影响力投资和回报其实不冲突，这家家族基金是这么说的

为中国商业新生代做最好的音频内容

主播丨丁教 Diane，声动活泼联合创始人

嘉宾丨Benjiamin Lu & Avi Sarma，GRIL VENTURE 管理合伙人

声动活泼专注于声音这种表达方式。我们强烈推荐您收听音频，通过声音感受音效和对话氛围。

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[01:55] 嘉宾及 GRIL VENTURE 介绍
[03:54] 投资全球项目的关键要素：时间、人
[07:05] 在海外市场投资如何与被投方建立信任
[12:02] 如何处理社会影响与 ROI 之间的平衡
[18:36] 如何达成 Hyperloop One 与 Squareroots 这类项目的交易
[22:35] 项目不同阶段的投资策略

*以下为英文对话稿

ShengFM: Let’s start with you, Ben. When did you join GRIL?

Ben: I joined GRIL in 2018. Avi poached me from one of our portfolio companies and they were trying to hire me at the time，my family invested in it.  Avi said "hey, don't go work for those guys, come work with me and change the world." That's sort of how our journey really began.

Benjamin Lu

GRIL VENTURE 管理合伙人

It's been two and a half years, and I get to work in things that I would have never invested in previously, like education tech, philanthropy tech, ad tech, and even like robotics where you’re taking conscious from your body and putting it in an avatar halfway around the world.

So Avi, please introduce yourself.

Avi: I came out of the Wharton school undergrad program, and I started with a small team —— a startup hedge fund out of school. It failed pretty spectacularly, so didn’t really go anywhere. But it was a very interesting experience.

Avi Sarma

GRIL VENTURE 管理合伙人

I worked in consulting for a wastewater treatment project in South Africa, I did consulting work for a well-known entrepreneur in the food space. We ended up investing in one of those companies, which is putting learning gardens and schools around the United States. These outdoor classrooms to learn how to plant, like vegetables, and they learn what a vegetable is, which is really inspiring work that they were doing.

Then I moved to London and met our third partner in GRIL, Colin Rushmere.

I had this meandering pathway in finance and a little bit in social entrepreneurship and impact.

They were launching real ventures, and Colin had built up GRIL from South Africa, we built a company in South Africa. Then he moved to the Isle of Man to launch a venture capital business, and I joined them as a managing partner.

● 图片来源：crunchbase.com

Since then, we’ve gone from strength to strength, we poached them and we've applied our mission to further dignity with our investments. That's been our story.

ShengFM: Where are you based right now?

Avi: I'm based in Washington, D.C. 

ShengFM: You have portfolios all over the world. How many countries are you investing in?

Avi: Most of our investments are in the U.S. and the U.K. ，but a lot of the companies are operating globally now.

We made our first investment into Brazil, and the Middle East, so those are two. We have investments in Central America, we have quite a few companies actively operating in India, and companies expanding in Asia now.

But it's mostly that our companies are based in the U.S. and Europe, and we help them as they expand globally to different markets.

ShengFM: Since you invest in a lot of different continents, how do you verify the legitimacy of those companies that you are putting money in?

In the Valley that people through warm intros or references, how do you solve this problem when investing outside of Silicon Valley?

Ben: Time，I would say ‘time’.

● 图片来源：unsplash

First, a lot of our investments came through our network. We pride ourselves on our network with GRIL.

We're about eleven families or eleven people, it’s all private capital. So, at this time we don't take a fee on the AUM. It’s essentially us doing the diligence in the research to basically de-risk our follow-ons.

I think Avi has been in the trenches with a lot of our companies. It's like going to war with each one of these entrepreneurs and making sure they’re good people at the end of the day that they’ll back and fight with you.

Outside of spending time, there's nothing else.

Avi: We feel like we stick with companies throughout the life cycle, and the biggest factor for us is the people.

Our biggest mistakes have been in not backing the right people, because we look at areas like food and agriculture, making people healthy and well, including mental health as we talked about earlier, financial inclusion, energy transportation, and deep technology. We’re in quite a few different areas.

A lot of our companies are really trying to do something different and bring something completely new to the table. We actually pride ourselves in taking companies and people who are quite unexpected and helping them get to market.

But the journey is a very long one. So, when you come in at the stage that we come in, you're sometimes in a journey for five years before a company really gets the stranglehold and stability in the market.

So, you go through quite a lot with people and see them change over time.

We've had some experience where we've definitely been let down by people, but we've also seen people come through, that are just completely unexpected - become incredible leaders and build sustainable profitable growing businesses during tough situations, and can have learned through a lot of adversity.

People have been our biggest variable. Today people finding things has been all, as Ben said, through the network. But there's also a little bit of magic to it where somebody or something strikes us as a mission that's worthy for us to be on, and we like to basically say we want to invest in this, we want to give a positive intent, and then we collectively do the work to either prove ourselves right or prove ourselves wrong.

We make the intent to invest and tell people ‘this is a company we want to back’. Sometimes it's something that happens within weeks, sometimes it's like one company that we're launching and funding for small-medium farmers in Brazil, we've been incubating this company for nine months now with the CEO who is amazing, but we’ve really got to know the company before investing. It's a very variable process.

ShengFM: Is that normally how long it took you to verify a company or incubate ？or is it just a special case?

Avi: This is a special case. The CEO of this company is basically looking at bringing and channeling billions of dollars of capital through fintech to small and medium farmers in Brazil in areas like soy and corn, basically the food basket of a lot of the world where farmers don't have access to a good working capital.

So, we've had to do a lot of work on the financial structures and thinking through the model with the entire goal of creating a system to efficiently flow capital to the people who need it.

It's taking just a long time and we've been very involved almost as like co-founders of the business, not just as investors.

That's a unique case, it's not something that happens often. Usually, it's like a month or two of getting to know the team, writing our internal investment memos, basically going through that process of either proving ourselves right and our original intent, a lot of which is like gut and magic, like there's some something or somebody strikes us as a person that really has a clearly defined mission or the right kind of sustainability and potential business model, and we said ‘we want to go after this’. We either prove ourselves right or wrong, it takes us about a month or two to make our decisions.

ShengFM: You have mostly the U.K. and the U.S. portfolio and are geographically very spread out. Do you have to go there and be with the companies for a while?

Ben: I don't know about ‘being with them for a while’. We're in the COVID situation right now.

I was talking to one of our co-founders of a company, and I told her ‘I haven't left my house since Sunday, I haven't even get outside to take out the trash and put it on the street, I haven't walked down my street’. That's my new norm, but my day goes on.

Right now, we spend a lot of time talking to our portfolio companies just on Zoom. You know sometimes it will come from a, you know through our network, and then we spend time with them.

We’ll write a quick small check sometimes, and then help thought of the idea. The idea could just be an idea. When we think it could be something magical.

I'll give you an example. After one meeting with these guys, Avi and I drove down to Palo Alto, this was pre-COVID. We sat down with these guys for about forty-five minutes, and they were like ‘we're doing smart addressing, this is going to change the world’. I have a mantra that ‘it's never if they will work, things are all about timing。

At that time, I told Avi, I said ‘hey man, I don't know about these guys. I don't think it's right.’ And we wrote the check anyways.

Avi: It's more of an example of how the dynamic of how we make our decisions.

Sometimes we’ll look at something that we feel should be in the world, and we feel like one of our responsibilities is to at least give it a shot.

This company has a massive challenge of trying to get their technology adopted. They essentially have created a smart addressing system that goes beyond GPS. It's a programmable address that can take into account a lot of different coordinates, and it becomes like a live addressing system.

You，Diane，sitting in that apartment, would have not only your physical location but also a lot of other data input into the address so that someone could speak to you or it could be used for logistics, last-mile delivery or those kinds of thing.

But for a company like that, they’ll need wonderful technologists that have an amazing background. The issue is always getting adoption and getting one anchor customer that can use the technology adopted broadly, make it a standard, and then from there that has a real chance.

A company like that is a long shot, but we work very closely with them anyway to try to help them get to market.

ShengFM: Do you fund companies that have the moonshot goal?

Avi: Yeah, quite a few.

Ben: Easily. More importantly, we give them the most expensive thing that we have, which is our time.

We spend countless amounts of time incubating, ideating, talking them through, working with them on their presentations, on their financials - whatever it may be to get them to the next level.

I think that's the most fun thing that I’ve got to do with GRIL and being a part of GRIL.

ShengFM: Speaking of your mission of the fund. How do you balance between the vision for making impact and the ROI?

Avi: That's a very interesting thing. A lot of people label themselves as impact investors, but we don't.

We say we are investors and we just look at projects on whether they are solving a very large fundamental problem in the world, in a very large market, where you can make a lot of money.

Food is an example, fintech and financial services is an example, mental health and health care is an example. These are all very large markets.

We're looking at entrepreneurs, projects and technologies that are doing things in a way that creating a net positive and furthering dignity through its very business model.

Everything that we do is about evaluating a business for the potential to scale, to solve a really big need, a big problem in the world, in a very large market.

We get judged our performance is one hundred percent based on how much value we return to our investors, that comes first.

Then all the other stuff in terms of the positivity we can create, the energy we can create comes second.

The one thing though is that we have noticed that money and capital have the power to change a lot of things. If we can create systems of value that we can channel capital through business models where it still is moving capital, it still making people a lot of money.

It's not just about saying that we are impact investors, we really do try to do things that will be able to move a lot of money.

Ben: I'll give you one example, which is Holberton school.

● Holberton 联合创始人 Julien Barbier 和 Sylvain Kalache

It's a computer science program that basically doesn't charge you upfront for tuition. Instead, they have an income share agreement with you, you pay them once you get placed at a job. We invested at twenty-six students in their first campus.

ShengFM: You are not investing in the company, you actually invest in a particular group of kids?

Ben: No. When we invest in the company. This is a highly scalable (school). They have eight campuses across the world and almost fifteen hundred kids.

Now we're looking at potentially taking out these schools all around the world. They have campuses in Colombia, Uruguay, Beirut, and we're now looking at the U.A.E and South Africa. We would take those opportunities, go and potentially franchise those, and build businesses on top.

When we talk about impact, we thought this was an absolutely massive impact, because those twenty-six kids that came out of that first cohort were placed at top tech jobs with higher average salaries than kids graduating out of MIT. How nuts is that, and they are trained in the real world situations from a peer to peer computer.

Holberton is now creating some of the world's tech talent. You're not learning about computer programming, you're learning about what you’re going to be doing on the job, and that's the main difference.

Avi: It’s a real need, and it's very massive. Something we think about a lot: we've been using the term ‘dignity’ in investing for three or four years.

There's a lot of energy out there for impact investing and putting metrics and things like that. We don't do any of that, actually. We don't measure impact ROI in equity investments that we make. We just invest in good people who are trying to solve very real fundamental problems in different markets.

ShengFM: I don't think they’ll go against each other, there’re rare cases. 

For example, the vaccine is probably not going to be very feasible for a big pharmaceutical company to develop after two or three years, and then maybe the disease is gone. They spend millions of dollars and no one going to buy it. 

That's probably why we need donations, nonprofits or government to help. But I think in most of the cases, an impact and ROI could come together, is that like how you see your fund’s thesis?

Avi: We have one portfolio company that are doing all the digital test result delivery management for Los Angeles County, L.A. City, now other counties in southern California. They've now hit their million test results delivered.

So, they're solving a really big problem. They’re cutting down the time that people have to wait with anxiety after getting my test sent to a lab, they get an empathetic response and I get actionable next steps. They're also doing it for government, they've cracked that problem.

That's a company for-profit business doing something they were previously doing for the HIV population in the U.S., so they have a lot of experience delivering lab results.

That's a really under-discussed problem generally before COVID, which was the fact that people couldn't get their lab results on time when they’re at the peak anxiety or waiting for their blood test results. They’re potentially exposed to some sorts of disease.

So, I was set off a system to do that. When COVID hits, it became an opportunity for them to apply what they had already been doing just like some of other vaccine companies, who've been doing AI development and stuff, and then they applied it here.

For example, they’re doing really good work, it's highly scalable, and it solves a very real problem in terms of impact as well.

ShengFM: I saw you have a very interesting portfolio in your fund two, like Square Root and Hyperloop One. How do you get into those deals with high-profile founders?

Avi: We've been fortunate to work with a lot of very good entrepreneurs, and our network is really what we rely on.

Part of being actively investing in companies or supporting companies were not operating on six continents is that we have quite a good network, whether it's a private family office or whether its funds are whether it's an emerging VC fund corporate network.

That's something we've been able to really rely on a lot, and add a lot of value to our companies that way.

Hyperloop was an example of a company that everyone got really excited about the potential. We came in through a co-investor partner that we have now invested in three deals with, who created an SPV. We said, ‘look, the great thing about our fund is we're not actually operating like a traditional fund, we get to invest in pretty much any structure that we want.’

So, we were able to invest as a SPV and take advantage of the opportunity.

It's been really fun. I was there for the very first test that they did it in the desert in Las Vegas.

That was one of the first investments we made out of fund two. We were fortunate to get access to deals like that. There’re quite a few where they are like lots of very high-profile people on the cap table and so that's where roosters one where we as in the GRIL partners said previously been working with the entrepreneur who founded Square Root and the founding team.

Then one of our shareholders in GRIL had known Kimble for a very long time. So, he invested, we invested, and we've been involved with the companies since it was a presentation.

That's been a very exciting one. We followed on and hopefully have some interesting collaboration that we can do coming up with them.

We've been very fortunate in our position as a small fund and just the private and we haven't been publicly facing to get access to a lot of really good companies.

Not all those good companies are very high-profile from the very start. Some of them come out of nowhere. Then they’re looked at and they say ‘oh well, this is something very new, it's very unique, doing something highly disruptive.’ At that point, everybody wants to get in and we've been involved in for multiple rounds.

Ben: I want to say that essentially what it was. It comes back down to I’ve always prided myself on at least when I went to have talks with Avi about people do business. 

And we were just so fortunate that our network has allowed us the ability actually invest in some of these deals that we probably at our size would probably not be investing in.

ShengFM: You guys’ check size is from angel to series B, do you guys make decisions differently?

Avi: yeah I think the early stages are really people-based.

It's like do we believe that this team because again for us everything is about like are they attacking a very large problem, do they have a pathway to get into a sustainable anchor in the market that they're trying to get to, like what's their clear pathway to that.

Our third partner Collins is a cofounder of GRIL and third managing partner, he created a business that went through 13 countries from South Africa. 

They employed ten thousand people, it was a private Coca Cola bottle company he built up out of South Africa. 

And his thing is that he always takes his best practice and then figures out how to scale it. And a lot of times it's just like I believe this person will fight through although you know the complexity of getting a company from the seed stage two a series A and proof of concept and proven business model and some good solid traction or profitability. Those are all things that combat it takes a long time. And it takes a lot of creativity and passion dedication too, a lot of it is people.

When we invest later, it’s really just the network like someone brings us to this deal. And we were very excited about this deal, you know, usually, it will come you know we have one company that has created a new thing called B code, which is a text-based code system that works for payments in coupons and loyalty but works with one hundred percent of all phones and it's fully secured. 

So, it's like moving pass QR code and reaching the next three billion people. 

So we invested fairly late in that company’s series B timeframe and we invested a larger amount but it came through a family office that we do a lot of co-investing with and in South Africa that was kind of on the board of the company and things like that.

so yeah that's kind of how we evaluate different stages. It’s harder for us to really feel our value proposition, which is getting to know the founder, getting another team being involved in the business creation. That doesn't really come about if you're coming in it like a series B，it’s like really get a chance to be hands-on earlier.

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