The View from the Office.

I met up with Morgan Barrett and dozens of tech founders for breakfast at Balthazar. I had the eggs and potatoes along with a cappuccino. 

Morgan organizes these monthly meetups he calls Tech Breakfast Club. He started a few years ago in New York and has since expanded to LA and San Francisco. 

I’ve probably met more great people in a shorter time window at Morgan’s events than anywhere. Morgan estimates he’s hosted more than 6,000 people since he started. 

Morgan tweets out invites and anyone can respond and apply to come; he carefully curates the list, however, to ensure he gets a great crowd. Then he leaves everyone alone to mingle. There is no assigned seating and no prescribed topic to discuss. 

I think anyone who organizes events could learn from this basic formula: cast a wide net to discover talented people, carefully select the group and then set the conversation free. 

One of the people I met said he loves Morgan’s events because they attract a high percentage of “doers compared with wrappers.” 

I had never heard that way of bucketing tech people or anyone else, but I loved it. I had to disclose that personally I happened to be more of a wrapper than a doer. 

Morgan has a day job working as a lawyer for Optimal Counsel LLC. He angel invests on the side while shuttling back and forth between cities to attend the events he organizes. 

He’s headed back to LA next week for a breakfast in El Segundo, which is 20 minutes from downtown LA. The city has emerged as a beacon for startups, particularly those focused on tech, aerospace and defense industry. 

Morgan said the tech startup scene there — nicknamed Gundo — is particularly dynamic in part because the city has done a great job in streamlining bureaucracy and paperwork to attract talent.  

I highly recommend you sign up for his newsletter.

You can follow Morgan on X or LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.