Startup Grind NYC

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Most fundraising advice focuses on surface-level networking and directory awareness.

Charlie O’Donnell thinks this approach is a waste of time.
As the founder of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures and a faculty member at NYU, Charlie has spent twenty years at the center of the New York City startup ecosystem.

He was the first analyst at Union Square Ventures and helped launch the First Round Capital office in New York. He has backed more than 100 local companies, including Hungryroot, GroupMe, and Radformation.

On Thursday, April 23rd, Charlie joins Startup Grind at Civic Hall to share insights from his new book, Founder Unfriendly.
This session is a brass-tacks breakdown of the honest mechanics of venture capital that investors usually keep hidden.

Until now.

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WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

• The Decision Logic: Understand the specific mechanics of how VCs decide to fund a company or pass.
• Influencing the Room: Strategies to shape the conversations investors have when you aren't there to defend your idea.
• Shifting a No to a Yes: Practical tools to move skeptical investors toward an enthusiastic commitment.
• Beyond Clichés: Skip the recycled wisdom and focus on granular, specific tactics that transform your deck into an asset.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

• Early-Stage Founders: Builders preparing to raise their first institutional checks.
• First-Time Entrepreneurs: Professionals weighing whether to pitch themselves on a new idea.
• Technical Operators: Practitioners who want to align operational math with fundraising success.

Tickets for this event include food and drinks, as well as direct access to the most accessible early-stage investor in New York.

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RSVP now to pre-order the book and pick it up at the event. If you're lucky, Charlie might even sign your copy. 🖋️

🚨 Selecting the book bundle ticket guarantees you a copy of Founder Unfriendly. This ticket also includes exclusive access to 8 live virtual AMA sessions with successful founders. This is a series of candid conversations about starting up from an extremely experienced group of entrepreneurs.

Getting a ticket guarantees admission. No waitlisting.

You'll also meet dozens of other high-performing entrepreneurs who are creating their next big thing. Seriously, it's some of the best founder networking in the city.

AGENDA

• 6:00 PM: Networking, Food & Drinks
• 7:00 PM: Fireside Chat with Charlie O'Donnell
• 8:00 PM: Meet the Speaker
• 9:00 PM: After Party at Time Out Market

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​We're at the new Time Out Market at Union Square. It features a selection of the city's best food and drink together under one roof, offering a wide variety of options to choose from throughout the event.
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Look for Startup Grind table signs toward the back near the outdoor terrace.

🚨 NO RSVP ON MEETUP. Complete your RSVP here in order to attend.

### A Founder Peer Group for the Scaling Phase

You're past finding product-market fit. Now you're managing the messy reality of scaling:

• Organizational design that needs work
• Sales compensation you're making up as you go
• Technical debt threatening to collapse the system

This is a closed-door session for founders dealing with scaling problems right now.

📅 Friday, March 6th • 12:00-2:00 PM
A private members club near Gramercy Park.
24 founders working to solve problems with peers in the same phase.

✅ You're likely a fit if:

• This is your full-time focus
• $15M+ in revenue or funding raised
• You're managing managers, not just ICs
• Your company has meaningful traction (Series A/B stage, scaling revenue)
• You're dealing with operational complexity (GTM strategy, org design, unit economics, hiring executives)

🤝 What happens:

• Meet founders like you
• Share your current bottleneck
• Get specific input from founders who've solved similar problems
• Build relationships with peers you can call when you need a sanity check

🏢 Sector agnostic. Fintech, SaaS, marketplaces, D2C—the scaling challenges are the same.

📍 Details:

• 24 seats (strict cap)
• No pitches. No panels.
• $100 (includes lunch and bar)
• Business casual dress
• Application required for stage alignment

Apply if: You're dealing with scaling problems and want peers who understand the specific challenges of this phase (not requests for advice from founders three stages behind you).

You MUST complete your RSVP here in order to attend.

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The AI Briefing is a recurring AI deep-dive for decision-makers.

Each month, we select one high-signal industry report, circulate it in advance, and meet to cut through the noise.

📜 This Month’s Source: From Warehouse to Wallet – State of AI in Retail & CPG 2026 (NVIDIA – Jan 2026)

Across retail and CPG, AI has moved from isolated experiments to a core part of how leading brands plan demand, run stores, and design customer journeys.

Most retailers in the survey are already using or evaluating AI and plan to increase spend again in 2026, yet only a subset are translating that investment into clear margin lift and distinctive customer experiences.

As value‑seeking consumers, channel fragmentation, and labor constraints intensify, the gap is widening between AI‑native operators and incumbents still treating AI as a set of pilots rather than a new operating system for retail.

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🏔️ The Mission: Turning AI retail budgets into real operating leverage

• This session goes beyond generic “AI in retail” hype to examine how AI is actually reshaping merchandising, supply chain, stores, and CX—and why so many initiatives still stall at the proof‑of‑concept stage.
• We will dig into where returns are emerging in practice (forecasting, inventory optimization, pricing, service, and content), what Agentic AI looks like in a retail context, and how teams are re‑architecting data and workflows to support it.

📊 The Format:

• 10-Minute Executive Download: A fast walkthrough of the NVIDIA 2026 findings: adoption and investment trends across retail and CPG, early results from AI in forecasting, supply chain, and CX, and how leaders are thinking about agentic AI in the next 12–24 months.
• Operational Reality Check – The Store/Ops Threat: How lean, AI‑native teams are using models and agents to compress planning cycles and automate decisions “from warehouse to wallet,” while many traditional retailers still ship changes in quarters, not weeks.
• Cross-Pollinated Debate: Builders share where AI already takes hours of merch, planning, or service work down to minutes; executives and operators unpack why, even with those gains, org design, risk, and legacy architecture still block them from rebasing pricing, headcount, and store formats.

🤝 Who Should Attend:

• Retail & CPG Executives: Clarify why AI initiatives show promising pilots but limited P&L impact—and hear how peers are restructuring roadmaps, KPIs, and vendor strategies to change that.
• Founders & Builders: Identify the most urgent problem spaces—demand planning, inventory, store ops, personalization, content, and customer service—where budget owners are actively looking for AI‑native partners and where agentic workflows are starting to land.
• Product, Data, and Operations Leads: Compare notes on data foundations, experimentation, and deployment: how others are wiring models into merchandising, supply chain, and service workflows, and where human‑in‑the‑loop design is non‑negotiable.

📬 The Prep: This is a working session, not a lecture. Review the report here. Bring your perspective.

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