• Breakfast Club next week in Boston and New York

• The Rahul Rana Story

Thank you to Fidelity for Startups for sponsoring today’s newsletter

November Breakfast Clubs

NYC November 8th (Wednesday)

Lots of space for November’s meetup - please register! Tech Breakfast Club is upping its game this month. Better coffee. The best pastries. Our budget has increased. Sponsors are feeling generous. Come hang!

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. And if you’re not familiar with Rahul - his story is insane. Read his interview below.

Also, if you’re a growth equity investor, reply to this and say what’s up - we should chat.

Boston November 7th (Tuesday)

I can’t wait for our second Tech Breakfast Club in Boston. Kylie Bourjaily (InnoCrew) is returning this month as cohost. Matt Crane, who runs MGMT, a newsletter and community that highlights top Boston area startups and the talented up and coming operators, is joining the crew. And of course, OG Tech Breakfast Club member, Jay Parekh (Fifth Down Capital), is back.

Sign up by clicking this link or the button below

Breakfast Club Expansion: Los Angeles

We’re going to LA in January - sign up

Stay tuned for details!

Fidelity for Startups (Cap Table Management)

Thank you to Fidelity for Startups for sponsoring Tech Breakfast Club

If you’re tired of Carta or scared of Carta’s high fees or are confused about the Carta drama - email Kristen Craft.

[email protected]

Fidelity for Startups is committed to supporting the startup & VC community. Fidelity helps founders prepare to raise with community, connections, and our cap table management and data room platform.

Rahul Rana

Shoutout to Breakfast Club OG legend, Jack McClelland (did anyone see him DJ at Return the Fun(d)?) for making this intro a couple months back and forcing Rahul to join the Tech Breakfast Club.

Despite his easy going charismatic vibe - Rahul gets stuff done. Before graduating college he had written a book, sourced deals, and worked with some of Venture Capital’s heaviest hitters.

You should know Rahul. Great hang and well on his way to being a fantastic investor.

Highly recommend you buy his book, Making Moonshots.

Rahul, you wrote a book as a freshman in college, that’s insane – 
I wanted to create content – do I start a substack? Make TikTok’s? Long form YouTube content? I wasn’t sure what medium to choose, but a mentor of mine pushed me to write a book. I was like, “I don’t know how to write a book.” I mean I hadn’t really written anything longer than an essay – I hadn’t written anything meaningful since high school, like AP literature. I’m not a writer. But he pushed me to get over my fear. I’m so grateful for him. I got the rough draft together during the first covid semester, Spring 2020, and then eventually published in December 2020. 

The book is called Making Moonshots. How did you choose to write about deeptech?
There are two core influences on my life 

First, my dad worked at Bell Labs my entire life, so I was immersed in all things science and tech and read about all the amazing breakthroughs and inventions to come out of Bell Labs. They built the transistor. Discovered the big bang. I thought it was normal to be surrounded by groundbreaking research.  

Second, my mom survived 9/11. She was in the north tower. I became really politically active. I cared about the country and solving problems, helping America thrive. I started paying attention to national security and national interests more broadly – not just defense stuff. 

And so, at the intersection of those two, I just fell in love with using frontier tech for impactful purposes.   

What do you mean by moonshot?
The first couple pages of the book are about the story behind the term. It’s actually a baseball reference from the LA Dodgers – hitting a homerun. But yeah, it’s a metaphor for going to the moon. JFK repurposed the term when he was galvanizing the country to beat Russia to the moon. He inspired us on a cultural level, the general population of the United States, to think more ambitiously and be bolder – and I love that. 

I was reading all these stories of founders who did the impossible - you know, deep tech founders, who quickly commercialized some sort of frontier technology... or they built something that people didn't think could be built. They did the impossible and then made it a successful business. 

And what interested me was that these success stories were a business, not a research lab project. It's not just a government grant. It’s commercial. For profit.

I really just became obsessed with, again, scalability and sustainably scaling, frontier tech, and solving big problems.

I broke the book down into the mindsets, philosophies, strategies, and then ecosystems around making deep tech companies. I set out those four sections, along with sub-subsections within those, and then just dug into stories. I focus on how founders implemented certain mindsets or their personal philosophies and mental models on the world and how they literally went about making these moonshots. 

With the ecosystems section, I explored all the different components you need to build an extraordinary company – the founders, the venture capitalists, the academics, the government, the media, etc.  

How do you feel about the future after writing this book?
Yeah, so optimistic

[Enthusiastic nodding]

Circling back to choosing to write a book instead of making tik toks – how do you feel about that decision?
I think it’s a sign of a good writer if you look back on old content and cringe a little – I think it’s a sign of growth. There are things that I would change, but more or less, I love it. I've spent the last couple of years putting the book into action. 

Youtube videos, tiktoks, newsletters... a lot of these things are ephemeral. For the most part, they’re not lasting years – very few pieces of content outside of books, maybe movies, have longevity. Are you watching vines from 10 years ago? Well, actually that’s a bad example, I watch vine compilations all the time. 

I’m very glad I did a book. What I wrote in 2020 will be relevant decades from now. 

How did writing the book impact your life? What doors did it open?
The glowing kind of core example is Josh Wolfe over at Lux Capital. I was extremely persistent about interviewing him. I sent him six emails or so right at the beginning of Covid, when he was transitioning his entire company to remote work and trying to deal with the chaos. Probably the worst time to be cold emailing someone. He eventually got back to me and we had a short call. Even though it was just 20 minutes he gave me incredible content. We stayed in touch after that first call. 

One day, he randomly tweets that he’s thinking about hiring interns for Lux. I immediately emailed him. Mind you I haven’t published the book yet – I’m a nobody. I tell Josh that “I can hustle, I’m already doing research into exactly what you invest in, I want to be your boots on the ground. Can I intern for you?” 15 minutes later he emails me back that I’m hired. 

So literally someone I interviewed for my book eventually became one of my first mentors in the space. Working at Lux gave me a lot of credibility and Josh put his name and a blurb on the back of my book. I owe a lot to him. I got experience with sourcing, diligence, research, and exploring incubations.  

I left Lux after a year to go help a scientist, Seemay, investigate non model organism based therapeutics for humans at Arcadia. Harnessing superpowers of animals like how some jellyfish are biologically immortal, some zebras or some elephants don’t get cancer, some giraffes don’t have certain heart problems, right? Can we understand these adaptations and apply them to human health? 

We wouldn’t have Ozempic without Gila Monsters
That’s so sick. Yeah. Exactly. 

Arcadia was awesome, Seemay and her cofounder Prachee raised $500m. As Arcadia became more focused on academic research, I decided to leave and go back to venture. 

Where does Packy McCormick come into the story?
Shoutout to my friend Nicole Ruiz. She knew Packy and he was asking his network for deep tech writers. She suggested me – Packy reached out and we chatted for a few minutes and then he hired me. 

For those who aren’t familiar, he writes a substack called Not Boring, with 200k+ subscribers, on tech, science, startups, etc. He leveraged the success of the newsletter to launch his fund. Amazing portfolio and he’s generally just killing it. He’s a bit of a celebrity now. 

I’ve written a couple articles for him, scouted for him – sourced two deals for him – and did research for him. 

Sourcing deals, let’s goooo – did you get carry on the deals?
Yeah! He was super generous. 

What was it like sourcing your first deal, can you walk me through the experience?
My first deal was a company called Circa, founded by a friend of mine, Corey Nobile. Big shoutout to him. Love him. I honestly have no clue how I first came across Corey, but I know we spoke when I was at Lux. We stayed in touch for a while and by the time I was scouting for Packy, he was coincidentally raising more money then. After one quick 30 min call I knew I had deep conviction in his company. It’s an environmental data library. After one chat between Packy and Corey, I remember getting a message from Packy saying how exciting it was and that he wants to back Circa. 

And then you end up at SALT?
Yeah, so in between, I was interning for General Atlantic, doing more Growth Equity. I love earlier stage frontier tech and wanted to get back to that. The fall of 2022 was the absolute worst time to go through recruiting for venture. I’m talking to all the big deep tech funds you see on twitter and out in the wild. I got an intro to Olivia at SALT Fund. I was familiar with the SALT conferences that Anthony Scaramucci runs. I knew it as the capital introductions conference, matching LP’s to GP’s. SALT Fund, the VC firm, kept a low profile. They are frontier tech investors and incubators. 9 interviews later, I get hired. 

I’m chief of staff to the general partner, AJ Scaramucci, who's running the entire venture fund and with another GP, Alex. It’s an apprenticeship type of industry so this has been awesome. I get to do sourcing, a lot of the deal work, pitch LP’s, due diligence. I get to incubate companies and sit in on every call. It’s a total crash course in what a general partner at a global VC firm does – I get to do it as a recent graduate. 

What’s a thesis you're excited about?
I work across life sciences (therapeutics, tools, and biotech more broadly), aerospace and defense, industrials/robotics/manufacturing, energy/climate/food/ag, applied AI, and a long tail of other frontier tech and fintech/blockchain. Even psychedelic therapeutics. Ask me about that!