☕️ September Tech Breakfast Club Events

+ how to crush initial sales as a preseed company

Author

Morgan Barrett
August 19, 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

September is going to be madness. 5 events in 3 cities.

I’m very excited to catch up with founder friends about all the progress they made over the summer and touch base with my VC friends to make sure they enjoyed Italy.

Also, I interviewed Rob Snyder about how to get to $1m in ARR. I found the conversation fascinating. Scroll down to read it.

If you’ve hit $1m in ARR, I'd be interested to hear what resources or ideas were helpful to you - feel free to reply to the newsletter.

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 ML Leaders Tech Breakfast Club (Tuesday, Sept 9th)
Cohosting with Hathora and ElevenLabs - if you’re a CTO or ML Engineer, come join! Many are saying this is the highest ROI way to start your day

SF ML Leaders Tech Breakfast Club (Wednesday, Sept 10th)
Teaming up with Baseten to feed and caffeinate some of the brightest minds in AI. If you’re a CTO or ML engineer, come join!

NYC Tech Breakfast Club (Thursday, September 18th)
Cohosting with the iconic Lori Berenberg (Bloomberg Beta) who might have sourced the most deals from TBC of any investor (awaiting Guinness to confirm)

For Founders & VC’s

SF Tech Breakfast Club (Tuesday, Sept 23rd)
Come have breakfast with one of the most elite evaluators of talent - Danielle Strachman. She helped start the Thiel Fellowship and now backs early stage startups at 1517

El Segundo Tech Breakfast Club (Thursday, Sept 25th)
Rounding out the month with Meghan Moreland from Riot Ventures. Meghan and Riot back the craziest hardtech founders, including OG Tech Breakfast Club friends like Isaiah Taylor (Valar Atomics) and David Tearse (Karman).

Tech Breakfast Club 🤝 Luka @ Remgu

Meet Luka, founder of Remgu, who sources top European (and Latin American) talent for fast growing companies

#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]

Escaping the Pain Cave - Path to $1m in ARR

First off - shout out to Jack McClelland at Afore for putting Rob Snyder on my Radar.

Rob is the startup sales whisperer for founders trying to get from $0 to $1m ARR. There’s not a lot of good information out there about how to do it. My theory is that it’s so painful that the body induces some sort of amnesia to protect those who endure the process from lasting trauma. Rob after enduring the process, though, didn’t immediately forget. Instead, he became fascinated by it. We chat about how he did it and how he helps early stage founders do it in a repeatable fashion.

For more info on Rob, check out his website

Rob, thanks so much for chatting with me today. There’s a lot of advice around building an early stage startup, especially sales - 
And unfortunately a lot of it sounds pretty compelling 

Build what people want…. Do things that don’t scale…. 
If you look at stories of successful startups and try to fit a framework onto their paths, it’d look something like “big pain point. Here’s a solution.” But that’s not the causality underneath. 

So the classic path, if you’re a smart person, is you perform a bunch of customer research and analysis. You validate a problem. Then you raise some money - hey, here’s a big market, here’s the opportunity - everything at this moment makes sense. But then your world rapidly disassembles

What happens?
You enter the pain cave 

You sound like a triathlete or an ultramarathoner
That’s where it comes from. In running it means entering a mental cavern of deep discomfort as you push against your limits. In startups, it’s when your brain is in deep discomfort because what should work doesn’t - and you’re not sure why.

You get to this moment where you have full conviction, a long term road map - you see how this could be a $100m or $1bn company. Your investors believe in you and the vision. Potential customers tell you this is amazing and ask you to build it. You go off and build. But when you try to sell, you start experiencing weird things. People who were excited a few months ago aren’t pulling out their wallets. They love your solution to a huge problem but then they ghost you.  Wait - am I bad at sales? Does the product suck?

This is when you realize you’re in the pain cave. Everything you thought you knew about entrepreneurship starts to fall apart.

Is the pain cave unavoidable?
Almost every founder spends some time in the pain cave. I spent years in the pain cave.

If you examine enough stories of startups that were stuck - like the founders felt like they were bashing their heads against the wall, and then it clicked - the moment where it clicked is almost identical. It usually happens during a conversation with a potential customer. The customer is like “Yeah, what you have is interesting. That is a pain point. But this other thing is what really matters to me. This is what I’m really focused on. Can you sell me something for that?” 

That’s what actually happened to me. I was trying to sell a scheduling software for hourly employees. I’m on a call with a Dunkin Donuts franchisee and he says “Sounds useful. I don’t think I need it. What I’m really struggling with is recruiting. Can you build me something for that?” 

We were like, F it, why not? Sure. And that is basically the story of every startup that works. You give up on your research and figure out what people are actually going to buy based on one customer anecdote or a couple. 

This sounds much easier and frankly, more pleasant 
Yeah, I worked at McKinsey, went to HBS. I was working 80 hour weeks doing a bunch of stuff to validate an opportunity when I could have just asked “Hey what do you want to buy?”

How do you replicate that experience for other startups?
I spent 2 years building my startup from zero to $4m ARR and wrote about the experience. We don’t really understand why something works when it works. So, I wrote to understand the mechanics of what's working. Other founders started reaching out saying “I tried this, let’s talk.” 

Two friends with startups that had been stuck at around 20k ARR came to me. We took this set of causal frameworks I developed and changed the way they were pitching and describing the product. We went through their sales conversations together. And both startups hit $1m in ARR in under 12 months. 

I felt like no one was trying to understand how this worked. I wanted to understand how this worked at a foundational level, in a way that works in idiosyncratic cases and generalizes. 

And now I work with a bunch of startups while bootstrapping my next company. I watch probably 30 sales calls a week. I don’t understand why everyone isn’t obsessed with this. 

Okay, I’m in the pain cave. How are you going to get me out?
I have to put a concept into your brain first to understand why startups fail and succeed. There’s a difference between problems (or pain points) and demand. Problems aren’t predictive of purchases. Demand is a way to describe what people are trying to accomplish that causes them to purchase something. 

Now, we typically think demand means “wanting our product” or “wanting supply.” Nope. Nobody has ever woken up and said you know what, today it’d be nice to switch ERP’s. If you go out looking for someone who wants your product, you’re going to be disappointed. 

Nobody wants enterprise SaaS. Nobody has ever wanted enterprise SaaS. Nobody will ever want enterprise SaaS.

Just imagine, everybody has a to-do list in their brain. They’re only going to take action on one thing on their to-do list at a time. Demand is what's on their to do list. And if they have only bad options for what's on their to-do list and we show up with a decent option - they will rip it out of our hands. 

And so that’s what you’re looking for. You are looking for demand. 

Okay, I’m looking for demand. How do I find demand?
When you talk to potential customers, you’re basically asking, “what’s on your to do list? What options are you considering? Why do those suck? Is this what you want? Yes? Okay, rip it out of my hands.”

And your job is to find a repeatable to do list item where you can uniquely help them accomplish it. Then you deliver that once manually. Five times manually with a mix of software. You come up with that and then your whole business is just taking that customer case study that you’ve delivered on and repeating that a million times. 

I’m particularly interested in how you dissect sales calls with founders - what does that looks like?
The first problem is that most founders have never seen a sales call. They have no idea how it should be structured. They know there’s a part that’s called discovery, there’s a part that’s called demo. Cool. But there’s actually a physics to a sales call. 

You have to figure out the demand side - meaning what’s on the potential customer’s to do list. Then look at the supply side. What options do they have? Why are those bad? Then we have to describe our product in such a way that it fits their demand. If we do that, they will pull for next steps or an onboarding call. 

So, when I work with founders, we look at examples of these components done well (usually in like two sentences) versus when someone fumbles the conversation (with a multi-minute ramble). 

The highest performing athletes spend a lot of time looking at game tape, so this seems like a no brainer to me 
It’s insane what a difference walking through calls makes. And I’ll also do a mega tear down of individual sales calls pointing out where the founder went wrong and where the missed opportunities were. 

The most impactful thing for founders seems to be watching the mechanics play out in other founders' sales calls. 

I think the natural inclination is to hop on a call and launch into a demo and then ask, “do you like it?” 
That’s actually the exact wrong thing to do. The more of the product you show, the less likely they are to buy. It’s counterintuitive. 

I know a lot of early stage VC funds hire you to work with founders in their portfolios but if a founder wanted to work with you directly, how would they know it's a good fit?
I help startups in a variety of stages. Usually it’s when the company is just starting to sell. They have started to sell and it’s not quite working or it’s not yet repeatable. Or they have product market fit in one area but now they’re trying to find product market fit in the next area. So that could be bigger companies, too. 

I think it’s more helpful to talk about when it’s not a fit. I don’t want to work with companies where they’re pivoting around - they’re in pivot hell - or when they’re in denial about the pain cave. 

What does it mean to be in denial about the pain cave?
They might be clinging on to the idea that Product Led Growth will save them. They want to build their way out of the pain cave. Reality will teach them soon and then they’ll be ready to chat.

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.