🎧1,000 Startups Investor: Why AI’s Biggest Wins Won’t Come From the US

My guest today is Fabrice Grinda, co-founder of FJ Labs and one of the most prolific angel investors, with +1,100 investments and key bets like Airbnb, Alibaba, and Flexport.

Prior to FJ Labs, Fabrice built multiple companies including Zingy, which he scaled from near bankruptcy into a $200M exit, and OLX, which he grew to 300M users across +40 countries, before it was acquired by Naspers.

Today he runs FJ Labs as an “angel investor at venture scale,” evaluating hundreds of deals a week and backing 150–200 startups a year with a fast, founder-friendly process.

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🗒 Show notes:

[01:00] – Why being a public company CEO stopped being interesting
[22:00] – Will AI kill marketplaces? The real impact on e-commerce
[27:00] –The next big play: buying offline businesses and 10x’ing them with AI

[33:00] – The trillion-dollar opportunity in B2B digitization
[49:00] – Do AI startups really need less capital?

🧠 Key Takeaways

#1 Stop Chasing “Success” If You Hate Your Tuesdays

Fabrice built a massive company, reached financial freedom, and won his market, yet felt miserable. He realized success isn’t about scale or recognition, but whether your daily work energizes you. His “life audit” forces founders to ask: Do I still enjoy the work this success demands? If not, the business isn’t the problem, the role is.

#2 Why AI’s Biggest Wins Will Come From Unsexy B2B Workflows

Fabrice argues the real AI gold mine isn’t in flashy verticals but in the offline, analog processes that run the global economy. Factories, suppliers, logistics, marketplaces, and procurement still rely on emails, spreadsheets, and phone calls. AI will create the most value by modernizing these slow, invisible workflows, not by reinventing consumer apps.

#3 Don’t Compete in “The Game of Kings”: Play a Vertical You Can Actually Win

Founders outside Silicon Valley shouldn’t compete with OpenAI, or Google on foundational models, they lack capital, talent, and infrastructure. The winnable path is going deep in a specific vertical, owning its workflows, and using AI to make them better. Investors should avoid infrastructure fantasies and back applied-AI companies with real customers and real problems.

#4 AI Won’t Kill Marketplaces—Because Shopping Is Human, Not Logical

Fabrice argues GPT won’t replace ecommerce because people don’t just search, they browse, discover, and entertain themselves. And the messy backend of fulfillment, payments, and logistics is something AI won’t own. Marketplaces aren’t dying; they’re getting augmented.

😲You won’t hear this anywhere else

“Most investors think of AI as a race to replace human labor, but the reality on the ground looks very different. When I look at how companies are deploying AI, I don’t see mass layoffs. I see teams hiring even more engineers to build better products, faster. Technology has always made work cheaper and more efficient, yet historically it has created more jobs, not fewer.

The real value isn’t in removing people, but in reshaping roles: AI handles the diagnosis, the doctor provides empathy; AI delivers the lesson, the teacher becomes a guide. The shift will be profound, but it will unfold far more slowly than people expect and its ultimate impact will be far greater than we imagine.”