🌴 The LA Grind: Week of November 2nd

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

Author

Justin Gordon
November 02, 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! The 12th episode of the Ambition Podcast went live yesterday, the show is growing every week, and I’d love for you to check it out! This has been a really fun project to work on, I’ve spent well over 400 hours studying some of history’s most ambitious people for the show, and I hope you enjoy it.

Let’s get to it.

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Upcoming Events

🌴 Upcoming Events I’m Hosting 🌴  

🗓️ 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 👋  

👀 Events Coming Soon 👀 

🗓️ November 14: Life Summit 2026. Culver City. 10 am - 7 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

Copywriter @ Aventon

Creative Producer @ StudyFetch

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 J. Paul Getty. His father sent him into the Oklahoma oil fields as a three-dollar-a-day roustabout, and by the summer of 1916, not yet 24, he had made his first million and retired. In 1932, in the depths of the Depression, he started buying Tide Water stock at $2.50 a share, the first move in a two-decade fight for control. He then bet on a strip of desert between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that took four years and tens of millions of dollars to produce a drop of oil, and in 1957 Fortune named him the richest American. He spent nearly $17 million building an art museum in Los Angeles, and never saw it.

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

Neuron Industries, an industrial hardware and software company building an AI-native industrial controller, raised a $10M Seed round co-led by FCVC and Obvious Ventures.

StimCardio, a clinical-stage medical device company developing non-invasive wearable therapeutics for atrial fibrillation, raised a $30M Series A led by Metis Medtech.

Loamy, a provider of an agentic AI operations platform for the food supply chain, raised a $6M Seed round led by Zeal Capital Partners.

Offe Market, an online marketplace connecting shoppers with excess inventory from fashion and lifestyle brands, raised a $3M Seed round led by Slauson & Co.

Edge Sound Research, a provider of perception infrastructure for AI to understand the physical world, raised a $2M round led by Stormbreaker Ventures.

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

Featured Location

The Night We Met. A stylish, lantern-lit restaurant serving creative Pan-Asian cuisine, including sushi, seafood crudo, Thai curries, crispy rice, and grilled meats, alongside inventive cocktails.

Fun Events

See you next week,

Justin

P.S. Want to connect?

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