I had the pleasure of chatting with the VNTR Podcast. I shared my journey from launching startups to becoming one of the world’s most active angel investors. We discussed my approach to early-stage investing, the importance of pattern recognition, and my philosophy when evaluating opportunities. I also offer insights into the evolution of global tech ecosystems, emerging trends in marketplaces and AI, and actionable advice for entrepreneurs navigating today’s challenges.

Chapters:

• 00:00 Intro
• 09:37 Founding OLX
• 19:53 A new era for marketplaces
• 30:45 Replacing yourself with AI
• 41:00 The most exciting AI use case
• 49:00 The best investment
• 1:00:43 Parenthood

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.

Transcript

Niko Leon: Welcome to Venture Podcast presented by VNTR, the world’s leading investors community, the place to learn from VCs and capital allocators.

Fabrice Grinda: And I’m like, you know what? You gotta just build it up the old fashioned way. Invested everything I had, borrowed a hundred K on my credit cards, missed over the course of two years, payroll 27 times.

But I raised 1. 4 million in like 5 and 10 K increments. I would meet someone like, Hey, I have this great startup. You need to invest. I’d get like 5k here, 10 K there. And I would make payroll just through the five, 10 K I would find here and there. But finally, and it took a long time to, like, get the first music licenses, get the first operator, but then they’re kind of lemmings.

And once I had one, all of them wanted to sign. And so it created a wonderful snowball effect. So revenues went from one million in 2002. 5 million in 2003, but almost all that in Q4, so the first nine months were very painful. But on August 15, 2003, we became cashflow profitable, became masters of our own destiny, and the sleeping in the couch of the office living off ramen noodles, which I’d done for almost two years, was done.

It was like, yes, I can pay the employees, I can pay back my credit card debt, I can actually get an apartment, pay rent, etc. And then we went to 50 million in 2004. 200 million in 05. So one to 200 million revenues and in four years only raised 1. 4 million and like seeds, fools, friends, and family money.

Yuri Rabinovich: Hey guys, welcome to the VNTR podcast. And today we are hosting Fabrice Grinda founder and managing partner at FJ labs Fabrice, welcome. Please introduce yourself. And we prepared cool questions to, to ask you through the podcast.

Fabrice Grinda: Thank you for having me. Just brief background. I’m a French originally, though.

I’ve been a tech founder and investor for the last 26 years. I built multiple venture backed companies. The largest one of which is a company called OLX, which is over 10, 000 employees in 30 countries. It’s like Craigslist on ride for the rest of the world. And I’m an investor in 1100 startups and I’ve actually exited 300 of them.

So I’ve done rather well, both as a founder and investor, and it’s been a, an amazing ride, which continues to this day.

Yuri Rabinovich: Amazing experience. Thanks.

Fabrice Grinda: I mean, look, if you want a more detailed journey, I’m happy to do that as well. That was like the elevator, if you want the full play by play and how I became an investor, et cetera.

I mean more than happy to do that as well.

Yuri Rabinovich: So, so let, let’s start with your entrepreneurial journey. So you, you started multiple ventures you know, the biggest is OLX. But what, what is your journey? How did you get started as an entrepreneur?

Fabrice Grinda: I would say it all began kind of randomly in 1984, I was 10. I got my first PC and it was love at first click.

You know, I got my PC and I knew we were meant to be together forever. Like, I love the idea of like programming. I built in board systems. I’d like, I mean, it was like it was a PC. It was a compact 8088. And clear, very rapidly realized that was an amazing way to express my creativity and ambition.

Now, my role models at the time were Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. And I went to the top school in France. So I was winning all the Olympiads, et cetera. And they were like, Hey, what do you want to do when you grow up? And I’m like, I want to be a tech founder, like my role models and idols. And they were like, What?

You would betray the ideals of the French socialist revolution. And I thought they were kidding. I laughed out loud. And of course they weren’t. I’m like, okay, I need to go to the U. S. to live the American dream. So in 92, I was 17. I went to Princeton for college and I already knew tech, you know, like, in fact, being way more so than like, no one else was like tech foundry at that point in time.

So like, you know what, I’m going to study economics and mathematics because A, to me, it explains the way the world works. And I think it’s intellectually interesting that I studied everything and anything. And at that point in time, You know, the web started exploding, right? Like, so Gopher, Mosaic, Netscape, Amazon was released, and I knew I wanted to be tech founder, but when I graduated, I was 21, I topped my class in 96.

I’m like, you know, 21, I’m shy. I’m introverted. I’ve never really, I build a little tech startup, but it was like sole proprietorship, no employees. It helped pay for college, but that wasn’t big. If I build something bigger, I’m probably going to fail. Why don’t I go to McKinsey? It’s like business school, except they pay you.

So went to McKinsey. And, and by the way, the path I could have created a company, probably would have failed, would have learned a lot, could have joined a company. I was 21. Would not have taken me seriously, but you know, you learn on the job. So I think all three paths would have been viable. Anyway, pick McKinsey business school, except they pay you.

Learn what I need to learn in terms of oral and written communication skills, business analysis skills presentation building, team building, etcetera. And we’re not able to start up. So in 98 didn’t have any brilliant ideas, but I’m like, you know, I like marketplaces and I see this thing called eBay and they’re creating liquidity and transparency and opaque fragmented markets.

They’re not doing in the rest of the world. I’m going to take the idea and bring it to France. And so essentially helped bring the internet revolution to France and Europe writ large. I was 23, I raised 63 million in venture money, grew the company to 10 million a month, 150 employees, unfortunately grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory.

Even though I had gone from zero to a hundred, like zero to hero, The bubble burst, the company that bought us saw their stock fall 99. 98 percent from 10 billion to 30 million, lost everything. And I thought, okay it was in my defense, I’d wanted to sell it for eBay for cash. And my majority investor said no, which is why sadly we grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory.

And I’m like, you know what? I didn’t do this for the money at the end of the day. I like being in tech. I like building something. I’m going to stay in tech, even though the internet is going to be this niche little thing with no money in it. It doesn’t matter. It’s where I want to be. And in 2001, I’m like, what can I build with the capital constraints where no capital is going to be available.

I need something I can make profitable reasonably quickly. And I had seen that ringtones were big in Europe and Asia, and they were not yet in the U S. So I’m like, you know what? Let me come back to the U S. Let’s go build a ringtone company and get the licenses, you know, the operators first years were extraordinarily tough, right?

I can raise a single dollar VC money I don’t think I’d finish the call that like they’d hung up because every BTC company in the US or in the world I’ve gone under eToys, Webvan, Cosmo, Pets.com very famously and frankly every Telco company had gone under like MCI, WorldCom, et cetera. So there was no VC money to be had.

And I’m like, you know what, you’re going to just build it up the old fashioned way, invested everything I had borrowed a hundred K on my credit cards, missed over the course of two years, payroll 27 times. But I raised 1. 4 million in like 5 and 10 K increments. I would meet someone like, Hey, I have this great startup.

You need to invest. So to get like 5k here, 10 K there. And I would make payroll just through the 5-10k I would, I would find here and there. But finally. And it took a long time to like get the first music licenses, get the first operator, but then they’re kind of lemmings. And once I had one, all of them wanted to sign.

And so it created a wonderful snowball effect. So revenues went from 1,000,000 in 2002, 5,000,000 in 2003, but almost all that in Q4. So the first nine months were very painful. But on August 15, 2003, we became cashflow profitable. Became masters of our own destiny and the sleeping in the couch of the office, living off ramen noodles, which I’d done for almost two years, was done.

It’s like, yes, I can pay the employees. I can pay back my credit card that I can actually get an apartment, pay rent, etcetera. And then we went to 50 million in 04, 200 million in 05. So one to 200 million revenues and in four years only raised 1. 4 million in like, seeds, friends and family money. And this time sold the company a bit, became profitable.

So we made like 4 million profits in, you know, five, you know, I know four and like seven or eight in, you know, five sold the company a bit too early, but this time for cash and better truly than too late, as I’d learned before. So this time grabbed victory from the jaws of defeat. And I sold it for 80 million in June of 04 to a publicly traded competitor.

And it actually was fun. I stayed on for 18 months. We were going at it from strength to strength. We were a rocket ship. So we went from 25 employees to 50 to 100 to 200 to 250. We were adding product categories. We’re getting ready for the smartphone transition. But ultimately, the people that bought me didn’t love me.

 I could have bought Shazam for like a million dollars. I could, like, there’s so many opportunities. And they said, no, no, no, send the profits back to Japan. After 18 months, I’m like, you know what? I like marketplaces. I should go back to my first true love and Craigslist has come of age and I’m like, you know, Craigslist is amazing, but they’re violating the principles of providing a proper public service to the community by not moderating, not eliminating scam and phishing and, and also by not modernizing the UX UI.

So I offered to buy them. They said no. I offered to run them for free. They said no. So I’m like, you know what, I’m going to build a better version of Craigslist for the rest of the world. So went on to create OLX. We first launched in 100 countries. It really, really worked in four, which were Portugal and Pakistan.

And then of course, India and Brazil. So we’re focused on these four. Use the one there and use the profits there to then re extend to 30 countries at the ends with a 300 million unique visitors per month. We are part of the fabric of society and like Brazil and pretty much all of Latin America and the UAE and all the Middle East and India and Pakistan and most Southeast Asia and all of Eastern Europe.

We have 50 million people who make a living off the site. I mean, it’s ginormous. In order to win though, because it’s winner takes all, we had to fight a huge war with a big publicly traded competitor. And in 2010, I went to my American VCs and I’m like, hey, we need hundreds of millions to spend on TV ads and like whatever Pakistan, and they were not enthused by the idea.

I think in 2015, by the way, it would have worked. And so I ended up partnering with a publicly traded media company from South Africa called NASPERS, now called Process, and they invested hundreds of millions of the company. They gave me the means to, to fight the war. So I fought the war, won, merged 51 49 for us versus our biggest competitor.

And then in 2013. Seemingly on top of the world, but I was like, you know, this big company where publicly traded is not really fun anymore. I want to go back to the building I sold to NASPERS and went on to my next journey. So because the VC backed into an old journey until 2013.

Yuri Rabinovich: So you, you kind of gave up on building.

Fabrice Grinda: I disagree. I did not build to give up and building you could for two reasons. One is what did I do afterwards? I didn’t just go join a fund. You know, I could have joined Sequoia or whatever. No, I decided to go build a fund. Building a fund is like building a startup. You need to raise capital. You need to hire the team.

You need to find a thesis and a strategy. You need a, you need to find a culture. I mean, it is a startup you’re losing money for the first, whatever, so many years you’re not covering with management fees, the cost of the operations. And I like building companies. And so as part of the fund, we have a studio business where we help build companies.

And so I ended up building a mobile classified company. That was called Sell It that I ended up emerging into a mobile classified company in Spain called Wallapop. I became CEO of the U. S. Chairman of Spain, and then we merged it with LetGo, which then merged with OfferUp. So I built that and not into a very big company.

Wallopop’s really worth like a billion, whatever. And then the more recently, and we’ve built like 10 companies over the years, I just built a yield bearing stable coin and tokenization company called Midas. Came up with the idea, hired the team, et cetera. So I’m still building and I’m still building at my fund.

In addition to being an investor.

Yuri Rabinovich: I was teasing.

Fabrice Grinda: No,, but look, it’s a fair point. And I thought long and hard, like, should I go and build another venture backed company? And I actually like the idea of doing that. The issue is, once you’ve reached a certain level of success, I have no fear of failing.

Like, you know, I failed my way to success. It’s more, to justify the opportunity cost of my time, it has to be big. And the problem is ahead of, ahead of, ahead of time, like X and T, it’s hard to know if something’s going to be bigger or not, right? Like Uber was originally like a black car service for rich people.

It didn’t feel very big, which is why Garrett chose to do stumble upon and gave Uber to Travis. Or Airbnb, it’s like inflatable mattresses in people’s living rooms. It didn’t feel big, just big ended up being in both cases, much larger ideas. And so I never found an idea that I’m like, Oh, I need to go all in, do other than sell it.

You know, Wallapop for a while. And I like investing. I like building. And so actually labs became my structure for that.

Niko Leon: And you said before, you’ve invested in 1100 startups over how long that must be some sort of record for VC.

Fabrice Grinda: Yeah. And by the way, as a builder, I built my own AI recently for fun.

So 1100 startups. So I started angel investing when I became a founder back in 98. So but most of the investors came after I had money in time. But back in 98, I was CEO, very public CEO, the cover of every magazine. And so a lot of other founders started reaching out to me and said, Hey, Hey, Can you invest in our startups?

Of course, I had no money. So it was like, look, I’m happy to take some advisory shares, for helping out and writing small checks. But I really can’t do much of that. And I thought long and hard, should I be an angel investor in parallel to being a CEO? I mean, clearly it is a distraction from my core mandate as founder to go and be an angel investor.

And ultimately, I’m like, you know what, if I can articulate lessons learned to others, it means I’ve internalized them. And I understand that I’ve really understood them. And number two, I’m running at that time, first Auckland, then OLX, which are multi category horizontal classified sites and auction sites.

 Meeting all the verticals and understanding the trends of the verticals and keeping my fingers on the pulse of the market also makes me better founder. So as long as it doesn’t take too long, like one hour meeting and I decided yes or no, it’s fine as long as I only focus on my course. So back in 98, I’m like, I can be an angel investor if it’s in marketplaces.

And in a one hour meeting, I say yes or no. And so I created the four investment selection criteria back then that I still used to this day. Now it’s two 1 hour meetings. Now it used to be one 1 hour meeting. But now the Deals were filtered before they get to me. And so I started angel investing in 98 by 2013 when I left OLX, I’d already had about 173 investments. We have 37 exits was crushing it. And so I like I like building companies. I like investing companies. Let’s create FJ Labs originally as a family office really to go and build and invest in tech companies. And that took a life of its own. And other people started saying, Hey, we want exposure.

What are you doing? Which allowed us to raise the first formal venture funds at FJ Labs 1 in 2016 with 50 million of external capital. But the scale of the volume is increased. The velocity is increased. Now we’re investing about 150 to 200 companies a year, but for many, many years, it was like 5, 10, 20, 30, 40.

So yes, we’ve invested in 1,100 companies, probably not as in the traditional or a VC or a seed stage VC is probably up there. But there are a few models like that, Kyma, BoxGroup, and of course, YC is way more prolific because each of the batch of YC is like hundreds and hundreds of companies. So The high velocity approach is reasonably unique, but probably we’re not the most the most prolific investor out there, but yeah, so it’s all been over 26 years, but most of the investors, I would say, have come in the last six.

Yuri Rabinovich: And do you recommend other founders to start investing early like you did, or at what stage do you recommend them to diversify a bit?

Fabrice Grinda: So look, the best time to start investing is when you have capital and time. So after you exit, when you’re a post exit founder and you’ve joined VNTR or whatever, your community, that is the time to start investing. I liked doing it because I think it’s a reflection of my intellectual curiosity.

There’s so many problems in the world and all these founders are amazing and they’re trying to solve the problems. And each problem is one founder going after it, or actually multiple founders going after it on average. And so it was a way to address my intellectual curiosity about what was going on in the world.

And it was a way to keep my tabs on the pulse of the market, because when your head’s down, you don’t actually really realize what are the changes that are happening out there. So I don’t think it’s for most people. You need to be able to context switch. You need to be, you need to have the time to be allocating that and to be willing to make decisions with imperfect information in very limited time.

So I think most founders, I would say, wait until you exit. But for a few of them, you know, why not?

Yuri Rabinovich: So exit could be also like some cash out in growth stage runs.

Fabrice Grinda: Yes. It could be that, especially if you have more, you know, especially if you have more time, you have a CFO, you have a COO, you know, you’re no longer working a hundred hours a week.

You’re only working 60 hours a week, you know, then what are you going to do the other 40 hours, you know, go angel investing. But I can tell you that when I was running OLX, it’s just thousands of employees in 30 countries and angel investing like crazy. That was not the most recommended lifestyle choices.

I mean, I was flying, I was working. Over a hundred hours a week, seven days a week, you know, for like years. So because essentially I had two full time jobs.

Yuri Rabinovich: Did you have family at that time or you were single?

Fabrice Grinda: No, of course not. No girlfriend, no kids. So you need to be at the right place for it in life as well.

Yuri Rabinovich: Yeah. And how did you define your investment thesis? So you, you mentioned you had the passion to marketplaces, but like did it shape over the years?

Fabrice Grinda: Yeah, so I like marketplaces. I’m an economist by formation. I studied market design in college. I like the fact that it’s all about creating liquidity. And if you create liquidity, you unlock massive value.

And I know how to solve the chicken and egg problem of like, would you start to supply or demand? How do you match them? How do you measure elasticity of supply and demand, etc. And If you’re a 23 year old, also, it’s a lot easier to go and build a marketplace than it is to go build an Amazon where you need billions of dollars of like inventory, supply chain, warehouses, or eTrade, where you need like a banking license, etc.

So it was also pretty well suited for me. And because I was running a horizontal site, I’m like, you know, I need to keep a trend my fingers on what’s going on in the vertical. So, the thesis, it’s always been around network effect and marketplace businesses because they’re capital efficient and winner takes most, but the details have evolved over time.

At first it was verticals, you know, so instead of eBay, it’s like StubHub or Airbnb or Uber or whatever. Then, it became the changing the dynamic by which the marketplace operates. So at first, you know, it’s a multi, if you’re on Angie’s list or Upwork, it’s like you say what you need and hundreds of people apply and then you interview them and you pick them.

I mean, it’s a shit ton of work. It’s a double commit marketplace. The modern model is the marketplace spec model. You say what you need. The marketplace says, this is the person for you. Uber kind of falls in that category. You don’t pick your driver. Uber picks the driver for you, but that you can do in every category.

You could do it for HVAC installation, heat pump installation.

Yuri Rabinovich: Getting massage.

Fabrice Grinda: Exactly. You can do it for every vertical possible, including also products like make it tell you which product you need and find it for you instead of giving you 27, 000 choices that you need to go and pick through. So marketplace pick models and more recently it’s been B2B marketplaces, right? Like in your consumer life, your quality of life is extraordinary, right? Like you have DoorDash and Instacart and Uber and Airbnb and Amazon, you can get anything you want in like two days max and often like 30 minutes Exactly or 15 if you go to get here or whatever and yet in the business world nothing, has been done, right?

If I want to order petrochemicals, there’s no there’s no list of what’s available just a list not even an online buy button. There’s no connectivity to the factory to understand manufacturing capacity and delays. There’s no online ordering. There’s online payment. There’s no tracking. There’s no financing.

And this needs to happen in every category and every vertical and every geography. So for all inputs, you need to be digitized. And this is like sub 1 percent penetration. And this is trillions and trillions of GMV and like steel and machine parts and whatever. Two. SMB digitization, right? Like every small business owner, we know like a restaurant owner.

Why did he become a restaurant owner? Oh, I like to cook. I want to chit chat with my employees. And yet, what are you doing today? Oh, I’m creating a website. I’m managing my relationship with open table and TripAdvisor and Yelp. And I need to manage a delivery fleet. I need to negotiate Uber and DoorDash. I need to get a POS like Toast.

I need to do inventory management accounting. I mean, this is a skill set they don’t have. So, SMB enablement, digitization, and then the entire supply chains, which have been very manual. And, and obtuse and full of different intermediaries need to be digitized. So that’s really digitizing B2B supply chains writ large, which is a combination of B2B labor marketplaces, B2B e-commerce, SMB enablement marketplaces for discovery of inputs and, and, and moving supply chains out of China and digitizing them and all the payments and infrastructure late layer around it, like digital freight forwarder, like Flexport is what we’re focusing on right now.

 And everything remains to be done. We’re like day zero of digitizing the B2B world.

Yuri Rabinovich: So we didn’t we didn’t hear any AI in what you were telling So how does AI fit in the in all this?

Fabrice Grinda: Well a few things. So first of all in life, I think it serves you well to be contrarian . In 2021 when everyone else was like investing like crazy in February 21 I wrote a blog post called “Welcome to the Everything Bubble”. Because of overly loose fiscal and monetary policy, everything’s overvalued.

I really meant everything real estate, bonds, equities, SPACs, NFTs, crypto, public, privates, and I’m like, if it’s not anchored to the ground, sell it. You’re and we obviously did that. Well, everyone else was going crazy and buying at insane prices. We were like selling in secondary. In 23 and 24, everyone else was like, I’m overexposed to venture, like peak to trough, like 75 percent decline in venture investments.

So I’m like, no, now’s the time to invest like crazy in areas where no one else is focusing on, like B2B marketplaces and you avoid AI because that’s where all the lemmings are. Like everyone else is AI, AI, AI, AI all the time. Now the time to invest in AI. It’s actually five years ago when no one else was focusing on it.

And I think we invested the DeepMind pretty early. We didn’t invest in Open AI for a number of reasons, but like a lot of it were like structural, like not for profit where the founders have any equity. It was like, and a lot of things didn’t make much sense. And we’re only now starting to make sense.

And now it’s probably it’s too late for us. But like the people that missed the boat on OpenAI or DeepMind, they were like, Oh, we need to invest now. And they’re investing in like non differentiated LLMs with no differentiation of the data. No clear business model, no real modes at insane prices.

You know, the median seed is 3 and 9 pre. The median A is 7- 18 pre. Median, the mean is higher than the mean is like three at 12 and like 10 to 30 pre on the a, but like in AI, I’m seeing deals of like a hundred pre 200, 300, or like nothing. And, and it’s going to end in tears for multiple reasons. A each time open AI does a new release, it like kills more and more of these companies.

Many of these are non-differentiated and there’s no real monetization. And so even, an acqui hire is not going to save you if you raise it too high price. So, but the funny thing is everything we do as AI. So, every company we, we, we invest in is the early adopter of AI. So every company we invest in uses AI to improve customer care.

Every company we invest in uses AI in order to improve program and productivity. Many use AI to improve flows. So many of our marketplaces, including the incumbent ones, are like, okay we use it to make it easier to sell. So Rebag is an example. Rebag is a handbag marketplace. They do like hundreds of millions of revenues.

They’re profitable. They have all the data of all the handbags. They know the condition, the price, the model. And so imagine that you want to sell a bag on eBay. You need to take 20 pictures. You need to pick a category. You need to write title. You need to write a description. You need to find the condition.

You need to set a price here with the AI called Claire. You take a few photos. It tells you Model condition price sell done. One minute, maybe 30 seconds. And this is happening in every major vertical. So A. I. Is an integral part of all the companies we invest in, but they wouldn’t define themselves as a I companies that we do invest in.

I companies about 9 percent of what we invested in last year is a I. And by the way, like Of the latest batch of YC, I think it was like 90 percent AI companies, right? Or many of the funds are like 90 percent AI. We will do AI when it’s vertical, on proprietary data sets with in categories with a viable business model and willingness to pay at valuations that are reasonable and a close to normal median seed, a et cetera, valuation.

So there’s been a few of these, you know, more investors in Photoroom, which was an AI to change the background of items. So it increases the sell through rate of marketplaces. We’re investor in Numerai, which is like a hedge funds type company where people upload their models. They fight the and then the invest alongside it, create a virtual hedge fund without any manager without any analysts.

And then they pay back part of the profits to the people that created the models were investors in a company called HeroStuff, which is like a one click marketplace for selling through AI, where it creates beautiful listings based on a few photos and a voice description. So we do AI, but again, it’s 9 percent of what we do.

And we also do picks and shovels of AI, like we’re in Nexus and things like that. But we’ve been very careful because a lot of it is like just a random copilot with no value added, an insane price, no willingness to pay, it just doesn’t make sense to me. And by the way, I know a lot about AI because I’ve been, I’ve coded my own AI for over a year.

And I went through the entire, you know, I use LangChain and Pinecone and it barely worked, worked way better than GPT 3.

Niko Leon: Tell us more about that. Tell us more about your AI.

Fabrice Grinda: I built Fabrice AI. It was really an intellectual exercise. And I’m like, you know, I want to understand when people are pitching me, what is hard?

What is easy? What is differentiated? What could I, what could anyone replicate easily?

And because on a regular basis a lot of people ask me questions as a founder, as an ambassador is like, Hey, what, what are the valuations which we’ve been raising at? How do I write a deck? What are your current thesis? What is FJ Labs thesis? How do I pitch FJ Labs? I was like, I would keep getting the same questions over and over again.

And I’ve actually, I have a blog and I do go on podcasts and I have my own podcast. So I have actually a fair amount of content. So I was like, Hey, can I create a digital representation of myself? That could answer all of the questions that I’m getting on a, frankly, daily basis to make myself more scalable and efficient.

And so my blog and my podcast is really everything I wanted to, I wish I knew when I was 23 and starting out as a founder that I now know. And it was like, can I codify that in an AI? And so about a year and three months ago, I’m like, okay, let’s see if I can code Fabrice AI.

And so I went down the path of grabbing all my content, digitizing it, which first took an infinite amount of time because I had to transcribe every podcast into text, I had to. And I use AI for that. Obviously, I had to codify who is the speaker is to make sure that it’s figuring out who I am.

I transcribed, I use Azure OCR to transcribe all my PDFs into texts. I use OpenAI to like translate all of the podcasts and other languages as basic as people languages into English, created the data store. Then once I have the data store I created a JSON files. And I started uploading it, just use the API that GPT had created.

And I tried GPT3 and 3.5 and the results were awful. Absolutely awful. That I would be ashamed of putting out there. So, and I kept trying and working. So started using MongoDB by the way, for like storing, and structuring the data in the right way.

Then I’m like, okay, let’s try different. Let’s try Langchain. Let’s try Pinecone. Results got a bit better. Then I’m like, you know what, let’s use the GPT Builder that that opening I created and I built a builder. I use it. I put an assistant. The issue of the GPT builder is, of course, you need to have a paid open a I can’t to be a user.

You can’t embed it on the website. It worked better, but not that well. And then finally, a year and a, you know, four got released. They created an API where I could just upload all the JSON files from my like MongoDB database and like everything started working. So a year and a half of coding for nothing.

I could just waited 4.0, but now I have 4.0 on FabriceAI and it is extraordinarily good, nuanced, thoughtful answers. It makes inferences that I would not have thought of. But everything, you know, I was like using Open Source, but little by little opening eyes replaced all my back ends. Even my, my text to voice, my voice text was an open source open source product, but then Whisper is multilingual and works better.

So then I coded, I mean, that was a hard integration because it doesn’t work natively in web app. I coded integration. So I’m on Whisper and currently I’m coding an avatar version of myself with HN. And so I looked at our, when I looked at 20 competitors, all the work I’m doing with HN, I am willing to bet in six months, 12 months, 18 months, GPD 5/ 6 comes out, it’s going to integrate it and it’ll be a waste of time. But the point was not actually even to create FabriceAI, the point was to understand how hard is it to do? What is easy? What is hard? What is replicable? To make myself a more knowledgeable about the space and it also turns out that it is getting a lot of use.

I mean, again, relatively speaking, but I probably have more traffic on my AI than I do on my blog. Because I think people are lazy and they’d rather ask the question and get the answer than like actually go and read long form posts because my posts are like 20,000 words long. And it’s gone really well.

So what I’m currently coding is “Can you pitch for every say I your startup?”, you upload your deck, you pitch it, ask all the questions. I don’t know if I’m going to succeed, by the way. So I’m using all of the pitches. FJ Labs is getting all the debriefs rewrite or to see if I can train the eye in a way that you can pitch it because every week and we didn’t talk about it at some point, we should cover how we evaluate startups.

But every week we get 300 inbound deals and we only take 50 calls. And because the other ones are out of scope or there’s too many doing the same thing, we want to wait around and or they’re doing hardware or whatever. And then we take second calls with maybe 10 of them a week. And I take second calls with like five per week.

So of the 300 companies pitching us, I talked to. Three or five per week. And this would be a way for people to talk to you. Even if we think it’s not for us, you can get good feedback, et cetera. I don’t know if I’m going to succeed. It’s going to take me a year to get an updated or like train it. But it’s, it’s super fun.

And in the meantime, I think it’s maybe a better AI investor because I’ve kind of realized most of the ideas people were pitching me for like various copilots, like I could code that in a week, you know, like there’s nothing there. It’s just a sales pitch. It’s a sales game.

Yuri Rabinovich: Do you code it all yourself or do you have a team of developers supporting you?

Fabrice Grinda: I mostly coded it myself at the beginning. And then I started hiring a bunch of people to help me. So especially sort of the, the, the current version where we’re trying to upload I’m trying to teach Fabrice AI to like ride the same debriefs we do and give recommendation. I need a lot of help because we need to upload.

We need to connect to Affinity, which has all of our CRM, which has all of our debriefs, which has all the decks. And so that I’m not doing myself. I hired a team in India to help me with that. But a lot of it I coded myself.

And by the way, it’s easier to code these days. You have a coding question, you ask GPT. You know, I’m not a good coder anymore. Whenever I forget something, it’s like, hey, I want to do this. Send me the code. And literally these days, I mean, again, not a big deal. Specific questions, not programs, like how do I, whatever I want to change this embed of YouTube from vertical portrait to landscape. How do I do that? It gives you five things, you take one.

Yuri Rabinovich: What language do you code?

Fabrice Grinda: It depends, but like mostly PHP and MySQL.

Yuri Rabinovich: Cool.

Fabrice Grinda: And I’m on WordPress for my blog.

Niko Leon: Yeah, so like you mentioned, it’d be great to understand how you get from that 300 down to 50 and then 10 and 5 if you’ve got like a strict set of rules, or if it’s just feel.

Fabrice Grinda: No, we have a strict set of rules. So the three, the 300 inbounds by a hundred come from other ECs. A hundred come from the founders we’ve backed in the past, so it’s about 2, 000 founders in 1, 100 companies.

And a hundred is like cold inbound, mostly to my LinkedIn, but, you know, kind of everywhere, email, whatever. If it’s the type of things we look at, a marketplace seed and A or B onwards or more likely than not going to take it. But we do get a lot of pre seed were more selective because what happens often is we see 10 people switching the same idea at the same time, and we’d rather wait until we figure out which one we don’t back competitors.

So we want to wait until there’s one that like emerges as the winner before we wait. So pre seed, we often like, yeah, we’re going to wait, especially if it’s a little bit out of scope and then all the rest, like hardware, biotech, green tech. Space, whatever, like if it doesn’t have a marketplace network effect component, we’re just not going to take a call because it’s not for us.

Of the 50 things we get per week that are on, on for us, we take a call that we have 10 people in the investment team, their deals were randomly assigned one of the 10 people and we take a one hour call. On the one hour call, we evaluate four things. We evaluate “do we like the team?” Now, of course, every VC in the world will tell you “oh, I only invest in extraordinary people.” The thing is, it can’t be like porn. It can’t be. Oh, I know it. I know when I see it. You need to be able to articulate what that is. So for us, an extraordinary founder is someone who’s both an extraordinary super eloquent, visionary salesperson, and not or, and knows how to execute.

So we want the Venn diagram intersection of salespeople that are very eloquent, who know how to execute. And the way I tease out, or we tease out how, whether they can execute in a one hour call is number two selection criteria. “Do we like the business?” What is the total addressable market size? What are the unit economics? Even pre-launch, we expect the founders to be able to articulate, Oh, I’ve looked at like keyword analysis and Google and Facebook, which is my primary paid acquisition channel.

This is the keyword density. This is average CPC. This is the landing page. And I’ll say we spent a thousand dollars. This is what the landing page looked like. Your version rate was X percent. We expect Y percent abide. These are the, and by the way, that Y percent better be the industry average. And the way it compares for, you know, economics is the average.

Order value. We’re expecting this list with this recurrence, which better be the industry average again, not five X better. And with this following margin structure, and I care about recouping the fully loaded costs on a contribution margin, two bases in six months, three accident in 18 months. So I want good unit economics and people that can articulate the unit economics typically understand well their business.

And if they’re not there, I need them to be explained why they’re going to get there with scale over time. Which. As you get more density, purchasing power, whatever you, you may be able to improve them over time if you’re not there today. So number one, “do I like the team?” Number two, “do I like the business?”

Number three, “do I like the deal terms?” That nothing’s cheap in tech, but is it fair? Is it fair in light of the team, the traction, the opportunity? And number four, “do I like the thesis?” Is it an idea I care about in a category I care about in line with my vision of the future? And I’ve clear theses on the future of mobility, of real estate, of food, of transportation, you name it solving one of the three problems I’m focusing on right now, which is inequality of opportunity, climate change, and the mental and physical wellbeing crisis.

And I need all four to be true. So it’s not three out of four, it’s all four. We need to like the team. The business, the terms and the thesis, and if all four true, then it goes on a second call on the second call. We dive in deeper and come at environment things that were not clear where they’re going to get to with the fundraise, and if we like them, then we invest.

So we invest in two one hour meetings over one week. We’re like we’re in were at. And if we’re not in, and many VCs I don’t understand, like they are not polite, they ghost people. But if we’re not in, we’ll tell you why we’re not and what we need to change for us to change our mind.

And it’s about a 1 percent conversion rate. 300 deals, 3 investments per week. So 1 percent from pitch, deal coming in for us to us investing. Which is about 150 new investments per year, but with the follow ons, etc. It’s like 200 to 250 investments per year.

Niko Leon: And what’s your average check size?

Fabrice Grinda: We are very dogmatic.

So the same way we’re programmatic in the way we evaluate, we’re pretty programmatic in the way we invest. Our pre seed is 150, our seed is 300, our A is 500, and our B is 700. And we can sometimes double that, double that if we have super conviction. And so blended average check size is 400K. Because we’re mostly seed and A, we’re also mostly US.

So we’re 70 % seed and A, 20 % B onwards, 10 % pre-seed. We’re 50 percent US and Canada, 25 % Western Europe, 10 % Brazil & India, 15 % rest of the world.

Niko Leon: And you mentioned before that the best time to invest in AI was five years ago. Like just out of interest, what’s the thing today that you think in five years is going to be the AI?

Fabrice Grinda: The most exciting company in my portfolio is an AI company. And I think they could very well be a trillion dollar company, but I also think it’s too late to invest now.

But it’s a company called Figure AI, and it’s the leading humanoid robotics company in the world. They’ve hired the very best talent in AI and robotics to create a Figure 2 right now, which is already live in the factory at BMW, replacing a bunch of machinists and doing really well.

But the team is extraordinary. And given the trajectory they’re on, I can imagine there’s going to be a Figure 3, this a lot better and cheaper in like a couple of years. And a Figure 4, a couple of years after that. And I can see a path where not that long into the future, like four or five years into the future, you’re going to have affordable humanoid product robots that are going to be common by the millions in both the factory and the home. And I think figure AI is probably a year ahead of Tesla in the game with much better products and AI and years ahead of the other players in the Chinese. So I think that company is one of one and they’re very unique and special.

And the founder is extraordinary. It’s definitely the most exciting company in the portfolio from an AI perspective, but you know, the current, if you were to invest now, it’s probably, I mean, I don’t know what the next round is going to be, but the last round is already 3 billion. So it’s going to be a lot.

Yuri Rabinovich: Nice. And so you mentioned that there are lots of cold outreach. Yeah. What is the ratio investing in cold outreach versus referrals?

Fabrice Grinda: So first of all we actually do look at the cold outreach and we do invest in it, which is not at all the case of 99 percent VCs where like deals at Sequoia probably goes straight into a burn junk mail folder that is never read and will never be looked at.

And maybe like real preclude you from being invested in ever in the future. Some of our very best deals were cold because what happens is if you’re a first time founder from a non-traditional geography, you know, you’re in Albany, New York, you’re in Belo Horizonte in Brazil. You did not go to Sanford, you know, of course, if you went to Sanford and computer science, you’re going to know people in TAC and VC.

You’re going to be able to get a warm intro. But if you’re in same thing, if you’re in Sao Paulo or whatever, but if you’re in like Belo Horizonte or Albany, and you went to secondary school, you may not have the connectivity. What ends up happening is you’re more resilient. You go a lot further, a lot less capital, and we end up investing in some of these companies.

I’m much lower valuation, much higher traction. We invested in some of these like 2 million a month in revenues of like 10 pre, you know, which would be a series B level traction. And like, you’d be raising 15 at 50 not 2 at 10. And, we’re also more in a position of limiters, but to answer the question, because you asked the ratio.

So third of the deals are coming from the VCs. And it’s about 55 percent of the companies we invest in. A third of the deals coming from founders. And that’s about 30 percent of the deals we invest in and a third of the deals come in cold and that’s about 15 percent of the deals we invest in.

So the ratio is lower. It’s a hundred deals well, of the 300 deals, we do three, but only, you know, 15 percent of the three, if you want over the course of the year, I guess I’ll just make the math easier. We do 200 deals and of the 200 deals every year it’s 30 deals that are coming from cold.

Yuri Rabinovich: So you, you do recommend founders to reach out to you in the cold manner as well?

Fabrice Grinda: No, I recommend that they try to get a warm intro. Preferably from another VC or a founder, but if you do not have a way to get to me because you’re, that’s not your network, you can send me an email, a LinkedIn in mail, but I will only reply if in that message you explain what you’re building, the traction you have, and you include the deck.

If you’re like, I have a great idea, I’d like to talk to you about it, you will not get a reply. I need to be able to make the decision as to whether or not to take a call based on the message you send me. I have zero time for like, you know, chit chatting. So you need to give me enough information to make an assessment as to whether or not this warrants a call in the message you send me.

Yuri Rabinovich: And so you mentioned what other advice you would like to give other founders in, when they build startups, right? It’s kind of now, now it became super cheap to build new ventures, right? You yourself building Fabrice AI you know, in your garage.

Fabrice Grinda: Yeah, you know, so also zero business model. It’s not a business. Yeah, I mean, just do it right. Like the here’s a mistake. I find many founders make. They were like, Oh, I need to raise a million dollars to go and like launch a startup. That is a very bad sign. The pre-seed, which is pre VC, which is full trans family. You should be able to go very far with very little capital.

And there are very few pre-seed funds. There are a few, right? There’s a four, there’s amplify, et cetera, that write like two 50K checks. But for the most part, you should be able with almost no capital. Like today, I could build and you give me 20K. I could build anything. And that’s hiring external team of developers or whatever on Upwork.

And, and, and many things that can be coded with no code look good. Like if I’m building a marketplace these days, I’m going to use Shopify. And yes, you need the seller component where you do need to code a way for people to list, but like, I would use most of the tools out there. Off the shelf, prove that the economics work and not really think through it.

So if you come to me and you’re like, I need a million dollars to build it. It’s a quasi-automatic pass. Like, yeah, you go and build it. Build it, get a little bit of product, show that you have a bit of product market fit. What VCs want to fund is scale. We want to scale you. If you’re like, Oh, I raised like, whatever, 500K from friends and family.

We’re live. We’re doing 20k a month of MRR. And now, but I know which customer acquisition channel works. And I don’t care what the channel is. It could be TikTok. It could be paid. It could be SEO. It could be influencers. It could be a sales team. It could be iBound. You need a scalable, repeatable acquisition channel with good economics.

And you’re like, now I’m raising a seed, raising 3 and 9 pre to scale from whatever, 20, 30 K in MRR to 150 K a month in MRR. That makes sense to me. And so launch be capital efficient, prove product market fit. Then you go to the VCs. Don’t go to the VCs saying I need money to launch that proves you don’t know what you’re talking about.

And it casts a doubt on your ability to execute and makes us not necessarily believe you’re going to get there. Now, of course, if you’re a second time founder or third time founder, you’ve done it before, we’ll believe you’re going to be able to execute. But as a first time founder, prove it.

Niko Leon: And just speaking about your top investments so far, I mean, you said you had 300 exits out of the 1,100 so far, which is a really good ratio. What were your top and did you kind of know they would be your top at the time or were they kind of surprising to you?

Fabrice Grinda: So first of all, what is a top investment, right?

The top investment could be by multiple, by absolute dollars and by IR, all of which are different metrics and different companies. So the top by multiple, I definitely did not think it was going to be the top buy multiple ever. It was a gaming company out of Turkey, which we invested in because our inbound analysts who just joined said, you need to invest in the company, even those gaming, even those Turkey, the way our investment committee works is we do not require consensus. We don’t even require a majority. If someone, anyone, even the incoming analyst who’s 21 and, and it’s his first job says we need to invest and pounds the table, we will invest. We’ll size them, we will invest. So we invested in this game company called Gram Games and they try to build a, Clash of Clans or Supercell for emerging markets on Android.

And it failed dismally, company was essentially going bankrupt. And I think we’d signed the liquidation docs by one of the engineers for fun. I’d build this tiny little game and they’re like, “Hey, let’s release it. You never know.” And instant global sensation is a game called 1010. It’s kind of like 2048. And the company realized, you know what, why build complex games with actors and stories and graphics when you can build casual games?

They became a casual game publisher and developer and after almost dying, literally, we had to sign the liquidation docs. It went from strength to strength. Zynga bought it for 250 million plus three years of profits. And I think the profits were like, 35, 100 and 250, right? Like the earn out was bigger than the buyout.

I mean, it’s like mind boggling. And we only put it for 50 K because it was like tiny check because we’re analysts insisted. And the 50 K You know, it became like 20 million. So a multiple definitely did not expect it. If you’d asked us to rank the company many times, it would have said bottom 5 percent of our portfolio companies, and yet ended up being the highest multiple ever.

So you get lucky. Better lucky than good and things surprise you and they surprise you in both directions. You have companies that were like billion dollar unicorns crushing it that die. And companies that are dying that like figure it out and like take off and exit. Other very big absolute dollar successes were Alibaba.

I studied Mandarin at Beijing Global University back in 94, while I was at Princeton. I met, I spoke to Jack Ma in 99, I tried to buy alibaba.com domain from him, because I wanted it to be the domain for my eBay of Europe. Didn’t convince him as you can imagine. And then later ended up investing pretty late, like at a 15 billion valuation of like $4 a share or whatever.

But it was obvious to me it was going to be big and the opportunity is huge. And it started to monetize and eventually they went public and grew even more. And yeah, you know, my, I think I put it in like a million that became 50 million or whatever. And then Coupang, same thing. It started as a Groupon of Korea.

So we passed, then it became the, one of the many Amazons of Korea. So we passed and then became the leading player in Korea in the Amazon category. So we invested and then eventually went public very well, very successful in absolute dollar, absolute dollar terms, but not a multiple because we invested a pretty high valuation to begin with, I think maybe a billion to start.

And so, yes, we sold for 50 billion, but. You know, we invested a billion.

Yuri Rabinovich: So you don’t mind to invest in in billion valuation as well?

Fabrice Grinda: We wait until there’s a clear winner. So we, as I said earlier, we don’t invest in competitors. And so, and I don’t want to invest in underwater economics.

So it’s not or bread and butter, right? Or bread and butter is seed and A, but let’s say at the A there’s seven companies doing the same thing. They’re all doing well with all amazing teams. If I invest in the wrong one. I lose the opportunity to invest in the category forever. And so I wait. And in the case of Coupang, we saw it early.

We saw it earlier. It just didn’t make sense to invest earlier. It was Groupon, didn’t like the Groupon model. It was one of five Amazons, wasn’t clear. Then finally it was time to invest. IRR was we invested in Skip the Dishes, which is a DoorDash for Canada. And they got acquired six months later, you know. I don’t know, five X, 10 X in six months.

It was like 10,000 IRR, whatever. I did really, really well. Again, that wasn’t why we invested. We didn’t expect to accept that quickly, but we were able to help them. They were very happy with the investment. We were very happy. We backed them the next companies. And yeah, so no, these things surprise you in both directions.

Yuri Rabinovich: And how do you monitor these companies that you liked, but you were not ready to invest? It’s kind of, how do you keep track of all these.

Fabrice Grinda: Yeah. So when we pass in a company, we, we have multiple states. So at the end of the investment committee, we do an investment committee every Tuesday for two hours.

So we had one today, we invested in a few companies. We have a status, like we invested, so we’re moving into portfolio. Well, we pass forever. We didn’t like the founder, we didn’t like whatever, or we pass and reconnect and we put an active in six months, nine months, one year. Let’s reconnect to get, check where they’re in.

And we sometimes do that seven times until we finally invest.

Yuri Rabinovich: And founders are ready to reconnect every time?

Fabrice Grinda: Yes, because we treat them well. We’re like, look, this is the reason we’re not doing it and it’s usually logical, but we’d love to, not everyone is up for it, some people get pissed because you passed, but we are honest and transparent.

Many VCs will just ghost you, you know and so yeah, no, they’re happy to, they’re mostly happy to reconnect.

Yuri Rabinovich: Yeah, again, it’s relationship building, right? So over time you might Invest in the same founder again and again, right?

Fabrice Grinda: Oh, we’ve done it many times. Yeah. So actually we have a non centered policy, which is. If you’ve done right by us, we will back you no matter what you do next. So we, we backed Brett Adcock in his first startup, which was at Vetteri, a labor marketplace for programmers, grew to a hundred million sales.

We sold it at Adecco for a hundred million. We made eight X or investor in a couple of years. Very happy. He’s then like, okay, I’m building in a flying electric taxi company like called Archer. I’m like, okay, here’s our check. We didn’t even take a call. We didn’t even look at the deck, we just wired the money.

And then, you know, took that public, did very well. And then he’s like, now I’m building a humanoid robot company. I’m like, okay, here’s your money. Doesn’t matter the terms, doesn’t matter, like, take it. And, and so if you’ve done well by us, we will back you again and again and again, no matter what.

Yuri Rabinovich: Amazing. And so at what stage you felt like you’re ready for a family, right? It’s kind of I saw you, you have little kids and it’s kind of you, you were crazy working hard to get there, right? Yeah,

Fabrice Grinda: I mean, I, I never thought I wanted a family to be clear. I thought the data in, in the world when you’re a super ambitious happy guy. You know, you talk to your friends who have kids. And also “A. they disappear from your life” “B. They stop being the individual or even the couple to become the parent”. And “C. when you meet them, which is very rare, it’s like every 2 months. It’s like, oh, I haven’t slept and my life sucks. I can’t do anything fun.

And my kids this, my kids that. It’s like, it wasn’t a very compelling pitch, right?” Like, yeah, not for me. I don’t want kids. I love my life. It’s perfect. Like I, and it happened kind of randomly. I went, I randomly did an ayahuasca ceremony. And again, many people do the ayahuasca ceremony because they’re like, looking for their life’s purpose, or like, trying to heal past trauma, et cetera, like, I’m super happy, I’m like, it just so happened, like, the time I could spend the 10 days before preparing ride, like no caffeine, no sex, sleeping, meditating, no meat full fast, like really creating the right environment.

I was, I did it in a deep jungle of Bushwick, you know, so I didn’t need to go very far. And like, I’m like, you know, why not? And I, and why not? Same thing on my, one of my defining traits is curiosity. What is there to the nature of reality? This could be fun and interesting. I didn’t expect anything out of it.

And my grandmother came to visit me. Grandmother, to be clear, had passed like 20 years earlier. And the message I got was amazing. It’s like, you’re living your life purpose. Everything’s amazing. You’re fulfilled. You’re doing what you should be doing. I don’t know if it’s but, but it’s definitely “and” or “or” but, here are a few ideas for you on the margin. So first of all, you’re a force of nature. If you want to make something happen, you can make it happen, but when things you try and they’re not working, don’t force them. It’s not meant to be for you.

Now, it only works if you’ve really tried hard, and I tried really hard to, like, build a community and a, and a studio in the Dominican Republic, and there was a combination of corruption, crime, tropical diseases, like nothing was going well. So I’m like, you know, kind of the message was move on, which is why I moved my secondary residence from Dominican Republic to Turks and Caicos and was the best decision ever.

But she said, “Hey, you should revisit the kid thing.” So the reason you’re not compelled is your life is amazing. It’s rich and adventures and friendship and love. Yeah. And you have your dogs and business, like everything’s great. And you think it will only be a negative, like all your friends.

Right. But she was like, “The cost of having kids could be lower than you think they are”, meaning, and I don’t mean financial costs. Those are always high. That’s cost to your quality of life is like other people live once they start having kids, they substitute their lives for being parents. But the kids can be a compliment to your life.

You can go heli skiing and take your kids. You can go kite surfing and take your kids. You can go hiking and take your kids. So it doesn’t need to be a or you can continue living. You can do everything with your kids and you can continue to be the individual, the couple and be the parent. And you don’t, and knowing your personality, you don’t need to be, you’re never going to be a helicopter parent.

You know, you’re gonna be less affairs fire, not like, you know, go to every soccer match. And this is like this is not you and it doesn’t need to be you. In fact, the way other people do it, it’s really bad for them and bad for the kids and bad for the relationship. So A, the costs are lower than you imagine and B, the benefits are greater than you imagine. Like you’d like to speak. You’d like to teach. You’d like to present. You’re teaching classes at like different business schools. You’re creating a blog and a podcast in order to not to have to go to be more scalable. Teaching your kids is going to be even more amazing because it’s going to keep you young.

You’re going to recognize yourself in it and. you’re gonna find it extraordinarily compelling. So, the pitch ultimately became the cost are lower, the benefits are greater. It’ll be a compliment to your life. I’ll substitute for it. You should try it. And I left that  ayahuasca ceremony, and I was like, okay, we’re doing this.

And she also said, I need to have a son and a daughter, at least, at least one of each because they’re different or your relation between them is different. And so, yeah. Her name was Francoise. She was my paternal grandmother. She was a very forceful influence in my life. And as a result, my son is called Francoise and he’s now three.

And it took me a while because I’d like you know make sure I pick the right partner. I get an egg donor and all that. So it’s complicated. But now I have a three year old and an eight month old and it’s, It’s perfect. I mean, they’ve been sleeping through the nights at the beginning. We love each other.

We have all the fun. I took my son, I put him in the e foil, I took him kite surfing, I took him heli skiing, rock climbing. We have a blast.

And my son a few weeks ago asked for a brother and he’s three, but, and people would not take this seriously, but I’m like, you know what? I see it as a sign of what the universe wants, and I actually had a long conversation with him, and I’m like, you realize if we have a brother he’s not going to come out, like, fully formed, ready to play.

It’s like, it’s going to be, you know, breastfed for eight, and non-functional. He’s like, I realize, but eventually it’ll be fine, it’ll be there, I want a brother. I’m like, okay, we’re doing it. So now I’m like getting a surrogate and all that stuff and that’s amazing. And in that same ceremony, by the way, I was visited by a white wolf that said, Hey, you, you realize that like, that the John Snow’s dire wolf ghost is not just a fictional, but it’s based on an actual dog.

It’s a white German shepherd and you should have me. You’re an epic guy. You need an epic dog and I’m the dog for you. So I also went to find a breeder and I now have my white wolf Angel. And it all came from that. So yes, but I decided that lead, I decided all those, that ceremony was in November, 2018.

I got my, it took a while to get everything ready. So I got my son at 21, my dog in 23, my daughter in 24. And I guess my next son will either be. Yeah, probably in 26. So not even I mean, I have an embryo. I don’t have the rest needs to be planned. But yeah, I’m working on it. So I came to it late in life, but it’s been amazing.

I don’t regret coming here late. I mean, I think it was the right time for me, but now I’m a convert. I think families are amazing. Kids are amazing. If I could have 100, I would have 100, but I also want to be a great father and present and I have a lot of fun. So I think it’s gonna be three. I kind of, I also have kind of have an adopted 17 year old, so I guess four plus the dog and it’s amazing.

Yuri Rabinovich: Yeah. Sounds like you, you have a nice lifestyle.

Fabrice Grinda: Yeah, I love my life.

Yuri Rabinovich: You are also community builder, right? It’s kind of, I see you, you’re hosting lots of retreats and gatherings and you know, networking. What is your favorite sport?

Fabrice Grinda: Like many things in life, I don’t have a favorite, favorite. I have a lot of things I like.

I’m driven. I like curiosity and diversity. I really, in my case, diversity really is the spice of life. So there are three sports I do well and often, which are padel, the racket sport from Spain paddle and tennis, both of which I play very well. Kite surfing, which I do a lot. And I’m currently learning to wing foil to compliment my kite surfing based on wind speed and back country skiing.

And I love all three and I do all three extensively, but I also read 1500 books a year. I also play video games. I also play ping pong and you know, I do a lot of like different things. I code my AI and I host a lot of gatherings, intellectual salons. I guess the community around me, my last name is Grinda. I guess we call it the Grindaverse. And it’s the family I have and the family I choose. So it’s friends and family and it’s hundreds of people in it. And you know, for every Christmas, like now there’s about 50 people that come here and we hang out. For my birthday last summer, there were 120 people. And yeah, it’s amazing.

Yuri Rabinovich: No, that’s great that you have amazing people around you. Great. Fabrice, thank you so much for joining us today. You shared lots of amazing insights. We would love to invite you to our next year global investor summit in Lisbon on November 12th. I hope you will join us.

Fabrice Grinda: Unlikely.

Yuri Rabinovich: But let’s try it. We’ll enable paddle games and tennis and surfing.

Fabrice Grinda: Yeah. Look, one of my keys in life is I only do conferences if I happen to already be there and I’m the keynote, like, travel for work is not something I look forward to doing. So I do structure my life in a very non-traditional way between New York ,Turks and Caicos, and Canada.

Because all three of them, so I have beach, mountain, and city, complement each other, right? In New York, it’s like a haven of intellectual, artistic, and professional endeavors. But if you’re doing, you’re not thinking. And after like two months of working 24/ 7, I’m like, I need a break. I go to Turks. I work during the day.

I’m in Turks right now. We’re doing podcasts, calls, emails, etc. But when I’m not doing that, I’m writing, reading, writing, meditating, kiting, playing paddle, playing tennis. And then during the winter, I also like to go backcountry skiing. And so I do the same thing as Turks, except in the mountains.

 And also do that in August. So that’s kind of my rotation, New York, Turks, Revelstoke. I had to go see the family in Nice. Lisbon, November, maybe, but unlikely unless for whatever reason I happen to be already in Europe. Right? Like I might get across the Atlantic. No, but if I’m already in Europe because I’m visiting the family or there’s something relevant for me there. You know, in Europe is different because like, you know, Nice to Lisbon, it’s like an hour and a half.

Yuri Rabinovich: We’ll be happy to host you in one of our 150 plus events next year.

Fabrice Grinda: Gladly! Did you do any in the US? In New York?

Yuri Rabinovich: For sure, yeah we do.

Fabrice Grinda: See, New York events, that I’m happy to do!

Yuri Rabinovich: Exactly. So we will meet you next year, for sure, somewhere around the world. Yeah, nice to meet you and thanks for joining us today.

Thanks, Nico, and, and see you soon.

Fabrice Grinda: Thank you for having me.