👋 Hi, Breakfast Club Members!

Thank you to Fidelity Private Shares for sponsoring this issue

Quick ask: I posted a recap video for July on LinkedIn - give it a watch and a like, please. Click Here

Keeping this short but if you’re in SF next Thursday, come join the crew. Cohosting with Jonathan Baer from Overlap (YC S24). Should be a bunch of YC people.

NYC Tech Breakfast Club September 5th

Austin Tech Breakfast Club September 24th

Tech Breakfast 🤝 Fidelity Private Shares

The Fidelity Private Shares platform supports equity management, cap table management, 409a valuations, operations, etc. 

I’m a big fan of what Charlie Stephens and Fidelity are doing for startups. If you’re tired of Carta, I’d be honored to connect you with the team - if I make the intro, you get 20% off Fidelity Private Shares Pricing.

It’s been really cool to see Fidelity pour a massive amount of resources into their early stage startup offerings and give founders a superior option when it comes to equity/cap table management.

Member Spotlight
Founding Tools/Lori Berenberg

Lori Berenberg (Bloomberg Beta), longtime Tech Breakfast Club member and frequent cohost, recently launched a fantastic newsletter that interviews founders about their tech stack, called Founding Tools.

I’ve been loving it and I recommend you check it out, too! So much startup content is about high level strategy. I love founding tools because it talks more about execution and how founders are getting work done.

Here’s a sample from her interview with the founders of toby
(Click here to read the whole thing and subscribe:
https://foundingtools.substack.com/p/founding-tools-lucas-and-vincent)

💼 CEO STACK – Lucas, the focused seller

Can't Live Without

• Communication: toby - duh.

• Payroll: Gusto - Chose it for its self-serve setup and excellent customer support (which they were worried might be hard to reach). Lucas noted, "I just pick up the phone and call them, and I feel like I've always been treated super well."

• Research: Wayback Machine - They use to research companies that they want to learn from. Lucas explained, "You can see what the thesis has been over the last several years, and how things have changed — it's good to learn from history."

• Sales: Apollo - Lucas found Apollo to be the most comprehensive for finding emails, especially for contacts in Latin America. He tried out Hunter and Interseller, which just didn’t have the global coverage he needed.

Wouldn't Recommend

• Payroll: Rippling - Aggressive upselling and slow onboarding process left a bad taste in their mouth.

• Website Building: Wix - When they needed to get a landing page up, Lucas and Vincent used Wix. They quickly realized that they couldn’t customize their website or make it interactive, and are about to launch their new site they built using Webflow.

Honorable Mentions

• Search: Perplexity - Lucas has "essentially deleted Google" in favor of Perplexity. (Vincent said “I use DuckDuckGo because I’m a CTO.”)

• Inbox full of newsletters: Stays up-to-date on the latest in startups and tech through his favorite newsletters like Big Desk Energy, Strategy Breakdowns, and Platformer. Meanwhile, Vincent is completely unsubscribed from all content and can only be reached by Signal.

• One-off outbound sales: When Apollo doesn’t have the email of a prospect, Lucas uses a combination of RocketReach and MailTracker to do free, one-off email lookups and tracking.

What They Wish They Knew

• Startup discounts aren't always useful: Many discounts only apply to basic tiers that lack needed features, and chasing them can often end up being a distraction.

• Self-serve products can still have good support: Their experience with Gusto supports that, and they’ll continue to seek out self-serve options with a quick onboarding flow and no “schedule a demo” button.

• Invest in what matters: Don't skimp on critical tools like payroll, legal, and accounting, even if it means paying a bit more.

Wishlist (Open to suggestions!)

• AI-powered sales tools: Lucas wants to continue to learn about emerging AI agent platforms for sales outreach.

• People search: Exploring ways to find talent with AI-powered options likeJuicebox (PeopleGPT), but always on the hunt for new platforms.

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.

Have a legal question? Reply to the newsletter. Happy to chat.