Meet The Angel Investor Who Made His Life A Video Game (Then Played It)

Meet the multi-millionaire that made his life a video game (then played it)

getty

Most successful entrepreneurs tell you to grind harder. They preach hustle culture. Wake up at 5am. Take cold showers. Sacrifice everything. Push through the pain. Except there’s one problem with this advice: the most successful people you know aren’t actually suffering. They’re having the time of their lives.

Fabrice Grinda proves this completely. Grinda had an $80 million exit in 2004. He has invested in over 1,000 companies. He was early in Alibaba, Airbnb, and Palantir. But Grinda insists his success came from treating life as a video game, not from grinding himself into the ground.

“If a student in college feels like their homework is work, and they have to take the finals, they’re going to cram the night before and forget everything the next day,” Grinda told me from his New York penthouse. “If you do it because you think it’s interesting and fun, you retain it. Princeton has more Nobel Prize winners than all of France,” because that’s what happens when people treat learning as play rather than obligation.

I needed to understand how someone goes from being just like Sheldon Cooper (the genius physicist from The Big Bang Theory who lacks all social skills), as Grinda describes himself at age 10, to building this kind of empire, while insisting it’s all just play. Because if he’s right, most of us are doing success completely backwards.

The Sheldon Cooper years changed everything

Starting out as the ultimate nerd

“When I was 10, I was insufferable,” Grinda admits. “I asked my parents – do you realize you have God at the dinner table, and you should be grateful that you have my intellect and presence?”

Grinda was winning every academic competition in France. Straight A+ at Princeton. The highest GPA in his class. From the outside it looked like something was fundamentally broken. He had no friends. No social life. He’d never been on a date by age 27, but while monomaniacal, he was fundamentally happy fulfilling his sense of manifest destiny.

“Everything was on the altar of intellect and ambition,” he says. “I thought everyone around me, including my parents, were idiots. I’m like, you know, you’re not smart enough to be graced by my presence, so let me go study alone.” But thankfully it was just a phase.

The turning point nobody saw coming

After academic success, Grinda started climbing the ladder of entrepreneurial success too. Founded OLX in 2006, which reported $777 million in 2025 revenue, and became its CEO. Front page of Forbes France. Then his first company went spectacularly bankrupt. Public humiliation. More front page news. The golden boy lost everything when the tech bubble burst.

“I went from zero to hero, back to zero again,” Grinda recalls. But instead of crushing him, it freed him. He sent himself a long email asking one question: what do I actually want to do with my life?

His answer shocked everyone. “Even though tech is going to be this niche, small thing, it’s not gonna be big, and there’s no money in it, you know what? I’m gonna stay a tech founder, because that’s actually what I care about.” Grinda genuinely believed that tech wouldn’t pick back up. But he decided to follow his joy anyway.

Life isn’t serious so stop pretending it is

The universe is playing hide and seek

Turns out, tech got big again. But after rebuilding his fortune with ringtone company Zingy (then selling for $80 million despite hating the business), Grinda had another crisis. Running OLX with 11,000 employees, he realized something profound.

“The job changed. You know, in the early days, I’m writing user stories, I’m writing product specs, and I feel like I’m having a direct impact,” he explains. “Once you’re 11,000 employees, and you’re part of a publicly traded company, your job becomes creating an annual budget, making sure you hit the numbers. I don’t know, bullshit.”

So he did the unthinkable. He quit the company he built. Gave away all his possessions. Started living out of a carry-on suitcase. “I decided to go back to first principles. I quit the company I started – that is winning, where I’m getting all the pay, all the recognition – because it is no longer true to what I want to be doing.”

Everything changed when he stopped forcing

“If you try hard at something and it’s not working, it’s a sign that it’s not for you,” Grinda discovered. This was revolutionary thinking for someone who’d spent seven years trying to build in the Dominican Republic despite personal experiences of corruption, disease, burglaries, and eventually being attacked by gunmen.

“The universe kept saying, no, no, no, no, no. In fact, I wrote a blog post on the universe kicking me in the teeth,” he laughs. “I did not take no for an answer.”

When he finally listened and moved to Turks & Caicos, everything flowed. Friends loved visiting. The business thrived. “The universe rewards people that do things that are right for them, that are in line with their energy, with their passion, with their ambition, with their joy.”

Play the game but don’t be played by it

Work becomes play when you change the frame

Here’s the distinction that changed everything for Grinda. Two people can work 100-hour weeks doing the exact same tasks. One burns out. The other thrives forever.

“If one person is doing it because they feel they need to prove themselves to their parents, society, their teachers, or most importantly themselves, for whatever chip on the shoulder they have, at some point, they burn out,” Grinda explains. “The other person is doing the exact same thing, working the same 100 hours a week. But they’re loving every single bit of it, because it’s play. They can go on forever, and that person wins every time.”

When work feels like play, you don’t need willpower. You don’t fight resistance. You just do what you love doing anyway.

The video game framework nobody teaches

“Life could read like a video game,” Grinda realized. “We all have these different character attributes that were pre-set ahead of our birth, that we can actually then tweak through training. It’s like a role-playing game.”

Think about it. You start with certain stats. Some people get better starting positions than others. You can level up skills through practice. But most people miss this: there’s no specific objective. You’re not supposed to win the game. You’re supposed to play it.

“If the purpose of a game were just to finish it, we’d play as fast as possible and end it immediately,” he points out. “But we don’t. We play for the thrill, the creativity, the improvisation, the experience.”

From virgin at 27 to living your design

Made dating a literal numbers game

When Grinda finally decided to address his complete lack of romantic experience at 27, he didn’t read dating books or hire a coach. He turned it into a game with clear mechanics.

“For 100 days, I forced myself to ask girls out in the streets of New York, so 10 girls a day out for 100 days, so 1,000 girls,” he explains. “The point was actually to be rejected, right? The point was to get over the fear of rejection.”

The results? 45 dates. Zero chemistry with most of them. But that wasn’t the point. The point was turning fear into data. “Our worlds did not overlap at all,” he laughs about those dates. “One of the girls was so hot, she asked me on a second date, I said yes, and then after the second date, she’s like, hey, do you want to come over? I’m like, no.”

Design your life like you’d design a character

After leaving OLX, Grinda went radical. No apartment. No possessions. No default mode. “How about I give everything away. Everything away to charity? I start with nothing. Complete first principles. If I have infinite time and nothing to do, where do I want to be today? What do I want to be doing? Who do I want to be seeing?”

He tried couch surfing (disaster – friends had families and routines). He tried Airbnb-ing everywhere. Hotels. Different cities every week, then every two months. “I tried many things,” he says. “I iterated, iterated, iterated, until I got to where I am today.”

Now he splits time between New York, Turks & Caicos, and Revelstoke, BC. Each location serves a purpose. Each has its season. None of it is random.

Stop caring what anyone thinks immediately

The game rewards authentic players

“Too many people have a combination of FOMO and doing things because they think they should, because they think someone like them should want to do these things,” Grinda observes. “Versus doing what they really want to be doing.”

This killed his younger self’s potential for decades. A virgin at 27, not because he couldn’t get dates, but because he thought intellect was all that mattered. No friends because he judged everyone as inferior. Missing out on life because he was playing someone else’s game.

“Never cared,” he says about what people thought. But that was the problem. Not caring from arrogance is different from not caring from confidence. One isolates you. The other sets you free.

Your purpose is simpler than you realize

“The meaning of life is life itself,” Grinda discovered through his psychedelic journeys. Not some grand mission. Not changing the world. Not proving your worth. Just playing your character in the cosmic game.

“Your purpose is to experience the present and to bring whatever brand of magic you have to those around you,” he explains. “While the actions of this specific incarnation of you is not going to be around in the future and nothing you do will be relevant in the future, it does not mean you do not have purpose.”

You’re already serving others just by being yourself. Your specific combination of skills, quirks, and perspectives is exactly what someone needs. But only if you’re actually being you, not some performance of what you think you should be.

Success comes from surrender not force

The world is whispering to you

Seven years in the Dominican Republic taught Grinda the difference between persistence and delusion. Guests got mugged. Tropical diseases spread. Guards demanded bribes. Someone attempted rape. A guest got shot. His dog was poisoned. Gunmen attacked the property.

“The whisper becomes a nudge. The nudge becomes a shove,” he writes. “Ignore it long enough, and the ground disappears beneath your feet.”

When Turks & Caicos opened up effortlessly – prime minister offering exemptions, community embracing him, everything flowing – the contrast was undeniable. One required force. The other invited him in.

Play your actual character class

“We’re all built differently, we all have our own perspectives, we all have our lives, and there’s no judgment to be had,” Grinda realized after his bankruptcy. “We are who we are.”

Stop trying to be a warrior when you’re built as a mage. Stop forcing extroversion when you’re wired for deep work. Stop chasing someone else’s definition of success when yours is completely different.

The universe rewards alignment, not effort. When you’re fully immersed in your actual character, you start playing on easy mode.

The meaning is there is no meaning

“In the end what I experience is that life is not a means to an end. Life is the end,” Grinda concludes. “You don’t look at a tree and ask, ‘What’s it for?’ Or listen to a song only to get to the end. You live it. You feel it. You dance with it.”

When you stop trying to win a game that has no win condition, you can finally start playing. When you stop grinding toward some future state, you can experience what’s actually here.

Most founders think success enables this mindset. Grinda insists it’s backwards. The mindset enables the success. When you’re playing instead of grinding, you can sustain it forever.

“I literally think I’m living the best life that’s ever been lived,” he says without irony. He figured out the cheat code: the point of the game is to play it.

Stop trying to beat life. Start playing it. Everything else follows.