☕️ NYC Tech Breakfast Club Thursday

+ SF and El Segundo

Author

Morgan Barrett
October 14, 2025

👋 Hi, Breakfast Club Members!

Thank you to Simple Closure - the easiest way to close down a company - for supporting today’s newsletter

Busy week - we’re excited for the 3 year anniversary of Tech Breakfast Club in NYC on Thursday!

Then it’s off to SF for Tech Breakfast Club on October 28th with the legendary Jack McClelland from Afore.

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
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Tech Breakfast Club Events

NYC Tech Breakfast Club (Thursday, Oct 16th)
Come celebrate 3 years of Tech Breakfast Club with me, Tamar Vidra & Allison Kiang (VC’s 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 🤝 Simple Closure

#Sponsoredpost

Helping startups shut down can sound grim. What does it really mean to you?
I get that reaction. As a repeat founder, I know how painful it is when things don’t work out. For me, it’s not about endings. It’s about making sure founders don’t go through the same messy, expensive process I did. We are here to take that weight off so they can move forward.

Why is it important to shut down properly?
When I shut down my own company, I learned the hard way that if you don’t do it right, the problems follow you. I remember being up at 2am googling forms and wondering if I was filing the right thing. Meanwhile, states kept charging, taxes piled up, and it only got worse. Doing it properly protects your reputation and lets you leave on good terms with investors and partners.

When does a founder know it’s time?
It’s rarely obvious in the moment. For me, it was a mix of burn rate, market fit, and tough conversations with my investors. I remember dragging my feet and thinking maybe one more month would change things. It didn’t, and waiting only made the process harder. The real sign is when the business no longer deserves your time and energy. The sooner you face it, the smoother it is and the stronger your relationships stay.

What does SimpleClosure actually handle?
Pretty much everything I wish I’d had back then: tax returns, payroll, benefits, permits, distributions, and more. There are over 95 steps, and we’ve already guided over a thousand companies through them. Founders don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We have built the playbook.

What’s the best way for Tech Club members to reach you?
I love talking with founders and VCs, even if you’re not shutting down right now. Connect with me on LinkedIn, or if you need help with dissolving your startup, visit simpleclosure.com

Augustus, Founder of Rainmaker

I caught up with Augustus for the first episode of the Gundo Report. I love b2b saas, but figuring out how to create more freshwater via cloud seeding seems pretty meaningful.

In case you missed it - I started working with the City of El Segundo to help founders (especially hard tech and defense tech founders) start and scale their companies there. If you’re a founder that is thinking of moving to El Segundo, get in touch.

El Segundo is eager to support visionary founders building critical technologies. I should have the next episode of the Gundo Report uploaded shortly.

I went back in our twitter DM’s - we actually just missed our 2 year anniversary - which is crazy because it feels like a decade has passed
Haha

But I remember getting breakfast together back in 2023 and you laid out the vision, not just for Rainmaker, but for El Segundo. It’s crazy, but everything you said came true and it came true pretty quickly. At the time, you had enjoyed some success with a groundwater monitoring company - 
Yeah so I had dropped out of college in 2022 to focus full time on my previous company. I’d already been working on it for a couple of years. Customers needed to know how much water they were using and we had automated the monitoring and reporting of groundwater use. That was great but customers actually just wanted more water. 

I started looking at desalination. Kind of the obvious first choice. But if you’re in Colorado it’s a non starter. If you want to produce water in the interior west, cloud seeding is really your only option. 

And even though we’ve been cloud seeding for like 70 years, it’s only recently been scientifically validated. 

Okay, so you incorporate, and you raise some money from 1517. Smooth sailing after that?
We made some great hires and then proceeded to punch ourselves in the face over and over again for a while. Rainmaker relies on two pretty fundamental technologies - 

Radar that measures and validates how much precipitation we’re inducing anthropogenically and drones, instead of planes, to reduce the cost of operations and allow us to operate in more conditions than planes can.

The mistake I made early on was trying to buy off the shelf commercial radar and drones. Nothing fit our mission specifications. Plus, with the radar, the designs were 15 years old and the lead time was like 12 months. One vendor we were working with got hit by a bus - 

Is that a metaphor? Euphemism? 
No, he actually got hit by a bus. He’s okay, thank God. So we had to commit to controlling our own technology and vertically integrating. 

It was like September of 2024 that it all started to come together. And once we proved that it actually works it’s been a pretty meteoric rise with cloud seeding operations in Utah, Colorado, Oregon, California, and the Middle East. We’ve become the biggest cloud seeding company outside of China. 

Why did it take so long for Cloud Seeding to become a proven technology?
We needed a technology called dual polarization radar. So what that means is, you have radar. It sends light out, it reflects the light. You can then measure some condition that way. Dual polarization means you have one beam oriented horizontally, one beam oriented vertically. And so if more light is reflected on, like the horizontal beam than the vertical one, then that means you have, like, an oblong target, right? Whatever the light bounced off of isn't spherical. It's not uniform in shape, and that means it's probably ice. 

Because of dual polarization radar, we're able to differentiate between liquid and ice and cloud, and what that enabled in research was the National Center of Atmospheric Research to fly in the zigzag pattern over Idaho, where they were cloud seeding, and see exclusively in their flight track phase change from liquid to ice. Then they tracked those lines of ice as they grew into larger precipitation size particles and eventually fell. So, because of dual polarization radar and the ability to differentiate between ice and liquid, you could measure how much precipitation was exclusively man made.

Then because in 2023, a university in Switzerland replicated those results for the first time, Rainmaker now can tell our customers how much water we’re producing for them on an event by event basis. And so now, people are a lot more willing to pay for cloud seeding. 

What does the math look like for a farmer or a state agency that hires Rainmaker?
There’s a couple ways to skin the cat here, but it’s the cheapest way to get water by like two orders of magnitude. 

…..

If you enjoyed this snippet, check out the entire interview with Augustus

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.