I decided to radically simplify my life and divide my living expenses by 10!

I just returned my house in Bedford, my apartment in New York and sold my McLaren. I gave 75% of my non-financial material possessions to charity and most of the rest to my friends and family.

Two years ago I wrote how I had temporarily divided my monthly expenditures by four after being kicked out of my crazy Park Avenue penthouse and my house in Sands Point (The Big Downgrade). The Bedford house actually proved more expensive to operate than my Sands Point house (an indoor heated pool consumes lots of propane – go figure and as such my monthly expenses were only sustainably divided by two.

This decrease was mostly driven by my nomadic lifestyle. As I was traveling more than 6 months per year out of the US for OLX, especially to Argentina, Brazil and India, I opted not to get an apartment in the city and to stay in hotels in New York City. As I spent my weekends in Bedford, I ended up averaging only 6 days per month in the city. Given that you pay only for the nights you stay in the hotels, it led to a massive decrease of my monthly expenses given the outrageous apartment I had before.

While it meant foregoing hosting my traditional salons, white parties, charity events and poker games, I figured I would join other people’s events for a change. In the process, I got to try out a wide variety of hotels in the city and ended with non-obvious favorites. I tried:

• Fashion 26
• Morgans
• Eventi
• Trump Soho
• The Setai
• Crosby Street Hotel
• Mercer Hotel
• The Greenwich
• The Standard
• The Pearl
• W Time Square
• W Union Square
• Hotel on Rivington
• The Surrey

Most hotels that people love proved disappointing. The Greenwich had by far the best spa and I kept running into celebrities like Ryan Gosling there, but the room was underwhelming and noisy (mostly with noise from the corridor). In fact, most of the hotels had disappointing rooms. The Crosby Street Hotel is amazing, but none of the rooms below $1,000 / night have a bathtub and I am partial to baths

Ultimately, The Mercer Hotel became my go to hotel. I love the location and convenience: Read More →

I have been an exceptionally good boy this year. As you may be struggling with ideas for what to get me tonight, I have come up with a short list of suggestions:

• Youthful, healthy immortality
• Point to point teleportation at will
• A space faring vehicle with faster than light travel
• Benevolent leadership of the world, barring that of a large country or a new country if you really want me to start small
• Omnipotence (you can skip omniscience)
• A Nobel Prize in whatever field you deem the most appropriate

Any of these will do for this year.

Yours truly,

Fabrice

P.S. Do you think I should also cc God?

Their portfolio is not too bad either

I decided to relinquish my position as Co-CEO of OLX. My partner Alec is staying as CEO. Given how much of my life and soul I poured in the company and the many friends I have working there, I did not take the decision lightly. I wrestled with conflicting feelings and wanted to walk you through my thought process.

The Origin Story: Aucland & Deremate

Before I walk you through the decision, it is worthwhile taking you back to the beginning of the story. The story actually began in 1998. I had decided to leave McKinsey to build an Internet startup. I was evaluating ideas when my friend Jeff Kaplan showed me the eBay site. It was love at first sight. The economist in me immediately saw the appeal of creating liquidity and bringing price discovery to fragmented and opaque markets. At the same time I realized it was one of the few ideas a capital constrained 23 year old could hope to bring to fruition. Unlike my other potential ideas, building a French version of Amazon, eTrade, Yahoo, Priceline, etc., it did not require inventory, complex supply chains, banking licenses, significant capital, etc. I quit McKinsey, sold everything I had and moved to France to build an eBay copy for Southern Europe.

I named the project “Alibaba” imagining the site would be the treasure trove of lore for consumers. I started developing the site with my partner Sasha Fosse-Parisis and set in motion a content acquisition strategy to guarantee we had more items on sale at launch than any of our competitors. Unfortunately the seemingly tiny Chinese company that owned the Alibaba.com domain name let my repeatedly desperate pleas and offers for the domain go unanswered.

After evaluating a slew of potential names, I opted for OLX. It lacked the magical quality of Alibaba, but was a simple to spell three-letter name. It could stand for OnLine eXchange and could be purchased for $10,000. We were all set to launch in February 1999 when disaster struck. One of our biggest competitors renamed itself from Quixell to QXL. Given how close QXL and OLX are and that they had launched first, we would have been accused of plagiarism and potential trademark violation, even though nothing was further from the truth.

We only had weeks to find a new name. Simultaneously, I was trying to hire an online advertising agency. I Read More →

Clearview’s Mt Kisco cinema has a tradition of having one of their staff thank us for being there before the movie begins. This one felt compelled to tell us: “let me warn you this foreign film is over 3 hours long and incomprehensible!” Nothing could have been further from the truth. Never mind that this movie is American and made by the Wachowskis, it was moving and amazing!

The movie is an adaptation of the amazing 2004 novel by David Mitchell. It relates to six stories taking place between the years 1849 and 2346. The same actors appear in different roles, playing characters of different races, genders and ages. The stories individually are reasonably conventional on their own, but their interconnections and interweaved elements make the result hypnotic.

Each story has game like elements in the sense that the hero or heroine needs to fight tyranny, oppression and greed. Each actor has moral continuity throughout time and is unambiguously good or evil, except for Tom Hanks’ character that is morally complex and ends up being good or evil depending on the outcome of his fight with his personal demons.

The intriguing concept the movie tries to convey is that we are all linked through time and that the dreams of one person passes to the next, especially in the form of love which is so pure that it can transcend death.

The acting is amazing and you often forget you are seeing Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving or Hugh Grant. I loved the winks at Hollywood movies such as Roots and Soylent Green and appreciated the comic relief provided by the modern day “great escape” of the senior citizens from their prison of a nursing home.

I realize the movie is not for everyone. After the movie, several of the moviegoers expressed their bafflement at the ensemble and asked me to describe each story in turn and the connections between them. However, the story really spoke to the (well hidden) romantic in me.

I hope it resonates with you the way it did for me. It was my most extraordinary movie experience of the year!

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Deidre Bolton on Bloomberg TV. We discussed the vagaries of investing in emerging markets. What was not discussed but is worth mentioning is how I ended up investing in many of these markets in the first place. Typically we would launch OLX in a new country. Through the process of executing in the market we became familiar with the environment and started meeting local entrepreneurs. We then ended up backing a few startups and it snowballed from there.

We started with Brazil and Russia and recently started investing in Turkey. We just started exploring opportunities in Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Vietnam, though we probably won’t start investing there for a few years.

Grinda’s Competitive VC Markets: Brazil and Russia

Let me know what you think of the interview.

Fred Wilson just wrote an article, What Has Changed, in which he confirms the observation I made in a recent post (And then there were 100…) that Series A funding rounds are harder to obtain for consumer Internet companies.

VC funding of consumer web and mobile companies is down 42% in this first nine months of 2012 versus the first nine months of 2011. He gives a thoughtful explanation as to why that is:

1. The Internet has matured and the incumbent dominant consumer Internet platforms make it hard for new entrants to emerge.
2. The transition from the web to mobile is changing what it takes to succeed in the consumer web.
3. Momentum and late stage investors are now focusing on the enterprise market.

Read the article!

I attempt to share the lessons I learned operating and angel investing in emerging markets.

The road to my house is completely blocked in a few places in one direction.

It’s barely passable in the other direction.

Power lines are cut everywhere!

You can see all of the photos of the devastation on my Phanfare account – and that was before the snow arrived!

Given the pace at which Jose and I have been angel investing, it’s not surprising we have now invested in 100 startups! Pitzi, the Assurion of Brazil, takes the prize for being the 100th startup! In fact given my procrastinating in writing this blog post, we are now at 105 startup investments!

In two prior blog posts, A SuperAngel’s Investment Guide and Angel Investing Secrets, I presented our investment philosophy and many of our lessons learned. However, crossing this milestone is a great time to take stock on how things have played out and describe the adjustments we made in the past 18 months.

Note that all of the statistics presented in this blog post only cover my angel investing and do not include the performance of companies I created and ran (Aucland, Zingy and OLX) or the performance of the companies I incubated. Also note that I am only presenting my performance and not Jose’s. Jose Marin and I have been doing 100% of our investments together since 2009, but we don’t always invest the same amount. Moreover, while our portfolios overlap by more than 80%, they are not identical because of our investments prior to 2009. That said Jose’s performance is just as good if not better than mine.

Of the 105 investments I made, 85 are still active.

A bit less than half of my active investments are in the US. More of my investments were in Brazil, but I had 4 exits from Brazil recently. The fact that 13% of my investments are in France represents mostly legacy investments as we rarely invest there anymore. We just made our first two investments in Turkey and are actively looking in India and Indonesia.

Of my US investments, 50% are in New York, a disproportionally large number explained by my presence and public profile there, which allow us to meet many of the best companies. We are not nearly as well implanted in the Valley. The best companies there go to Y Combinator, Ron Conway, Jeff Clavier and the like. We thus selectively co-invest with them, typically in companies with global ambitions where our expertise is relevant.

We invested in 7 cities, a testament to the fact that Internet ecosystems are proliferating. It’s now possible to attract talent, follow-on capital Read More →