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🌴 The LA Grind: Week of December 8th

🌴 The LA Grind: Week of December 8th

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

Justin Gordon
December 08, 2025

👋 I’m Justin. I run The LA Grind 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.

I’m putting the finishing touches on The LA Grind Holiday Party and it’s set to be one of our best events of the year! If you haven’t already, now is your last chance to get your ticket. We’ll have a private chef, open bar, holiday decorations, and a great group of attendees at a beautiful private residence.

We’ve got more than 60 confirmed guests, including bootstrapped and VC-backed founders, operators, angels, and VCs from some of the most ambitious companies in LA. Join us.

Also, as we head into 2026, I’d love to get a sense of what everyone in The LA Grind community is focused on.

What is your current biggest business priority going into 2026?

Let’s get to it.

Weekly events. Curated groups. Real relationships for founders, operators, and investors in Los Angeles.

You will meet people like:

A venture-backed founder who just raised a multi-million dollar seed round
A bootstrapped founder doing hundreds of thousands in revenue and another doing millions
An investor who has made 100+ investments into athletes, creators, and entrepreneurs
Operators and executives with experience at public companies and high-growth startups

Around 50 members and growing. Join us!

⭐️ Featured Event ⭐️

🗓️ December 11: Automate your life with claude code (so you can actually live it). Venice. 6 - 9 pm. Led by Evan Grenada, who works in Amazon’s Generative AI Research organization. Join his workshop to learn the cutting-edge techniques AWS is developing with Claude Code—and build your own agents to automate anything. If there’s a task, process, or workflow that drains your time, you’ll learn how to design something that handles it for you using simple, natural language.

Want your event featured here with a longer blurb? Sign up here.

🌴 Upcoming Events I’m Hosting 🌴

🗓️ December 9: Q&A with Arteen Arabshahi of Fika Ventures. Santa Monica. 8 - 10 am. Sponsored by Pilot.

🗓️ December 11: Startup Community Holiday Party Presented by Fidelity Private Shares. Hollywood. 7 - 10 pm. Sponsored by Bailey & Glasser, LLP and Fidelity.

🗓️ December 14: Startup Community Basketball. DTLA. 10 - 11 am.

🗓️ December 17: Members Coffee Meetup. Santa Monica. 8 - 9:30 am.

🗓️ December 18: Members Poker Night ♣️ 🃏. Hollywood. 6 - 11 pm.

🗓️ February 2026: Curated Temecula Founder Retreat. Looking for 1 or 2 sponsors. Reply to this email if interested.

👋 This Week 👋

🗓️ December 8: Office Hours at Sony Music Publishing. Hollywood. 12:30 - 2 pm.

🗓️ December 9: Women Who Move The Game. Inglewood. 11 am - 1 pm.

🗓️ December 9: LA Health Tech Hang. Santa Monica. 6:30 - 8:30 pm.

🗓️ December 10: Startup Cafe: The Practical Startup Legal and Finance Playbook. Venice. 8:45 - 10:30 am.

🗓️ December 10: LA Tech Holiday Party. Venice. 5 - 9 pm.

🗓️ December 10: Ascend GenAI Summit: Enterprise Insights & Startup Innovation. Irvine. 6 - 8 pm.

🗓️ December 10: MLOps LA Happy Hour. Marina del Rey. 6 - 8 pm.

🗓️ December 10: AI LA+ Holiday Party w/ NRW.Global Business. Venice. 6 - 9 pm.

🗓️ December 11: Pitch & Run LA: Run Club for Founders, Investors, and Tech. Beverly Hills. 7 - 8 am.

🗓️ December 11: AI Cafe: Deploying and Optimizing VoiceAI Agents. Venice. 8:45 - 11 am.

🗓️ December 11: Factory Fuel (After Hours). El Segundo. 4 - 7 pm.

🗓️ December 11: Before The Exit: How Founders Build Wealth Long Before They Feel Ready. Santa Monica. 4 - 6 pm.

🗓️ December 11: Consumer Tech Accelerator Demo Day, Fall 2025. Glendale. 5:30 - 8:30 pm.

🗓️ December 12: Marketers, founders & AEO. Santa Monica. 6 - 8 pm.

🗓️ December 13: Toastique Presents: Holiday Pop-Up Market. Hollywood. 10 am - 2 pm.

Top 5 LA Startup & VC Firm Jobs

Director of Revenue Operations @ Curri

Robotics Software Engineer @ Splash Inc.

AI Software Engineer @ MindFort

Sales, Customer and Growth Lead @ Olympian Motors

Business Development Manager @ Pilot

👋 Hiring? Feature your job in The LA Grind newsletter.

Investment Opportunity

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 7,000+ founders, investors, and operators.

Community Partner spotlight on Marc Hankin at HPL Law!

Marc helps founders protect what they are building through expert guidance on patents, trademarks, and all things IP.

Before your next raise or product launch, get clarity by emailing Marc at [email protected].

He shows up consistently for the LA startup community and has supported The LA Grind from the beginning.

Castelion, a defense technology startup building hypersonic weapon systems, raised $350M in Series B funding led by Altimeter Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Antares, a nuclear reactor development company, raised $96M in Series B funding led by an investor group.

Quickture, an AI video-editing platform, exited stealth with $1.9M in pre-seed funding in a round was led by Kickstart Ventures, with participation from Forward VC and Arts Alliance Fund.

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