INVESTING By Kevin Dowd
From The Ground Up
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By investing in hundreds of startups at the earliest stages and targeting overlooked markets, M AGN U S GR I M EL A N D and A N TL E R are putting their own twist on the entrepreneurial dream.
A After finishing a two-year stint in Norway’s naval special forces, Magnus Grimeland arrived at Harvard as a 23-year-old freshman in 2003. He promptly caught the tech bug, which put him in an opportune place at an opportune time. Grimeland befriended a classmate named Eduardo Saverin. He rowed on the crew team, where he met Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. He might have even worked for Mark Zuckerberg at TheFacebook, as it was then known, if he weren’t also juggling classes and athletics and caring for his infant son. “I was close to applying for one of their internships. They more or less hired anyone in the early days,” Grimeland recalls with a wry grin. “I think anyone who took those internships is incredibly well off right now.” Unlike Saverin, who was one of Facebook’s cofounders and is now worth $11.4 billion, or the litigious Winklevoss twins ($4 billion each), Grimeland was only on the fringes of the Zuckerberg phenomenon. But the entrepreneurial inclination rubbed off. After graduation and a stint at McKinsey, Grimeland would go on to work for a different internet billionaire, Rocket Internet’s Oliver Samwer, and help him build Luxembourg-based Global Fashion Group into an e-commerce conglomerate with more than $1.6 billion in sales. Now, Grimeland wants to reinvent startup investing. His latest venture is Antler, which was founded in Singapore but has no formal headquarters. Antler is trying FORBES ASIA
to combine aspects of a startup studio, incubator, accelerator and venture firm into a global company-creation machine. What Sequoia has done in venture capital and Y Combinator as an accelerator, Grimeland hopes to replicate at an even earlier stage of the startup lifecycle. Antler canvasses the world for potential founders—often from emerging markets like Jakarta, Nairobi, Sao Paulo and Ho Chi Minh City that Grimeland feels are overlooked by other VCs, and often poaching them from successful companies like Cisco and McAfee. “We love that,” Grimeland says. “For example, we reached out to the head of product at Spotify and said, ‘Hey, you know, big congrats on building Spotify—isn’t it about time for you to leave and build your own billiondollar business?’” Some Antler founders are recruits. Others find the program on their own. But none are guaranteed entry, and all must go through the same application process: Grimeland expects to receive around 100,000 applications this year, of whom about 2.5% will be accepted. Those who enter the program leave their old jobs, betting they will be able to create a better one on their own. Antler offers only a stipend of up to $2,500 to offset living expenses. The programs range from six to 12 weeks during which participants hunt for cofounders, develop a business model and try to convince Antler they’re worthy of initial funding. Antler usually decides whether to invest—typically between $100,000 and $200,000 for a 10% stake— before a company is even incorporated. Grimeland started Antler in 2017 with $500,000 in capital from his time in the fashion industry. A year later, he raised $6 million from a group of colleagues and fellow entrepreneurs. Today, Antler manages about $500 million in assets, raising money from the likes of $920 billion British asset manager Schroders, the International Finance Corporation (an affiliate of the World Bank) and his old friend Saverin. It operates 21 offices on six continents, with a network of advisors and operators in each city, and it has invested in more than 450 startups. But to succeed in the long term, Antler will have to stand out from a rapidly growing crowd of incubators, J U LY 2 0 2 2
