☕️ Max Altman, Technology Brothers, And A New Series

It's a major time for Tech Breakfast Club

Author

Morgan Barrett
January 16, 2025

Today’s Menu ☕️

👋 Hi, Breakfast Club Members!

Thank you Thomas @ Citrin Cooperman for sponsoring today’s newsletter. Read more below about Citrin’s flat fee tax/advisory program for startups

Big week next week - we’ve got AI Engineer Tech Breakfast Club on Tuesday with Baseten and then original Tech Breakfast Club on Wednesday with Max Altman from Saga Ventures. Max’s portfolio is insane - Reddit, Ramp, Rippling, etc. Basically if you’re a unicorn with a name that starts with “R” then Max is on your cap table.

Then we’re heading to El Segundo to host Tech Breakfast Club with the most profitable podcast in the world, Technology Brothers, and my favorite hard tech VC, Jacques Sisteron.

Big Announcement 🥳 We’re officially launching the FinTech Tech Breakfast Club Series in NYC with Topher Price (MS&AD) and Parker Odrich (Communitas). Scroll down and read about the series and get to know Topher and Parker.

Also, thank you to everyone who reached out to check on me re: the wildfires in LA. I’m spending most of the winter in LA and was enjoying a relaxing, warm, sunny time until last week. We’re totally fine - luckily we’re far away from the Palisades and Altadena. We did, however, have a tense moment when the hill behind us ignited. LAFD was so on it, though. A bunch of helicopters swooped in and extinguished the burn. Here’s what it looked like from our patio 👇️ 

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 Max Altman (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 🤝 Citrin Cooperman

Meet Thomas Porricelli, Tech Partner at Citrin Cooperman

#SponsoredPost

Citrin Cooperman handles tax and advisory and it has a huge footprint - it covers all industries, but you focus on Tech. Tell me about the clients you work with
Generally our clients are SaaS developers, other software developers, digital media companies, data analytics companies, FINTech, AdTech, to name a few.  They’re VC-backed or intend to raise outside capital.  We work with pre-revenue start-ups all the way up to our largest client, which is about a half billion in revenue. Our clients tend to be growth-oriented and extremely dynamic, so they often deal with business, accounting and tax issues earlier on in their life cycle, including state and local tax issues, international tax issues, accounting for complex equity transactions and valuation matters. Other issues that we work with our clients on include revenue recognition matters and accounting for software development costs, from an accounting perspective, and Section 382 and 1202 stock from a tax perspective.

Usually, founders are so focused on the product and then go to market, financial housekeeping isn’t a priority. Maybe the thought is that they’ll get to the next round of funding and bring in a CFO to clean everything up
Exactly, a lot of founders are very cost conscious early on, especially if they are a first-time founder. Many resort to bootstrapping as a way to reduce costs until they start generating revenues. We help by customizing our services to meet the needs of early-stage companies, while maintaining flexibility to tap into the full expertise and resources of our firm as they grow. This allows us to become the trusted advisor from day 1.  

What does that mean? How do you actually work with early-stage startups?
We offer a fixed-fee program for early-stage companies that includes business tax return preparation, outsourced bookkeeping, and access to advisory services like the R&D credit and QSBS. The goal of the program is to provide guidance on issues that many early-stage companies may not have the answers to or know how to handle. In other words, we’re here to help them get their “house” in order. We've found that there are often key missteps at this stage that can lead to costly and time-consuming clean-up if not addressed properly from the start.

We’ve designed it to be as simple as possible, bring us in at the beginning so you can focus on running your business or - “focus on what makes your beer taste better”

Hah, I like the Jeff Bezos AWS reference and there’s definitely some similarities. Basically, it’s like infrastructure for running your company. 
You’re trying to build an incredible company. Any part of your brain that’s worried about tax compliance or how to maximize tax credits in multiple jurisdictions or company structure, or should we be recording this as a debit or a credit, that’s taking away from your core mission.

If people want to chat with you or learn more about Citrin Cooperman, what should they do?
Feel free to connect on LinkedIn or email me at [email protected]

You can also find me at Tech Breakfast Club in NYC and if you want to learn about our early-stage tech program, you can check out our webinar on February 26th, 2025 - 12pm-1pm. Here’s the rsvp link below

Unlock Tax-Saving Opportunities: Join Our Webinar!

Featured Job Listing from Twill (Get paid for talent referrals!)
Clara AI Software Engineer

If you know someone for this role, sign up for Twill here! Twill will email you a link to submit your referral. If your referral lands the job, you’ll get a $5K referral bonus. 

Overview of Role:
Remote/Hybrid (Bay Area or NYC preferred; Seattle or LA secondary) 
Company culture is remote; Team co-works weekly in NYC and the Bay Area $160K-$200K + equity Seed stage, backed by Bloomberg Beta and TenOneTen 

About the Company and Role:
Clara AI is doing away with all the mundane drudgery of work, starting with the annoying task of scheduling meetings. Clara is an autonomous AI agent that manages scheduling workflows through natural conversations within existing email, calendar, and messaging platforms. 

Basic Requirements to Submit a Candidate
3-6 years in software engineering with demonstrated expertise in platform engineering and comes from an agentic flow company like Scale AI or LangChain.

Strong platform engineering experience and has worked with LLMs or applied machine learning systems in production environments. Deep Python expertise, particularly with modern frameworks (FastAPI, Pydantic) and type systems

Launching FinTech Tech Breakfast Club 🚀 

In 2025 we’re doubling down on New York and what makes New York special - that means we’re going all in on Fintech.

I’m teaming up with super savvy FinTech VC’s Parker Odrich and Topher Price to host FinTech specific Tech Breakfast Clubs (quarterly) where we get the smartest FinTech founders and VC’s together to chat and feast.

I caught up with my cohosts recently about what they’re up to and the state of the market:

Parker Odrich

Okay, Engineering Major at Stanford – should be a straight line to VC, right?
Hah, well not exactly. I was aware of VC and was curious about it. I did an internship at Jet Blue Ventures, but I actually started my career at Alvarez and Marsal, a management consulting firm known for their restructuring work (Lehman Brothers Bankruptcy). I worked primarily with private equity firm owned portcos on the operations improvement side. I had a lot of ownership and quickly became a big data specialist. I was the only one who was able to code or write scripts to deal with annoying data sets and legacy systems - all the fun stuff. Then after two years, I got tapped to join Alvarez Marsal Capital, the private equity firm affiliated with Alvarez and Marsal.

What was the strategy?
The firm has over $5.9B in AUM and across 4 strategies, the majority of which are focused on middle-market buyout, but I was attached to a new strategy/fund that did strategic co-investments. These were minority equity stakes alongside other GPs in deals of their expertise. So for me it was great, I got exposure to growth equity all the way to buyout across a bunch of different sectors. 

Then, in 2023 when the AI explosion happened, specifically the developments around transformers, I became the head for AI. The senior leadership was eager to get ahead of the trend and I had studied AI/ML. You’re seeing companies like Hebbia and Rogo Data with the capability to digest massive amounts of unstructured data and make sense of it – tools that I really wish I had when I was a consultant sifting through data rooms on tight timelines. 

I started developing a thesis around these tools tackling painful industry specific tasks that companies will gladly pay a lot for - that propelled me into venture. 

Yeah so tell me about Communitas
We’re early stage and our heritage is financial services but we’ll also invest in other verticals like B2B SaaS and marketplaces. 

You might be underselling the heritage, your partners are absolute killers in the financial world
And they’re phenomenal to work with! We’ve got Tom Glocer, former CEO of Thomson Reuters and now on the board at Morgan Stanley and Merck, Duncan Niederauer, the former CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, and Doug Atkin, the former CEO of Instinet. Very interesting history there. 

We’re on our second fund, it’s a $55M fund and we’re about halfway deployed, investing primarily in Seed and Series A (we can go earlier or later depending on the company and round dynamics) Typical check size is one to two million. We can lead or follow on – we co-invest with lots of fintech investors like Fin Capital. 

What are some examples of companies you like? Whether portfolio companies or startups you wished you had invested in –
We recently co-led Abstract’s Series Seed round, an awesome product built by an incredibly impressive team. 

In terms of broader fintech AI companies I’ve been monitoring - Rogo Data, I’m super impressed with Gabe and the team. They’ve built a unique product that’s resonated with a lot of the financial services verticals and gained traction quickly. It’s an AI platform that automates workflows and enhances decision making for investment banks and private equity firms. 

I think 2025 is going to be a big year for vertical SaaS broadly. I’ve talked a lot about workflow automation for knowledge workers and that feels like it’s still a massive opportunity if you can productize it effectively. 

Talk about FinTech Tech Breakfast Club – what are your expectations?
New York is the best ecosystem for FinTech... it’s the center of the financial services universe. If you’re building, just with the access to design partners, it’s unmatched. 

And breakfast is the best. It’s the perfect way to catch up with a lot of familiar faces and meet new founders and investors. There’s a lot of alpha in trading information and insights for both investors and founders over a meal. I think we’re going to get some deals done at breakfast and I’m confident that it’s going to be a big hit. The original Tech Breakfast Club is so good and I think having the sector focus is going to take it to another level.

Topher Price:

So, you’re holding down the fort at Mitsui Sumitomo Ventures – for those, and I would assume the reader, if they’re not in the banking industry or grew up in Japan, they’re probably not familiar with this behemoth – what is Mitsui?
Yeah, so in Japan, there’s a couple large financial groups and they each have their own distinctive color. Mitsubishi is red team. Mizhuo is blue team. Mitsui Sumitomo is the green team — coincidentally, not dissimilar to starter Pokemon. “Mitsui” as a group is very horizontally and vertically integrated, so it covers everything – banking, investments & financial services, all types of insurance. MS&AD specifically was set up as the holding co for all things risk & insurance, and it’s become one of the 10 or so largest insurance companies in the world. So think like Allianz, Travelers, Allstate or whatever but HQ-ed in Japan. And then around 2018, we set up a venture shop in Menlo Park. 

What do you invest in and at what stages?
We’ll do seed through series A and often come in as a strategic from the insurance, risk, or global/cross border perspective. Depending how strategic the investment is, we can go into the series B or C range. 

We have business units all around the world, each with their own products and distribution channels. So, our job is to figure out how to direct some of our advantages and assets into really interesting projects. It’s different from a generalist VC —we want a financial return but the whole point is asking, “how do we add value beyond capital”, whether it’s working to create a net new product or finding ways to blend our startup partners into one of our existing products. 

Insurance is a massive industry but many of the problems are known. So we’ve done cool stuff in core insurance infrastructure, tech-enabled insurance distributors like Next and Vouch, however, a lot of our interest is in the edges of insurance distribution. We invested in Multiplier, a Deel competitor, and now you’re touching on a bunch of new companies, remote companies, and large enterprises that are good buyers of these products– that’s an interesting vessel for distributing insurance products. We also invested in Carro, a Singaporean used car market, and then helped create a native insurance product for them just because it was a good fit despite being adjacent to the core product.

You cut your teeth at Kairos at a really interesting time, a really pivotal time
Yeah, the day I joined we launched Bilt, the rental rewards card. We raised a new $150m fund and I came out on to help with new incubations and investments, focusing on the consumer expense ecosystem – meaning where are people not getting great value or running into difficulties affording life-critical products? We were looking almost like a family of brands and assets across that category. Much more operational than a typical venture portfolio.  

And it directly led into what I’m doing now. It was an education on how to get large incumbents, who have the balance sheets, the expertise, and the distribution networks to help startups win. It took a while to set up Bilt with some of those incumbents, but then it popped immediately.  It can be more effective to launch with these partnerships and strategic investments in place, at least in fintech. 

What’s got you excited about FinTech right now?
Fintech has been taking it in the shins for a while now. People are realizing you can’t really unbundle a bank. You have to re-bundle, do it better, and do it all at once. But banks and financial institutions are getting more strategic and getting smarter. 

The infrastructure for the industry is maturing, there’s increasing knowledge of how to build more and more complex financial products faster. Embedded products are easier, like anything can become an investing platform. One example is our portfolio company, Sidekick, in London, giving normal consumers access to the same fund management tools and private banking support you’d get at these gigantic, specialty investment institutions. Or like Ansa – I thought this was a really interesting deal – giving small and medium sized businesses a platform that mimics the Starbucks wallet and rewards program. We’re just getting a lot better and faster at helping people and businesses manage and spend money. Given that our LP is an insurer, we’re always interested in solving problems around moving money, structuring financial products and underwriting and providing credit to weirder or nontraditional customers. 

And, I would encourage founders who are gaining access to interesting data flows from consumers or businesses or industrial systems, connected vehicles and telemetry, you may not think of insurance as a customer but they are. There’s lots of opportunity to append risk analysis or insurance products onto their business model and unlock a new revenue stream while they continue crushing it at whatever the core business is.

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.

If you made it this far, reply with a croissant emoji, and I’ll tell you where to find the best croissant in NYC, LA, or SF