Playing With Unicorns

Today’s episode is special because Jeff Weinstein interviews Rahim Lakhani, the CFO of Alpha Capital. Most of you will remember Jeff from Episode 13: What's the deal with SPACs. He is the resident SPAC boy at FJ Labs. Rahim has an illustrious record of leading finance, strategy, and sales from Anheuser-Busch InBev to Offerpad, and now Alpha Capital.

Brian Requarth is the Co-Founder of Latitud and former CEO of Viva Real. Through Latitud, he now dedicates his time to providing mentorship and advice for entrepreneurs in Latin America (LATAM). Brian’s new book, Viva the Entrepreneur: Founding, Scaling, and Raising Venture Capital in Latin America shares the hard lessons he learned while building and scaling his company. It covers best practices for communicating with your co-founder, finding great investors, and building a good board.

Tim Jackson is a fellow entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author. He has lived an interesting life from a career in journalism for the Financial Times, to VC seed funding for technology startups. It was no accident that he would eventually find himself in this world - he recalls speaking on the phone and writing a column about some guy called Jeff, who had just started a company called Amazon in 1995. Tim fell in love with VC as a managing director running a $700m fund for The Carlyle Group in Europe:

This week Kerim Baran (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kbaran/) shares where we stand in the world of solar. He covers: • The history of solar • The impressive decline of the cost of panel over the last 40 years • The decline in the cost of batteries • Why ultimately batteries plus panels will cost less than maintaining the grid leading most electricity to be made locally in a distributed fashion even if fusion comes to pass and creates energy at 0 marginal cost • And Much More!  

I often pondered the makeup of successful founders and founding teams. At FJ Labs we spend a disproportionate amount of time screening for EIRs. We only build 1 or 2 companies per year, so we cannot afford to get it wrong. I was fascinated to talk Magnus Grimeland and Vegard Medbø of Antler because they filter through 50,000 candidates per year in 30 locations around the world including the US, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Out of the 50,000 candidates, Antler selects 1,500 and ultimately funds around 250 projects.

It is extremely hard to succeed as an entrepreneur. Even the most successful entrepreneurs have countless ups and downs. I would argue that I failed my way to success. My brother Olivier (https://oliviergrinda.com/), a successful tech entrepreneur and investor in his own right, joins me this week to discuss all the mistakes entrepreneurs make. As we have seemingly made all the mistakes there are to make, we hope you can learn from our mistakes as you go down your entrepreneurial path. I had a few technical snafus during the first 10 minutes so I apologize for the breaks in the conversation then.

Christian is the rare breed of polymath Renaissance Man operating in a world that rewards specialization. We had an extremely broad and far-ranging conversation covering: • Whether you should always pursue your passion • The relative importance of focus • How to make the most of the opportunities presented to you • Spirituality • Happiness • Much More!

SPACs have been one of the hot topics of 2020. Jeff Weinstein, who co-heads investing at FJ Labs, and our resident venture capital nerd, joins to talk about all things SPAC. He covers: • What are SPACs? • How do they operate? • Why are they hot in 2020? • What’s in it for sponsors, institutional investors, the companies merging into them and retail investors?

Given the omnipresent doom and gloom of 2020, I took the time to reflect objectively on where things stand and where the world is heading. My deep dive across so many industries and technologies left me inspired and awe struck by the opportunities open to us. We will address the two fundamental issues of our time: climate change and social injustice / inequality of opportunity.

In general, I do not read “business books” as I find them simplistic. Loonshots is the exception to that rule. It blew me away. It mixes compelling personal narratives of entrepreneurs like Edwin Land (Polaroid) and Juan Trippe (Pan Am) with observations from physics and history to weave a very compelling narrative.