Episode 51: Fabrice Grinda - Founding Partner of FJ Labs

**Amir Fischer** (0:00)
This week on Generating Alpha, I sat down with Fabrice Grinda, serial entrepreneur, prolific angel investor, and founding partner of FJ Labs, one of the most active venture funds in the world. Fabrice Grip in France studied at Ecole Polytechnique in Princeton and launched his first startup in 1998 at the age of 23 He went on to build and sell multiple companies, most notably OLX, the classified ads platform that reached 300 million users across 40 countries for pivoting full-time to investing. FJ Labs has now backed over 1,100 startups across six continents, including Alibaba, Coupang, Delivery Hero, and Rappi with a portfolio valued at several billion dollars. Beyond his track occurred as an operator and an investor, Fabrice is one of the most unconventional figures in tech and finance. Known for his ruthless prioritization of life design, his quantitative approach to evaluating marketplaces, and his willingness to share his frameworks with total transparency. In our conversation, we talked about growing up in France and catching the entrepreneurship bug. What he learned building and losing companies in the early internet era. Why he became so obsessed with marketplaces, the specific metrics he uses to evaluate marketplaces businesses, how FJ Labs decides whether to invest or not in under 60 minutes, the difference between being an operator and an investor, how he thinks about life design and optimizing for happiness, and much more. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow the podcast and rate it five stars on Spotify. Subscribe on YouTube and share it to anyone who you think might find it valuable. I really enjoy recording this episode, Fabrice, and I hope you guys enjoy listening. Thank you.
Thanks, Fabrice, for coming on. I really appreciate it.

**Fabrice Grinda** (1:37)
Thank you for having me.

**Amir Fischer** (1:39)
Well, I want to start where I always do, the beginning. If I'm correct, you grew up in Nice. But at the age of 22, you were already running a startup out of Princeton. Tell me about Young Fabrice, what your childhood looked like and where you think your drive came from.

**Fabrice Grinda** (1:53)
I'm not sure where ambition comes from. I was five and I was already wanted to make a ripple on the fabric of the universe. I was ambitious. My role models growing up were like Augustus and actually Genghis Khan, and Alexander Hamilton, and thought long and hard about the role I wanted to play in the world.
Actually, I considered going down the political path, but then pretty rapidly, I mean, early teens realized that that felt corrupt, corrupting, limited to your nationality, like for a niece, you're not going to become president of the US. At the age of 10, I fell in love with computers. I got my first PC, and it was a lot of efforts click, and I knew that immediately we were meant to be together, and it was going to be the form of my both artistic expression and to have impact in the world. At that time, my role models were Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and clearly, I could see that their vision, and Bill Gates at the time used to say computer in every home, was democratizing and providing access to information, information technology, was a means to touch billions of people, absent borders and limitations. So it just so happened my hobby became a ginormous industry that could actually influence the world.

**Amir Fischer** (3:08)
If I'm correct, you went off to Princeton, and eventually graduated with a degree in economics. But while you were a student, you were running this company called Princeton International Computers, that's correct, exported hardware to Europe. Tell me a bit about that. Then ultimately, after that, you instead of going to Golden or McKinsey, like your average Ivy League student, you went to McKinsey for a bit, and then went off to start your own company. Tell me about that experience in college and why you went off to the races in the startup world so quickly.

**Fabrice Grinda** (3:35)
Well, as a computer manured, I was already building computers for parts, like H10 or whatever, 17 And so I was always taking them apart, building them, etc. I built a BBS for people to connect. So kind of the ancestor of the internet. And when I got to the US, I realized that retail prices in the US were lower than wholesale prices in Europe. And so it wasn't all that hard to imagine. And also at the time, companies like Intel were not really global companies that would release in the US first. And things would get to Europe like six months or 12 months later. So there was an opportunity for gray market exports where you could buy in the US from wholesale and sell to retailers in Europe who could be, who were basically my customers. And so it worked for a high value, low weight, low volume items like hard drives, motherboards, processors, memory, that you could basically FedEx from the US to Europe.