1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner at FJ Labs (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner at FJ Labs, discusses his firm’s investment thesis around marketplaces.

Sramana Mitra: We are going to start today’s session with a conversation with Fabrice Grinda, the founder partner at FJ Labs. Let’s get you acquainted with our audience. Tell us a bit about your background as well as FJ Labs. 

Fabrice Grinda: In brief, I’ve been a tech entrepreneur, founder, and investor for 22 years. I’ve always held a dual role of building companies and investing in companies. By virtue of being a consumer-facing internet CEO, a lot of other companies ask for investments.

The last large company I’ve built is a company called OLX which is in the Middle East. They have 5,000 employees and 350 million unique visitors per month in 30 countries. In 2013 when I sold the company, I realized that I had made over 100 angel investments.

I love investing in companies and I love building companies, so I created a hybrid venture fund and startup called FJ Labs. At FJ Labs, every year, we invest in over 100 startups and build one or two startups. Since launching in 2016, we launched 600 investments and built over 10 companies. 

Sramana Mitra: What check sizes are we talking about?

Fabrice Grinda: First of all, we play mostly in the early stages. We are pre-seed and series A for the most part. We don’t lead and we don’t price. We behave more like an angel investor – being thoughtful and helpful. We write reasonably small checks.

We never want to be competing with large VCs. From an allocation perspective, we have minimum check sizes and ownership requirements. Our average check size is $500,000. It varies. At seed, it may be $250,000 to $500,000. In Series A, it may be $750,000 and in series B, it may be $1 million. It’s always the size where we will not be competing with the leads. 

Sramana Mitra: How big is the fund at FJ Labs?

Fabrice Grinda: The current fund, fund two, is about $175 million. To date, we have deployed $270 million to over 100 companies. We deploy about $50 million a year. To make the math work, it’s 100 investments with $500,000 each. 

Sramana Mitra: What do you like to invest in in terms of sector or style of business?

Fabrice Grinda: We have one specificity and that is the business model that we like to invest in. The business model that we like to invest in is marketplaces. We like to invest in companies that are intermediaries between buyers of something and sellers of something. That could be a service, product, and other things. Something like Alibaba, which we invested in back in the day, would qualify as that. Many of the FinTech startups that are intermediaries between the borrowers and lenders or marketplaces also qualify.

Marketplaces are the focus but beyond that, it’s every geography, industry, and every stage. On average we are 70% seed, 70% in the US, and 70% investing in marketplaces. With that said, we are global investors. We are 20% in Western Europe, and 10% in the rest of the world. We have 10 investments in the Middle East and a number of investments in India. We also have investments in emerging markets like Kenya and Nigeria among others. While we are mostly early, we do have 30% of the investments that are Series B and C. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner at FJ Labs
1 2 3 4