Musings of an Entrepreneur

                                                 

For the French speakers among you.

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While I was in Paris for LeWeb, I ran into Philippe Guerrier, a great French IT journalist whom I have known for 11 years. He took the opportunity to ask for a quick update on OLX and my angel investments.

French speakers can watch the interview at:
http://www.itespresso.fr/video-f-grinda-olx-nous-nous-concentrons-sur-les-pays-dans-lesquels-nous-pouvons-etre-leader-32958.html

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I loved this year’s LeWeb. I met many great entrepreneurs and was truly impressed by the organization and the quality of the participants.

Loic Lemeur, LeWeb’s founder, generously invited me to chat about OLX and entrepreneurship. We had a lot of fun!

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Over the past few years OLX has largely been under the radar in the press given our small presence in the US leading me to coin OLX the largest website no one’s ever heard of! This article is the first real public mention of the company in a reasonably mass market publication (we appeared a few times on TechCrunch in the past).

You can find it at:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2009/tc2009126_680884.htm

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BFM is the leading French economic and business radio channel. They were interested in hearing about my American adventure and the latest happenings at OLX.

French speakers can download the mp3 of the interview.

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http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/07/craigslist-competitor-olx-scores-5-million-for-online-classifieds/

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The last time I was interviewed by Greg at Venture Voice was on my last day at Zingy. I shared the wild ride I had been on at Aucland and Zingy and pontificated on entrepreneurship. You can find that interview at: http://www.fabricegrinda.com/?p=23

This new interview basically covers everything that happened since then, focusing on the creation and growth of OLX. You can download the mp3 of the interview or read a brief summary.

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If you are a super smart programmer hell bent on world domination looking to live new adventures surrounded by gorgeous people in beautiful Buenos Aires (Argentina), we want you! You will live like a king given the cost of living in Argentina and will be near tons of exotic destinations: Patagonia, Iguazu Falls, Antarctica, Punta del Este, Rio and more! You will join people from 17 countries and get the opportunity to travel to our offices in Beijing, Moscow, and New York. No experience necessary as long as you dream about code at night! Feel free to bring along fifteen of your best programmer friends!

If this sounds like you, email me your resume.

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OLX just raised another $13.5 million from General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, Founders Fund and DN Capital. This brings the total raised to $23.5 million as we had raised $10 million in September 2006 from the same VCs and various angels.

My two favorite VCs – Joel Cutler and Jeremy Levine, from General Catalyst and Bessemer Venture Partners respectively, remain on the board alongside my co-founder Alec Oxenford and myself.

We thought long and hard about whether we should raise more cash. In the end, in light of our ambitions and the insurance it buys in a probable economic downturn, we felt that raising more cash was the best solution despite the incremental dilution and liquidation preference.

We will use the funds to:

• Build the best site in the market
• Further our global deployment (we are currently in 40 countries in 15 languages)
• Acquire more sites (we already acquired Mundoanuncio.com, Freestreet.it, Freeads.ru and invested in Edeng.cn)
• Continue our aggressive marketing campaign

We intend to be extremely careful in how we spend the money to make sure that it lasts us until profitability.

We realize we remain a startup and need to keep our low cost and nimble startup culture. We are still at the beginning of a long road that will hopefully lead to the creation of the best free classified site in the world and allow us to make a difference in the life of our customers.

You can also read a TechCrunch article on the fund raising at:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/11/craigslist-competitor-olx-raises-135m/#comments

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