In the same Ayahuasca ceremony during which my grandmother Françoise convinced me to have kids, my grandmother told me to have at least one boy and one girl because the relationship between a father and a son is different than the relationship between a father and a daughter, and both are amazing and worth having. I was blessed with the birth of my daughter Amélie Victoire Grinda on February 21, 2024.

She’s named after my mother’s extraordinary grandmother Amélie Haemmerlin, who was a renaissance woman, trilingual and one of the first women in France to obtain a driver’s license. Her middle name is an homage to Victoire Schmitz. Despite the challenges of the 19th century, when most women did not work, Victoire built a real estate and hospitality empire. She was instrumental in establishing several prominent hotels, including the Hôtel Westminster, which became a cornerstone of our family’s fortune.

Like her brother, she’s extremely agreeable. She is always smiley and happy and willing to be manhandled and taken on crazy adventures. She’s already been on crazy hikes, including her first cable assisted river crossing. She also had her first Can-Am adventure including overnight camping while wolves were howling in the distance. Best of all, François absolutely adores her and does not have an ounce of jealousy in his bones. Her grandmother Sylviane is beyond enamored with her.

Because Amélie was the adventure of the year, I did not go on any crazy trips like the Antarctica trip I did in 2023. Instead, I split my time between my three wonderful homes: Revelstoke, Turks & Caicos, and New York. We started by hosting the bi-annual FJ Labs retreat in Revelstoke.

We then had amazing adventures in Turks & Caicos. As usual, I kited up a storm and continued enjoying all that Turks has to offer.

New York continued to serve as our base for urban adventures. It’s the perfect haven of intellectual, professional, social, and artistic endeavors.

On top of that Fafa’s school, The Ecole is literally perfect for us. It blends the rigor of the French school system with the team building, public speaking and creativity of the American system. They even have padel as an after-school program!

To mix up our European summer adventures, we spent a week in Megève to experience the Alps in the summer, before stopping by Gordes on the way to Nice and Saint Tropez.

As inconceivable as it is to me given how young and energetic I feel, I turned 50 on August 3! I invited all my best friends and family from the Grindaverse to celebrate this momentous event in style. Over 100 showed up! I hosted a racquet sports extravaganza for a week. For the formal festivities, I separated the birthday into three nights which I themed completely differently to create variety with distinct activities every night. We essentially brought Burning Man to Turks & Caicos, culminating in a wonderful white and gold party where we celebrated our love and friendship.

I then had the most epic summer adventure in Revelstoke including paragliding, hiking, camping, car racing, jet boating, jet skiing, bungee jumping and much more!

I headed to my annual pilgrimage to Burning Man. This year I went alone. I brought many virgins over the last few years: my brother and his wife, my mom, and many friends. It’s great to see Burning Man through their eyes, but I missed having my own adventure. One of my favorite things to do is to drop acid and bike around randomly, seeing where the night takes me. I had not had that experience in years. As there were no dust storms, I dropped acid the first night I got there, hopped on my bike and meandered away.

I biked near a little dome with triangular light fixtures in which someone was playing a piano concerto. Each note sent vibrations through my body. I was beckoned. I entered the dome and sat down. The notes made my body vibrate in such a way that I felt every human emotion possible amplified to their maximum level. The pianist simultaneously turned into a cartoon character: first old school Disney animation, then Pixar, then Play-Doh.

When the concerto ended, I hopped back on my bike, only to be summoned by a metal dragonfly. They were playing joyful 1960s music. The dragonfly’s wings were flapping, driven by 5 people swinging on a couch attached to the wings. They were playing psychedelic visuals in the wings. I was overcome by a sense of joy and felt the good-natured mood of the entire experience. At some point the dragonfly turned into a real dragonfly flying around with rainbow colors. It was so beautiful and innocent.

When the experience ended, I hopped back on my bike summoned by a beacon of light in the sky. The new Mayan Warrior was calling me. As I watched the amazing set, I felt transported to a bacchanal event at Studio 54. I then walked a few feet over and a giant dragon art car was making everyone stomp gloriously completely changing the mood in a beautiful and meaningful way just by walking 50 feet over.

As I biked around again, I entered a tunnel made of semi-circles of light. It truly felt as though I was biking in a wormhole through time and space in the most majestic of ways. When I exited the night sky once again beckoned. Puffy Cloud’s lights convened me. As I approached, I observed perfect synchronicity. Puffy Cloud’s light and music danced in perfect harmony with the stars, clouds and moon, only displaced by dawn. The night culminated by meeting my cousin in a way that felt pre-ordained. It was all majestic and I cannot wait to see what next year’s trip brings.

I returned to New York for the fall, always one of the highlights of the year. The foliage is gorgeous and Halloween in the city is so much fun!

The annual Christmas Grindaverse pilgrimage to Turks was more subdued as many people had already come for my birthday. We still ended up being 20 and had lots of fun playing padel. I took Fafa kiting and efoiling for the first time and taught him how to swim with an underwater scooter.

We finished the year cozied up in Revelstoke where Fafa had his first proper skiing lessons, while we enjoyed the epic powder.

Professionally, 2024 continued to be extraordinarily busy. We continued to be contrarian. We invested aggressively as everyone else was retrenching.

We continue to 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 2023 – 2025 timeframe.

For the most part we are focusing on B2B marketplaces and the digitization of B2B supply chains, avoiding the bubble and froth in AI. For more nuanced thoughts on the matter, I recently detailed our AI thesis and presented the latest marketplace trends. I also explained why we are so optimistic on climate which I presented in a keynote I gave at the Transatlantic Leadership Forum at Goldman Sachs.

Overall, FJ Labs continued to rock. The team grew to 36 people. We deployed $74 million. We made 189 start-up investments, 100 first time investments and 89 follow-on investments. We spun out our liquid crypto strategy into a new fund, Triton Liquid. We also incubated Midas which tokenizes yield on chain.

Despite the macro, we were fortunate to successfully exit several of our positions, including the IPO of NuBank, the acquisition of Cibeles by Uber, and the secondary sale of AtVenu.

Since Jose and I started angel investing 25 years ago, we invested in 1,192 unique companies, had 355 exits (including partial exit), and currently have 871 active unique company investments. We had realized returns of 30% IRR and an average multiple of 2.8x. In total, we deployed $692M of which $173M was provided by Jose and me.

With regards to the blog, I spent the most time developing and refining Fabrice AI. I also wrote a lot in 2024. Beyond the articles I already referenced, my best articles were:

I appeared on multiple podcasts. My favorite of which was my amazing conversation with Jack Farley covering macro, crypto, venture capital, and much more.

Most of my predictions for 2024 proved true. Despite headwinds, the economy did well in 2024 with low unemployment, strong growth and decreasing inflation. As expected, the Fed lowered rates in the second half of the year. On the personal side, my daughter Amélie joined our ever-expanding family. I convinced François to kite with me, and we had a more intimate New Year with only very close friends and family in Revelstoke.

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 it will happen.

The geopolitical environment is more fraught with risk than it has been in years. There is a looming dollar currency crisis 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 crises playing out before then. Absent geopolitical incidents, I expect 2025 to be much the same as 2024, though I am hoping the IPO window opens again and that the regulatory environment will not be as averse to M&A such that tech can see exits again.

I am excited for 2025. On the professional side, we will be launching FJ Labs IV, our next $300M fund. On the personal side, I will head to Finse in Norway to train for a 2026 snow kiting adventure across Greenland. I will also skip my traditional summer Turks birthday extravaganza for a longer and more intimate stint in Revelstoke to try it out. I am also going to bring many Grindaverse members to their first Burning Man which should be exciting.

Happy New Year!