☕️ Investing in the Next Beehiiv

New Tech Breakfast Club Signups

Author

Morgan Barrett
November 12, 2024

Today’s Menu ☕️

👋 Hi, Breakfast Club Members!

Excited to see a bunch of you tomorrow morning in NYC!

Also, if you’re an early stage startup that has raised a pre seed round (at least $500k) in NYC, SF, or LA and wants me to buy you breakfast (I’ll cater it for your entire team in the office) reply to this newsletter. I’ll pick a dozen teams and you’ll get your own mini tech breakfast club.

Scroll down to read about my latest investment in Twill and learn about how Michelle Volberg is making hiring better.

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
-Better Bookkeeping offers streamlined support to founders on everything from bookkeeping to tax strategy and filing.
-Ramp is offering a $500 bonus to TBC members when they start using Ramp.
- Hubspot: Tech Breakfast Club members get their free CRM and 50% off HubSpot pro plans if you purchase by Nov 30th. Redeem directly here. Questions? Reach out to Cristine at [email protected]

Tech Breakfast Club Events

NYC Tech Breakfast Club Nov 13th
Lori Berenberg (Bloomberg Beta), the Queen of Early Stage Venture in NYC, is back again to cohost Tech Breakfast Club. This is the last one of the year (don’t worry we’ll be back in January)!

SF Tech Breakfast Club Dec 5th
Closing out the year with Jack McClelland (Afore) in SF. Jack just sourced a deal from Tech Breakfast Club - come join and 10x your deal flow.

El Segundo Tech Breakfast Club Jan 9th
Kicking the year off with in the most important 5 square miles in America

Austin Tech Breakfast Club Jan 16th
Hopefully my cholesterol is under control by January - planning on eating a ton of tacos and brisket

Bonus: Laurent Span, one of TBC’s favorite VC’s, is throwing a holiday gala on December 6th in NYC. Grab your tux and grab a ticket: https://posh.vip/e/the-gala-3

Tech Breakfast Club 🤝 Ramp

Ramp’s corporate cards and expense management tools are trusted by companies like Stripe, Shopify, and Anduril. If you’re running a startup, it’s a no brainer to use Ramp.

Okay, Ramp once again, I guess because they’re so confident in their product, gave me zero talking points. So, I get to go off on another Ramp related tangent.

The company is brilliant. They’re serious, like I hope you are, about maximizing the value of every dollar they spend. And this is really clear in their marketing.

Ramp has to get in front of CEO’s and CFO’s who happen to really like golf. If you’re IBM, you can shell out 10’s of millions of dollars to sponsor the Masters. For that price tag you get zero signs on the property and a 60 second commercial every hour. Nuts!

Ramp went in a different direction, made an asymmetric bet, and won big. They sponsored an amateur, Neal Shipley, in hopes that the amateur would get a couple minutes on TV when they received the prize for being the low amateur of the Masters. They felt like sponsoring amateurs (compared to pros) was wildly underpriced.

The tournament went way better than expected though. Neal Shipley, then a student at OSU, outperformed all expectations and made the cut. It got even better when Neal (potentially on purpose) missed a short put on the final hole on Saturday, guaranteeing he dropped back a spot and got paired with Tiger Woods for Sunday’s round. So, every time the cameras showed Tiger on Sunday, there was Neal sporting his Ramp branded polo.

This absolute masterpiece of sports marketing resulted in Ramp’s website seeing 65% increase in website traffic month over month. Nice.

Neal Shipley awkwardly becoming a meme

Featured Job (brought to you by Twill)

AVP of Sales for a rapidly scaling startup:

  • Remote, US

  • Salary $200K-$350K OTE

  • Reports to: COO

About the Company:
This startup is the first modern fintech platform transforming the $500 billion U.S. higher education payments industry by solving the dual complexities of the tuition payment process for students and accounts receivables for universities. The founders are former leaders at Amazon, Outschool, Klarna and Amex. Investors include Susa Ventures, AlleyCorp, Giant Ventures, and Treble Capital.

About the Candidate:

  • 8+ years of experience in enterprise (B2B) sales, preferably in the higher education or fintech sectors.

  • MUST have sold into Director of Student Financial Services, Director of Student Accounts or CFOs at universities

If you’re a fit, reply to the newsletter

Why isn’t recruiting better?
Michelle Volberg, Founder of Twill

I love startups that give people new ways to make money. There is so much untapped potential in this world waiting to be unlocked. Airbnb helped property owners monetize their unused homes and vacation properties. Uber allowed people with a couple free hours and a car to start making money on the side. Beehiiv (I invested in their series A) allowed everyone with an interesting perspective to start a niche media company.

So when Lori Berenberg (Bloomberg Beta) asked me to take a look at Twill, the company instantly resonated with me. Michelle, the founder of Twill, was helping the best coders, sales people, and ops leaders make substantial side income by helping their friends get jobs. I wanted to join Twill immediately, both as a user and investor.

How to use Twill
Join Twill as a Member (You’ll be fast-tracked as a TBC member)
Use Twill to hire as a Employer (as a TBC member you get a discount, $10k flat fee of 2 roles)

What is Twill? 
Twill makes hiring easier and faster by having top talent recommend their peers and friends for open roles and get paid for it. 

Twill has two sides to it – the member side, the supply side, and the company or hiring side, the demand side. Explain the member experience
So, unlike other platforms, you have to apply to become a Twill member. We accept around 30% of applications. 

We look for tech experts with demonstrated expertise in a specific vertical, which is likely five to eight years of engineering experience, product experience, sales experience, ops, customer success - anything within tech. We're specific to tech right now. 

Then, once you are approved as a member, you get access to twill roles, which span from engineering roles at Google to engineering roles at startups. PM roles, sales roles, customer success roles. 

Then, when you make a referral for a specific job, Twill takes over. We do all the legwork. We figure out if they're the right fit, we introduce them to the hiring manager, we help schedule interviews, and the person that made the referral has transparency into their process - they're copied on emails. They see what's going on. They don't actually have to do anything. And then when the person gets hired, they make $5k to $25k and get paid out within 30 days of the person starting their new job.

You have a bunch of roles from Google, but I’d say the majority of roles are from early stage startups. What’s it like from the company side?
It's much easier to work with startups because startups don't have major recruiting teams with robust workflows and bureaucratic red tape. Startups are the best to work with, because founders just care about hiring the best people as quickly and economically as possible. We don’t charge anything upfront. You only pay if you hire someone and it’s always a flat fee. 

I like the flat fee model
It aligns incentives better – you get the right talent instead of a recruiter trying to sell you the most expensive talent. 

And if a couple months down the line, it turns out the engineer isn’t the right fit, they’re not able to ship fast enough, or the AE hasn’t met a quota, you have a six-month guarantee, so we’ll replace them at no cost. 

A lot of our members are elite, senior engineers, product and sales leaders at FAANG companies, but we have a ton of members at earlier stage startups that just get the mentality of working quickly in a chaotic environment - roll up your sleeves with no ego. Many of our members actually have the skills and qualities that a lot of startups are actively seeking.

And we average filling roles in less than 30 days. 

When Lori Berenberg was pitching Twill to me, she said that other founders have tried the model, or close approximations, before but you’re the right person to make it work – why do you think that is?
I think it’s because I have actual recruiting experience. All the other founders who have tried to do this are engineers with limited hiring experience. I’m a non-technical solo female founder but I ran an executive search firm for a decade and worked with both massive and small companies on hundreds of roles in different verticals. I’ve seen it all and this isn’t so much a technical problem to solve – it’s a human or network problem. 

You essentially built Twill already and now you’re trying to scale it beyond yourself with tech – can you give me the full story?
I originally thought I was going to be a journalist, I interned at ABC News but it wasn’t for me – so I moved to New York and got an assistant job for Tina Brown and Edward Felsenthal at The Daily Beast. Three months into the job I got tapped to lead a sales team. I brought in American Express and a bunch of other partners. Amex recruited me to the client side, I hated it. I went back to sales at NBC, ABC, and AOL. 

I always found myself kind of bored after two years. Once I built a pipeline they were like you can just take people out to dinner now. You’ve met your quota, you’re good, just relax. I don’t know how to do that. 

I had a massive network of salespeople I had gotten to know over the last 10 or 15 years and I knew what made a good Account Executive so I thought I could switch to doing sales recruiting. 

After building 30 or 40 sales teams, a client asked if I could build an engineering team. I failed miserably. I would look at an engineering resume and have no idea who was a good fit for what. 

Out of desperation, I basically called some friends who were engineers at Google and begged them for some recommendations – the three people they sent were all perfect and the client hired one of them. Same thing happened with a product role. So, I immediately thought there was something here. 

Pretty quickly I had 50 people working with me across the US who had W2’s at Google, Amazon, etc, just recruiting people on the side. But the money they were making was more significant than their W2 income. 

That’s insane – these highly paid engineers were making more recruiting on the side?
People were expanding families - literally having babies because they could afford it. They were upgrading their apartments. They were buying houses. They were going on vacations and sending me pics from Turks & Caicos. 

That’s so moving. You know you’re a good recruiter when you help someone build out their family
It got to the point where I couldn’t manage more than 50 people, but I knew tech could. I think everyone deserves the opportunity to make money from just recommending their friends for jobs. And so that's how Twill came to be. 

I think I love Twill because people already do this for their friends, but without compensation. You’re finding a way to amplify behavior that people already naturally want to do
There’s a line of thinking in today's world that a good deed is only a good deed if it doesn't serve you as well. It’s not a good deed if you get paid for it. 

But you can do a good thing - like recommending someone for a job - and get paid for it. They're not mutually exclusive, and companies are going to pay someone anyway to do it - why not you? They are paying executive recruiters who are spamming your friends for these jobs, whereas you're probably hanging out with them after work and could get them an interview much faster than a recruiter. 

I also wanted to touch on how important Twill is now with the rise of AI. AI is making almost everything easier but it’s complicating recruiting
Yeah, historically, when you post a job on indeed or monster or something, you'll get 1,000 resumes, and like, 95% of them suck, and 5% of them are, like mediocre, and maybe one is okay enough to interview, but AI has made it so that, and we're seeing this over and over again, hiring managers are getting catfished. 

You post a job, and 1,000 perfect resumes appear. You think you’re good. You pick 20, maybe interview 10, but over zoom, it’s completely the opposite of what the resume describes. You can very easily put a resume into Chat GPT and make it match a job description. 

The deception can run even deeper for remote roles and we’re hearing horror stories constantly – you interview one candidate and then they’re switched out for someone completely different and much more junior when it comes time to start the role. 

So, a warm referral really has never been more important. Somebody actually vouches that you are a real person and can actually do the job, especially in today's remote culture, where there's a lot of trust that has to be given that you're able to work asynchronously and execute. 

What's your ultimate vision for Twill?
With AI making it harder to hire, human networks matter more than ever. Twill's vision is to be the platform that powers all hiring through trusted referrals, because at the end of the day, great people know great people.

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.