Every holding company has a boring core that pays for the interesting things. For NGMI, that core has a name — V&B Luxembourg — and it started in 2012, before any of this was an "NGMI."
We are the sole agent for Villeroy & Boch hospitality in Luxembourg. B2B only: hotels, restaurants, institutional catering, cruise lines, the kinds of places that order 400 plates at a time and expect them delivered next Thursday. No retail. No "come in and pick a dinner set." That is a different business, run by different people, and we don't pretend otherwise.
What it actually is
If you have eaten in a restaurant in Luxembourg at any point since roughly 2012, there is a reasonable chance the plate under your food came through us. We don't put stickers on anything. Nobody outside the industry has heard of V&B Luxembourg and that is the correct amount of awareness for an agent. Our customers are head chefs, F&B directors, and procurement teams. They want catalogs, lead times, and a phone that gets answered on the first ring.
That's the entire business. A phone that gets answered. A delivery that shows up. A replacement when the kitchen breaks a dozen soup bowls the day before a hundred-cover Saturday.
Why it funded everything else
The interesting parts of NGMI — Snooze, Blocx, Roma, the fund — are operationally dramatic. Restaurants break at random hours. Gyms need insurance renewals. Crypto funds have drawdowns. None of those businesses produce the kind of calm monthly cashflow a holding company needs to survive the bad months elsewhere.
V&B does.
The agent business is the reason the interesting businesses got to exist. Every founder with a "boring" business should say the quiet part louder.
For fourteen years it has done something very specific: it has paid the rent while the risky projects tried to work. Snooze City didn't make money in year one. Blocx didn't pay itself back the first summer. wagmi Fund I had a -22% drawdown in 2023. None of those moments required a panic call to an investor, because the agent business was running in the background, paying salaries, paying suppliers, and quietly accumulating the balance that let us ride out the rest.
The thing nobody tells you about agency work
It is not glamorous and it is not leveraged and it does not 10x. It is also the only business in the NGMI portfolio that has never had a bad year. In 2020, when restaurants in Luxembourg were closed for months and every hospitality P&L in Europe went red, V&B still shipped. Hotels had to stock for reopening. Hospitals never stopped needing plates. Institutional catering shifted but didn't vanish.
There's a founder fetish for high-beta businesses — the ones that swing hard in both directions. Agency work swings softly in one direction: up and to the right, slowly, for fourteen years. That sounds boring because it is. It is also the single most important thing on the NGMI cap table.
What surprised me
How much of being an agent is memory. Fourteen years of knowing which chef hates which plate weight. Fourteen years of "Christmas stock lands on the 12th, we don't need to call." Fourteen years of remembering that a specific hotel always orders an extra 20% on ramekins because they break that many every quarter, and nobody is pretending otherwise.
That memory is not in any CRM. It is in a handful of people who have been doing this a long time. The day I treat the agency business as the "boring one" is the day I deserve to lose it. It is the part of NGMI I am most careful about, and it is the part nobody ever asks about.
The quiet compounding
Fourteen years compounds quietly. No one writes Twitter threads about agency businesses. No one raises a round on "we're the sole distributor." But a calm, contracted, decade-plus relationship with a brand like V&B, in a country like Luxembourg, is the kind of moat that cannot be venture-funded into existence. You can only grow it one plate, one hotel, one chef at a time.
If the holding company has a foundation, this is it. Everything else on the portfolio page sits on top of fourteen years of someone picking up the phone.