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Fabrice Grinda's First Time (Raising Money)
Venture Voice – interviews with entrepreneurs
English - April 16, 2008 18:27 - ★★★★★ - 23 ratingsCareers Business Technology entrepreneur venture capital technology entrepreneurship startup business Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
This is part of a new series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers.
How'd you raise your very first round of financing?
Fabrice Grinda: The first time I had to raise money was for Aucland, a copy of eBay for Southern Europe which was my first Internet startup. I was lucky not to have to raise seed money. While in college at Princeton, I built a company exporting high end computer equipment to Europe (motherboards, memory, CPUs, hard drives, etc.). Given its profits, I left Princeton in June 1996 with $50,000 in cash.
When I joined the McKinsey New York office as a consultant in September 1996, I ran a sophisticated real estate rent versus buy model. The model and my rule of thumb analysis (see Rent … unless you want to buy) were screaming BUY! I bought a large 1 bedroom apartment on 54th and 2nd for $115,000, putting $25,000 down.
With the other $25,000, I bought 4 stocks: Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon and Intel. When I decided to create Aucland in July 1998, I sold the 1 bedroom apartment for $185,000. I sold all the stock I owned. After taxes, I was left with around $300,000 in cash. I invested 100% of it in Aucland.