• September Breakfast Club: Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!

• Grata (Sponsor)

• Tech Week Kickoff Party (Stealth Mode)

• Can I text you?

• 7 VC’s you should know

Thank you to Grata, the leading business development platform for proactive deal makers, for sponsoring the newsletter and September’s Breakfast Club

September Breakfast Club

Join my cohosts, Laura Hamilton and Wil Hagen, and I as we celebrate the launch of Jerry Neumann and Liz Zalman’s new book, Founder vs Investor.

Jerry is a legendary angel investor with early (and I mean extremely early) investments in Trade Desk and Datadog (both $30bn+ publicly traded companies now).

Elizabeth Zalman is a two-time founder and CEO of venture-backed companies, building the first to a successful exit and the second to a multi-hundred-million-dollar business. Elizabeth has raised more than $100 million in venture capital from the most renowned investors in the world.

Laura and Wil are going to interview Jerry and Liz about the book. There will also be plenty of time to sip coffee, eat a bagel, and chat.

Click here to register:

Pre-order the book on amazon.

Grata (Sponsor)

Grata is used by over 500 firms to source and research deals. It powers $400b+ in AUM.

I was catching up with an anonymous growth equity investor and breakfast club member (who for compliance reasons has to go nameless). This breakfast club member was an early adopter of Grata and is now a bit of an evangelist for the product - I had to ask why Grata?

“It makes my life a lot easier. From an investor’s perspective, I’ve found that Grata has the most accurate and relevant dataset among sourcing tools, allowing me to get the best outside-in view on a company. Grata’s platform provides intuitive functionality for researching known companies and for net new company discovery. Differentiated features like the “Similar Companies” tool allow users to efficiently source across a broad set of company profiles.”

Breakfast Before Dawn: NYC Tech Week Kickoff Party

I’m teaming up with Popl and Bulletpitch to throw a blowout opening night party for New York Tech Week. Food, Drinks, Elite Entertainment.

Popl and Bulletpitch are only giving me an allotment of 100 tickets for Tech Breakfast Club members, though. (half are gone now - thank you to those who’ve bought one already)

I know it’s a ways off, so if you buy a ticket now and end up not being able to make it, I’ll refund the ticket

If you have any questions or want reassurance that you’ll have a very good time, reply to this newsletter.

To purchase, click the button below:

Sign up for a curated list of tech events (weekly/via text)

Breakfast Club Member Spotlight: 7 VC’s to watch 🚀 

The greatest joy of hosting breakfast club is the incredible people I get to meet. I feel like I have inside information about what the future is going to look like. Today, I want to share with you profiles on 7 early career VC’s that are already crushing it and will continue to crush it.

Nicole Friedman
Is a true generalist early-stage investor with Blue Collective, writing checks into everything from cowboy boots to no code software. After a storied squash career at Williams, Nicole worked for Bowery Valuation, a fintech startup making commercial appraisals more efficient. Eventually she met JJ Kasper and Brian Stafford, the founders of Blue Collective, who convinced her to make the leap to early stage investing. Blue Collective identifies phenomenal founders at the earliest stages - the same, I think is also true, when it comes to associates.

Matt Lu 🐴 
Matt recently (back in January) made the jump from Bullpen Capital to Cowboy Ventures, a fund focused on exploring generative AI infrastructure and vertical-specific AI applications. At Bullpen, Matt made a name for himself by sourcing several high-growth startups in non-consensus categories, like healthcare-coordination software. When he’s not working you can find Matt playing soccer or interviewing up and coming Asian chefs for his photo journal.

James Hueston
James likes old people. He can trace his appreciation for the elderly back to his time spent volunteering at the local library as a child. James might not have expected this appreciation to give him an edge as a VC but now as an associate at Primetime Partners, James invests in companies that better the lives of older adults and those that care for them. A graduate of Vassar, he played varsity lacrosse and made the Liberty League All-Academic Team four years in a row.

Anjing Fu
Anjing, who is currently hustling up Mt. Kilimanjaro, has climbed to the metaphorical peak of proptech at Fifth Wall. As the largest prop tech focused venture fund, Fifth Wall invests in everything from seed to pre-ipo companies. Asked to define proptech, Anjing says “technologies that are tackling some of the biggest problems in the Built World and bringing value to real estate owners, operators, and developers.” To fully understand Anjing’s combination of intensity and poise, it’s helpful to know that she was a competitive figure skater for 13 years, placing as high as 3^rd at Nationals.

Laura Hamilton
Laura is perhaps the most thoughtful VC associate I’ve spoken to with regards to systematically approaching sourcing series A/B investments. She has near encyclopedic knowledge about the most random niches. Pick something obscure - say floral subscription startups - and get ready to be impressed. Her mindset makes a lot of sense given her fund, Spring Mountain Capital, prides itself on taking advantage of investment opportunities “in the gaps” where larger investors do not focus. In her spare time you can find her recording episodes of her venture focused podcast, Partner Path, and experimenting on tik tok.

Evelysse Vargas
Evelysse has this supreme confidence that things will work out, allowing her to see opportunities where others might only see risk. After receiving a crash course in alternative investments at BlackRock, Evelysse made the jump to the NYC Board of Education Retirement System. There she managed a $200m private investment portfolio. While managing this portfolio, she saw a massive opportunity in impact investing. Through conversations with Nasir Qadree, the founder of Zeal Capital Partners, Evelysse began to crystalize her vision of going beyond representation to drive real measurable change. Now a Senior Associate at Zeal, Evelysse seeks to achieve top tier financial and social returns that impact low-wealth communities and small businesses. As a First Generation American from the Bronx, her time at prep school on the Upper East Side and at Wesleyan has fueled her determination to democratize economic opportunity for everyone.

Vincent Zhu
I think the randomness of Vincent’s career path speaks to both his grit and willingness to learn quickly. Somehow, after graduating Georgetown, where he captained the rowing team, he landed a job at Goldman as the chief of staff to the COO of Consumer and Wealth Management. Then, despite zero connections to Venture Capital, Vincent hacked his way into General Catalyst. At GC, you can find Vincent exploring how Gen Z will reinvent the consumer internet and asking big questions - like is happiness a limited resource? For fund performance sake, we’re hoping it’s renewable.

Thank you for reading! Reply with “Return the fun(d)” (or whatever else you want) to let me know you made it