Generating Alpha Podcast

This week on Generating Alpha, I sat down with Fabrice Grinda — serial entrepreneur, prolific angel investor, and founding partner of FJ Labs, one of the most active venture funds in the world with over 1,100 investments across six continents.
Fabrice grew up in Nice, France, the son of a doctor. He arrived at Princeton, graduated summa cum laude in economics, and was already running his first business — Princeton International Computers, exporting hardware to Europe — before he had his degree. He spent a matter of months at McKinsey before walking away at 23 to launch Aucland, a direct eBay competitor in France that became one of Europe's largest auction sites. From there he built Zingy, a mobile media company he scaled to $200 million in revenue in four years, before founding OLX in 2006 — a classified ads marketplace that grew to 350 million monthly users across 40 countries and became one of the most trafficked websites on the internet.
Along the way, he tried to buy the Alibaba.com domain from an unknown Jack Ma — and ended up an early investor in Alibaba instead. Forbes later named him the #1 angel investor in the world. Today, through FJ Labs, he has made over 1,100 investments and seen more than 300 exits — backing companies like Coupang, Delivery Hero, and Rappi — all without leading rounds, taking board seats, or spending more than two calls on a decision.
But what makes Fabrice genuinely singular isn't just the track record. It's the intentionality behind it. In 2012, he gave away all his possessions. He's designed his life around Turks & Caicos, New York, and Revelstoke, optimizing not for accumulation but for happiness on his own terms.
In our conversation, we talked about growing up in France and catching the entrepreneurship bug early, what he learned from nearly going bankrupt and borrowing on credit cards to make payroll, the contrarian logic behind launching OLX in over 100 countries simultaneously, his pattern recognition for great marketplace businesses at the seed stage, why his two-call investment model is a feature and not a bug, and how he thinks about designing a life most people never consider.
It's a rare look inside one of the most prolific and unconventional investing minds of his generation — and a masterclass in building wealth, companies, and a life entirely on your own terms.
Presented by: ⁠rho.co/generatingalpha⁠

This week on Generating Alpha, I sat down with Gavin Baker, founder and CIO of Atreides Management, one of the most respected technology-focused investment firms in the market today.

Gavin grew up in Houston, Texas, the son of two attorneys, with an early obsession with history, books, and games of skill and chance. He arrived at investing almost by accident — a college internship at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette introduced him to equity research, and he never looked back. After graduating from Dartmouth, he joined Fidelity Investments, where he would spend over a decade covering semiconductors, pharma, telecom, and retail before rising to manage the $17 billion OTC fund.

It was at Fidelity where Gavin developed the convictions that would define his career. As a young semiconductor analyst, he was among the first to identify the inventory buildup that preceded the dot-com crash. He built early, high-conviction positions in NVIDIA and Tesla, and was an early institutional investor in SpaceX. After leaving Fidelity, he founded Atreides Management, where he has continued to focus on deep tech, semiconductors, and the infrastructure underpinning artificial intelligence.

In our conversation, we explored Gavin's unlikely path from aspiring rock climber to one of the sharpest technology investors of his generation, the frameworks he built covering commodities and semiconductors early in his career, what makes Jensen Huang and Elon Musk generationally exceptional, how he thinks about the AI buildout relative to every prior technology cycle, the psychology of navigating drawdowns, and the advice he gives to young investors starting out today.

It's a rare look inside one of the most rigorous and historically grounded investment minds in public markets — and a masterclass in finding conviction at the earliest stages of transformative technology.

Presented by: rho.co/generatingalpha

This week on Generating Alpha, I sat down with Ian Livingstone, co-founder of London Regional Properties, one of Europe's most successful and enduring private investment firms — with over $30 billion deployed across four decades and approximately $10 billion in assets under management today.

Ian's journey began in Ealing, London, where he grew up the son of a dentist. After qualifying as an optometrist in 1984, he opened his first eyewear store in 1989. Within three years he'd acquired the David Clulow chain, growing it to 170 stores across the UK including concessions in Harrods and Selfridges. He served as chairman of the Optika Clulow Group for two decades, building it into one of the leading optical retail businesses in Europe, before selling to Luxottica in 2011.

But the business that would define his career began in 1987, when Ian and his brother Richard founded London Regional Properties at the height of a commercial property crash — buying distressed assets at half price while every institution in the market was running for the exits. That contrarian bet became the foundation of a portfolio that today spans David Lloyd Leisure, Hilton hotels in London, the leasehold on Cliveden House, a $2 billion development in Panama City, and the Fairmont Monte Carlo — one of the most iconic hotel addresses in the world, which Ian acquired in 2007 and spent nearly two decades transforming. Along the way, they provided seed funding for Evolution Gaming, a Swedish online gambling company whose 8.6% stake grew into a position worth nearly $3 billion. Through it all, Ian and his brother have retained full family control — no outside capital, no institutional partners, no compromise.

In our conversation, we explored Ian's unlikely path from optometrist to entrepreneur, the philosophy behind buying aggressively when everyone else was selling, how he thinks about opportunity across wildly different asset classes, the story behind the Fairmont Monte Carlo, what nearly four decades of family control actually looks like, and where he sees the market today.

It's a rare look inside one of the most deliberate and disciplined investing minds in Europe and across global markets — and a masterclass in building lasting private wealth on your own terms.

Presented by: rho.co/generatingalpha

This week on Generating Alpha, I sat down with Yoni Assia, co-founder and CEO of eToro, the platform that has fundamentally changed how a generation approaches investing.
Yoni's story begins in Savyon, Israel, where finance was in the air from childhood — his father founded Magic Software and would pull over the car to read stock quotes with his kids, while his mother ran a copyright law firm. After serving as a programmer in the IDF and earning dual degrees in Management and Computer Science, he got his first taste of product-building with CDRide, selling on-ride videos to people coming off roller coasters. In 2007, he co-founded eToro with his brother Ronen and friend David Ring. Then 2008 hit — and watching the global financial system freeze in real time only sharpened his conviction that markets needed to be opened up for everyone.
What emerged was revolutionary. In 2010, eToro launched CopyTrader, allowing everyday investors to automatically replicate the strategies of the world's best traders. The idea helped define an entirely new category — social investing — and the platform has since grown to over 40 million registered users across more than 100 countries, going public on Nasdaq in May 2025 at a valuation of $5.64 billion. Along the way, Yoni collaborated with a young Vitalik Buterin on the Colored Coins project in 2012, years before Ethereum existed, and spent three hours at dinner with Warren Buffett in 2020 making the case for the future of finance.
In our conversation, we explored that journey in full — the crises navigated, the breakthroughs earned, and what nearly two decades of building alongside his brother actually looks like. We also discussed how eToro has survived crypto winters, regulatory battles, and multiple market crashes, what Yoni took away from his dinner with Buffett, and the advice he'd give to a 16-year-old who wants to make their mark on the world.
Presented by: rho.co/generatingalpha

This week on Generating Alpha, I sat down with Dmitry Balyasny, Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Balyasny Asset Management (BAM), one of the world's most successful multi-strategy hedge funds with over $30 billion in assets under management.
Dmitry's journey began in 1992 when he joined Schonfeld Securities as a proprietary trader straight out of Loyola University Chicago. Over nine years, he honed his craft in volatility arbitrage and options trading, eventually becoming Head of the Volatility Arbitrage Group. In 2001, he founded Balyasny Asset Management with a clear vision: build a best-in-class platform that attracts and retains exceptional investment talent across multiple strategies.
Under Dmitry's leadership, BAM has become known for its rigorous risk management, disciplined capital allocation, and ability to generate consistent alpha across market cycles. The firm operates dozens of portfolio management teams spanning equities, quantitative strategies, commodities, and credit, unified by a culture of intellectual rigor and accountability. Dmitry built one of the industry's most sophisticated infrastructures for portfolio management, combining centralized risk oversight with decentralized decision-making that empowers talented investors.
In our conversation, we explored how Dmitry thinks about talent evaluation and building high-performance investment teams. We discussed his framework for risk management at scale, the evolution of multi-strategy investing over two decades, and how BAM has maintained its edge as the industry has become increasingly competitive. We also talked about his philosophy on capital allocation, learning from losses, and creating a culture where the best investors want to build their careers.
It's a rare look inside one of hedge fund investing's most disciplined minds and a masterclass in building institutional excellence.
Presented by: rho.co/generatingalpha