Decoding the Future: AI, Venture Market & Marketplaces
I had an engaging fireside chat with Dhruv Sharma, CEO of AngeList India, for Offline. Offline is a private members’ community for leading entrepreneurs in South Asia. It was a blast to chat with Utsav and his community of extraordinary unicorn founders. India’s tech future is very bright!
Here is Utsav’s cheat-sheet of golden nuggets that landed hardest with the Offline crew:
🔑 4-point “one-hour” deal filter
1️⃣ 🔥 Team = eloquent and execution-obsessed
2️⃣ 💸 Business = big TAM + pay-back ≤ 6 months
3️⃣ 📄 Terms = fair vs traction, not frothy
4️⃣ 🎯 Thesis fit = lines up with the future you actually want to exist
Miss even one box? → pass. Discipline > FOMO.
🤖 AI ≠ free pass
75 % of Q1 US VC dollars went to AI, yet moats are rare.
“Copilots for X” is a week of code & a crowded party; differentiated data is where the edge lives.
Valuations at 💯× ARR? Careful… the bill for 2021 déjà-vu is coming.
📈 Marketplaces 2.0
Consumer side is largely done; the next trillion-dollar wave is B2B inputs, cross-border & re-commerce.
AI superpowers: auto-translate listings, auto-price, one UX for chat and search.
Answer-engine optimization (AEO) is the new SEO.
💰 Angel math
< 50 bets → odds stacked against you. 50 + → probability tilts.
Stay in your zone of genius, keep cheques small, and sell 50 % of winners on the way up to lock real DPI.
🛠️ Productivity hack-stack
Ruthless outsourcing: VAs for inbox, bills, slides; butlers for offline ops; five rotating nannies on a shared Google Sheet.
Saves cycles for reading 100 books a year, kitesurfing, ✈️ and hosting Jeffersonian salons.
🌏 Macro take
De-risking from China = India’s manufacturing moment. Massive whitespace for SME tooling & export-ready marketplaces.
💡 Biggest reminder: Ambition scales fastest when curiosity, discipline & joy ride together.
Huge thanks to every Offline member who poked, prodded and pushed the convo further.
Transcript
Dhruv Sharma: Good evening everyone. Thank you for joining us Fabrice. It’s great to have you with us. Thank you for making the time. What do you need to know about Fabrice? Most of us know him as the founder of OLX and now FJ Labs. Fabrice is from Nice, France, lives in New York, loves the life of exploration and adventure, and he is built not one, but three extremely successful companies that we don’t always know about.
And the other two being Zingy and Aucland. And just very delighted to have you with us, Fabrice.
Fabrice Grinda: Thank you for having me.
Dhruv Sharma: Before we get into the substance of this conversation, I wanted to ask you about these Jeffersonian dinners you’ve been having all these years.
What, in your mind, Fabrice is a good recipe? Figuratively speaking for these dinners. And what has it meant to you over time?
Fabrice Grinda: So, the reason I have them, is think back to when you were in college. You’re studying everything and anything, and you’re having conversations on the meaning of life and you’re being extraordinarily thoughtful.
This world, this simulation matrix, whatever you wanna call it, reward, specialization. And in fact, specialization is the reason we have the quality of life we have. But we as humans should not purely be defined by the job we do on a daily basis. And actually, I value being able to be polymath and think through a whole bunch of different topics.
And as a result, what I’d like to do is bring together about 10 people. like eight to 10 around a dinner table. The format of a Jeffersonian dinner is that there’s only one conversation at a time. You don’t have side conversations The sum total of the minds at the table or on the issue.
And of course, no one is expected to speak for more than 30 seconds or a minute at a time. I give the topics ahead of time and the topics are very far and varied. It could be like how to reinvent democracy for the 21st century, life in a post singularity world religion in 2100. The ethics and morality of torture, or sometimes the most open-minded ones are very interesting.
It’s like what has been on your mind or something you’ve learned recently that you could share with everyone. This way everyone presents for three, four minutes and then we all discuss it for five, 10 minutes. It’s an amazing way to elevate the debate
The point is to get to the truth. I find that we live in a world where intellectualism is not valued enough. it’s wonderful to be thoughtful about a variety of topics with extraordinary people some of the best friendships and frankly, fascinating conversations upcoming these.
I organize one about every three weeks, changing the guest list. I’m, extraordinarily strict. Your phone cannot ring or you’re not invited again. You cannot be one minute later you’re not invited again. Like I really, and, and by having these rules, people take it seriously.
They come prepared, they read the questions, they know what they’re gonna talk about. and I changed the guest list with like intellectuals at people from academia, policy makers, entrepreneurs, and people from a wide walk of life. it’s super fun. I wrote a blog post on, Dialoguing dinners on my blog.
I’ll put the link in the chat and you could read, sample questions, organization, the email I sent to people about how to get ready,
Dhruv Sharma: That’s amazing. Fabrice, when was the last time you hosted one
Fabrice Grinda: I did one through weeks ago and I’m going to one tomorrow night.
Dhruv Sharma: Oh, that’s great. So you’re not the only host that means you others who host these dinners as well? Similar format.
Fabrice Grinda: people from my circle are hosting the ones tomorrow night. There’s an organization in the US called Dialogue, organized by Peter Thiel and Orin Hoffman, which brings together several hundred really smart people to talk about, problems.
The organization has one event per year for extraordinary people. typically, in California, in April or May. during the year, I use the organization to curate and find people. So this way I outsource, which is something I like to do in life, outsource almost everything I can to focus on things that are in the most fascinating.
They help me find the guest list and think through questions.
Dhruv Sharma: That’s amazing. you also have this thing, Fabrice, that you launched, about a year ago. It’s called Fabrice AI, and it’s a way for the world at large to, in a sense gain a window in your thinking. For those of us who may not know about that, what can you tell us?
Fabrice Grinda: In venture writ large right now, it’s really a tale of two cities. Venture at large has been down like 70%, and yet there’s been a massive recovery, at least in the US in adventure investing because of AI. In Q1 25, 70 3% of all investors in AI. And by the way, a year ago I thought already AI was in a frothy bubble and the bubble has only inflated more since.
And we’ll talk more about that later. But because I started being pitched infinite AI deals, I wanted to really understand what was easy, what was hard. I’m like, you know what? Why don’t I code my own AI to understand, where we are? and what are the complexities? I started by using GPT 3.5 or 3.0 didn’t work actually two years ago.
Didn’t work particularly well. So, I started using Langchain and Pinecone then I started using an open source library to do, voice of text. Nothing worked particularly well, I have to admit. And the complexity was way greater than I thought in the sense that the source files for all the knowledge and data structure, which was basically everything I’d ever written, every podcast I’d been on, every YouTube video I uploaded, et cetera.
The transcription of all of these, the separation of the speakers. So even the data formatting preparation was extraordinarily complex. And then the data retrieval was complicated. I had to use MongoDB ’cause I didn’t, it didn’t work in just my SQL. I put all this work literally a thousand hours of work, and I thought originally it was gonna be like 40.
And eventually GPT released 4.0, and I ripped out my entire backend, connected 4.0, replaced my open source library for voice to text, put Whisper and everything started working. The point of that is when people started pitching me things like Co-Pilot for X, Y, Z, I realized, okay, when you’re pitching me, I can code in a week.