NJ Tech Meetup is the new name for Hoboken Tech Meetup. Everything else has remained pretty much the same since my last visit to Stevens Institute, the home of this Jersey-based startup gathering: interesting demos, great energy, and exceptional speakers.
My mind is still spinning from my weekend at The Singularity Summit with thoughts of super AI minds, immortality, robotic bodies, and regrowing human body parts. So it was comforting to be back on more familiar ground last night watching demos from Fiesta, Tracks.io, and BiteHunter.
The most rewarding part, though, was listening to Fabrice Grinda, now founder and co-CEO of OLX, a global classified ads site.
But that’s his day job. Somehow he also manages to be an active angel investor with stakes in over 80 startups. This moonlighting part of his work life was really the point of his talk to this crowd of entrepreneurs and perhaps future angels.
Here’s his story in brief: after a series of entrepreneurial successes (Auckland and Zermante in Europe, Zingy in the US), Grinda took up angel investing.
And made a lot of mistakes.
Grinda attributed a string of bad investments–losing $6 millions on six startups–to hubris on his part. After selling Zingy, a ringtone company, to a Japanese firm for $80 million, Grinda felt he had a golden touch. He learned the hard way that it’s better to diversify and place smaller bets–hey, I knew about diversification from my David S. Rose course–and perhaps even more importantly to not serve on multiple boards.
So now he limits himself to divvying out smaller sums of money, about $50K, per deal and making many more investments. Last year Grinda gave out checks to 22 startups, and this year he’s placed bets in over 30 companies. He also knows from his prior 0-6 record to not serve as a director because he’d be mostly a nuisance and bureaucratic overhead to the founders and their team.
What does Grinda look for in a startup? He’s focused on consumer internet, his expertise area, and only considers companies that fall into one of four buckets: travel, e-commerce, marketplaces, and user-generated content. If he sees a presentation he likes–Grinda receives something like 30 per week–he and his team will then set up a one-hour meeting with the founder.
If the founder is both compelling and has an actual web-site (it has to be live), and the business ideas meet a 9-point selection criteria– $1 billion market potential, solid business model, and low capital requirements under $1 million to name just four big points–then Grinda will likely put some skin in the game.
For those startups reading this post and would like to pitch an idea to Fabrice, he does accept blind emails.
But you’ll have to follow angel rules and attach a 15-page deck that covers, as he put it: “this is the idea, this is the market size, this is who we are, this is the business model, this is our go-to market strategy, these are the unit economics, and this is how much money we need and what we’re doing with it.”
Check out Fabrice Grinda’s blog for more details.