Our Investment Philosophy: Beyond the Numbers
The qualitative factors behind our portfolio decisions.
By FGA Labs
We do not write checks and wait. We build and operate the companies in our portfolio, which means our 'investment philosophy' is really a philosophy about where to spend the scarcest resource we have: attention.
Bet on problems we understand
The best ideas we have shipped came from problems we personally felt. When you are the user, you can tell the difference between a feature that matters and one that just demos well. We are skeptical of markets we only understand from a spreadsheet.
Weigh the qualitative
Numbers tell you what already happened. The decision to keep going or walk away almost always turns on things a model cannot capture.
- Do people who try it come back without being nudged?
- Is there a natural way for it to spread, or does every user cost the same to acquire?
- Would we be proud to have our name on it in three years?
Small bets, real stakes
Because we operate rather than spectate, we keep bets small enough that a failure is a lesson, not a catastrophe. The portfolio is designed so that any single project can fail without threatening the whole. That is what lets us take real swings on the ones we believe in.