Meet New York Superangel Fabrice Grinda, Master of Digital Knockoffs

About a third of my investments are in innovative new ideas in the US.

BTW when you launch a "copy" in an emerging market, it's much more involved than just copying. You obviously need to adapt for the local market place. Most of the products have local sourcing, local logistics — so a concept might be copied, but you need a lot of innovation in the execution of the idea, because it’s fundamentally different. In Russia, you need to deliver the goods and get paid in cash on delivery, and that appealed to a whole bunch of other conclusions and consequences in terms of how to run these businesses. Even though the idea is the same, they actually look very different in terms of execution. If you look at eBay in France, wine is always a big category, where in the US it was practically non-existent. There are cultural differences.

There is a lot of innovation going on in emerging markets — it’s just that I choose not to invest in innovation on principle. In the US if you have a new idea, and your idea ends up being smaller or failing, the market is so big that you may still do okay with your investment. Whereas if you invest in a new idea where the concept is not proven, then in emerging markets, you’re probably going to be wiped out. So in the US I’m willing to take idea-risk, but I will not take market-risk, because the market is very big. So I’ll do innovative stuff in the US — in fact all my US investments are innovative — but in the emerging world, I intentionally avoid innovation because I don’t want to take idea-risk and market-risk. So in the emerging world I’ll take market-risk but then I won’t take the idea-risk.

If he's so anti-originality, he should have stolen Fabulous Fab for his nickname.

Do startups that aren't clones take money from this sleazeball?

The Samwers are bad enough.