Yesterday, we had the chance to catch up with Fabrice Grinda, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded the free classifieds site OLX — now owned by Prosus — and who has in recent years been building up his venture firm, FJ Labs. He often likens the outfit to an angel investor “at scale,” saying that like a lot of angel investors, “We don’t lead, we don’t price, we don’t take board seats. We decide after two one-hour meetings over the course of a week whether we invest or not.”
The outfit, which Grinda co-founded with entrepreneur Jose Marin, has certainly been busy. Though its debut fund was relatively small — it raised $50 million from a single limited partner in 2016 — Grinda says that FJ Labs is now backed by a wide array of investors and has invested in 900 companies around the world by writing them checks of between $250,000 and $500,000 f...
