Today’s Menu ☕️

• NYC AI/ML Leader’s Tech Breakfast Club Jan 21st

• NYC Tech Breakfast Club Jan 22nd

• EL Segundo Tech Breakfast Club Jan 29th

• Fintech Tech Breakfast Club Feb 5th (NYC)

• Noah from Crossover VC (betting big on Super Angels)

👋 Hi, Breakfast Club Members!

Thank you Luka @ Remgu for sponsoring today’s edition. Luka helps growing companies source top European engineers

Happy New Year! After a pretty light December (events wise, not deal wise) we’re back and ready to make the most of 2025. This is the year to make as much money as possible. I’d like for you to be very very rich.

Hope you enjoyed your break (if you took one). I got a lot of skiing in at Vail and even ran into Sam Rohr, a NYC Tech Breakfast member and investor at JAWS. If you’re on the fence about inviting me to come skiing with you this winter, give it a shot. I’m an elite guest. Value add both on the slopes and at apres.

Scroll down for signups for upcoming Tech Breakfast Clubs.

And stick around for my interview with Noah Lichtenstein from Crossover where he details his unique investment strategy backing some of the smartest Super Angels and doubling down on their breakout hits.

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.

Tech Breakfast Club Events

NYC AI/ML Leaders Tech Breakfast Club Jan 21st
Cohosting with Baseten and celebrating some of the smartest AI/ML engineers and CTO’s in the city

NYC Tech Breakfast Club Jan 22nd
Cohosting with Ben Braverman (Saga Ventures). If you’re embarking on a worthy quest - come join!

El Segundo Tech Breakfast Club Jan 29th
Join the most profitable podcast in the world (Technology Brothers) and Jacques Sisteron (Upfront Ventures)

Fintech Tech Breakfast Club (NYC) Feb 5th
Cohosting with Parker Odrich (Communitas Capital) and Topher Price (MS&AD). Come join if you’re building or investing in Fintech

Tech Breakfast Club 🤝 Luka

Meet Luka, founder of Remgu, who sources top European talent for fast growing companies

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 connecting with him on LinkedIn

Noah Lichtenstein(Crossover)
If you can’t beat them, join them

Life is unfair. And you can complain. But what if you made it unfair in your favor? That’s exactly what I think Noah is doing with Crossover. His strategy of backing some of the world’s best angel investors and then doubling down on their breakout hits gives his LP’s the diversification of a fund of funds but with the return profile of a traditional VC fund.

And not only is Noah taking a unique (and very thoughtful) approach to early stage investing - he’s having an incredible time. The guy hosts some of the best events of any fund in venture.

Crossover Fund 1 – after 10 years on the operating side and having a lot of success you decided it was time to launch a venture fund?
I had a good run as an operator. I co-founded two startups and was early at the Climate Corp working for Dave Friedberg – we sold for $1b in cash to Monsanto...

For those not familiar, what was Climate Corp
Climate Corp created predictive algorithms using weather data and then sold custom insurance contracts that had no claims process. It could be for whatever – let’s say you’re a farmer and want to get paid $1,000 for every day the temperature drops below 30 degrees in Des Moines, Iowa in the month of September. We’d calculate and share with you the predicted likelihood as well as how much we charge to take on that risk, and you could buy the contract that pays you out automatically if that weather event occurs.

Then I went on to help build HomeRun, an early competitor to Groupon, where I was responsible for figuring out how to build the go to market. We sold at the peak for a nice exit. 

Right around the time of the last exit, seed stage was crystalizing as a more institutional-grade asset class. You had First Round Capital, Mike Maples over at Floodgate, Steve Anderson at Baseline, Jeff Clavier at SoftTech, and a few other great investors leading the charge. I also saw from angel investing activity that founders, when given the choice, wanted to raise money from other founders. You were starting to see a rise of super angels...

And I started to feed my ADD by investing and found that I really like the zero to one process – not just building with one company but providing capital and insights to a bunch of companies. 

Yeah, say more about the rise of these super angels
The first call of the most technical – the top technical talent – when they’re starting a company is never to a VC. It’s always been to another founder they look up to. Sourcing flows through these key founder ecosystems – they’re seeing stuff before the professional investors. Sequoia recognized this early and tapped into this with its scouts program, and then many other multi-stage funds followed…but the scouts are now starting to go pro and launch their own small funds. 

I think it's going to be very difficult for the generalist early-stage funds to outperform in today’s venture landscape. These super angels, like Elad Gil, the Collison Brothers, Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross – they’re going to continue to get in early and increasingly up-size their checks in follow-on rounds. And investing at the early stage – and particularly out of a smaller fund – the economics are way more favorable. You can return an entire fund with sub-1 billion dollar exits with a small fund, and there are far more exits and offramps below $1 billion than there are above. 

Where does Crossover come in?
I wanted to leverage the insight and the access of these super angels. Let’s put capital behind those people who are the first call for the next wave of talent in a key sector or network. How can we support them in standing up and running funds – almost flipping the venture model on its head. Instead of building a big firm, high AUM, high fees, hiring a bunch of partners, let’s enable these founders (who are already magnets for talent) and enable them with more capital, more guidance, more structure. 

I want to call it a fund of funds, but that’s losing some important nuance –
Technically we are a fund of funds, but a key difference is that we are investing in a specific type of fund that the data suggests will produce the best returns in venture, and we underwrite to a higher return profile than a traditional fund of funds. We also allocate about half of our capital to direct investments. The funds we invest in meet the following three criteria:

1. Investing at the earliest stages. Pre seed, seed, usually first check in.

2.  Smaller fund size – where a sub billion-dollar exit can return the fund. 

3. Led by a next generation manager – those on a Fund 1-3. We believe that these next gen managers – and in particular, those who were consequential founders and operators –  have an unfair advantage in seeing and winning the best opportunities. So we look for a direct line between their operating experience and why they’re a founder’s first call. 

Our job is to pick the best managers – those who are truly the best first call/first check-writers. That’s step one. Step two is earning trust and building a relationship with each manager. That means applying a founder’s mindset around how we can add value to both them and their portfolio founders, and approach the relationship as more of a peer than a traditional LP. 

How does the follow-on investing usually work then?
There usually isn’t a board early on but these founders-turned-investors serve as de facto board members and confidants. They’re the first to know when a key inflection point happens, and so we position ourselves as both a strategic and capital partner to help them think through options, such as to buy up more ownership, position for allocation in an upcoming round, and so on.

Through our investment into around 20 managers, we expect to have exposure to around 1,000 companies sourced and invested in by these managers. We obviously can’t have relationships with all of them, and so our goal is to work with these managers and add enough value to help identify the top 10% of those companies and increase our odds of earning allocation in a follow-on round.

We’re not going to win every single one of these, but it increases our odds – and at worst, we are taking actions – such as customer intros and go-to-market strategic work – that can help increase the company’s value. Traditional LPs usually wait to coinvest once a Benchmark or Sequoia has committed to leading – the problem with that strategy is that you’re either not going to win allocation or you’re going to suffer from adverse selection.

If I’m a super angel, am I going to pass the hottest company in my portfolio on to a multistage firm or am I going to try and capitalize on that very close relationship I have with the founder? I’m guessing option B is much more lucrative –
If 3-5% of companies are generating all the returns for a fund then you need to ride your winners. You should be trying to pile in capital. If you have the access and insight, we want to be your first choice of partner to help you execute. 

I think this is attractive to LPs for a couple reasons, especially LPs without access to Sequoia or Benchmark –
We think so! The idea is you get diversification through the fund investments and then you get increased concentration through the direct investments. The goal is to provide the diversification of a fund of funds, but with the return profile of a traditional fund. 

We think the VC ecosystem is evolving into a barbell with the best returns concentrated into small next gen and specialized funds and then a very short list of large multi-stage firms that are going to continue to do well and be successful. I recently spoke to an endowment in the northeast, a couple of billion dollars, with just four people on the team and they cover everything from growth to buyout to credit – everything. They knew they needed exposure to venture so they went to Silicon Valley to try to meet with Benchmark, First Round, and Sequoia and realized quickly that’s not happening. There’s a long line of folks trying to get into those funds. 

So if you want tier 1 performance but don’t have access to the handful of true tier 1 multi-stage firms, then you have to get creative. With limited resources it would be incredibly hard for this endowment to identify, win allocation in, and then manage relationships with 20 of these next gen managers. 

The pitch clearly resonated. Crossover had a healthy fund 1. Almost $40m?
Yeah, $38m. I feel very fortunate. Definitely a humbling experience – it’s not easy to raise a first fund. 

Now that we have data behind us and some points on the board, we hope to scale the model and bring on more capital – whether it’s small pension funds or family offices or RIA’s that are under-allocated to venture or are over-allocated to underperforming ever-larger legacy multistage firms. 

Before you go, I wanted to chat with you about your legendary events and the NBA connection –
Hah, yeah, well I’ve been doing a dinner series for a long time and that led to a fellow Stanford Alum reaching out, “hey the NBA is looking for someone who can teach the athletes about tech and investing.” I got invited to the NBA Summer league in Vegas to teach these players about some basics and I hit it off with a lot of the guys. It blew me away how thoughtful they were about using their platform to pursue opportunities off the court–as well as how much money players even at the end of the roster were making. Not just Lebron and Steph, but like the 8^th man on the Milwaukee Bucks was making $10 or $12 million a year. If you’re making $100m in salary, not even counting endorsements, over the course of your career, then you should probably have some small allocation to venture. While athletes were not our focus and are a small part of our LP base, we have 45 pro athletes and entertainers as LPs spanning the NBA, NFL, MLB, and more, and we serve as a kind of on-ramp for them into the tech sector.

We have always been a believer that excellence inspires excellence, and so we host 10-12  dinners a year where we bring together a mix of top athletes, more established founders of billion dollar companies, and then work with our fund managers to include up-and-coming founders from their portfolios. We try to curate the right feel where it’s fun, exclusive, and where it encourages everyone to leave their labels at the door. So if you’re playing the Lakers tomorrow and have the night off, this is the dinner you want to come to.

We’ll also do 3-4 larger tentpole events each year, including a day of programming centered around the NBA Summer League in Vegas as well as our annual Desert Tech Connect event that coincides with the WM Phoenix Open. These are expanded to invite other venture investors, LPs, and the broader tech ecosystem.

Summer league is amazing
I think it’s one of the most slept on events. It’s basically Spring Training for the NBA and you get all the stars hanging out and all the rookies fighting for a roster spot. Everyone, all the brands trying to do deals, too... everyone is there and looking to have a good time. We just like to bring a little tech flair to the table!

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.