Today’s Menu ☕️

• LA Tech Breakfast Club Feb 8th

• NYC Tech Breakfast Club Jan 23rd

• Shoutout to Michael Carney

• Boston Tech Breakfast Club Jan 31st

• Member Spotlight: Matt and Shreyas @ Antimetal + Secret Event

👋 Hi, Breakfast Club Members!

I’m back in New York next week - if you want to chat about legal stuff (I’m a startup lawyer @ Optimal) or your fundraise let’s get coffee.

Be sure to scroll down and catch the interview with the founders of Antimetal, Matt and Shreyas. Your AWS budget will thank you.

Also, thank you to Kristen Craft and Fidelity/Shoobx for sponsoring today’s newsletter.

LOS ANGELES
El Segundo Tech Breakfast Club - Feb 8th

Two big updates:

1) We moved the date to February 8th

2) Litquidity Capital is co-hosting

Michael Carney

If you came to the last LA Tech Breakfast Club meetup, you might have met Michael Carney. Besides being a big supporter of the Tech Breakfast Club (Thank you!), he is the guy to know at Google if you’re a venture backed startup.

Michael is a tenured Googler and senior partnership lead supporting early stage startups on their growth strategy.  He recently launched a new pilot program within Google focused on partnering with startups in areas related to growth, customer acquisition, and digital marketing.  He's passionate about working with early stage companies & supporting the LA tech ecosystem!  

NYC Tech Breakfast Club January 23rd
January NYC Tech Breakfast

Teaming up with Andrew Yeung to host the first NYC Tech Breakfast Club of the Year. Really excited for this. Hope to see you there.

Fidelity/Shoobx

Thank you to Fidelity for Startups for sponsoring Tech Breakfast Club

• Fidelity for Startups is supporting the startup & venture capital community in a big way.

• Shoobx, their Cap Table platform, is the all-in-one tool that will help founders prepare for their next round of funding.

• Shoobx gives founders access to seed stage capital, equity scenario modeling, and premier support to generate, execute & store legal documents.

Boston Tech Breakfast Club January 31st
January Boston Meetup

Come join me and Kylie Bourjaily (InnoCrew) on the 31st in Boston.

Member Spotlight
Antimetal
I think Matt and Shreyas are going to make a ton of money with Antimetal. I had the good fortune of meeting Shreyas a couple months ago thanks to Sam Hatem. Shreyas is an elite engineer. Matt can sell anything, so the fact that Antimetal is an AWS cloud optimization platform - something nearly every company needs - feels unfair.

Next week, on Thursday, I’m celebrating Antimetal’s new product launch with Matt and Shreyas. If you’re an early stage startup that’s spending too much on AWS and enjoy breakfast, come join us.

Click here for signup

What is Antimetal?
Matt: It’s a platform that saves you time and money on AWS. 

AWS is one of the largest cloud providers – and one of the largest line items for most tech companies as far as IT spend. A lot of startups are spending way more money than they should. There’s this systemic problem – people don’t really understand AWS. There’s like three ways to go about doing anything. In two of them, you shoot your foot off. We thought there has to be a better way to make decisions around infrastructure, around the cloud, to save people time and money efficiently. 

You see so many posts on reddit, twitter, hacker news – people are always asking why they got this surprise $20,000 AWS bill. 

The problem is that AWS is just built for everyone and everything. That’s good and bad. It’s bad, though, for a lot of smaller companies because AWS is just so complex and there’s so many ways to go about doing anything. A lot of times, no one at the company has the necessary DevOps experience.

How did you [Matt Parkhurst] and Shreyas meet?
Shreyas: I was interviewing with a bunch of startups. There were a couple I was enthusiastic about, but a lot of them just didn’t feel early enough. My friend, Mukund, who founded the Harvard Blockchain Club was involved at Praxis and introduced me to Matt, who was an early employee there. 

Matt: We grabbed drinks, and hit it off immediately. The original idea was for middleware between centralized hardware providers and end users. Once we dove into the weeds, we realized that everyone could use this. 

We kept iterating on it until it became Antimetal. 

It’s never a straight line – how has the plan evolved over time?
Matt: There’s been a ton of forks in the road where we’ve had to step back and think through what the next stage of the company looks like and how we need to change the product.

We went up-market really quickly. Now we’re starting to go down market again. We started selling to fortune 500 companies and realized that we’re building out custom solutions, we’re providing a ton of support, we’re making good money, but it’s not infinitely scalable. 

Matt, I get the sense that you’ve been super entrepreneurial since day one
Matt: Definitely, I was doing what I could in High School to make money. Lied on my first resume to get a job when I was 14, was mining Litecoin in 2012 – ended up actually dropping out of high school to sell cars and realized I liked sales but didn’t want to sell cars for the rest of my life. 

Matt, Sam Hatem says I have to ask you about the cookie chain you started
Matt: I was working for an early-stage startup and my girlfriend at the time and I would order cookies from this 27 year old Mormon dude who was making them out of his kitchen and delivering them around Arizona State University. We’d order them all the time. They were amazing. I thought this could be a great business. One night, instead of ordering cookies from him, I called him and invited him to dinner. We went into the cookie business together. 

We scaled it to 75 employees and sold it in 2021. It’s grown to over 100 locations. Pretty similar to Crumbl, but not as large. 

That’s amazing. Shreyas – were you similarly entrepreneurial from a young age?
Shreyas: No, not at all. I went into school wanting to do math. Along the way, I discovered CS. I was actually on track to do a PhD. I quickly realized being an academic or a professor sucks and it was more fun to build stuff and solve cool problems. That’s what really excites me. 

I was going to take a job at Facebook but was like this is way too big. It’s like a retirement community for millennials. 

What’s next?
Shreyas: Yeah so not a ton we can say about our new product but you can basically know that it’s focused on startups and is the de facto best way for startups to interact with AWS. 

We want to help teams build their infrastructure in the right way and grow with them. 

Matt: Right now it’s all about hiring great people, and acquiring more customers. 

Anyone who is looking to save money on AWS – we should chat