Today’s Menu ☕️

• LA Tech Breakfast Club Feb 8th

• DTC NYC Tech Breakfast Club Feb 21st

• NYC Tech Breakfast Club Feb 20th

• Boston Tech Breakfast Club Feb 22nd

• SXSW Secret Tech Breakfast Club Mar 11th

• Member Spotlight: Lillie Sun @ Breezi

👋 Hi, Breakfast Club Members!

I’m in LA this week - if you want to chat about legal stuff (I’m a startup lawyer @ Optimal) or your fundraise let’s get coffee. A call also works.

Scroll down for an interview with Lillie Sun, founder of Breezi. You can learn a thing or two from her mischievous growth hacking.

Also, thank you to Rob Hughes and Citizens for sponsoring today’s newsletter.

LOS ANGELES
El Segundo Tech Breakfast Club - Feb 8th

Litquidity and I are excited to celebrate Isaiah and Valar Atomics. Putting out an interview with Isaiah shortly. His mission with Valar is beyond critical and gives me so much optimism for the future.

We have a couple more spots left for hard tech/defense tech founders. If you know anyone who make a good addition, reply to this email and I’ll invite them.

Also, shoutout to Michael Carney, day 1 TBC supporter for sponsoring

NYC Tech Breakfast Club February 21st
DTC Tech Breakfast Club

Teaming up with longtime Tech Breakfast Club member, Zach Cox, and Chew on This to host Direct to Breakfast on the 21st for founders and e-commerce killers.

If that’s you and you want to join, reply to this email and I’ll send you the details.

NYC Tech Breakfast Club February 20th
February NYC Tech Breakfast

If you’re a Founder or VC, come hang with me and Brett Perlmutter as we celebrate the anniversary of the time we got kicked out of the Columbia Startup Lab. Headcount is extremely limited.

Citizens

Boston Tech Breakfast Club February 22nd
January Boston Meetup

Come join me and Kylie Bourjaily (InnoCrew) on the 22nd in Boston.

SXSW Tech Breakfast Club March 12th
Secret SXSW Tech Breakfast

Member Spotlight
Lillie Sun

You can either read about Lillie, the founder of Breezi, or listen to Taylor Swift’s song, Mastermind. It’s the same vibe. Except Lillie’s version is about business and instead of scheming it’s called growth hacking. 

“What if I told you none of it was accidental?
...
Nothing was gonna stop me
I laid the groundwork, and then
Just like clockwork
The dominoes cascaded in a line
What if I told you I’m a mastermind?” 

When I asked Lillie about why consumer social gets such a bad rap or why it’s so hard, she told me “It’s too easy to think of something – and there’s no middle. In b2b saas you can get by and do really well existing in the middle.... to excel in social, you have to be brilliant at execution while having the mind of a 14-year girl... the reason Snap was so successful is because Evan Spiegel is and always will be a 14-year-old girl. He sees the world through the lens of a 14-year-old girl.” 

And just from the short amount of time I spent with Lillie, I have to say that she has the mind of a 14-year girl but the psyop capabilities of the CIA. 

She cut her teeth running growth for fintech and beauty startups, but now, after having a lot of fun on Tik Tok, she’s ready to launch Breezi, a list based social app. 

Also, I want to say thank you to Vincent Zhu, longtime Tech Breakfast Club member, for the intro to Lillie.

What is Breezi?
Breezi is a list based social app. Our whole thing is people have their notes and they make lists all the time. Usually, it’s just for themselves... groceries, packing, travel itineraries, date ideas, dream boyfriend – you know, all these crazy lists. For me, I’ve always wanted to share that. 

If you were on a game show, and you had to answer 10 questions about me correctly for us to both get $1m, but you can’t talk to me, what’s going to be more helpful? Looking at my twitter, LinkedIn, or my notes app? I would 100% tell you to look at my notes app. You would know everything. 

Before, you make a list in one place, you take a screenshot of it, and you send a picture of it to a friend. If they have questions, they text you. If they want to make their own list off of your list, they start from scratch or copy/paste. 

Lists are funny – I love a good list. This is before your time, but David Letterman used to do a whole list based segment on the late show called top 10.  
They tell a story concisely – it just hits. Like, it’s just the punchline. One of my first tik toks that went viral was “How To Know If You’re In A Situationship” and it was just me running through a list of five signs you’re in a situationship. 

But then people start saving it, sharing it, suggesting additions to the list in the comments. 

How do you get from that to a business?
I knew I wanted to build a list app. I knew I needed to do three things –

I sense a list coming.
1) Find a cofounder
2)  Make sure other people wanted this

I didn’t want to just build something only I wanted, so I put up a waitlist and I hit 1000 people in 48 hours. I started talking about it on Tik Tok. I started a Breezi newsletter. After I finished my day job, every night from 7pm to midnight, I was working on Breezi. 

Wait you have to tell me the cofounder Hinge story
So everyone does YC cofounder match. It’s tough to get an edge – everyone is already doing it. You can either try to find a cofounder or you can attract a cofounder. I felt if I was going to attract a cofounder, I needed to be famous. I wanted to put myself out there – making videos, writing newsletters, tweeting. 

I tweeted about using Hinge to find a cofounder.

I changed my Hinge location to Hayes Valley, kept a picture of my face but changed every other photo to figma mockups of the app. The prompts explained the situation - Looking for a technical cofounder, are you free to apply to Y Combinator tomorrow?

Most of the replies were batsh*t crazy.  

It blew up on twitter, though. My dm’s were full. There was one guy who had messaged me who was a great candidate and we started working together.

A true Hinge success story
I think more people could use Hinge for things other than dating. Let’s say you wanted to play pickleball or wanted a new roommate – 

I think that’s more of a growth hacking strategy for you. I would get into a lot of trouble with that. 
Maybe not that then 

So first cofounder. Phenomenal guy. I worked together with him for six weeks but he wanted to build spaceships. 

I met my current cofounder, Conner, while I was still working with the original guy. 

Tell me about Conner
Super smart engineer. Originally, he only wanted to help us finish our MVP. But along with Natalie, our designer, we devised this plan to convince Conner to join full time. We found as many excuses as possible to interact with Conner, hoping he would get so emotionally bought in, he’d make the jump to full time. 

He was committed to building the mvp and then leaving. I’m like, no, you’re going to stay. 

I floated the question to him three or four times. The no’s turned to maybes. Then I finally asked him to stay and he said I’m in. 

I feel like you’re a big schemer and I mean that in a positive way 
Well, yeah, I think it has to do with being an only child. There’s no hiding. All eyes are on you. Scheming is a necessity. 

Well it’s definitely made you effective 
When I was a freshman, I wanted to get an internship. I started applying to a bunch of internships and never got them. So, I decided I was going to be a barista at the Starbucks in the business school at Western. Once I was hired though, I was placed at another building, the social sciences building. I then got a doctor’s note explaining I have claustrophobia to help me get transferred to the more spacious Starbucks at the business building. 

What was so important about the business building?
Well, CEO’s and business leaders or important people who could give you an internship were going in and out of there. It’s also where all the on-campus recruiting took place. 

One night while I was working, this guy comes in, places an order, and while I’m making his drink, I’m googling him. He’s a founder of a company that just raised a couple million dollars. I go to hand him his drink and I’m like “Are you Derek from Drop? I just read your Tech Crunch article a couple of days ago. Are you guys hiring interns?” He’s shocked but says to email him and set up a time to chat. And that was how I started working for early-stage startups. 

A strong theme that has emerged in talking to you is how you speak things into existence or manifest or put yourself in situations to attract opportunities to yourself – how do social lists play into that? Are the lists shared manifestations between you and your friends?
I think about this all the time. We live our lives in the past, present, and future. And most social media today is about the past or the present. There’s never anything about the future. No one knows where you’re going. No one knows what you want in the future, because it hasn’t happened yet. Yeah I feel like what we’re noticing now with Breezi is people are making lists about future things – places I want to travel in 2024, or goals, or the type of guy I’m looking for. 

If other people know about your future, it makes the future more likely to happen, people can share knowledge or be helpful. That’s kind of what manifesting is.  

How far along are you with Breezi?
We’ve launched a Beta – if you want to try it, join the waitlist