Fabrice Grinda

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures just wrote a great article on why early stage ventures fail.

Check it out at:
http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2007/11/why_early_stage.html

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Last night, I had the pleasure of listening to Alan Patricof speak on Entrepreneurship in Africa at the Core Club. As you are probably aware, microcredit has been one of the success stories of development in the past decade allowing extremely impoverished people to engage in self-employment. Alan made a compelling case for why microcredit is great, but not enough.

On the low end, he presented the work of Trickle Up (www.trickleup.org). Trickle Up provides grants of $100 and business training to help people launch micro enterprises. They work with the extreme poor who live on less than $1 per day and are unable to obtain micro loans, usually because the financial institutions are not yet operating where they are located. Tricke Up has mostly been focusing on Mali where it is making a substantial impact.

Alan made an even more impassioned speech in favor of equity financing in Africa. As he pointed out, almost all the capital available in Africa is debt financing. There is also a growing private equity business in Africa, but no real venture capital funds making equity investments in early stage businesses. Debt financing, given the need to pay interest in the short term, limits entrepreneurs to businesses with immediate sales, and misses many of the more scalable, employment and wealth generating ideas. To change this, he is creating a $45 million fund, funded by foundations at this stage (given the below market expected rate of return).

I hope his investments succeed!

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It’s smart, witty and hilarious. I am truly impressed!

How Can We Raise Awareness In Darfur Of How Much We’re Doing For Them?

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Having read and enjoyed Richard Dawkins The God Delusion, I decided to check out the book that made him famous. It’s interesting to see that many of the themes from The God Delusion are already addressed (if only in passing) such as the illusion of design – and this 30 years before Intelligent Design became “relevant”.

His rethinking of Darwinism is enlightening. I loved his debunking that animals act “for the good of the species”. I also loved his breaking down of the basic reproductive unit to the meme. As a conscious entity, it’s hard to accept that we are arguably puppets serving the reproductive desires of our memes, and that this very consciousness is just another trait to increase this reproductive potential, but the arguments and evidence are compelling.

You can buy the book at:
http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Anniversary-Introduction/dp/0199291152/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196284477&sr=8-1

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As many of you know, I have been a fan of the Xbox 360 for some time (see Report from the video game wars and Great game setup), but last week I bought a PS3!

With the recent price cut, the $399 40 Gb PS3 is an amazing deal. For $399 you get a Blu-ray player, built in wifi and free online playing. The equivalent would actually be more expensive on the Xbox – it’s $94 for the wifi connector, $179 for the HD-DVD player (not to mention it’s not as nicely integrated) and $59.99 per year for Xbox Live Gold.

Out of the box the PS3 looks good, there is no power adapter – it’s built into the console which is a huge improvement on the humongous power adapter of the Xbox 360 – and it’s quieter than the Xbox 360. On the negative side, the first thing it does is download a patch which takes forever to download and install. Once that was done, it ran smoothly. As a cinephile, I love the Blu-ray player which nicely complements the HD DVD player I already have for all the movies that are not available in both formats.

All that said, I only bought the PS3 because it finally has a game I really wanted to play: Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. It’s a third person adventure/action game which is probably best described as “Indiana Jones meets Gears of War.” It’s single player only with no coop, but it’s tons of fun.

Unfortunately for Sony, Drake’s Fortune is the only exclusive PS3 game I truly wanted to play. The Xbox 360 still has many more great exclusive games: Gears of War, Halo 3, Bioshock, Mass Effect. Most of the games available on both consoles come out first on the Xbox such as Oblivion IV and The Orange Box. Finally, with multiplayer working better on the Xbox and as more of my friends have Xboxes, I buy the multiplayer games available on both, such as Call of Duty 4, only on the Xbox 360.

Conclusion:

The Xbox 360 is still the better console for most hard core gamers with a stronger line up of games and a cheaper entry price. However, with the new lower price point and new games, Sony is finally back in the race.

It’s going to be interesting to watch the battle over the next few years. The competition can only be good for gamers. At the very least, I hope Microsoft will embed wifi in the console and drop the Xbox live fee.

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As the holidays are approaching, I am compelled to offer a few gift ideas :)

I had never flown a remote controlled helicopter before. The Esky LAMA comes pre-built and ready to fly out of the box. It’s fun, stable, easy to learn to fly and incredibly cheap at $69!

You can buy it at:
http://www.hobby-estore.com/esky-lama-2-rc-helicopter.html

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This summer, in an attempt to connect with my inner Carrie Bradshaw, I tried out trapeze on top of Pier 40 on the West Side Highway. It’s a lot of fun. You can even complete a catch – where a guy on the other trapeze catches you as you let go of the trapeze – on your first day.

You can see find out more at:
http://www.yelp.com/biz/trapeze-school-new-york-new-york#hrid:qSL_7L2FJ1eCcsXrnSuELg/query:trapeze

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In a recent post, Facebook: the next Google?, I expressed skepticism on the value of Facebook given the nature of advertising there.

A year ago, I expressed similar doubts on the advertising on MySpace to a friend. He coined my analysis the “Grinda Hypothesis”: if you put an ad near a hot girl on MySpace, nobody will see it, let alone click on it.

I would generalize the hypothesis to be: if the advertising you see is not related to what you are actually doing, you are unlikely to notice it and click on it.

As I am only looking at what my friends are up to on Facebook or whether I can find a hot, interesting single girl on MySpace, I doubt they can ever display an ad I will be interested in even with the most sophisticated analysis of my profile and site activity.

Conversely, this is why search marketing is so powerful. The ads are directly related to what I am looking for.

To test the hypothesis, we tried advertising on Facebook for OLX with dismal results so far. We are using a higher CPC than we pay on Google and we just can’t get anyone to click on the ads!

Fred Wilson seems to be having similar problems with his Facebook ad. See: http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/11/my-facebook-ad-.html

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I had the pleasure of listening to my good friend Einat Wilf (www.wilf.org) speak on the future of Israeli politics at Danny Gillerman’s house last night. She is ever the brilliant orator and made an impassioned speech on the continuing importance of politics and a plea for the next generation to participate in the political process. She then gave eloquent and well thought through answers on a variety of topics ranging from the potential separation of Church and State in Israel to the importance of conscription.

On a separate note the host of the event, Danny Gillerman, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, was recently in a very funny interview with John Oliver from the Today Show with Jon Stewart.

Watch the video below :)

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Fortune just covered Peter and his former Paypal crew.

Read the article at:
http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/13/magazines/fortune/paypal_mafia.fortune/index.htm?source=yahoo_quote

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