FJ Labs

“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…”

“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 …”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”