Fabrice Grinda leaves OLX to pursue a "new, new thing"

Fabrice Grinda

Fabrice Grinda is leaving OLX. He made this announcement in his blog post yesterday.

Fabrice Grinda is part of the formidable duo that founded OLX; along with Alec Oxenford. OLX is an internet company based in New York City and Buenos Aires, Argentina. The website hosts free user-generated classified advertisements for urban communities around the world and provides discussion forums sorted by various topics.

The company was co-founded in March 2006 by Internet entrepreneurs Fabrice Grinda and Alec Oxenford. OLX considers itself the next generation of free online classifieds. The OLX platform is used in over 96 countries including Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa and 40 languages.

OLX entered the African Classifieds landscape by way of an investment by Naspers, the South African media company. Naspers converted its leading classified properties - Dealfish in Kenya, Nigeria and Kalahariads in South Africa to OLX within the last 18 months due to its superior platform and expert resources. (Naspers owns 84% of OLX)



According to Fabrice, 

"It seems paradoxical to leave just as I am reaching certainty that OLX will be a multi-billion dollar company.

So why leave? My entrepreneurial spirit compels me to build my ideas into a new company now that OLX is all grown up and has an amazing management team in place to lead it forward. I find myself yearning for a new entrepreneurial adventure!"

Pre-Naspers investment, Fabrice was in charge of the product strategy, investor relations, front line M&A (identifying and reaching out to targets), business development and English PR. While Alec took the lead on operations, post-merger integration and Spanish and Portuguese PR. They both jointly set the strategy.  

However Post - Naspers, Fabrice says:

... post-Naspers investing, the nature of my work started changing. I no longer had to manage investor relations. The M&A and business development roles disappeared as we started focusing on organic growth. Simultaneously, we started needing to have a structure and budgeting rigor commensurate to our size, not to mention being owned by a large publicly traded company. We were no longer building a new company, we were running a mature company, and for that one CEO is enough.

Simultaneously, further copying the Schibsted playbook, we decided to decentralize OLX operations and really empower local country managers. As such we transferred product strategy to local teams. I completely agreed and supported the strategic changes, but I also realized that to be effective in this new organization I would have to move to Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo or Delhi which I was loth to do. Fortunately, Alec already lives in Buenos Aires, so it was natural to transition the sole CEO role to him.
On his next move, Fabrice has this to say:

"Kitesurfing in Cabarete! :) Beyond that stay tuned for news about the “new new thing”!

So we say "Congratulations Fabrice and best of luck"

P.S. For more of his story on his disengagement from OLX, click here