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- 🌴 Two Quick Updates
👋 I’m Justin. I run The LA Grind and The SF Grind, host the Ambition Podcast, and scout for Headline.
Happy Thursday! I’m about to head out for Pitch and Run, our weekly run club, in a couple of hours, but wanted to send some updates because there’s a lot going on in my little corner of the world.
Let’s get to it.
The Ambition Summit, on September 24th, will bring 150 founders, operators, and investors together in Santa Monica to learn and connect for a full day, with a VIP dinner the night before.​
I’m excited to announce our latest speaker: Arteen Arabshahi, General Partner at Fika Ventures.
Arteen invests in "pre-Series A" B2B and B2B2C software and AI companies. He was with Fika at its inception, but left for an operator role as SVP of Strategy at Route during its hypergrowth phase, before returning in 2023.
Arteen had an untraditional path to venture capital. The son of Iranian immigrants, he grew up planning to be a surgeon before pivoting into entrepreneurship and technology. Without any direct access to the industry, he broke into tech by cold emailing 150+ people and landed his first jobs at Techstars and Built in LA, then transitioned to venture capital and spent seven years investing at Fika and WndrCo before joining Route.
Recognized by Forbes, Business Insider, CNN, and the LA Business Journal, Arteen is also a TEDx speaker, University of Arizona graduate, and mental health advocate. Outside of work, he's usually hiking, exploring new restaurants and venues, or practicing hot yoga.
Arteen joins our other confirmed speakers:
Mehul Nariyawala: Co-Founder, Matic Robots. Mehul previously co-founded Flutter, which Google acquired for $40M, and went on to work on Nest. In January 2026, Matic raised a $60M Series C to scale their home robotics platform, a product that earned a 10/10 from WIRED (the reviewer's first 10/10 in over a decade of reviews) and a 9/10 from The Verge.
Dee Murthy, Co-Founder of Ghost, an AI-native distribution platform for the best brands in the world, that has raised $95M, most recently a $40M Series C.
Jessica Chang, Co-Founder of Upwards, the largest childcare network in the US, and a company that raised $43.3M, most recently a $21M Series B.
Tyler Denk, founder of beehiiv ($50M raised, on pace for $50M ARR in 2026), the platform I use and love, is confirmed for an exclusive Day Zero VIP dinner the night before, on September 23rd.
We’ll announce more speakers soon! Also, if you’re interested in becoming a sponsor, please reply to this email and I’ll share more details.
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: what they built, how they thought, the struggles they overcame, and the tactics, strategies, and principles underneath it all.
Our second episode, featuring the Wright Brothers, was released yesterday. Their story is insane and an incredible display of perseverance, accomplishing something that most people at the time thought was impossible. I read the incredible biography by David McCullough to create the episode and I think it turned out great.
Ambition is available now on all podcasting platforms including:
If you enjoy the show, I’d greatly appreciate you sharing it with one other person!
See you next week,
Justin
P.S. Want to connect?
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