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- The LA Grind: Week of July 14th
The LA Grind: Week of July 14th
Upcoming events, founder spotlight, venture deals, investment opportunities, and more.
Justin Gordon
July 14, 2025
Curated events and standout stories for LA’s most ambitious founders, builders, and investors.
👋 I’m Justin. I run The LA Grind, host the Just Go Grind podcast, and scout for Headline. I’ve lived in LA since 2018, earned my MBA from USC (✌️), and I’m probably out running when I’m not writing this.
Sponsor The LA Grind and reach 2,600+ founders, operators, and investors in LA through this newsletter and events.
Before we dive in, I want to give a big thanks to Relay Human Cloud (Use code LAGRIND for $500 off every resource every year), Polsinelli and Ephraim Hintz, TriNet, and Dorwart Law for sponsoring the 50-person founder dinner I hosted on Tuesday at a private beachfront residence.
Also, I’m always looking to work with more partners, and I’d greatly appreciate your input below.
Would your company consider sponsoring The LA Grind?2,600 LA founders, investors, and operators. 68%+ open rate. 14% CTR. |
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🌴 Upcoming Events I’m Hosting 🌴
🗓️ July 15: Curated Founder Breakfast. Breakfast in Hollywood with the owner of a healthy fast-casual restaurant that recently opened. More intimate, smaller, come chat with me and a few founders!
🗓️ July 29: LA Startup Community Mixer. This event is made possible thanks to our partner, AE Studio. They help founders implement AI with the right product strategy and have engineers, data scientists, and designers from Stanford, MIT, and Harvard ready to create bespoke AI solutions.
🗓️ August 1: Founder Poker Night. I'm bringing together ~30 of LA's most ambitious founders for a fun night of poker in the Hollywood Hills! AE Studio is also sponsoring this event (You should really check them out). I have room for 2 more sponsors.
🗓️ August 9: Startup Community Basketball. Basketball with LA founders, operators, and investors. Amazing indoor court in DTLA. 20 spots available. Full-court 5 on 5 games.
This Week
🗓️ July 14: CryptoMondays. Whether you're a crypto newbie or a long-time builder, you're welcome. Come with your questions, your perspectives, and your curiosity.
🗓️ July 15 - September 16: LA Summer Speaker Series, hosted by A16Z. Weekly gatherings at the a16z Santa Monica office for candid conversations between top LA-based General Partners and the standout founders they’ve backed.
🗓️ July 15: WeAreLATech: LA Tech Community Beach Walk 🌊🚶 Summer Edition. This is for networking amongst engineers, product people, heads of growth, designers. Founders and investors are welcome.
🗓️ July 15: Founders & Funders Happy Hour at San Diego Yacht Club. Ok, so this isn’t in LA, but it looked fun so I had to include it.
🗓️ July 15: MLOps Community Coworking. Come cowork and network with people in the AI space.
🗓️ July 16: Scaling the Internet Economy: Fundraising, Finance, and Founders. An intimate evening hosted by Parker and The KINN, where top founders, operators, and investors explore what it takes to scale a digital business.
🗓️ July 17: Pitch & Run LA: Run Club for Founders, Investors, and Tech. We meet every Thursday in Beverly Hills for a 3-mile run and coffee after. It’s my favorite run club.
🗓️ July 17: Founders in Tech Meetup. An exclusive evening in the heart of West Hollywood, where tech founders, builders, and investors come together to connect.
🗓️ July 17: LA Fintech Connect Happy Hour. It's their 1-year anniversary! Come celebrate with the rest of your LA Fintech friends with a lively evening of networking, drinks, and good vibes with fellow fintech enthusiasts!
🗓️ July 17: AI LA x Marina Del rAI Meetup. Marina Del rAI is a new local meetup series in Marina del Rey bringing together the blue tech, AI, and startup communities by the water.
🗓️ July 19: Let's Talk Shop & Hike. Talk Shop is hosting a networking hike so that folks in the industry can connect, burn a couple hundred calories, and make some new friends.
Want to submit an event for consideration in the next edition? Fill out this form.
Joan Nguyen is the Founder and CEO of Bumo, a marketplace that lets parents book licensed childcare in seconds and lets providers fill unused capacity. Think of it as “Airbnb for childcare,” only built by parents who felt the pain themselves.
Bumo just announced a $10 million seed round led by True Ventures and Offline Ventures. The platform already supports roughly 10k parents across 200 locations in 13 states and has facilitated close to half a million hours of care, with Los Angeles still its densest market.
Joan’s path to Bumo started early: at 20 she bootstrapped an Inc 5000 education company, then teamed up with influencer Chriselle Lim in 2019 to open a coworking space with on-site childcare. The pandemic forced a hard pivot to virtual learning, which showed her the scale tech could unlock; by 2024 Bumo had evolved into the instantly bookable marketplace parents use today.
The LA Grind newsletter currently reaches 2,600+ founders, operators, and investors living in Los Angeles. It's a HIGHLY engaged audience: 68% open rate, 14% click rate, and many subscribers attend events around LA (Or are very interested in the right events).
This section will be for ongoing partners, up to 10 of them, category-exclusive. Minimum 3-month commitment. If interested, reply to this email or email me at [email protected].
Some of my current partners, as an example of what this section will include moving forward:
Relay Human Cloud can help you find your next team member in minutes. Offshore talent, in Relay Human Cloud's office, dedicated to you. Use code LAGRIND for $500 off every resource every year.
Polsinelli is an AmLaw 100 law firm that specializes in technology, startups/emerging growth companies, and healthcare law. Ephraim Hintz, an LA-based attorney at Polsinelli, is an experienced technology transactions/venture capital attorney with clients ranging from pre-seed startups to Fortune 500 companies.
TriNet is a leading professional employer organization that lets high-growth startups hand off payroll, premium benefits, risk mitigation, and HR compliance to a single tech-enabled platform backed by seasoned experts, freeing founders to keep their focus on building the business.
AE Studio helps founders implement AI with the right product strategy and has engineers, data scientists, and designers from Stanford, MIT, and Harvard ready to create bespoke AI solutions. Their secret? They treat your project like it's their own startup.
Varda Space Industries raised a $187M Series C led by Natural Capital and Shrug Capital. The El Segundo startup says the cash will let it ramp to near-monthly launches and finish an in-orbit pharma lab that crystallizes drugs in microgravity.
Bumo raised a $10M seed round led by True Ventures and Offline Ventures. The on-demand childcare marketplace will use the funds to expand into new cities, grow its team, and hit an ambitious target of 15× growth in 2025.
Landline raised an additional $2.7M according to SEC filings. The airline-affiliated bus operator is rolling out new American Airlines code-share routes—most recently a Trenton-to-Philadelphia link that keeps passengers in the secure zone—to feed more travelers into major hubs.
Please send any fundraising news for LA-based companies or funds to [email protected].
Top 5 LA Startup & VC Jobs
Senior Mission Software Engineer @ Varda
Senior Machine Learning Engineer @ BuildOps
Product Manager @ Atticus
Product Manager @ HeyGen
Startup Community Operations Associate @ Techstars
👋 Hiring? I’m working on a job board! Coming soon.
💼 Looking for a job? I’ll be curating more LA-based roles soon.
Investment Opportunities
I know of a few founders who are raising capital right now and I’m always meeting more. If you’re an investor, let me know what type of deals fit your thesis, your check size, and stage you invest in. Simply reply to this email.
If you’re a startup founder raising capital, fill out this form to get started.
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Fun Events
See you next week,
Justin
P.S. Want to connect?
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