🌴 The LA Grind: Week of October 19th

Upcoming events, venture deals, LA opportunities, and more in Los Angeles this week.

Author

Justin Gordon
October 19, 2026

👋 I’m Justin. I run The LA Grind and The SF Grind, host the Ambition Podcast and the Ambition Summit, and scout for Headline.

Happy Monday! Hope everyone had a great LA Tech Week! I’m hosting our monthly startup community mixer and poker night this week, so I’ll see many more of you soon.

Let’s get to it.

A note from a fellow member: Shawn Gold, long-time LA Grind member, CMO of Relay Human Cloud, 25 years hiring for startups in LA.

I know the tradeoff: the hire you need versus the runway you have. Relay solves it. Dedicated, full-time team members from Asia and Latin America at roughly 75% below US rates, month to month. Not freelancers. Not outsourcing. 100% dedicated people, managed by you, in your standups, on your systems. Developers, accountants, marketing, ops, AI-capable talent. SOC-verified, Dallas-based.

Questions? Message me directly. [email protected]

Upcoming Events

🌴 Upcoming Events I’m Hosting 🌴  

🗓️ October 20: The LA Grind: Startup Community Mixer. Santa Monica. 6 - 8 pm.

🗓️ October 22: Pitch and Run. Beverly Hills. 7 - 8:30 am.

🗓️ October 27: Members Dinner. West Hollywood. 6:30 - 8:30 pm.

🗓️ November 4: Game Night. West Hollywood. 6 - 10 pm.

🗓️ November 10: Member Coffee Meetup. Santa Monica. 8 - 9:30 am.

🗓️ September 23, 2027: Ambition Summit. Santa Monica. 9 am - 8 pm.

👋 This Week 👋  

🗓️ October 23: Originals Summit. Hollywood. 10 am - 6 pm.

👀 Events Coming Soon 👀 

🗓️ October 28: Climate After Hours. Financial District. 6 - 9 pm.

LA Grind Club

Over the past 17 months, we’ve hosted ~100 events in Los Angeles to bring together the startup community.

Who were many of these events specifically for?

Members of The LA Grind Club.

The LA Grind Club is where the LA startup community comes to life. We’re a community of ~70 founders, investors, and operators in LA who gather multiple times per month through basketball runs, poker nights, coffee meetups, dinners, and other member-only events.

Marc Hankin of HPL Law advises inventors and high-growth teams on patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, and licensing. Before your next fundraise, launch, or M&A chat, know where you stand by talking with Marc, who you can reach at [email protected].

Marc can often be found at startup events in LA and has been one of the biggest supporters of The LA Grind since its inception!

Top 5 LA Startup & VC Jobs

People Operations Specialist @ Circadia Health

Senior Manager, Social @ Beekeeper’s Naturals

Hiring?

RJR Partners: Experts in helping startups scale their teams with high quality hires. Their team is comprised of tech industry veterans, allowing them to source and vet candidates directly through their personal networks. Their industry expertise also enables a deeper understanding of the needs of clients and candidates on a level unmatched by other firms.

Know a founder or investor in Los Angeles who is raising capital or searching for a co-founder? Reply to this email with more details that I could share in this newsletter for 11,000+ founders, investors, and operators.

The Ambition Podcast is a show about the world's most ambitious people from history, and the lessons you can take from their lives and use in your own work and life.

Each episode is deeply researched, built around the definitive biography of one person (or in some cases, two), with dozens of hours spent reading, synthesizing, and pulling out what actually matters.

The latest episode is on Akio Morita, Co-Founder of Sony. He was the 15th-generation heir to a 300-year-old sake-brewing family, and his father let him walk away. In 1946, he and Masaru Ibuka pooled about $500 in the ruins of postwar Tokyo to start the company that became Sony. When Bulova offered to buy 100,000 of his radios on the condition that they carry the Bulova name, he said no. By the time he died at 78, Sony was one of the most famous brands in the world.

Available now on all podcasting platforms including: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, YouTube, and more.

Sensydia, a medical technology company advancing non-invasive cardiac assessment, raised a +$6M round was led by Colle Capital Partners.

PickTrace, a provider of workforce management, labor compliance, and operations technology for agriculture, received an undisclosed amount as investment from Terminus Capital Partners.

Uniform Labs, the developer of Multiliquid, the institutional liquidity protocol for tokenized assets, raised an undisclosed amount as Seed round led by Polychain.

Sharp Performance, a provider of confidential performance coaching platform to first responders from the academy through retirement, raised a $18M Series A led by Hidden Variable.

RSYNQ Corporation, a provider of a Physical AI infrastructure platform and middleware layer, received a $2M investment from Kanden Corporation.

Goodweek, company brings tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Mistral into one governed workspace, raised a $12M Seed round led by Adara Ventures.

Send any fundraising news for LA-based companies or funds, including your own, to [email protected].

Featured Location

Lemon Grave. A stylish rooftop restaurant in Hollywood, serving seasonal California cuisine, fresh seafood, handmade pastas, and creative cocktails with scenic views.

Fun Events

See you next week,

Justin

P.S. Want to connect?

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