☕️ How Much Ya Bench? (Kendra Schultz)

+ Tech Breakfast Clubs in NYC, SF, and El Segundo

Author

Morgan Barrett
April 20, 2026

👋 Hi, Breakfast Club Members!

I’m very excited for New York Tech Breakfast Club this week with Kendra Schultz (VC at Benchstrength).

Regular NYC attendees have come to love Kendra but if you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting her, scroll down to learn about how she’s stacking her portfolio with some of the most interesting AI companies.

Resources:
-Clerky offers a $100 discount for TBC Members on their formation packet. Reply to the newsletter and I’ll send you an invite
-Fixing the YC SAFE: Reply to the newsletter and I’ll send you a redline for the YC Postmoney SAFE that can save founders millions in dilution

Tech Breakfast Club Events

NYC Tech Breakfast Club (Thursday, April 23rd)
Co-hosted with Kendra Schultz (Benchstrength)

El Segundo Tech Breakfast Club (Wednesday, May 27th)
Co-hosted with Jacques Sisteron (Partner at Upfront) and the Harbinger Team

SF Teach Breakfast Club for AI Leaders (Thursday, May 28th)
Co-hosted with Baseten

Tech Breakfast Club 🤝 Rho

Time to upgrade your business banking?

You grew up in the Bay Area but went to Duke. Durham is the south. Duke is it’s own world. What was that like?
It was definitely a shock. I showed up at Duke in my Vans and a Santa Cruz sweatshirt with no real sense of what I was walking into. Durham is very much the South, even though culturally a lot of Duke feels more Northeast.

One of the biggest differences for me was around culture. In Silicon Valley, being different is celebrated. That’s what I expected from college—and it’s also what you look for in founders, people doing something novel or approaching problems in unique ways.

Historically, Duke has been more oriented toward traditional career paths—banking, consulting, med school, law school. That creates a certain level of conformity. But that’s changing. There’s been a real push to build out the entrepreneurship ecosystem, and you’re starting to see more founders coming out of Duke and more support for that path.

Stanford and Berkley have a ton of well known founders but Duke is sneaking up the rankings. The founders of Plaid, Coinbase, and Airtable all came from Duke, and the co-founders of Box and Cameo as well. 

At Duke, you researched and wrote about ethics in Tech. I wish I could have followed your lead because you parlayed your thesis into a job at Google. I wrote a thesis on ancient Roman art which career wise is a dead end, lol
Getting a job advising on AI ethics at Google was a dream job for me. I had always been interested in tech and ethics and working in that space was incredibly fulfilling and intellectually stimulating.

Why leave then?
I’ve realized that I’m someone who’s always looking for the next challenge. I wanted to be in a more entrepreneurial environment. At a company of that scale, there are limits to what you can do, and I was drawn to the energy and scrappiness of earlier-stage work.

I also felt like we were entering a moment where a new generation of companies was going to be built. One of my biggest takeaways from Google was that it really matters who’s in the room building these products. Being able to support thoughtful, high-integrity founders at the earliest stages felt like another way to have impact—just in a different form.

You have such a different lens for evaluating founders - how would you describe it?
I’m not sure I can capture it concisely but one of my big observations right now is that every founder is selling trust. It doesn’t matter if it’s a consumer product or a B2B company selling into commercial real estate—at the core, they’re selling trust.

That’s been especially interesting to me given my background in responsible AI. There’s this idea that the opposite of anxiety isn’t peace—it’s trust. And I think we’re living in a very fear-based moment. There’s a lot of anxiety, whether it’s about technological change, geopolitical issues, or workforce shifts.

In response, companies are trying to build and sell trust in ways we haven’t seen before. But there’s also a danger there. When people are scared, they make fear-based decisions, and that can lead to the wrong outcomes. Ideally, we’d be making decisions rooted out of trust and hope instead of fear.

That’s interesting. And I think about it all the time with Anthropic and OpenAI, which have to walk a fine line trying to convince people that their technology is so powerful, but also not so powerful to risk regulatory response and pushback. How does that influence founders who are building companies? 
You see it everywhere, even in very tactical ways. For example, in industries where companies are trying to capture data—like putting cameras on workers to improve operations—there’s often resistance because people feel that data might be used to replace them. That breaks trust.

Even in sales, founders are constantly trying to establish that human connection. I joke that we should be buying Krispy Kreme stock because so many founders are showing up to customer meetings with donuts just to demonstrate, “Hey, I’m a real person. You can trust me.” 

Today relatability is important. You have to find ways to show that your technology is going to help the business, and also that it’s transparent, reliable, accountable, and safe.

And how does it influence the way you evaluate founders? What gets you excited when you’re looking at a startup? 
It’s tricky because ultimately it’s a paradox. You want a founder with a huge amount of confidence—someone who genuinely believes they can build a generational company. But you also want humility. You want someone who can take feedback, who’s self-aware, and who’s willing to be honest when things aren’t going well.

Similarly, you want a great storyteller who can sell a big vision, but you also want someone who’s transparent and grounded in reality.

A lot of that can only be assessed over time. That’s why it’s helpful to meet founders in more casual environments like Tech Breakfast Club, where you can talk not just about their company but about their life, their values, and how they think. Those conversations give you a better sense of their character and what matters to them. 

Should humans be worried about AI?
I think fundamentally the way we work is changing, and the skills that matter are shifting. That said, there are certain characteristics—resilience, adaptability, work ethic, vision—that will always matter.

I do believe we’ll figure things out as humans. But there’s going to be a high-friction period. There will be winners and losers, and we’re likely to see very uneven outcomes where a lot of value accrues to a small group.

What’s important is being thoughtful about system design and incentives. We’ve seen how previous tech shifts have played out, and there are lessons to learn. The question isn’t whether we’ll adapt. It’s how we navigate that painful middle period.

So many successful investments feel…ethically dubious? How do you focus on AI ethics without sacrificing DPI?
I think thoughtfulness can actually be a strength. Companies that are intentional about what they’re building and how they’re building it tend to create more durable, sustainable businesses. Anthropic is a great example of a company that built a brand around AI for humanity, and also made a lot of very smart strategic decisions, and is excellent at their enterprise sales.

Brand and trust matter a lot, especially right now. If you’re building a company that signals integrity and a commitment to doing the right thing, that helps with everything—from recruiting talent to convincing customers to adopt your product.

It’s a big ask for someone to rip out systems they’ve used for decades and replace them with yours. Trust is what enables that.

So, what should people know about Benchstrength?
That they should come work with us! I joined Benchstrength because I wanted to work with earlier-stage companies, and I love the scrappiness and hustle that we have as a firm. 

We’ve been around for about four years now, and we’re investing out of Fund II. We're proving our success every day - every incremental introduction or marginal way we can help our founders is also an investment in our firm and making our name and brand known. We care that everyone in our ecosystem is high integrity and is going to follow through on their word, and we try to embody that. 

Any companies in the portfolio you’re especially excited about?
So many, of course. One that comes to mind because of some recent exciting milestones is Alta, a consumer company focused on the context layer for shopping and fashion discovery. The founder, Jenny Wang, is exceptional. We met her before she even started the company, and she’s built something that’s technically differentiated and really resonating. She was recently featured on Good Morning America and the Tamron Hall Show, and users have generated over a million outfits on the app. 

Another is Knox, which has built a proprietary cloud that helps companies sell to the federal government. They’ve reduced the time and cost of getting FedRAMP certification dramatically—from what used to take years and millions of dollars to something that can be done in about 90 days at a fraction of the cost. It’s not just a great business but it’s also helping modernize government infrastructure.

Final question— if you had to pick a public company to invest in, what would it be?
Ah I think I’d go with Google. 

Are you talking your own portfolio? You must have gotten some shares while working there
I tragically sold my Google position to pay for business school. 

Wow, rarely is the opportunity cost of going to business school so easy to measure
I know, but ultimately the best things to come out of business school, and in life, are intangible. Which maybe I tell myself to help me sleep at night, but it’s also the reason I chose to do this job. I’m grateful to show up every day and work with incredible people  

About Morgan Barrett:
Morgan is the creator of Tech Breakfast Club. He hosts breakfast meetups in NYC, LA, SF (and occasionally Austin, Miami, Boston) that bring together the best founders and investors.

Morgan is also a Startup Lawyer at Optimal, an elite lean boutique startup law firm repping clients funded by a16z, Sequoia, Kleiner, Accel, and countless other VCs. He works with clients from formation to exit, in collaboration with Optimal’s partners.