Fabrice Grinda

Me: Long time no speak. How are you?
Him: I VIP!
Me: ??????
Him: I Vest in Peace!

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VentureVillage did a quick and fun interview following last week’s fun profile of me in the New York Observer:

VV. Any strange feedback to The Observer article?

Grinda. I thought people would ask for my autograph, girls would proposition me in the streets, and extraordinary entrepreneurs would line up for me to invest in their companies. Unfortunately, it was pretty much life as usual. Reading the article did make me extremely grateful to my friends. They said such nice things, I was yet again reminded how lucky I am to have them as friends!

VV. “I like him a lot…Very smart guy,” Gilt CEO Kevin Ryan wrote about you in an email to the Observer journalist, ostensibly “without a trace of annoyance, despite the fact that [you] invested in ripoffs of two of his companies. What did you think of that?

Grinda. I think he realizes that the real value lies in execution rather than the idea. As Edison once said: “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”. Besides Gilt is itself a copy of the French company Vente Privee. Our entire society is essentially built by resting on the shoulders of the improvements that came before. Even Apple which is seen as a paragon of innovation copies and improves the ideas of others. Steve Jobs often quoted Picasso who said that: “Smart people plagiarize, but geniuses plunder and steal”. Picasso himself was copying Matisse regularly and vice versa. Besides the quote is not particularly original given that Oscar Wilde essentially said the same thing.

VV. The Observer article includes a thorough rundown of your many clones, including not only Aucland but a Booking.com for Russia, a Diapers.com for Germany, a Jetsetter for Turkey, a Stubhub and Eventbrite for Spain and Latin America, a Warby Parker for France, and a Shoedazzle, an Expedia, a Gilt and a PayPal for Brazil. It also suggests you’ve cloned the extroversion of others. Is this true?

Grinda. I have personally observed how our personalities are plastic and can be molded. I essentially forced myself to go from being an introvert to an extrovert. I’ve written the full back story of the transformation on my blog, which could prove useful to anyone trying to do the same.

VV. Your first company, Aucland, was an eBay for France. You’re French. What did you know about French people ahead of time that you took into account when building the company?

Grinda. I was born in Paris and grew up in Nice. I realized that French people had the same need to sell things they no longer used and buy used goods or collectibles as Americans. The details varied relative to the United States: French people traded wine and collectible Asterix comics rather than pez dispensers, but the underlying principle remained the same.

VV. Your former McKinsey colleague and current member of the Isreali Knesset Einat Wilf said of you: “He wants to run the world…He has the notion that he could be an enlightened ruler.” Who is the world’s most enlightened ruler, currently, according to your analytical mind?

Grinda. It’s a difficult question to answer given the political constraints most rulers operate under. Right now, Mario Monti, the current prime minister of Italy, gets my vote. He has had the courage to tell the truth to the electorate about how dire the situation really is, to implement difficult reforms and to face down populist opposition.

You can read the full article at:
http://venturevillage.eu/the-observers-featured-clone-collector-chats-with-venturevillage

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Adrienne Jeffries, the reporter, did a very thorough job. She interviewed many of the CEOs whose companies I backed and many of my close friends for a portrait that I find, in all objectivity of course, to be funny, endearing and accurate.

The article again highlighted how blessed I am to have such amazing friends! I am also glad that there is no talk of the “evil Grinda brothers” :)

Read the entire article at:
http://www.betabeat.com/2012/04/18/the-clone-collector-meet-new-york-superangel-fabrice-grinda-master-of-digital-knockoffs/?show=all

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I had the pleasure of being interviewed by memeburn a few weeks ago. Topics included the following: which emerging markets are most attractive, why tech clusters are no longer required to create successful startups, and why copying concepts and implementing them in new places still requires innovation.

Read the entire interview at:
http://memeburn.com/2012/03/the-emerging-markets-internet-craze-memeburn-speaks-to-super-angel-fabrice-grinda/

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I have not seen the deck or met the entrepreneur. I have no idea what the gross margins are and how big this can get, but the launch video is brilliant!

Clear, simple and funny!

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Sounds about right:)

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The video of my fun interview with David Lerner for Venture Studio and Mashable is live.

We cover a wide variety of topics: OLX, advice to CEOs of consumer facing Internet companies, the attraction of Brazil and Russia and much more.

Enjoy :)

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I had the great pleasure of being invited to give a keynote at LeWeb 2011 on angel investing in Brazil, Russia and around the world! I really enjoyed the fireside chat I had with Loic Lemeur at LeWeb in 2009 and was really looking forward to the opportunity to share all the lessons learned over the course of the past few years and explain why Brazil and Russia have been such an important part of my professional life in the recent past.

I hope you enjoy it and avoid all the mistakes I made!

I am also attaching the PDF of the presentation for your reading pleasure.

You can read Techcrunch’s take on the speech at:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/09/serial-entrepreneur-fabrice-grinda-on-angel-investing-brazil-and-russia/

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For the French speakers among you:
http://www.itespresso.fr/fievre-de-start-up-fabrice-grinda-toujours-essayer-jusqua-trouver-ce-qui-marche-le-mieux-44612.html

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My good friend Auren Hoffman posited that existing nation states would benefit from a little bit of creative destruction and competition to maximize the welfare of their “customers“: http://blog.summation.net/2010/06/the-ultimate-startup-creating-a-new-country.html.

In light of the importance of governance on countries’ economic success I wholeheartedly agree. Bad governance has repeatedly destroyed countries or slowed their growth. We have had many dramatic examples from Mugabe’s destruction of Zimbabwe over the last 15 years to Argentina’s decline from one of the richest countries on a GDP per capita basis to a poor country over the course of the 20th century due to the populist policies of Peron and his successors. The extent to which bad policies and politicians can impact economic outcomes is disheartening and I hope that current American politicians ponder the lessons of history!

While we were brainstorming the idea, we came across an interesting article in the Atlantic by Paul Romer which suggested that poor countries should have foreign run “charter cities” within their borders: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-politically-incorrect-guide-to-ending-poverty/8134/?single_page=true

While the specifics of his idea don’t feel right – I loved the example of Henry the Lion who created a merchant’s Mecca out of Lübeck and transformed it from a backwards city in a failed region with a “bad-governance equilibrium” into a resounding success through light taxation and regulation:

“Onerous taxes and trade restrictions were ruled out; merchants who settled in Lübeck would be exempt from duties and customs throughout Henry the Lion’s lands, which stretched south as far as Bavaria. The residents of Lübeck were promised fair treatment before the law and an independent mint that would shelter them from confiscatory inflation. With this bill of rights in place, Henry dispatched messengers to Russia, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Merchants who liked the sound of his charter were invited to migrate to Lübeck.

The plan worked. Immigrants soon began arriving in force, and Lübeck became the leading entrepôt for the budding Baltic Sea trade route, which eventually extended as far west as London and Bruges and as far east as Novgorod, in Russia. Hundreds of oaken cogs—ships powered by a single square sail—entered Lübeck’s harbor every year, their hulls bursting with Flemish cloth, Russian fur, and German salt. In less than a century, Lübeck went from a backwater to the most populous and prosperous town in northern Europe. “In medieval urban history there is hardly another example of a success so sudden and so brilliant,” writes the historian Philippe Dollinger.

Perhaps the only thing more remarkable than Lübeck’s wealth was the influence of its charter. As trade routes lengthened, new cities mushroomed all along the Baltic shore, and rather than develop a legal code from scratch, the next wave of city fathers copied Lübeck’s charter, importing its political and economic liberties. The early imitators included the nearby cities of Rostock and Danzig, but the charter was eventually adopted as far afield as Riga and Tallinn, the capitals of modern Latvia and Estonia. The medieval world had stumbled upon a formula for creating order out of chaos and prosperity amid backwardness. Lübeck ultimately became the seat of the Hanseatic League, an economic alliance of 200 cities that lasted nearly half a millennium.”

Paul Romer’s idea, while intriguing, does not feel right because in our nationalistic world sovereignty and land ownership are explosive issues. Creating cities with new foreign-run rules might solve the trust and credibility problem that many developing countries face as well as attract investments and jobs if people felt the charter would hold. However, it does not seem likely that countries would be willing to lease chunks of their land to foreign powers. The Madagascar example suggests it’s not likely to happen. Besides, Lübeck did not have foreign rule. There is no way Henry the Lion would have let a foreign ruler take charge.

I suspect that a large purchase of land from a poor country in an unpopulated area, most likely in Africa, might work if the new country’s sovereignty could be enforced.

I look forward to seeing some experimentation on the idea in the future!

Non sequitur: One of Paul Romer’s research papers in the early 90s was the inspiration for my junior paper at Princeton: Tariff Policy with Differentiated Products. Mathematically inclined readers wishing to assuage their curiosity can check it out :)

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