FJ Labs

“I'm coming in at Four pre at pre-seed, at 10 pre at seed, and at 20 pre at A's, and I feel very comfortable that in 10 years, these will be much, much larger with valid business models, and we less risk of disruption.”

“I want to say the cheat code I use for IR, why I still can get 30% IR today, is the virtue of being diversified means I own two, one to three percent of any of the companies, and so what I've been doing is getting secondaries on the way up. So, I've been doing…”

“And that's why I've been staying at the sidelines, especially considering the valuations they've been raising at. I'd rather pay up when one of them seems to be the dominant winner, and I suspect that then price and traction will be more aligned.”

“And so I created a setup for a process for deciding in a one hour meeting if I would invest or not in a startup. And that's essentially one that we still use to this day, you know, with refinement over time.”

“Inbound deals that we get about 200 a week, they go to someone else first, and the team reviews, takes the first call, and I take the second call, so we went from one hour decision-making process to two Two one-hour meeting decision-making process over the cou…”

“A year ago, I wrote a piece called Welcome to the Everything Bubble, and I made the argument, and so that was in March 20, 21, that a combination of extraordinarily low, loose monetary and fiscal policy was fueling an asset bubble in every asset class simultan…”

“Today, in my probabilistic terms, I say there's a 20% scenario that we, probability that we end up with a optimistic outcome from where we are, and I can explain why. Maybe a 60% scenario of, like, what I call the great stagnation and another 20% scenario of, …”

“So, so because the number of startups we invested in, because the number of startups that was created weren't tripled from 5000 to 15,000, we tripled the number of deals we did from a hundred to 300, essentially. And so I've had to divide my check sizes by thr…”

“I mean, last year we didn't do a single deal C and beyond, just because prices are too high.”

“Where I'm most excited about opportunities to deploy a lot of capital at good prices in the coming 12 months. Yes, it is the B and beyond or C and beyond, because I think we're going to see major repricing”

“In the last 24 years, and I've realized I are 45% a year. And then in the unrealized, we have like 650 companies or so, it's like also 45% implied IRR.”

“Every document that was ever sent to me, legal document that was sent to me, SPA, anything like company selling, et cetera, I auto-signed, or actually my virtual assistant in the Philippines who had my signature would auto-sign for me all the docs that I never…”

“And instead of one hour meeting today, we have 2:01 hour meetings. So usually the inbound deals that we get about 200 a week, they go to someone else first and the team reviews takes the first call and I take the second call. So we went from one hour decision …”

“So because the number of startups that was created tripled from 5000 to 15,000, we tripled the number of deals we did from a hundred to 300, essentially. And so I've had to divide my check sizes by three to not run out of money.”

“I mean, last year we didn't do a single deal C and beyond, just because prices were too high.”

“Where I'm most excited about opportunities to deploy a lot of capital at good prices in the coming 12 months, yes, it is the B and beyond, or C and beyond, because I think we're going to see major repricing.”

“So right now we get a 150 deals in about a week. They get randomly assigned to one of the team members. The team member reviews whether or not we should take a call. We ended up taking a call with about 50 of these.”

“We will never be a 10 X fund just because we're too diversified for that. Any one fund will never be top to sell.”

“And number three, founders we backed in the past that have done well for us, we will back them blindly in whatever they do next.”

“We tried doing reference checks on founders and realized that they were a negative signal. Some of the very best founders were horrible employees. They would talk back to their bosses. They would work on their startup at their job. They had the worst reference…”

“We don't lead, we don't price, we don't take board seats, we write small checks, we're not competing for allocation. In fact, we're not even ownership sensitive per se.”

“Now, we don't do that for all of them. We do it typically for the fifth to 35th percentile companies in the portfolio. The top five percent usually don't need us, and the bottom 50th percentile will tell them where they send, will tell them what we think they …”

“An example, we invested in a rewards company in Brazil called Milius that was in a tertiary city. They had extraordinary traction, but because they were in tertiary city, and they were not very eloquent, and their English wasn't great, no one wanted to back th…”

“Now, the investment side, I definitely have a pet peeve, which is you would think that with a track record that we have, it'd be actually reasonably easy to raise capital. You would think investors or LPs would be more for it thinking and more creative in term…”

“We spend most of our time helping startups with, because it's also where we can have the most value add with the least amount of work that we need to do, because it's all about like relationship, but also talking about experiences that we face time and time ag…”

“We don't, we typically don't lead the rands, and so we don't typically price them.”

“Check sizes vary, but on average it's about 200 K at seed 300 K at the A, 500 K at the B, and then one to five million in the later stages.”

“But the main VCs that we work with are investor venture partners General Catalyst Andreessen Horowitz we work with Redpoint and We work with the end capital in Europe, and those would be the ones we spend, that we share the most deals with”

“At this point we've backed 209 startups, which means we've backed Like, 500 entrepreneurs or so.”

“Over the years, I've invested, as I said, around the 210 startups. We've actually made money in over 50% of the exits. On average today, we've done about seven acts and over 70 or 80% of IRR.”