☕️ Tech Breakfast Club is Back (Bigger And Better Than Ever)

+ Afore's Demo Day Recap

Author

Morgan Barrett
April 03, 2025

👋 Hi, Breakfast Club Members!

Thank you to Luka @ Remgu for sponsoring today’s newsletter - you know Luka as the go to partner for top European dev talent but now he’s also offering Latin American dev talent

Big day for breakfast. Big day for taking asymmetric bets. Welcome to the next chapter in Tech Breakfast Club! We’re announcing 6 upcoming breakfasts. More details below. I’ve never felt more bullish about getting deals done over breakfast than I do right now.

And scroll down for my recap and thoughts on Afore’s demo day. There was an insane density of talent. Afore is doing something very special right now and it deserves more attention.

Resources:
-Clerky offers a $100 discount for TBC Members on their formation packet. Reply to the newsletter and I’ll send you an invite
-Fixing the YC SAFE: Reply to the newsletter and I’ll send you a redline for the YC Postmoney SAFE that can save founders millions in dilution
-Ramp is offering a $500 bonus to TBC members when they start using Ramp.
-Did you know that J.P. Morgan has a complimentary Cap Table free up to 100 stakeholders? If you like to learn more visit their site link
- Free Zendesk for 6 months. Time to scale your customer service? Talk to Zendesk

Tech Breakfast Club Events

NYC Tech Breakfast Club April 16th
Cohosting with Ariana Song from Slow VC. For founders/VC’s

SF Tech Breakfast Club April 17th
Cohosting Amber Yang from CRV. For founders/VC’s

El Segundo Tech Breakfast Club May 1st
In celebration of Discipulus Venture’s new cohort of founders

NYC ML Engineering Tech Breakfast Club May 7th
Finally the engineers get some love. With Julien Reiman from Baseten.

NYC Tech Breakfast Club: DTC/CPG Edition May 8th
Teaming up with the legend, Nate Rosen (Express Checkout), to feed the best and brightest DTC/CPG founders

Harbinger x Tech Breakfast Club (Factory Tour & Truck Test Drive)
Come eat breakfast and see elective delivery trucks. So pumped for this. Harbinger has been quietly executing on a grand scale.

Tech Breakfast Club 🤝 Luka @ Remgu

Meet Luka, founder of Remgu, who sources top European (and Latin American) talent for fast growing companies

#Sponsoredpost

You studied CS at Waterloo – incredible CS program – then you worked at companies in Toronto, Chicago, and NYC for almost two decades... why did you move to Croatia?
I moved to Canada as a kid from Croatia but then I went back on vacation in 2017 and met my wife. So, I moved back to be with her. I started finding all of this incredible technical talent that spoke English very well – that’s what prompted me to start Remgu

Who is Remgu a good option for?
We’re ideal for startups and SMB’s seeking top-quality European talent for long term engagements. Our talent is elite – we’re very selective and do intensive vetting. So when a client comes to us, the process is very streamlined, we match them with one or two handpicked candidates. So for $50 to $80/hour you can get a vetted experienced senior engineer instead of settling for the most junior and inexperienced US based engineers.

Why is Remgu a better option than competitors?
We have near perfect retention of clients, and I think that comes from our long term perspective. We’re not here to maximize profit from every engagement. We want to grow with our clients. We have a lean and flexible model with low overhead, so clients keep coming back to us for more and more talent.

If you’re ready to build out your team, the easiest way to get in touch with Luka is emailing him at [email protected] connecting with him on LinkedIn

Preseed 2.0
Notes on Afore’s Demo Day

I had the good fortune of catching Afore’s Demo Day on Monday. Thank you to Jack McClelland for the invite.

The Afore team was world class before but it feels like they’ve taken their game to another level these last 18 months. 

First off, they raised their 4th fund. It’s a massive $185m fund dedicated to preseed. 

Secondly, they’re doubling down on the Founder in Residence Program. 

I love the Founders in Residence (FIR) program because it meets founders closer to the true start of their journey and arms them with the coaching and resources they need to execute faster - whether that’s talking high-level strategy or getting as granular as reviewing transcripts of individual sales calls. 

We talk about preseed as the first step in the journey but the journey actually starts long before you have a crystalised vision and team. It begins with navigating the idea maze, finding a cofounder, and gaining the conviction to quit your secure, high paying, comfortable job. A lot of funds say they’ll invest early. Few are handing out checks as early as Afore. If the FIR program sounds like a fit for you - I’m happy to make an intro to Jack. 

One of the big takeaways from Afore’s traction is that it’s never been a better time for preseed. Afore is seeing startups, whether they’re AI focused or just leveraging AI tools, getting to $1m in ARR in like 50% less time. Bren and Gerard at Synquery (AI Platform for Human Expertise) during their Afore Demo Day pitch just casually mentioned hitting $1m in 5 months after launching like it’s no big deal. I would be yelling that from the top of a Waymo. 

Another insane stat:
For every dollar Afore puts in, 39x follows

Startups that caught my attention at Afore’s Demo Day: 

Caledon: the data layer for accounting/finance 
If you can get LLM’s to be compliant, precise, and (above all) accurate when giving tax advice, you’re going to make a lot of money. It sounds like Caledon, between their red teaming tools and the attention to detail they have with their data sets, is a couple steps ahead of the competition and has led them to have a pretty promising $5m pipeline of business. Big fan of Thayallan, cofounder of Caledon, too. 

ViryAI: Palantir for marketing & advertising
Big companies want to use Gen AI for brand assets but can’t due to inconsistency and lack of copyright protection. Steven Miller and Alex Crisara are solving this problem by mapping the creative components and generating auditable logs. You get more precise creative control and the ability to copyright it. Cracked Team - good mix of prestigious big tech experience (Amazon, Uber, Instacart) with scrappy hard fought startup success. 

Graysound AI: AI Co-pilot for Music Creation
I’ve never seen a music startup I like. It’s a terrible industry. Saying I’m a skeptic is a huge understatement… yet I came away from Anshu’s pitch optimistic. Great background - Duke, Berklee (not a typo - the college of music), and Robotics Engineer at Amazon. The market for audio engineering is quite small but there’s a lot of musicians. The insight here is turning every musician (or person who wants to make music) into an audio engineer with precise control over the output via an AI Co-pilot. 

Palette: Datadog for the front end 
I wish I had invested in Datadog. I met up with an early investor in Datadog for coffee on the day of the Datadog IPO back in 2019. Whoever said money can’t buy happiness clearly had never bagged a 100x’er. Light was radiating from his pores. I digress - Amila (founder of Palette) is elite. Prolific open source stud turned Amazon Engineer. The market for making apps load feels infinite. Really robust pipeline, too. 

Additional Tech Breakfast Club Shoutouts: 
I was thrilled to see Tyler from Gild pitch - you might have seen him at NYC or SF TBC. He’s transforming recruiting for skilled trades. It’s a very worthy mission. For America’s sake, I hope Tyler becomes very very rich. 

Richard Zhou, Ray Xu, and Nathan Chung from Omnial - it’s been great chatting with this crew since we met in SF at TBC. Absolutely cracked Waterloo AI talent (they were publishing/presenting at top conferences as teenagers). They’re building something crazy ambitious: getting your computer to understand your intentions. Sounds like their beta test is crushing. Excited to see more. 

About Morgan Barrett:
Morgan is the creator of Tech Breakfast Club. He hosts breakfast meetups in NYC, LA, SF, (and occasionally Austin, Miami, Boston) that bring together the best founders and investors.

Morgan is also a Startup Lawyer at Optimal, an elite lean boutique startup law firm repping clients funded by a16z, Sequoia, Kleiner, Accel, and countless other VCs. He works with clients from formation to exit, in collaboration with Optimal’s partners.