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Morgan Barrett
August 27, 2024

👋 Hi, Breakfast Club Members!

Thank you to Fidelity Private Shares for sponsoring this edition. Before you renew your Carta plan, you need to chat with Fidelity Private Shares. More info below

I’m Morgan Barrett, creator of Tech Breakfast Club. I host breakfast meetups in NYC, LA, SF, (and occasionally Austin, Miami, Boston) that bring together the best founders and investors.

I’m so excited for the Fall! Deals got done this summer but now it’s time to kick things into gear.

Tech Breakfast Club Events

New York Tech Breakfast Club SEPT 5TH (next week!)
Absolute blockbuster - critics everywhere are raving about this star studded cast. Cohosting with elite early stage investors Will McKelvey (Lerer Hippeau) and Lauren Corcoran (Blue Collective).

Austin Tech Breakfast Club SEPT 24TH
Tech Breakfast Club returns to Austin against the advice of my doctor (I have high cholesterol and can’t say no to brisket).

Cohosting with Harry Campbell and Colin Gardiner, two of my favorite early stage investors and hosts of the Wannabe Angels Podcast.

SF Tech Breakfast Club DTC Edition SEPT 26TH
Cohosting with brilliant early stage investor, Anna Piñol (NFX).

LA Tech Breakfast Club DTC Edition OCT 14TH
Cohosting with Espree Devora for LA Tech Week. Espree is the best - she introduced me to Beehiiv and has made me a lot of money (on paper)! We’re blowing it out for LA Tech Week.

El Segundo Tech Breakfast Club OCT 15TH
So many surprise guests for this Tech Breakfast Club - you do not want to miss this. Fly to LA for this. It’s conveniently located next to LAX. Cohosting with Jacques Sisteron from Upfront.

Special Edition Tech Breakfast Club for Dreamforce
Tech Breakfast Club GTM Edition (by Clay) SEPT 17TH
So excited to partner with Clay, the go to solution for Go To Market teams looking to scale their outreach, for a very special Tech Breakfast Club during Dreamforce in SF. If you’re GTM focused, come join!

Fidelity Private Shares 🤝 Tech Breakfast Club

If your Carta renewal is coming up - don’t renew until you talk with Charlie at 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
Ben Braverman And The Start Of An Epic Saga

Ben has an incredible story in that his success feels simultaneously inevitable and accidental. You might know him as one of the early team members at Flexport, where he helped grow the company to an $8 billion dollar valuation - but you should get to know him as a VC at Saga where he’s partnered with Max Altman and Thomson Nguyen to invest in founders solving the world’s hardest problems.

You had to miss the last NYC Tech Breakfast Club – but I think you have a pretty worthy reason
Yeah I have a great excuse - my wife and I welcomed our third child

Congratulations! 

You’ve fit a lot of life into last decade and a half, family and work wise – Flexport, playing a supporting role at some great early YC companies, and now starting Saga – where does the story start?
It’s one of those stories that can really only take place in Silicon Valley - like the concept, not the physical place. I left college when I was 19, goofed around for a little while, went to India, meditated, volunteered and accomplished, unfortunately, very little. 

I moved to the Bay Area with my then girlfriend (now wife and mother of my three children). This was 16 years ago. I had no idea how to get connected in tech and basically just started doing freelance work for people, for anybody who would have me. 

One of the people I started doing work for had taken a company public in Germany in the 90s and now was starting a company called Fort Knock. He just needed a young person willing to do a shitload of work and take a lot of customer-facing meetings and basically do all the things that he didn’t want to do. It was a perfect symbiotic relationship. I got to learn a lot and he didn’t have to do a bunch of work. We got very close to an exit to PayPal but it fell apart. 

Oof – what happened?
That’s a story for another day but it was probably the best thing that could have happened to me. If I had made a little bit of money when I was that young, I don’t know what I would have accomplished. 

What did you do next?
I had to go get a job and I wanted to optimize for who was the best person to work for – this was like 2010 or 2011. It was super obvious that YC was the thing. This was OG YC. Paul Graham was still in charge. Garry was a group partner. Airbnb, Instacart, just hit after hit. So I went to work for the first YC founder who would have me, Immad Akhund (and his cofounder, Jude Gomila) at Heyzap. Now Immad is the founder of Mercury, probably the largest Neobank in America. 

I learned pretty quickly that I was actually better at serving founders than I was at being the founder. For Heyzap, I was really good at getting people to put these ads in their games. On my ninth day, I onboarded an account that was bigger than all of Heyzap to date. 

How was the exit with Heyzap? 
They only raised $9 million and ended up selling for 60 or 70 million. It was a great exit for both guys. 

I immediately went to another YC company called URX. At the time, it was the hottest company. Accel did their series A right after YC. It was basically infrastructure for monetizing mobile content and enabling mobile commerce. Great team, unbelievable tech... the business just didn’t quite work. They sold to Pinterest. 

While I was there, I met Ryan Petersen at the dog park. 

The dog park?
Yeah, our dogs were playing together, and I noticed his Y Combinator sweatshirt. I said what’s up, I do sales for a YC company. It turned out it was Ryan’s brother’s (Dave) hoodie. Dave had gone through YC for BuildZoom. 

Ryan and David had built Importgenius.com – it was massively profitable. At that point in my career, I had met a lot of people who had raised money... I had never met anyone who had a properly cash flowing technology business. Ryan was fascinating and we started walking our dogs together every night and over time became friends. I spent the next year convincing Ryan to bring me on. He was trying to get Flexport going but dealing with the regulatory licensing part of the business. I invested in the seed. 

Finally, after securing the licenses, he let me join and we went on a pretty good run. 

Pretty good run? I feel like you skipped over a lot [laughter]. Incredible company – Flexport – you helped Ryan build a truly innovative company in a challenging vertical 
You should go on only worthy quests and Flexport was a properly worthy quest. We’re talking about a category that’s double digits of GDP. If you can make it better, the whole world can trade more – everyone can make more money. Consumers can buy cheaper stuff. From a value perspective, from a scale perspective (20 different business units under one roof, by the way), from an intellectual perspective... it’s just one of those companies that you kind of want to go build. 

Ironically, it’s easier to build a really hard company than it is to build an easy idea. 

We’re going to make global trade easier and have offices all over the world. We’re going to do everything from dispatching trucks to chartering our own 747… to running our own lending business with 100’s of millions of dollars of loans on a good day... it’s endless. Ryan could spend the next 20 years scaling Flexport. It could be a $100bn company and it would still have plenty of room to run. The category is just that big. In revenue, we went from zero to $2b in 7 years. It’s much bigger than that now and I think it’s going to be very profitable in the coming year. 

And the whole experience really informed how I go about investing – 

So with Saga... It’s kind of tough to scale the dogpark. Give me the rundown on Saga 
[laughter]

Yeah, I couldn’t have said it any better. The dogpark doesn’t scale. And frankly that’s our thesis behind the fund. We basically don’t think venture as an asset class scales. If you look at the funds of the last 20 years that made obscene amounts of money from the universities and hospital systems pensions, they were not these mega institutions that employed hundreds of people. They were tight knit groups that knew their domains cold and did a small number of high conviction deals a year. I don’t think venture is supposed to be what it has become. Some of these multistage firms - they are more like private equity or buyout funds. And that’s cool and interesting, but it’s very difficult to be good at something that’s, you know, 10 bps of your fund size per deal. So, there is a big gap in the market.

We feel if we can be disciplined and be the best in the world at first check through series A and not scale beyond that, then there’s actually a ton of white space. It’s very difficult to get a fund going right now. We’ve all seen that chart that general catalyst and a16z basically represent the majority of all capital raised by venture funds this year so far. So, if you’re willing to do a small enough deal that you could source it at the dog park, there’s a lot of alpha. 

What’s got you excited investment-wise? Saga’s portfolio is all over the place
If you look at our personal histories, it’s very diverse. If we weren’t generalists, our track records wouldn’t be as good as they are. If you take Max’s best two investments – Rippling and Reddit – one’s the most middle of the road B2B saas play of all time and the other is a consumer product. One has a controversial founder and the other is controversial, but that’s the extent of the overlap. Both are premier assets. 

We’re big believers in the Peter Fenton (Benchmark) quote, “throw out the crystal ball, you can’t predict anything. What you can do is recognize when lightning strikes.” And that really is our strategy… There’s so much about the world that’s going to surprise us. 

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.