Today’s Menu ☕️

• NYC Tech Breakfast Club Nov 13th

• SF Tech Breakfast Club Dec 5th

• October Recap

• Running into Jeb Bush (famous for investing in Ramp)

• Exdanris: Two Cofounders who met at Tech Breakfast Club

👋 Hi, Breakfast Club Members!

Thank you to Ramp for sponsoring this newsletter - Tech Breakfast Club members get a $500 bonus when they start using Ramp

Welcome to Tech Breakfast Club! Sign up for a Tech Breakfast Club in your city. We’ll be back shortly with a lot more stops on the itinerary. So, if you’re in LA or Austin or Boston or Miami, hang tight.

October was a huge success - we did SF Tech Week, NYC, and LA Tech Week. VC’s sourced deals through Tech Breakfast Club and early stage founders got funding. Also, I forgot - Tech Breakfast Club turned 2 years old! I’ll have more to say on that in an upcoming edition of the newsletter.

The highlight, though, was the El Segundo Tech Breakfast Club. Check out the recap video here on LinkedIn. El Segundo, if you’re not keyed into American Dynamism and all the press the city has received, is the most important 5 square miles in Southern California. The original home of SpaceX - El Segundo is now seeing a wave of incredible early stage defense tech and hard tech companies.

Seriously, if you’re curious about what’s going on in El Segundo, it’s my favorite conversation topic, I’m happy to chat.

Also, scroll down to read about Exdanris, an early stage startup in El Segundo. The two cofounders, Chris Ochoa and Chris Sahagun met at Tech Breakfast Club earlier this year!

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
-Better Bookkeeping offers streamlined support to founders on everything from bookkeeping to tax strategy and filing.
-Looking for high quality offshore dev talent to scale your startup? Talk to Luka at Remgu

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.

Tech Breakfast Club Events

NYC Tech Breakfast Club Nov 13th
Lori Berenberg (Bloomberg Beta), the Queen of Early Stage Venture in NYC, is back again to cohost Tech Breakfast Club. This is the last one of the year (don’t worry we’ll be back in January)!

SF Tech Breakfast Club Dec 5th
Closing out the year with Jack McClelland (Afore) in SF. Jack just sourced a deal from Tech Breakfast Club - come join and 10x your deal flow.

Tech Breakfast Club 🤝 Ramp

Tech Breakfast Club Members get a $500 when they start using Ramp

Ramp gave me zero talking points for this post so I’ll share some personal stories:

I was chatting with a former YC founder about his failed startup and I asked him what he regretted most… he had a lot of regrets, but one of the biggest was that he destroyed his personal credit. “I should have used Ramp.” So, maybe use Ramp and protect your personal credit.

Apply here to get the bonus through the Tech Breakfast Club Portal  

Also, while we’re on the topic of Ramp - I ran into one of Ramp’s earliest investors, Jeb Bush at a CVS in Maine. I was staying in Biddeford (close to Kennebunkport) and picking up a toothbrush when I saw the former Florida governor. I wanted to say hi and congratulate him on raising a $350m fund but he was talking on the CVS landline phone and looked annoyed. How weird.

I later found out he had locked his phone and keys in his car.

Anyhow, Jeb, if you’re reading this - congrats on investing in Ramp!

And if you want to chat with someone at Ramp, feel free to shoot Joley an email at [email protected] 

Member Spotlight
Exdanris and the American Manufacturing Renaissance

So the story of Chris Ochoa and Chris Sahagun, the cofounders of Exdanris, has a lot to be excited about. It involves some of my favorite things - Manufacturing, El Segundo, and Tech Breakfast Club.

Nothing makes me happier than waking up to text from a founder about how they found funding through Tech Breakfast Club - that happens quite a lot though. Two cofounders meeting at Tech Breakfast Club? Now that’s rarer. When the Exdanris founders told me they met at Tech Breakfast Club, I was thrilled.

Exdanris is streamlining the soft materials supply chain for manufacturers.

Chris Sahagun, when I met you at Tech Breakfast Club, you introduced yourself as the Space Glue Guy

[Sahagun]
Ha, yeah, my original plan was that I was going to be “Home Depot for the Moon”.  That’s still the eventual plan, but I’m focusing on building on Earth for the moment.  Glue – polymers in general, really – are super important for modern manufacturing, but they’re often overlooked and taken for granted. 

I’m a polymer scientist and studied polymer physics for my PhD work. I’ve spent over a decade working as a materials and process engineer, so I think about things like, how do polymers - which are soft materials like coatings, resins, adhesives, gaskets, fabrics, foams, basically anything that's not a metal - how should you process them?  How do they interact with their environment? How durable are these things?  Are they going to perform in the way that you need them to?  In my career I’ve seen a real need for a better soft materials supply chain for space and defense, so we’ve set up Exdanris to make it easier for our customers to buy and build with polymers.

I’ve worked at a couple of hardware startups – things like building flying cars for Larry Page’s Zee.Aero, defense tech companies like Blue Force Technologies, built some satellites... I was also a lead engineer at SpaceX focused on composite materials and processes. I worked for Cambium here in El Segundo. Through all of this, I noticed that materials – particularly polymers – can sometimes be an afterthought in manufacturing. Builders just expect that appropriate materials are going to be there and perform as required. That doesn’t always happen though. 

Oh, and I wanted to say, you already know this, but I first met my cofounder, Chris Ochoa, at Tech Breakfast Club. 

I love that, I’m so happy Tech Breakfast Club connected you! Chris Ochoa – what’s your background?
[Ochoa]

In a past life, I was an investment banker based in NYC. I’m also a repeat founder. I co-founded a machine learning company in 2013, which was acquired by GrubHub in 2016.

I started investing professionally in early-stage aerospace companies in 2021 and helped build a space incubator in Pasadena, CA that indirectly spun out of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 2023, I moved back to California full-time to focus and build products that help modernize America’s materials supply chain and that’s when I met Chris Sahagun at my first Tech Breakfast Club event.

Being close to the SpaceX ecosystem, seeing the frequency of launches grow exponentially, including Starship, is signaling an industry transformation - the demand for advanced materials in both the new aerospace and defense economies is just beginning. Think about all of the new space assets SpaceX will transport… satellites, in-orbit vehicles, space habitats and humans.  

Tell me about Exdanris 

[Sahagun]

So Exdanris basically modernizes the aerospace and defense soft materials supply chain. You shouldn’t have to worry about materials. They actually should be an afterthought. Exdanris is going to make it so that you never need to worry about lead times or performance data. Focus on your mission, focus on your design, your manufacturing process, and Exdanris will have the materials you need when you need them.

There’s a huge data component to Exdanris. I like to tell people that we’re really a data company that happens to sell materials. Right now, a builder needs to contact a polymer manufacturer and they get a technical data sheet that describes the general properties of the materials. Then it’s up to the company to invest the time and the money to do statistically-robust testing needed to meet FAA and DOD certification requirements. Incumbents don’t publish their statistical data - they just report an average, but that’s not enough to design around. That’s a roadblock for smaller companies and it’s an information moat that protects the incumbents and the primes. Currently, new companies need to buy the material, create test coupons, and then do all the testing to prove that a material will work. We’re talking hundreds and thousands of dollars and months of work along with domain expertise that most companies simply don’t have.  Once that’s done, you then need to package everything up correctly – being sure that you’ve maintained traceability throughout this entire process – and hand it over to the FAA or NASA or whoever to prove that you’ve met their requirements. It’s quite a process.  

We do that for our customers so they can do what they’re good at – build hardware.  Exdanris gets our customers over that information moat so they can start building faster, and we all serve as the traceability system of record that they’re going to need once they start going after the big DOD contracts.

How big is this market?

[Ochoa]
We’re in a renaissance of onshore manufacturing and innovation. The global aerospace soft materials market is about $18 billion and growing around a rate of 7-8% annually. This increased velocity is due to a number of factors, especially AI, which has created an opportunity for industries that adopt it and humanity as a whole. In the wake of this, Exdanris is positioning itself around customers with bold visions while supporting their need to build faster and scale sooner.

This reminds me of the early days of e-commerce, when companies like Square and Stripe built infrastructure to help their customers build faster and scale sooner. As Chris Sahagun said, we want our customers to focus on what they do best - build hardware. Exdanris will do the blocking and tackling needed to achieve regulation certification. A materials platform which serves as our customers system of record that can easily be accessed by the various internal stakeholders and/or ERP system.

Going back to the manufacturing renaissance – can you talk about tailwinds from securing our domestic supply chain?

[Ochoa]
The DoD has advised their contractors to focus on onshore American companies for their supply chain even if these companies are not fully mature yet. So, in a way, our customers have an incentive to support us as we build trust and transparency together. For a long time, we’ve relied on materials from global sources. The DoD has put a hold on that - foreign supplier interactions are limited now with the primes. If you violate ITAR regulations that’s a knock to your reputation and a risk on traceability of your materials.

Why El Segundo?
We believe it’s the epicenter for hard and deep tech in Los Angeles. The fundamentals are simple, El Segundo has been home to the incumbents of the aerospace industry for the past 70 years, it has the infrastructure, it has the legacy knowledge, it has the real estate. We’re very bullish and have high conviction it will be the home to the next crop of aerospace companies, too.

Anyone who spends time here comments on the energy. We’re surrounded by fellow founders who we might sell to one day. After work, you can head to the Boardroom on Arena street, grab a beer, and just talk about whatever. It’s a friendly community and the people here can understand what you’re working on. You can talk through problems.

There’s also close proximity to the Mojave desert for testing. It becomes like a matrix, all of these reinforcing elements. You can see how it’s going to shape up. 

How far along are you?
We’re putting together our seed round that will give us 18 months of runway to start working with our earliest customers here in El Segundo. 

There’s so much to be said about being close to your customers, responding nimbly to their needs.