🌴 The LA Grind: Week of October 26th

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

Author

Justin Gordon
October 26, 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! Excited to welcome FinStrat as our newest partner. They give founders a fractional CFO and finance team, from bookkeeping and financial models to investor reporting and fundraising prep. If your back office is held together with spreadsheets, check them out below.

We’re also lining up partners for 2027 across The LA Grind, The SF Grind, the Ambition Podcast, and the Ambition Summit. If your company wants to get in front of founders, investors, and ambitious builders, just reply to this email.

Let’s get to it.

Building a startup? Your finances need to keep pace.

FinStrat pairs founders with a fractional CFO and finance team to build reliable financials, sharpen forecasts, and prepare for fundraising. From bookkeeping and financial models to investor reporting and raise strategy, we bring the people and processes you need, without hiring a full-time finance department.

Spend less time piecing together your back office and more time building your company. Learn how you can partner with FinStrat here.

Upcoming Events

🌴 Upcoming Events I’m Hosting 🌴  

🗓️ 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.

🗓️ November 20: Poker Night. West Hollywood. 6 - 11 pm.

🗓️ December 3: Rams Game (Seed and Series A Founders). Inglewood. 5:15 - 8:45 pm.

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

👋 This Week 👋  

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

👀 Events Coming Soon 👀 

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

Junior Media Buyer @ KittySpout

UGC Content Creator @ High Scale

Operations Lead @ New Creative

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 Ernest Shackleton. He came within 97 miles of the South Pole and turned back so his men wouldn't starve. In 1915, his ship Endurance was crushed by the ice of Antarctica's Weddell Sea, stranding 28 men with no way to call for help. To get them rescued, he sailed a 22-foot open boat about 800 miles across the Southern Ocean to South Georgia, then crossed the island's uncharted mountains on foot. Every one of his men made it home.

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

IDL, a global professional dance league, raised a $15M Series A led by Elysian Park Ventures.

ScribeUp, a provider of an AI-powered embedded recurring bill platform for financial institutions, raised a $13M Series A led by Curql.

Stellios Technologies, a high-energy power systems company developing high-power microwave, directed-energy, compact-fusion, and advanced-propulsion technologies, raised a $5M Pre-Seed round backed by Sofreh Capital, Wave Function Ventures and more.

POV Beauty, a provider of a skin prep beauty brand bridging clinically backed skincare with cosmetics, raised an undisclosed amount Series A led by Silas Capital.

DrizzleX, the water intelligence platform for multifamily and commercial real estate, raised a $6.8M Series A-2 led by Israel Investment Fund Group.

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

Featured Location

Bottega Louie. A stylish European-inspired restaurant in Downtown LA, serving Italian pastas, wood-fired pizzas, fresh salads, and French pastries, including its signature colorful macarons.

Fun Events

See you next week,

Justin

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