Today’s Menu ☕️

• LA Recap & February Signup

• NYC Tech Breakfast Club Jan 23rd

• Boston Tech Breakfast Club Jan 31st

• Member Spotlight: Anna Berger @ Trayd

👋 Hi, Breakfast Club Members!

I’m headed to Utah next week for the kickoff of Sundance. If you’re around, let me know. As always, if you want to chat legal stuff or strategize about your fundraise, hit me up.

Thank you to Citizens Private Bank for sponsoring this newsletter and LA Tech Breakfast Club. Shoutout to Safa Aliabadi and Dominique Fu at Citizens.

Also, I’m really excited to introduce you to Anna Berger and her company Trayd. I think you’ll enjoy her story of jumping from the world of gay dating apps to building some really exciting (and very necessary) construction tech.

To kick off the New Year I asked a bunch of Tech Breakfast Club Members about their 2024 predictions. Some highlights include:

Erika Bricky: e/acc leads to steroids going mainstream among founders
Fil Aronstein: El Segundo overtakes SF as the main hardtech hub
Abiola Familusi: glp-1 adjacent supplements have a big year
Jack Rains: Someone other than Biden or Trump wins in ‘24

One alarming takeaway, though, from asking people for their predictions, is how sheepish most VC’s are about prognosticating. It’s literally your job to predict the future!

Reply to the newsletter with your hottest 2024 take and I’ll include some in the next edition

LOS ANGELES
Showtime

LA Tech Breakfast Club is off to an exciting start. Great venue, great guest list - some really fascinating hard tech founders, solid weather (sorry NYC).

I had such a good time. I think I’m going to do it again. Next month, though, we’re hosting LA Tech Breakfast Club in El Segundo. Something special is happening just south of LAX. Come down and tour some factories/labs.

Sign up here or click the button below for the February 15th Tech Breakfast Club

NYC Tech Breakfast Club January 23rd
January NYC Tech Breakfast

Teaming up with Andrew Yeung to host the first NYC Tech Breakfast Club of the Year. Really excited for this. Hope to see you there.

Citizens

I would like to give a big thank you to the startup banking team at Citizens. If you came to the most recent Tech Breakfast Club, you might have had a conversation with Dominique Fu - if you’d like to chat further with her, shoot her an email:

[email protected]

Fuel your growth and pursue each milestone with a set of financial products and services built for your innovative company. Enjoy a dedicated, empowered point-of contact and a team of experts who can proactively address your needs and collaborate with you to develop customized strategies to help your business succeed.

Boston Tech Breakfast Club January 31st
January Boston Meetup

Come join me and Kylie Bourjaily on the 31st (new date) in Boston.

Member Spotlight
Anna Berger, Founder of Trayd
I think you should meet Anna Berger - she’s an absolute force of nature. I had the good fortune of meeting her a couple months ago when she returned to New York after completing the 2023 summer cohort of Y Combinator. Along with Cara Kessler, she’s building Trayd, a B2B payroll platform designed specifically for commercial real estate subcontractors.

Construction is big business - in NYC alone, construction spend tops $86bn per year. Despite being such a massive industry, it’s super inefficient. Everything in Tech seems to get less expensive or better over time. Not so in construction.

I think we should build more. To do that, we need to do a better job of retaining construction talent. That’s where Anna comes in.

How did you find out about Tech Breakfast Club?
Avante Price [Founder of Posh]. I’ve known him for six years. My first startup and Posh were in the same NYU accelerator cohort. He’s a great friend of mine. 

What’s Trayd?
It’s a construction payroll platform designed for same day pay. We allow the 7 million construction workers in the US to get paid seven to ten days sooner than legacy payroll providers like QuickBooks, ADP, and Paychex.

If you drive for Uber or Lyft, or even work at McDonalds, same day pay has been a reality for a while. Why isn’t this the case for construction?
600,000 construction workers have left the industry to go pursue jobs in the gig economy for that reason. There’s a massive labor shortage happening in construction. For every six people that retire from the Trades, one new person is entering the field. 

Money doesn’t move through construction seamlessly. It drifts down from owner or developer to the general contractor to the subcontractors and then to the workers. There are work stoppages, delays, etc. 

General contractors and subcontractors are always playing catchup. They don’t have the right software to run their business. They’re forced into using as many as 6 different tools – their systems are disjointed and inefficient. As a solution, we’re building an all-in-one back office platform 

You might be underselling it – how tough is it to make payroll?They’re going to tremendous lengths. Money usually comes in net 90 or net 120. Subcontractors are pulling capital from other projects that have been completed in order to stay current. They’re opening lines of credit at undesirable rates in order to make ends meet, to retain their staff. And so that’s really where Trayd comes in – to keep workers paid and coming back to work. 

There’s a big range in sophistication among contractors – what does their tech stack look like?
I could talk about this question for 30 minutes – there’s such a range. You have subcontractors with 300 or 400 laborers who operate off of pen and paper. Not even excel. Then you have a newer generation starting to adopt tech. Maybe they’re using QuickBooks for timesheets. 

Some contractors operate off of selfies. You’ll send a selfie to your foreman and it’s just sitting on their phone –

Selfies?
Yeah, you have to get the right street signs in the back of the shot to prove your location. I mean the technology is there. We have geolocation with your exact coordinates. It doesn’t have to be like that. 

Going back to the 600,000 construction workers who have left the industry... That’s shocking. I hear that trades pay really well, though
You might go to Trade School and become proficient in carpentry or flooring or plumbing and when you start out you might be making $25 or $30 an hour, which is actually comparable to Uber, but after a few years in the Trades, you’re making triple or quadruple that. So, it’s shortsighted to leave construction after a few years for a job in the gig economy or choose the gig economy as an alternative, to begin with. 

I’m trying to piece your path together – this is your first proptech or fintech company, right?
I went to Michigan for Undergrad. I’m from Long Island originally. I grew up in a construction family and saw firsthand how contractors are fighting to get ahead.

I worked at an agency, supporting American Express B2B, actually supporting their construction merchant business. In hindsight it makes sense why I’m here, but it wasn’t obvious getting here. 

I then went in-house to Marriott, where I was on the global marketing team for three years.   

That was when they acquired Starwood?
Actually I was hired by Starwood in the middle of the acquisition, quickly becoming a Marriott employee. 32 Brands – it’s a behemoth. I was there at the inception of the Bonvoy brand. I loved it. I loved hospitality. I love to travel.

Okay, so from a massive company to a startup – how?
Coachella. I met a founder, named Brenden, at Coachella, and we launched a dating app together.

Probably the most productive thing to ever come out of Coachella
Yeah, we were sharing our frustrations of dating in New York City in our 20’s and how often you’re immediately disappointed – like your date isn’t the vibe or the person you thought they were and your stomach just drops. We wanted to fix that with video. We came back from the desert and started building Curtn. I was still working at Marriott but nights and weekends it was all about using short form video to make dating better. 

This was right when Tik Tok, well Musical.ly then, was starting to take off. 
Yeah, exactly, and I made the jump to full time. We were backed by Sam Altman and Joel Simkhai, the founder of Grindr. 

What happened to Curtn
The incumbents in the dating space started to figure out video. I ended up going to work for Joel Simkhai on his next app, Motto. 

Gindr 2.0?
It’s a clear (and necessary) evolution from Grindr. A better product, featuring best-in-class verification systems, and real users who aren’t afraid to show their face.

Incredible founder – Grindr is now a public company. What did you learn from Joel?
I’m still learning from him. He’s one of my closest confidants. Joel taught me how to execute. It’s all about the details. He focuses on every little thing. To build a big business, you really have to care about everything, especially early on. Attention to detail. Hustle. With consumer apps, you have to work really really hard. 

How long have you known your cofounder, Cara, for?
Cara Kessler and I have been friends for 21 years now. We went to the same sleepaway camp in upstate New York. This is actually our second job together. We were lifeguards together at 18.

Did you always know you wanted to do something with Cara?
She’s the perfect fit for me. She has brought every one of my big ideas to life. I don’t think I could have dreamed up a better partner for Trayd. I had a hunch we’d work well professionally and it’s turned out even better. 

How did you convince her to work on Trayd with you?
She was just coming off a nine-year run at LinkedIn. She was the web platform lead for Linkedin.com She started as an intern and made it all the way through to senior staff. 

Coincidentally, we were both in Europe at the same time last summer and I suggested we take a road trip together. She thought it was just a friendly trip.

Did you have the fully formed idea for Trayd? Cara told me she thought this was supposed to be a fun vacation but then you very quickly got down to business
It was like 75% formed. When we started the trip I began asking her about what’s next? What does she want? What was missing at LinkedIn? Just some big questions. She alluded to wanting to build again. She had been leading a team for so long and wasn’t coding anymore. I felt like there was room to talk. 

I told her my plan but she wanted to validate the idea for herself. She took two months to investigate and confirm my research. Eventually she said yes. 

We got the MVP as far as we could without third party API’s but that was enough to get us into Y Combinator.

Congratulations on Y Combinator – tell me about the experience 
Looking back, it feels crazy that I wasn’t jumping at the idea. For me, the business, our customers, it’s all here in New York. Going to San Francisco for three months was never even on my radar. I was ready to raise but then in 2023 the market completely dried up. So YC seemed like a good move. We filled out the application after the deadline had passed but got an interview and then off to SF a week later. 

The network you get access to and the ability to fundraise in a bad market was incredible. 

Do any conversations or connections from YC stand out?
YC got me on the phone with Tracy Young, the founder of PlanGrid, which had sold to Autodesk for $895m. Her advice on how to navigate sales was invaluable. It’s super challenging in construction. 

Yeah, I imagine contractors aren’t exactly hanging out on LinkedIn
They don’t even really answer their emails. So, you either show up with doughnuts or Crown Royal or maybe you catch one at an event. I’m out most nights of the week at different construction association events. These guys are dealing with houses on fire, pipes bursting, it’s tough to get their attention.

The value is there though. You get better retention of your employees. One of the first contractors we spoke to, he was using a legacy provider, and his top guy has a family emergency and needs access cash quickly. The contractor was powerless – all he could do was give his employee the cash in his wallet. The contractor couldn’t let his employee withdraw funds early from ADP, so the worker quits to go drive for Uber. 

When we get in front of contractors, I mean no one switches payroll as a favor or on a whim, we have to work hard to close each deal. But, once we are able to sit down with prospective customers and explain how much time, energy, and resources are saved by using Trayd, we are able to close the deal. 

Okay, going back to YC, how did Demo Day go?
Demo day went well! We walked out of YC with a ready-to-launch product and it resonated with investors. We got great traction with our fundraise and headed back to New York and jumped into the market in early October.

Having signed contracts feels amazing but the best feeling was when the first employee clocked in, clocked out, and opened up a cash out flow. I have chills saying that. 

Wow. What’s the bigger vision here?
We’re building the best vertical saas tool for construction with the mission of speeding up how money moves, all while providing greater transparency throughout the foodchain. 

How do you stay sane under the pressure of building an early stage startup?
My days start early, usually at the gym – even if it’s just a stretch morning.  

Are you an Equinox Person?
Lately I’ve been going to the Bond Street one. It’s kind of home away from home. 

I’m also a big tennis player. My one regret is not playing club tennis at Michigan. I lost my game for a few years but I’m getting it back. It’s without a doubt my favorite thing to do in the world.