☕️ Tech Breakfast Club 3 Year Anniversary in NYC

+ Chatting with David Tearse from Karman Industries

Author

Morgan Barrett
October 09, 2025

👋 Hi, Breakfast Club Members!

Thank you to Luka @ Remgu for sponsoring today’s newsletter - you know Luka as the go to partner for top European dev talent but now he’s also offering Latin American dev talent

Excited to celebrate three years of Tech Breakfast Club next week in NYC - I’m going to write a little more extensively about this journey and the future of Tech Breakfast Club soon. So stay tuned.

Today, I’m catching up with David Tearse from Karman Industries. Karman, earlier this year, announced raising $11.5m (so far) to modernize heat pumps for industrial applications. Thermal infrastructure wasn’t even on my radar but it’s a massive opportunity. Scroll down for the full story.

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
- Time to get a Ramp card? Reply to the newsletter and I’ll hook you up with a bonus
- Free Zendesk for 6 months. Time to scale your customer service? Talk to Zendesk

Tech Breakfast Club Events

NYC Tech Breakfast Club (Thursday, Oct 16th)
Come celebrate 3 years of Tech Breakfast Club with me, Tamar Vidra (VC at Twelve Below), and OG Tech Breakfast Club members, Natan Wise & Rocky Seftel (cofounders of Conduit).

SF Tech Breakfast Club (Tuesday, Oct 28th)
Back with OG Tech Breakfast Club cohost and the king of pre seed checks, Jack McClelland (principal at Afore).

SF AI/ML Leaders Tech Breakfast Club (Tuesday, Nov 11th)
Teaming up with Hathora to entertain the best AI/ML engineers and CTO’s

El Segundo Tech Breakfast Club (Dec 3rd)
Come hang with me and Jacques Sisteron (Partner at Upfront)

Tech Breakfast Club 🤝 Remgu

#Sponsoredpost

You studied CS at Waterloo – incredible CS program – then worked in Toronto, Chicago, and NYC for almost two decades... why did you move to Croatia?
I moved to Canada as a kid from Croatia, but in 2017 I went back on vacation and met my wife. I moved back to be with her, and once I settled in, I kept meeting incredible technical talent — fluent in English, highly skilled, and eager for meaningful work. 

You worked at Toptal. Why did you leave and start Remgu?
Toptal gave me valuable experience and a look inside the freelance space. But I saw a gap — companies needed long-term, senior-level engineers without inflated costs, and great engineers wanted stable, impactful projects. I started Remgu to solve that. We run lean with small margins, so clients get top-tier European and Latin American talent at fair rates — typically $50–$80/hour — and engineers get to work on projects that matter.

Who is Remgu a good option for?
We’re a great fit for startups and SMBs who need deeply vetted engineers they can count on — whether it’s a founding engineer to build your MVP, or strong additions to an existing team. We tailor every match and only send one or two standout profiles per role, so you’re not wasting time on irrelevant resumes.

Why is Remgu better than other options?
Our model is lean and efficient. We focus on quality, speed, and long-term relationships. That’s why our clients stick with us and keep coming back as their teams grow.

How do I get in touch?
If you’re building your team and want long-term talent without the high cost or churn, reach out directly on LinkedIn or email me at [email protected]

David Tearse, Cofounder of Karman Industries

When we first met, you were an entrepreneur in residence at Riot Ventures, looking at a lot of different ideas - 
Yeah, and the area I kept coming back to was energy. As far as opportunities within energy, the industrial sector is a sleeping giant in terms of energy consumption, emissions, and how far the technology has lagged. 

While at Riot, I met my eventual co-founder, through a contact at Hyperloop One, and he's been working within this energy space for quite some time. He was at Antora Energy as Head of Technology. 

And prior to that he was at Heliogen, a concentrated solar company. But for a long time, on nights and weekends, he had been exploring industrial thermal systems. The insight was that we could leverage technology from the rocket industry, like turbo machinery, high-speed power electronics from electric vehicles, and update the technology of a pretty sleepy, forgotten industry. 

Okay - thermal systems for industrial applications: what does that mean?
So currently, the process is antiquated. Companies are using natural gas. They bring it in, they burn it inside a boiler to create steam, which is used in processes all around us. From the clothes that we wear to chemicals to agriculture. It’s about an 85% efficient process. 

But the beautiful thing with heat pumps is that you get to tap into the waste heat coming off all these factories. That's all the white steam that you see - a boiler can’t reuse that. We tap into that and basically get that for free, and we run that through a compressor that’s driven with electricity. The ratio of the amount of electricity that it requires to actually then deliver heat back into your process is tiny. That’s how we have this 400% efficiency boost and that can translate to 75% energy savings. The gains are huge so it becomes an easy sell with customers. 

Previously, you were exploring some ideas in the defense industry that were not easy to sell. They were worthy pursuits, but I think they might have had a much worse IRR. 
I also think this is where you can have an edge. If you look at the defense industry, you already have some very big companies. SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Shield….  So it’s hard, not just technology-wise. You need lobbyists, and the timelines are longer. But with industrial equipment, there’s no dominant startup player. It’s all legacy companies with sprawling product portfolios that are content with the businesses they already have. 

In thermal infrastructure and heat pumps, the incumbents are selling a handful of monster projects a year - 50, 100, 150 megawatt. But there are 700,000 boilers globally. If you can take this other technology to increase the performance of the systems, dramatically reducing size and cost, now your TAM opens up so big that it makes sense to mass manufacture these systems. 

You’re moving very rapidly out of the gate. I’m blown away by how fast you’ve gotten to a working prototype
We did a lot of prep work before launching the company, so we can just press the accelerator. Our team comes from SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and the energy and manufacturing space. Everyone told us we’d be crazy to build a turbo machine in less than two years and now we’ve turned it on in about eight months. 

Wow - tell me about the prototype
It’s not a subscale prototype. This is a 2 megawatt system. To be able to get this up and running at 30,000 RPM this quickly is pretty crazy. I’m very proud of the team. 

Was there any question about this being an LA/SoCal company? 
Talent density here is unmatched. Elon didn’t pick this as the home for SpaceX by mistake. We have a huge manufacturing base here. There is aerospace and also EV. We can go to machine shops that are local. 

Insane talent density, yes, for sure. How have you been able to recruit great engineering talent when there are so many other, maybe sexier, companies here to work for? Like how do you convince someone from SpaceX to work on thermal systems?
Yeah, if we were another rocket company, it’d be impossible to recruit people from SpaceX - they’re already working for the best rocket company. 

We really have a strong mission. Like hey, you’ve done really amazing things within the rocket industry. Now you can take your talents and have an immediate positive impact for society updating industrial infrastructure.

We don't call ourselves a climate company, we are an energy efficiency company. We're going to save you a boatload of money. But the amount of emissions that we can help these companies abate is staggeringly huge.

For one of our customers, we looked at their top 50 sites globally, and if we put heat pumps at every single one of their sites, we would save them $1.75 billion in energy costs over the lifetime of these assets, but it would also abate 7.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide. So what we're targeting just with our initial product of heat pumps is 20% of our global greenhouse gas emissions. So it's twice as much as all the cars on the road and eight times as much as all the planes in the sky. So when you think about the biggest decarbonization opportunity out there - it's industrial manufacturing.

Before you go, I wanted to ask you about your investors - you’ve been very savvy assembling a value-add cap table. 
There are many ways you can stack the cards in your favor. Throughout my career, I’ve always thought about how I can increase the odds through my network or the partners I pick or my cofounder. Some view VCs as just money. And maybe some VCs view themselves as just money. But you have to pick partners - especially since VC relationships can last longer than the average marriage - that you can work closely with for the next decade. 

For example, Jonathan Lacoste, at Space VC, is such a huge asset. I probably talk to him twice a day. Because he’s a former founder, his advice on even the most random things is so helpful. From feedback on hiring decisions to who I need to talk to if we’re going to move as fast as possible, he’s great.

So excited for the future here - I hope we get to host a Tech Breakfast Club at Karman’s factory soon.
I’d love that

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.