The DC Founders' Salon - Pre-Seed to Series A (Hosted by Growth Dinners + District Angels)
The DC Founders' Salon is an exclusive, curated gathering for Pre-Seed to Series A founders & VCs who are building and investing in defense, dual-use, cyber, and AI.
Hosted in a private speakeasy in DC's Ritz-Carlton, this salon is structured to facilitate high-impact peer-to-peer discussions, strategic exchange, and relationship-building.
Theme: Does AI give hard-tech founders more leverage? AI is changing the cost and speed of building companies—but defense, dual-use, cyber, and AI founders still face the realities of security, procurement, regulation, hardware, and deployment.
We’ll explore whether smaller, AI-native teams can reach real traction before raising, how founders should think about strategic capital, and what investors should underwrite at the earliest stages.
Founders: We're prioritizing founders in defense, dual-use, cyber, and AI who have raised $2M or more.
Investors: We're allowing a couple of investors to join us.
We’ll follow up with selected guests and send the final details privately.
-Vernon
Note: Attendee details (name, company, LinkedIn, and email) will be shared with event sponsors to help them connect with you. This is how we keep events accessible and bring in top-tier partners.
What to Expect
Strictly Capped Capacity: Registration is strictly limited to 20 founders & guests to ensure meaningful, direct engagement among all participants.
Curated Room: Attendees are vetted to ensure complementary peer dynamics across founders and VCs.
Non-Commercial: Focused entirely on practical insights, direct feedback, and peer collaboration. We ask all guests not to sell or solicit during the event.
About our Host & Sponsors
Vernon T. Foster II is a 3x founder and 2x author who's spent 15 years building communities, agencies, and media — shaping founder scenes from Denver to NYC to the DMV. Today he runs Growth Dinners, an invite-only IRL community for founders past $1M in revenue, and WebinarRev, a tech-enabled agency running end-to-end webinar programs to fill B2B pipeline. He's also a Lovable Ambassador. Previously he led events and community at Bootstrapped Giants.
Growth Dinners is built to help founders solve real problems in the room — not just network. From pre-seed to exit, every event brings together the right people to work through what founders are actually facing: raising, scaling, or getting support from the ecosystem partners who move things forward.
District Angels is a DMV-based founder community of 3,000+ operators, 50+ angels, and 25+ regional partner organizations. The DA deals team source and vet founders across the region, including the Battle of the Regions finalists represented in their most recent competition.
J.P. Morgan is dedicated to being the leading bank of the innovation economy—bringing together founders, investors, startups and high-growth companies. With tech that powers growth, J.P. Morgan helps give early-stage startups, venture-backed and high-growth companies the agility needed to make secure, real-time and efficient decisions.
Alfalfa Haus is designed for early-career and growth-minded professionals who want more than just a place to live. It is for people who value community, ambition, and being around others who are building toward something.