Scaling up Companies with Fabrice Fischer
AngelHub chats with Investment Committee Member, Fabrice Fischer about how to maximize your learning curve and scale companies
Who is Fabrice Fischer?
Fabrice Fischer is the founder and CEO of Blu Limited, an Artificial Intelligence advisory firm that specializes in disruptive innovation within the Financial Services industry, the Director of ATTA (Asia Transformation and Turnaround Association), and the co-founder of INSEAD Angels (Asia). Fabrice has overseen the significant growth of 6 companies throughout his career, 3 of which he founded, and lives by his motto of “maximise your learning curve”.
Fabrice holds a bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from the École Polytechnique de Montréal and an MBA from INSEAD (Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires). He began his career in Taiwan as an Information Systems Manager for construction company Olivier Asia Group which was a remarkable experience because of the unique nature of the construction projects that Fabrice was working on. These projects had short project timelines (of 3–5 years) and large fluctuations in personnel (moving from zero to 5,000 staff members and back to zero again as the project concluded) and served as experience for Fabrice in the occupational stress of rapid growth and attrition.
Following this experience, Fabrice then relocated to Hong Kong and continued working in the IT field until he decided it was time to pause for a bit and reflect on his progress. Upon doing so, he took a break from his position and his contacts began to ask him for favors — IT assistance. At first, he was happy to assist but the scale of the requests quickly escalated until he found himself saying, “You know, I’m happy to help and thankful that you buy me lunch for my services but frankly that’s a 3-weeks job you’re asking for.” It just so happened that many of these companies were more than happy to pay for his services and Fabrice then set up his first company, Comane.
Within 4 years, the company grew to a team of 20. As interesting as it was to grow the team and lead the company, Fabrice knew that in order to scale, he needed to learn more about finance and strategy. He then followed his intuition and decided to sell Comane, leaving for France to pursue an MBA at INSEAD. Fabrice further solidified his education by a stint in strategy consulting at Bain & amp- in order to put his new skills into application. Following this strategic consulting experience, it was time to reflect again and once more his network reached out to him for help. By 2005, Fabrice founded his second company, GlamOne, which operated for 3 years before the next opportunity for maximising his learning curve presented itself. One day, a client approached Fabrice with an opportunity to be the CFO and COO of a boutique investment bank.
“And so, I became the CFO and COO of Bryan, Garnier & Co. I took them from about 70 people to 100 people. But then, the next currency crisis happened and I had to fire a quarter of the bank. Then, I fired myself,” he remembers.
A few years later Fabrice was recruited by Antoine Blondeau, CEO of Sentient Technologies, to join his AI-powered hedge fund based in Hong Kong and San Francisco. “And so, I became the CFO of Sentient.
Initially, there were 22 people on the team and we were worth about USD $24 million. Within 4 years, we grew to 120 people and were worth more than USD$900 million,” he recalls. After overseeing the launch of Sentient Investment, an AI-powered investment engine, he returned to his entrepreneurial roots and founded Blu Limited. Fabrice is currently advising on a variety of projects in numerous industries and geographic markets, as well as, speaking at industry
conferences.
Words of Advice and Wise Words
“Start with a curious mind. When you are in your comfort zone, you are getting deep (into your expertise) but you are not getting wide — and you are in a sense not maximizing your learning curve.”
For Fabrice, maximising your learning curve entails not only mastering your field of expertise, but also being able to see it in context of other fields and engaging with adjacent and related subjects. He advocates honest self-assessment in acknowledging weaknesses and reminds entrepreneurs to “get wide” by sometimes step out of their field.
When building businesses ….to keep winning, you have to listen to your market
Fabrice will tell you that starting a business is easy. He explains that:
“In the beginning, you always win. When you start a company, it is usually because you’ve already got a client or a captive audience — there is demand. What’s challenging is to survive and to grow. That’s a different learning curve. As an entrepreneur, you have an idea about the world and something that it is lacking, something that you can deliver! However, meeting a demand is the first win on the very long journey of successful entrepreneurship.”
Fabrice continues by expressing that one’s idea will succeed based on your concept of the world and its wants and needs — that’s the world in which you plan to implement your idea; but if it doesn’t really match up with the world as it actually is, then the idea may not work so well. Having an accurate picture of the market is important in ensuring that your idea will be able to get real traction.
“To solve this problem, what you need to do is pivot. Pivot, pivot, pivot — as many times as you need until you find a win,” he suggests. What’s key here is that you need to be persistent enough to win, but at the same time smart enough to know when you won’t win, and to pivot instead. “It’s knowing the difference between when you are pushing against a door and pushing against a wall,” he says.
The market is responsive and you will learn quickly whether you made the right move because you will be rewarded instantly. Equally, if you make a mistake you will also be punished instantly. If you want to navigate the market well, you need to pay attention to the feedback you are getting and consistently use it to refine your idea, as well as your worldview. Especially since the market is constantly changing, staying in alignment with actual demand will be integral to your business’s growth.
Why AngelHub?
“Angel investment is so early in the game that the probabilities are really hard to determine,” says Fabrice. The expertise of the investment committee can help to guide investors in seeing new dimensions of assessment. Behind the business pitch are individuals. Through the help of seasoned committee members, AngelHub assesses both the business idea and the leadership driving it forward. Beyond market traction, experts like Fabrice help to determine each company’s ability to stay in alignment with their market and their industry.
