People regularly ask me what I actually do, so I am writing it all down in one place. None of this is exotic. In fact, the most striking thing I learned is how much of the longevity conversation is noise, and how much of the signal comes down to a handful of boring fundamentals done consistently: sleep, lift heavy things, move a lot, eat well, and fix what your bloodwork tells you to fix.

The usual caveat applies: I am not a doctor. This is what I do and why, with the evidence as I understand it. Your mileage will vary, and your bloodwork should drive your decisions, not my blog post.

1. Sleep

If you only change one thing after reading this, make it sleep. Everything else rests on it.

Not sleeping enough conclusively leads to and contributes to cancer, heart disease, and dementia, and it dramatically shortens your life. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” is exactly backwards: not sleeping is what gets you there faster. On top of that, being under-slept reduces mental acuity, willpower, creativity, and new memory formation. It also wrecks your hormones. A study in JAMA found that restricting healthy young men to five hours of sleep a night for one week cut their testosterone by 10 to 15%, which is the equivalent of aging a decade. Poor sleep raises cortisol, lowers insulin sensitivity, and increases ghrelin, the hunger hormone, which is why you crave carbs when you are tired.

It is also not enough to get eight hours. You need to get them at the right time. Deep NREM sleep is concentrated in the first half of the night and REM in the second, so going to bed at 2 am instead of 11 pm essentially eliminates most of your deep sleep even if you sleep until 10 am. Your circadian rhythm sets that window, and night owls and early birds differ, but whatever your window is, the single most important habit is to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, including weekends.

I have been a bad sleeper my entire life: hard to fall asleep, easy to wake up. Here is what I do about it.

No alcohol. Alcohol makes you sleepy, but it is a sedative, not a sleep aid. It fragments sleep, suppresses REM, and leaves you waking up at 3 am as it metabolizes. Matthew Walker’s tongue-in-cheek recommendation is that if you must drink, do it first thing in the morning. I simply don’t drink.

No caffeine after noon. The half-life of caffeine is roughly six hours, meaning a coffee at 4 pm leaves half the caffeine in your system at 10 pm and a quarter at 4 am. Even if you fall asleep, caffeine blocks adenosine and reduces deep sleep. Decaf is not caffeine-free either; it can contain up to 10% of the caffeine of the real thing, so I stop decaf by 2 pm.

My nighttime supplement stack. About an hour before bed I take:

• Magnesium glycinate (Nature’s Bounty High Absorption, one 240 mg tablet at bedtime). Most people are mildly magnesium deficient, and magnesium is involved in GABA signaling, which calms the nervous system. The glycinate form is bound to glycine, an amino acid that on its own has been shown in Japanese trials to reduce the time to fall asleep and improve subjective sleep quality, likely by lowering core body temperature. It is also gentle on the stomach, unlike magnesium citrate or oxide.
• Magnesium L-threonate (Life Extension Neuro-Mag). This is the only form of magnesium shown to meaningfully cross the blood-brain barrier and raise magnesium levels in the brain. The original MIT research showed improvements in synaptic density and memory in animals, and small human trials show better cognitive function and sleep quality. I think of glycinate as the body dose and threonate as the brain dose.
• Taurine (NOW, 500 mg). Taurine acts on GABA-A and glycine receptors, which is exactly what you want before bed. It also got a lot of attention in 2023 when a paper in Science showed that taurine levels decline with age and that supplementing it extended healthy lifespan in mice and improved health markers in monkeys. The human longevity data is not there yet, but it is cheap, safe, and helps me sleep, so it stays.

Temperature is the hack. Your core body temperature needs to drop by about one degree Celsius to initiate sleep, which is why our minds have a Pavlovian response and become sleepier as we get colder. This leads to a counterintuitive trick: a hot shower or bath right before bed. The heat pulls blood to the skin, and when you step out, you dump heat rapidly and your core temperature crashes, which puts you to sleep. I then sleep on an Eight Sleep mattress cover that actively cools the bed through the night. It is the single best sleep purchase I have made. I also keep the room at 68°F instead of 75°F.

The rest of the basics. I put black tape on every source of light in the bedroom and have blackout shades so the room is pitch black. I play white noise. There is no TV in the bedroom, so my brain associates the bed with sleep and sex only. I blue-shift my devices after 9 pm and try to avoid anything stimulating, including work email and intense conversations, in the last hour. I wear a sleep mask, ear plugs, and a mouth guard, which makes me the least sexy sleeper alive, but I sleep. I target being in bed for nine hours to get eight hours of sleep, since everyone is awake at least an hour per night, and I go to bed at the same time every night.

I track everything, and while I am still not a natural sleeper, I went from averaging under six hours a night to consistently over seven. It is a work in progress, and an ongoing life goal.

2. Don’t Drink, Don’t Smoke

This deserves its own section because it is just as important as anything else on this list, and because the cultural narrative around alcohol in particular is so wrong.

Alcohol is literally a poison. Ethanol is a Group 1 carcinogen, the same classification as tobacco and asbestos, causally linked to at least seven cancers including breast, colorectal, liver, and esophageal. The “a glass of red wine is good for your heart” story has collapsed under scrutiny: the older studies suffered from the sick-quitter bias, where the non-drinking comparison group was full of people who had quit because they were already ill, making moderate drinkers look healthy by comparison. When you correct for that, and when you look at Mendelian randomization studies that use genetics to get around confounding, the cardiovascular benefit disappears. The largest modern analyses, including the 2018 Global Burden of Disease study in The Lancet covering 195 countries, concluded that the safest level of alcohol consumption is zero. Not one glass. Zero. The WHO said the same thing explicitly in 2023: there is no safe amount.

And that is before you get to what alcohol does to the pillar everything else rests on. As I covered in the sleep section, even a single evening drink fragments sleep and suppresses REM. It also lowers testosterone, adds empty calories, reduces inhibition around food, and impairs muscle protein synthesis. It works against every other section of this post simultaneously.

That said, I am not dogmatic about it. I am happy to have a celebratory drink once in a while, a glass of red wine or a cup of champagne, but it happens less than ten times a year, and at this point I don’t even remember the last time I drank; it was months ago for sure. The dose makes the poison, and at that dose the damage is a rounding error. What I would never do is drink daily, because daily is where the cancer, liver, brain, and sleep costs compound. If you enjoy wine, treat it the way I treat the baguette: a rare, deliberate pleasure only to be indulged when I am visiting my family in France where it is most delicious, not a habit.

Smoking is not even a debate. It remains the single largest preventable cause of death in the world. It causes about a third of all cancers, not just lung: bladder, pancreas, kidney, stomach, throat. It doubles to quadruples your risk of heart disease and stroke, destroys your lungs through COPD, accelerates skin aging and bone loss, tanks your VO2 max, and impairs the recovery and blood flow that everything in the strength and cardio sections depends on. On average, smokers lose about ten years of life expectancy. The one piece of good news is how forgiving the body is: quit before forty and you get roughly nine of those ten years back, and your cardiovascular risk drops meaningfully within just a few years of stopping. If you smoke, quitting is worth more than every supplement, sauna, and fasting protocol in this post combined.

I would extend the same logic to vaping and nicotine pouches. They are almost certainly less harmful than cigarettes, but “less harmful than the leading cause of preventable death” is a low bar. Nicotine itself raises heart rate and blood pressure, constricts blood vessels, and disrupts sleep, and the long-term data on vaping simply does not exist yet. I would not run that experiment on myself.

On recreational drugs, I would differentiate rather than lump them together. Opiates, heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine are unambiguously terrible for you: addictive, cardiotoxic or neurotoxic, and responsible for staggering mortality. Avoid them, full stop. I would also avoid weed, having seen too many regular users lose part of their motivation and intellect, and I am skeptical of ketamine’s professed non-addictive properties given the number of people I have seen hooked on it.

But I don’t put classic psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD in the same category, and as I wrote at length in The Meaning of Life, my own experiences with them have been among the most meaningful of my life. They are not neurotoxic, have essentially no physiological toxicity, and are not addictive; tolerance builds so quickly that daily use is nearly impossible, and in David Nutt’s famous harm rankings in The Lancet, they sit at the very bottom while alcohol sits at the top. There is serious clinical evidence, from Johns Hopkins and Imperial College among others, for their benefits in depression, end-of-life anxiety, and addiction, and preclinical evidence that they promote neuroplasticity and dendritic growth. The longevity angle is more speculative but no longer purely theoretical: a 2025 study in npj Aging found that psilocybin extended cellular lifespan in human cells and improved survival in aged mice, and Bryan Johnson ran a fully quantified n-of-1 experiment tracking 249 biomarkers across high-dose psilocybin sessions, reporting his inflammation dropping to undetectable levels, improved glucose control, and a meaningful cortisol reset. An n of 1 proves nothing, and his self-reported results deserve every ounce of skepticism, but it is directionally interesting, and I expect real trials on this within a few years. In the meantime, I hold the longevity claim loosely.

And they are emphatically not for everyone: they act on the serotonin system, so they do not mix with SSRIs, SNRIs, MAOIs, antipsychotics, benzodiazepines, or stimulants, and anyone with a personal or family history of psychosis or bipolar disorder should stay away entirely, as should anyone generally prone to paranoia or anxiety, since these substances amplify whatever you bring to them. I cover set, setting, and the full list of contraindications in the other post. Occasional, intentional, screened use is a very different thing from chronic use; daily microdosing in particular raises emerging concerns about heart-valve effects from constant serotonin-receptor stimulation. If your brain chemistry is right for them, they are probably among the least harmful psychoactive substances that exist. If it isn’t, they can hurt you.

One legal drug people forget belongs in this section: chronic sleeping pills. Ambien and its cousins produce sedation, not natural sleep architecture, and long-term use is associated with worse outcomes. Fix the sleep environment and habits instead.

3. Strength Training

If sleep is the foundation, strength training is the single most underrated longevity intervention, especially for people over forty.

Muscle is not just for aesthetics. It is your largest metabolic organ. It is the primary sink for glucose, which is why more muscle means better insulin sensitivity and lower risk of type 2 diabetes. It raises your resting metabolic rate. And it is the best predictor of how you will age: grip strength and leg strength are among the strongest predictors of all-cause mortality in large cohort studies, better than many traditional biomarkers. A 2022 meta-analysis in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that just 30 to 60 minutes of resistance training per week was associated with a 10 to 17% reduction in all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.

The reason is simple. After thirty, you lose roughly 3 to 8% of your muscle mass per decade, and the rate accelerates after sixty. This is called sarcopenia, and it is what turns a fall at 75 into a broken hip, and a broken hip into a 30% one-year mortality rate. The people who stay independent and vigorous into their eighties are the ones who kept their muscle.

There are gender-specific reasons to care:

For women, the priority is bone density. Estrogen protects bone, and its decline at menopause leads to rapid bone loss and osteoporosis. Heavy resistance training is the most effective non-pharmaceutical way to maintain and even rebuild bone. The LIFTMOR trial in Australia had postmenopausal women with low bone mass do heavy deadlifts, squats, and overhead presses twice a week and saw meaningful improvements in spine and hip bone density. Light weights don’t do it; bone responds to load.

For men, the priority is injury prevention and hormonal health. Strong muscles and tendons protect joints, and strength training is one of the most reliable natural ways to support testosterone production, which I will come back to.

What I do. Three full-body sessions per week, 60 minutes each, on non-consecutive days. I rotate through the major movement patterns: squat, hinge (deadlift), horizontal and vertical push, horizontal and vertical pull, and carries. I focus on compound movements with progressive overload, meaning I add weight or reps over time, because that is what drives adaptation. I train hard but leave a rep or two in the tank on most sets to avoid injury; at my age, the goal is to never miss a week, not to hit a one-rep max.

Creatine. This is the most studied supplement in sports science, with hundreds of trials showing improved strength, power, and lean mass, and no meaningful safety concerns in healthy people. The standard dose has been 3 to 5 g per day, but I take 10 g of creatine monohydrate (Naked Nutrition), split as 5 g in the morning and 5 g in the evening. The reason is that the newer evidence suggests the brain, which uses about 20% of the body’s energy, saturates at higher doses than muscle, and the studies showing cognitive benefits (better memory, less mental fatigue, better resilience to sleep deprivation) used higher doses. Splitting it reduces the minor GI issues some people get with a single large dose.

Stretching and mobility. I put this here because if you lift, you need to keep your range of motion, and because flexibility declines with age just as muscle does. I stretch for ten minutes every day before bed using the Bend app, which walks you through a routine. Others prefer the morning or post-workout. The timing matters less than doing it daily.

4. Movement and Cardio

Strength keeps you independent. Cardiovascular fitness keeps you alive. In a 2018 study of over 120,000 patients published in JAMA Network Open, cardiorespiratory fitness (VO2 max) was the strongest predictor of mortality, stronger than smoking, diabetes, or hypertension, and the benefit kept increasing at the highest levels of fitness with no ceiling.

Two things matter: your baseline daily movement, and your structured cardio.

Daily movement. I target at least 10,000 steps a day, ideally 12,500. The research on steps, including a 2022 meta-analysis in The Lancet Public Health, shows that mortality risk keeps falling up to about 8,000 to 10,000 steps for people over sixty, and up to 10,000 to 12,000 for younger adults. Beyond the numbers, the point is that sitting all day is not undone by a workout. I take calls walking, I walk to meetings, and I get off one stop early.

High-intensity interval training. The most time-efficient way to raise VO2 max is HIIT. The protocol with the best evidence is the Norwegian 4×4: four minutes at 85 to 95% of your max heart rate, three minutes of easy recovery, repeated four times, for a total of about 25 minutes with warm-up. I do some form of this roughly three times a week on my non-lifting days, for about 20 minutes. Zone 2 cardio, the long, easy, conversational pace, has its place for mitochondrial health and I do some of it, but if you are time-constrained, intervals give you far more per minute.

But really: find a sport you love. My actual cardio is tennis and padel, which I have played ten-plus hours a week for years, nearly every week, especially when I am in Turks and Caicos. Racquet sports happen to be naturally interval-based: short bursts of maximal effort, brief recovery, repeat. The Copenhagen City Heart Study found that tennis players lived almost ten years longer than sedentary people, the largest gain of any sport studied, and badminton and soccer were not far behind. Part of that is the cardio, part is the social component, and part is that you will actually show up for something you enjoy. I have never had to motivate myself to play tennis. I have had to motivate myself to do every other form of exercise.

5. Nutrition

I have tried most diets at this point, and I have landed on something simple.

High protein. I eat about one gram of protein per pound of body weight per day. That is higher than the official RDA of 0.36 g per pound, but the RDA is the minimum to avoid deficiency, not the optimum for building and retaining muscle, and it is especially inadequate for people over forty who have anabolic resistance and need more protein per meal to trigger muscle protein synthesis. I spread it across meals, aiming for 40 g or more per sitting, and use a scoop or two of grass-fed whey protein isolate (Transparent Labs) to help hit the target.

Low carb, high-quality fat, all organic. I keep carbohydrates low most of the time, get my fat from olive oil, avocado, nuts, fatty fish, and grass-fed meat, and eat organic whenever I can. I avoid seed oils, processed food, and sugar. This is not ideology; it is that I feel better, my bloodwork is better, and my energy is stable through the day without the post-lunch crash.

Cycling into keto. When I am not playing tennis and padel heavily, I go fully ketogenic for three to four weeks, about twice a year. I don’t do it year-round because I find my performance on court suffers without carbohydrates, and because I think there are benefits to metabolic flexibility, the ability to switch between burning glucose and burning fat, that you lose if you stay in one state permanently.

Electrolytes. One underrated detail if you train hard, sweat a lot, or eat low carb: salt. Playing padel for hours in Turks and Caicos heat can cost well over a gram of sodium per hour, and a low-carb diet independently raises sodium needs, because lower insulin levels make the kidneys excrete more of it; the infamous “keto flu” is mostly a sodium deficit. Rehydrating with plain water alone after heavy sweating just dilutes what is left. So on training days I drink a stick of Liquid I.V. Sugar-Free while I exercise, and two on the heaviest days. Any clean, sugar-free electrolyte mix works; what matters is replacing the sodium rather than fearing it, which decades of blanket low-salt advice trained us to do even though the risk calculus is different for lean, active people who sweat for a living.

Fasting, done differently. Intermittent fasting is popular, and the 16:8 or 18:6 daily windows are what most people do. I have come to believe that daily time-restricted eating is overrated. Two randomized trials, the TREAT study in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2020 and a larger Chinese trial in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2022, found that time-restricted eating produced no meaningful benefit over simple calorie restriction for weight or metabolic markers, and in TREAT, the fasting group actually lost more lean mass. My read is that the body adapts to a fixed daily fasting window the same way it adapts to any other stimulus; the signal stops being a signal.

So instead I do one 24 to 30 hour fast per week. A longer fast done intermittently is a bigger hormetic stress: insulin drops further, growth hormone rises substantially, and you get deeper into fat oxidation than an 18-hour window allows, without the muscle loss that daily restriction seems to produce when protein intake gets squeezed.

Then, once per quarter, I do a three-day water fast. Around 48 to 72 hours is when the interesting things happen: glycogen is fully depleted, ketones are high, mTOR, the growth pathway, is suppressed, and AMPK is activated, which triggers autophagy, the cellular recycling process where the body clears out damaged proteins and organelles. Valter Longo’s work at USC on prolonged fasting and fasting-mimicking diets shows reductions in IGF-1 and regeneration of immune cells, and I find I come out of each fast feeling reset. It is not pleasant, and you should not do it if you have any medical condition without talking to a doctor, but I have found it to be one of the highest-leverage things I do.

Cheat meals are fine. All bets are off when I am in France. I eat the baguette, the cheese, the croissant, and I do not feel remotely guilty about it. What matters is what you do consistently. If your macros and calories are on point 90% of the time, the other 10% is not going to hurt you, and a life without the occasional great meal is not one I am interested in.

6. Supplements

This is where people want the list, so here it is, with a big disclaimer first. Your supplement stack should be driven by your bloodwork, not by what I or anyone else takes. Get a full panel every six to twelve months, including ApoB, Lp(a), fasting insulin, HbA1c, hs-CRP, vitamin D, omega-3 index, ferritin, thyroid, and hormones, and fix what is actually wrong. Most of what I take beyond the list below is specific to my situation: I have recently been dealing with elevated cholesterol and take things for that, and I take several things for hair loss. Those are not universal and I won’t pretend they are.

That said, a few seem close to universal for anyone serious about longevity:

• Vitamin D3 (with K2). Most people in the developed world are deficient, especially in winter, and vitamin D affects bone, immune function, mood, and testosterone. I target a blood level in the 50 to 70 ng/mL range, which for me means about 5,000 IU per day; I currently use a liquid D3/K2 tincture (Pure Encapsulations EmulsiSorb K2/D3), taken with food since it is fat-soluble. The dose that matters is the one your bloodwork validates, so test every six to twelve months and adjust; don’t guess.
• Omega-3 (EPA/DHA). Most people have an omega-3 index under 4%, when the target is 8% or higher. Higher omega-3 index is associated with lower cardiovascular and all-cause mortality. I take Pure Encapsulations EPA/DHA nightly, and adjust the number of capsules based on where my omega-3 index comes in on my blood panels. I emphasize EPA for its anti-inflammatory effects, and it is also part of my cholesterol management.
• Creatine, 10 g per day, split morning and evening, as discussed above.
• Urolithin A (Mitopure). Urolithin A is a metabolite your gut bacteria produce from pomegranate and certain nuts, but only about 40% of people have the right bacteria to make it. It triggers mitophagy, the clearing of damaged mitochondria. Two randomized controlled trials, one in JAMA Network Open and one in Cell Reports Medicine, showed that 500 to 1,000 mg per day for four months improved muscle endurance and mitochondrial biomarkers in middle-aged and older adults. Mitochondrial decline is one of the hallmarks of aging, and this is one of the few supplements with real human RCT data behind it. I take Mitopure gummies daily, which deliver the 500 mg clinical dose.
• Spermidine. A polyamine found in wheat germ and aged cheese that induces autophagy. The human evidence is mostly observational: a large Austrian cohort found that higher dietary spermidine intake was associated with lower mortality, roughly equivalent to being five years younger. Small trials on cognition are mixed. I take spermidineLIFE daily because the mechanism is plausible and the downside is negligible.
• TMG (trimethylglycine, or betaine). Betaine has modest evidence for improving body composition and strength in resistance-trained people, with studies using about 2.5 g per day. It is also a methyl donor, which matters because NMN and NR consume methyl groups as they are metabolized, and TMG helps replace them. I take NOW Extra Strength TMG, 1,000 mg tablets.
• NMN (liquid). NMN is a precursor to NAD+, a coenzyme involved in energy metabolism and DNA repair that declines with age. The animal data is compelling. The human data is early but improving: a 2021 trial in Science showed NMN improved muscle insulin sensitivity in prediabetic women, and a 2023 dose-response trial showed improvements in walking distance and biological age markers at 600 to 900 mg per day. I take a liposomal liquid form (Designs for Health Liposomal NMN Synergy), two pumps per day in the afternoon, for better absorption. Full disclosure: that is a 50 mg dose, an order of magnitude below what the trials used, even accounting for the better bioavailability of liposomal delivery. Consider it a token bet while the evidence matures rather than an attempt to replicate the studies. I hold this one more loosely than the others; if the next few years of trials disappoint, I will drop it.
• Collagen. One 20 g scoop of Vital Proteins Collagen Peptides per day, ideally with vitamin C. The evidence for joint health, tendon recovery, and skin elasticity is moderate but consistent, and as someone who puts serious hours on a tennis court, I care about my joints.
• Magnesium glycinate, magnesium L-threonate, and taurine at night, as covered in the sleep section.

7. Other Things I Do

Sauna. The evidence here is surprisingly strong. A long-running Finnish cohort study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that men who used a sauna four to seven times a week had a 40% lower all-cause mortality and a 50% lower cardiovascular mortality than those who went once a week, and a subsequent analysis found a 65% lower risk of Alzheimer’s. The mechanism is likely heat shock proteins, improved vascular function, and the cardiovascular load itself, which resembles moderate exercise. I try to do 20 minutes at 175 to 195°F several times a week when I have access to one.

Red light therapy. I use two BioMax 900 panels mounted side by side on the BioMax horizontal stand for full-body red and near-infrared coverage, 20 minutes a few times a week, front and back. I want to be honest that the evidence here is weaker than for everything else on this page. There is reasonable data for skin health and collagen production, and decent data for muscle recovery and reducing inflammation and joint pain. The broader longevity claims are mostly extrapolation from mitochondrial mechanisms. I consider it a low-risk, moderate-reward habit rather than a core pillar.

Morning light. The cheapest intervention on this list. Getting ten to twenty minutes of direct sunlight within an hour of waking anchors your circadian rhythm, which improves sleep that night, and it is why I try to be outside early.

Peptides, selectively. This is the one area where I knowingly run ahead of the human evidence, so let me be precise about it. I have used BPC-157 and TB-500 to recover from tennis elbow and a shoulder injury, and they seem to have helped: both resolved faster than I expected given my age and the hours I put on the court. BPC-157 is a synthetic fragment of a protein found in gastric juice; in animal studies it accelerates healing of tendons, ligaments, and muscle, largely by promoting blood vessel growth and collagen formation at the injury site. TB-500 is a fragment of thymosin beta-4, a protein involved in cell migration and tissue repair, with similar animal data for tendon and soft-tissue recovery. The catch is that the human evidence is almost entirely anecdotal; there are no good randomized trials, the FDA has flagged BPC-157 as not eligible for compounding, and both are banned in competitive sport. I took them for a specific injury, for a limited time, from a source I trusted, and stopped when I healed. I would not take them chronically, and I would not treat a couple of n-of-1 recoveries as proof of anything.

Stretching, daily, as discussed above.

8. What I Avoid, and a Note of Caution

The longevity space has a lot of people doing a lot of unproven and occasionally dangerous things. A few that I steer clear of:

TRT. Testosterone replacement therapy has become extremely common, and for men with clinically low testosterone and symptoms, it can be life-changing. But most men who think they need it don’t. Poor sleep, excess body fat, alcohol, and inactivity are the biggest suppressors of natural testosterone production, and sleeping eight hours, strength training, cutting alcohol, and getting lean will move the number substantially for most men. The problem with starting TRT is that exogenous testosterone shuts down your own production, and it often does not fully recover if you stop. You are making a lifelong decision, frequently to fix a problem that lifestyle would have fixed. Exhaust the natural levers first, and get your levels tested properly (morning, fasted, twice) before concluding they are low.

GLP-1 agonists (Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro). These are remarkable drugs for people who are obese or diabetic, and I don’t judge anyone who needs them. But for metabolically healthy people using them to lose the last ten pounds, I would be cautious. In the STEP 1 trial that established semaglutide for weight loss, roughly 40% of the weight lost was lean mass, not fat. Losing muscle while losing fat is exactly what you don’t want if your goal is a long, strong life, and it makes everything in section 3 harder. The GI side effects are real, there are ongoing questions about gastroparesis and muscle loss, and the weight typically comes back when you stop.

Human growth hormone. HGH is popular in some anti-aging clinics, and it will add muscle and strip fat. It also raises IGF-1, which is associated with increased cancer risk, drives insulin resistance, and has essentially no evidence of extending life. It is a performance enhancer masquerading as a longevity therapy.

Metformin, for athletes. Metformin got a lot of attention as a possible anti-aging drug, and the TAME trial is meant to test that. But if you exercise seriously, the data should give you pause. A 2019 trial in Aging Cell found that metformin blunted the improvement in VO2 max and mitochondrial function from aerobic training in older adults, and a companion study found it also blunted muscle growth from resistance training. The proposed mechanism is that metformin dampens the very stress response that makes exercise beneficial. I would rather get my glucose control from muscle than from a pill that keeps me from building it.

Everything unproven, taken chronically. Stem cell injections, young plasma, rapamycin off-label, growth-hormone-releasing peptides, high-dose stacks of twenty things at once. Some of these may turn out to be valuable. Most will not, and a few will turn out to be harmful. There is a difference between a short, targeted experiment for a specific problem, as I did with the recovery peptides above, and making something with only mouse data and a charismatic podcast guest behind it a permanent part of your routine.

The Short Version

If this is too much, here is the list:

1. Sleep eight hours at a consistent time, in a cold, dark room, with no alcohol and no caffeine after noon.
2. Don’t smoke, and treat alcohol as a rare celebration, not a habit.
3. Lift heavy three times a week with progressive overload.
4. Walk 10,000-plus steps a day, do intervals three times a week, and find a sport you love.
5. Eat a gram of protein per pound, keep carbs and processed food low, fast once a week for a day, and enjoy the baguette in France.
6. Get bloodwork twice a year, fix deficiencies, and take the few supplements with real evidence.
7. Be wary of anything that promises to shortcut the above.

The fundamentals are not glamorous. They also work, they compound, and they are almost entirely within your control. But notice the word quietly doing all the work in every line above: consistency. None of this operates in bursts. The person who lifts three times a week, every week, for a decade beats the person who trains six days a week for three months and then stops, every single time. The same is true of sleep, diet, cardio, and steps: the returns come from the streak, not the sprint. Motivation is what gets you started; systems and habits are what keep you going when motivation inevitably fades, which is why everything in this post is built to be repeatable forever rather than impressive for a season.

Consistency is not rigidity. I take a full week off several times a year, whether off-grid on an adventure or simply indulging in France, and I come back stronger and hungrier for it. A deliberate week of rest is recovery; three months of letting go is a new baseline. Know the difference, and never confuse the two.

Your health is the highest-yield asset you will ever own, and unlike every other investment I make, the returns are guaranteed if you simply keep showing up. So start today, keep going, and stack the decades. I intend to be playing padel at ninety, and I see no reason you should not be on the other side of the net.

To firms and founders alike, Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner of FJ Labs and one of the world’s most prolific and experienced marketplace investors, offers reassurance: “I’m actually seeing more opportunity – meaning, things you can do with AI to inflect your business and make it much better – than I’m seeing threats.”

“Tech moves fast, but policy and culture move slowly”

Broadly, Fabrice’s perspective on AI takes into account the longer history of technological advancements, from the commercialisation of electricity to the early internet. “During transitions, people overestimate the impact that the revolution has in the short term and underestimate it in the long term,” he observes. 

Looking back on the dot-com boom, Fabrice lists off examples of early web-based firms that were simply ahead of their time. Pets.com may have misestimated the timeline, but was not wrong about the viability of online pet retail. The company that eventually made that model work is now known as Chewy. Webvan’s vision was eventually realised by Instacart. Many ideas of the dot-com era were sound. The infrastructure, consumer habits and regulatory environment, however, were not ready.

Fabrice sees the same dynamic operating today, with the startup world leading the charge in early adoption. “Because we’re all at the forefront of AI implementation, we think it’s happening extraordinarily fast,” he notes. However, the institutions that drive most economic activity, such as governments, healthcare systems and large enterprises, are slower to transition to new technologies. “We’re still at the very beginning of the AI revolution,” thinks Fabrice. “Tech moves fast, but policy and culture move slowly.”

AI as a strategic lever for marketplace operators

While disruption is more targeted, the opportunity is considerably broader. Fabrice identifies three concrete mechanisms through which AI is already generating material value for marketplace operators.

‘I’m actually seeing more opportunity – meaning, things you can do with AI to inflect your business and make it much better – than I’m seeing threats.’ – Fabrice Grinda

First, Fabrice points to cross-border liquidity. Vinted has used AI-powered auto-translation not only of listings but of real-time conversations between buyers and sellers. This effectively collapses the language barrier that has long fragmented European e-commerce into market silos. The result for Vinted has been a compound expansion strategy: liquidity built in one market becomes the springboard for winning adjacent geographies. Companies in FJ Labs’ own portfolio, including Wallapop and automotive parts platform Ovoco, are achieving similar outcomes.

Another lever is supply-side friction reduction. “In most marketplaces, especially the consumer-facing ones, 99% of people are buyers,” Fabrice explains. “There are not that many sellers, because it takes work to sell. And now with AI, you make selling a lot easier.” Indeed, AI changes the calculus. A user who previously needed to photograph an item multiple times, write a title and description, select a category and research a price can now submit a single image and receive an AI-generated listing ready for review. According to Fabrice, “immediately, you can get a 20-30% uplift in the number of listings” by implementing this kind of supply-side tooling.

The third is customer service automation. As companies in Fabrice’s portfolio have integrated AI agents into their support operations, they’re seeing cost reductions as well as measurable improvements in customer satisfaction. “Many of my companies now have 50% lower customer care costs than they did a year ago, [and] with higher NPS,” Fabrice says. It’s a combination that, not long ago, would have been considered a contradiction in terms.

The strategic question: to index or not to index

As LLMs become increasingly important discovery channels, marketplace operators face another new strategic question: should they allow themselves to be indexed by and surfaced within AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude?

“If you’re going to index yourself in Google for SEO, then you should absolutely index yourself in the LLMs,” Fabrice answers emphatically. For the handful of platforms with near-total market dominance (those with 95%+ market share, where users navigate directly without an intermediary discovery step), indexing in LLMs could risk reshaping user habits in ways that could introduce intermediaries where none currently exist. These platforms, which Fabrice says number around three to five globally, are better served by protecting the direct relationship they have with their users.

For everyone else, which is to say, for almost every marketplace, the situation is rather different. LLM usage is currently about a third of search engine traffic, with only 2-3% referral traffic. However, that traffic is free, incremental and seems to be increasing. The appropriate response, Fabrice argues, is to pursue Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) alongside traditional SEO. “The answer for 99.99% of marketplaces out there is: index yourself on Google, get the free SEO, get the free AEO, be in Gemini, be in Claude, be on OpenAI – no reason not to,” he says, while adding one important caveat: “Index yourself, but don’t let them use you for training data.” Laure Claire adds: “We produced guides at Collective Intelligence for AI to encourage founders to embrace AEO and GSO ( generative search optimisation).” The Search in an AI world report and the practical implementation guide are useful resources to decipher the new visibility rules.

Marketplace activity: protected or not?

While AI disruption is still also taking place, not all marketplace activity is equally vulnerable. Here, Fabrice distinguishes between three categories of buyer behaviour, each carrying a different risk profile. He also notes that the majority of traffic falls into the first two categories.

The first is what might be called browsing as entertainment. On marketplace platforms like Vinted, many users scroll through listings without a specific item in mind, and the discovery itself is the value. This behaviour is structurally immune to AI disruption, according to Fabrice: “There’s no efficiency to be gained.” An LLM isn’t built to replicate the serendipity of finding an unexpected bargain, nor does he believe that AI firms are likely to prioritise building this capacity. “In the top 10,000 priorities for Anthropic or OpenAI, creating a feed of entertaining shopping content that is bespoke for you is not on the list.”

The second category, intent-driven search, is also largely protected. “If you just want an OLED LGC3 65-inch TV, there’s no reason to go to ChatGPT or Claude to start the process,” Fabrice says. “You just go to Amazon, buy it, done – one click.” In his view, there’s little incentive for a user to route that process through an LLM. “Most of the value is derived from the execution [of the transaction], like inventory, shipping, payment, fulfilment, returns, et cetera: all the things that the LLMs don’t want to do or are not going to do,” he explains. The dominant players in this category have accumulated enough trust, inventory depth and logistical infrastructure that, for most users, engaging with an LLM would be unnecessary friction rather than a shortcut. 

The third category, considered purchases, carries the most genuine risk. When a buyer doesn’t yet know what they want, particularly in certain high-value purchase categories (which car to buy, which neighbourhood to move to, which laptop best fits their needs), an LLM is well positioned to help guide that decision. Yet even here, Fabrice argues, the threat is often overstated. “Even though there’s more risk of disruption here, the more the marketplace does from a work perspective, the more cap value they’re going to capture,” he says. In other words, the execution value that marketplaces provide – inventory management, payments, logistics, returns – isn’t something that AI will absorb. Where the supply is highly fragmented and the transaction complex, the platform retains its indispensability regardless of how the discovery journey begins.

Therefore, for marketplace firms operating primarily with traffic from this third category, Fabrice suggests that there are other, more pressing questions: “What’s the frequency of purchase? What’s the average order value? How managed is the marketplace? How much work is the marketplace doing, and how fragmented is the supply?” 

AI adds strength to existing economic headwinds

The most significant vulnerability, in Fabrice’s view, is for marketplaces that specialise in thin, commoditised transactions. In contrast, tri-sided marketplaces and those with frequent transaction volumes are less vulnerable to disruption by LLMs.“Amazon, eBay, DoorDash, Uber: all these are protected,” he thinks, adding bluntly, “ChatGPT is not going to be delivering your DoorDash food order.” 

The platforms most at risk are those doing the least work: low-managed, low-frequency platforms where the user is mainly left to their own devices, as with Craigslist or legacy home-services directories; and markets with highly consolidated supply, where an AI agent could plausibly complete the entire transaction on a user’s behalf. Fabrice uses the airline industry as an example and singles out Expedia. With a handful of airlines running “essentially monopoly routes” and easily comparable prices, an agent asked to “buy me… a ticket, New York to Miami” could handle the booking on its own. This type of supply concentration, which poses a difficulty regardless of AI, is exacerbated by the arrival of AI agents that are capable of redirecting transactions away from marketplace intermediaries.

An optimistic long-term view

Overall, Fabrice sees AI as one component of a broader civilisational shift. That optimism is not unqualified: Fabrice concedes we’re “at peak AI fear” and bracing for “a period of disruption” amid heightened geopolitical uncertainty and a populism that “ebbs and flows, and it’s been flowing of late”. Yet he remains “beyond bullish.” “We’re headed for a world of prosperity, and the challenge is going to be figuring out what we do with said prosperity,” he thinks. In his view, the convergence of falling costs in solar energy, battery storage and AI-driven automation points toward a world better in many ways than the one in which we live today. 

In such a world, the recurring fears of technological unemployment are, he argues, historically unfounded. According to Fabrice, every prior wave of automation has generated more employment than it displaced, at higher wages and in less physically demanding conditions: “I have zero worry about the fact that amazing jobs will be created.” And he is also confident that when jobs are reduced in given areas, this will be for humanity’s benefit. “The jobs we’re eliminating are jobs that humans should not be doing. We should not be moving packages or driving cars or carrying boxes and doing repetitive manual tasks that are better done by robots and AI,” he believes. 

To Fabrice, the more challenging question is what will animate human purpose when material survival is no longer the primary organising concern. For marketplace founders navigating an uncertain moment, his message is one of calibrated AI optimism. “It’s going to make things cheaper, better, faster, which is what the internet has always been about,” he repeats. “But as usual, it’ll take a lot longer than we think it does.”

FJ Labs Portco MEXT Acquired by Advanced Micro Devices
Earning ~6X return in 6 months

FJ Labs portfolio company, MEXT, a startup using AI-powered predictive memory technology to give customers a more efficient way to utilize memory, is being acquired by American Micro Devices. As AI and data center workloads continue to scale, memory optimization is becoming increasingly relevant. MEXT’s software can reduce memory costs by nearly half while expanding usable memory capacity by two to four times, a meaningful efficiency gain for enterprise customers. 

Owing to our collaborative, network-driven approach, we were brought this deal by a friendly VC late last year and invested in the company’s Series A. Following the acquisition, this investment has generated a ~6X return in roughly 6 months. We are delighted by this outcome which is made possible by our diversified approach and ability to capitalize on idiosyncratic risk opportunities. (AMD.com)

Scout AI, the “AI brain” for unmanned warfare, announced a $100M Series A, the largest defense tech Series A in U.S history.  The premier frontier AI lab for war, Scout AI enables layered orchestration from command and control to unmanned systems across air, land, sea, and space. (TechCrunch)

FJ Labs’ fastest growing incubation, Midas, announced that mGLOBAL (tokenised onchain investment product issued by Midas) is now live on Aave, enabling investors to use mGLOBAL as collateral to borrow stablecoins and access liquidity. (LinkedIn)

Canadian fintech Float raised an $85M Series C. Float is on a mission to simplify business finance in Canada, helping teams improve compliance and scale with corporate cards, bill pay, reimbursements, FX, and more. (BusinessWire)

Finnish energy tech company Cactos closed a €12.5M round to further expand within Europe, led by Union Square Ventures. Cactos offers end-to-end solutions based on battery energy storage systems, combining hardware, software, financing and other services. (Tesi)

Forage, a mission-driven startup helping low income families save on groceries, announced a $40M Series B. The company’s payment technology is currently used at over 100K stores in all 50 states. (JoinForage)

Fabrice sat down with Mike Williams of Everything Marketplaces to discuss the state of marketplaces in the age of AI, new strategies for AI-native marketplaces, defensibility for marketplaces in the age of AI, tips for founders starting marketplaces in 2026, and more.

In Jeff’s latest piece, On Spreadsheets and Monkey Brains, he attempts to reconcile his personal style of numerate, financially oriented “New York VC” style investing with the fact that you can’t simply spreadsheet the tech breakthroughs and adjacencies that come from the best tech founders.

Make sure to check out Fabrice’s latest blog post How to Build Wealth. In this refreshingly simple framework, he distills where to invest (in what order), what to buy specifically, and what not to do. Bottom line: save consistently, invest simply, and avoid doing something stupid

What surprised me most was not that this was technically possible. It was that the economics increasingly made sense.

As I covered in my essay on Climate Optimism, solar has become the cheapest form of energy production in many parts of the world. Over the last four decades, the cost of solar modules has fallen by roughly a factor of 10 every decade. More recently, lithium batteries have followed a similar trajectory. Prices keep falling faster than almost anyone expected, and even the most optimistic forecasts of the past underestimated how quickly solar and batteries would scale.

As a result, people have consistently underestimated the growth of solar energy. Solar went from essentially nothing in 2010 to roughly 8% of global electricity generation in 2025, far outpacing even the most optimistic forecasts.

The implications are profound. Off-grid living is no longer just a survivalist fantasy or an environmental statement. In the right places, it is becoming the rational economic choice, and a preview of a world of clean energy abundance.

For my house in Turks & Caicos, the logic was obvious. The islands are blessed with abundant sunshine and cursed with very high electricity costs, in large part because power is produced from imported diesel by a monopoly utility provider. In that context, going off-grid was a no-brainer.

In the video below, I walk through the full installation with the team: the solar field, battery system, and reverse osmosis system.

There are four keys to making off-grid living work.

1. Generate Cheap Power

The first key is solar.

We installed a 200 kW solar system, large enough to power the entire compound. In a place like Turks & Caicos, solar is almost perfectly matched to the environment: abundant sun, high electricity prices, and enough available land to install panels at scale.

The beauty of solar is that once the system is installed, the marginal cost of electricity is effectively zero. Every additional kilowatt-hour produced by the sun is free. That changes how you think about energy: less as a scarce input to be rationed, and more as a resource to be harvested.

2. Store Energy for When the Sun Is Not Shining

Solar alone is not enough. The second key is storage.

We installed 645 kWh of battery capacity, which allows us to store excess solar production during the day and use it at night or when clouds reduce generation, giving us a little over a day of energy capacity.

This is what makes the system truly practical. Without batteries, you are still dependent on the grid when the sun is not shining. With enough storage, solar becomes a full energy system rather than just a daytime supplement.

It also means resilience. When a storm knocks out the island grid, as it regularly does, the house does not notice. The lights stay on, the refrigerator keeps running, and we keep making our own water. In a place that gets hurricanes, that is not a nice-to-have; it can be the difference between riding out a storm in comfort and having to leave.

One unexpected bonus is that I can monitor everything in real time from my phone: solar production, household consumption, battery charge, grid imports and exports, and overall system performance. You can see the house breathing electrically throughout the day.

3. Turn Energy Abundance into Water Abundance

The third key is water.

People often worry about water shortages, but the planet is not short of water. The Earth is roughly 70% water. The real issue is that clean, accessible fresh water is scarce in many places.

In coastal regions, cheap, abundant energy changes the equation entirely. With enough energy, you can desalinate seawater through reverse osmosis and create fresh water.

That is exactly what we did.

We installed the Island Watermaker from AqSep.

It produces 22,000 liters, or 5,812 gallons, of fresh water per day.

This is especially valuable in Turks & Caicos, where water is expensive and where irrigation is necessary if you want beautiful landscaping. With “free” solar electricity, reverse osmosis becomes extremely compelling. Energy abundance creates water abundance.

4. Make the Economics Work

The final key is economics.

The solar plant and batteries cost approximately $650,000, including import duties and installation. The reverse osmosis system cost approximately $100,000, also including import duties and installation.

Together, they offset roughly $20,000 per month in electricity bills and $10,000 per month in water bills.

That implies a payback period of a little over two years.

That is extraordinary.

Granted, Turks & Caicos is an unusually attractive place for this kind of system. It has lots of sun, high electricity prices, high water costs, and a strong need for resilience. The economics will not be this compelling everywhere.

But that is how technology adoption often begins. It starts in the places where the pain point is most acute. Then, as costs keep falling, the solution spreads to more and more geographies.

Solar, batteries, and reverse osmosis are all on declining cost curves. What makes economic sense today in islands and remote locations will increasingly make sense elsewhere.

The Future Is Abundance, Not Scarcity

The project was not easy. It took forever just to get the permits to build the system. There were logistics, import duties, installation complexities, and the usual headaches that come with doing something ambitious in a remote island environment.

But standing in a field of solar panels, watching the house power itself and make its own fresh water from the sea, felt like a glimpse of the future I believe in.

Not a future of austerity and sacrifice.

A future of clean, resilient, carbon-neutral abundance.

That, to me, is the real promise of off-grid living. It is not about disconnecting from the world. It is about building systems that are more robust, more sustainable, and ultimately more free.

I had a wonderfully frank, intimate, and multi-faceted conversation with Jodie Cook. We covered many a topic I’d never admitted to anyone: being a virgin at 27 who thought everyone around him was an idiot; the very public bankruptcy that humbled me and turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me; the hundred days I spent getting rejected by strangers on purpose; giving away everything I owned and rebuilding my life from first principles; the psychedelic journeys that changed how I read the world; and why I’ve become convinced that life is a game most people don’t realize they’re playing. If you’ve only known me as an angel investor, this is the rest of the story.

Here is how Jodie presents the conversation:

Fabrice Grinda has invested in over 1,000 companies and had more than 300 exits. He also treats life like a game.

In this interview, Fabrice explains how he thinks about ambition, failure, money, relationships, decision making, and building a life that actually feels good to live.

He shares how he went from being socially awkward and deeply ambitious to building companies, losing everything, making millions, giving money away, and designing his life from first principles.

Inside the video:

• Why work feels easier when it feels like play
• How Fabrice got over the fear of rejection
• What public failure taught him about ambition
• Why he gave away his possessions and started again
• How he makes major life decisions
• Why he believes money is a tool, not the point
• How to read the signs when something is no longer working
• What he thinks people get wrong about risk, success, and happiness

This is a conversation about success from someone who has achieved it, questioned it, and rebuilt his life around what he actually wants.

Chapters:

• 08:01, Why 100-hour weeks don’t lead to burnout
• 13:57, Why bankruptcy became one of the best things that ever happened
• 17:38, The 100-day rejection challenge that changed everything
• 25:36, The decision-making framework for major life changes
• 27:28, Giving everything away and starting from zero
• 30:01, The spiritual framework that guides decisions
• 35:12, Why you shouldn’t fear taking big risks
• 45:44, The biggest mistake most people make
• 48:15, What it was like to fail in public
• 55:25, Living your best possible life
• 1:01:20, Does free will actually exist?

Topics covered: angel investing, startup strategy, first-principles thinking, fear of rejection, decision making, founder burnout, building marketplaces, money mindset, risk, and living life as a game.

Transcript

Jodie Cook: What you’re about to hear comes from one of the most successful angel investors on the planet. Fabrice Grinda has invested in over 1,000 companies, with over 300 successful exits. He treats his entire life like a video game.

Most people spend their whole lives chasing success and still feel empty. Fabrice figured out why. In this interview, he shares how he went from being a virgin at 27 with zero social skills, to working 100-hour weeks that felt like play, to now living his dream life split between three countries. He talks about his unconventional approach to decision making, his radical philosophy on money and success, and the spiritual awakening that changed everything. This is an intense deep dive into how the ultra-successful actually think. If you’ve ever wondered what you’re missing, this is it.

Here is Fabrice.

Fabrice Grinda: I didn’t start with this perspective, to be completely honest. I had a sense of manifest destiny growing up. I got my first computer in 1984. I was 10, it was love at first click, and I knew computers and I were meant to be together forever.

I always had a very assured sense of myself. I had the ambition to make a ripple in the fabric of the universe. I don’t know where that ambition came from, I was five and I had it. I was going to be the smartest, the best, the most successful, no matter what, and that was all that mattered to me. In fact, I thought everyone around me, including my parents, were idiots. I’d think: you’re not smart enough to be graced by my presence, let me go study alone.

I was Sheldon Cooper. In my pre-teen years and early twenties, I was definitely Sheldon Cooper, everything was on the altar of intellect and ambition, and the two were highly related in my mind. For a while I wondered whether I should be in politics, but I realized my allegiance is to humanity, not to any single nation state, and the best way to impact humanity at large is through technology and harnessing its deflationary power. So at 10, 11, 12, 13, this was the 80s, my role models were Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. I was winning all the Olympiads and getting the top grades in France. When I went to interview at a top French school, they asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a tech founder, like my role models Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. And of course they said: what? You’d betray the ideals of the French Revolution.

So it was obvious, I needed to leave France and live the American dream in the US. At 17 I left Nice, where I grew up. It’s an amazing place to grow up, but it’s a sleepy summer tourist town, and if you have a modicum of ambition you don’t belong there, you belong in Paris at least. But frankly, I needed the American dream. So I left for the US, went to Princeton, and finished with the highest GPA in my class, straight A-pluses in my major.

Because I already knew how to program and knew I wanted to be in tech, I decided to study economics and math: math because it’s beautiful, and economics because it explains the way the world works. But here’s what’s interesting. I didn’t do any of it out of obligation. At Princeton I studied everything, Russian literature, the Roman Empire, Mandarin, electrical engineering, molecular biology. I was probably the only non-pre-med in molecular biology. I did these things out of intellectual curiosity. I did them for fun.

So here’s the key thing. I was very ambitious, but none of it felt like work. It all felt like play. I was building things, I had four jobs in college and built a computer company that exported equipment to the US and Europe. It was all fun. And I think that’s the fundamental difference. If a student feels their homework is homework, they’ll cram the night before, maybe get a good grade, and forget it immediately. If you do it because you find it interesting and fun, it sticks. Princeton has more Nobel Prize winners than all of France, and these are people who get their two minutes of fame and then no one remembers them. The average academic paper is read by five or seven people. They have office hours and nobody goes. I thought: I have the greatest minds in the world at my disposal, I can just go hang out and chat about their latest research. If you take a genuine interest in people and what they’re doing, they’re more than happy to talk to you. That approach, pursuing my curiosity and passion, has always led me right. It always looked like play.

In fact, this simulation we live in always looked like a video game to me. We each have character attributes that were preset before birth, and we can tweak them through training. It’s a role-playing game: through iteration you get better, you can max out some attributes and not others depending on your preset character. Pursuing curiosity and interest has always guided me.

That said, I did some things I thought were necessary that, in hindsight, I probably wouldn’t do again. Graduating at 21 in ’96, in the early bubble days, I feared people wouldn’t take me seriously, I was shy and introverted. Even though I’d built a little company that paid for college, it wasn’t a “real” company; I had no employees. I figured if I started a company I’d fail, and if I joined one I wouldn’t be taken seriously. So I went to McKinsey for a few years, as a kind of finishing school, business school, except they pay you. In hindsight I think I shouldn’t have. I should have gone straight to Silicon Valley and built or joined a startup, even if I failed, because failing is a lesson in itself. So that’s one place I went a little astray, but not very astray.

The next possible mistake: I wanted to build a startup, but I had no brilliant idea. So I thought, why don’t I take a US idea and bring it to Europe? In ’98 that was too early. It would have been far better to go to Silicon Valley and build or join something. But it was a very interesting experience. I raised $63 million in venture money, grew it from zero to $100 million in sales, and hired 150 employees. And I made a lot of first-time-founder mistakes. First, I overworked, I overcompensated for a lack of experience with sheer hours. I was working over a hundred hours a week, seven days a week, going to bed at one and waking up at five, every single day.

But even then it was play. I didn’t deem it work; I thought it was fun. And that’s the difference between two people. Imagine two people doing exactly the same thing. One is grinding because they need to prove themselves, to their parents, to society, to a teacher, whatever chip they carry on their shoulder. At some point they burn out. The other is doing the exact same hundred hours, but loving every minute because it’s play. They can go on forever. And that person wins every time.

Jodie Cook: It probably shows physically, too. The person for whom it’s play would look healthier and happier.

Fabrice Grinda: Even though I had no life outside of it. I had no friends, no girlfriend, I didn’t even have a girlfriend until I was 27. It didn’t even occur to me to look for one. It was manifest destiny, world domination. Girls were a distraction. Fun, but a distraction. I needed to focus on what I thought was important.

Of course, when the bubble blew up and I lost everything, I realized that being high-IQ and successful might not be the be-all and end-all. When you’re younger, you’re insecure about the things you’re not good at. I was very confident in my intellect and in being a smart, successful tech guy. But I was deeply insecure socially, I had no interest in soccer or clubbing, I’d rather be into music, and I had basically zero social connections. I had no friends in college.

What’s interesting is that when that company failed, I went from hero, covers of magazines, the French Forbes, the eight o’clock news, to losing it all. And then I had a moment of reflection. I actually sent myself a very long email: what should I do now? I’d been in the right place at the right time and I’d missed my chance. One opportunity, and I didn’t take it. I thought long and hard: do I go back to McKinsey? Business school, which is a bit ridiculous, because my company was a case study there. Private equity? And then I thought: I didn’t do any of this for the money in the first place. I like building something out of nothing. I like harnessing technology to make things cheaper and better for other people. Even if tech was going to be a small, niche thing with no money in it, you know what, I’m going to stay a tech founder, because that’s what I actually care about. This is my form of play. So this is 2001: the bubble had burst, venture was dead, tech was dead. And I’ll share that email I sent myself at the time.

Jodie Cook: I’d love that. So because the bubble had burst, you literally thought: there’s no money in this, but I’m going to play in it anyway because I love it.

Fabrice Grinda: Yes. And one piece of advice: when you write yourself these emails, be thoughtful and methodical, but don’t try to reach a conclusion while you’re writing. I’ve done that email exercise multiple times. Let me send you the first one.

Jodie Cook: One question on McKinsey after college, was that a mistake because you were doing something you felt you “should” do?

Fabrice Grinda: No, the funny thing is I liked it. For the first time, I liked the people. McKinsey at the time was where the smartest people were, so I actually made friends for the first time, and I learned written and oral communication and public speaking, which were useful. The work itself was just reasonably uninteresting. I think it was a mistake mainly because I lost two years of the tech bubble I should have been part of. And those same communication skills you can learn on the job by just doing it. The first time I gave a presentation to an audience of 500 people, I was scared shitless. By the fiftieth time, easy. Put me on the other side of a camera with millions of people watching, it doesn’t faze me. I’ve done it so many times.

What resonates is being your true, authentic self. The one thing that set me apart early on: most people have a fundamental insecurity, a little devil telling them they’re not good enough, not working hard enough. I never had that. I’ve always had the opposite problem, you could do anything, nothing could stop you, whatever you put your mind to you’ll accomplish. That was always there.

So McKinsey wasn’t a huge mistake. I think there are no real mistakes. McKinsey, joining a startup, building a startup, all three would have turned out great. Going straight to Silicon Valley is probably a marginally better outcome than going to McKinsey and going to France, but whatever. The thing is, I almost sold my company for $300 million and would have made $120 million. Instead I went bankrupt. And it’s probably one of the best things that ever happened to me, because I was an arrogant, narcissistic, self-involved prick, condescending and judgmental, and I didn’t understand the value of money. I thought it was easy to make, so I didn’t value it. Failing so publicly, the first time I’d ever failed at anything, was useful for perspective.

It also taught me to stop being judgmental. Actually, what taught me that was forcing myself to go on dates. I realized people are built differently, and there isn’t just one metric of value. For me it had been all IQ and ambition, if you didn’t have those, you weren’t interesting. That’s why I didn’t relate well to my parents or to most people. Eventually I realized: we’re all built differently, we all have our own perspectives and lives, and there’s no judgment to be had. And a lot of that judgment came from insecurity, because I was so good at being smart and ambitious and so bad at being social, having friends, having hobbies. Once I dropped the insecurity and started accepting people for who they are, my relationships, with others, and especially with my parents and family, improved dramatically. So I went from a condescending, arrogant prick to someone who accepts that everyone is built differently and has their own merits. But that transition took years. It probably started at 25 or 26, after the public failure, and continued into my early thirties, as I started dating and realizing there’s more to life than IQ.

Jodie Cook: Imagine that. If you had to pinpoint one year when Fabrice 2.0 was created, when would it be?

Fabrice Grinda: It was a gradual path. Going to McKinsey at 21, in 1996, and realizing there are a lot of other smart, interesting people out there, I just hadn’t known where to find them. So I started interacting and having friends for the first time. Then I started my startup in 1999–2000 and realized: I thought I was a shy introvert, but being eloquent and passionate actually comes naturally to me. My perceived introversion was driven by being in settings without my peers, where I couldn’t express my passion. Put me on stage and, oh my God, this comes naturally. So when the startup failed in 2001, I thought: I’m a confident, extroverted, curious person intellectually and in business, and yet I’m shy and introverted in my personal life. Maybe that’s just an artifact of never having had friends, never having been in the right social situations, never having dated. Why don’t I get a girlfriend?

Obviously, if you’ve never even asked a girl on a date in your life, the concept of a girlfriend is hard. So for a hundred days, I forced myself to ask girls out in the streets of New York, ten girls a day, for a hundred days, so a thousand girls. The point wasn’t to get a date; the point was to get over the fear of rejection. The benefit was that I’d asked so many VCs for money and been told no that, in a way, you get used to rejection.

Jodie Cook: How did that go? The first time must have been terrifying.

Fabrice Grinda: The first time I literally ran away in the other direction, because it’s awkward, you’re asking a random beautiful stranger out in the street. But thanks to the law of large numbers, it went pretty well. I got 45 dates, roughly one every other night. The problem was, I’d never been on a date in my life, and my expectation of a date and the reality were very different. I thought a date was a meeting of the minds, two people debating Locke versus Hobbes, Rousseau versus Voltaire. It turns out the random beautiful stranger you pick up on a New York street is a model-slash-actress, really a bartender and aspiring model, interested in fashion and the latest pop news, with no interest in any of the things I wanted to talk about, and vice versa. Our worlds didn’t overlap at all. I had no money, so I quickly figured out it should be drinks, not dinner. And I quickly realized this wasn’t going to work. One of the women was so attractive that on the second date she asked me to come over, and I said no, I’d never had a girlfriend, and someone I had zero intellectual chemistry with was not going to be my first. But it was still useful, because I got over the fear of rejection. After that I went looking for the right women instead of the random beautiful stranger, and ultimately found love several times.

So, the next startup. It’s interesting because it was a means to an end, and I didn’t grind through it. I didn’t like the product I was building, the products I was selling, the category I was in, or the partners I was working with. I didn’t like anything about it.

Jodie Cook: But it was lucrative?

Fabrice Grinda: I was selling ringtones. I brought ringtones to the US. Here’s the thing: in a world with no constraints, go build what you want, follow your passion. But in 2001 there were real constraints, there was no capital available. My passion was to be a tech founder, in the US, ideally in New York, because I was madly in love with a girl (it didn’t work out). So I needed to be in New York, in the US, building a tech company. But there was no VC money; tech was dead; it was going to be a small, niche business. So instead of building the kind of thing I’d want to build, I built something I thought I could make profitable with very limited capital. That’s why I built a ringtone business, even though I’d never really listened to music, and I thought the music companies were idiots. They were. They kept saying no to my advances even though I was trying to make them money, and I ended up making them hundreds of millions. The phone companies didn’t understand the opportunity either.

So I didn’t like the products I was selling, and I didn’t think providing street cred to teenagers added much to society. But I genuinely liked the process, building the company, hiring the team, scaling it, doing the deals, even though I didn’t like the category. You also have to be aware of the constraints you live in. I had no VC money, so I built that company the old-fashioned way: on profits. We almost died many times. We missed payroll 27 times, including four months in a row. It took two and a half years to land the first operator deal. But once it landed, they loved us, and revenues went from $1 million to $5 million to $200 million, profitably. Then I sold it, too early, but better too early than too late, and for cash, because the last company’s stock had fallen 99.98%. At 29, I made about $43 million. The means to an end had paid off, and now I had the capital to build what I really wanted.

That’s when I went back to building marketplaces and built OLX. OLX is Craigslist for the rest of the world, except mobile-first and female-friendly, because women are the primary decision maker in every household. Women decide which house you live in, which babysitter you hire, which car and couch you buy. Craigslist was the least female-friendly site imaginable, full of scams, prostitution, and junk. I thought: in emerging markets like India, Pakistan, and Brazil, there are no payment systems, no trust, no shipping. Can I build a site that becomes part of the fabric of society and makes the world a better place there? It took a long time, but it worked, this time VC-backed, building something I truly cared about. I grew it to 350 million users a month. About 5% of the world’s population uses it every month; tens of millions of people make a living off it. In those countries we’re part of the fabric of society. Every day we’d get thousands of letters from users telling us what a difference we’d made. So my ambition was finally aligned with my values.

Jodie Cook: At five years old you had an ambition for a ripple effect. With OLX, being part of the fabric of society, getting all those messages, were you aware at the time that this was what you were here to do?

Fabrice Grinda: Oh, yes. That’s why I started it. I studied economics because it explains how the world works, and I love markets because they bring efficiency to things that are opaque and fragmented. By making things cheaper, they make things better and improve people’s purchasing power. So I knew from the start I wanted to build marketplaces. To me the power of the internet is cheaper, better, faster, and I wanted to bring that to hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. I knew OLX was the company I was meant to build. It took a while, but I loved it. Aligned values, aligned mission.

But funnily enough, once I’d succeeded, the same thing happened again, I felt I was no longer living my life’s mission. Picture 2012: I’ve won the war. Huge company, 11,000 employees, 30 countries, letters from users every day, a top site in every one of those countries, massive external validation. But I wasn’t happy anymore, because the job had changed. In the early days I was writing user stories and product specs, feeling a direct impact on the outcome. Once you’re 11,000 employees and part of a publicly traded company, your job becomes building quarterly budgets and making sure you hit the numbers. And I wasn’t happy day-to-day. So I went back to first principles. What if, the unthinkable, I quit the company I started, the one where I’m getting all the pay and recognition, because it’s no longer true to what I want to be doing? And I knew it was time, because I wasn’t loving the day-to-day. To me, loving the day-to-day is what matters. So I wrote myself another long email, laying out all the crazy things I could be doing instead. I wrote it in the summer of 2012, while I was still CEO of OLX.

Jodie Cook: When you write these, are you writing to your current self?

Fabrice Grinda: Yes, to my current self. I lay out where I am in life, what I’m happy with, what I’m not, what could be better, and what the options are, with no limitations. I went broad, run for office in Cuba, become a public intellectual, whatever. Then, instead of imagining the ideal day for each option, the day you succeed and get celebrated, I imagine the average day. What does it actually look like, and what are the pros and cons? What would I like? What wouldn’t I like? Then I send the email to people who know me, friends, advisors, and ask two questions: knowing what you know of me, what do you think I should do? And, if it were you, what would you do? Those are different perspectives. Most people, if they were CEO of a hugely successful company with amazing pay and recognition, would stay. My conclusion was: absolutely not. You start from scratch.

In fact, I went to full first principles. I decided I didn’t like that life has a default mode, you have an apartment, so you go there; a city, so you live there; a group of friends, so you see them. What if I gave everything away to charity and started from nothing? Complete first principles. If I had infinite time and nothing to do, where would I want to be today? What would I want to be doing? Who would I want to see?

So that’s the exercise I went through after deciding to leave OLX. I went to first principles, and then I iterated, I didn’t know what the answer would be. I tried couch-surfing on friends’ couches, which was a total disaster. My vision was that we’d have infinite time to remake the world, talk like we were in college, play tennis. But I was single with infinite energy and time, and they were married with kids. I wasn’t a value-add; I was a distraction. So that didn’t work.

Jodie Cook: And you have to sleep on a couch, too.

Fabrice Grinda: Exactly. So I tried many things. I Airbnb’d for years. I worked from hotels. I tried staying in a place for one week then moving every week, but that was tiring. I tried two months, but that was too long. I iterated and iterated until I got to where I am today. People don’t throw enough spaghetti at the wall. Two things matter: you have to throw the spaghetti, and then you have to read the tea leaves. For seven years I tried to build a big compound in the Dominican Republic, and for seven years the universe kept saying no, no, no. I even wrote a blog post about the universe kicking me in the teeth, actually it’s called “The universe is whispering to you.” For a long time I refused to take no for an answer.

Jodie Cook: And that was recent?

Fabrice Grinda: Yes, recent. I explained why I’d chosen the Dominican Republic and everything that went wrong, again and again. But I learned to read the signs. I’ve gotten much better at it since I took my spiritual path in earnest, which happened fairly randomly, I did three deep psychedelic journeys: one on ayahuasca, one on psilocybin, and a couple on LSD. Since then I’ve become much better at reading the signs than before, when I was ignoring them.

I’ve always thought life is a game. I even wrote a long blog post on the meaning of life, the meaning of life is life itself: to play the game and to be your true, authentic self. Most people don’t realize that. They think things are serious when it’s all a game, all play. But here’s where a lot of people in spirituality fail, and why a lot of them never make money: letting things flow is very different from sitting on the couch waiting for things to happen. Going with the flow of the river isn’t doing nothing. It’s doing things, then watching the response you get from the universe to see whether you’re aligned. You still have to be active. The monks who think they need to meditate all day are, I think, missing the point of the simulation. You’re meant to be a participant, not to transcend or disengage. Zen would call that clinging to emptiness; Watts would say they missed the punchline. The moment you reject the game, you’re back in the illusion, you think there’s a purer state somewhere else, but there isn’t. This is the game. The game is playing this life. That’s why you should have fun with it. It’s why my whole life I’ve done things that make me happy even when they make no sense to others, leaving a company at the top, giving all my possessions to charity, starting a tech startup in 2001 when tech was “dead” and everyone told me to go to business school or private equity.

Do the things that resonate. I lead a very nontraditional life, distributed across three and a half geographies, with a nontraditional relationship, but it’s true to me. You shouldn’t live your life worried about the judgment of others, or do things because you think you “should.” Do what’s right for you and what truly resonates.

It applies to startups too. You build, you try things, you have to try a lot of things, throw the spaghetti, and then you read the signs. In a startup, the worst thing is to fail slowly; you want to fail fast. Try hard, and if it doesn’t work, move on. If your metrics are 10x away from where they need to be, you’re probably not going to get there. If they’re 50% away, then with enough iteration you probably will. Grit and tenacity matter, if you don’t try hard, it means nothing, but you also have to read the signs. You try hard, and then you learn whether it’s going to work based on the data and the signals you’re getting.

Jodie Cook: I once heard the phrase, “the universe rewards big risk-takers.” Which I guess is like throwing big spaghetti at the wall.

Fabrice Grinda: It’s just as much work to build a small startup as a big one. It’s just as much work to open a restaurant as to build a billion-dollar company. So you might as well build the big one. Go big or go home. But again, it has to be a reflection of you, there’s no judgment in it. Some people are very happy running a mom-and-pop shop or a restaurant; maybe you want the local connection to your community and love chatting with your customers. Optimize for what’s right for you.

And I don’t actually think the universe rewards big risk-takers more than small ones. I think it rewards people who do what’s right for them, what’s in line with their energy, passion, vision, and joy. The universe rewards play and joy. Be joyful and playful in everything you do. That play is rewarding in and of itself, and I think you’ll be rewarded for it. When people force things, it’s hard to make it sustainable.

Jodie Cook: Have you always applied this to the people in your life, too? Read the signs, play the game, follow joy, do you apply that to who you spend time with?

Fabrice Grinda: Yes. First of all, I don’t think there’s much real risk in life for people like me. My first startup went bankrupt, so what? I could find a job at McKinsey or Goldman in a minute. I could make a ton of money if I wanted to; all my friends are successful and could hire me; I could live on my parents’ couch. There’s no real risk. What’s the downside, I live with my parents for a couple of years? It’s not the end of the world. People have an overblown sense of the risk they’re taking. I’ve been bankrupt, so what? It’s not that hard to make enough to eat, and people can help you. Okay, maybe you’re not dining somewhere fancy, but an all-you-can-eat buffet for five bucks exists. People overestimate how much risk there really is. If you’re confident in your abilities and your intellect, there is no risk.

Second, yes, the people you surround yourself with matter. I try to surround myself with people who have a similar mentality. I’ve noticed that people who constantly complain that horrible things happen to them tend to put themselves in situations where horrible things happen, it’s confirmation bias for their belief that the universe is out to get them. I believe the universe is out to reward me, so it does. So I surround myself with happy-go-lucky people who believe the same: that life is a game, you’re here to have fun, you work hard but don’t take it all too seriously.

Jodie Cook: When you had 11,000 employees and all that external validation but realized you weren’t happy, how did you turn that feeling into the next plan? How big a part was the email you wrote to yourself?

Fabrice Grinda: This was pre-meditation, pre-spiritual-awakening for me, that started on May 30th, 2015. When you have the sensation that you’re bored or unhappy, you think about it and talk to people about it, but thinking about it is loose and unstructured. What I love about writing is that it structures your thoughts. When you put pen to paper, you have to articulate what you’re really comfortable and uncomfortable with, the actual pros and cons. I’d been noodling on it for months, and the writing was the clarification of that process. Taking the time to write it down structured my thinking far more rigorously, and that became the basis for the conclusion that I should leave.

Jodie Cook: It’s interesting that you’re an ENTJ. I’m an ENTJ; my husband’s an INTJ. I’ve spent my whole life around NTJs, I almost thought about starting a podcast called “NTJ Radio.” And we all think we’re the best.

Fabrice Grinda: Though I’m on the border, I love public speaking, but I’m also perfectly happy alone with a book. Small talk drains all my energy; I hate it. I’m happy to go to Burning Man with a girlfriend and enjoy the place, but not to make small talk with strangers.

Jodie Cook: The N makes sense, intuitive, visionary, in tune with spirituality. But the T and J can feel at odds with that, because we want to plan things and put logic around everything. Did you ever feel that push and pull, pre-May 30th, 2015?

Fabrice Grinda: First, I haven’t retaken the test, so maybe it’s changed.

Jodie Cook: Right.

Fabrice Grinda: You might be more of an F than you think.

Jodie Cook: Maybe, yeah, that would be interesting. The ENTJ type is the commander: control everything, seek control, cling to control. So how does that ,

Fabrice Grinda: I see it differently. You put things in motion, but you don’t get attached to the outcome. You do the work and then watch how it plays out, and adjust accordingly. I’ve never been a control freak, even before.

Jodie Cook: And the “you can do it” attitude, some people have an internal monologue saying “no, you can’t, it’ll never work.” You’ve never had that. There’s a school of thought that says your internal monologue comes from your parents telling you what you can and can’t do. Where did yours come from?

Fabrice Grinda: I don’t know, maybe it was the opposite. Maybe it came from observing my parents and thinking, these people are incompetent, I’ll do it myself.

Jodie Cook: Did you tell them that?

Fabrice Grinda: Oh, yes. When I was 10 I was insufferable. I’d tell my parents at the dinner table that they should be grateful to have my intellectual presence there. I was an insufferable, arrogant kid, Sheldon Cooper. I told them I didn’t understand where my intellect came from, but it clearly didn’t come from them. And yet, funnily enough, I was probably the best kid you could have: skipped grades, straight A-pluses, never got in trouble, never drank, never went out. Literally the best in every respect, but also very cold and judgmental, not very lovey-dovey.

Jodie Cook: And do you laugh about it with them now?

Fabrice Grinda: Oh, absolutely. My mother makes fun of me. We definitely laugh about it now. But yes, I was very different then.

Jodie Cook: How’s Angel doing?

Fabrice Grinda: She has an eye infection, so she needs a cone and I have to put drops in her eyes morning and evening, but she’s doing great. We have an amazing relationship now, because, you know what? They’re not as smart, and that’s okay. They’re not as ambitious, and that’s okay. They’re their own people, with their own pros and cons and the things they love. I used to be judgmental; now I’m not. Now I accept people as they are. I used to want to change people, or judge them by a certain framework of value. Now I see everyone as invaluable exactly as they are. In fact, thank you for being you, because it allows me to be me. I couldn’t have the life I love today if it weren’t for all the other people living their lives and allowing me to live mine. That’s the real difference: judgment has completely disappeared. I don’t think there’s any single wrong way to live your life. You do what’s right for you, and that’s okay. And maybe you’re doing things that aren’t right for you, but maybe that’s the experience you need in order to learn that lesson. People can give you advice, but it’s up to you whether you take it. It’s your journey, and you shouldn’t be judgmental of other people’s journeys; you don’t know what they’re going through. That’s probably the single biggest difference between back then and now.

Jodie Cook: Funny, I was just writing the word “advice” as you said it. So with this full acceptance of other people, what do you do when someone specifically asks you for advice?

Fabrice Grinda: I tell them what I’d want to hear myself: if I were you, here’s what I’d do; if I were me in your situation, here’s what I’d do; and here’s the process I’d follow. Now it’s up to you to decide whether it resonates and whether to act on it. So I still give advice, especially when asked, but I’m not attached to the outcome. It’s their choice to take it or not.

For instance, part of how I give to charity is that occasionally, when I have a big exit, I just give money to friends, because many of them have made choices that are good for humanity but not great for them. Someone who ran a dermatology clinic decided to go into cancer research and cut their salary by five. Better for the world, maybe, but not great for them. So I’ll occasionally give people like that $100,000 or $200,000, and here’s how I do it: it’s not recurring, and there are no strings attached. You can blow it in Vegas, go on vacation, put a down payment on a house, it doesn’t matter. Give willingly and freely, with no expectations. Do it because it’s the right thing to do, because you love them. That’s true of everything, including advice. I don’t have expectations on the other end. You do things because they’re the right thing to do.

Jodie Cook: Is there anything I should have asked you? Anything you really wanted to talk about that we didn’t cover?

Fabrice Grinda: What I think people are bad at, and this is the subject of a recent blog post, is being themselves. Too many people have a combination of FOMO and doing things because they think they should, because they think someone like them is supposed to want those things, or because their parents or society want it. Very few people are truly themselves, doing what they really want and being their authentic self, instead of worrying about what others think. That’s probably the biggest mistake younger people make, worrying about what other people think, when no one is really thinking about them at all, and doing things because they “should” rather than because they want to. Don’t do things for the résumé or the pedigree. Do them because you really want to. When you do, in my observation, very good things happen.

Jodie Cook: Pre-27, before you’d ever dated, geeking out and thinking everyone else was an idiot, did you have any sense of obligation, or worry about what people thought? Or have you always just not thought about it?

Fabrice Grinda: I never cared, because I judged them for not being smart enough. They could judge me for being a virgin at 27, but I could judge them for being unworthy. So no, I never cared.

Jodie Cook: Have you ever written an “advice to my former self”?

Fabrice Grinda: The funny thing is, when I ask myself whether I have any regrets, the answer is probably no, because I love where my life is today, and I wouldn’t change anything. If I changed anything, I probably wouldn’t be where I am. Including the very public failure at 25 or 26, including being a virgin until 27, including being an arrogant, condescending kid. If you “fixed” all those things, I worry the outcome would actually be worse. It would definitely be different, and I can imagine many scenarios where it’s worse than where I am. I genuinely think I’m now leading the best life that’s ever been lived.

Jodie Cook: When you say the public failure, can you give a snapshot of how public it was?

Fabrice Grinda: I was on the eight o’clock news every night and on the cover of every magazine. So when the company went bankrupt, and I had a falling out with one of the richest men in the world at the time, it was very high-profile. I’d signed an NDA, so I couldn’t talk about any of what had happened. My image was being destroyed and I couldn’t even defend myself.

Jodie Cook: What did you do while those headlines were running?

Fabrice Grinda: Funnily enough, I didn’t particularly care. I thought: I’m amazing, people are entitled to their opinions, and I’m just going to go build my next startup, even if it’s small and there’s no money in it.

Jodie Cook: I wonder if you just had a sense that it would be a blip, a story you’d tell in the future.

Fabrice Grinda: I definitely did not know that. At the time I thought I’d lost the biggest thing, that I’d been in the right place at the right time with the right skills, and I’d let it slip through my fingers. It’s the same feeling I’ve had every time I’ve fallen in love and it hasn’t worked out, including recently. In the moment it feels like the soul-crushing, be-all and end-all. But it’s interesting: now, when these things happen, I do think there may be something to the idea of one infinite present. On the second date with one woman, after she left I sent her a voice note saying, “This is amazing, I love you”, and then thought, what the hell, I just told her I love you on the second date. So I deleted it and didn’t tell her for the next five months, because I was embarrassed. But somehow I knew she was going to be one of the great loves of my life. And in the final months, before our recent breakup, I felt dread, even though I’d never been as in love, and everything felt the most perfect it had ever been. Somehow I felt it coming. I think you sometimes have a premonition of these things.

It’s funny, only this year have I really been writing on these topics of spirituality. I wrote something I didn’t publish, because it would beg the question of why I’m suddenly writing about falling in love and who we should fall in love with. But, believe it or not, Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code, just released a new book, The Secret of Secrets, and it’s about consciousness and non-dual existence. It really resonated; I’m reading it now. He actually wrote a good book for once. These non-dual themes have definitely been on my mind for the last six to nine months.

Jodie Cook: Have you read The Game of Life and How to Play It?

Fabrice Grinda: No, but I suspect I could have written it.

Jodie Cook: It’s a very old book, the second edition is from 1941, maybe earlier, possibly the 1920s. Florence Scovel Shinn. It’s all those classic ideas. I have so much highlighted from it. Are there other books you’d recommend? If you took a very logical, skeptical person and said, “read one book that will change your life,” which would it be?

Fabrice Grinda: Honestly, read my blog post on the meaning of life. It’s almost a book in itself, about an hour-long read. The reason it’s worth it for a skeptical, rational person is that I go from first principles: this is what I experienced as a rational, scientific-minded individual, and this is how I explain it. It works well for skeptical intellects as an argument for why the world is the way it is, versus a lot of spiritual mumbo-jumbo that doesn’t resonate with normal people. It’s nice to say “the universe is one” and “Maya is illusion,” but it doesn’t speak to people. What I describe is actual, first-person, real experience, and then I generalize from there.

Jodie Cook: Have you turned that blog post into a book?

Fabrice Grinda: That one, maybe. The blog as a whole is harder. I’ve thought about it for a long time. First, I wanted to wait until my kids were older, so I could say I’m a successful parent in addition to having a successful life. The other issue: the most popular nonfiction books have one central idea repeated fifty times. My blog should arguably be more successful than it is, and it certainly would be if it had one central theme, all spirituality, or all marketplaces, or all fundraising. The fact that I write about love, decision making, and non-dual existence makes it hard to find an audience, because deeply intellectual and curious people are few and far between; most people are more narrow. So the breadth of topics I cover makes it hard to build a book around a single unified theme.

Jodie Cook: But aren’t you the unified theme? Even if your hundred closest friends read it first, if they all love it and tell more people, I think you are the theme.

Fabrice Grinda: Yeah. It could be “the game of life.” The book I wanted to write is called Life: How to Live the Best Life Possible. I’ve been thinking about it, but I wanted to wait until I’d also been proven a successful parent.

Jodie Cook: How do you define that? And how old do they need to be to prove it?

Fabrice Grinda: Happy, well-adjusted kids who are thriving in the world, being their authentic selves, not depressed, not addicted. You’d probably know reasonably early, but to be sure, maybe 25 or 30. Right now they’re four, two, and negative-nine-months. I’m implanting an embryo with the surrogate next week, the third one. My son asked for it: a year ago, when he was three, he said he wanted a brother. And this is the same son who put his penis in a Seabob and cut it, not permanently; kids do a lot of stupid things. But I took it as the universe talking to me through him. So I had a conversation with him: do you understand that a brother doesn’t come out fully formed, that he’ll need the milkies, that he’ll be small and need to learn to talk and walk? And he said, “Yeah, but eventually he’s going to be great. I want a brother.” So I thought: okay, the universe is telling me to make him a brother.

I have frozen embryos from an egg donor, I got the donor when I decided to have kids, which was after an ayahuasca ceremony. Speaking of reading the tea leaves: in that ceremony, everyone around me was having a horrible time, throwing up, crying, screaming. The message I got was that I’m living my best life, my life’s purpose. My journey was the opposite of everyone else’s, singing, dancing, love, joy. I drank four cups, and everyone around me was in agony, while I was thinking, this is the best thing ever, I could do this all day.

But my grandmother, who had passed more than 20 years earlier, told me something. She said I’d been resistant to having kids because I thought I was leading a perfect life and that kids would impede my quality of life. And that belief was based on observational data: my friends with kids disappeared from my life, were always tired, and complained about their kids whenever I saw them. But she said: you’re wrong. You lead a nontraditional life, so you can be a nontraditional parent. What people in New York do incorrectly is become helicopter parents, they substitute their kids for their own lives, they’re no longer a couple or individuals, they become only “the parents.” Don’t do that. Keep living your life and take your kids with you; they’ll have fun. So I’ve taken my three-and-four-year-old heli-skiing, kitesurfing, rock climbing, paragliding, I put him in a pack and we go camping. You name it. She was right that the cost is lower, not financially, but in quality of life, than I’d expected. And she said the benefits are greater than I thought. Every parent tells you “it’s the best thing ever,” but that’s generic. What mattered was why she thought it would specifically be great for me: you love teaching, you’ve taught at Harvard and Stanford, and you’ll love teaching someone you recognize yourself in. And you’re a big kid. You love playing, you play video games, you race remote-control cars and planes. This will give you an even bigger excuse to build Legos and train sets. You’ll be the biggest kid ever, and you’ll love it.

In the ceremony, I was also visited by a white German shepherd who said: you’re an epic being of light, a beacon in a universe of darkness, you need an epic white dog. You think Ghost from Game of Thrones is fictional, but it’s based on a real dog, a white German shepherd. Come find me. So I loved that ceremony: I’m leading my best life, plus kids and a white German shepherd, and a boy and a girl, because the relationship is different with each. And the other message from that ceremony was: if you keep trying and it’s not working, move on. That lesson came in 2018, that’s when I left the Dominican Republic. After that ceremony it became clear: follow the signs the universe is giving you. So it’s only been seven or eight years that I’ve gotten better at reading the signs rather than forcing things.

Jodie Cook: Are you into astrology?

Fabrice Grinda: Not really. Could there be something to it? Maybe. But I’m more of a “let’s drop acid, tune in, and figure things out” person, a couple of times a year, light doses. The deep ceremonies, as I said, three times so far. I’ll see when the next one calls.

Jodie Cook: So do you ultimately believe things are preordained?

Fabrice Grinda: I think there may be determinism at the universal level, but I do think we have individual, local free will, and not just the illusion of it. I really think we have actual local free will, even though it doesn’t matter at a galactic scale. We have predispositions, and it’s up to us whether to follow them. So the universe looks deterministic, but I think we still have individual free will, and regardless, it doesn’t change the outcome of the universe.

Jodie Cook: I think about it like that too. Everyone gets this consciousness and can do what they want with it, it’s up to you to play the game at different levels. You could play at the highest level and achieve everything you’re capable of with all your given cards. Or you could take the exact same ingredients and do something else with them that wastes them, though you might not feel they’re wasted, because you just have a different level of ambition.

Fabrice Grinda: Yeah, it’s Alan Watts’s dream of life. If every night you could dream a life of 80 years, at first you’d dream lives of infinite pleasure and control. But after a few nights, once you’d fulfilled all your fantasies, you’d say: maybe I want to do something where I don’t control the outcome, let’s see what happens. You’d have a few of those, and they’d be scary and exciting and different. And as the nights went on, you’d dream further and wilder things, including suffering, war, disease, because the point is to experience. Eventually you’d get to the point where you’re living exactly the life you’re leading today. And I really believe that’s true.

My perspective is that reality experiences itself. We are the universe; we are the consciousness of the universe experiencing itself. We are all God, basically, but we forgot our divinity, because ultimately we’re one. And the reason we intentionally forget our divinity is so that we can have all these experiences. If you’re an immortal, omnipotent, omniscient deity, you’re bored. This simulation is a way of having novel experiences for an otherwise bored, immortal deity. Because we’re all godly, this is why manifesting works, we have these superpowers, we’ve just forgotten them. And it’s not just me: we are all gods. You are a god. That is where my interpretation diverges from traditional Christianity. They think there’s one God, Jesus Christ. I think he’s one, but we’re all gods. There’s a universal consciousness, and we each filter a subset of it down to the individual you are. So you’re Jodie, I’m Fabrice, but it’s an infinite speciation of the same universal consciousness. At the end of the day, we’re all one. I can see it when I’m on acid: I look at the atoms of the table and see them moving, because there’s mostly space between them. All of this makes so much sense to me.

Jodie Cook: Do you use your phone much?

Fabrice Grinda: First of all, I’m on permanent do-not-disturb, no rings, no vibrations. You want to be in the present. Imagine if, while we were having this conversation, notifications kept showing up; even a vibration takes your attention away from the present. Do I think a phone is useful for communication? Absolutely, I use WhatsApp all the time to chat with friends and family, and I like watching funny YouTube videos. But I’m not doom-scrolling. I’m much more a content creator than a content consumer, I’m writing blog posts, posting on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. I don’t look at TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook much, and I don’t follow any news. I think news and politics are a trap, an outrage-fabrication machine designed to capture your attention, but ultimately irrelevant.

Jodie Cook: That was Fabrice Grinda, angel investor and entrepreneur, who’s proven that treating life as a game works. You can follow him online to see what he does next. What’s the one thing from this interview you’re going to try?

• They earn money.
• They spend money.
• They vaguely hope things will work out.

Ten years later: “Wait… where did my money go?”

This is especially true for many smart, successful women I know, not because they’re less capable, but because no one ever gave them a clear, simple playbook.

So here it is.

Step 1: Understand Your Cash Flow.

Let’s make it real.

Case A: $100K income

• Gross: $100,000
• Taxes (~30%): $30,000
• Net: $70,000 (~$5,800/month)

Spending:

• Rent: $2,200
• Lifestyle: $3,000
• Total: ~$5,200

Savings: ~$600/month (~$7,200/year)

You’ll be fine. You won’t be rich.

Case B: $150K income (same lifestyle)

• Net: ~$105,000 (~$8,750/month)
• Spending unchanged: ~$5,200

Savings: ~$3,500/month (~$42,000/year)

Now we’re talking. Wealth is built by savings rate, not investment brilliance.

• $7K/year → slow progress.
• $20K/year → real wealth.
• $30K–$40K/year → financial independence trajectory.

Step 2: Build Your Foundation.

1. Emergency Fund.

Keep: 4–6 months of expenses in cash.

Example: $5K/month spend → $20K–$30K reserve.

This is not for returns. This is for not making stupid decisions under stress.

Put it in a high-yield account like the Wealthfront Cash Account which currently earns 3.30%.

Why I like Wealthfront Cash:

• Very easy UX.
• Easy online setup.
• Good yield.
• No minimums / no monthly fees.
• Strong liquidity features.
• Strong FDIC coverage structure through partner banks, with eligibility up to $8 million for individual accounts

Keep your emergency fund and short-term cash here.

2. Kill Bad Debt.

Credit cards = guaranteed negative returns.

Pay them off!

Step 3: Where to Invest (The Only Order That Matters).

This is where most people get it wrong.

1. 401(k) → Up to Employer Match.

Take the free money. If your employer matches, take it. Always. No exceptions.

Example:

• You put $5K
• Employer adds $5K
  → Instant 100% return

2. Roth IRA → Max It.

If there is no match, this becomes your first priority.

• You contribute after-tax money.
• It grows tax-free forever.
• You can withdraw contributions anytime.
• Full investment control.

This is underrated because it’s both a retirement account and a flexibility tool. For most people in their 20s and 30s, especially those not yet at peak income, this is usually better than a 401(k) without a match.

2026 limit: $7,500/year.

3. Taxable Brokerage.

This is where most advice gets lazy.

You’ll often hear: “Max your 401(k) before anything else.”

A 401(k) is often more tax-efficient because it avoids tax drag during compounding. However, withdrawals are taxed as ordinary income, while taxable investments benefit from lower capital gains rates and full flexibility.

In addition to saving for the future, you can use your taxable brokerage for:

• Quitting your job.
• Traveling.
• Starting a company.
• Leaving a bad relationship.

That’s why on average I would say only do the 401(k) up to the employer match, then max the Roth IRA, then go taxable. You don’t want to end up retirement-rich but life-poor.

That said if you have very high savings, are in a high tax bracket, are stable in your career and location, and don’t need near term liquidity, you can also contribute to your 401(k) beyond the match for up to $24,500 per year total.

Step 4: What to Actually Buy.

Don’t overthink this.

Option 1 (Best for 90% of people)

• 100% VT (global stock ETF)

Done.

Note that most 401(k) plans don’t offer global ETFs like VT. In that case, just use a low-cost US equity index fund (like an S&P 500 fund) inside the 401(k). Then use VT in your Roth IRA and taxable account. Because VT is ~60–65% US, this naturally brings your total portfolio to roughly 75–80% US / 20–25% international, which is exactly where you want to be.

Option 2 (Slightly optimized)

• 80% VTI (US)
• 20% VXUS (international)

Simple and effective if your 401(k) supports it. Replicate in your Roth IRA & taxable brokerage accounts.

What NOT to do:

• Pick stocks.
• Chase trends.
• Buy crypto as your core strategy.
• Build complex portfolios.
• Try to be clever.

That’s how people underperform while feeling sophisticated.

Step 5: Automate Everything.

Set:

• Monthly transfers.
• Automatic investments.

Then stop touching it. This is a system, not a hobby.

BTW I would have both the Roth IRA and taxable brokerage at Fidelity.

• Smooth app with the easiest UX.
• $0 commission for online US stock and ETF trades in retail accounts.
• Supports fractional shares of US stocks and ETFs.
• Has recurring investments for stocks and ETFs, with recurring transfers from $1 to $100,000.

Step 6: How You Actually Reach $1M.

If you invest $20K/year for 15–17 years at ~7–8% returns you end up around $600K–$1M+.

If you push that to $30K/year, $1M becomes quasi automatic.

No magic. Just consistency.

Bonus: Gifts & Family Money

This is wildly misunderstood.

In the U.S.:

If you receive money from a non-U.S. person:

• No tax!
• If > $100K → file Form 3520.

That’s it!

In France (important for many of my readers):

From parent → child:

• ~€100K tax-free.
• Per parent.
• Every 15 years.

So, a French parent can give €100K to each child, tax-free, every 15 years

Just:

• Declare it properly.
• Make sure it’s a real gift.

Bonus: Why Not Just Buy Real Estate?

Everyone says: “Real estate is the best investment”

It can be, but it’s often misunderstood.

The upside:

• Leverage.
• Potential appreciation.
• Rental income.

What people ignore:

1. It’s not passive.

You’re dealing with:

• Tenants.
• Repairs.
• Management.
• Vacancies.

Airbnb? That’s a job!

2. It’s a capital sink.

You pay:

• Maintenance.
• Repairs.
• Property taxes.
• Insurance.

As a homeowner, I can tell you things break constantly.

3. It’s illiquid.

You can’t sell 5% of your apartment. You can with ETFs. Moreover, it can take a long time to sell. My apartment has been on the market for over a year. You can sell the ETF essentially instantaneously.

4. You’re concentrated.

• One property
• One location
• One market

That’s risk.

5. The math is often bad right now.

I wrote a blog post in 2006 explaining why it made more sense to rent in what I perceived to be a real estate bubble: Rent… unless you want to buy. In it I explain the economics of real estate ownership. The same arguments are true today.

At today’s high prices and high mortgage rates, especially in places like New York, rental yields are often extremely low.

If I were to rent my apartments out, the rental income would not cover mortgage + property tax + maintenance + repairs. Real yields are at best 2-4% not including your time and more typically negative these days.

The only thing that can make the math work is appreciation. However, you’re taking leverage risk, on a single illiquid asset, hoping prices go up. Prices don’t always go up. I am selling my NY apartment for much less than it cost me, and I bought it 10 years ago!

Most people buying real estate today are not buying an investment. They are buying a leveraged bet on appreciation with significant operational complexity.

Compare that to ETFs:

• ~7–8% long-term returns.
• Fully liquid.
• Globally diversified.
• Zero operational overhead.

Do you really want complexity + leverage + risk for 2–4% (at best) over simplicity + liquidity for 7–8%?

Real estate works if:

• You love it.
• You operate at scale.
• You’re good at it.

For most people index investing is easier, safer, and more scalable.

Final Truth

You don’t need perfect timing, complex strategies, financial genius.

You need to save consistently, invest simply, avoid doing something stupid.

If you do nothing else do this:

• Build a 4-6 months emergency fund (Wealthfront Cash).
• Take your 401(k) match.
• Max your Roth IRA in VT (Fidelity).
• Invest the rest in VT in a taxable account (Fidelity).
• Automate everything.

Then go live your life. Wealth is not built by obsessing over money. It’s built by setting the system once… and letting it run for 15 years!

Most people don’t fail because they picked the wrong ETF. They fail because they never built a system and stuck to it.

Vinted Completes Secondary Transaction at €8B Valuation Reflecting Consistent, Profitable Growth.

Vinted, the  C2C second-hand marketplace, and our second-largest position in Fund II, completed a secondary share transaction of €880M at an €8B valuation, marking yet another milestone in one of Europe’s most remarkable growth stories. The transaction demonstrates Vinted’s progress in building a category-leading business with a unique financial profile: fast growth at scale with sustained profitability. In 2025, Vinted grew GMV to €10.8B, generating €1.1B in annual revenue and €62M in net profits, in 26 markets. Congratulations to Thomas and team for this well-deserved outcome! (Vinted.com)

Quince Hits €10B Valuation. ICONIQ Leads Giant $500M Series E Funding Round.

Factory-to-consumer e-commerce brand, Quince, another top position by carrying value in Fund II, raised a $500M Series E at a $10.1B valuation led by ICONIQ. Best known for its $50 cashmere sweater, Quince has redesigned the system behind traditional retail, growing revenue by triple digits annually and nearing $2B last year! This latest funding will support ongoing global expansion, category growth, and deeper supply chain partnerships. (TechCrunch)

Founded in 2023 by former Tinkoff employees, Plata, the Nubank challenger in Mexico, raised a $400M Series C at a $5B valuation led by Bicycle Capital. Plata has surpassed $600M in revenues in under three years making it the fastest growing startup in LatAm history! (PRNewswire)

FJ Labs’ fastest growing incubation, Midas, announced a $50M Series A led by RRE and Creandum. Midas tokens (mTokens) have seen widespread adoption with $500M+ current TVL and $37M+ in yield paid out to investors. (fabricegrinda.com)

Colombian telecom startup Somos Internetraised a $40M Series B round co-led by Bracket Capital & Ribbit with participation from USV and Kaszek. The company builds fiber networks that deliver enterprise-grade connectivity at lower cost. (LatamList)

Fuse, an AI-native loan origination system, raised a $25M Series A to disrupt the legacy systems used by U.S credit unions. Fuse’s agents  help lenders process higher loan volumes, automate underwriting, and reduce costs. (TechCrunch)

In his latest podcast episode, Marketplaces in the Age of AI, Fabrice shares his belief that AI is far more likely a productivity revolution than economic collapse. He explains why most fears around AI disintermediating marketplaces are overstated, where AI does in fact threaten marketplace margins, and the immediate opportunities AI creates for liquidity, cross-border trade, and profitability.

Make sure to check out Fabrice’s recent blog post, AI Is a Productivity Revolution, Not a Collapse where he argues that AI is not the end of economic progress, it is simply the next chapter. Fabrice describes the way in which AI is a powerful accelerant to productivity, expanding output, raising living standards, and ultimately increasing human optionality.

The power law mindset of venture has gone from genuine insight to crowded trade with every fund fighting to get into the same AI deals at eyewatering valuations. But being right about the company isn’t enough to succeed. You also have to be right about the price. Jeff Weinstein digs in: Part 1 and Part 2.

In case you missed it, we recently published our 2025 year in review. Last year, the team made 168 total investments (96 new, 72 follow-on) in 25 countries. Life to date, we have backed over 1,200 startups with 400+ partial & full exits.

On Amir Fischer’s podcast, he and Fabricediscuss Fabrice’s leaving McKinsey at 23 to launch an eBay competitor in France, trying to buy the Alibaba domain from an unknown Jack Ma, why Craig Newmark refused to let him buy Craigslist, and more fascinating anecdotes.

This does neither, instead, it does something much rarer: it tells a simple story, well.

The Return of the Hero’s Journey

At its core, this is a classic hero’s journey, not the modern version, where the hero is secretly perfect or the arc is subverted for cleverness. The real version:

• A flawed, underpowered protagonist.
• Navigating a world far bigger and more dangerous than himself.
• Learning, stumbling, and growing along the way.

It’s almost shocking how refreshing that feels. We’ve gotten so used to irony, anti-heroes, and deconstruction that seeing a straightforward, earnest journey play out competently feels… novel.

An Unlikely Friendship at the Center

What truly elevates the story is the relationship at its core. The dynamic between Dunk and Egg isn’t just charming, it’s the entire point.

You have:

• A physically imposing, good-hearted, somewhat naïve knight.
• Paired with a small, sharp, politically aware boy.

Individually, they’re incomplete. Together, they work. It’s a classic pairing, but executed with restraint and authenticity. There’s no forced sentimentality. The bond builds organically through shared hardship, small moments, and mutual dependence.

Because of that, it lands.

A Different Kind of Protagonist

I’ll admit this is where I was skeptical. I generally don’t love protagonists who aren’t particularly sharp. Intelligence is usually what makes characters compelling.

Dunk is… not that. He’s not especially clever. He’s not strategic. He’s not playing five-dimensional chess.

But he is:

• Kind.
• Loyal.
• Brave in a very human, non-theatrical way.

Somehow, that works. His naïveté isn’t frustrating, it’s disarming. There’s a sincerity to him that feels almost out of place in a world as cynical as Westeros.

That contrast is exactly what makes him compelling.

Egg: The Counterbalance

Of course, Dunk only works because of Egg.

Egg brings what Dunk lacks:

• Intelligence.
• Strategic thinking.
• An understanding of power and how it operates.

Where Dunk has strength, Egg has insight. Where Dunk reacts, Egg anticipates.

Quietly, beneath it all, Egg carries something even more interesting: a latent command of power. Not just intellectually, but instinctively. You get the sense that he understands the game at a level far beyond his years. That balance between them is what gives the story its texture.

It’s not just friendship, it’s symbiosis.

Smaller Scale, Higher Impact

One of the smartest choices the show makes is restraint. This isn’t about saving the world. It’s not about existential threats or continent-spanning wars.

It’s about smaller stakes:

• Honor.
• Identity.
• Survival.
• Doing the right thing when it’s inconvenient.

And paradoxically, that makes it feel more real, more human, more engaging.

A Tone That Actually Works

There’s an earnestness here that would normally feel risky, but it lands because it’s grounded. The humor is light, character-driven. The drama comes from decisions, not spectacle. The pacing allows relationships to develop instead of rushing to the next “big moment.” It trusts the audience, which, again, is rarer than it should be.

The Bigger Picture

What A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms gets right is something the industry seems to have forgotten:

• You don’t need bigger stakes.
• You need better characters.
• You need relationships that feel real.
• You need a journey that means something.

Final Take

If you’re expecting another sprawling, high-stakes epic, this isn’t it. It’s better. It’s a reminder that storytelling doesn’t need to be reinvented to be compelling, it just needs to be executed well.

When it is, even a simple tale of a knight and a boy can feel extraordinary.

0:04 Intro
‍0:58 Fabrice’s background
‍1:44 What Fabrice looks for in marketplaces when investing
‍4:46 The state of marketplaces with AI
‍17:28 New strategies for AI-native marketplaces
‍19:03 Growth rates for marketplaces with AI
‍22:50 How AI is changing the capital needs for marketplaces
‍25:40 Defensibility for marketplaces in the age of AI
‍28:13 Tips for founders starting marketplaces in 2026
‍31:08 Group Q&A on how investors evaluate managed marketplaces
‍33:44 Group Q&A on tips for transitioning to being AI-native
‍34:55 Group Q&A on calculating LTV
‍36:45 Group Q&A on seller-side CAC
‍38:17 Group Q&A on fundraising benchmarks in 2026
‍40:10 Parting marketplace advice

In addition to the above YouTube video, you can also listen to the podcast on iTunes and Spotify.

Transcript

Mike Williams: Welcome back to Everything Marketplaces, where we talk about founders and leaders on some today’s top marketplaces. So this is episode 2 0 9, which is really a good group chat had with Fabrice Grind, who’s a partner at FJ Labs. FJ Labs is an early stage venture fund that’s backed over 1200 startups, including marketplaces like Alibaba, Flexport, Clutch, and more.

Fabrice is also passed group chat guest. This is great to welcome back on where we started off with a quick overview of FJ Labs Venture Fund and what they look for in marketplaces when investing. We did a deep dive into marketplaces in the age of AI. We discussed topics like how AI is making it easier for marketplaces to do more defensibility, the current state of fundraising.

Fabrice share lots of tips for founders and we also had a great group Q&A. I really enjoyed this conversation. I think you are going to find it a great watch to the end.

So Fabrice, it’s great to have you join us again for the follow up group chat today. I feel like so much as I changed since you’re up past chat, that was only a few years ago, and now we of course have a lot that we’re going to dive into with this. And, marketplace is in the age of AI, but I thought that it’d be great if you could set off with a quick refresher your background for those that might not know and that have just joined us here.

Fabrice Grinda: I’ve been a tech founder and investor since 1998, so 28 years. Built three large venture backed companies. The last one of which I grew to 11,000 employees in 30 countries, over 300 million uniques. It was a Craigslist for the rest of the world, and throughout this entire timing starting in ‘98, I started investing in marketplaces.

And so I, and I professionalize that. In 2016, creating FJ Labs, which is a venture fund specializing in asset-like businesses that work back businesses and marketplaces were large. We’ve invested, I guess in three, yeah, probably should mention a few sets. We’ve invested in 1300 businesses. We’ve had over 300 exits and so far compounding in like whatever, around 30% IRR realize.

Mike Williams: That’s really incredible background, of course. There’s so much that we’re going to get into here. I guess as a quick kind of refresher. Can you give us an overview of FJ Labs, as a venture fund and what you look for in marketplaces when investing?

Fabrice Grinda: FJ Labs is really a reflection of my personality. Like I was a super angel became me before I became venture capitalist. And I never did like top down fund construction. It’s where I see a deal, I meet a founder I like and that convinces me and I invest. And so because I am intellectually curious and I think I see tech as solving the world’s problems. So in the 21st century, I think the three fundamental problems we’re trying to fix: climate change, inequality of opportunity, and the mental and physical well-being crisis. And I think I like using tech, especially asset-light tech to be better, cheaper, faster than alternatives. Now, what I look for hasn’t fundamentally changed in any way, shape or form.

I have four selection criteria that are still the same they are today though there are a few things that I’ve changed in the age of AI, but the four selection criteria are the same, which is, “Do I like the founder?” which for me is someone who’s extremely eloquent; because whether you want it or not, as a founder, you’re a salesperson, you’re selling employees, you’re selling business partner, you’re selling investors, you’re selling the press, whatever.

So it doesn’t matter if you’re introverted, extroverted, you need to be eloquent. And number two, “can you execute on set vision?” And they’re both necessary but insufficient so if they’re separate. So you need both of them together to make a great founder. And the way I tease out in a one hour call if someone can execute is number two, “do I like the business?”. Which is a combination of total addressable market size, but more importantly for a marketplace unit economics. What is your fully loaded customer acquisition cost, both in the supply side and the demand side? What is your net contribution margin per customer? What do your cohorts look like over time?

What’s your LTV to CAC on a CM2 basis? And whether regardless of the stage you’re at. I expect you to be able to answer this. Even pre-launch, I want you to have thought about it. If you haven’t thought about it, it’s very unlikely you’re gonna be able to execute on the idea.

Number three: what are the deal terms? And I am price sensitive. And I don’t mean I don’t want anything cheap. I want it to be fair. Fair in light of the traction, in light of the opportunity, in light of what you’re solving.

Number four, just as fundamental frankly, is “are you solving a problem that I care about that is making the world a better place from my perspective?” Obviously that is bias, but I’d be pretty. Clear sense of what I, where I see the future of the world heading, the future of mobility, the future of robotics, the future of food, et cetera. And is your idea and it’s good to be aligned with mega waves, right? To be going with the current of history and not against it.

And so is your idea aligned with the direction of history? And so these four criteria are collectively true. I invest and we invest pretty quickly, two one hour meetings over the course a week; we’re in, we’re not. So that hasn’t changed, but yeah. That’s great.

Mike Williams: No, the criteria are gonna be very helpful here for everyone. So I’m sure it’ll lead to quite a few questions when we get to that group Q&A. But, I wanna transition to talking about marketplaces and the age of AI that we’re in. Of course, you’ve seen an impact on marketplaces. So I guess the starting point, where are we at right now with things?

Fabrice Grinda: I would say we’re in peak year from marketplace boundaries and public investors as to the impact of AI on marketplaces. They were like, oh! The top of funnel is going to move all over that to the agents and therefore, you’re not gonna be able to have margin, you’re gonna have massive magic impression and disintermediation. Perhaps the short tail LLMs like, GPTs and Claudes of the world are going to vertically integrate and will, they’ll do everything and there will be no room for it for marketplaces at all. And perhaps the entire sack goes agentic commerce and there’s no even a human in the loop and therefore marketplaces are irrelevant.

And I could not more fundamentally disagree with literally every one of those statements. First of all, when I’m looking at the behavior of users today in marketplaces, I am not seeing a shift to the LLMs that I don’t expect there to be one, because there’s three purchase behaviors on marketplaces.

One is, you’re browsing for entertainment, the equivalent of walking down on, on Broadway and SOHO. And going from store to store. So if you’re in a, one of these types of sites, so think of a Vinted in the used fashion category where it’s really browsing as entertainment and you’re browsing an average 20, 30 pages per visit.

You’re visiting multiple times a month. You’re not really looking for anything, but it’s an a pretty typically low average to value you. Something like you buy an impulse buy. Again, there is no world in which that feed goes to the LLMs. Like it’s not in the top thousand priorities to create a feed of used whatever fashion, a 30 euro average price point that you might wanna buy in any of the LLMs. They’re organized for efficiency, not for someone who’s like trying to brag. In a world where you’re not looking for efficiency, it doesn’t work. Even if the traffic moved there, I didn’t think it would be a big deal.

Number two, if you know exactly what you’re looking for, there’s also zero reason to go to one of the LLMs, right? The current behavior is you go directly to Amazon or eBay or to a luster extent, Google, you type in the model, whatever LG TV C3 65 inch OLED and boom, you get it.

And by the way, even if you want to Google, the amount of value they capture is pretty de minimis because. 43% of the of the results are actually coming to Amazon and eBay. So the liquidity is still provided by concentrating people on the backend. Now there’s a third category of considered purchases where I can make a case that LLM will take more of the value.

Because if you don’t know what car you should buy in light of who you are, where you should live, et cetera, then a conversation that LLM makes sense. And so for considered purchases, but then again is Carvana get or be going to be better positioned to tell you, or is it GPT? It’s unclear.

It’s possible it’s GPT. But even then, let’s say though, so I don’t think, first of all, most of the traffic is moving the LLMs. That said, LLMs now are about a third of the traffic of search and it’s free. So you should absolutely no questions asked in index yourself in the LLMs. And you should do aggressive AEO.

And the early adopters AEO, are gonna be winning in the free traffic war. And so you can get a lot of free traffic there. So absolutely index yourself there. Don’t let them use you for training data, but index, you’re listening such that you show up in the results. Okay, so now it, let’s assume a worst case scenario.

For whatever reason, I’m wrong. A hundred percent of the top of funnel goes to the GPT to GPT. And all the searches start there. Now let’s think through, how much of the value is GPT going to be capturing in this worst case scenario world versus the marketplace? And it comes down to, frankly, the job to be done, right?

So if you’re telling me. You’re booking an airline ticket and they’re five airlines and they have 99% market share, and they’re oligopolistic. Okay, you’re screwed. But then again, in today’s world, how much money is Expedia making from airline tickets? Nothing. Like they, they’re not really a marketplace. They’re a distributor for agents. And by the way, this is true. Have any one of you building a marketplace out there? If your supply is concentrated, you are not a marketplace. You’re a distributor for it, whomever you’re selling, and they were gonna have pricing power over you, and you’re not gonna be able to have reasonable margin.

Now think of an Airbnb with millions of listings or DoorDash with hundreds of thousands of restaurants. That supply, which has been aggregated, is extremely hard to replicate. There is no world in which GPT is going to go do that. And by the way, the more work that you then do to match them with couriers.

DoorDash has the three-sided marketplaces, like the buyers, the restaurants, and the couriers. And the more you do in payments, so logistics, et cetera, the more value you capture. And let’s not forget, most marketplaces are winner takes most and most of these categories, and you know there’s basically just Airbnb and then there’s DoorDash and Uber Eats, but that’s it.

There’s Uber and Lyft, and that’s it. The more there are the  small recurring transactions with massively aggregate disaggregated supply, the more value you’re gonna capture. So the most I can see A GPT capturing would be the equivalent of a Google SEM at the top of the funnel, and that’s assuming a 100% of the traffic went there, and I don’t think the traffic will go there.

So, I would not worry about “what is the impact of like  eugenic commerce?” And by the way, eugenic commerce today is zero. It is non-existent from a volume perspective. Like there a non-human d directed purchases of items by agents is like de minimis. And will it grow over time? Yes. Do I expect it’ll be more than 10% of commerce in the next five years? No.

So number two, so I would actually not worry that much about the threats I just mentioned, but instead worry on the opportunity. To me, that’s where people are underestimating is how much you can do today as a marketplace founder using AI. And it is mind boggling. Lemme give you a few examples like maybe six categories of things you can do.

One is cross border commerce, that’s maybe less relevant if you’re selling in the us. But in India, for instance, where there’s so many languages, Bengali and Tamil, and Hindi, et cetera. It used to be disaggregated marketplaces. Selling locally like CDC did, could not work. You could not sell from one consumer in one region in another because they didn’t speak the language.

And that was true in Europe. Europe was never Europe. Europe was France and Germany and the UK and the French people don’t speak English or German, and you could not be shipping across borders. But now Vinted, which is the fashion marketplace I mentioned earlier with over 10 billion in GMV. A billion in net revenues, hundreds of millions of free cash flow.

Their geniuses, they’re auto translating the listings. They’re auto translating the conversations between buyers and sellers. And so they’re using their French liquidity when they’re, where they won to then go to Spain to go to Italy, and they immediately have liquidity and they immediately become a dominant force. We’re investors in marketplaces like even B2B marketplaces in used car like CarOnSale in Germany, which is now selling in France. And like within a year 30% of sales. So you can basically go cross border and in collect your business 30% in a year using AI.

Number two, listing on marketplaces historically in most marketplaces, it’s 1% seller, 99% buyers. And it doesn’t matter what, whether it’s services, whether it’s products, et cetera. Hardly because the barrier to listing is reasonably high.

If I need to take 20 pictures and write a title and write a description in the selected category and select the price, it’s a fair amount of work. And most people are lazy and are not willing to do it. And that’s even especially true for low average order value items. And it’s also true for categories where the transactions are complicated.

But now with AI, you can just take a photo of boom. Category description, boom. And you’re done. And like even improved listing with higher conversion rate on the selling. So you absolutely should be using AI with the proper training and the data sets for your category to simplify the listing process to the maximum to improve the percentage of visitors that are sellers and generally improve the user experience, that improves the buy rate.

Number three, you can fundamentally inflect your cost structure. We’re investors in a company called Ace Waves, which does customer service AI for marketplaces. The marketplaces that have embedded it have lowered their customer care costs by 50% in six months, 50 while improving NPS.

At the same time, by using Vibe coding, you can improve your program and productivity dramatically. So you should be able to improve programmer productivity, lower cost dramatically.

Number four. Marketplaces these days have more and more revenue streams coming to them like it used to be you take a commission and that’s it, but these days it can be, you have a SaaS subscription fee, plus you take a small commission.And one of the big ones is selling advertising. Your own sellers, buying advertising. By the way, most people don’t realize Amazon is a marketplace. The vast majority of items sold on Amazon are third party items. Amazon is totally a marketplace which manages payments in pick and packing and shipping. So logistics, returns and customer care, but they’re a marketplace.

Their sellers, their merchants buying ads on Amazon for sponsored listings is now a multi-billion dollar category. And the beauty of that of advertising is it’s a 95% margin product. And so companies like Instacart, 5% of GMV comes from self-service ads, and it’s like the vast majority of the profits.

And so marketplaces as they scale, should totally implement advertising, especially sellers of the marketplace, buying ads to promote themselves using companies like Topsort. And obviously AI, right? The thing is, doing it is pretty hard. Like you can’t just be selling to the highest CPC because actually what you’re optimizing for is not CPC, it’s CCM.

You’re optimizing for the CPC times the click-through rate. And so you need to have really smart AI to figure out what ad to your display where that is gonna lead to the highest CPC times the highest CTR. And so it’s totally AI driven on the revenue generation side.

There are millions of other things you could do tracking of the items. I mean that basically your company should be built AI forward and AI first with integrated AI from the get go, and this can inflect the business. So I would look at the opportunities of AI over the go.

Actually no, one more thing. There are many categories where marketplaces could not exist in the past because too much human labor had to go in making the transaction happen. And there are many categories where, imagine you’re a general contractor and you’re doing a build somewhere.

The number of sub subcontractors you’re working with is mind boggling, and everything is in iMessage or WhatsApp and there’s no Gantt chart, et cetera. Now you could use AI and agents to basically replace the job of humans and like actually streamline workflows, lower costs. I know construction companies that are now, their tech companies, not construction companies, they’re selling tech to allow people that are like bidding for RFPs for building commercial or warehousing or replying to RFPs from cities. They basically build the RFP where the agent, they can get through the entire licensing process for the city.

They can press the timeframe from years or month to weeks, basically. And so there are many businesses that could not be done before that you can build that at the age of AI.

Mike Williams: That’s a great breakdown. How AI is impacting marketplaces and I’m glad we also spent some time addressing the how marketplaces can do more and also the why now, right now for marketplaces as well, those are topics that we’re often discussing in the community.

And another topic that I wanted to transition into talking about is some of the new kind of strategies. ‘Cause these AI native marketplaces, sometimes not taking the more kind of traditional approach to starting a marketplace. So what are the, some of these new strategies that you might be seeing that, that are marketplaces are starting to use today, that are playing out?

Fabrice Grinda: Yes, but I’d say they’re tactical. So I know many marketplaces that right now, they’re using. I guess you could use Claude Co-work but before Claude Co-work came out, they’re using OpenClaw. That found out all the leads of the supply of the demand on LinkedIn. Created a LinkedIn InMail account, and reach out. And basically with essentially zero CAC or underlying credits, so maybe not exactly zero.

And was able to build both the supply and the demand of the marketplace in a category. I’ve seen examples where people coded their open class to basically do telesales where they were coding a voice interface slide, like with Whisper or whatever. And then they would call where they’d get a Twilio number and they’d call and essentially could be cold calling at reasonably low costs, either supply or demand that they’re trying to do.

So there are many things you can do to hack the liquidity using AI in, in today’s world. So I, but again, to me it’s tactical. So here you’re using the tools in order to do interesting things or you’re using agents to basically fill roles that would’ve not been uneconomic and you could not create a marketplace for in the past where now you can make a market least work.

Mike Williams: Yeah, definitely great. It’s tactical and nuanced as well. And another thing with these kind of new AI native marketplaces starting, we’re seeing them get off the ground and getting liquidity and growing faster or never. So how’s this potentially change on how you evaluate you know them when investing and maybe like what some of those kind of benchmarks are for growth.

Fabrice Grinda: It’s part of raise for marketplaces today. And the reason it’s hard to raise for marketplaces today and the A and the B is because AI has captured all the oxygen in the room, and they’ve had these examples of companies going from zero to a hundred million in AR and 90% margin and the Lovable and Cursors et cetera in the world when you’re measly marketplace goes from zero to 3 million in GMV and then 3 million. 3 million GMV to 15 million in GMB to 50 or whatever, over three years. It’s hard to get, the bigger VCs that are writing the bigger checks, excited.

That said, you could do a lot more with a lot lots. And so what I’m seeing more and more of is essentially marketplaces bypassing the pre-seed, right? It used to be your pre-seed stage was a million and whatever, six free, again.

If you’re in YC it’s gonna be 30 or 40, but so there’s a range but maybe it’s eight, these days or whatever. And you needed a million to get a retraction where you could get your seed round and your seed round. And by the way, the seed for marketplace businesses, the valuations haven’t changed all that much.

They’ve inch up a little bit, but frankly. We’re still seeing a lot of seeds where the company’s doing 150 K a month at GMV, 15% take rate with the 70% margin, and they’re raising pre at 12 pre, right? And maybe they’re raising five and 15 or whatever, but it’s like not, and maybe the median series A now in, with a 15% take grade, right? It is maybe 10 at 30 pre with a seven 50 K million a month in GMV. So we’re, I guess the traction expectation has gone up because you should be able to get more. And so we don’t do that much idea anymore, it’s people come to us and it’s kind, even though they’re two, it’s already live, they’re already at subtraction, they’re ready to pay unit economics, et cetera, because you can build anything with nothing. And in fact, if you are not capable to launch, you get traction with very, with like peanuts money.

It actually speaks to your inability to potentially execute in the category you’re in. And I’d say that a big trend is bypassing of the pre-seed ran, going straight for seed with traction. Now look, if you have, there’s a few exceptions where people have been able to scale, like dramatically, and they go from not the old school was you were at 150K a month.

You raise three, you go to seven 50K a month, you raise 10 or seven, you go to 2.5 to 5 million a month, you raise 15 or 20 or 25. Sometimes you can accelerate that. The thing is, I haven’t seen that much acceleration in these businesses versus pure AI native type SAS subscription companies these have been able to scale it insanely fast.

I have not seen much of that. The only places where GMV scales like crazy is in the B2B marketplaces, but then again, if your take rate is 1%, I don’t care. I care about the net revenue, not the growth, the GMV. And so if your take rate is, so a million with 15% take rate is 150 K net. And so if you’re at 1% intake rate, I need you to be at 10 million, not 1 million to be at the same series A level traction.

Mike Williams: Certainly and you did mention, some kinda like skipping, pre-seed and just, being able to get much further. And so I guess related to that, how do you think AI will start to change the capital needs for startups and marketplaces specifically in the future?

Fabrice Grinda: AI itself has been extremely capital intensive, right? So, part of the reason it’s hard to reach for marketplaces right now is all the oxygen in the room is being captured by AI related, like 95% of YC companies, AI companies, 75% of the funding in 25 was going AI and I mean AI LLM type companies and almost all the capital went to five companies.

So not only is it all AI all the time, it’s also, Claw or Anthropic and ChatGPT capturing a massive percentage of that capital, followed by the whatever Lovable and Cursors of the world and ElevenLabs. And then defense tech, like things like Anduril, which is also AI adjacent with a big chunk of a AI or whatever figure, which I like big AI components.

The answer is pretty typical. It depends, right? I think it depends what your customer is like. At the end of the day, marketplaces, as I mentioned earlier are unit economic businesses. And so it’s a question of how quickly can you make the unit economic work and often the unit economics are not really in the early days. In fact, a clear signal that you have product market fit and that you have, you’re building an actual marketplace now effects is that your CACs are going down. You know, every more buyers bring more sellers. Every, more sellers bring more buyers.

A clear sign that you don’t is as time goes by, you’re spending more and more to bring the marginal users and then you’re more of a sales driven type of organization. And so to the extent that you have. Positive economics, lowering CACs and you’re able to automate more of the processes. Do I think you could go a lot further with a lot more, a lot less capital?

Absolutely. But again, have to the estate and I’ve been, I’m still investing in whatever, 150 marketplaces a year. I haven’t seen many examples of marketplaces that I’ve scaled, extra to extraordinarily scaled with very limited capital. I’ve seen them scale with very few people. Because they’re now using agents to be much more productive, but they’re still using capital essentially to scale supply demand, and you always wanna scale both in parallel. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s sales driven, it’s marketing driven, it’s agent driven. They all have costs in involved or associated with them. And so I have not seen, something go from zero to billion in GMV with no capital raised, essentially. Maybe OnlyFans rather than OnlyFans.

Mike Williams: Yeah, definitely. And you briefly mentioned earlier the kind of market sentiment and then, when it comes to, fundraising. But I think, a topic that right now that has been, coming to play a little bit more is the know around defensibility, right?

And then, so how do you think about defensibility, in the age of AI and specifically with marketplaces now.

Fabrice Grinda: So first of all you should all go to my blog and watch episode 52 Marketplaces in the Age of AI. And I have a few slides there that look at what are the things that make you defensible is AI and long term.

So first of all, whenever you launch your marketplace, you have zero defensibility, right? So your moat is your liquidity. Say at the end of the day, it’s liquidity. And once you have liquidity, you’re basically non displaceable. Just look at Craigslist, which is still shockingly sell relevant in 2026.

And from a volume perspective in certain categories, like blue collar jobs, despite being, having the worst UX UI, it’s intentionally destroying the liquidity, doing things like charging, et cetera, right? The way I would think about it is A, how much work are you doing as a marketplace, right?

Are you purely a lead gen marketplace, whatever, Zillow, Angie, and you’re not really doing anything or you heavily managed a lot, DoorDash, Amazon, where you have like warehouses and customer care and returns and payments and managing third party delivery.

The more managed you are. And the more fragmented your supply is the less the less amount of impact, the more defensible you are. The other thing I would think about is how frequently are people buying the products? And how much time do they spend thinking about what they’re buying? And again, the less time they think about think what they’re buying, meaning it doesn’t require research.

And the more frequently they’re buying the product, the more defensible you are. Instacart, DoorDash, Uber, Amazon. Etsy, eh! Not really worried. Now if you’re a high consideration purchase. So people are spending a lot of time thinking about whatever they’re buying or somewhere they’re hiring. And it’s not very recurring, probably a lot riskier.

And so I think there are a lot of things you can do to defend yourselves in market from the LLM by just doing more and picking the categories where this is true. But ultimately, once you have liquidity. It doesn’t matter. Even if the top of funnel went to the LLMs, they, because the transaction would be happening through you, even if it’s an agent exactly and you would be capturing most of the value.

Mike Williams: That’s gonna be a really helpful outbreak down for us here.  Cool. So, I’m getting some of my questions from founders and I promise I’m gonna save time for the group Q&A. Right before we jump into it, do you have a few tips for founders, starting on marketplaces today?

Fabrice Grinda: Use AI tools in the ways I mentioned earlier. Be super capital efficient because capital is going to be the hard to get to or to get by. Make sure you go as far further. Basically make yourself default alive in default and investable. If your traction is indisputable and the business so good that no, that some VC is going to have to fund it no matter what.

If you went from zero to whatever, 10 million a month at GMV with very little, the capital degree economics, it doesn’t matter the next, that stage is 30 million a month and not, a hundred, it’s okay. Someone is gonna in invest in this. And there’s still VCs that like marketplaces because they are defensible.

What people are not realizing is like 46% I think of AI companies ever created already are dead. You have companies that go to 4 billion in value, like all of AI, and they die. So your companies are a lot more defensible, but in order to make it, use the tools, be capital efficient, have great unit economics, and really find product liquidity and the way I would find liquidity and prove your product market fit, I’ll share the biggest mistake I think marketplace founders make. The biggest mistake marketplace founders make is because sellers on the marketplace. It doesn’t matter where they’re selling: products, services, whatever you use, et cetera. Or financially motivated be by the market marketplace, it’s very easy to flood your marketplace with supply, right? Anyone you go to, even though you say you have no traffic, you’re like, Hey, I’m launching your marketplace. You want a list here? It’s free and roll. The decommission sells. Everyone will say yes. The problem is that if you have infinite supply and you have no demands.

You’re gonna have zero engagement with the sellers. They’re not gonna be engaged. If someone actually by mistake, buy something, they’re not gonna reply. They’re gonna have bad experience. It’s way better to have the best, highest quality, most curated supply. You treat them well, you make them happy, you bring them.

Depending on the category, if it’s items they’re selling, maybe a use item, they’re selling like 25% probably of selling. So like low end of liquidity. If it’s a service, you wanna represent at least 25% of their income. Ideally a hundred percent. Like Uber, but maybe 25%. Then you start scaling the supply, then you add more demand and you scale them in parallel.

You never wanna flood your marketplace so much supply that your liquidity goes down. It’s liquidity, liquidity, liquidity. And when in that more liquidity.

Mike Williams: Yeah. That’s gonna be great. So I’m glad we’re highlighting and important to that. And then, I can speak from my own experience myself, grew kind of supply early on at the cost of demand, cool. We’re gonna get into the group Q&A. Hey Lisa, I saw you raise your hand. Did you wanna jump on here?

Lisa: Yeah. Hi Fabrice. Good to meet you. I’m Lisa. I’m building buddy at B2B Recycled Metals Marketplace. I know you are an index fund, get a huge amount of opportunities crossed your way and managed marketplaces and true marketplaces, right?

So both of those exist, but I think you’ll seen like revenue means can mean completely different things in a true versus managed. For example, we are take rate based. Everyone else in our space is buying and reselling its principle.

Fabrice Grinda: Yeah, but we’re not dumb. Meaning if someone buys and resells and they count that as revenue, of course, I still look at the margin that they have and also the capital deficiency if they have inventory.

So at the end of the day I’m going to be comparing apples to apples. So if your revenue is your take rate. I will look at what the margin structure of that take green. I’ll compare it obviously to what they did. So, I would not overthink. I would do whatever is right for the business from KPI OKR perspective and would not overthink this. So investors are not, and marketplace investors understand the difference.

Lisa: Thank you. And I know you’re a marketplace I investor, so you’re very familiar with that. But our experience has been non marketplace investors have, not maybe evaluated in the same way as you. And I was wondering if you had any advice around the framing, around being something that has a potential to become a transaction layer because it’s the nature of a true marketplace versus, only being able to take the revenue off the transactions that it captures.

Fabrice Grinda: You should to the extent you track it, mention all the GMV that’s going through the platform, right? Like then it becomes a lot more comparable to whatever the top line of the guys that are buying and selling.

Lisa: Okay.

Fabrice Grinda: Try to index them to GMVI. And then you can talk about what a percentage of the transactions you’re able to monetize today versus you’ll be able to monetize in the future and why, what the current take rate is and why you think that can tread upwards in B2B marketplaces,the take radio hat can take varies on the elasticity of supply and demands. And there’s some categories where frankly you can’t take anything. It’s zero. But there’s some categories where, you start one, two, or three, but over time as you have more liquidity and you provide more value, you can actually start training it up to seven, 6, 7, 8 or 9.

And then you can add things like financing you can add things like insurance, you can add things like whatever other value added insurances to get your blended effective take read or whatever, 10 to 15.

Mike Williams: Hey, Fabrice, I wanted to ask a question for a founder that I could not join, and this is somewhat common as well in the community, and it was around transitioning to being a AI native or, considering like how AI is impacting your business.

So we have a lot of marketplaces that have previously, say a year and a half ago, kinda raise like a proceed round. So there any, are there maybe any kinda like best practices or tips that you have for, businesses that have, previously raised pre AI kind of era and then, today thinking about like how it impacts their business and potentially transition it.

Fabrice Grinda: To me it’s the exact same advice as you’re building to start and new startup today. Use the tools, integrate AI, like there, there is be AI forward. And if you need to rewrite your stack, rewrite your stack. But then again, often you don’t need to. And by the way, like a lot of our marketplaces, they’re using off the shop tools, right?

Using Shopify because at the end of the day it’s less the tech even though you are doing things like single photo listing, et cetera it’s much more about unit economics and liquidity. That is the differentiator than the underlying tech platform. But yeah, be tool forward and do a AEO and index yourself in the LLMs.

Mike Williams: Hey, I’m Molly. Sorry. You raise your hand. Do you wanna come on?

Molly: Sure. Yeah. Hi. So I’m the founder of Recess. It’s like the booking.com of kids classes and camps. We’ve. Raised 4 million to date. We have less than a year of revenue, but we’re growing really fast, so we’re going out for our next round soon.

One question that’s come up in discussion with investors is around LTV, which our LTV is pretty long, given sort of the age of child that we serve. Our ICP realistically have zero data to back up that LTV. Is there anything other than, user research that’s out there about when the purchase cycle normally is for your product that investors would accept for LTV?

Fabrice Grinda: I didn’t actually hear what you were selling, but to the extent churn is low and people were paying monthly, for instance they’re willing to buy your LTV because the churn is low, right? So net revenue retention after a six month, 12 month. 18 month, et cetera, actually speaks to, even though, so most startups that we look at the seed have not been live for more than 18 months. And yet we can project an LTTV to CAC over five or 10 years based on churn.

So to the extent you have negative net revenue retention or, so you have 150%, sorry net revenue retention after 18 month or whatever you can actually do and you know what your monthly, annual churn rates look like, you can actually project that and we will buy it.

We will buy what your long-term LTV to CAC looks like because it is driven by your cohorts. And as long the cohorts keep looking good and the trim, remains the same, it remains good. It’ll be fine. So I don’t need you to have been live for 10 years to buy that. You have users that will be paying for 10 years as long as the data’s there to support it.

Mike Williams: Hey Julius saw you raise hand. Do you wanna don’t jump on here.

Julius: Wanted to ask on CAC on the seller side. What would be like benchmarks you would have maybe, or say where you’re saying CAC is actually quite good. And also conversion rate, meaning that we onboard a seller and then he basically that lists something on the platform.

We have 16,000 monthly active users. That’s like where we’re currently at. I’m just curious on the CAC side, on the seller side.

Fabrice Grinda: The CAC here support is driven by the, that you’re willing to support is really driven by the LTV, that the user that they have.

And so I can’t answer the question not understanding average order value, how many items they’re selling et cetera, et cetera. You want good economics, right? And usually the seller economics are much better than the buyer economics because one seller ends up selling a lot of items over a long period of time.

So typically, ’cause it’s easier to get sellers than buyers. The un, the unit economics and the sell side or the seller side are much, are like 20 to one or 50 to one or a hundred to one versus the buyer. The unit economics on the buyer side, were only three to one or four to one because you’re spending a lot of money on Google and these guys buy every, depends the category, but like once or twice versus the sellers keep selling over and over again.

And I would make sure that your seller economics or whatever, 10 to one, 20 to one, like on unit economic basis.

Mike Williams: Hey got Godfrey. Sorry. Raise your hand. Do you wanna jump on? We’ll try to get out. One last question in here.

Godfrey: So Godfrey here, founder of a cross-border shipping marketplace that help used car the last submiss missionaries are brought to find vetted freight brokers for shipping their cars from auctions in US and Canada overseas.

So you mentioned one of your four criteria for funding is good deals, and I was looking at the FJ Labs fundraising metrics. My question is how have these fundraising metrics changed?

Fabrice Grinda: Has it’s really changed honestly, in marketplaces? We’re, so the maybe an inch up a little bit. Both ramp size evaluation, but not all that much. The things that have moved the needle have really been the AI companies where you have like a company, like a AMI labs that was raising a billion seed at like 3.5 billion pre or whatever.

And then when you look at the averages, the medians in the industry, nothing makes sense because you have these stupid deals in AI that are completely inflating or conflating where the statistics are right. Other than the fact that people were skipping pre-seed, for the most part, we haven’t seen a very big change.

But what we have seen is in a difficulty in raising. And so, you need to have a growth story at good economics. That’s makes it basically so compelling that the VCs have no choice but to take you seriously and invest.

Mike Williams: That’s a great way to wrap things up here, Fabrice. I know we’re out of time here, but, I really appreciate taking the time to join us here today for the follow up group chat.

And I know we really packed it in and, some of the topics and questions are of course, like really nuanced, and it depends right? But I think this is great and it’s gonna be super helpful for everyone. And I had one last question and this is my typical kind of parting our closing question, so I’ll slightly reframe it this time, which is that if you could go right back to, pre 2026 and this kind of new era that we’re in with AI, what would you tell yourself about a marketplace specifically?

Fabrice Grinda: Honestly, if there’s one type of business that I think is gonna be the most insulated from the AI revolutionist marketplaces. And by the way if there’s a category where I think people are still underestimating how big it could be, it’s marketplaces. Like right now, yes in our consumer lives, we’re actually very well served, between Lime and Instacart and Amazon and eBay and Uber and Airbnb. We have marketplaces covering 15, 20, 20 5% of commerce in each of the major categories.

But then you’re looking B2B and. And nothing’s been done. We’re like sub 1% penetration in most categories. Definitely sub 5% in these categories that are trillions and trillions of dollars. And where I think because you could do much more work and because they’re also slow moving, et cetera, you’re gonna have amazing defensability. So I still think marketplaces are the way to go. They’re asset light, they’re gonna, you’re gonna build a boat, they’re gonna be defensible.

Just use all the tools don’t index yourself, but don’t let them use you for trading data to be clear. And yeah you’re still the right place, doing the right thing.

Mike Williams: That’s great. That’s great parting advice, and you got lots of head nods with that. We once again, really appreciate, taking time and join us and of course, I share a link to your blog and to FJ so everyone can keep updating and follow along if they don’t and reach out as well.

So really appreciate, joining us and thanks everyone for the great questions today.

That shouldn’t be surprising. The source material was exceptional. But what is surprising is how rare it has become for Hollywood to get something like this right.

A Movie That Actually Respects Its Audience

Most modern blockbusters optimize for the lowest common denominator. They over-explain, over-simplify, and assume the viewer needs to be spoon-fed every emotional beat and plot point.

Project Hail Mary does the opposite. It treats you like an adult. It trusts that you can follow scientific reasoning. It lets ideas breathe. It allows tension to emerge from problem-solving rather than artificial drama. There’s a quiet confidence to the storytelling that feels almost… old-fashioned, in the best possible way.

The Return of the Hero’s Journey

At its core, this is a classic hero’s journey, something that, oddly, has become rare because they often replace transformation with spectacle.

Here, you get the real thing:

• A flawed protagonist. ,
• Thrust into an impossible situation.
• Forced to grow, adapt, and ultimately transcend himself.

It’s not cynical. It’s not ironic. It’s not trying to subvert the journey. It just executes it well, and that alone makes it feel fresh.

The Unexpected Heart: Friendship

What elevates the film from great to unforgettable is something much simpler, and much rarer: Friendship. It’s not the usual Hollywood version. It’s not forced, not sentimental, not decorative. It’s an unlikely, deeply earned friendship that becomes the emotional core of the story.

At a time when so many films are obsessed with scale, Project Hail Mary quietly reminds you that what actually matters is connection, trust, and loyalty. The willingness to sacrifice not just for an abstract idea like “humanity,” but for someone you know, someone you care about.

That relationship gives the story its weight. It’s what turns a clever sci-fi problem into something genuinely moving. It’s why the stakes land so much harder.

Higher Stakes, Real Stakes

If you compare it loosely to The Martian, another excellent adaptation, it becomes clear why this hits differently. The Martian is ultimately about survival, one man trying to make it home.

Project Hail Mary is about something bigger. It’s about saving humanity, and, crucially, saving another civilization as well. It’s about choosing to help, even when you don’t have to, even when it costs you everything.

Because of that central friendship, those stakes don’t feel abstract. They feel personal.

Optimism Without Naivety

What I loved most is the tone. This is a deeply optimistic film, but not in a naïve or saccharine way. It’s optimism grounded in competence, curiosity, and human ingenuity.

It’s the belief that:

• Intelligence matters.
• Cooperation matters.
• Trying, failing, and trying again matters.

In an era where so much sci-fi leans dystopian, this feels like a return to something closer to why we fell in love with science fiction in the first place.

Sharp Humor, Not Marvel-ized Noise

The humor lands, not because it’s constant, but because it’s precise. It comes from character, from situation, from the absurdity of the problems being solved, not from forced quips every 10 seconds.

You actually laugh, and more importantly, you care.

Spectacle Done Right

Visually, it’s extraordinary, not in a “look at our CGI budget” way, but in a way that serves the story. The scale, the environments, the sense of isolation and discovery. It all reinforces the narrative.

This is absolutely a film to see in IMAX.

A Faithful Adaptation (Finally)

If you’ve read the book, you’ll appreciate this even more. It’s remarkably faithful, not just in plot, but in spirit. They didn’t try to “Hollywood-ize” it into something louder or dumber.

They preserved what made it special:

• The problem-solving.
• The pacing.
• The emotional core.

That’s rarer than it should be.

The Bigger Picture

What makes Project Hail Mary stand out isn’t just that it’s good. It’s that it reminds you what big-budget storytelling could be:

• Intelligent without being pretentious.
• Emotional without being manipulative.
• Spectacular without being empty.
• And, perhaps most importantly, human.

Final Take

If you’ve been feeling like modern movies have lost something fundamental, this is the one that proves they haven’t.

Go see it in IMAX!