Venture Capitalist Who Called 2021 “Everything Bubble” Thinks VC Valuations Are “Reasonable” | Fabrice Grinda, Super Angel Investor, on Geopolitical Threats, AI, and Yield-Bearing Stablecoins

Speaker 0: Forward guidance is brought to you by VanEck, a global leader in asset management since 1955. You'll be hearing more about a VanEck ETF later on. But for now, let's get into today's interview. I'm very pleased to welcome to forward guidance Fabrice Grinda, entrepreneur and investor. Fabrice was the founder of AUGCLIN, which was later sold to Bernard Arnault, a founder of OLX, which was subsequently sold to Naspers, and is a serial angel investors in companies such as Airbnb, Alibaba, and FanDuel.

Fabrice, wonderful to, meet you. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for having me. You have your entrepreneurial journey, which is great. And we we I wanted to ask you later on about Midas, a company you're a cofounder and investor in, which is doing a lot of great things in the stablecoin world.

But I understand that you also are very interested in macroeconomics and what impacts asset prices and with central banks. So on you on your website, you've got articles such as welcome to the everything bubble, which you wrote in February of 2021, as well as in February 2020. You wrote COVID 19, maybe the black swan that pushes the global economy into recession. So my first question, for you is how does macroeconomics affect your world of investing in venture companies as well as being an entrepreneur? You know, if if your job is trading interest rates all day, it obviously makes sense to pay

But for a broader person who's investing in venture capital or starting a business, how does the macro economy impact them?

Speaker 1: The macro cycle matters because of the price points at which you enter and which you exit. And and that said, as a as a investor in in the venture capital world, you don't control the exit. The exit happens 5, 6, 7, 10 years in the future, so you actually don't know at at what point you're gonna be in the cycle. What you do know is when you are investing. And so I try to be very cognizant of, especially, price levels to make sure that I'm not overpaying.

And so in 2021, while everyone else was basically going crazy, I took a step back, and I'm like, okay. We are in an everything bubble because there's way overly there's overly loose fiscal monetary policy, and it's leading to asset price inflation in every asset class. Correlation to 1 on the way up in everything from real estate to bonds, stocks, privates, publics, NFTs, cryptos, SPACs, you name it. And therefore, let's sell, actually. Suit a policy that if it's was an anchor to the ground, we should be selling it in every asset class possible.

Of course, in the private world, that's not it's not that's not liquid. We only sold a fraction of what we would have liked to do. But while everyone else was investing, we were divesting. And the reverse is true. Last year, while everyone in the venture world was basically saying tighten down the ashes, we're not investing in anything, I was like, no.

This is the very best time to be investing because valuations are reasonable. I mean, nothing's cheap in tech, but more reasonable than they have been. There's way less competition. So while there used to be 20 companies funded to do the exact same thing, there's 1 or 2, so you're more likely to win the category. And the founders now are focused on unit economics, burn rate, making sure they have 2 years of cash and run away, and they're going to get to the next stage.

And these things matter profoundly. If you look at the last decade, so venture as an asset class is very different than most. It follows something called the power law, versus all other asset classes follow normal Gaussia