Paul Gardi has extensive entrepreneurial, operations and investment experience. He has been a lead investor in CNET Networks, Personifi and was a seed investor and CEO/ Chairman at Playlist.com. He held the CEO position at IAC/InterActiveCorp Advertising Solutions and COO at Teoma. At Ask Jeeves he was the Executive Vice President of Strategy and Operations. Ask Jeeves was the top performing stock on the Nasdaq in 2004 (shareholder value increased by over 40x) and was later acquired by IAC/InterActiveCorp Advertising Solutions. Prior to this he was a Partner at GeoCapital Partners and worked at Procter & Gamble in their brand management division. Other significant investments include: Uber, Canva, Thras.io, Produce Pay, Ant Financial, Happn, Fanduel, Ecosense, Flexmoney, Comtravo, Viajnet, Heritage Restaurant group. He was on the American Express Advisory Board, the Vix Media Board and the IAB Board which sets the standards for internet advertising. Mr. Gardi is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School.
Our team has a unique combination of entrepreneurial, operational, public and private market investing and M&A and capital markets experience that we believe will differentiate us and will increase our ability to identify successful opportunities and add real value to companies we partner with before and after becoming public.
We believe that technology companies will continue to revolutionize the way consumers and businesses behave for the years to come. Our confidence as investors is supported by the fact that according to PitchBook data, there are 665 technology unicorns globally valued at $2.6tn as of March 29, 2021 up from 252 and $925bn as of December 31, 2015, demonstrating a highly fertile investment space which we believe will continue to enjoy a strong growth trajectory in the coming years.
Four of the five largest U.S. technology IPOs since 2017 (Uber (NYS: UBER), Snowflake (NYS: SNOW), Doordash (NYS: DASH), Lyft (NAS: LYFT), and Airbnb (NAS: ABNB)) have been online marketplaces, and we believe this is not a coincidence. Marketplaces are one of the few business models that prominently feature network effects: the more users a platform has, the more value the marketplace offers to all its participants. Supply attracts demand, which in turn attracts more supply, spinning a flywheel that can create high-growth, capital efficient leaders of scale. We believe that these network effects drive high barriers to entry and winner-takes-all dynamics, allowing for champions to scale to unprecedented sizes. The first generation of marketplaces such as Craigslist are now giving way to a new generation of vertical marketplaces such as Uber, Airbnb and Doordash that specialize in a specific sector, with features that drive substantially more value to buyers and sellers. We are particularly excited by investment opportunities in trends such as the continued “verticalization” of horizontal platforms (Drizly for alcohol delivery), the rise of managed marketplaces that provide more value to the transaction experience (Opendoor for homebuying) and the emergence of B2B marketplaces (Workrise for staffing).
We will additionally target businesses in the FinTech space. FinTech in particular has emerged as a large and vibrant vertical in emerging markets such
as LatAm, where FinTech start-ups dominate the ecosystem due to the structural inefficiencies of the financial sectors in this region (with Nubank acting as a prime example of consumers increasingly preferring FinTech players to more traditional financial institutions). Aside from the flourishing FinTech sector we have been observing in LatAm, we see financial capabilities becoming a highly valued asset across many other verticals (e.g., consumer, real estate, software and B2B marketplaces), as offered by emerging FinTech companies like Stripe in B2B and Klarna in B2C.
We also see highly attractive opportunities arising from SaaS models, which have seen 308 IPOs over the past five years according to PitchBook data. Leading SaaS businesses offer a highly scalable, easy to deploy, and recurring revenue business model, which provide compelling fundamentals in potential target businesses. While U.S. players have until recently dominated the SaaS market (Palantir and Dropbox), we are observing the rise of highly attractive international SaaS businesses (Aircall) and we believe the international SaaS opportunity will continue to grow at pace. Furthermore, we believe that SaaS will continue to experience significant change, driven by the cloud transition, growth of API platforms, shift to consumption-based revenue models and the emergence of data assets. We believe new models and technology leaders will emerge as a result of this continuous change.
Europe, LatAm and the U.S.
While we have a broad remit to invest globally, we believe we have a particular competitive advantage in Europe, LatAm, and U.S.-born companies with global ambitions. We believe there are opportunities on a global scale and while the U.S. continues to enjoy the most robust technological ecosystem in the world with 328 unicorns as of March 29, 2021 according to PitchBook data, Europe and LatAm are benefiting from strong tailwinds with large cohorts of leading technology platforms now achieving significant scale. This is further illustrated by the fact that there are 108 unicorns in Europe and 15 unicorns in Latam valued at $294bn and $48bn, respectively, as of March 29, 2021 according to PitchBook data.
The European technology market has gained significant momentum in recent years on the back of a rise in high-quality privately owned technology companies, increasing volumes of privately funded venture and growth capital, and a new cohort of entrepreneurial role models who have achieved widely acclaimed technology IPOs. The European technology unicorn universe has seen a dramatic growth in recent years, and according to PitchBook data there are 108 technology unicorns in Europe as of March 29, 2021 compared to 34 as of December 31, 2015 with venture capital investment increasing from $22bn in 2015 to $52bn in 2020. The European public technology market has seen equally important growth, with the number of listed technology companies valued over $1bn reaching 166 as of March 29, 2021, representing a total market capitalization of $1.5tn as of March 29, 2021, according to PitchBook data, demonstrating its attractiveness to institutional investors. While this momentum is impressive, this compares to 328 unicorns in the U.S. as of March 29, 2021. According to PitchBook data, in 2020 the total venture capital investment in the U.S. was $139bn, an increase from $69bn in
2015. This is despite similar GDP and populations with respectively $16tn and 457m inhabitants in Europe and $21tn and 328m inhabitants in the U.S. as of 2019 according to the World Bank, implying significant potential for further growth. We believe that the European private technology market is set to continue to see strong growth going forward, underpinned by substantial and growing access to funding, increased public market understanding and demand for technology stocks, a highly educated workforce providing a large talent pool, a supportive and stable regulatory and political backdrop and increased governmental focus and availability of public funding for the digital economy among other factors.
A growing number of world class technology players have also emerged over the past decade in LatAm, with Brazil accounting for the largest contribution. The number of unicorns in the region has reached 15 as of March 29, 2021 according to PitchBook data, including 10 in Brazil. Investors are increasingly turning to the LatAm region to identify tomorrow’s regional and global champions, investing $5bn in total venture capital investments in 2020, an increase from $1bn in 2015, and helping public companies raise an aggregate $629m at IPO in 2020 alone. These impressive dynamics are underpinned by favorable demographic trends: LatAm has a young and growing population of 646m people of which almost 20% is 15-24 years of age according to the World Bank. Moreover, LatAm is one of the world’s most urbanized regions and largely digital-friendly (75% smartphone penetration adoption in LatAm compared to 84% in the U.S. and 102% in Europe according to Global Data in 2020). We see Brazil as a particularly attractive market thanks not only to its sizeable market, but also to its robust venture ecosystems and financial markets coupled with the relatively low penetration in marketplaces and digital companies in general, compared to more mature markets like the U.S. and Europe.
While we may pursue an initial Business Combination target in any business, industry or geographical location, we intend to focus our search within marketplaces, FinTech and SaaS companies in Europe, Latam and the U.S., where we believe our management team, board members and advisors have a competitive advantage based on their prior experiences and investments.
We intend to capitalize on our Sponsor team’s deep expertise and large global network spanning the entire technology industry, as well as our management team’s extensive experience in completing strategic transactions in a wide range of sectors. Our ability to locate, engage and partner with our prospective target business will be further enabled by our highly complementary and accomplished board members and advisors, with long-standing experience in the broader technology space. We believe that our distinct approach and successful track record, as well as the superior value proposition we will bring to our prospective target will be viewed favorably by the prospective seller of our target.
We believe that our highly complementary and experienced team and differentiated investing approach offer multiple competitive advantages in sourcing, evaluating and executing on opportunities, including:
Broad Network with Unique Data Insights.
FJ Labs is a unique investing franchise, with deep sector expertise and distinctive insights into the technology industry. The FJ Labs team has evaluated over 14,000 opportunities and invested in over 600 companies and over 1,000 founders, with over 40 achieving unicorn status. FJ Labs typically reviews over 50 opportunities every week and evaluated 2,500+ deals in 2020 alone. Thanks to the scale of our sourcing model, we have exceptional data insights resulting in the ability to identify successful business models and future category champions early on. Moreover, our board benefits from considerable and complementary local expertise in Europe, LatAm and the U.S. Our global perspective is all the more valuable as we can learn from and replicate the success of a business model in one region and apply it to another, thereby efficiently identifying companies in any geography and supporting our investments as they develop their operations internationally.
Global Expertise and Entrepreneurship.
Our management, board and execution team have significant experience in investing in and operating companies across all key markets globally and have particular deep expertise in Europe, LatAm and the U.S. Our entrepreneurial approach is supported by the prior experience of our Sponsors, Jose Marin and Fabrice Grinda, who have successfully founded, built and exited leading global technology businesses. We believe this provides us with a unique positioning not just for sourcing but also supporting target businesses in achieving their full potential both locally and globally.
Disciplined Underwriting.
We are strongly committed to fully leverage the extensive private and public market experience of our Sponsors, management team, board and advisors to facilitate a highly disciplined and optimized process. We believe we collectively bring together highly complementary and differentiated capabilities thanks to our team’s strong track record and many years of experience in various private and public market settings, both on the
buy-side
and sell-side. Our team is composed of top tier private and public market investors, who have previously
co-founded
their own investment funds, and industry-leading M&A executives with long standing careers at highly acquisitive and reputable public institutions. As a result, we believe we bring the necessary experience to efficiently and critically assess our prospective targets. To further enhance our undertaking, we have our own fully dedicated investment team with a strong track record at both leading buy and sell-side firms.