🌴 Why I'm building this

👋 I’m Justin. I run The LA Grind and The SF Grind and scout for Headline.

Happy Thursday! 

Over the last several years, I've been fortunate to meet some incredible people in the startup world.

Through more than 400 podcast interviews across three different shows and spending years at a venture capital firm, I met so many founders, investors, and operators who genuinely moved me. People who changed how I think about building companies, about capital, about what a career can be, hell, about what matters in life.

And what matters most? Relationships.

Relationships run the world. Relationships inspire us. Relationships support us. Relationships influence us, good or bad.

Build the right relationships, and I'm confident your career will eventually spiral upwards. The wrong ones? Downward spiral.

This is why I'm building Ambition: an intimate 150-person startup summit.

I want to put together a room full of ambitious people, let them hear from some incredibly successful speakers and provide opportunities for them to meet each other.

The fun part of building an audience of tens of thousands of people over the years and personal relationships with hundreds of people is, to me, bringing them together.

It's my way of giving back, and Ambition is the event I would want to attend.

The vision is simple: curated but accessible. No $10,000 tickets, no bloated panels, just intimate fireside chats, honest talks, real tactics and strategies, and the kind of inspiring stories that actually make you want to go build something.

We’re 16 weeks out from Ambition, and the room is coming together. We've got a founding operating partner at a multi-hundred million dollar hard tech VC fund, a GP at an early-stage B2B fund that’s backed dozens of companies, founders who have raised $10 million+ or built to millions in revenue, operators and angels who've been in the trenches for decades. We have people flying in from outside LA because they believe in the vision and want to be in the room.

We're announcing speakers on a rolling basis, have Tyler Denk, Mehul Nariyawala, Dee Murthy, and Jessica Chang confirmed, with another 8-10 still to come. The full lineup is going to be something special, a unique blend of founders and investors who have been working on their craft for years.

The conversations between sessions in the hallway, over drinks, at the VIP dinner are the things I'm hoping lead to future deals being done, future co-founders coming together, future investments being made, future friendships being formed.

This is going to be a melting pot of ambition.

And we're supported so far by some incredible partners: Bailey Glasser LLP, Ardas, and Venice Inc., who are also designing the event itself. I just saw the initial concepts, and it's going to look incredible.

Early bird tickets are available now for a little while longer and we have a limited number of service provider and VIP tickets available as well.

We also have a handful of sponsorship opportunities still available if you're looking to get your brand in front of this room. Reply to this email if interested.

See you soon!

Justin