• NYC Tech Breakfast Club tomorrow!

• December Boston Breakfast Club Wednesday 12/6

• Cofounder Drama

• Celebrating the Freshman Class of VC’s

Thanks to Grata for sponsoring today’s newsletter

Hi Breakfast Club members - I’m writing this week’s newsletter on a redeye from LA to Boston. Excited to see everyone at Boston Tech Breakfast Club later this morning!

Love getting texts like this one from Breakfast Club OG’s sourcing deals at Breakfast Club - I’m telling you there’s something special about breakfast 👇️ 

See you tomorrow, New York

NYC November 8th (Tomorrow!)

Thank you to Grata and Fidelity for Startups for picking up the tab for Breakfast.

We’ll have coffee and croissants from Librae.

These aren’t just any croissants, they’re the flakiest, most delicious croissants you can get in lower Manhattan. Really thrilled to share these with you.

Rahul Rana, my cohost for Novemeber, and I are celebrating the Freshman Class of VC. Come meet some of the smartest and most ambitious recent grads turned investors.

Boston December 6th (Wednesday)

Sign up by clicking this link or the button below

December NYC Tech Breakfast Club <Hold>

Breakfast Club Expansion: Los Angeles

We’re going to LA in January - sign up

Stay tuned for details!

Grata

Grata is used by over 500 firms to source and research deals. It powers $400b+ in AUM.

I was catching up with an anonymous growth equity investor and breakfast club member (who for compliance reasons has to go nameless). This breakfast club member was an early adopter of Grata and is now a bit of an evangelist for the product - I had to ask why Grata?

“It makes my life a lot easier. From an investor’s perspective, I’ve found that Grata has the most accurate and relevant dataset among sourcing tools, allowing me to get the best outside-in view on a company. Grata’s platform provides intuitive functionality for researching known companies and for net new company discovery. Differentiated features like the “Similar Companies” tool allow users to efficiently source across a broad set of company profiles.”

If you see Jackie, be sure to say thank you! Very grateful for Grata’s generosity. If you’re an investor and would like to learn more about Grata - shoot Jackie an email at [email protected] 

This Week’s Legal Topic: Cofounder Breakup

Not sure what’s in the air but half the calls I’m getting lately are about co-founder breakups. They are always 10x uglier if the right (basic) paperwork wasn’t put in place beforehand.

No matter how much you trust each other, sign some contracts. There are tons of templates and tools that can be used to keep this relatively low-cost. If you don’t have access to some, e-mail me.

Here’s some high-level points that could save you from a contentious and expensive legal battle in a founder dispute:

- Zero ambiguity as to (i) titles, (ii) who owns what portion of the cap table, and (iii) who is on the Board of Directors
- IP Assignment and Non-Solicit Covenant, and language about returning company property upon separation
- Vesting Schedule for founder stock (standard is 4-years with a 1-year cliff)

Let’s say you didn’t follow this guidance and a split happens. You could be un-fundable.

Maybe there’s enough of an email trail to prove things in your favor, but it will be stressful, expensive, and the “hair” in your history could scare away investors.

It’s in everyone’s interest to paper things cleanly and simply upfront, before any tension breaks out.

About Morgan
Morgan, besides running Tech Breakfast Club, is 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.

New York Freshman Class of VC

This month, for NYC Tech Breakfast Club, we’re celebrating the young guns of VC. There’s incredible investor talent out there. Here are 7 names you need to know. I guarantee you’ll be seeing a lot more of them in years to come.

Ara Varma is an associate at SOSV working with the HAX team – SOSV’s preseed hardtech program. She invests in pre-seed hard tech (physical sciences) startups in three areas: climate tech, industrial independence, and human health. Before SOSV, Ara studied Economics at Cambridge University (Trinity College). A breakfast club OG, Ara sourced her first deal over coffee at a meetup earlier this year. Most days, you can find her in Newark at Hax’s factory (Yes, it’s a vc fund with an actual factory for portfolio companies).

Rahul Rana is an Associate & Chief of Staff at SALT Fund, a $150M AUM frontier tech venture capital firm spun out of SkyBridge Capital/SALT Conference. He is a guest writer for Not Boring and the author of Making Moonshots. Previously, Rahul was a Summer Analyst at General Atlantic where he covered climate and b2b tech. Additionally, Rahul helped start Arcadia Science, a frontier biotech research lab. He also spent a year as a Venture Associate at Lux Capital, a $5B deeptech venture capital firm. If you want to learn more about Rahul, check out my longer interview with him here.

Mia Krishnamurthy is an investor at General Atlantic focusing on Series B+ technology companies. General Atlantic has over $70b in AUM and has backed companies like Alibaba, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb. Previously she was part of Dorm Room Fund and graduated from Cornell, where she played squashed. Additional fun fact: she founded a women’s squash apparel company!

Abiola Familusi is an investor at Night Ventures, Night Media’s (Mr. Beast’s) early-stage consumer tech fund. Previously he was at General Atlantic, where he focused on consumer and b2c tech. Abiola graduated from MIT and continues to research creator-led marketing under David G. Rand in the Cognitive Sciences department.

Alexa Grabelle is an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners where she focuses on Seed-Series B consumer tech and vertical software. She graduated from Penn where she helped foster Penn’s entrepreneurial ecosystem as the Student Director of Venture Lab and Co-Director of the Weiss Tech House Innovation Fund. She also took a gap from Penn to work at ICONIQ Growth.

Jack McClelland is an engineer & investor at Afore Capital ($300m aum software generalist pre-seed-focused vc fund). I’m not really sure how, but he’s had an internship at basically every hot startup and 90% of VC funds. Previous internships include Crowdstrike, Eightfold, Fictiv and vc firms like Accel, Battery Ventures, and Foundation Capital. He’s a bay area native but huge fan of the New York tech scene. Fun fact, he’s an avid ham radio operator and in high school he even competed in ham radio tournaments. If that sounds amusing, read my longer interview with Jack here.

Libbie Frost is an investor at Bessemer in the NY office where she focuses on vertical software, fintech, and healthcare. Before joining Bessemer, Libbie worked at Accel on their Growth Team in Palo Alto and Insight Partners on their Diligence and Growth Strategy Team in NY. Libbie graduated from the University of Notre Dame where she earned her BBA in Finance and BA in Industrial Design. While in school, she helped launch and grow the Notre Dame Venture Capital Club and is an alum of Girls Who Invest. In her free time, she enjoys painting murals, running with friends, and learning about the Italian Renaissance.