OpenVC:我有史以來最深入的視頻採訪!

我參加的大多數採訪都集中在我最近的歷史和 FJ Labs 目前的論文和選擇標準上。當 Harrison Faull 給我發送以下問題清單以準備面試時,我印象深刻。

早年生活和基礎經驗

1. 普林斯頓

問題:您年僅 17 歲就來到普林斯頓大學,身兼三份工作,向歐洲出口計算機設備,畢業時仍然以班級第一名的成績畢業,在銀行里存了 50 美元。那些大學時代是否有特別的記憶,一個小小的勝利,或者當你意識到你的雄心壯志和努力工作可以打開你從未想像過的大門時的安靜時刻?

2. 麥肯錫

問題:從普林斯頓大學畢業后,您加入了麥肯錫,並以創紀錄的速度晉陞。是什麼讓您如此迅速地超越了非常有能力的同齡人?

3. 奧克蘭

問題:在 90 年代後期,您將 eBay 模式應用於歐洲和拉丁美洲,籌集了 1800 萬美元,創下了一家法國初創公司的創紀錄融資。這家公司是什麼?您有哪些投資者,您的退出過程是怎樣的?

研究說明:從 Bernard Arnault 那裡籌集了資金,他不想最大限度地以現金退出。儘管擁有該公司 400% 的股份,但由於沒有標籤版權,錯過了 eBay 的 300 歐元收購。最終賣給了一家上市公司,該公司倒閉了 99%。

4. 媒體

問題:當第一次退出市場沒有如願以償時,法國媒體對您很嚴厲。在成為法國數字企業家的典範之後,您年輕時是如何應對公眾的審視的?

5. Zingy – 捲土重來

問題:在 Aucland 失望之後,您變得更明智,並尋求一種不會資本密集型的特定商業模式。這最終讓您創立了 Zingy,這是一家移動鈴聲企業,這是一款您並不熱衷的產品,但仍然決定用盡您的信用卡,在紐約每天靠 2 美元生存,並被迫多次錯過工資。是什麼讓您在最黑暗的時刻堅持下去,您如何為當今在生存邊緣搖搖欲墜的創始人提供説明?

6. 天文數位的增長

問題:Zingy 的收入從第一年的 100 萬美元飆升到 500 萬美元,然後是 5000 萬美元,最終達到 2 億美元!非凡的增長軌跡。回顧過去,在規模的每個階段,哪些情況最常出錯,哪些框架或思維方式説明您和團隊迅速適應這些持續的壓力?

研究筆記:面對來自唱片公司的巨額訴訟,不得不處理複雜的法律和規模問題。

7. 以 $80M 現金出售 Zingy

問題:經過激烈的競標戰,您以 8000 萬美元的現金出售了 Zingy。曾經努力籌集一毛錢,如此成功地退出是什麼感覺?從那次退出中吸取的哪些教訓會指導您如何看待當今投資組合公司建立企業價值和把握退出時機?

研究筆記:堅持了 18 個月,但與日本所有者的願景不同。有機會以 $1m 的價格購買 Shazam!?

OLX系列

8. 機會

問題:退出 Zingy 後,您發現 Craigslist 並沒有達到應有的水準。您能否分享一下您的所見所聞,以及您是如何在建立自己的改進版本OLX之前嘗試與Craigslist聯手的?

9. 全球發佈

問題:您同時進入100個國家/地區,每個市場分配了大約50美元來運行實驗並找到最初的吸引力,最終將目標鎖定在印度和巴西。您能否向我們介紹一下您是如何設計這些測試的,以及哪些跡象告訴您應該加倍投資哪些市場?

研究說明:導致專注於印度和巴西,大規模的 SEO 驅動增長。

10. 將 OLX 擴展到 3.5 億使用者

問題:OLX 增長到每月 3.5 億獨立訪客,這得益於巨大的 SEO 成功以及遍佈 50 個國家/地區的全球業務和 11,000 名員工。您能告訴我們您在 OLX 最美好的一兩個回憶嗎?

11. OLX 退出和競爭戰爭

問題:在 OLX,您被迫與一家歐洲競爭對手作戰,這導致了一場代價高昂的媒體戰爭。您從與根深蒂固的競爭對手正面交鋒中學到了什麼,在決定支援可能進入類似競爭環境的創始人時,您如何應用這些經驗教訓?

FJ Labs:標準、流程和全球視野

12. 問題:FJ Labs 每年投資約 300 筆交易,涵蓋不同的行業和地區。您能否向我們介紹一下這種大批量、全球方法背後的核心論點和戰略,以及您認為目前最引人注目的市場和商業模式類型?

13. FJ Labs 的出色業績記錄

問題:FJ Labs 擁有 300 多次退出和 39% 的內部收益率,擁有卓越的業績記錄。您能否分享一個最近的成功故事,最能說明您為初創公司帶來的價值,以及您如何在關鍵拐點支持他們?

14. 您提出的關於市場的九個問題

問題:在 FJ Labs,您制定了一套九項標準來評估市場。這些是什麼,創始人最容易忽視其中哪些?

研究說明:團隊、商業模式(單位經濟學)、交易條款。

15. MVP 市場建議

對於想要建立市場的創始人,您是否建議他們使用 wordpress 的通用範本來開始?您如何建議他們研究機會?

16. 兩次會議的決定

問題:您每周看到 300 筆交易,但每年只進行 300 筆投資,通常只在兩次一小時的會議後就做出決定。這些會議中發生了什麼?

17. 全球和意想不到的市場

問題:您支持過波蘭的礫石和印度的石化產品等各種市場。您能否分享一個您投資的一個特別出乎意料的市場的故事,是什麼說服您冒險一試?

研究說明:更喜歡分散的市場,而不是其他的分銷商。

18. 籌款和同期群指標

問題:您非常瞭解初創公司從種子輪到 A 輪發展過程中提高同期群指標的重要性。如果一家初創公司看到他們的新員工比以前的員工花費更少或購買頻率更低,您建議他們考慮哪些戰略調整或重新評估以避免停滯不前?

研究說明:警告說,如果佇列沒有改善,初始ICP可能是峰值。

19. 人工智慧和市場的下一次演變

問題:隨著人工智慧繼續重塑行業,您如何看待市場的發展,超越簡單的買賣雙方配對,以及哪些新興趨勢或模式讓您對未來技術、供需的交叉點感到興奮?

20. 改進投資組合

問題:鑒於您擁有如此高度集中的市場投資組合,您是否曾經在「topco」級別進行過可供整個投資組合利用的投資?我認為像 Klarna 這樣的東西非常適合你們的大多數初創公司。如果是這樣,您能與我們分享一些例子嗎?

個人感想

21. 極簡主義、家庭和冒險

問題:您花了三年時間擁有了除 50 件物品以外的所有物品,您認為在這種炫耀消費的文化中,最有價值的物品是什麼?

22. 最難忘的冒險和購買

問題:就您的生活經歷而言,您經歷過的最好的冒險和最好的購買是什麼?

OpenVC 的採訪介紹

在本期 OpenVC 播客中,我們邀請到了 Fabrice Grinda,她是市場、技術創業和風險投資領域的真正先驅。

🎓 At 17, he joined Princeton, worked three jobs, and graduated top of his class

💰 Raised $18M in seed funding for his first startup—the largest seed round ever for a French company

📈 Built Zingy to $200M+ revenue, then sold it for $80M in cash

🌍 Founded OLX, a global classified ads giant with 350M+ users and valued at $3B

📊 Now co-founder of FJ Labs, one of the world’s most active angel investors with 300+ startup investments

In this episode, we dive into:

✅ The hard lessons he learned from his first major exit

✅ His framework for evaluating billion-dollar opportunities

✅ How he scaled OLX into a global marketplace leader

✅ His investment philosophy and approach at FJ Labs

✅ Advice for founders navigating hypergrowth & market expansion

The OpenVC Show is hosted by Harrison Faull, co-founder and managing director of OVC Ventures. OVC ventures is the sole investment arm of OpenVC, where 1,000+ new startups raise funds monthly.

Harrison’s LinkedIn:   /harrisonfaull 

Timestamps:

00:00 From Ambition to Action: The Startup Journey Begins

04:02 Building Auckland: The Rise of a Marketplace

06:27 Navigating Challenges: The Evolving Landscape of Tech

08:35 Lessons from Failure: Resilience in the Face of Setbacks

10:43 Reinventing Success: The Birth of Zingy

13:15 The Ringtone Revolution: A New Business Model

15:16 Scaling Up: Overcoming Initial Hurdles

17:27 The Art of the Deal: Selling Zingy

20:32 Life After the Sale: Reflections and Future Plans

25:26 The Journey of Hypergrowth and Selling a Business

26:40 Passion for Product Development

27:58 Identifying Market Opportunities with OLX

30:54 Rapid Expansion and Market Testing

33:40 Transitioning to Angel Investing and FJ Labs

36:01 FJ Labs: Investment Strategy and Criteria

43:46 Advice for Founders: Building Marketplaces

46:35 Navigating Growth Challenges in Marketplaces

49:48 Leveraging AI in Marketplaces

52:44 Closing Thoughts and Future Engagements

In addition to the above YouTube video, you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify.

Transcript

Fabrice Grinda (00:00.141)

play that role and little by little got a lot better but they promoted me and I’m like okay thank you bye time has come I learned what I need to learn and now the time has come to go and actually pursue my destiny and go build tech startups

Harrison Faull (00:13.515)

Amazing. OK, so you had that ambition to be a founder from a young age. You went out, you built your toolkit, you got your credibility working at McKinsey. Can you tell us a little bit more about your first startup, Auckland, or not your first, well, the first tech startup that you had after McKinsey?

Fabrice Grinda (00:27.667)

Well, first venture method, but prior ones were tech as well, but they’re just not big, right? Like they were more like, you know, I building computers, selling them with your classmates and friends. I built a BBS, like the ancestor of the internet. This is the first one that’s like venture backed, lots of employees, et cetera. So the issue is I graduated, I finished McKinsey, was 23. And the issue is I didn’t consider myself to be pretty creative. And you want to be in tech, but I didn’t know what to build.

And so I’m like, you know what, maybe to start, I’ll just take an idea from the US and bring it to the rest of the world. Also, a lot of the ideas, in a way, required a lot of, especially back in the day, where it was a lot more expensive to build startups, a lot of skill sets and or capital I didn’t have. If you want to build Amazon, you need billions in inventory and warehouses and supply chain management skills. If you want to build E-Trade, you need banking licenses, et cetera.

Harrison Faull (01:24.367)

Cloud didn’t exist, right? So you had to build the physical infrastructure, which was already cost prohibitive. Yes.

Fabrice Grinda (01:28.008)

yeah, no, I built my own data centers. I built my own data centers. We had to get Oracle database licenses, and Microsoft web servers. mean, just turning the lights on is like a million bucks. The times have changed. There were very few people that knew how to code. And you had to code for the web. And so even finding them, which is part of the reason I coded the full front end of the site myself, because I just couldn’t find anyone that I was happy with their coding.

So kind of randomly, I saw the site of eBay in June of 98. And it was another one of these aha moments of love at first click. I studied economics and mathematics at Princeton, including market design. And the idea of creating markets which have liquidity, which unlock a tremendous amount of value, resonated with me. And I realized, OK, if you go to these offline,

flea markets, you’re unlikely to find what you want. If you want to sell, you’re unlikely to find a buyer for what you have. But if you put all that online, you create this virtuous circle with ever more buyers, brands, ever more sellers, and so on and so forth. And I thought this is a something, yes, marketplace is of a unique problem of chicken and egg, but it’s a problem that I’m uniquely well positioned to solve, given that that’s exactly what I’ve studied. Market design, a measuring elasticity of supply and demand, to figure out what an effective take rate is.

Fabrice Grinda (02:53.597)

thinking through how you match supply and demand, et cetera. And so I decided to go and build an eBay for France and Europe, ultimately, which is called Auckland.

Harrison Faull (03:03.469)

Awesome. the journey with Auckland was off to a running start. I’m not sure how long it was before you had the largest fundraise of any French startup ever with $18 million and actually funded by the family office of Berno Arnard, I believe. Yeah. So you’re extremely young. You’re bringing this US model to Europe. You’ve had the biggest fundraise and you’re off to the races. The press are writing about you.

Harrison Faull (03:33.061)

You’re on the front page of several different magazines. Can you tell us a bit about the journey of building that company before we get into just as interesting the ending of that journey?

Fabrice Grinda (03:43.739)

Well, the beginning of the journey was interesting because in the US, there was a full-blown tech bubble going on. And it actually had not yet reached France. And so even though I built the company, I built the code we’d launched, it actually hadn’t reached the level of hype. And every VC I talked to, and I was like, I want to raise like $10 million, do proper fundraising. They were like, nah, it’s France, half a million or a million. And I just didn’t want to do that.

kind of engineered the press hype around the company and around me. People did not take PR very seriously. And so in France, the CEOs of the companies were like barely talking to the press. And I basically reach out to the journalists and say, hey, I’d like to tell you about what I’m doing. None of them would take me seriously because I was 23 or 24. But I’m like, you know what? I’ll come to your office and just chat. And of course, I had a compelling story to tell. So each

Fabrice Grinda (04:39.987)

One hour conversation led to an article. And then I became kind of the go-to person for them to ask questions about tech. So they would send me a question. I would send them the article back. And literally, they would copy and paste the article, publish it. I mean, they’re lazy. And so very rapidly became the go-to person to ask tech questions, first in the written press, then radio, and finally on TV, like the 8 o’clock news, et cetera. And at the same time, people started realizing this internet thing was bubbling.

Fabrice Grinda (05:09.996)

And it became a bit frothy and also like it switched from no one caring to everyone wanted to invest in the category and Arno amongst others started reaching out and saying, hey, we want to back you. actually, I remember he actually bid on a foosball table or his secretary did and like and the transaction went well and realized there was something there. and so talk to him and the other people. He offered the most the highest valuation and the most capital, which is why I chose

to raise capital from him. And we were off to the races, I used the capital, we launched a super successful TV ad campaign, which was a way to reach the masses then. Traffic exploded, we grew to like 100 plus employees in five countries, 10 million a month in GMV. Like things looked actually like we’d made the right choice and everything was going well.

Harrison Faull (05:57.052)

Yeah. Wow. Amazing. So you’re young, you’ve managed to convince extremely impressive people that this is the future. They’ve backed you, you’re off to the races, the model is working. Did buyers started appearing? I believe there was some talks with eBay at some point.

Fabrice Grinda (06:15.26)

So eBay, met Meg and Pierre early, before I raised the capital from Arnaud on Europe at Web. And they actually offered me like $25 million or maybe $20 million. And at that point, I owned 75 % of the company. But the delusions of grandeur and arrogance of a completely penniless 24-year-old at that point, I’m like, eh, whatever. It’s money. doesn’t mean anything. I’m doing this to build something meaningful.

Fabrice Grinda (06:43.027)

15 million is nothing. And I really meant it. And it’s funny because I literally, I didn’t even, yeah, I didn’t even consider it. Since then I’ve learned how hard it is to make money and how easy it is to lose it. But yeah, I was gonna make 15 million at 24 and I didn’t even for one minute consider it. I was like, nah, it’s nothing, I’ll make it later. But it doesn’t matter. And…

Harrison Faull (06:47.303)

just dismissed it, literally just managed to dismiss it out of hand like that. It’s similar to your heroes though, like Zuckerberg turning down a billion when he was building Facebook.

Fabrice Grinda (07:12.07)

Yeah. so, and for a long time, it actually looked like it made the right call, right? Like the company grew very rapidly and then eBay came back maybe nine months later and offered like 300 million in cash. So clearly the turning down 20 to take 300 despite the dilution that happened along the way made sense.

Harrison Faull (07:37.939)

And would that have been all cash? Would that have been part of the dot com bubble in terms of equity? And why ultimately did that?

Fabrice Grinda (07:44.979)

It was a cash offer, but frankly their stock is one of the few that held up during the dot com bubble burst because they were a profitable company that did very well. So either would have been fine, but actually it was a cash offer.

Harrison Faull (08:00.308)

Okay, so what’s telling, who’s stopping you taking 300 million nine months after the fund rate?

Fabrice Grinda (08:03.762)

Well, as a first-time founder, you make a lot of mistakes. One mistake is you shouldn’t necessarily raise the highest, the most money at the highest valuation. Picking a VC is like getting married. They need to be with you in good times and bad times. You need to see eye eye and where this is going and what the vision of the company is. turns out that when

the person backing you is one of the wealthiest people in the world, making more money is not necessarily their core objective. And I came to Arno and he’s like, no, I’m not a mere financial investor. Making 10X in six months, that’s not for me. I’m an industrialist. I want to be perceived as the old school guy who got the internet. And he’s like, no, I don’t want to sell. Normally I would not want to sell now. I don’t want to sell ever. I’m not in it for the money.

Fabrice Grinda (08:56.689)

And I was like, that would have been nice to mention when you invested in my company. And usually it’s not a big deal because today you have these standardized documents and you can, there’s a drag along if I want to sell, I can force other people to sell, et cetera. But again, when I signed these documents, I was 23, I had no idea what I was doing. I trusted my lawyer to negotiate the right things. Of course, they didn’t take me seriously. Even though they were very well known.

law firm, I don’t think they took me purely seriously because I was so young. And yeah, they did a really bad job, didn’t have any of the relevant rights to force a sale of transactions. So sadly, we grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory. And what would have been extraordinary, as I led to essentially nothing. Sold to a company that he wanted to sell to, whose stock probably fell 99.98 % from like $10 billion in market cap to

$30 million in 1999. I mean, it was a total disaster. basically left the company with barely less, more than I started with. But interesting life lesson at someone else’s expense.

Harrison Faull (10:06.057)

Yeah, mean a lot learned and not very much time. But in terms of dealing with that failure, that setback, I’m sure there had been several along the way, building such an explosive growth company, there’s always going to be problems every day, but nothing of the magnitude of seeing the value of your shares go down quite so drastically, coupled with you being the poster child of France’s tech guru. And I’ve read that the press weren’t too kind to you.

after that success became a bit of a failure in their eyes. How did you handle that? What kind of resilience? Did you have any tools, any techniques to help you get through that that would be helpful for founders to hear about today to manage that pressure?

Fabrice Grinda (10:49.437)

So first of all, I mean, look, I never took that seriously like, you’re worth a billion or whatever. first of all, I realize it’s monopoly money, right? Like, virtual value of your shares does not allow you to buy an apartment or car, let alone buy coffee. So it’s virtual. And I realize we’re in a bubble. And then at some point, the bubble would burst. So from that perspective, my feet were grounded on a

were reasonably well-grounded and didn’t let that success get in my head. The bigger concern for me was I had been at the right time, at the right place, the right skills, and I’d failed to capture that opportunity. I worried that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity where young people with the right type of skills and background were given an opportunity to in a way like shortcut the different path that you had to go through in life or hoops.

to become successful. And I’d blown the opportunity, even though I’d executed in many ways perfectly from a product perspective, getting liquidity, building a website, et cetera, from a financial perspective. But at the end of day, I didn’t do this for the money. So I’m like, you know what? Maybe the entry now is going to be this niche little toy thing that only nerds like me are going to play with. And there’s no money in it. But I like building something out of nothing. This is my form of creative expression. And so.

There’s no money in it, but I’d rather stay in the internet. This is what I love to do. And I’ll go and build it again. So yeah, I was bit disappointed and disappointing. But because I never led the hype game in my head, the disappointment was more about the fact that I’d missed the opportunity and now I was just going to be doing this little niche-y thing for the rest of my life. It wasn’t going be meaningful or big. So that was more the disappointment. But at the end of the day, I like, you know what? I like what I’m doing. That’s all that matters.

Harrison Faull (12:47.86)

Incredible resilience, but let’s not downplay the victories too much. Do you have a favorite memory of that time of building Auckland? Is there one particular moment where you felt, wow, I’ve achieved X or that was really special?

Fabrice Grinda (13:03.474)

The, look, lots of little victories, right? Like turning the lights on, having the first transaction, having, I mean, we created a TV ad that was so shocking that we won a silver lining con for like creativity to when I made the cover of the French Fortune basically, or being the eight o’clock, all these were amazing. There were two TV shows where they’re following me around in my life as a founder and like, and it was like,

Fabrice Grinda (13:32.178)

number one TV show in France. don’t know, like 20 million or 30 million people watching it. And an entire episode was just following me do business. It was pretty insane, the level of fame and recognition, et cetera, for a otherwise shy, introverted 25-year-old.

Harrison Faull (13:50.124)

Yeah, you must have been able to create this persona or been able to convince yourself that it was the right thing to do to get all this free publicity to advertise Auckland and also yourself. Was personal brand a part of this or were you always trying to push the platform?

Fabrice Grinda (14:02.48)

The, no, it’s both. Look, I thought it would be helpful for both getting traffic and getting revenues. I think it was more meaningful then than it is today. Like today, I don’t care for visibility. Like I don’t have a publicist. I don’t want a big following. I have exactly the right level of fame. I think it would get in the way if I was more well known in terms of my quality of life.

And so I don’t pursue it in any way, shape, form. It was a means to an ends. Ultimately, I don’t think it was actually all that as helpful as I thought it might have otherwise been. Perhaps the doing that in the early days probably helped me get fundraising or capital in a way that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. But it didn’t bring that many users. Because the users are not reading Forbes and Fortune and the Washington Journal.

Fabrice Grinda (14:57.939)

The two that were helpful were the big TV ones where they were following me around. But even then, it’s pretty short-lived. One big TV ad in prime time on one of the major channels would have probably had just as much impact. But I did like the attention. And I realized that speaking came very naturally to me. And I’m not sure I created persona. It was just myself. And I was like a.

Be your authentic self and I think it resonates when you’re your true authentic self to other people, even though, know, I’m probably not probably, I am more direct and transparent than most people and sometimes it makes people uncomfortable, people realize it’s genuine and that’s all that matters.

Harrison Faull (15:39.363)

Awesome. No, I think that’s great advice. And yeah, a persona might be good if someone’s too nervous to get out of the camera, but the best thing is being your authentic self. And it definitely comes across on camera if you’re able to tap into that. Okay. So we’ve had the massive rise, a lot of small wins and some big wins with Auckland, then the crash ultimately with the exit. And then you reinvented yourself to create Zingy for the audience that don’t know.

What was the business and why did you choose that particular sector?

Fabrice Grinda (16:14.714)

Zingy was a mobile media company, to be more specific, we basically sold ringtones in the US market. In the old school days of the Motorola flip phones and the Nokia phones, people loved to personalize their devices with wallpapers or play little games or ringtones, which were the bigger category. And I chose the category despite not thinking it was particularly a large value add for humanity, and I never even listened to music in my life.

Because my prime directives was I wanted to be a tech founder. And in 2001, when the bubble had burst and no capital was available, I needed a company that I could build with very little capital and make profitable quickly. And as I looked at the types of companies I could build, almost all of them required reasonably large amounts of capital that was essentially not available. And this one, the few companies that were around doing it in Europe and Asia, were all profitable. And I’m like, OK.

This is something that doesn’t seem all that hard to execute that I can go build. The US is like years behind. There’s no like text messaging within a carrier, let alone between carriers. There’s no mobile payment solutions. We’re like US dark ages when it comes to mobile. So let’s try to see if I can bring the mobile revolution to the US market. And so that was the genesis of the idea. Because I just want to be a founder and the idea didn’t matter. Now.

Ideally, of course, that wouldn’t have been what I would have done. Ideally, I would have built the company I wanted to build, but you need to deal with the constraints that are around in the environment you’re with. If there’s no capital available, build something that you can build in a shoestring that can be profitable, even if it’s not ideal. Use that as a means to an end to then go on to build the thing you want to build.

Harrison Faull (18:00.749)

Awesome. I like it. But can you give us an insight into the early days? Because I know you went on to have phenomenal growth and a fantastic exit, but there was a long period where cash flow wasn’t coming in. Sales weren’t happening as fast as you wanted them to because you were doing a B2B. You wanted a B2B model, but I think you got initial traction B2C.

Fabrice Grinda (18:22.01)

Well, the ideal model, the way it’s worked in the rest of the world was actually B2C. You sell directly to the consumer, but the consumer can pay through their cell phone and it works on every phone. In the US, you had all these different networks like GSM, TDMA, CDMA, IDEN, et cetera. They were all incompatible. None of the carriers had delivery mechanisms into their platforms that were open or frankly didn’t even have any of them. And there was no billing mechanism. So the only way to launch, frankly, as a proof of concept was directly to the consumer.

Fabrice Grinda (18:50.675)

where we literally hacked into the delivery mechanisms of the carriers to deliver. They didn’t even know you could do that. We hacked into it and showed we could deliver into the networks, and not all of them, a subset of them. And so in order to order the ringtones at first, you had to pick your carrier, pick your phone model only from one of the phones that were available, so you didn’t know what that was. And you had to enter a credit card number on the web. So you can imagine the volumes were extraordinarily low. And the music companies didn’t take this seriously.

Fabrice Grinda (19:20.4)

None of them wanted to give me a license. And in other countries like France, there is a centralized music repository where you can just go get a license and poof, you get a license to all songs and you pay whatever, 10 cents a download or 10 % of the revenues. In the US, there was no standard contract, no standard license, and even no database who owned what. So we had to go on this detective hunt of figuring out which artists worked with which.

Fabrice Grinda (19:50.259)

writers, songwriters, because we needed the mechanical rights which were owned by the songwriters, which were represented by which law firm to try to figure out by which music publishing company to try to get the rights. even when we did figure it out after a massive detective work, the music companies often didn’t want to give us the licenses. And so even though I was like offering to pay them, they just didn’t give us the time of day. So we did a number of different things. At first, I

Fabrice Grinda (20:19.57)

documented who owned what, we launched, violating every, we didn’t even have licenses, we violated every copyright law in the world, but we would actually be sending checks to the different music publishers as though we had a contract. And they pretty much all of them deposited it. And so eventually they caught onto it and the penalty was like $250,000 per download infringement, and same penalties. So I was starting getting sued for billions and billions of dollars.

Fabrice Grinda (20:48.337)

by all these different publishers. And the lawyer, so I get the season’s business letter or whatever and the billion, multi-billion dollar. And I would call the lawyer like, I’m so excited that you’ve reached out to me. I’ve been trying to talk to you for so long. This is amazing. And to be like, who is this crazy guy? I’m suing him for like a billion dollars and he’s like so happy to talk to me. And I’m like, look, I actually want to do the right thing. I’ve wanted to do deals. I’ve wanted to pay you. By the way, I’ve paid you. You’ve deposited the checks. You’re all the checks. So I would argue I have an implicit contract.

Fabrice Grinda (21:17.618)

And if you want to sue me out of existence, you can, but it’ll cost you more and then just settle with me. And so I ended up settling with all the music companies, obviously for what I owed them or maybe 2x what I owed them, not like the crazy penalties, and ended up being the only licensed player in the US. No one else was trying to, because they went after me and I was just friendly. And also I put every last penny I had in the company. I borrowed 100k on my credit card.

Fabrice Grinda (21:46.675)

We had no revenue, so I missed payroll, I think, 27 times. Every two weeks, we make payroll. If I missed payroll, I’d be like, I don’t understand. Something’s wrong with the bank. They suck. They keep not wiring. Of course, there’s nobody in the bank who had to wire. But then I’d meet someone and convince them to put 5K or 10K in the company to make payroll. And so that happened over and over again for the first two years, basically. But little by little, laid the groundwork for what would lead to the success, meaning

Fabrice Grinda (22:16.828)

got the licenses. Then in order to, I kept knocking on the doors of all the phone carriers, but they’re big, ginormous companies. They don’t work with startups. They’re afraid we’re not gonna be around in the future. And so I went to all the shows. They didn’t even want to give me a meeting. Like I would shake their hands, make sure they heard my name. And so to, I kind of engineered the first deal. I, MSN, just like the Microsoft portal, they were desperate for good revenues.

I paid them $100,000 to become their official ringtone provider with a tab ringtones on MSN portal. And then we got a press release, and that got a little bit of tension. Then got Motorola to inbound me, and they were like, hey, we’re running the ringtone portal by web for Nextel. Do you mind providing them to us? So that was our first contract. And then this friend came calling and says, hey, we’re thinking of launching ringtones. Do you have any license? And I gave them like 25 of them. And that took on. once that took on and worked,

Fabrice Grinda (23:14.45)

All the other carriers were like, wait, we need this. And it became a frenzy where we signed every operator in like a three month period. And there was a question of launching. We finally got that. we launched on Sprint in March or April of 2003. We didn’t even know how well we were doing because it was on their platform. We finally got the check August 15, 2003, which is when we became profitable. And so we were saved. I I lived on the

Fabrice Grinda (23:43.443)

couch at the office for two years like living at two dollars a day I could only eat ramen noodles. So I paid back my credit card debt, paid back the employees that had backed salary and then it became a rocket ship. We went from a million in revenues in 02, 5 in 03, 50 in 04, 200 in 05 and yeah this time we grabbed victory from the jaws of defeat.

Harrison Faull (24:05.572)

How much were people willing to pay for ringtones back then?

Fabrice Grinda (24:11.122)

More than you would think. I started 99 cents, then I increased to 149, then I increased to 199, then I increased to 249, then I finished at 299, and we never saw declines in volume. So 299 in ringtone. And if you were especially a teen, and you wanted really the latest hook of the latest song to provide social currency, and so people would change almost every week or every other week. So it became a much bigger business than people expected.

Fabrice Grinda (24:40.531)

And in fact, think I paid 50 cents, I don’t know, $5 or $10 million in one year when he had in the club and once paid similar amounts. mean, the top songs of the day were extraordinarily popular. And we were generating more revenue to the songwriters and the artists than traditional music sales, which at the time were being all pirated by Napster and whatever the.

all the different, lime wire and things like that.

Harrison Faull (25:08.199)

Let see. wow, what a journey, what a story. So astronomical growth, right? 1 million to 200 million in four years in revenue. And then you end up selling. It’s sold to a Japanese company, if I’m right on that. I have to say, like most people do, transition period, pass over your skills, make sure there are processes in place. And I actually found that process to be not as smooth as one would hope. Could you tell us a little bit about

Harrison Faull (25:41.98)

what you learned from selling and perhaps what you might not have known at the time, do you would like to advise other founders on now to avoid a similar situation?

Fabrice Grinda (25:50.579)

The first thing I learned in selling is use a banker. We were approached by the Japanese buyer in Q1-04, and they offered $40 million, which of course at that time I owned the majority of the company. It was like a life-changing amount. I was like, I’ve learned my lesson from the buy time. This is meaningful enough that I should probably take it. I hired Broadview, which now is called Jefferies, to run a process, and it doubled the price.

So we ended up closing with the same seller, but they ultimately bid $80 million. So I sold for $80 instead of $40. And by running process, making competitive, we increased the price dramatically. Number two, while you’re negotiating the stock purchase agreement with a buyer, having someone be the backup is very useful because you’re going to have to work for a certain period of time with a buyer. And so you can’t be the one creating a bad blood, negative relationship with.

Fabrice Grinda (26:45.235)

I would actually be the one driving the negotiations in the back end, like whatever I said, I wanted something different. would say, look, I love you guys. I wanna work with you, but my bankers are telling me this is on market and I don’t wanna look foolish. So, you know, if you change that, I’ll make sure it gets through. And so I appear as the good cop and the person solving their own. So bankers, amazing when it comes to deals above a certain price and definitely 40, 50 million pass that threshold. Number two,

Fabrice Grinda (27:14.066)

If you do an earn out, make it a revenue earn out more than EBITDA earn out because the buyer controls in a way your cost structure and so they can change your EBITDA and that will lead to that will lead inevitably to a loss. Much better actually if you have an earn out to be just time-based. You need to be there and making sure that easy things happen like the hand of control, a la la. Now in case, actually stayed longer than you might think. I stayed for 18 months.

Because actually in the early days it was fun. I was part of a hyper growth company going from 50 to 200 million. We were changing offices every six months. We were expanding the product lines, adding gaming, adding full-blown music ringtones, negotiating deals with labels. We even had the opportunity to buy Shazam for like a million dollars. Now, ultimately the reason I left is actually because all the ambitions I had, which included like buying Shazam, et cetera,

Fabrice Grinda (28:10.076)

were thwarted because the Japanese just said, no, I need the profits. And so they would take all my profits and ship it to Japan and didn’t let me continue building the empire. so we’re like, you know, at end of the day, didn’t particularly love the business, definitely didn’t like them. The cultural differences were large, but I don’t regret selling to them because they paid the most and in cash. And it was reasonably easy to keep doing my own thing on a go-forward basis. So I’m actually no regrets from that perspective.

I mean, I would have wished they’d let me continue to try to build it into something bigger by the fact that they didn’t lead me to the next adventure. So, regrets.

Harrison Faull (28:41.313)

Okay. So you’ve been living on $2 a day with ramen noodles four years ago. Suddenly you get this massive paycheck, all liquid, full cash. What’s top of the list? What do you splash out on straight away?

Fabrice Grinda (29:03.186)

Nothing, honestly, I stayed in the same studio apartment. bought a TV, an Xbox, and two tennis rackets, which probably cost me $1,500 max total. I didn’t do it for the money to begin with, and I saw money as a means to an end, like to have the freedom to build my next company without needing seed capital or pre-seed capital, to not have to worry about, like, you know, if I don’t…

Harrison Faull (29:11.243)

What?

Fabrice Grinda (29:33.219)

food again like the way I did for two years or rent or whatever but no there was I didn’t change anything into my life partly because we’re so busy or like like the more meaningful day was the day became profitable because the day we became profitable and I like that day full-on popped champagne like we were saved like we were the masters of our own destiny we were not going to die and and and that was like the probably to this day the most meaningful day of my like business career because like

Fabrice Grinda (30:03.026)

Until then, there was always a moment where it looked like we could die. And from that day on, was like, OK, now we’re saved. We’re good. Selling was just another step. But at the moment we sold, we closed in May or June of 2004, was the hypergrowth mode. Part of the reason I sold for, in a way, that little relative to what ended up being our 2004, 2005 revenues is in Q104, we closed 4 million revenues, 1 million EBITDA. And the Japanese asked me for my projections.

And of course, you never know these things. I’m like, yeah, I don’t know. We’ll make 20 million revenues this year, 4 million profits, maybe 50 million next year, 7 million profits. Had I known we’re going to do 50 and 200, I would have waited a bit longer. But again, better to leave it too late and better for cash and sock. But as a result, when I sold, we were growing like this. We were probably literally we’re moving off as I take an office, we were we were seven and we came.

25 for the time I moved office. Then I’ve taken office for 75 people. Like, yeah, we’ll never move out of that. Like six months later, like I was shit, we needed a bigger office. So we kept moving offices, hiring people, launching product lines, growing like crazy. I was working so hard that, yeah, it didn’t change anything in my life because my life was still building my business.

Harrison Faull (31:20.396)

Yeah, that’s amazing. I think it’s also extremely interesting that you found so much joy in the process, in the building, over the product. I’m sure you had to be a product expert or have someone there that loved it and made it perfect. But ultimately, you weren’t very aligned with the final consumer.

Fabrice Grinda (31:37.469)

So I didn’t love selling ringtones, but I actually like building product. And the nuance for me, the product is not that. The product is like the website, the user interface in the mobile apps of the different phones. And I love building product. I’m a product CEO. I’m the one writing the user stories. And these days, I’m like on Figma.

Fabrice Grinda (32:03.314)

like creating all the frames and then I use Canva to create different designs. So I love playing with products. I didn’t like the end product we were selling, but actually the product process of building the products. I love that. That I could do all day long. I I still do it to this day, right? I build my own AI, build my own blog because I love playing with products.

Harrison Faull (32:26.979)

I mean, it comes through. It’s energized and say, you’re passionate for it. And I’m sure it played dividends in your next step as well. moving forward to OLX.

Fabrice Grinda (32:38.247)

But actually, one comment, because when people are like, OK, does working really hard pay dividends? And the answer is absolutely yes. But if there two people competing, and one is doing it for fun, and the other one is doing it because they feel they have to do it, the person doing it for fun will win every day of the week, because it’s not work. It’s fun. And so in college, frankly, in high school, my first startup, yeah, I was working 100 hour weeks.

traditionally defined as work, but I didn’t think it was work, I thought it was play. And so, because I thought it was fun, I was just doing my hobby and being compensated for it. So other people that are doing it for work, they’re getting burned out. And if you do something you love doing, you don’t get burned out, it’s just what you do.

Harrison Faull (33:24.612)

I think that’s more true for founders because they encounter so many hurdles, so many no’s, so many failures. Unless you truly love it or you find some passion, some joy that makes you a little bit delirious and the 1 % that manages to get to the finish line, it’s extremely hard to get there without that. So there’s definitely a lot of truth to what you’re saying. So third company now, OLX which also went on to become an absolute juggernaut.

Harrison Faull (33:54.432)

For those of us that aren’t fully aware of that company, can you give us a bit of a market landscape and why there was actually an opportunity for OLX? Because I know there’s a really interesting story when it comes to Craigslist and what you tried to do there.

Fabrice Grinda (34:05.522)

Yeah, so 2005, yeah. So obviously my true love, originally it was marketplaces. So I kept an eye on what was going on in that world. And of course eBay had gone from strength to strength, 2004, 2005, Craigslist came into its own in the US and became part of the fabric of society. And it was a place to find roommates and apartments or jobs and items. And, but even back then it was already looked like it was 10 years out of date from a user interface perspective.

And just as importantly, I didn’t think they did a very good job in moderation. was full of scam and spam and phishing. They basically didn’t have a moderation team. The latest listings would be the latest posted. And then they would use the community to mark the bad ones to eliminate them. So all the latest listings were always the worst ones. It made no sense. So I went to see Craig and Jim. And I’m like, hey, I love what you guys are doing. You’re providing an amazing public service to humanity and the community. But we can do it better. Let’s moderate. Let’s improve the UX UI.

Fabrice Grinda (35:02.288)

You may not want to, you may not have the money for it, but how about that? I’ll do it for free. Like I just sold my company, I don’t need money. I don’t need anything. I don’t need equity, I don’t need cash. I will do this as a service to the community and to humanity. And no, they didn’t give me time a day, they didn’t care. They literally didn’t care. I think in one of the meetings they were like so high on like weed that they were like fading out of consciousness.

Fabrice Grinda (35:29.712)

And every time I met them since, they never remember meeting me before. was like pretty weird interactions. And I’m like, you know what? If I’m going to compete with someone, might as well compete with the person who doesn’t care. Now, the issue is in the US, they already had liquidity in marketplaces. Liquidity and network effects are so powerful that breaking them is very hard. But the opportunity was, while it was big in the US and there were few established incumbents in Europe, in most of the rest of the world, no one was doing this.

Fabrice Grinda (35:59.291)

And Classified is actually an amazing product for an emerging market because in countries where there’s no trust, where there’s no online payment, where there’s no shipping systems that work, actually meeting at your street corner and exchange a good for cash is actually a very viable option. And it’s like, know what? I’m going to build a better version of Craigslist for the rest of the world. We’re going to go mobile first. We’re going to focus on women because…

women are the primary decision makers in all household purchases, right? They decide the car you drive, the babysitter you hire, the house you live in, and pretty much everything else. And yet Craigslist is the least female friendly safe site in the world. And yeah, we’re going to start with consumer used goods because those are people buy them on a regular basis. So we get started getting a lot of organic traffic. And from there, we’re to go to cars and then real estate and then jobs.

Fabrice Grinda (36:54.836)

And yeah, that was the vision. I’ll pause here for now.

Harrison Faull (37:00.377)

Awesome. I mean, you didn’t go slowly. I read a little bit about your first go-to-market strategy, which seems bonkers, but there’s a lot of good thinking in there. Could you tell our audience a little bit of how you managed to launch in 100 countries to test the different markets? I don’t know over what period, but I imagine very quickly.

Fabrice Grinda (37:19.378)

Yeah, a couple of months. mean, basically, when you build a marketplace, you want to sort of supply, so you get sellers on the platform. And you just go to all the sellers, like car dealers, roles and brokers, like, look, I’m building a website. It’s free to list. I don’t have an audience right now, but perhaps you’ll get buyers. So do you want to list? And everyone kind of says yes. So you get supply. We built a little sales team in Buenos Aires in Argentina that was multilingual. That spoke all the different languages of the countries we attacked.

And we created the site, 100 countries, I don’t remember 30 or 40 languages, launched. And then we spent 50k per country, so $5 million total, to test where we could get the flywheel going of ever more sellers buying, bringing more buyers, and so on and so forth. And in these things, there’s a level of randomness. There are a few countries where it really, really resonated and really, really, really picked up in Portugal and Pakistan.

Fabrice Grinda (38:18.322)

And it picked up, lesser scale, but still very well for, I mean, bigger scale overall, but lesser scale is the market share of the country in Brazil and India. And so for the 100 countries, yeah.

Harrison Faull (38:27.368)

Sorry to interrupt, but what does that look like? What does that outlier look like? Is it 100 times return on your capital on the marketing? How obvious was it to spot here or was it marginal differences?

Fabrice Grinda (38:36.508)

No, it’s pretty obvious to spot because all of a sudden, every day, more listings, more buyers, more transactions, the flywheel just starts and just doesn’t stop. And even when you stop marketing, things keep going. And so it’s reasonably obvious. If we were listing an item, the probability that it would sell, at first, was 25%, which was already liquidity, but grew to 50%, 60%. So all the items listed would sell.

Harrison Faull (38:46.589)

wow, the flywheel had already started kicking in. Okay.

Fabrice Grinda (39:07.27)

consumers would be happy. And just like, yeah, it just kept going. So the unit economics were, by the way, underwater for a long time. So our revenue per user is like $1 or $2 a year at that point in time, because we’re only on an advertising model in countries with low GDP per capita. And acquiring customers would cost us more than that. Nonetheless, the idea that you pay for the first customers and then they lead to more

And so the flywheel, it was pretty obvious that the flywheel was working in these four countries. So we went from 100 countries down to four, really doubled down on the ones that we thought had real strategic value. Obviously, if we’re going to win Portugal back to China, might as well win it. But that’s not we’re going to create a multi-billionaire company. It’s going to be Brazil and India. So we really doubled down there, grew it, became very large, even profitable in Brazil. And then once we were there, used those profits to then rescale

Fabrice Grinda (40:01.053)

to 30 other countries and become the leaders in 30 countries overall.

Harrison Faull (40:05.961)

Okay, so you’re building another phenomenal marketplace, which ultimately gives you this incredible toolkit. You’ve been there, you’ve done it, you’ve had two incredible marketplace businesses, and you’re making some angel investments on the side. Did you start off by only wanting to angel invest into marketplaces, or did you have a bit of a spray and pray approach, but then ultimately found your footing with just marketplaces?

Fabrice Grinda (40:30.674)

So before I move on answering this question, I’ll give you a sense of scale. So OLX became huge, right? It’s like 300 million users a month. It’s like tens of millions of people making a living off the site every month. We grew it to, I think 11,000 employees at the beginning. Huge, huge company. Now, my vision mission was always be founder CEO. I never meant to be an angel investor. I never meant to be a VC. But what happened is when you’re a very visible internet founder, a lot of other founders come to you for advice and or money.

And so back in 98, at the very beginning of my journey, already other founders were saying, hey, can you invest in my startup? And so I thought long and hard, should I be an angel investor in parallel to being a founder? mean, it is a distraction in a way. And having thought long and hard, I ultimately articulated, I guess, three things. One is if I can articulate lessons learned to others, it means I’ve internalized them. Makes me a better founder. Number two, I’m running these horizontal multi-category sites,

eBay or Craigslist type sites. Actually meeting and keeping my fingers on the pulse of the market by meeting all the verticals and understanding the latest trends and business models also makes me a better founder. It’s actually useful to make sure I don’t miss any of the bigger trends. Number three, to minimize distractions as long as in a one hour meeting I decide if I’m going to invest or not and therefore I’m going to stick to things I know like marketplaces, it’s okay. So I created my four selection criteria.

Fabrice Grinda (41:58.035)

and started investing already in 98. And so by 2013, when I sold and left OLX I’d already made 173 investments, I’d like dozens of exits, even though was a secondary business for me. In fact, it was funny, in the US, I was known more as a super angel than I was known as a tech founder because OLX is not big in the US. So even though OLX is like literally one of the largest companies in the world from websites in the world, I was known as an angel.

Fabrice Grinda (42:26.74)

Even though that was like my night gig, not my main gig.

Harrison Faull (42:28.938)

Thanks. Amazing. Okay. So you saw it as an opportunity to actually help OLX, help yourself in that journey with marketplaces. You ended up formalizing that angel investing process by forming FJ Labs, which has gone on to make 1100 investments, 300 plus exits. It’s remarkable. It’s a VC fund, but a super angel type model. Could you tell us today what

FJ Labs looks like, what you’re looking for, what kind of investment sizes you do.

Fabrice Grinda (43:06.576)

Yeah, so first of all, we didn’t start out as a VC fund. We started really as my partner, Jose and I were like, hey, we like building companies, we like investing companies. It’ll be a family office to do that. And it kind of took a life of its own. we started getting, beyond getting it inbounded by massive volumes of deals, like every week we get 300 inbound deals, which required a structure. So we had to hire people, et cetera. We started getting inbounded by investors who said, hey, we want exposure where you’re doing.

can you let us invest? And that’s what led to our first formal venture fund in 2016 of like 50 million of external capital. It led to our second venture fund in 2018 with 175 million of capital from 20 LPs, third one in 21 with 290 million from 20 LPs. And we’re about to go to market. We’re going to raise fund four of 300 million in Q1 25. And we do fund every three years. So like fund five will be in Q1 28 and so on and so forth.

And so it kind of took a lot of it’s own, but to your point, we don’t behave like VCs, we behave like angels. You know, like two one hour meetings over the course of a week and we decide if we invest or not. Now, what are we looking for? I’ll answer it in multiple ways. You know, we, as I said, we behave like angel investors. So we invest in every category, in every geography, at every stage. But we’re 50 % US, 25 % Western Europe, 10 % Brazil, India, 15 % of the rest of the world.

We’re 70 % seed and A, so we’re mostly post-launch, post-revenue. We want to fund your growth, but we are also 20 % beyond words and 10 % pre-seed. We are 70 % marketplaces and network effect businesses, mostly in B2B marketplaces these days because you need to digitize the entire supply chains in the B2B world, which are at the very beginning of their digitization processes. And that’s everything.

moving the online ordering of inputs to online, or moving input ordering online, helping SMBs digitize, doing support infrastructure for all the payment networks, shipping, cetera. And I guess most importantly, what we look for is we have four selection criteria. So when we decide to invest in a startup, it’s four things. One, do we like the team? Now every VC in the world will tell you, I only invest in extraordinary founders.

Fabrice Grinda (45:27.398)

But it can’t be like porn. It can’t be something like, I only recognize it when I see it. And so for us, an extraordinary founder is someone who’s amazingly eloquent, visionary salesperson, and so Van Dijkers intersection of those two knows how to execute. And the way in a one hour meeting we evaluate if someone knows how to execute is number two selection criteria. Do we like the business? And for us, it’s like total addressable market size and more importantly, unit economics. Can you f-

recoup your fully loaded customer acquisition costs on a net contribution margin basis in six months? Can you three x in 18 months? Do you have negative revenue churn such that ultimately your LTV to CAC is like 10 to 1 or 20 to 1? And if you’re not there, why are you going to get there with scale without needing every star in the multiverse to align? And there are some VCs will say team is everything, the rest is relevant to them, but we care deeply about the business you’re in. Does it have a good economics? Number three, what are the deal terms?

Now, nothing’s cheap in tech, but is it fair? Is it fair in light of the traction, the opportunity, the category, and the team? And number four, what is the thesis? Is the thesis aligned with our vision of the future of the world? And we have clear visions for the future of mobility, of food, of real estate, et cetera. And we’re trying to solve three fundamental problems, so climate change and equality of opportunity and the mental and physical wellbeing crisis. Are you solving something we care about? And we want all four things to be true simultaneously.

So we need to love the team, love the business, find the deal terms fair, and like the thesis and the problem they’re trying to solve. And if all four are true, after two one hour meetings in a week, we’ll tell you we’re in. We’ll write the $400K check on average. And we’ll be super helpful to you in terms of fundraising and think through marketplace dynamics. But we won’t bother you. We won’t be on your board. We’ll take whatever reporting you’re willing to give us. And yeah, we want to talk to you really once a year when you go fundraise. And we’re going to make sure you nail your fundraising.

Harrison Faull (47:22.234)

Okay, wow. That’s quite a high benchmark. I imagine you have to see quite a few deals to build the portfolio size that you’re after here. Could you give us an insight on how much you actually see and what that actually results in over a 12-month investment period?

Fabrice Grinda (47:37.971)

So we see about 300 deals a week inbound. They come from three sources. We share a lot of deal flow with other VCs. So we’re friends with about 100 VCs. We talk to them once a quarter. So it’s about a VC a day per quarter. And we send them all of our best deals. And they send us in return their best deals. Now, of course, we’re more prolific than they are. So we send them more deals than they send us. But it’s kind win-win-win. When they send us a deal, we give them our perspective.

we’re going to help the founders with their marketplace dynamics, in return we send them a lot more deals and our founders get funded by the best VC, so they love it. And we’re not competing for allocation. They’re writing a $10 million check, we’re writing a $400K check, so it’s not a big deal. So these deals are probably the best quality. That’s about 100 deals a week. Another 100 deals a week are coming from the founders we backed before. 1100 companies, about 2000 founders, they come back from the next company. They send us their friends, they send us their employees. So of the deals we invested in about

Fabrice Grinda (48:33.747)

50 % come from the VCs, about 30 % come in from the founders. Now the last 100 a week come cold and bound, mostly through my LinkedIn, some direct to my email, but frankly Instagram, WhatsApp, I you name it, it’s like kind of all over. Mostly to me because I’m the kind of the vision or the face of the fund, even though we’re four partners, we’re 10 investors, we’re 35, so we’re pretty big. And it is still 15 % of the deals we do.

Yeah, a bit more, like 17%, but whatever. 15%, 20 % of the deals we do come from the cold inbound channel. And while they’re lower quality on average, some of the more interesting deals come from that channel because it’s like amazing founders. They just happen to not come from Sanford and live in SF. They’re in like Albany, New York, or they’re not in Sao Paulo, they’re in Palo Horizonte, and they didn’t go to the right schools. They don’t have connectivity. Of course, it’s better to get a warm inbound, but if we don’t have it, that’s fine too.

And so we see through any deals, we take calls about 50. The other 250 are often completely out of scope, biotech, hardware, et cetera. If there’s not a marketplace network effect type dynamic, we’ll do any industry, but it has to have that. So if you’re telling me you’re building a marketplace for something in space, that’s fine. But if you’re building rockets, we’re less likely to invest. And same thing in biotech, a marketplace for labor in biotech, no problem at all.

for buying or selling components, but if you’re just building a biotech company, not for us. A lot of Out of Scope, a lot is also just too early. Look, we do do pre-seed and pre-launch, but because we don’t invest in competitors, if eight people were pitching us the same idea at the same time, we want to wait until one of them emerge as the early leader before we pull the trigger, because if we’re wrong on the bet in pre-seed, then we’ve shot ourselves out of the category completely.

So we’re more likely to wait until C or A than do pre-seed unless you’re a second time founder or third time founder, and we’ve backed you before, then we’ll do pre-seed. But our pre-seed bar is very, very high. And so we take these 50 calls a week with a 10 % investment team. It’s a one-hour call. We evaluate the four things I discussed. We have a two-hour investment committee meeting on Tuesday, every Tuesday, from 10 to 12. We review the 50 deals. We take a second call with maybe 10 other companies.

Fabrice Grinda (50:52.914)

One of the four partners will take many of the calls, but I’ll take maybe half of them. And at the end of that, we invest in about three new companies for a week. So 300 becomes three. So it’s 1%. It’s 150 new investments per year, not including the follow-ons and the companies we already invested in. And of course, so we have a separate investment committee every week for whatever companies in the portfolio are raising, going public, going bankrupt, whatever, when we decide what to do. And we treat those as net new investments.

Knowing what we know now, the team of the company of the opportunity would we invest in? The answer is yes, we write a check, the answer is no, we do nothing, or if a secondary is available, we might take a secondary opportunity on the way up. And so that’s another maybe 7,500 investments a year. So total, we end up doing two to 300 investments a year, of which 150 are net new on average.

Harrison Faull (51:44.158)

Wow, you’re a busy man. But that is amazing. It’s great to see someone deploying at such scale, at such velocity, because the ecosystem need it. And they’re going to be able to leverage the ones that do pass the benchmarks that you require to get in as an investor, to get you on board, get such great value out there. It’s just,

Fabrice Grinda (51:45.914)

Hey

Fabrice Grinda (52:08.528)

Yeah, and look, and by the way, this is not because I decided, this is the best top-down way to maximize portfolio construction. It’s more a reflection of the founder, my partner Jose, and frankly, the other partners’ personality in us. It’s like, we meet people we like, we want to back them. And each founder is really tackling a problem. There’s so many problems. Like when you say climate change, it’s not one problem. It’s 1,000 problems. It’s like emissions at a cement.

factory at submissions when you’re extracting mineral. mean, it’s it’s a billion different sub problems and each founder is tackling one of them. And there’s as many, there are multiple entrepreneurs and solutions per problem out there. And so there’s a million or thousands of founders we want to back. And so it’s really reflection of personality, even though actually a diversified portfolio leads to the best returns in the business because of the power law nature of venture.

Harrison Faull (53:00.074)

No, it’s a passion. You’re pulling it through. I’m sure you convinced your LPs that they know exactly what you guys are doing, what you’re trying to build, and they’re on board with that journey. Flipping back to founders and advice to founders, given your experience with marketplaces, are there like three top pieces of advice that you’d give a founder who wants to build in the next marketplace for something. What should they bear in mind from day zero?

Fabrice Grinda (53:27.452)

first thing is it’s easier to build than ever before. So don’t overthink it. Just launch and build it. I’d probably build on Shopify, even though Shopify is more for e-commerce than marketplace. And you can then build the seller component on top of it. Don’t overthink the tech. Just keep it simple. Literally, I could probably build any marketplace today if I’m for less than $15k in like a month. Use Shopify. have companies doing hundreds of millions of GMV in revenues on Shopify. It’s not a problem.

It’s not where the key success factor is. The key success is can you make the unit economics work? Can you acquire the sellers and the buyers? Can you match them? Second big recommendation, probably the number one mistake marketplace founders make is they overwhelm their marketplace with supply. so when you start a marketplace, 99 % of the case you’re going to start with the sellers because they’re financially motivated by the platform.

If you kind of go to anyone in any category, it doesn’t matter where they’re selling. They could be selling a service, could be selling a product, and you’re like, hey, I’m creating this store. It’s free for you to be on it. I may have buyers for you. Do you want to be there? Everyone’s going to say yes. Like there’s a very limited cost for them to be on it. But if you just take everyone and you have infinite supply and you don’t have any buyers, then

Fabrice Grinda (54:47.026)

None of these are going to get any value out of your marketplace and they’re not going to have buyers. As a result, they’re not going to be active. They’re going to churn. If I wanted to build a locksmith marketplace in New York City, I don’t need locksmith there in New York. A couple thousand? I could probably call every one of them in a month and get them on a platform, but I’m going to have no demand for them. So they’re all going to churn. If someone places an order, they’re not going to reply. They’re not going be engaged in the platform. So instead, what you should do is you get the very best supply, a good price,

Good operator, depends if it’s a product or a service, but like the very best seller for that product category. And then like a limited quantity, and then you go find them a buyer, you know, spend money. And it doesn’t, I also don’t care what the channel could be. It could be influencers, be TikTok, could be Facebook, could be Google, could be sales team, could be inbound, irrelevant. Just make sure that the economics work. So you find them a buyer and you make them happy. And then they scale the amount of time and products that they put in your platform relative to others.

And once you’ve reached kind of saturated them, then you bring the next seller and you keep scaling your supply and your demand in parallel. You don’t massively scale one side before the other, unless there’s value in having more items, which are some categories you need a critical mass of items before you can actually attract buyers. Otherwise you’re going to overwhelm your supply side. Nothing’s going to convert. The sellers are not going be engaged and everyone’s going to churn. You basically, you’ve drowned your marketplace and you’ve killed all chance of liquidity.

So really scale up the supply and demand in parallel, making sure both sides are happy at all times.

Harrison Faull (56:20.188)

That’s great advice and not something that might become as intuitive to someone that hasn’t built a marketplace before. So thank you very much. Okay, so that’s the founder that hasn’t started. The founder that has started who’s not seeing the cohort performance,

Harrison Faull (56:43.698)

Okay, thank you. Okay, so that’s fantastic advice for the MVP, the founder that’s just about to start their marketplace. When it comes to a founder that actually has taken that step, has taken that leap, they’ve got a marketplace going, they’re seeing some growth, they’re seeing some traction, but maybe their cohort performance is not improving over time. They’re not seeing that next user purchase more frequently. Do you have any advice on what to do then?

Fabrice Grinda (57:13.074)

So obviously finding product market fit is the number one thing that kills or at least success in startups. All I would say is, look, if you’re 20 % away, you’re going to figure it out. You’re going to change the funnels in a way that you can get there. You’re going to get optimizations in your marketing channels, et cetera. If you’re 10x away, you’re probably not going to get there with whatever it is you’re doing today. You need to change something pretty radical. Product, user experience, business model.

distribution strategy, et cetera. if you’re far away from it, probably not going to get there, which is OK. You use that lesson and pivot into something else. And if you’re close, just keep iterating on whatever current approach you’re doing. Now, there are some things you need to realize is something solve themselves automatically through scale. So imagine your economics are underwater because you’re paying the delivery people or they’re being paid on the marketplace $15 an hour, and you’re doing one delivery an hour.

But at scale, you can easily imagine that’ll be three deliveries an hour, and so $5 a delivery, not 15. And there the economics work. Then you can still articulate why you’re going to get there. Now, understand this. VCs like me, want to growth. obviously, we’re not going to fund profitable growth, but not profitable as in you reach underlying profitability. Profitable, you did economic growth. So the objective of your seed is to go to your A. The objective of your A is to go to your B. And from B, then you can go to full-blown profitability.

But let’s say you’re a consumer facing marketplace with like a 15 % take rate. At seed, you’re probably raising the median right now, three and nine pre, and we expect you to be doing 150k with the GMV. And with that, again, 15 % take rate. So if you’re at 5 % take rate, you need to be 4x bigger or whatever, 3x bigger. With that, we expect you to be at 750k in GMV with a 15 % take rate in good union economics, like 66 % margin, let’s say.

for your A. And with that you get whatever 2.53 million a month in GMV for your B. Again, with good economics. So cohorts, we expect the cohorts to improve over time. So the more you go on, the more valuable your marketplace, typically the more valuable the community is, the more items you have, the easier it is transact. And so we would expect new users come in to buy faster, to buy more.

Fabrice Grinda (59:38.643)

and to have a retention that is higher. And so if pretty quickly you see that the new chords are worse than the old chords, it probably, may mean the market is swelter than you think it is because it suggests that you already got all the early adopters and then the rest are not that excited or interested in the category. yeah, chord analysis matters a lot. LTV to CAC models matter a lot. And also making sure you have density in your acquisition channels because

If you’re doing Google almost totally fine, make sure that you can spend not just $100K a month, but like $1 million a month, or $5 million a month, and then you keep scaling. You have proper network effects when your cat goes down over time. If you have real network effects, you start getting more and more organic growth. So your blended cat should actually be declining over time as you scale. If your cat keeps going up and up and up, again, it probably means either you don’t have network effects or the market is more capped than you thought it was.

Harrison Faull (01:00:35.072)

Incredible advice. Thank you. Okay. With this AI boom and tools that are so easy for people to code now, is there anything particularly exciting about applying AI to marketplaces that you’re seeing happen today that hasn’t happened before that could reinvent space or just help that founder put fuel on the fire?

Fabrice Grinda (01:00:58.534)

Well, first of all, every founder should be using AI to improve productivity in their startup. Like customer care, productivity can improve dramatically with AI. Sales, productivity can improve dramatically with AI. Programmer productivity improves dramatically with AI. So you should be using the AI tools. I I take that as a given. Now you could also use AI to improve marketplace flows pretty dramatically. In some categories, now you could just take a photo and the AI can detect the item.

Fabrice Grinda (01:01:27.58)

pick a title, write a description, select the category, select the price, say if it’s real or fake, like poof, in like three photos, 20 seconds, you have a listing. Compare that to the old school way of doing it on eBay, where you do all that work for yourself. It’s like 10 minutes to put a listing, plus you put a credit card details, et cetera. So you should definitely use AI to improve buyer and seller flows to the point that you increase conversion rates, basically.

Fabrice Grinda (01:01:55.739)

In some categories, it’s very easy to do, like trading cards or collectibles where the items can be recognized or unique. In some categories, it’s less easy to do and may not be in the incumbents, rather in a better position to do it than the startups because they have the data. So Rebag, which is a handbag marketplace, has all the data of all the handbags which one are fake or real and what price based on the level of scratches and et cetera. And so they’ve created their AI called Clair to help you list your handbag.

They can do it, but if you were just a startup starting, probably you don’t have the data to be able to do that. But there’s also third party AI tools that can help on the marketplace. So we’re investors in a company called PhotoRoom. And what PhotoRoom does is you take photo of an item, it detects the type of item it is, and based on the marketplace you want to sell it on, it’ll change the background image of your photo to maximize the conversion and sell through rate. So sometimes it’ll put a white background, sometimes it’ll put a nature or whatever. mean, so there’s a lot that can be done from an AI perspective.

And of course, depending on the search behavior, you can improve your search and your recommended listings like, you like this, you may also like this, through AI in a pretty dramatic way. these are the most fundamental ways to use AI in marketplaces.

Harrison Faull (01:03:09.843)

I really like the idea of investing maybe into a startup that needs marketplaces as a customer. So that photo room, obviously you can give them instant scale. You’ve got 1100 portfolio companies, many of which are marketplaces. Bam, instant go to market strategy.

Fabrice Grinda (01:03:21.266)

Exactly. We’re investors in TopSort. TopSort helps marketplaces monetize by selling ads to their own sellers, kind of like Instacart or on Amazon right now. You can buy ads as an Amazon seller. And so it increases your take rate and it’s very high profitable, very profitable. And so we invest in that and of course then we send it to all portfolio companies and it’s win-win. TopSort gets all of our marketplaces as customers and the customers get higher GMB take rate. So it’s amazing.

Harrison Faull (01:03:51.694)

Incredible. Look, Fabrice, I know we’ve already gone over, so let’s wrap things up and just end by saying thank you very much for your time. The wisdom is incredible. For the founders out there that want to approach you, want to get investment from FJ Labs, where would you prefer that they send you DealFlow?

Fabrice Grinda (01:04:10.652)

So if you want to learn more about my thinking, read my blog, fabricegrinda.com. You can actually talk to my AI, fabriceai, at fabricegrinda.com. So fabriceai.fabricegrinda.com to ask any questions you may have and that you approach me directly to send me deals. The best way is to send me a LinkedIn in-mail. And in that message, though, make sure you describe what the startup is, what traction you have, include a deck. Basically, give me every information I need to decide whether it’s for us or

If you just say, I have an amazing story, I’d like to talk to you about it, you will not get a reply.

Harrison Faull (01:04:44.0)

Thank you very much.

Midas Liquid Yield Tokens (LYT):代幣化收益策略的新時代

穩定幣被譽為加密生態系統的基石,在動蕩的市場中提供穩定性,並有望徹底改變支付軌道。然而,在表面之下,穩定幣供應從根本上是由鏈上收益率驅動的。

在過去的兩個市場週期中,穩定幣供應量與收益率直接反應而擴大和收縮。當鏈上收益率超過美國國庫券 (T-Bills) 時,對穩定幣的需求飆升——尤其是在 DeFi Summer 之後,當時總供應量在短短兩年內從不到 100 億美元 飆升至超過 1500 億美元 。相比之下,當鏈上收益率低於美元無風險利率時,穩定幣供應的收縮速度與 22 年第一季度至 23 年第三季度的下降一樣快。最近的增長是由 contango 加密市場導致的高鏈上收益率來解釋的。

資料來源:DeFiLlama

問題:穩定幣不穩定
在尋求收益的過程中,穩定幣已經演變成 鏈上對沖基金策略 (“產生收益的”穩定幣“),正如 Ethena 和其他公司的增長所表明的那樣。在這種結構中,收益通過兩個代幣分配——一個傳統的穩定幣,它可以被質押到第二個代幣中,以賺取標的抵押品的收入。之所以出現這種結構,是因為發行「穩定」幣避免了被歸類為證券或集體投資計劃,而這需要監管部門的批准。

通過將這些產品定義為「准穩定幣」,發行人可以利用監管漏洞——但這是以引入系統性風險為代價的,包括:

  • 脫鉤事件 – 如果投資組合表現不佳,流動性就會迫使發行人進行減價銷售,從而破壞整個生態系統的穩定。
  • 錯位的激勵措施 – 發行人追求更高的收益率以吸引TVL,通常會將投資組合推向風險較高的資產。
  • 監管不確定性 – 將對沖基金策略包裝成「准穩定幣」會產生合規風險,使投資者無法對標的資產提出法律定義的索賠。

正如 Steakhouse Financial 在其穩定幣手冊中指出的那樣:

“穩定幣受到流動性和償付能力的限制。要發揮作用,穩定幣必須滿足這兩個硬性限制。

然而,產生收益的穩定幣本身就強調這些限制。吸引TVL的競爭會導致兩個系統性後果:

  1. 擠入相同的收益機會,減少回報
  2. 系統性脆弱性增加,脫鉤風險加劇

後果:較低的回報和增加的系統性風險

通過設置 1 美元的負債,從技術上講,可 投資 的收益穩定幣僅限於 零期限 抵押品。這會將所有發行人的資產彙集到相同的交易中,從而導致回報遞減。從歷史上看,擁擠的交易,例如大宗商品市場的基差交易,一直表現不佳。學術界已對市場擁擠的影響進行了廣泛研究,導致較低的回報和更高的風險。例如,大宗商品市場的基差交易導致 24 年期間的回報率一直較低。

來源:Wenjin Kang、K. Geert Rouwenhorst 和 Ke Tang 的《擁擠和因子回報》

對收益率的不懈追求將穩定幣發行商推向了風險曲線的進一步上升。在此過程中,它們引入了系統性的脆弱性,即抵押品池中的單個薄弱環節就可能導致級聯故障。

此外,穩定幣發行商依靠槓桿和再抵押來推動採用。這創造了一個系統,其中附屬結構的一部分中的應力可以觸發級聯失效。 2022 年的 stETH 折價UST 的崩盤以及 最近 USD0++ 和 USDz 的脫鉤 都反映了這種脆弱性。


解決方案:Liquid Yield Tokens (LYT)

Midas,我們建立了一種全新的代幣化收益方法——Liquid Yield Tokens (LYT)。

LYT 沒有將收益強加給脆弱的穩定幣包裝器,而是引入了一個專門的鏈上投資策略框架:

  • 浮動參考值 – 與穩定幣不同,LYT 沒有固定的 1 美元挂鉤。它們的價值根據性能而波動,從而消除了脫鉤風險。
  • 擴大投資範圍 – 取消 1 美元負債限制,釋放了更廣泛的收益資產,優化了風險調整后的回報。
  • 專業風險管理 – 每個 LYT 都由機構級風險管理人積極管理,並根據市場條件動態調整。
  • 共用流動性和原子贖回 – LYTs共用一個共同的流動性池,消除了對分散的LPs的需求,實現了無縫的DeFi集成。
  • 大規模獎勵挖礦 – LYT 持有者受益於 Plume、Etherlink 和 TAC 等協定的額外激勵措施。

Liquid Yield Tokens (LYT) 如何運作

Liquid Yield Token (LYT) 通過 Midas 的開放和可組合基礎設施發行。這種方法將髮卡行和風險管理者的角色分開,使用戶能夠從定製的風險管理中受益。

每個代幣的抵押品都由 專門的風險管理人員 管理,他們在特定授權下運作,並在鏈上透明地報告。風險經理將抵押品動態分配給最佳機會,適應不斷變化的市場條件,在管理風險的同時捕捉阿爾法。

LYT 是通過 Midas 的開放式組合型基礎設施發行的。與穩定幣不同,LYT 代幣明確區分了發行人和風險管理者的角色。每個 LYT 都由專門的風險管理人管理,他們將抵押品動態分配給最佳風險回報策略。

每個 LYT 都作為 無需許可的 ERC-20 代幣發行,使其與更廣泛的 DeFi 生態系統完全可組合。

在所有 LYT 中, Midas 都實施了共用流動性池以實現即時贖回。LYT 不需要流動性挖礦激勵,而是專為資本高效擴展和 DeFi 深度集成而設計。 MorphoEulerAnja 等協議已經支援 LYT。


介紹三種新的 LYT

今天,我們推出了 mRE7YIELDmEDGEmMEV,每款都由頂級公司進行風險管理。

mRE7YIELD – 由 RE7 Capital 進行風險管理

RE7 Capital 是一家研究驅動的數位資產投資公司,專注於 DeFi 收益率和流動性 alpha 策略。mRE7YIELD 採用成熟的機構級方法,提供對結構性收益產品的主動管理敞口。

  • 當前年化收益率:20.83%
  • 機構級結構性收益策略
  • 積極管理以捕捉市場低效率

mEDGE – 由 Edge Capital 進行風險管理

Edge Capital 是一家領先的數字資產對沖基金和 DeFi 流動性供應商,為機構投資者和加密基金會管理資本。他們的市場中性策略旨在產生一致的高風險調整后回報。

  • 當前年化收益率: 20.12%
  • $230M+ 資產管理規模
  • 四年經審計的業績記錄,夏普比率為 3.5

mMEV – 由 MEV Capital 進行風險管理

MEV Capital 是一家專門從事風險管理、DeFi 原生收益提取策略的投資公司。憑藉在流動性供應和結構性收益產品方面的專業知識,它在去中心化市場中提供高收益機會。

  • 當前年化收益率: 17.53%
  • $350M+ 資產管理規模
  • 跨多個鏈的 10+ 精選公共金庫

您還可以在我們的 Twitter 帖子LinkedIn 帖子中找到有關流動性收益代幣 (LYT) 如何運作的簡要概述。

有關媒體報導,請查看 The BlockCoindesk上的新聞稿。

我們歡迎您提出任何問題或反饋。

Unicorn Bakery 對話:B2B 和 B2C 市場的 2025 年趨勢

我有幸與 Unicorn Bakery 的 Fabian Tausch 聊天。我們涵蓋了風險市場的狀況、B2B 市場的興起、AI 對初創公司的影響,以及為什麼許多公司仍然難以實現IPO。

我們討論了:

  • 為什麼風險投資市場在多年停滯後於 2025 年開始復甦。
  • B2B 市場如何改變行業以及為什麼它們仍處於早期階段。
  • AI 在提高市場效率和重新定義商業模式方面的作用。
  • 為什麼 IPO 仍然具有挑戰性,以及公司上市需要做出哪些改變。
  • 創始人如何在他們的市場中建立防禦性並創造網路效應。
  • 2025 年的主要趨勢包括直播商務、跨境市場和 SMB 數位化。

章:

(00:00:00) Fabrice 在撰寫論文時會查看哪些時間框架?

(00:02:20) 2024年的“回顧情緒”和2025年的“展望”

(00:07:11) 要使 IPO 市場再次具有吸引力,必須做出哪些改變?

(00:10:38) 市場動態如何改變風險投資行業?

(00:16:23) 新業務的當前趨勢

(00:29:52) AI 對防禦性的影響

(00:35:06) 今天開始市場時遇到的障礙

如果您願意,可以在嵌入式播客播放機中收聽該劇集。

除了上面的YouTube視頻和嵌入式播客播放機外,您還可以在 iTunesSpotify上收聽播客。


抄本

法比安·陶什:

[0:00] 歡迎來到 Unicorn Bakery 的新一集。今天,我們將研究市場並展望 2025 年,因為這一年正在加速,一切都在重回正軌,每個人都在重新工作。因此,我決定聘請 Fabrice Grindag。Fabrice 可能是談論市場的最佳人選,到目前為止,他與 FJ Labs 進行了 1,192 次獨特的投資。FJ Labs 3 是一個即將結束的基金,準備 fj4 我現在稱它為 fj4,因為它更快,但準確地說,包括部分退出,可能是我稱之為最荒謬的之一,這可能不是正確的詞,而是我在過去幾年中聽到的荒謬故事,也是最獨特的的角色之一,即使有我瞭解了它背後的大型團隊,因此我認為 Fabrice 我們今天必須討論市場,我非常高興您再次參加展會,謝謝。

法布裡斯格林達:

[0:57] 你有我

法比安·陶什:

[0:58] 所以你自己也是一名創始人,現在你正在投資,你如何評估,比如瞭解兩種觀點,你如何評估一年,當你做決定和構建論文時,你會考慮哪些時間框架,所以我們是我。

法布裡斯格林達:

[1:14] 可以說是自下而上的基金,這意味著我們沒有預先存在的投資組合構建,我們想投資許多公司,這必須是論點。我認為更重要的是,如果我們遇到我們喜歡的創始人,我們就會投資。如果我們不這樣做,我們就不會這樣做。在像 21 歲這樣的年份,我們認為一切都被高估了,我們投資的公司更少了。然後是 23 或 24 年,除了人工智慧之外,市場更加低迷,我們瘋狂地投資,因為我們覺得機會很大。論點也差不多。我們有遠見,我們看到趨勢以及公司如何發展。隨著我們看到趨勢的發展,因為新的創始人提出了新的模型和方法,我們隨著時間的推移發展了我們的論點,我們已經看到市場從這些雙重承諾模型開始,然後變得更加垂直垂直,所以它們是水準市場和垂直市場,然後它們是託管市場,然後我們有市場選擇類型的市場,我將詳細介紹這些是什麼,肯定還有更多的趨勢正在發生現在是 2025 年,我們仍處於市場革命的起步階段,令人震驚的是,市場革命已經足夠了,所以

法比安·陶什:

[2:20] 對 2025 的看法如何。深入研究一下,當你回顧 2024 年時,……回顧對 2024 年的情緒,然後基於此對 2025 年的展望,是的。

法布裡斯格林達:

[2:34] 讓我談談風險投資類別中的情緒,所以 21 年當然是泡沫豐滿的一年,一切都被高估了,隨著利率上升,因為風險投資是一種風險資產,出現了大規模的裁員,而風險投資基本上一直處於衰退甚至蕭條中。 如果不是過去幾年的寒冷冬天的話。所以 23 年和 24 年,我們的風險投資總額從高峰到低谷下降了 66% 到 75%。當然,現在,也許 21 年的峰值被高估了,但它正在大規模縮減,投資數量減少,支票規模減少,基本上沒有退出,也沒有獲得流動性。也就是說,這是一個關於兩個城市的故事。整個企業就像這種深度蕭條。AI 一直非常火爆、泡沫化、起泡,並且將繼續如此。所以我實際上認為,如果我回顧 24 年,我預計深度科技衰退會繼續,而且一直在繼續。費率仍然很高。流動性機會仍然有限。

法布裡斯格林達:

[3:41] 併購受到限制,部分原因是這些公司在 AI 之外沒有充足的現金,而且併購在很大程度上受到監管制度的抑制。SEC、FTC、FCC 等基本上限制了大量的併購。因此,大公司不再收購其他公司,IPO 市場已經關閉。所以沒有流動性。許多 LP 覺得自己對風險投資暴露過度。因此,除了人工智慧之外,冒險作為一個整體一直處於低迷狀態。在 AI 領域,許多人看到了開放式 AI 的非凡增長。他們覺得自己會錯過機會,而且他們基本上並沒有全神貫注,一直都是 AI,不一定真正瞭解他們投資了什麼,也無法區分那些不那麼出色的產品,經常投資於我認為還可以的工具,但就像副駕駛或其他什麼,但它們並沒有真正差異化。它們不是差異化的數據集,沒有差異化的 LLM,沒有可行的商業模式,最糟糕的是,它們不是瘋狂的估值。因此,我認為人工智慧投資領域總有一天會到來,儘管人工智慧將改變我們的世界。但不是,它一直都是泡沫和 AI,其他地方都低迷。現在25歲,

法布裡斯格林達:

[4:50] 實際上,巨集觀效果相當不錯。我們降低了通貨膨脹率,實現了充分就業,經濟增長和生產率增長相當不錯。現在,當我期待 2025 年時,我懷疑情況會更加相同。從巨集觀角度來看,我們不再處於巨集觀驅動的環境中。我們處於一個略低的利率環境中,這要好一些。在合理的低通脹、高就業、低失業率和相當好的生產率增長之間,總體基本面仍然相當不錯。我希望,這是一個希望,併購市場和 IPO 市場開始重新開放,我們最終開始看到投資組合中最好的公司退出。我認為它會從 25 開始,一直持續到 26 歲,並希望在 26 歲和 27 歲加速。因此,我懷疑風險投資市場將在 2025 年擴大或開始走出 AI 以外的低迷。因此,我實際上比過去 25 年和 26 年在風險投資市場上更看好。是的,我在這裡暫停一下。

法比安·陶什:

[5:56] 在風險投資市場再次開始加速之前,是否必須先退出?或者你說是因為預期這將在 25 年、26 年或 27 年發生,就像無論確切的日期何時,每個人都更有可能,而且 LP 也更有可能再次將資金投資於基金。那麼這裡的動態是什麼呢?

法布裡斯格林達:

[6:17] 我認為兩者兼而有之。顯然,隨著退出的發生,LP 獲得了流動性,他們更願意將支票改寫為風險基金。但總的來說,由於其他資產類別,尤其是公開市場,表現相當不錯,因此存在一定程度的流動性,利率開始下降。因此,我懷疑,即使沒有退出的早期跡象,相對於 23 和 24 年,25 年的風險投資和風險投資興趣也會更大。顯然,退出會加速提供很大説明,但如果它們還沒有發生,我認為這可能沒問題。

法比安·陶什:

[6:55] 我最近與 Kevin Hartz 做了一集簡短的節目,你可能也認識他,Kevin 說目前沒有動力公開,這就是我們正在談論的。他還表示,不會很快出現。我想知道,為什麼一開始,比如,為什麼沒有,你同意嗎,我認為這是第一個問題。第二個問題是,需要什麼改變才能讓IPO市場再次對你提到的優秀公司更具吸引力,比如說,嘿,我們投資組合中最好的公司目前沒有退出也沒有IPO。那麼需要改變什麼呢?

法布裡斯格林達:

[7:30] 好吧,人們不想公開的原因有很多。首先,如果我們是投資組合中最好的公司,而您的複利速度非常快,那麼您沒有理由上市,對吧?如果你是SpaceX或 Stripe,並且你已經可以通過二級市場獲得流動性,並且投資者正在向你投入資金,而不管你在SpaceX的情況下已經身價數千億美元……那麼推遲 IPO 可能是有道理的,特別是因為您不想處理公開的所有缺點、公開所有資訊、處理 404 和 SOX 合規性以及所有監管制度以及公開帶來的痛苦。所以,你知道,我認為我們在 2007 年間接投資了 SpaceX,你知道,已經 18 年了,不管怎樣,17 年了,他們仍然,我們現在已經 18 年了,他們仍然沒有公開,也不會很快上市。這沒關係。有些公司不能真正上市,因為它們在21歲時以非常高的價格籌集資金。而今天,公開市場的估值實際上會低於自有品牌。因此,對他們來說,上市是沒有吸引力的,除非他們真的需要資金,而且他們被排除在私人市場之外。但坦率地說,他們可能不是最佳候選人。但我認為,準備上市的公司有一個中間步驟。

法布裡斯格林達:

[8:49] 相對於上一輪融資,它們的定價在一定程度上是合理的,上市對他們的投資者、創始人和 LP 來說將是一個流動性事件。而且他們在比賽中已經足夠晚了,實際上,沒有,他們現在已經是 G 輪了。因此,也許私募市場中沒有更多真正有意義的資本。對於這些,我確實認為上市是有意義的。還有像 ShipBob、Flexport 或 Klarna 這樣的公司,我認為它們會在 25 或 26 年的某個時候上市。話雖如此,上市有意義的公司範圍更加有限。現在,有沒有辦法減輕上市的成本和監管負擔? 或。

法布裡斯格林達:

[9:32] 這已經夠痛苦的了,除非你的身價超過 50 億美元,否則上市是沒有意義的。否則,您就沒有流動性,您就沒有無窮無盡的覆蓋範圍。而這在過去是非常不同的。我認為 Microsoft 的市值為 2.6 億美元。如果您今天的身價為 3.6 億美元,那麼您就負擔不起上市的費用。每年要花費數百萬美元才能公開,而且您沒有保險,也沒有流動性。那麼,我們是否要再次降低它?也許,在這種情況下,它需要一個相當深刻的制度、監管制度的改變,我沒有看到這一點。因此,我懷疑上市的門檻,至少在美國,將保持相當高的水準。沒關係。我認為這是為了保護公開市場投資者和公眾,當他們買襪子時,他們不會買壞公司。儘管這確實意味著它可能會切斷他們對高增長公司的了解,因為大多數高增長發生在私募市場。然後,一旦它們不再是高增長企業,它們就會上市。所以,如果你是公開市場投資者,這有點糟糕,因為這意味著大部分價值都歸於像我這樣的私人投資者。從結構的角度來看,它就是這樣。

法比安·陶什:

[10:38] 對於像您這樣通常以 10 加 2 為基礎運行的基金的人來說,這整個動態意味著什麼,因此 10 年的投資期限可以稍微調整和延長?但是,看到所有這些動態都會改變公司的生命週期,直到未來發生流動性事件,這將如何改變風險投資行業?

法布裡斯格林達:

[11:05] 從投資到退出的時間急劇增加。在過去的 20 年裡,它一直在增加。是的,今天,如果你投資於種子,對於最好的公司來說,你可能會超越12年,即10加2。而且您必須從您的 LPA 那裡獲得信件才能進一步延長。據說這樣做實際上可能是有道理的,因為它們正在積極複利,您不想過早退出其中任何一個。從風險投資行業的角度來看,問題在於 DPI 一直相當低,所以分配的資本、我們在上升的退出量、籌集資金和獲得資金之間的差距,可能存在三個基金的滯後。我們現在是第四隻基金,我們即將在第一季度籌集 25% 的資金。

法布裡斯格林達:

[11:56] 我們的基金 1 現在已經完全分配,這意味著我們返還了 1 倍的資本。所以在某種程度上,基金退出了,我們處於 DPI 的頂部十分位數。因此,大多數基金在投資和退出之間可能存在 4、5、6 個基金滯後,這是一個巨大的負現金流。不過,對於像我們這樣的人來說,這意味著,在某種程度上,我們之所以能夠以高 DPI 來擺脫它,是因為我們開了小支票。我們已經通過二級伺服器獲得了很多退出機會。因此,二級市場實際上已經爆炸了。因此,風險投資的一個更大趨勢是,越來越多的二級市場,無論是在公司中,還是在基金中。有新的投資者從其他 LP 那裡購買全倉或 LP 頭寸,尤其是在後期基金或已經部署了 10 年或 12 年的基金或其他任何階段的基金中,人們很累,他們只想退出。你也有人購買基金的 GP 頭寸。因此,二級市場基金的規模越來越大。隨著人們追求流動性,Forge、Equities、InsurancePost、NASDAQ 等二級市場、私人市場變得越來越大。所以這是一個大趨勢。通過現在投資,我認為二級市場基金非常有意義,因為流動性非常昂貴。因此,你既可以以很好的折扣購買公司的頭寸,也可以以非常大的價格購買優質基金的頭寸,比如想要流動性的人以 40%、50%、60% 的資產凈值折扣。

法比安·陶什:

[13:26] 這在哪些方面影響了我作為創始人應該如何確定我想讓誰作為投資者參與?

法布裡斯格林達:

[13:34] 一般來說,首先,挑選大使就像一場婚姻,對吧?他們是您的首席大使。他們在你的董事會上。你會永遠和他們在一起。因此,選擇一個喜歡你、瞭解你在做什麼、支援你,並且在順境和逆境中都會陪伴你的人。從風險投資的資本結構角度來看,我選擇基本上是長期投資者的風險投資公司。無論他們是在 5 年、10 年還是 15 年後退出,在某種程度上,對他們來說都無關緊要。因此,您不會被推入比您希望的更早的退出。當然,那些永遠存在的人,他們擁有無限的長期資本,可能是最好的選擇。Benchmark、紅杉,這些品牌長期致力於為他們的基金投入資金,他們不會急於退出。事實上,他們已經將基金從單純的私募基金轉變為公私合私基金,在那裡他們可以永久持有公共證券。你知道,這就是為什麼紅杉不是IRA的原因。但這有那麼重要嗎?我認為總的來說,不是真的。大多數 VC 會,他們會獨立弄清楚自己的資本結構,然後讓創始人見面,對吧?就像在一天結束時一樣,您最不想做的就是強迫一家公司過早出售,因為它正在複利。所以我不會那麼擔心。順便說一句,我們 FJ,我們的 DPI 高的原因是我們擁有 2-3% 的公司。我們可以去找次級。事實上,很多 VC 問我們,嘿,你介意賣掉你的部分頭寸嗎?我們希望對 upruns 有更多的擁有權。所以創始人實際上問我們,我們是否願意出售。

法布裡斯格林達:

[15:02] 但是,如果你是首席風險投資公司,你擁有公司 20% 的股份,而且你是董事會成員,你就不能做二級投資。因為如果你試圖出售,這是一個負面信號。哦,他們對這家公司瞭解多少我們不知道的?所以它殺死了這家公司。因此,這種方法並不適用於 Lead VC。他們需要等到IPO。事實上,他們甚至不能在鎖定后出售,因為他們擁有公司的大部分股份。他們賣掉了,價格就會崩盤。因此,對於主要風險投資公司來說,他們將被鎖定很長時間。只有像我們這樣的人才有小比例的股票才能在上漲的過程中賣出。老實說,我認為對於創始人來說,這並沒有太大的變化。只需選擇支援您並且有資本可以追隨的人。現在,我認為更重要的是,VC 能否繼續支援你進入種子、A、B、C 等?因為我們所處的世界,除了 AI 之外,資本更難獲得。因此,您希望成為具有足夠深口袋的種子,以便它們可以進行另一輪。所以我不會擔心優先種子基金的問題,因為雖然種子基金是種子基金,但他們不會做你的 A,他們沒有足夠的資金。但是一旦你到了 A 基金,很多基金都是交叉的,他們會做 A 和 B 等。所以想想左車道。他們會做 A、B、C 等。或者 Andreessen 或 Sequoia。唯一的例外是像 Benchmark 這樣令人驚歎的專用 A 基金。即使他們沒有必要的資本來領導你的 B,也沒關係。我還是會帶他們去。他們太棒了。

法比安·陶什:

[16:23] 2024年,您在 FJ Labs 對公司進行了 100 次首次投資。因此,您查看了數千個市場,尤其是市場。那麼,在評估新業務時,您目前正在識別、看到和關注哪些趨勢?現在越來越多地出現哪些事情,您認為,嘿,2025 年可能是一個機會,並對市場的這一趨勢產生重大影響?

法布裡斯格林達:

[16:52] 我會分開。首先,我們投資了我們看到的交易的 1%。因此,對於 100 筆投資,我們看到了 10,000 筆交易或虧損。但當然,其中許多都超出了範圍,你知道的,我們的開發等等。所以我們沒有接聽,我們接聽了 300 個電話,我們每周接到交易,我們接聽了 50 個電話。然後我們投資了三個。所以這就是 1% 的那種。所以我們只接聽了其中五分之一左右的電話。所以也許有 2,000 個。現在,我將趨勢分為兩類。一個是大趨勢,我們將其視為一個通用類別。然後,比如,為什麼不讓那些可以構成更大趨勢基礎的有趣事物呢?那麼,讓我解釋一下兩者之間的區別。我們看到的一個類別的大趨勢是 B2B 市場,而 B2B 供應鏈的數位化正在成為一個巨大的趨勢。因此,如果您考慮您的消費生活,您可以在 DoorDash 或 Uber Eats 上訂購食物,並在 15 分鐘內取回。您可以在 Instacart 上訂購雜貨。您可以在亞馬遜上訂購。您可以在一天到兩天之間甚至在同一天獲得所有資訊。

法布裡斯格林達:

[18:07] 您可以預訂 Airbnb。您可以在五分鐘內打到優步。您可以在 Booking.com 上找到酒店。在您的消費生活中,數位化以一種非常大規模、有意義的方式發生,軟體已經吞噬了世界。

法布裡斯格林達:

[18:25] 然而,在 B2E 世界中,情況並非如此。大型企業和SMB都不是這樣,對吧?比如,所以,我將分別給出這兩個例子。大型企業,比如,如果你想購買石化產品,沒有可用的目錄。所以我什至不是說亞馬遜,你現在已經在那裡有一個。我說的是一份清單,只是一份可用清單。然後就沒有連接到工廠來了解製造能力和延遲。 沒有在線訂購。 沒有在線支付。沒有跟蹤,也沒有融資。這需要發生在每個行業、每個垂直領域和每個類別中。目前,我們在所有這些方面的滲透率都低於5%,通常低於1%。當我想到這些類型的投入時,我指的是大宗的投入,比如汽車零部件、建築、化工、能源,但它也可能是成品。這些都沒有被數位化。第二,如果你想想你的小 SMB 老闆的生活,就像一個小夫妻店老闆。所以想像一下你擁有一家餐廳。擁有餐廳的人,他們喜歡做什麼?他們喜歡做飯。他們喜歡和顧客閒聊。然而,他們今天最終必須做的工作是什麼?他們需要創建一個網站。他們需要去Google、Yelp和 Tripadvisor 上回答評論。他們需要獲得 POS。他們需要做會計。他們需要管理自己的庫存。

法布裡斯格林達:

[19:42] 他們需要做工資單。他們需要與Uber和 DoorDash 進行談判。所以SMB數位化,夥計,這些SMB人不喜歡做的所有工作也是一個大趨勢。我給你舉幾個例子。在SMB中,我們投資了 Slice,幫助披薩店老闆管理他們的所有後台。他們現在在平臺上有 20,000 家比薩店,銷售額超過 10 億,非常有利可圖。我們有 Freshia,它為理髮店做同樣的事情。Sense 這對自助洗衣店或乾洗公司也有同樣的作用。我們有一個為水療中心和一般瑜伽工作室等、寒冷時刻等做這件事。所以我們正在進行 vertifizing。在投入方面,我們在 Nodi 的石化產品中。在德國,我們是一家名為 ShootFlix 的公司,這是一個三面市場,用於獲取礫石。

法布裡斯格林達:

[20:33] 我們在Material Bank中,我的意思是,在許多其他領域。我想說的是,B2B 中的其他三個趨勢正在將供應鏈移出中國。我想我稱之為法國支撐的總體趨勢,尤其是進入印度。例如,如果你是 H&M 的沙皇,你想買服裝,你想在印度買東西,那麼印度有成千上萬的小夫妻製造商。這些夫妻店製造商想做什麼?他們只想製造。他們不知道如何輸入 RFQ。他們不知道如何開具發票、原型製作等。因此,像 Ziad 這樣的市場將為他們做這一切。因此,我們投資了所有這些市場,以幫助將供應鏈從中國轉移到中國,主要是印度,但顯然也包括墨西哥、越南、菲律賓、印尼等地。

法布裡斯格林達:

[21:18] 第四,有大量的勞動力市場。他們正在崛起以支援 B2B 的興起。因此,我們進入了 WorkRise,這是一個面向所有服務工作者的市場。我們正在為歐洲的藍領工人提供 Job and Talent。我們是護士的 Trusted Health。

法布裡斯格林達:

[21:39] 最後但並非最不重要的一點是,實際上還有兩個,Recommerce。當然,電子商務現在在消費者中非常大,它實際上正在進入 B2B 世界,這既是為了降低成本,也是為了綠色環保。我們是一家名為 Ghost 的投資公司,它允許您購買多餘的庫存。所以你是一家小商店,你可以從大品牌的多餘庫存中以 90% 的折扣購買服裝,然後你可以賣掉它。從歷史上看,這並不存在,因為這些商店不可能購買 100 萬台。但是現在你可以購買 10k 個訂單並使其工作,它允許但至少不允許支援所有這些的基礎設施,所以支付基礎設施,如條帶或快速自動化機器人機器人化基礎設施,如此成熟,可以幫助人們自動化或弄清楚哪個是工廠中的機器人取代人類工作力,他們在德國的寶馬用一個每天工作 20 小時的 90k 年機器人取代了 250k 的機械師,並且然後是像 Flexport、ShipBob、Shippo 這樣的航運公司,甚至是我們投資的跨境公司,比如 Portless。所以所有這些都就像 B2B 的主要大趨勢。現在,除了 B2B 的這些趨勢之外,

法布裡斯格林達:

[22:50] 我們看到一些有趣的公司正在做一些事情,這表明還有更多的事情要做。因此,市場中的其他大趨勢,比如說,跨境商務終於成為現實。所以想想 Vinted。Vinted 在這麼多國家如此成功的原因,他們實際上……在你有像eBay這樣的分類廣告的時代,Klein & Zagen現在只在德國有清單。而 Le Boncoin 僅在法國有房源。而且您不會跨國家/地區發貨,等等。但 Vinted 基本上翻譯了清單,將使用者之間的聊天翻譯為跨境綜合運輸和跨境集成支付,從而首次創建了真正的泛歐市場。他們在歐洲創建了一個市場,使歐洲看起來像美國。它是完全集成的,一種語言,一種貨幣,一種一切,但實際上正在真實發生。它絕對易於使用。我喜歡。是的,他們正在粉碎它,對吧?就像 GMB 中有 60 億一樣。

法布裡斯格林達:

[23:47] 我認為他們在英國和歐洲利潤豐厚。巨大。這正在其他類別中發生。我們是一家名為 Ovoco 的公司的投資者,該公司是立陶宛的汽車零部件市場,在東歐採購汽車零部件,例如波蘭和立陶宛等。他們在法國等地銷售。絕對也粉碎了它。因此,跨境正在成為現實,尤其是在歐洲。歐洲終於開始看起來像美國了。下一個大趨勢是直播商務。現在,在中國,淘寶就像中國的 eBay,如果你願意的話,25% 的銷售額來自視頻直播。在美國,這種情況只發生在一個類別,即收藏品。有一家名為 WhatNot 的公司,我們不是投資者。他們剛剛籌集了50億美元的估值。

法布裡斯格林達:

[24:32] 但對於收藏品來說,這有點道理。但現在它正在其他垂直領域發生。所以,我們是一家名為 Palm Street 的公司的投資者。基本上是小商店裡出售稀有植物的產消者。他們每周做兩次直播,每月銷售價值約 1 萬美元的植物,他們購買的女性每六個月花費約 1800 美元,這很美,因為人們會講述植物來自哪裡的故事,或者你照顧它等,它創造了豐富的體驗,所以直播視頻購物終於來到西方,這家公司絕對粉碎了它所以我可以想像其他類別現在他們自己也在擴展到其他類別,鐵水晶和稀有陶器等。然後我們看到新的垂直領域的創造。我們在一家名為 Alpaga 的法國公司工作,他們正在創建……

法布裡斯格林達:

[25:21] 他們是一個 B2B 餐廳設備市場。有趣的是,過去如果你是一家餐館,你會購買新設備。這家餐廳經常倒閉。然後他們改變美食,等等。他們有這個設備。他們賣不出去,因為脖子疼。你不能運送它。而且更難安裝。因此,他們所做的是建立一個由服務提供者、託運人和安裝商組成的網路。現在市場開始運作。他們已經為它播種了來自他們的酒店、萬豪等酒店廚房等的供應。因此,在現有類別中添加服務層可以從頭開始創建一個市場。所以,我們也在一些事情上看到了這一點,我想,綠色化是一個很大的大趨勢,每個人都想綠化他們的房子。但從歷史上看,如果你想綠化你的房子,你就去像 Thumbtack 這樣的地方,你需要招聘,你找到承包商,他們給你報價,我們正在安裝熱泵。這非常複雜。你需要管理大約 20 個投標,然後你通常會被搞砸,投資者是一家名為 Tetra 的公司,基本上會拍幾張照片,比如你的系統是什麼,他們就像這是供應商,這是價格,他們為你做這件事,同樣的事情,他們向一個市場添加了一個服務層,出售你正在安裝熱效率或能源效率,他們正在粉碎它所以我想添加服務來使事務複雜、簡單的作是另一個大趨勢。我想我會給你更多趨勢。新的商業模式正在出現。我們是法國一家名為 La Bourse Olive 的公司的投資人,這是一個圖書市場。

法布裡斯格林達:

[26:49] 這裡的獨特之處在於他們收取了這本書銷售傭金的 90%。你會想,為什麼有人願意捐出 90% 的傭金?這是因為他們不是致力於實現價格最大化,而是致力於效率最大化。如果你是新手父母,你有很多書。到頭來,你沒有空間容納他們。所以你可以在亞馬遜上一個一個地賣掉它們,但這很麻煩。你需要掃描它,列出它,它賣,你需要運送它。在這裡,你基本上把所有的書都放在一個盒子里,然後寄給他們,就完成了。您可以獲得 10% 的信用額度來購買其他書籍。在基本上一年的時間里,他們以90%的接受率成為法國領先的二手書銷售商。如此驚人的經濟,令人驚歎的業務,專注於便利遊戲。因此,我們再次看到了通過添加新方法和便利性來攻擊現有品類的新趨勢或方法。AI 開始出現,我將舉兩個 AI 示例,然後我將停止趨勢。

法布裡斯格林達:

[27:46] AI,顯然每個人都在使用 AI 來提供客戶服務,每個人都在使用 AI 來提高程式師的工作效率。在市場中,我們看到 AI 使用最多的是重新定義上架流程,對吧?所以如果你想在 eBay 上賣東西,你需要帶一部電話。你拍一堆照片,寫一個標題,寫一個描述,你選擇一個類別,你輸入一個價格,然後你等待一兩個星期,然後它,然後它就賣掉了

法布裡斯格林達:

[28:13] 新模式是我們在美國投資的一家名為 Hero Stuff 的公司。您拍了幾張照片,並製作了一個視頻來描述產品。借助 AI,他們可以將您的描述轉換為完整的清單。他們實際上會選擇價格、類別、標題、描述。他們製作了一個 15 秒的 TikTok 視頻,您可以在您的社交媒體上冒險。他們在 eBay、Facebook Marketplace 等上列出了它,稱為 Hero Stuff。我們看到現有的現有企業也在使用他們的數據來重塑上市流程。因此,我們是一家名為 Rebag in handbags 的市場的投資者。他們所做的是,他們創造了這個名為Claire的 AI,因為他們擁有所有數據。你拍了幾張照片,他們告訴你,好吧,這個包是真的。今年的這款型號在這種條件下會以這個價格出售嗎?噗,你點擊一下,它就被賣掉了。就像前一分鐘你賣掉了你的包,因為他們會以市場的價格為你買,這真是太棒了。因此,我們看到了 AI 被用於提高市場效率的新趨勢。所以,是的,有很多令人驚歎、令人興奮的趨勢。是的,我預計這些只是一個開始,而且會進一步擴展。因此,直播商務將進入其他類別。在我給出的兩個例子之外,跨界將存在。新的商業模式可能會脫穎而出,您可以通過在那裡添加服務並專注於便利性來獲得更高的接受率。

法布裡斯格林達:

[29:36] 添加服務將解鎖新的類別,而這些類別在歷史上太痛苦而無法進行交易。因此,這些是 B2B 市場趨勢之外的大趨勢,正如我所描述的,這是一個大趨勢。我們現在正處於零日。因此,所有這些都需要10年時間才能發揮作用。

法比安·陶什:

[29:52] 很多事情同時發生。所以你談到的一件事是,每個人都在使用 AI 來增強程式設計,到處都是。人工智慧如何為這裡的公司建設帶來生產力的提高,並增強產品建設和其他一切,當產品本身和第一個 MVP 的交付並準備好一切時,你如何建立一個市場防禦性,建築防禦性的動態如何因人工智慧而改變?

法布裡斯格林達:

[30:31] 在過去的 25 年裡,建立公司的成本出現了一個大趨勢,進入壁壘下降。當我建立我的第一家公司時,我需要獲得 Oracle 資料庫和 Microsoft Web 伺服器。 我需要建立自己的數據中心。 沒有 AWS,也沒有 Rackspace。然後我們有了開源、MySQL……然後我們有了 php,然後我們有了雲計算,你可以使用 aws,現在隨著新的 AI 革命,你得到的是沒有代碼、低代碼和/或 AI 輔助代碼,其中啟動初創公司的成本比以往任何時候都便宜、更低,也就是說,構建技術平臺真的從來都不是市場上的貧瘠入口,產品本身很容易複製,你可以事實上,我們的大多數市場經常在 Shopify 上推出 The Consumer on the Consumer,如果您是面向消費者的市場,即市場的買方,您不妨使用 Shopify,他們擁有所有工具,它很便宜,很容易,您可以嵌入您需要的一切,例如跟蹤歸因測試,就像一切都在那裡一樣,它是回應式的,您可以很容易地獲得移動應用程式,因此一直是一種商品

法比安·陶什:

[31:44] 有趣的是,我從來沒有想過這個問題,但這是有道理的。

法布裡斯格林達:

[31:46] 是的,所以當你啟動一個市場時,沒有護城河,產品就是護城河,實際上是流動性,它是你的執行,它吸引買家和賣家,它有很高的NPS,它有效地匹配它們,它創造了飛輪,更多的買家帶來了更多的賣家,更多的賣家帶來了更多的買家,你建立的品牌就是護城河,這是實際的執行,產品本身無論如何都不是護城河, 形狀,或者說形式,因為它是可複製的。基本上,任何產品都可以複製的每個垂直領域都變得如此。你的執行力是最大的。這就是為什麼想法有一定的價值,但沒有那麼大的價值。真正具有所有價值的是執行。

法比安·陶什:

[32:25] 那麼,您如何說什麼是必要的,我想您已經觸及了許多主題,但我很想再次將它們放在一起,建立成為第一的品牌,建立供需雙方的模式,真正成為我所在行業的第一大市場?

法布裡斯格林達:

[32:45] 您需要讓您的客戶滿意。所以我通常會從一開始就去供應。我認為 Very ,你去 Supply 的原因是他們有經濟動機加入這個平臺。所以你去找最好的供應商,然後告訴他們,看,我們正在推出一個新的市場。我們還沒有很多客戶,但我們可以自由地參與其中。您有興趣列出嗎?每個人都會說是的。所以實際上,你可能犯的大錯誤是供應過多。您實際上只接受非常有限的供應。然後你測試一堆行銷管道。它可以是一個銷售團隊,可以是Google,可以是Tech Talk,這都無關緊要。您給他們帶來需求,然後匹配他們。

法布裡斯格林達:

[33:21] 而且你基本上希望,根據類別,如果你是一個二手市場,你希望商品銷售的概率至少為 25%。如果您是服務市場,您希望代表至少 25% 的供應收入。但你想讓他們高興。你希望供需雙方的 NPS 都非常高,通常是通過擁有一定程度的管理和服務層來確保他們都非常滿意。一旦你做到了這一點,他們很高興,你的 NPS 很高,賣家和買家都很高興,你再增加幾個賣家,然後你再增加一些買家,你繼續並行擴展。通常,這種啟動飛輪,突然之間,你會得到網路效應,越來越多的買家進來,賣家進來,賣家進來,賣家進來,更多的買家。而且您知道當您的 CAC 開始下降時,您就有了飛輪。許多這些所謂的市場不是市場,因為發生的事情是他們花了很多錢買下賣家和買家。他們擴展得越多,他們的 CAC 增加得越多。這意味著它們沒有網路效應。這意味著某些東西從根本上不起作用。我希望工會經濟狀況非常好。但是,你讓第一批客戶滿意,你繼續為他們構建,確保他們滿意,這個普遍的想法不僅適用於市場,坦率地說,也適用於每家初創公司。現在,您在市場中開始的方式可能會因您所在的市場而異。也許你需要在一個郵政編碼中,但也許你是一個全國性的產品,對吧?那麼你怎麼去做

法布裡斯格林達:

[34:45] 首先,顯然,如果您屬於服務類別,您可能需要超當地語系化。如果您出售的是二手商品,也許不是,特別是如果它們可以發貨。所以這真的要看情況。但是,關注和取悅您的客戶,並確保他們看到他們的賣家,他們看到的是需求。如果他們是買家,他們會看到足夠多的他們想要的東西,他們可以在這裡進行交易。

法比安·陶什:

[35:06] 當我今天開始一個市場時,我可能會遇到的第一個障礙是什麼?

法布裡斯格林達:

[35:14] 無論是今天還是 20 年前,你遇到的第一個障礙就是先有雞還是先有蛋的問題就是我有這個很棒的網站,很棒的用戶體驗,但我一無所有。我沒有買家,也沒有賣家。我應該從哪一個開始呢?在 99% 的情況下,我的建議是從賣家開始,因為他們有經濟動機加入該平臺。如果他們在那裡,他們就會賺錢。但正如我所說,我會經過精心策劃,去找最好的那些將要參與、樂於測試、回復買家請求並讓他們滿意的供應商。公平。

法比安·陶什:

[35:48] 就時間而言,我認為這是一個非常尖銳、非常密集的瞭望劇集,有很多趨勢,當你思考它們時,你可以更深入地研究它們,這是有道理的。我可以從這裏挑選一些想法,並將其用於我自己的市場業務,並在此基礎上進行構建,因為我可以研究不同的行業。所以,我知道你在自己的播客上也做了一集市場趨勢,我會在下面連結它,所以如果有人不能從你那裡得到足夠的東西,所以我連結你的 LinkedIn,當然還有 FJ Labs 和你的播客,還有更多你應該聽的劇集,例如我真的很喜歡的外包劇集,所以 fabrice 真是太棒了很高興,感謝您分享您對 2025 年市場的所有見解和想法,並期待很快趕上。

法布裡斯格林達:

[36:37] 謝謝你邀請我。

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