2023年1月26日,

法布里斯Grinda说,他从来没有打算运行一个风险投资公司。他真的真的喜欢天使投资。事实上,到2013年末,当他即将出售全球分类广告市场OLX保持他的第三个业务——他说他已经写检查150多创业公司与他的老朋友和OLX创始人亚历克Oxenford。“我们一直永远在一起工作。真的是一个家庭办公室,天使投资在大规模”Grinda回忆说。鉴于一系列检查,潜在的有限合伙人,包括战略投资者、家族理财室,创始人开始表达一个投资很感兴趣。Oxenford最终决定启动cofound另一个市场,而不是在2015年发射。(后来被竞争对手收购OfferUp)。但Grinda靠进一步投资和另一个朋友和企业家,何塞•马林,到2016年,挪威电信公司Telenor提出只基金的基金组合,为此给他们5000万美元。快进,他们的服装,FJ实验室,已经从一个公园西路与34一家庞大的公司员工,包括八个投资者和四个“全面的合作伙伴。”自2018年开始变得认真,当有限合伙人与机构承诺投资1.75亿美元。 Now, Grinda is announcing that FJ Labs has garnered $260 million in capital commitments across a pre-seed fund and an opportunity-style “Series B and beyond” fund, with backing from family offices, institutional investors, and a wide array of founders, including of LinkedIn, PayPal, Supercell, Transferwise, MongoDB and Wayfair. Indeed, over time, FJ Labs has come to look less like a “lab” and more like a traditional venture firm, though Grinda rejects the comparison. “We are a venture fund,” he says, but one that does “angel investing at venture scale,” he insists. “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’ll invest or not because we have extraordinary pattern recognition that allows us to decide extremely quickly.” It sounds high risk, yet FJ Labs has results to show for its approach. Among its many investments, for example, it has bet early on outfits that have ballooned over time, including Alibaba, Coupang, Flexport, and Delivery Hero. Focusing on marketplaces and network effects businesses — which Grinda knows well — certainly helps. So does the portfolio that FJ Labs has built over time, which includes 900 active investments as part of what Grinda describes as the “world’s largest marketplace portfolio.” (Pitchbook data supports that FJ Labs was the most active venture outfit globally in the third quarter of last year.) It all builds on itself like its own kind of flywheel, Grinda suggests, pointing to the firm’s deal flow to underscore the point. Through FJ Labs’s 900 companies, it has connections to roughly 2,000 founders, and they “come back for their next companies, and send us their friends and employees,” says Grinda. Similarly, because FJ Labs is a “source of differentiated deal flow for the VCs, they invite us to their deals,” he says. FJ Labs will get bigger still if everything goes as planned. Grinda says that the “idea is to create an institution that is going to be a legacy and “be around “for decades.” It’s hard to imagine that Grinda, who is famously itinerant , could stick with venture capital so long. But he says to believe it. Right now there are three problems FJ Labs would like to help address, while also making money, and none of them are minor. The first is inequality of opportunity, the second is climate change, and the third is the “mental and physical well-being crisis.” One related bet is on User Interviews, a seven-year-old Brooklyn startup that helps user experience researchers source study participants across different demographics and behavioral criteria. (TechCrunch covered its newest funding here .) Other startups don’t easily fit into one of those three buckets, including Gravitics, a one-year-old Seattle startup that is developing living and work modules for space travel and that announced a $20 million round last year. (We covered that round , too.) Apparently, if there is a web3 angle, that also works. Just yesterday, a year-old London-based blockchain infrastructure company said it has $8.5 million in seed funding to build private sharding capabilities for blockchain networks, with participation from FJ Labs. A lot of the firm’s bets boil down to what FJ Labs’s perspective on what the future of humanity looks like, offers Grinda. “We have a perspective on the future of food, automobiles, real estate, work . . . we’re trying to solve the world’s problems; we’re also thesis driven.” You can find out more about what FJ Labs is funding and why from a story we published last month about the outfit, before FJ Labs closed its newest funds.