2023年1月26日,

法布裏斯Grinda說,他從來沒有打算運行一個風險投資公司。他真的真的喜歡天使投資。事實上,到2013年末,當他即將出售全球分類廣告市場OLX保持他的第三個業務——他說他已經寫檢查150多創業公司與他的老朋友和OLX創始人亞曆克Oxenford。“我們一直永遠在一起工作。真的是一個家庭辦公室,天使投資在大規模”Grinda回憶說。鑒於一係列檢查,潛在的有限合夥人,包括戰略投資者、家族理財室,創始人開始表達一個投資很感興趣。Oxenford最終決定啟動cofound另一個市場,而不是在2015年發射。(後來被競爭對手收購OfferUp)。但Grinda靠進一步投資和另一個朋友和企業家,何塞•馬林,到2016年,挪威電信公司Telenor提出隻基金的基金組合,為此給他們5000萬美元。快進,他們的服裝,FJ實驗室,已經從一個公園西路與34一家龐大的公司員工,包括八個投資者和四個“全麵的合作夥伴。”自2018年開始變得認真,當有限合夥人與機構承諾投資1.75億美元。 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.