I built a mobile classified site in the U S called Salud, which I then merged with wallop pop. I ran Walla pop. USAA was true, but a wallet pop. And then we merged that with let go, which now of course has merged with offer up.</p> <p>So now it&#8217;s offer up and that&#8217;s a multi-billionaire company, which I ran in 20 14, 20 15. And the CTO model is as follows. Very different, very generous because we do very few. We, you come in, we pay you 135 K until you find idea, once you find the idea we put in the first seven 50. With 65% of the capital going to the team, 35% to us.</p> <p>And then we commit the next 2 million at either 10 million valuation or market, if you can get better terms but we have the right invest 2 million in your next round. And and so the T it&#8217;s not at all, like some of the other studios out there where the teams get five, 10, 50%, or in our case, they started at 65% and actually real capital, right?</p> <p>Like you guys have got 2.7, 5 million. So if you don&#8217;t want to go to market for the next first two years, you don&#8217;t really need to. And that model&#8217;s really worked well. Intrusive, like it&#8217;s fine. We build amazing companies. The problem is it&#8217;s time consuming and my time is not scalable. I&#8217;m still, I&#8217;m on the board of and these companies it&#8217;s the opposite model.</p> <p>We&#8217;re coming up with the ideas. And often I even rent product like Rebag and lofty. I was like, I went to Ukraine and Romania and I hired the team. I re I was like scrum master. I was like, I was actually writing the stories and managing the teams. I was working day and night for them for many years.</p> <p>And now I&#8217;m still on the board of like most of them ones I just mentioned. And so that model, it&#8217;s amazing. But it&#8217;s just too time consuming. And so putting that on hold for now, but we still have two or three more to build. We still have two more to build as we speak, despite the fact that we&#8217;re not recruiting a new batch and in 20, 22&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;only so much for breeze.</p> <p>That&#8217;s a lot of sounds like you&#8217;re spread pretty thin if you&#8217;re doing.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;Yeah. Yeah. Plus we have a SPAC plus the a week plus I do a lot of stuff in crypto, independently. What we do at FJ yadda I&#8217;m spread too thin as is. And so my current what I&#8217;d like to find a way to do while I. The reason I built the team to 31 is actually to do all the, a lot of the stuff I don&#8217;t like to do, which the good news is that the problem is when you&#8217;re going to something, the world sends you, the universe sends you more of that.</p> <p>And so the temptation of course is to do more and more. But I need to find a way to be more scalable. And I think putting aside started the studio to spite of how much fun it is, eh, and just focusing on the venture side because it&#8217;s more scalable and POS probably more useful for humanity in the long run, but in terms of like placing bets in so many categories to try to address it, all the world&#8217;s problems is broadly a better allocation of time.</p> <p>And I can tell&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;you&#8217;re inspired by it. Yeah. You&#8217;ve had a lot of success. I think that&#8217;s safe to say maybe an understatement of the day. Did you grow up.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;Yes and no is the, which is a weird answer. My great grandmother so I greet great grandmother in the late 18 hundreds inherited a hotel from when her husband passed away.</p> <p>And instead of doing the done thing and and marrying again, she had decided to just take over the hotel, which was like fully embedded. She turned it around, made it super profitable, then bought another one. Then another one, she ended up owning all of the luxury hotels in nice owning half of the residential real estate of niece, basically becoming the wealthiest thought.</p> <p>And if not the wealthiest, one of the wealthiest women in the world in the late 18 hundreds She gave it all to, she had multiple children, she gave it all to, or oldest Augustus who was actually an effective manager and didn&#8217;t lose any of it, but a force by the time. But he didn&#8217;t do the same thing.</p> <p>And by the time. It&#8217;s kissed took over. It was split between all of them and they all spent basically the new VAR reach. All they want to do is hang out with the queen of England and the prince of Monaco. And by the time of my grandparents&#8217; generation, by the time my parents came along, there was basically nothing left.</p> <p>And so the, I imagine a generation that had been brought up with the idea that they were going to be wealthy, never need to work. It&#8217;s the silver spoon in their math, and yet didn&#8217;t have anything already be to show for it. And so my father had started from scratch. So when w we were living, the four of them.</p> <p>Brother and I have two brothers, so I&#8217;d like when we started at my brother and my parents, like in a studio apartment and he started working for this French billionaire as an endless, and they&#8217;re a leveraged buyout firm in the seventies. And so we came from, even though we had come from family that had a lot of money by the time my parents level, there was nothing left.</p> <p>And so we started with nothing. I went to public school but in 1989 when I was 14 my father&#8217;s father was became grossly of the ranks. We can to CEO of the company that that, that guide bought through an LPO. And they sold it for whatever, like a billion dollars. I think my dad had a 5% of it in stock options.</p> <p>And it&#8217;s like the pre not venture capital per se, but like a similar model and overnight became wealthy. And actually you retired at the age of 41, which I think was a huge mistake. But I guess it didn&#8217;t live through it because I, at that point I&#8217;d already, I was living with my grandmother and niece and then I&#8217;d left for college and probably out of ego.</p> <p>I decided I didn&#8217;t want to take any require, ask for any help. So I paid for college. Most of them, I saw, for my living expenses myself. So I had to work. Like I went to Princeton and when I was 17, but I&#8217;d like to work four jobs plus build my first company to pay for it, et cetera. Whereas probably the easier thing would have been asked my parents for money.</p> <p>So because at that point of time we did have money. Cause that was two years after my father had become wealthy. But because I had left kind of my parents, I was living with my grandmother. I also didn&#8217;t really notice a shift. And so I came from an upper-class family that was probably middle-class in income.</p> <p>But that rose through the ranks. And then all of a sudden became wealthy at the. A 50 for me by my parents. My parents are getting,&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;but from a life experience standpoint, it sounds like you had more modest sensibilities as a kid than maybe generations before you what&#8217;s. How has money changed your life now because you&#8217;ve had tremendous success?</p> <p>I know that is challenging for a lot of entrepreneurs who are going through these cycles. What have been the ups and downs of this evolution for you?&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;I don&#8217;t know first of all, as a kid, I was just built differently from everyone else in my family. I was like really serious, like until post-college I was like Shelton, for me it was all about like intellectual pursuits and getting a pluses and skipping all the grades and winning the Olympiads.</p> <p>And I was completely antisocial not at all a good public speaker or. Just different. Like I cared about like studying economics and philosophy and getting a pluses and nothing else and map like no interest outside of that. And no time for anyone, including by the way, my family, I was extremely arrogant and condescending as a kid of you guys are not smart enough and worthy enough of my time and attention, including my parents, by the way, I was like, so it&#8217;s funny because in a way I was the best kid ever, like always a plus is going to bed early, not doing anything bad, et cetera, but it was also.</p> <p>At difficult kid in the sense that I&#8217;d like, didn&#8217;t provide much love. It was like, yeah, you guys are not smart enough for me. Leave me be I&#8217;ve learned. And it&#8217;s interesting because I have come to value people, I think as you&#8217;ve you put the emphasis and value and things you were really good at.</p> <p>And of course that I was really good at being smart and not so good at anything else. And so of course that was my prison by which to value the world. And as you become older and also more confident and successful, you&#8217;re also realize there&#8217;s so many ways to be and to live. And it&#8217;s not my ways a personal value judgment, but there are many other ways that are absolutely amazing.</p> <p>That to answer your question directly it&#8217;s a little bit of a non-sequitur know. So I became wealthy and in 2004, I sold a zingy for $80 million and I own 53% of the company. So I made $43 million net of tax. It was like 26.5. And what&#8217;s interesting is in a way it didn&#8217;t change anything.</p> <p>I still lived in a studio apartment for a few more years. I think the big purchase of that time, it was the next box of TV and two tennis rackets mostly driven by how busy I was. Like we were growing, we grew from 15 million in revenue. So for it&#8217;s two hundred and two oh five. I can moving offices every four months and thinking we re-did that.</p> <p>And like it kept, we kept getting bigger and bigger offices and hiring. So it didn&#8217;t really hit me completely. What&#8217;s interesting is my first company where I built in 98, 99, like my company on paper is worth hundreds of millions and that it comes so easily that I didn&#8217;t realize how much money that was like at 28.</p> <p>I started my bath company at 23 is like an eBay of Europe. We had a buyout offer. 300 million at 40% a company, I was going to make $120 million. And again I&#8217;m like, man, of course everyone makes money to me. Other than that, it&#8217;s just a bubble. Everything seemed easy. I did not realize how, because you, 23, you don&#8217;t know any better.</p> <p>And also I never really lacked for money. And also I never really, I never money was never an objective. It&#8217;s like a means. It&#8217;s not even a Misa net. I want to be a tech founder. That&#8217;s all I wanted to be. And whether or not I was going to be financially successful was irrelevant, which is why, by the way, in 2006, After the bubble bursts and, I made I went from hero to zero basically, and was bankrupt in 2001.</p> <p>Then I realized maybe I should have taken a secondary for a couple of million, which is people will offer it. And I&#8217;d be like, nah, a couple billion who need, I want to be Bebe. The founder of there&#8217;s all in. I don&#8217;t want to take money off the table, et cetera. I&#8217;d like a more to prove I want to be the ideal entrepreneur.</p> <p>And of course for me, I thought like a couple of millions, nothing. It forced at that point, I was thinking that having literally nothing in my bank account that I realized, oh shit, no money is really hard to make. It&#8217;s very easy to lose. It&#8217;s very hard to make. But in 2001, when I would have built zingy.</p> <p>This internet thing is it&#8217;s dead. It&#8217;s small. It&#8217;s not big and no big deal. At the end of the day, I didn&#8217;t do this for the money. I did this to be, I wanted to create something and nothing. I&#8217;d love tech. So I&#8217;m going to build a new company. It&#8217;s probably not going to be big and it doesn&#8217;t matter. Now, lo and behold, it turns out I made sure that it wasn&#8217;t dead.</p> <p>Despite every company had got on web van Petlock com MCI work on everyone had got under. And at that point in time and VC soft investing, but came back and B was financially successful. Now what has done for me since is I value experiences and I value my time. And so what I use the money for is I have a, I have a Butler or a an estate manager and who&#8217;s also my chef and does all of the offline things that I don&#8217;t like to do, so I don&#8217;t cook. I don&#8217;t clean. I et cetera. I have a virtual assistant in the Philippines and managers of my entire life. I. I go heli skiing, which is extraordinary, expensive, by the way for fun. Now I don&#8217;t own any physical goods per CyberKnife. I have a house in Turks. I have a house and I have a department, New York avenue.</p> <p>I have a house in Revelstoke, but I don&#8217;t have, yeah. I really have a sense of cars or clothing and luxury, et cetera, all those things. I don&#8217;t think mattered too much for me. I think physical goods are anchors. But for me it&#8217;s more using the financial success I&#8217;ve had as a means of buying Experiences.</p> <p>I love helping people around me and I give millions a year, but beyond giving millions a year to charity, I actually give millions a year to my friends as a means of changing their lives and making the, making a difference on the day to day of their life. And it&#8217;s a bit non-traditional other way.</p> <p>But these are people I&#8217;ve known for 20, 30 years. And so I tell them, don&#8217;t expect it to be recurring. It just happens when I have an exited where I feel you&#8217;re in need and it&#8217;s meaningful for them. And I don&#8217;t think it impacts our relationship. So I think it&#8217;s been an amazing tool and it&#8217;s also been amazing to have freedom.</p> <p>Like my dream, for instance, in and FJ labs is actually not to have external investors. If it&#8217;s the maximum I can invest with my current strategy is 300 million a year. If I have 300 million a year of I owed money to deploy, I would do that and not have any external capital. That would be way easier. That would remove the part of my life that I don&#8217;t like of dealing with LPs and fundraising and like and whatever, a gap, accounting and sec registration and all that stuff.</p> <p>I would do that in a heartbeat. Financial success is really a means of free personal freedom to do what you want. When you want to have the experiences you want to have and to help the people around you.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;Was there a moment when you felt like you got your sea legs with being wealthy, where it went from, figuring out what that meant for you to, okay.</p> <p>I got it. I know my framework for how I want to use money to have impact my friends, my personal life, et cetera.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;Eh, happened automatic over time automatically like the. I soon as I add capital, I started investing in startups. So I really stayed all by angel investing in 2005 and I knew I wanted to deploy capital into.</p> <p>To back the, my friends were building companies and to help them realize their dreams and to solve the problems in the world. So that immediately came to me in terms of helping my friends did that leader, but I realized how, what I started considering like a little capital could change.</p> <p>It could make a difference in the lives of my friends, a friend of mine, she was running a dermatology clinic in New York and she was making whatever a half a million a year. And she decided to said to go run a cancer research, live at Harvard and make like whatever, a hundred K a year. Profound difference in her income yet for the world.</p> <p>I thought I was like a massive net positive contribution, but as a result, she could no longer afford like the down payment or a house in Boston. So I paid that for her and I think it&#8217;s the right thing for you and your husband and your kids to be able to love and amazing place. So you can actually do research this meeting folder of the world and that sort of happened.</p> <p>Little by little over time. No, I&#8217;m not sure there was ever like a, oh, this is a correct strategy. Very rapidly. What I did realize is I don&#8217;t, I never followed traditional wealth management advice. You go to these wealth managers or like Goldman or whatever, and they&#8217;re like, oh, you should have 50, 60% equities and 30% bonds and blah, blah, blah, like crazy.</p> <p>None of that ever made any sense to me, I have a complete barbell portfolio where it&#8217;s like a 10% of cash because you want optionality of being able to take advantage of things in crises, 10%, crypto, 10% public Sox of the things that have gone public in my portfolio that I still like and old 10% of real estate that&#8217;s really consumption.</p> <p>And then everything else is like early stage Texas tech stuff. A completely barbell works really well. I realized it was much better at doing that. And ma which is essentially the same thing as like running FJ labs. If your labs are in a ways, a family office, and good on that front. And I made many mistakes.</p> <p>Like I, I lost in a way millions dollars and Billy&#8217;s trying to buy a big chunk of the country to preserve the rainforest, which, taught me something about a rule of law. I lost millions dollars in Dominican Republic doing something at a much smaller scale, instead of hundreds of thousands of acres doing it with 165 acres, wanting to build a big community where I would bring founders and spiritual leaders and and artists to just create and be there with no business model, but like everyone from the mayor to the minister of tourism and environment, all wanted bribes and create an environment that was all super tenable.</p> <p>So lost millions of dollars. Pursuing, if you, these houses, I made many mistakes along the way, but in general, at the end of the day, my true north star of help those around you. Help the world through, in my case, second Vaseline. So like finding solutions, the world&#8217;s problems, and like by yourself and living the life you want to lead has been amazing.</p> <p>By the way, through that process, I did a lot of iteration in 2013. I&#8217;d actually 2012. I gave almost all my physical possessions to charity. I went down to 50 items that fit in a carry on my backpack and my tennis bag. And I went cap surfing and France couches for a year that I went like an Airbnb.</p> <p>I lived in Airbnbs and hotels for three years beyond that all around the world. Like making sure I allocate time to invest in my friends and friendship and my friendships and my family in a way I&#8217;d never done that before.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;And why did you need to do that? Just cause the material items were owning you at some level.</p> <p>Was that the thinking, did you have all the goods to do that? To have related&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;time allocation? If you have like at a country house in Bedford and I would go and it was amazing, right? Like I, it was huge and we played paintball there and like it organized like parties. We played video games the way they gave me a room, et cetera.</p> <p>But at the end of the day I went there because I was paying so much for it, which is the wrong reason to use something. The minute I didn&#8217;t have an apartment, the minute I didn&#8217;t have a house, I was like, okay, dad, I have infinite freedom and flexibility. Where do I want to be? Who is it that I want to be spending time with?</p> <p>And so being, when you have a default, you go to that default, if you remove the default option, you can be way more thoughtful about what it is you really want to do, who it is, what it is you really want to hang out with. And the fundamental problem I was trying to solve for is. As you get older as your friends.</p> <p>And I start getting married, having kids jobs, et cetera. I like the quality of the tea. The texture of your friendships, like changes when you&#8217;re in college, you&#8217;re remaking the world. You&#8217;re starting to you&#8217;re seeing your friends seven days a week. Even at McKinsey, I would see my friends date many days.</p> <p>Many hours every week. And all of a sudden it would came at like the biographical update. I, we see you once every six weeks. And at that point is what happened to your husband and your work, et cetera, and your kids since then? And it&#8217;s fine, but it&#8217;s not the reason that we became friends. We became friends because there was a more fundamental connection and perspective and beliefs of some of the world and extraordinary conversations.</p> <p>And I wanted to rekindle that in, in my thirties, in a eighties, it seemed to have gone away between the age of 25 and whatever 35. And I&#8217;m like, there must be a way to change it. And others were not making the adjustments to their little. Why don&#8217;t I adjust my life to make it happen. And now there are many false starts, right?</p> <p>Like the couch surfing was a total failure because of course it was Dean and cab. The fact that I was at a position in their life and they saw, I&#8217;d like to bring skids to school and go to work, et cetera. The Airbnb thing worked really well until her BB was made illegal. It may most of the major cities and like across New York, all the high-end inventory to spirit then they will tell us all became full.</p> <p>So I was like moving hotels every four days. So that&#8217;s actually the reason I ended up buying an apartment in New York. I was very happy living in like billionaires apartments, for a month, at a time in every neighborhood in New York, hosting dinner parties there. But once I had to live at hotels and move a tell, remember five days, I&#8217;m like, okay, that&#8217;s not viable.</p> <p>And I couldn&#8217;t find high-end re rental inventory. I liked, so I bought a place, but. I guess people don&#8217;t put enough iteration and design and thought into their lives. They follow the default, whereas you can throw stuff on the wall and see what sex and see what sticks for you, right? Like people are built differently and what they want to do and how they want to lead their lives.</p> <p>And they followed the, I guess thing, the default path way too much. Like my life is very non-traditional in general. I do a month in New York than a month intrusive kaikos I&#8217;ll do a month in Canada. Because New York and is socially artistically, professionally extraordinary intense.</p> <p>And if you&#8217;re doing, you&#8217;re not thinking, and then I come to church and I&#8217;m working during the day. I&#8217;m in trucks right now and we&#8217;re doing this call and I have 12 calls today, but I&#8217;ll meditate. I&#8217;ll go, kitesurf, I&#8217;ll play tennis. And I&#8217;ll take the time to read and write and think and be reflective and rebuild my batteries.</p> <p>And then most people don&#8217;t necessarily think through what is right for them in light of their energy level, personality, et cetera. And so that iterative design is alive, made it alive by.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;I love all that. You mentioned through there that you do a lot of charity, which I think is great. I particularly was interested in the buying a Britain forest or attempts to do taking it that further.</p> <p>I would love to hear your take on impact, right? Is there a cause that you&#8217;re passionate about or some particular topic? Let me put it a different way, because my favorite way to ask this question, if you were king now, president king, what is one thing you would change?&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;So I&#8217;m going to give the hyper rational answer to that.</p> <p>Please, if you look at all the policies you could do in the U S and which ones would actually impact wellbeing for people the most it&#8217;s actually, there&#8217;s one thing that has much larger impact on personal outcome than everything else. And in the U S social mobility as a client, it used to be the 95% of people made more money than their parents.</p> <p>Now it&#8217;s about 50% since people born since 1982. And the main reason for that is that the top cities are the ones where all the jobs created for all the opportunities are, have become unaffordable. And the reason there aren&#8217;t affordable is we&#8217;ve passed extraordinarily idiotic, zoning and landscaping laws.</p> <p>And at that, that mean that you cannot build as easily as you should be able to. And there&#8217;s a lot of reasons for that. If your current owner restricting supply means your thing your homes increasing value dramatically. But it&#8217;s extremely bad for like social mobility economic diversity.</p> <p>And so you look at San Francisco, 80% of the city is zoned. Apartments are illegal. You can not have more than two story buildings. And as a result, you have the cities become extremely unaffordable. So if I could change one, one thing is essentially. Remove all air rights, all essentially zoning and construction regulation.</p> <p>Other than a few, see if you&#8217;re not going to be building over whatever central park, but like air rights and city and your city make no sense. Like having these buildings that are less than a hundred year olds old, be like landmark that you can&#8217;t build over them makes no sense. You should be able to build up as much as you can.</p> <p>And we should have unlimited supply. And of course, there&#8217;ll be a lag of eight years or 10 years before things get built and prices adjust. But at that actually solves affordable housing. And when you solve affordable housing, you recreate mobility and your lack of people to get the best jobs. And this is what changes the outcome more than anything else.</p> <p>Now that&#8217;s not a something I&#8217;m investing in any way, shape or form or. Because there&#8217;s crazy nimbyism and political forces against it. And it&#8217;s, it has to be in the U S the rules are like literally like neighborhood by neighborhood. And it&#8217;s so painful. So I, as king, I would do that. That is not where I keep my claim to.</p> <p>Now I&#8217;ve not put a lot of thought into charity. That first of all, what I do at the charity level, it is way more personal and directed will have a much larger impact on the lives of the people I help, but it&#8217;s much more smaller scale. Like in the Dominican Republic, I helps pay for the education of 10,000 kids from K through 12.</p> <p>It&#8217;s amazing for these kids. So it changes their life outcomes, dramatically program.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;You do that through, or you just set that up.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;No, it&#8217;s the dream project that I was funding. And I, but I helped them beyond that. I helped, I built like a tech center where they could learn programming and to have access to computers and internet and find jobs, et cetera.</p> <p>I fund something called the university of the people, which is helping non low-income people basically get us degrees, especially in things like computer science. And there are people from like our over a hundred nations and they often end up getting jobs at Google, Facebook, et cetera.</p> <p>So it&#8217;s been mostly right education, helping people be able to increase their out their life outcomes through adhesion often in the communities where I was living, I lived in the Dr for largest spend, like four or five months a year from 2012 to 2019 2018, the men I&#8217;ve done a lot of that now, separately I&#8217;ve dragged given directly.</p> <p>Contributions to many of my friends and like dozens of them, right? And we&#8217;re talking millions and millions of dollars, it&#8217;s life-changing for them, but I don&#8217;t larger scale. All of that is dwarfed from a social and economic impact by what I do. And as a tech investor, right? Like my tech investments of hundreds and hundreds of companies, I think ultimately will change the lives of billions of people.</p> <p>And yeah, they&#8217;re for profit, but there&#8217;s a fundamental social motivation for them. And I think they will dwarf anything I do on the direct investment and the direct shadow charity frame. That&#8217;s why most of my personal capital is actually allocated to investing technology, to solve the world&#8217;s problems.</p> <p>And I think we will, by the way, I&#8217;m extremely optimistic on how we&#8217;re gonna address climate change, inequality of opportunity, et cetera.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;It&#8217;s been great having you on. Thank you so much for doing this.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Fabrice Grinda:</strong>&nbsp;Thank you for having me</p> <p><strong>MPD:</strong>&nbsp;every time I talked to Fabrice, I feel a little bit smarter, very grateful for him being on the show today and grateful to have him in my orbit, working together and doing deals together. It&#8217;s a great guy. If you liked what you heard, please hook us up with a like or a five-star review. This is my basic pandering.</p> <p>Help us out. You can find me on Twitter at MPD. And to hear more of my conversations with innovators, subscribe on YouTube, Facebook, or any major podcast platform. Just search for innovation with Mark Peter Davis.</p>

<p>I had a fun conversation with Mark Peter Davis of Interplay about my love of marketplaces and all &hellip; <a href="https://fabricegrinda.com/the-king-of-marketplaces-with-fabrice-grinda-of-fj-labs/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;My conversation with Mark Peter Davis of Interplay&#8221;</span></a></p>

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My conversation with Mark Peter Davis of Interplay. Categories - FJ Labs, Interviews &amp; Fireside Chats. Date-Posted - 2022-03-30T15:47:30 . I had a fun conversation with Mark Peter Davis of Interplay about my love of marketplaces and all things FJ Labs. The discussion was peppered with lots of entrepreneurial advice and thoughts on impact. Their Episode Description: This week I chatted with Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner at FJ Labs. FJ Labs is a VC that specializes in marketplaces and invests in every geography in every category at any stage. As Fabrice puts it they do angel investing at venture scale, meaning they don’t lead rounds but do a massive number of investments every year. Last year they made almost 200 investments. Fabrice is super interesting beyond being a VC. He’s been a serial entrepreneur for a couple of decades at this point and has interesting views on wealth and impact. He started what was essentially the ebay for Europe and then OLX, the Craigslist for the rest of the world. During our chat he shares some incredibly useful tips for entrepreneurs &#8211; especially for those who are interested in marketplaces. We talk all about his approach to venture capital, how FJ Labs operates and makes decisions and much more. Enjoy. Show Links: Follow us on Twitter:&nbsp;@fabricegrinda,&nbsp;@mpdGuest Links:&nbsp;FJ LabsGuest Articles:&nbsp;Pandemic, Populism and Policy Failure – The Surprising Case for Optimism in 2020Podcast Links:&nbsp;YouTube,&nbsp;Twitter,&nbsp;Facebook,&nbsp;LinkedIn Transcript&nbsp;(this is an automated transcript): MPD: Fabric, thanks for being here.&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;Thank you for having me.&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;I&#8217;ve been very excited to have you on I think you&#8217;ve got a lot of wisdom and you do something that most people don&#8217;t do and that you practice radical candor. It feels like in everything, every time I&#8217;ve ever talked to. So I think we&#8217;re going to get into some really interesting topics today. And I think I have a feeling you&#8217;re going to share more than people normally comfortable with, which I think is very powerful. You&#8217;re going to help a lot of people. Let&#8217;s start though. Let&#8217;s level set this can you give an overview of FJ labs? I think people need to know what you&#8217;re doing for your day job before we extend beyond. Sure.&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;So my current day job is to be the founding partner at FJ&nbsp;Labs which is a venture fund &#8211; actually it&#8217;s an accidental venture fund. It really came out of my angel investing activities while I was an interpreter. So for the last 24 years, I&#8217;ve been building companies, I&#8217;ve been running companies and. Other founders kept approaching me for me to invest some of them. And for the longest time I thought they were, should I be doing this right? Is it a distraction from my core mandate as a founder to be investing in other startups? And I&#8217;m like, if I can articulate lessons to learn to others it probably means I&#8217;ve internalized them. And so it&#8217;s okay. And meeting all these amazing founders beyond helping them realize their dreams is also an amazing way to keep my fingers on the pulse of the market. So by 2013, when I sold my last company, which by the way, was like dried or missing. I don&#8217;t know if you want to cover that until I went, the last company was real quick. So the last company was a company called oh blocks. It&#8217;s today, the biggest classified site of the world. It&#8217;s a 11,000 employees in 30 countries. It&#8217;s the leading classified site in Brazil and all black tem and Russia, Ukraine, all of these sued Europe and India, Pakistan of all the Southeast Asia and the UAE and all the middle east. And it&#8217;s basically what Craigslist would be or should be if it was running. By someone like me, meaning a modern UX UI, integrated payments and shipping and escrow. Exactly. No, no spam, no scab, no birders, et cetera. And actually targeting primarily women in a female friendly space, given that women are the primary decision makers in all household purchases. That companies like over 300 million new users of mothers is absolutely ginormous. And after I sold that already at 150 investments doing really well already pulled them with my current partner. And I was like, I like building companies like invest in companies. Let&#8217;s create a structure that allows me to do that. And I never really set out to build a venture funds. And I think by virtue of being visible, I started being approached by potential investors and said, Hey, we would like exposure to where you guys are doing. Do you mind if we co-invest with you? And so 2016, we took our first investor LP for 50 million, one LP outside of our own capital. Yeah, it&#8217;s again, what I be basically they&#8217;re people that had it, it&#8217;s a company called . They were a big telco in, in Norway. And they had backed my biggest competitor when I was running about locks and ultimately we fought a big war and we merged 51 for us, 49 for them. And by then we, all of this I&#8217;d like unwell. They&#8217;d made like a billion dollars and they ended up owning a whole bunch of classified assets around the world. And they were like, Hey, we love you. You&#8217;ve also made us a lot, lots of money. We&#8217;d like to understand what&#8217;s going on in marketplaces in the U S to either bring it to our markets or defend against disruption. And so it was really both strategic for them. And financial in 2018 we raise fund two and they&#8217;re like, Hey, if you want to bring other people on board, why not? And other people&#8217;s sorta approaching us. So we started getting like a lot of family offices that were being disrupted by tech and a lot of other strategics were interested in investing in the category. And so we finished deploying that and that was a hundred, 225 million finished uploading that in July of 2021. And then we close fund three, which would be like three, 400 million with either amazing founders that I&#8217;ve worked with forever, like Reed Hoffman, or, whatever Kevin, Ryan, or the founder of Wayfair or these family offices were actually strategics interested in either buying or investing leader seizures in the companies move us. So I guess w w. That was a long-winded way to answer your question. So my day job is running FJ labs. FJ labs is an a, a venture fund specializing in marketplaces. We invest in every geography in every category at every stage. But the focus is we really do angel investing at venture scale. We don&#8217;t lead, we don&#8217;t price. We don&#8217;t take board seats. We decide after two, one hour meetings, whether we invest or not with full transparency, we tell them why we&#8217;re investing, why we&#8217;re not investing what we need to change for us to change your mind. And we try to be as Frey, founder, friendly as possible. So we&#8217;re not setting the terms we decided very quickly. And we&#8217;re super prolific. To give you a sense of scale to date, we&#8217;ve invested in overheat 150 startups. Last year, we invested in 281 startups, so 180 new investments or 101 followups, and it&#8217;s a lot for a venture firm and it&#8217;s been going really well. We&#8217;ve had 265 exits and so far in a 45% realized I are. So things are good.&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;That&#8217;s great. Okay. So what&#8217;s the typical investment profile. Cause when you say angel investing at a venture scale, I get the angel investing part that your, the process is less rigorous it&#8217;s you&#8217;re looking at more strategic elements rather than doing your own diligence. I get that nothing wrong with it. The question is when you say to venture scale, is that the reflection of the volume, the amount of capital you&#8217;re managing the volume, what is it? The check size?&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;Yeah the angel investing in venture skills really because of the overall. Capital deployment. We&#8217;re deploying a hundred million a year, 150 million a year potentially, but this funds which is way more than typical angels deploy. Now, the reason it&#8217;s still angel investing is writing small checks relative to the lead. We don&#8217;t want to compete with the top VCs in the world for allocation. We want to be their friends. In fact, most of the deals come from friendly VCs or sharing deals with us in return. Of course, we send them all of our deals. And so our pre-seed check size is going to be like 200 K or C check size, like 300 K or eCheck size is 3 25 or beyond words is 7 25. So it&#8217;s fixed check sizes that we&#8217;ll take lots of philosophers available and they&#8217;re always small relative to the lead. And that&#8217;s why it&#8217;s kind of angel investing in venture scale. But I&#8217;m more than happy to talk to you and walk you through the process of how we decide whether we invest or not. If you&#8217;ve&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;teed it up, let&#8217;s do it.&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;Yeah. So actually, before I get to the process, I&#8217;ll walk me through the flow. These days, every week we get about 200 inbound deals and often many more than that. And they come from three sources, a third comes from the friendly VCs and every eight to 12 weeks, we sit down the top hundred VCs in the world, covering every siege, every category of geography and we share deal flow. And it goes from everyone the amplifies or whatever first submitted to the pre-seed stage with the. General catalyst, Bessemer Sequoia first walk in the middle, all the way to whatever the tigers at the leader stages, where we bring them all of our best seals. And in return Bain by to some of the deals where we have expertise. So mostly marketplaces about a third of the deal comes from fellow founders. So at this point we&#8217;ve backed almost 2000 founders in the 835 companies. And they come back for their next company. They send us their friends. They&#8217;ve sent us their employees to becoming founders and about a third of the deals come in cold. And it actually, we review even the cold inbound deals and that 16% of the investments we&#8217;ve made have come from cold. And some of the very best investments come from cold. So we get these seals they&#8217;re assigned randomly to one of the team members, unless someone says they want it. We we&#8217;re four partners, three associates, and one analysts. And we reviewed the deal we decide, is it appropriate or not for us or not? And usually about. Three quarters of them are not there. They&#8217;re amazing, but they&#8217;re not for us. They&#8217;re like biotech, hardware, space SAC, and we don&#8217;t feel that we have appropriate expertise. So we review and we, the other 50, we take a one hour call and that one hour call, we try to assess four things and that&#8217;s actually the evaluation criteria. Do we like the team? Do we like the business? Do we like the deal terms? And does it meet or pieces of where the world is heading? Now, let me double click on all four of these. Do we like the team. Every VC in the world will tell you. I only invest in extraordinary people. The thing is that&#8217;s extremely subjective. What is an amazing team? And we&#8217;ve actually looked and thought through what it meant for founders to be very successful for us. It&#8217;s someone who is both a visionary and an execution machine. And that means someone who is extremely eloquent and as extraordinary communication skills. But that&#8217;s not enough because if you only have that, maybe you build a you build a very large company, but one that&#8217;s not profitable or it doesn&#8217;t scale, et cetera, but that&#8217;s, that is necessary. It&#8217;s a necessary but insufficient condition. Because if you have an amazing, if you&#8217;re an amazing or rater or public speaker, you can attract better teams. You&#8217;re going to raise more money. You&#8217;re going to get better PR and you have better. But you also need to be able to execute. And we look at that, that we evaluated over the course of when our call is, how well do you understand the business, your hand? How well do you understand you did economics? And we want you to be able to articulate even pre-launch, we want you to have done the lending page analysis and done a customer, cocky a customer acquisition cost analysis, and compare that to look at what the average order value in the industry is. See what the net margin structure you&#8217;re expecting is. And you should be able to articulate that intelligently and the Venn diagram of people that are amazing storytellers and people that are amazing at execution is actually the intersection is very small and we want people that are both number two, Businesses that are compelling. And for and so for many, some VCs, by the way, number one is enough. And if you&#8217;re pre-seed, pre-launch obviously will, this is the most relevant metric once you&#8217;re post-launch actually we do care, but the other three number two is, do we like the business? Which means for us, is the category large enough? Or can it be larger enough through your execution and, or the unit economics is compelling and we are extraordinarily unit economic driven in marketplaces. And obviously this a little bit different if you&#8217;re in e-commerce is a little bit different if you&#8217;re in SAS. But we try to invest in businesses where you re. You&#8217;re fully loaded customer acquisition costs on a net contribution margin basis after six months. And we&#8217;ll use three X your CAC after 18 months now. And ideally we don&#8217;t know what the LTV to CAC is because you have negative churn. In which case, who knows it&#8217;s 10 to one, 20 to one, et cetera. And if your unit economics are underwater, which can happen, we want you to be able to articulate why with scale. They will automatically fix themselves. Maybe you&#8217;re in a food delivery business. And right now you&#8217;re doing one delivery per hour, you&#8217;re paying $15 an hour. Your delivery guy, your unit economics are under water, but the minute he does three deliveries an hour, it&#8217;s $5 a delivery. And it works. Something like that. Like I don&#8217;t, it should not require every story. The multi-payer so align for you now, economics to work. And we really care about that because otherwise you may build a very large business that doesn&#8217;t make any money, which in the long run doesn&#8217;t really work out. Number three, what are the deal terms? And we are. Yeah, nothing&#8217;s cheap and tough, but we want something that&#8217;s fair. In light of the size of the opportunity, the quality of the team, the traction that you have,&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;what is fair? How do you think about that?&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;So evaluations went up, especially in the late stage last year and, something I covered in one of my macro articles, but the median pre-seed the median valuations didn&#8217;t move up nearly as much as you might think. And crypto falls a little bit of time that route, but then the median pre-seed for us until 2020 was like three to five pre raising one. And last year went up to six, seven, but not that much more. And so if you&#8217;re, pre-seed raising a 30, more likely than not, we&#8217;re not going to do it. The median seed used to be like re three raising at eight and nine pre and last year we went up to 12 and that&#8217;s still reasonable for us and the median a, you used to be, you&#8217;re raising seven at 22 and iRacing 10 at three. And those are fair by our standard with relevant traction. So as your seed ran, we&#8217;re expecting you to have whatever, 150 key in GMV per month with a 10 50% take rate of the, a Rand, you&#8217;re doing 500 K in GMV and the B round, you&#8217;re doing 2 million GMV per month, more or less, it depends on the take rate you have, et cetera. Now there are exceptions, right? Like the rounds you&#8217;ve been reading about in the press are like, oh, they raise a $50 million series, a two 50 pre total, and these crazy. But yeah, we wouldn&#8217;t do those deals. There were amazing for the founders and the companies that actually I can make an argument. Many of the companies that dies because the company, the founders raise too much money at too high, a price. They don&#8217;t grow into that valuation. And that kills the companies because of like anti-pollution provisions and it one more Sudan, Rams. It&#8217;s really one of the top reasons companies die is founders raising too much money at too high a price. So we don&#8217;t do these deals. So the mean by the way is way higher than mean seed a and B is way higher than numbers I gave, but the media actually is not. And we&#8217;re so prolific. We have a good sense of where the market is. And so we stick to our with the exception that if you&#8217;re a returning founder for us, that has done well before we will back you, no matter what, no matter where you build, no matter the raise, et cetera, you don&#8217;t even need to take a call. We&#8217;ll just send you the check. And so we have done a few crazy deals by that&#8217;s the reason it, also many of those deals are out of scope for us. Like we had the founders of a. Vettery, which was a labor marketplace then decided to go. And we sold a deco for a hundred million made of whatever, 8.5 extra money. Everything was great. And then they went on to build Archer, which has an electric flying taxi company. And they&#8217;re like, we&#8217;re launching we&#8217;re pre-seed, 80 pre or whatever, a hundred pre. And we&#8217;re like, okay, here&#8217;s the check&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;is those is the re-upping founders, your lumps,&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;Ever increasing because we have 2000 founders, we backed, put it differently. 30% of the portfolio is non marketplace. And many of those are the re-upping founders which is a good sign that they have they&#8217;re coming back and they would have worked with us. But we also do like tools around marketplaces, et cetera. And we&#8217;re doing a lot of stuff. That&#8217;s like an interest things that interest us, which actually leads me to selection criteria. Number four is your idea in line with our thesis of where the world is. And we are extraordinary thesis driven. We have a clear thesis on the future of finance, the future of food, the future of see the future of automotive, the future. And even within marketplaces, we have three core thesis on marketplaces that we look for and we want ideas that are in line with that. And in a way we&#8217;re also mission driven, right? The reason I&#8217;m a VC, the reason I&#8217;m an investor is I, the world is facing a number of fundamental problems. We&#8217;re facing a climate crisis. The, we have a social inequality and inequality of opportunity or social injustice. We have a mental and physical we&#8217;ll be in crisis. And the, I do not think that a. The political system is going to address any of these. And so it&#8217;s up to us as founders to use, to be solutionist to use technology, to find solutions to the world&#8217;s problems. And so it is mission driven from that perspective. I want to try to invest in companies, founders that are trying to address these fundamental problems. And by the way, the bigger, the problem, the bigger, the economic opportunity, and it fits better in a for-profit model because this actually ends up being more scalable and more effective. And here we have it. If we&#8217;d love the team, we&#8217;d love the business. We&#8217;d love the deal terms. And we think that the ideas in library, their thesis, we invest and we can decide that in one hour. MPD:&nbsp;That&#8217;s great. What&#8217;s the what are the reasons why a founder should choose to work with you guys? This is my underhand pay.&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;And take a swim, the were former founders. So we actually know what it&#8217;s like to operate a business and we can talk extremely intelligently about the complexities of operating a business. We&#8217;ve probably seen more marketplaces than anyone else either. And in addition to the fact that I run marketplace, I&#8217;ve run marketplaces for most of my life. And so when it comes to everything from like building liquidity, do you start with the supplier, the demand, should you go hyper-local or national or international? W should your rake be 5% of 1% of 20% you&#8217;d have, how do you measure it? Let&#8217;s see supply demand. We&#8217;re probably more. Versed. Any other investors out there in this category in terms of being able to help you and last but not least, we&#8217;re in an ma because we don&#8217;t lead and we don&#8217;t price. And we have these amazing connections with all the other VCs, we will get you funded. Like our superpower is we will get, if you need help raising your filling this round, we will do that for you. And more importantly, and most people do not need help raising a specific, the ran they&#8217;re typically talking to us about but if they, when they go to the a, when they go to the beach and they go to the sea, we will ensure them to whomever, like first of our grade lock and Driessen whomever is right for them. We will make the intros and is extremely valuable for them because it directs the fundraising and makes it a lot simpler. We will give them feedback on like them, but back on the pitch on the process. And it&#8217;s also super efficient because you&#8217;d we have 850 companies in the portfolio and yet. We&#8217;re often the most value added investor these founders have because we really focus on when to help them, we&#8217;ll do, we&#8217;ll help them right before they go fundraising the next ran and that&#8217;s the most valuable for them.&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;Okay. So there, there is a implicit piece of this that I think is the most interesting. It&#8217;s the sheer volume of your portfolio, right? There are a couple of firms out there that have huge volumes Techstars. My buddy, over at David phone number Techstars has a huge volume. He&#8217;s had a very different model than you. You have a huge volume. It&#8217;s not as common. Most firms are going out there and targeting 25 deals in a portfolio. Is something there about what is your thinking around the optimal volume in a portfolio?&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;First of all this is a reflection of my personality and not there&#8217;s no intelligent portfolio construction. So I actually have done the research. And what is the ideal portfolio construction by the portfolio of F J labs is completely built. Bottom line. We meet people. If we&#8217;d like them, we invest. If we don&#8217;t like them, we don&#8217;t invest. And at the end of the year, the chips fall where they may, and it just so happens. Of course, there&#8217;s more seed deals and ideals, more aid deals and deals and CDLs, there&#8217;s more U S deals than European deals or European deals in India and Brazil deals. And so if you look at our portfolio for a number of deals for of, we&#8217;re mostly seated a then a few B&#8217;s and very few season and not too many pre CD there. And then we&#8217;re 55% us Canada. We&#8217;re 25% Europe. We&#8217;re 10% Brazil, India. We&#8217;re like the rest of the world and really all over the world. But it&#8217;s not by design. Now in terms of number of deals to answer your question specifically, is I diverged on portfolio construction. The I actually I think there are many problems to solve in the world and I like finding ways to address many of these because we choose not to compete with the major VCs. We could actually not run a concentrated portfolio. So first of all, by design, if I wanted to invest in 30 companies, I would need to be a lead and I would need to ride like five, 10, $15 million trucks. Then the entire strategy. Of working with the other VCs and being their friend and other competitor becomes invalidated. But more importantly, as a reflection of my personal philosophy, I just like, meeting lots of interesting people and being exposed to all these different areas. And I get I, now I have a great sense of what&#8217;s happening in like everything from climate to to automotive, to real estate. And I think it&#8217;s fascinating there also the corollaries between these other industries, which are the marketplace dynamics so much closer to people suspect. I find that fascinating. And so it&#8217;s more a reflection of my personality, but that said there is data, but what is the correct portfolio size and angel listed and analysis of what your return profile looks like based on the number of deals you have. And basically because venture follows a power law. The best deals return, do most of the returns you need to be in those best deals. And the best way to be in those best deals is essentially to be in every deal. And so the angel was study, which actually was published in peer reviewed and all that is the more diverse your professor of your portfolio, the higher your IRR and your returns that you should invest in all qualified. And they have a definition of what qualified beans deals possible. Now, the reason most VCs are not built that way by the way, is actually driven by the LPs. So LPs heat that diversity. Because they see their jobs as themselves picking the VCs that are more specialized. So the LPs are like, oh, I&#8217;m going to have this fund. That&#8217;s going to be my series, a B2B SAS company. I&#8217;m going to have this one. They&#8217;re going to be my series B DDC e-commerce in Europe, whatever. And they do, they&#8217;re like little funds of funds, strategy and fund that does all that for them. They really don&#8217;t like, because in a way it&#8217;s like the job they should be doing. And so LPs are not super keen on that diversified strategy. And so it wouldn&#8217;t work for most, but it really works. And the benefit is over longer periods of time. We&#8217;re always going to be in the title. That&#8217;s solid before now and anyone fund life, by the way, we&#8217;re never going to be top decile because if you imagine a fund, eh, is hyper concentrated, they do 10 investments. One of those is a hundred X. They&#8217;re going to be at a 10 X funds and they&#8217;re going to be topped us all, but they&#8217;re going to have massive variability, next fund they&#8217;re 10 may not hit and they made Richard money. And by the way, most VC funds actually don&#8217;t return cashflow cash money beyond the S and P the top Cortel does. And the top quartile is actually highly correlated over, over fund life by most do not it our case. We I&#8217;ve been, if you include all of my history as an angel investor and but not as a founder, right? I&#8217;m not including my benefit. The equity I got into companies I&#8217;ve founded on the 270 exits we&#8217;ve had a 45% realize I are over 24 years either. That&#8217;s I don&#8217;t know where that ranks. It has to be in the top 10%, maybe in the top 1% over that time, Peter.&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;Given that you&#8217;re diversifying so much, is the core value add more sourcing or is it more deal selection? Because one of the things, theoretically, arguably the best portfolio is one investment, all the money in the world and the best company, the best returns, that&#8217;s it. But the presumption there is that someone could be a good enough deal picker and get access to it. The core issue for a lot of VCs is they&#8217;re not great deal pickers. So how do you think about this? Is that the message to LPs like, Hey look, we&#8217;re good deal pickers, but we really don&#8217;t have to be because we play the game so broadly. Is that part of the narrative for you?&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;Not really. So we were actually would argue we&#8217;re very good deal pickers. We will buy often. We will not be in the top 0.1% of deals by the way, because we&#8217;re so sensitive on price. And we&#8217;re so sensitive on unit economics, either like we would have passed the Facebook, we would have fastened Google because neither of them had business models when they launched, nor could they articulate where those models, the, those those models were. But we have a lot of singles and doubles and triples. So even though our portfolio is so broad, we&#8217;ve actually made money in over 50% of our exits which for a seed, mostly seed fund is extraordinary. Last year we had 41 exits, we made my name 24, we lost one in 17. And obviously you make a lot more on the 24th and you lose on the 17. So I think we were very good pickers, number one, but two, obviously our deal flow is amazing because we built a brand as these founder friendly. Guys who&#8217;ve decided after you investor died, who were super helpful. And if you&#8217;re doing anything marketplace related, by the way, marketplace, let me define it pretty widely as if you&#8217;re building something that&#8217;s an intermediary between a seller of something and an a at a buyer or something. And that thing could be anything. So to me, most of FinTech is the marketplace because, think of Clarita. It&#8217;s an intermediary between providers of capital. Typically the banks will give you the lines of credit and consumers that are borrowing. And many people wouldn&#8217;t think of it that way. But to me, those dynamics, if you&#8217;re matching sellers, the buyers, regardless of the category it falls in the marketplace definition for us, which is obviously why we can invest at 300 marketplaces in a year.&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;Okay. So there&#8217;s a little bit of learning here. I think you&#8217;re a bit of a pioneer in this type of volume for something outside of an accelerator incubator model. Yeah. Whereas this model gone wrong that you had to correct. What did you learn along the way? That&#8217;s nuanced to not being a VC and not being an investor, but being a high volume VC or high volume investor,&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;The way luck what&#8217;s I don&#8217;t know if it has gone wrong in the sense that we can typically. First of all, I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s necessarily easily replicable by most because we are in extraordinary privileged position to answer also part of the previous question where the deals come to us, right? Like most associates and analysts and most VC firms spend their time like networking and finding deals. In our case, we&#8217;re like drinking at the fire hose of incoming deals and we&#8217;re reviewing the incoming deals and we would like to do more at boundaries, just we&#8217;re too busy, previewing main band. And we have the 200 Ben bands. We&#8217;d there&#8217;s. Yeah, we do miss seals as a result of that. So I D we are trying to change that to some extent, even though, so first of all, there&#8217;s the, part of the reason I can share my entire strategy online, including everything, the deal memos, the philosophy, et cetera, is even if you had all of it in your mind would encode it, even though probably hard to do without the 24 years of like ad bats of seeing 5,000 companies a year without a deal flow. So I really replicable now where it&#8217;s gone wrong. Yep. Sorry.&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;And as I say, FJ labs is a&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;marketplace. Yes, we are our marketplace. Absolutely. We&#8217;re matching founders with money, from our LPs. And by the way, our LPs I&#8217;m the largest LP in the fund, right? Like about 450 million we&#8217;ve deployed to date, over a hundred million of that is my own money. Maybe one 50. I actually, haven&#8217;t tried to look at it too closely because this started as a frankly personal investments for my partner. I said myself again, the accidental VC thing. One more thing. I know, I didn&#8217;t answer the question. One more thing we do very differently by the way is the following. So we. We don&#8217;t reserve capital for follow-on. So we&#8217;ll invest that of whatever fund is currently active. The follow-ons. So we tell our, because we don&#8217;t always follow on we&#8217;ll evaluate follow-ons as though they were new investments, knowing what we know now, the company of the team would the terms, would we invest? And often the answer is we love the team. We&#8217;d love the company, but the valuation is insane, so we&#8217;re not taking our Paratas. And so we&#8217;re, we&#8217;ve been following on and maybe 33% of the deals. But as a result, it doesn&#8217;t make sense to reserve capital fellows in a fund. So we do it in other funds, which leads me to the issues in a way we face, right? Like the problems we face. As we have had a really hard time, much harder than ever to expected raising capital other than the capital that keep to us automatically. So we&#8217;ve had these LPs that are like friends. They&#8217;re like, here&#8217;s a check, they know&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;you were, I know your success,&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;those exactly, or strategics that we&#8217;ve worked with from across many years who want to exposure where we do or family offices. And so there, the capital&#8217;s come, but pitching institutional investors has been really so far. We don&#8217;t have a single institutional investment partner differently. They don&#8217;t love. Anything about what I just described the hyper diversification, because they feel that in a way it&#8217;s their job to find different funds that cover different areas and hyper diversification number of deals. They don&#8217;t like that. We&#8217;re multi-stage, they don&#8217;t like that real multi geography. They don&#8217;t like that. The follow on strategy is in whatever fund is currently active in which versus, having capital reserve followings in the original funds. And so all of that. And so it&#8217;s been, it&#8217;s taken way more time to raise capital than I would have liked. And also as a result, we&#8217;re proudly a much smaller fund that we should be. So right now, we&#8217;ve closed for student 10 million of the new fund and you find. It&#8217;s three to 500 million, five, really a hard cap. I would like to hit it, there&#8217;ll be at least 300 million and it&#8217;s been seven months. It&#8217;s mostly the existing investors. Re-upping yeah, there are new investors like founders that we&#8217;ve backed that have excess exited that are investing in it, et cetera. But again, we have, don&#8217;t have a single institutional investor in the fund because of all the reasons I, and I&#8217;d like to change that because the reality is we should probably, we could be a billion dollar fund with no problem. Despite the not leading, not pricing strategy with given the volume we have if you do, if I do intelligent portfolio structured, like what is the maximum size I can deploy at pre-seed without leading to 25 K or so maximum check size, I could deploy at seed without leading it&#8217;s four 50 at AA could probably write a million. That&#8217;d be, I could probably write 2 million and let&#8217;s see. It could be right, probably right. 5 million and up to 10 million in like the pre IPO Rams. And so if you look at all the deals last year, all the allocations we had, we could have deployed 350 million. And yet we didn&#8217;t have that level of capital. And so we only deploy a hundred million. So what we&#8217;ve done to not run out of money after a year because our LP base is not such that I can actually. Say, oh, instead of three years, we it&#8217;s just one year and now we are re-upping they don&#8217;t want that is at nor could I, because I&#8217;m the biggest art piece. It&#8217;s also driven by my personal cashflow. And so what we did instead is we men decrease her check sizes to not run out of capital. So currently, as I said, our HX size is 3 25 K. It could be a million or beach, X size is 7 25. It could be two and her and frankly, DHX license. So the 25 K and could be 10. And so that&#8217;s been an issue I&#8217;m trying to address it and we&#8217;ll see if we were successful in the future now, in terms of underlying performance and access to deals, et cetera, Matt, I think B hasn&#8217;t been too much of an issue, I guess the other issue, it&#8217;s something we&#8217;ve learned as we&#8217;ve had to build a very big ops team. The team we&#8217;re 30. Which is a lot of people are most people&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;doing, cause it sounds like 10 or so those are investment professionals. What do they, yeah,&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;so yeah. So four partners, three associates. Why now? So eight investment professionals we have two but then we have a big back office team or like the head of operations, the CFO the lawyer, the, all the accountants and the that are in the back office team. And then we have all the support team for them. So when&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;you say 200 deals a year, you mean 200 pounds of paperwork?&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;Yeah. Let&#8217;s do a lot to do. Yeah. Everything, stock, purchase agreements, follow ons, legal approvals, exit, there&#8217;s infinite back office work to do. And actually one more thing we haven&#8217;t done is we&#8217;re currently not gap dot a gap accounting, because like, how do you do gap accounting on. 800 startups and we don&#8217;t even, we want to be the founder friendly guys and so doing an evaluation of each company in the portfolio when they&#8217;re like seed is a massive exercise that most, firms, which is another reason we haven&#8217;t been able raised institutional money. And maybe we need to have bite the bullet and do it. In fact, we&#8217;re currently talking to Mike CBO and YC and, people like that, like how do you guys do it? And we probably need to buy that bullet at some point. But yeah it&#8217;s a lot of the issues that like you don&#8217;t think about when you&#8217;re dealing, when we&#8217;re lower volume from,&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;okay, now you guys are the marketplace experts, and that&#8217;s very clear what are three rules of thumb that marketplace entrepreneurs listen to this need to know the things that are like, Hey, these are the baseline pro tips, right? Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;When you&#8217;re building your marketplace and you have your chicken neck problem the. Place to start is with supply because the sellers on the platform are financially motivated to be on the platform. And I would go to them and set said, low expectation and saying, Hey, we&#8217;re launching this. We&#8217;re free to launch at the beginning. And we take just a rake, a B in there, but here&#8217;s the key. And here&#8217;s the pro tip. It&#8217;s easy to have infinite supply, but if you&#8217;re drown your marketplace and infinite supply and you&#8217;d have demand for it, they&#8217;re all going to turn. They&#8217;re not going to be engaged. So when you launch, you curate the very best supply for it in one vertical, in one category, maybe even in one geography, like in one zip code, and then you find demand for that. And first of all, there are the very best. So you make sure they&#8217;re engaged. You make sure they understand where the product is. You understand what their needs. Then you find demand for them, whatever way it is. It could be sales driven. It could be marketing, it could be Google, it could be Facebook. And by the way, I actually like paid marketing to work because that means it&#8217;s scalable kind of infinitely you find demand and what you wanted to get to for that supply. And again, very limited supply, highly curated. You want to represent. If it&#8217;s an item for sale, you want the probability of the item for sale to be about 20, 25%. That&#8217;s when you have pretty good liquidity, if it&#8217;s a services business, you want to represent at least 20% of the revenues of that provider. And then once you have that at that scale, then you scale the supply up one more like whether it&#8217;s in the same zip code or gee sitter, adjacent category, and then you match. So you always, you start with supply, you bring them in and then you scale both always in parallel. A problem is it&#8217;s so easy to get supplied that you could launch. I could launch a locksmith marketplace and put every lots within New York on it, but then you have no demand for it. And so the supply is going to churn. There&#8217;s gonna be no engagement and the users, we awful, et cetera. So doing that is, is key. So that&#8217;s I guess somebody human mind or like magic trick number one, magic trick. Number two is, as you start thinking about. How do I monetize? How much do I charge? Who do I charge? And what is the correct percentages? Because you see marketplaces like stock photography, marketplaces that takes 75%. And then you have some B2B marketplaces where it&#8217;s essentially 0% rate or 0.1% because of extreme price sensitivity. And so the correct way to assess that is you look at the less toxicity of supply and the less, the city of demands and you take your rake on the more and elastic part of the curve. And the more elastic it is, the higher the rake is that turns out that in most cases you can take 10 to 20% from the supply side, but it&#8217;s not a hardest at roll. It really depends on how fragmented your supply and demand is. And by the way, the more fragmented it is, the better it is for you as the marketplace, right? If you&#8217;re in a market where there&#8217;s three or four suppliers and three or four consumers, You&#8217;re probably not a marketplace. You&#8217;re probably a distributor. And your ability to price and take margin is going to be very limited. And that&#8217;s why I be very careful of playing in like highly concentrated industries. It happened to me and not really a market place, but I was I ran a company that was selling ringtones to the mobile operators. And in the early days it was okay. But like between 2001, when I launched in 2005 and my mom, I sold in 2004, but 2005, when I left all the operators, consolidated merge with each other, like singular with, at and T Verizon with they&#8217;ll remember whom I&#8217;ll be like. And also when we went from. 50 customers. So four and on the music come to a five and on the music company side, they all merge with each other like BMG and whatever, and EMI and whomever. And they also went from like many to three or four. And so all of a sudden there were four and five and it wasn&#8217;t an issue until we had 50 million in annual revenues. But the minute we hit 50 million annual revenues, we started being seen by the VP level at these companies. And they started seeing us in their P and L and they started squeezing and squeezing. So in 2004, with my company, we did 50 million in revenues and 4 million in profits. In 2005, we did 200 million revenues and seven and eight in profits because they basically divided by our margin by three. And so that&#8217;s not a marketplace, you&#8217;re a distributor, you&#8217;re a facilitator, but it&#8217;s not a proper marketplace.&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;Okay. So now you guys do more than invested FJ labs. I know this is evolving. You guys have been a studio, right? You&#8217;ve been building companies. You don&#8217;t talk about what you guys do when the method for it. Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;Sure. The reason we were a studio is really, I say, bang. It&#8217;s what do I like to do? I like to build companies. I could invest in companies. I love that. And so every year we&#8217;d be coming up with ideas and it was like, try to build them either personally and go run them, which I did for a few of them or with entrepreneurs and residences. And we created through happenstance, a program that ended up being successful. So what happened is. I don&#8217;t even remember the year, maybe 2010 or 2011. This young founder reach out to me and he&#8217;s Hey, I&#8217;m McKinsey, Harvard business school. I am I&#8217;m at HBS right now, but I&#8217;ve raise 500 K and trying to build this company. And Eddie kept harassing me. The thing is I was running billing oil, super busy writing a relaxer. I&#8217;d like, so that 10,000 employees in 30 countries, and I was getting emails like that, like dozens every week. So I ignored him and ignored them. And one day he&#8217;s Hey, I&#8217;m at the door of your office, can we meet? And I&#8217;m like, okay, maybe I&#8217;ll beat him. Maybe I&#8217;ll leave. Let me be. And he was building like some sort of chat roulette for competitor, and I&#8217;m like, terrible idea. Won&#8217;t work return the money to your investors, call it a day and. Cultural back the next day. He&#8217;s oh, thank you for the radical honesty and candor to when I&#8217;ve been like honest with me. I talked to my investors, I offered to return the money and they said, no, let&#8217;s find an idea. And another idea. So now why don&#8217;t you and I look on fighting an idea together. I&#8217;d have I&#8217;d like to know the last thing I want to have time. And I kept saying, no, I kept saying no. Then he emailed me a check for $5,000. He&#8217;s I&#8217;m going to pay you $5,000 a month to work for you. And I&#8217;m like a fight. Keep your money. Yeah. You&#8217;re super motivated clearly. Let&#8217;s let&#8217;s see if we can do this. And in a way it it was useful because it forced me. The first thing I made him do is help me filter my inbound deal flow. And at that time it was 200 a week. It was like 40 a week. And I was like, can I teach someone else? Might Euro six K I could have fight how to evaluate a team, how to validate if the business attractive, what my thesis is what appropriate deal terms are. And can I have him, do that for me and not pass the next Uber and turns out that while he was useful, because it forced me to structure my thinking on what my Euro six were and teach them to him. And once he started seeing all the deal flow, he started getting ideas, sorta applying the same criteria to his own ideas. And then we started 50 ideas then became 10, then five and two, then one, then we pivoted and that company became adore me and adore me is a laundry DDC, commerce subscription company, both econ not which today is I don&#8217;t know, over 200 million revenues, I don&#8217;t know, 20 million tickets. It might be much more than that, but I&#8217;d like at least that and crushing it. And the last thing he did. And I told them too, it was like, find me your replacement. And so we started a program where we would go to the first year of business school at Harvard MIT, Wharton, Columbia, Stanford, we&#8217;d say, Hey, you&#8217;re S you&#8217;re going to join us. Full-time during the summer between your first and second year, half the summer, you&#8217;re going to be taught venture capital. Not because we want you to be VCs, but because we want you to see where the ideas are, how to pitch how to write a great effective deck and keep your pulse on the fingers of the market, your fingers on the pulse of the market. And number two, pap the summer, you&#8217;re going to be in the company we&#8217;re currently trying to build. So you understand what it&#8217;s like to be an early stage founder, that profile. So the reason we took these schools by the way, even. On average, we&#8217;d rather have people that don&#8217;t go to business school. It&#8217;s frankly, it&#8217;s just an easy filtering mechanism. And, but we only wanted people who wanted to be founders. And most of them, the profile was they were product managers or city managers of one of the larger marketplaces, like Instacart or Uber or or Airbnb. And they want to now go and do it on their own. And and there were an HBS like looking for ideas and maybe improving their skills that like finance, something like that. So they join us for the summer during their second year they&#8217;re part-time 15, 20 hours a week. Mostly helping us filter inbound deal flow. And then when we graduate. They become full-time EIRs meaning we pay them. I don&#8217;t know where the salary was, like maybe 135 K years. I&#8217;m like that to look for ideas with us, they look for their own ideas and we meet like on a weekly basis to iterate. Now, also every twice a year, we bring the entire team investment team, everyone like in the team together once in February and once in August and July, usually my house interest in kaikos who are in Canada. And we have to all come up with ideas that don&#8217;t exist in the world of tech that should and out of these. And we usually come up with like a hundred, a pop or 150 up opposite, two to 300 ideas a year of which they can actually go and go deeper and pick some of these et cetera. And we typically would take two weeks. I bet there&#8217;d be some churn because some people decided to build companies that were not, for us, some people decided they don&#8217;t want to be founders after all, et cetera. And we ended up building a lot of companies like that. We some successful some not so much. So we built a company called BP, which should have been Carvana, raise 150 million and was worth 700 million in like in famously blew up. We, the main mission is we try to have the founders fail fast. So we try to build a company. We build a company called punch show, which is like an entrenched company and it didn&#8217;t grow big enough. And so we decide close it, but then we&#8217;ve had a lot of companies that are really doing well. So we&#8217;re in Rebag, which is a handbag marketplace. I think they&#8217;re going to do 200 million of revenues this year and I&#8217;m like that that is that the founder is amazing. We were in properly, which is a Zillow Trulia meets compass meets a open door for Canada. Absolutely crushing it. Last round was like, multi hundred billion dollar valuation we&#8217;re investors&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;in that with you great company. Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;Yeah. Yeah. So I&#8217;m chairman of that one and unsure is one of the best a EIRs we&#8217;ve ever had also we&#8217;re the best founders we&#8217;ve ever had. The team is amazing. We&#8217;re in Mundey, which is a trade finance company between Mexico and the us helping us and B some Mexico export of the U S and there, they grew from zero to like tens of millions and originations in a year and a half. Like my, my, I know that it sends really definitely over 10 million might be over 20 million now. We&#8217;re in like Seafair, a marketplace for helping shipping companies find seafarers, a work rise for shipping where we&#8217;re in a umami card versus vertical. And grocer in the Asian category, we&#8217;ve created Milko, which is a kind of Shopify for restaurants, helping people build digital brands in food and helping them operate restaurants operate better and more effectively. Many of these that actually I ran one of them for a while, actually to 2014, 2015, I built a mobile classified site in the U S called Salud, which I then merged with wallop pop. I ran Walla pop. USAA was true, but a wallet pop. And then we merged that with let go, which now of course has merged with offer up. So now it&#8217;s offer up and that&#8217;s a multi-billionaire company, which I ran in 20 14, 20 15. And the CTO model is as follows. Very different, very generous because we do very few. We, you come in, we pay you 135 K until you find idea, once you find the idea we put in the first seven 50. With 65% of the capital going to the team, 35% to us. And then we commit the next 2 million at either 10 million valuation or market, if you can get better terms but we have the right invest 2 million in your next round. And and so the T it&#8217;s not at all, like some of the other studios out there where the teams get five, 10, 50%, or in our case, they started at 65% and actually real capital, right? Like you guys have got 2.7, 5 million. So if you don&#8217;t want to go to market for the next first two years, you don&#8217;t really need to. And that model&#8217;s really worked well. Intrusive, like it&#8217;s fine. We build amazing companies. The problem is it&#8217;s time consuming and my time is not scalable. I&#8217;m still, I&#8217;m on the board of and these companies it&#8217;s the opposite model. We&#8217;re coming up with the ideas. And often I even rent product like Rebag and lofty. I was like, I went to Ukraine and Romania and I hired the team. I re I was like scrum master. I was like, I was actually writing the stories and managing the teams. I was working day and night for them for many years. And now I&#8217;m still on the board of like most of them ones I just mentioned. And so that model, it&#8217;s amazing. But it&#8217;s just too time consuming. And so putting that on hold for now, but we still have two or three more to build. We still have two more to build as we speak, despite the fact that we&#8217;re not recruiting a new batch and in 20, 22&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;only so much for breeze. That&#8217;s a lot of sounds like you&#8217;re spread pretty thin if you&#8217;re doing.&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;Yeah. Yeah. Plus we have a SPAC plus the a week plus I do a lot of stuff in crypto, independently. What we do at FJ yadda I&#8217;m spread too thin as is. And so my current what I&#8217;d like to find a way to do while I. The reason I built the team to 31 is actually to do all the, a lot of the stuff I don&#8217;t like to do, which the good news is that the problem is when you&#8217;re going to something, the world sends you, the universe sends you more of that. And so the temptation of course is to do more and more. But I need to find a way to be more scalable. And I think putting aside started the studio to spite of how much fun it is, eh, and just focusing on the venture side because it&#8217;s more scalable and POS probably more useful for humanity in the long run, but in terms of like placing bets in so many categories to try to address it, all the world&#8217;s problems is broadly a better allocation of time. And I can tell&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;you&#8217;re inspired by it. Yeah. You&#8217;ve had a lot of success. I think that&#8217;s safe to say maybe an understatement of the day. Did you grow up.&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;Yes and no is the, which is a weird answer. My great grandmother so I greet great grandmother in the late 18 hundreds inherited a hotel from when her husband passed away. And instead of doing the done thing and and marrying again, she had decided to just take over the hotel, which was like fully embedded. She turned it around, made it super profitable, then bought another one. Then another one, she ended up owning all of the luxury hotels in nice owning half of the residential real estate of niece, basically becoming the wealthiest thought. And if not the wealthiest, one of the wealthiest women in the world in the late 18 hundreds She gave it all to, she had multiple children, she gave it all to, or oldest Augustus who was actually an effective manager and didn&#8217;t lose any of it, but a force by the time. But he didn&#8217;t do the same thing. And by the time. It&#8217;s kissed took over. It was split between all of them and they all spent basically the new VAR reach. All they want to do is hang out with the queen of England and the prince of Monaco. And by the time of my grandparents&#8217; generation, by the time my parents came along, there was basically nothing left. And so the, I imagine a generation that had been brought up with the idea that they were going to be wealthy, never need to work. It&#8217;s the silver spoon in their math, and yet didn&#8217;t have anything already be to show for it. And so my father had started from scratch. So when w we were living, the four of them. Brother and I have two brothers, so I&#8217;d like when we started at my brother and my parents, like in a studio apartment and he started working for this French billionaire as an endless, and they&#8217;re a leveraged buyout firm in the seventies. And so we came from, even though we had come from family that had a lot of money by the time my parents level, there was nothing left. And so we started with nothing. I went to public school but in 1989 when I was 14 my father&#8217;s father was became grossly of the ranks. We can to CEO of the company that that, that guide bought through an LPO. And they sold it for whatever, like a billion dollars. I think my dad had a 5% of it in stock options. And it&#8217;s like the pre not venture capital per se, but like a similar model and overnight became wealthy. And actually you retired at the age of 41, which I think was a huge mistake. But I guess it didn&#8217;t live through it because I, at that point I&#8217;d already, I was living with my grandmother and niece and then I&#8217;d left for college and probably out of ego. I decided I didn&#8217;t want to take any require, ask for any help. So I paid for college. Most of them, I saw, for my living expenses myself. So I had to work. Like I went to Princeton and when I was 17, but I&#8217;d like to work four jobs plus build my first company to pay for it, et cetera. Whereas probably the easier thing would have been asked my parents for money. So because at that point of time we did have money. Cause that was two years after my father had become wealthy. But because I had left kind of my parents, I was living with my grandmother. I also didn&#8217;t really notice a shift. And so I came from an upper-class family that was probably middle-class in income. But that rose through the ranks. And then all of a sudden became wealthy at the. A 50 for me by my parents. My parents are getting,&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;but from a life experience standpoint, it sounds like you had more modest sensibilities as a kid than maybe generations before you what&#8217;s. How has money changed your life now because you&#8217;ve had tremendous success? I know that is challenging for a lot of entrepreneurs who are going through these cycles. What have been the ups and downs of this evolution for you?&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;I don&#8217;t know first of all, as a kid, I was just built differently from everyone else in my family. I was like really serious, like until post-college I was like Shelton, for me it was all about like intellectual pursuits and getting a pluses and skipping all the grades and winning the Olympiads. And I was completely antisocial not at all a good public speaker or. Just different. Like I cared about like studying economics and philosophy and getting a pluses and nothing else and map like no interest outside of that. And no time for anyone, including by the way, my family, I was extremely arrogant and condescending as a kid of you guys are not smart enough and worthy enough of my time and attention, including my parents, by the way, I was like, so it&#8217;s funny because in a way I was the best kid ever, like always a plus is going to bed early, not doing anything bad, et cetera, but it was also. At difficult kid in the sense that I&#8217;d like, didn&#8217;t provide much love. It was like, yeah, you guys are not smart enough for me. Leave me be I&#8217;ve learned. And it&#8217;s interesting because I have come to value people, I think as you&#8217;ve you put the emphasis and value and things you were really good at. And of course that I was really good at being smart and not so good at anything else. And so of course that was my prison by which to value the world. And as you become older and also more confident and successful, you&#8217;re also realize there&#8217;s so many ways to be and to live. And it&#8217;s not my ways a personal value judgment, but there are many other ways that are absolutely amazing. That to answer your question directly it&#8217;s a little bit of a non-sequitur know. So I became wealthy and in 2004, I sold a zingy for $80 million and I own 53% of the company. So I made $43 million net of tax. It was like 26.5. And what&#8217;s interesting is in a way it didn&#8217;t change anything. I still lived in a studio apartment for a few more years. I think the big purchase of that time, it was the next box of TV and two tennis rackets mostly driven by how busy I was. Like we were growing, we grew from 15 million in revenue. So for it&#8217;s two hundred and two oh five. I can moving offices every four months and thinking we re-did that. And like it kept, we kept getting bigger and bigger offices and hiring. So it didn&#8217;t really hit me completely. What&#8217;s interesting is my first company where I built in 98, 99, like my company on paper is worth hundreds of millions and that it comes so easily that I didn&#8217;t realize how much money that was like at 28. I started my bath company at 23 is like an eBay of Europe. We had a buyout offer. 300 million at 40% a company, I was going to make $120 million. And again I&#8217;m like, man, of course everyone makes money to me. Other than that, it&#8217;s just a bubble. Everything seemed easy. I did not realize how, because you, 23, you don&#8217;t know any better. And also I never really lacked for money. And also I never really, I never money was never an objective. It&#8217;s like a means. It&#8217;s not even a Misa net. I want to be a tech founder. That&#8217;s all I wanted to be. And whether or not I was going to be financially successful was irrelevant, which is why, by the way, in 2006, After the bubble bursts and, I made I went from hero to zero basically, and was bankrupt in 2001. Then I realized maybe I should have taken a secondary for a couple of million, which is people will offer it. And I&#8217;d be like, nah, a couple billion who need, I want to be Bebe. The founder of there&#8217;s all in. I don&#8217;t want to take money off the table, et cetera. I&#8217;d like a more to prove I want to be the ideal entrepreneur. And of course for me, I thought like a couple of millions, nothing. It forced at that point, I was thinking that having literally nothing in my bank account that I realized, oh shit, no money is really hard to make. It&#8217;s very easy to lose. It&#8217;s very hard to make. But in 2001, when I would have built zingy. This internet thing is it&#8217;s dead. It&#8217;s small. It&#8217;s not big and no big deal. At the end of the day, I didn&#8217;t do this for the money. I did this to be, I wanted to create something and nothing. I&#8217;d love tech. So I&#8217;m going to build a new company. It&#8217;s probably not going to be big and it doesn&#8217;t matter. Now, lo and behold, it turns out I made sure that it wasn&#8217;t dead. Despite every company had got on web van Petlock com MCI work on everyone had got under. And at that point in time and VC soft investing, but came back and B was financially successful. Now what has done for me since is I value experiences and I value my time. And so what I use the money for is I have a, I have a Butler or a an estate manager and who&#8217;s also my chef and does all of the offline things that I don&#8217;t like to do, so I don&#8217;t cook. I don&#8217;t clean. I et cetera. I have a virtual assistant in the Philippines and managers of my entire life. I. I go heli skiing, which is extraordinary, expensive, by the way for fun. Now I don&#8217;t own any physical goods per CyberKnife. I have a house in Turks. I have a house and I have a department, New York avenue. I have a house in Revelstoke, but I don&#8217;t have, yeah. I really have a sense of cars or clothing and luxury, et cetera, all those things. I don&#8217;t think mattered too much for me. I think physical goods are anchors. But for me it&#8217;s more using the financial success I&#8217;ve had as a means of buying Experiences. I love helping people around me and I give millions a year, but beyond giving millions a year to charity, I actually give millions a year to my friends as a means of changing their lives and making the, making a difference on the day to day of their life. And it&#8217;s a bit non-traditional other way. But these are people I&#8217;ve known for 20, 30 years. And so I tell them, don&#8217;t expect it to be recurring. It just happens when I have an exited where I feel you&#8217;re in need and it&#8217;s meaningful for them. And I don&#8217;t think it impacts our relationship. So I think it&#8217;s been an amazing tool and it&#8217;s also been amazing to have freedom. Like my dream, for instance, in and FJ labs is actually not to have external investors. If it&#8217;s the maximum I can invest with my current strategy is 300 million a year. If I have 300 million a year of I owed money to deploy, I would do that and not have any external capital. That would be way easier. That would remove the part of my life that I don&#8217;t like of dealing with LPs and fundraising and like and whatever, a gap, accounting and sec registration and all that stuff. I would do that in a heartbeat. Financial success is really a means of free personal freedom to do what you want. When you want to have the experiences you want to have and to help the people around you.&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;Was there a moment when you felt like you got your sea legs with being wealthy, where it went from, figuring out what that meant for you to, okay. I got it. I know my framework for how I want to use money to have impact my friends, my personal life, et cetera.&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;Eh, happened automatic over time automatically like the. I soon as I add capital, I started investing in startups. So I really stayed all by angel investing in 2005 and I knew I wanted to deploy capital into. To back the, my friends were building companies and to help them realize their dreams and to solve the problems in the world. So that immediately came to me in terms of helping my friends did that leader, but I realized how, what I started considering like a little capital could change. It could make a difference in the lives of my friends, a friend of mine, she was running a dermatology clinic in New York and she was making whatever a half a million a year. And she decided to said to go run a cancer research, live at Harvard and make like whatever, a hundred K a year. Profound difference in her income yet for the world. I thought I was like a massive net positive contribution, but as a result, she could no longer afford like the down payment or a house in Boston. So I paid that for her and I think it&#8217;s the right thing for you and your husband and your kids to be able to love and amazing place. So you can actually do research this meeting folder of the world and that sort of happened. Little by little over time. No, I&#8217;m not sure there was ever like a, oh, this is a correct strategy. Very rapidly. What I did realize is I don&#8217;t, I never followed traditional wealth management advice. You go to these wealth managers or like Goldman or whatever, and they&#8217;re like, oh, you should have 50, 60% equities and 30% bonds and blah, blah, blah, like crazy. None of that ever made any sense to me, I have a complete barbell portfolio where it&#8217;s like a 10% of cash because you want optionality of being able to take advantage of things in crises, 10%, crypto, 10% public Sox of the things that have gone public in my portfolio that I still like and old 10% of real estate that&#8217;s really consumption. And then everything else is like early stage Texas tech stuff. A completely barbell works really well. I realized it was much better at doing that. And ma which is essentially the same thing as like running FJ labs. If your labs are in a ways, a family office, and good on that front. And I made many mistakes. Like I, I lost in a way millions dollars and Billy&#8217;s trying to buy a big chunk of the country to preserve the rainforest, which, taught me something about a rule of law. I lost millions dollars in Dominican Republic doing something at a much smaller scale, instead of hundreds of thousands of acres doing it with 165 acres, wanting to build a big community where I would bring founders and spiritual leaders and and artists to just create and be there with no business model, but like everyone from the mayor to the minister of tourism and environment, all wanted bribes and create an environment that was all super tenable. So lost millions of dollars. Pursuing, if you, these houses, I made many mistakes along the way, but in general, at the end of the day, my true north star of help those around you. Help the world through, in my case, second Vaseline. So like finding solutions, the world&#8217;s problems, and like by yourself and living the life you want to lead has been amazing. By the way, through that process, I did a lot of iteration in 2013. I&#8217;d actually 2012. I gave almost all my physical possessions to charity. I went down to 50 items that fit in a carry on my backpack and my tennis bag. And I went cap surfing and France couches for a year that I went like an Airbnb. I lived in Airbnbs and hotels for three years beyond that all around the world. Like making sure I allocate time to invest in my friends and friendship and my friendships and my family in a way I&#8217;d never done that before.&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;And why did you need to do that? Just cause the material items were owning you at some level. Was that the thinking, did you have all the goods to do that? To have related&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;time allocation? If you have like at a country house in Bedford and I would go and it was amazing, right? Like I, it was huge and we played paintball there and like it organized like parties. We played video games the way they gave me a room, et cetera. But at the end of the day I went there because I was paying so much for it, which is the wrong reason to use something. The minute I didn&#8217;t have an apartment, the minute I didn&#8217;t have a house, I was like, okay, dad, I have infinite freedom and flexibility. Where do I want to be? Who is it that I want to be spending time with? And so being, when you have a default, you go to that default, if you remove the default option, you can be way more thoughtful about what it is you really want to do, who it is, what it is you really want to hang out with. And the fundamental problem I was trying to solve for is. As you get older as your friends. And I start getting married, having kids jobs, et cetera. I like the quality of the tea. The texture of your friendships, like changes when you&#8217;re in college, you&#8217;re remaking the world. You&#8217;re starting to you&#8217;re seeing your friends seven days a week. Even at McKinsey, I would see my friends date many days. Many hours every week. And all of a sudden it would came at like the biographical update. I, we see you once every six weeks. And at that point is what happened to your husband and your work, et cetera, and your kids since then? And it&#8217;s fine, but it&#8217;s not the reason that we became friends. We became friends because there was a more fundamental connection and perspective and beliefs of some of the world and extraordinary conversations. And I wanted to rekindle that in, in my thirties, in a eighties, it seemed to have gone away between the age of 25 and whatever 35. And I&#8217;m like, there must be a way to change it. And others were not making the adjustments to their little. Why don&#8217;t I adjust my life to make it happen. And now there are many false starts, right? Like the couch surfing was a total failure because of course it was Dean and cab. The fact that I was at a position in their life and they saw, I&#8217;d like to bring skids to school and go to work, et cetera. The Airbnb thing worked really well until her BB was made illegal. It may most of the major cities and like across New York, all the high-end inventory to spirit then they will tell us all became full. So I was like moving hotels every four days. So that&#8217;s actually the reason I ended up buying an apartment in New York. I was very happy living in like billionaires apartments, for a month, at a time in every neighborhood in New York, hosting dinner parties there. But once I had to live at hotels and move a tell, remember five days, I&#8217;m like, okay, that&#8217;s not viable. And I couldn&#8217;t find high-end re rental inventory. I liked, so I bought a place, but. I guess people don&#8217;t put enough iteration and design and thought into their lives. They follow the default, whereas you can throw stuff on the wall and see what sex and see what sticks for you, right? Like people are built differently and what they want to do and how they want to lead their lives. And they followed the, I guess thing, the default path way too much. Like my life is very non-traditional in general. I do a month in New York than a month intrusive kaikos I&#8217;ll do a month in Canada. Because New York and is socially artistically, professionally extraordinary intense. And if you&#8217;re doing, you&#8217;re not thinking, and then I come to church and I&#8217;m working during the day. I&#8217;m in trucks right now and we&#8217;re doing this call and I have 12 calls today, but I&#8217;ll meditate. I&#8217;ll go, kitesurf, I&#8217;ll play tennis. And I&#8217;ll take the time to read and write and think and be reflective and rebuild my batteries. And then most people don&#8217;t necessarily think through what is right for them in light of their energy level, personality, et cetera. And so that iterative design is alive, made it alive by.&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;I love all that. You mentioned through there that you do a lot of charity, which I think is great. I particularly was interested in the buying a Britain forest or attempts to do taking it that further. I would love to hear your take on impact, right? Is there a cause that you&#8217;re passionate about or some particular topic? Let me put it a different way, because my favorite way to ask this question, if you were king now, president king, what is one thing you would change?&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;So I&#8217;m going to give the hyper rational answer to that. Please, if you look at all the policies you could do in the U S and which ones would actually impact wellbeing for people the most it&#8217;s actually, there&#8217;s one thing that has much larger impact on personal outcome than everything else. And in the U S social mobility as a client, it used to be the 95% of people made more money than their parents. Now it&#8217;s about 50% since people born since 1982. And the main reason for that is that the top cities are the ones where all the jobs created for all the opportunities are, have become unaffordable. And the reason there aren&#8217;t affordable is we&#8217;ve passed extraordinarily idiotic, zoning and landscaping laws. And at that, that mean that you cannot build as easily as you should be able to. And there&#8217;s a lot of reasons for that. If your current owner restricting supply means your thing your homes increasing value dramatically. But it&#8217;s extremely bad for like social mobility economic diversity. And so you look at San Francisco, 80% of the city is zoned. Apartments are illegal. You can not have more than two story buildings. And as a result, you have the cities become extremely unaffordable. So if I could change one, one thing is essentially. Remove all air rights, all essentially zoning and construction regulation. Other than a few, see if you&#8217;re not going to be building over whatever central park, but like air rights and city and your city make no sense. Like having these buildings that are less than a hundred year olds old, be like landmark that you can&#8217;t build over them makes no sense. You should be able to build up as much as you can. And we should have unlimited supply. And of course, there&#8217;ll be a lag of eight years or 10 years before things get built and prices adjust. But at that actually solves affordable housing. And when you solve affordable housing, you recreate mobility and your lack of people to get the best jobs. And this is what changes the outcome more than anything else. Now that&#8217;s not a something I&#8217;m investing in any way, shape or form or. Because there&#8217;s crazy nimbyism and political forces against it. And it&#8217;s, it has to be in the U S the rules are like literally like neighborhood by neighborhood. And it&#8217;s so painful. So I, as king, I would do that. That is not where I keep my claim to. Now I&#8217;ve not put a lot of thought into charity. That first of all, what I do at the charity level, it is way more personal and directed will have a much larger impact on the lives of the people I help, but it&#8217;s much more smaller scale. Like in the Dominican Republic, I helps pay for the education of 10,000 kids from K through 12. It&#8217;s amazing for these kids. So it changes their life outcomes, dramatically program.&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;You do that through, or you just set that up.&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;No, it&#8217;s the dream project that I was funding. And I, but I helped them beyond that. I helped, I built like a tech center where they could learn programming and to have access to computers and internet and find jobs, et cetera. I fund something called the university of the people, which is helping non low-income people basically get us degrees, especially in things like computer science. And there are people from like our over a hundred nations and they often end up getting jobs at Google, Facebook, et cetera. So it&#8217;s been mostly right education, helping people be able to increase their out their life outcomes through adhesion often in the communities where I was living, I lived in the Dr for largest spend, like four or five months a year from 2012 to 2019 2018, the men I&#8217;ve done a lot of that now, separately I&#8217;ve dragged given directly. Contributions to many of my friends and like dozens of them, right? And we&#8217;re talking millions and millions of dollars, it&#8217;s life-changing for them, but I don&#8217;t larger scale. All of that is dwarfed from a social and economic impact by what I do. And as a tech investor, right? Like my tech investments of hundreds and hundreds of companies, I think ultimately will change the lives of billions of people. And yeah, they&#8217;re for profit, but there&#8217;s a fundamental social motivation for them. And I think they will dwarf anything I do on the direct investment and the direct shadow charity frame. That&#8217;s why most of my personal capital is actually allocated to investing technology, to solve the world&#8217;s problems. And I think we will, by the way, I&#8217;m extremely optimistic on how we&#8217;re gonna address climate change, inequality of opportunity, et cetera.&nbsp; MPD:&nbsp;It&#8217;s been great having you on. Thank you so much for doing this.&nbsp; Fabrice Grinda:&nbsp;Thank you for having me MPD:&nbsp;every time I talked to Fabrice, I feel a little bit smarter, very grateful for him being on the show today and grateful to have him in my orbit, working together and doing deals together. It&#8217;s a great guy. If you liked what you heard, please hook us up with a like or a five-star review. This is my basic pandering. Help us out. You can find me on Twitter at MPD. And to hear more of my conversations with innovators, subscribe on YouTube, Facebook, or any major podcast platform. Just search for innovation with Mark Peter Davis.

2022-03-29T14:06:29

2022-03-29T14:06:29

https://fabricegrinda.com/?p=18578

2022-10-10T09:25:55

2022-10-10T09:25:55

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Do not worry, I have got this parenting thing figured out :)

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Do not worry, I have got this parenting thing figured out :). Categories - Displays of Creativity, Personal Musings. Date-Posted - 2022-03-29T14:06:29 .