☕️ Lori Berenberg, Fully Caffeinated

+ Tech Breakfast Clubs in NYC and SF

Author

Morgan Barrett
March 17, 2026

👋 Hi, Breakfast Club Members!

Last week in New York was phenomenal - thank you to Will McKelvey for cohosting. Not sure if it’s connected (probably is) but Will - maybe because the universe loves people who host good events - had a super viral tweet yesterday about New York:

Tomorrow we have a Tech Breakfast Club for AI/ML engineers cohosted by Ansa - if you are a 10x engineer and a 10x breakfast enjoyer, this is for you.

Also, please scroll down and read an interview with the undisputed NYC it-girl of Tech Breakfast Club, Lori Berenberg. People often wonder why breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Lori will tell you - it’s where deals get done. I had the archivist here at Tech Breakfast Club do some digging and it turns out Lori came the second Tech Breakfast Club (back in 2022). She’s been a fixture ever since. Along the way she’s done a lot of deals and made even more friends.

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 AI/ML Leaders Tech Breakfast Club (Wednesday, March 18th)
Teaming up with Ansa to entertain the best AI/ML engineers and CTO’s

SF Tech Breakfast Club (Tuesday, April 14th)
Co-hosted with Jack Rains (Slow VC)

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

Tech Breakfast Club 🤝 Rho

Time to upgrade your business banking?

Lori Berenberg, Checks and Balances

Congratulations on the promotion to Principal at Bloomberg Beta! One of the things Roy, your boss, mentioned in the announcement is how rare it is to get promoted at Bloomberg Beta 
Thank you! At Bloomberg Beta, very few people have ever moved up internally. It’s not a team that focuses on titles, we care a lot more about output. In this case, I’ve been with the team for 3.5 years, stepped into more of a leadership role, and led many of my own deals – this title reflects that.

You really started to hit your stride as an investor around the second year of your time at Bloomberg Beta. I remember noticing that you went from like no deals to doing a deal every other month. What changed?
A teammate encouraged me to take myself more seriously as an investor. 

That advice stuck with me. After spending my first year improving how the firm worked internally, I started to lean more into networking and meeting founders. 

A big turning point was realizing that if you don’t play the game, you’ll never know if you’re good at it, even if that means losing sometimes. Investing means making bets without perfect information. Sometimes you’ll lose on deals. Sometimes you’ll miss companies that become huge. But if you never put yourself out there and make the decision, you’ll never find that breakout success either. That was something Roy Bahat, the head of the firm, really instilled in me. He’s been a great mentor to me.

Even now, I think about the companies I’ve brought into the fund and wonder which ones might eventually become the big winners. It could take years before we know.

In my second year, I doubled down on that. After doing a lot of work to improve the firm, I turned my attention to sourcing great deals. I focused a lot on events and Twitter, and cultivating  community in New York.

That’s when I started building the relationships that eventually led to the 10 investments I’ve made to date.

One thing I loved about your promotion announcement was how many founders commented on your promotion announcement saying you had helped them in very specific ways.
That was honestly one of the most meaningful parts of the announcement.

Of course, it’s nice to hear from founders whose companies I directly invested in. But what surprised me was how many founders commented who I didn’t invest in. They were founders that the fund backed before I joined, but I got to know them over time and tried to support them.

That meant a lot to me because it showed the relationships weren’t transactional.

At Bloomberg Beta we’re a small team: nine people. We don’t run giant service organizations for founders. Instead, we try to be the most valuable investor per minute spent. That means we’re not constantly bugging founders for reports or updates. But when they need help, they know they can call us and we’ll show up.

A lot of the job is also advocating for founders when they’re not around. When we can say their names in rooms they’re not in, we do. I think that plays a big role. I am also just a real person – I’m very honest and very, very direct. 

I think you also take a different approach to networking than most VC’s 
I definitely don’t subscribe to the typical VC way of doing things. For example, anytime someone asks me to hop on a call to “deal swap” and exchange companies they’re looking at, I almost never do that. Often what that really means is sending around deals you’re passing on, which can make founders look bad. I never want to do that.

Instead I try to build real relationships with people. That’s why I love communities like Tech Breakfast Club. It’s a recurring event where you see the same people every month. You can have real conversations. You can ask about someone’s family or how their life is going. It’s not just “what deals are you seeing?”

You’ve done a fantastic job leveraging Tech Breakfast Club for deal flow. One example is Ajax. How did that happen?
I overheard you talking about Ajax across the table at Tech Breakfast Club and immediately asked to meet the founders.

At the time, I had been looking at a lot of legal tech companies and hadn’t found anything that remotely made sense to me in terms of incentive structures. Ajax does automated billable hours for lawyers, and the idea just made so much sense. AI is going to improve and, as a result, it’s going to be easier to automatically detect what matters lawyers are working on. 

For lawyers that bill hourly, it’s both a way to save them time on their most annoying task and a way to find hours that went unbilled. 

When I met the founders, Jack and Alex, who are two brothers from a family of lawyers, it was clear how focused they were. Within a few days of introducing us, we had agreed to do the deal. That focus has taken them far since that first check, and they’re getting huge attention among law firms.

Trayd was another investment that came from Tech Breakfast Club
I showed up to Tech Breakfast Club and asked you, “Who should I meet in this room?” You walked me over to Anna from Trayd, the CEO. As soon as we started talking, I was floored.

Alongside her co-founder and CTO, Cara, she’s building back-office software for construction contractors. Anna also comes from a construction family, so she understands the industry deeply. Anna and Cara have known each other since childhood summer camp.

They weren’t even raising at the time, but we managed to sneak a check in.

What’s been amazing about that company is how much they’ve grown with such a small team. For a long time most of their sales were founder-led. Only recently, after some explosive growth, have they started building a larger sales organization.

Bloomberg Beta focuses on the “Future of Work” - it’s crazy how aligned both of these investments are to that focus.
Yes, and they also share another trait I love: the founders grew up around the industries they’re building for.

Anna grew up in a construction family. The Ajax founders come from a family of lawyers.

That kind of firsthand experience creates insight that’s hard to fake.

You led both of those deals. What's your take on the common advice that founders shouldn't meet with VC associates (even though now you’re a principal)?
It's mostly true. But like most rules, the exceptions matter.

Some firms genuinely empower junior investors to write the first check. At Bloomberg Beta, we have an "anyone can say yes" policy. A junior person can lead a deal if they believe in it. That changes the calculus entirely.

At multi-stage firms, associates often drive a huge amount of sourcing. If you refuse to take that meeting, you might never get the conversation at all. And title inflation is real. When everyone on a firm's website is listed as a "partner," that doesn't mean they all write checks. Decisions still follow a hierarchy in a lot of places, even if the org chart doesn't show it.

The rarer but important case: there are junior investors who have real internal sway. They can become your biggest internal advocate, the person pushing for you in rooms you're not in. That's worth a lot.

You grew up in the Bay Area, so maybe you were always destined to work in startups. But you built your career in New York. How do you feel about both cities at this point? 
I moved to New York and instantly felt that it was a complete personality fit for me. Professionally, I'm very direct. I don't mind sharp elbows. I care way more about feeling energy in the place that I'm in. 

San Francisco is the startup capital of the world. That’s just a fact. But New York is the business hub of the world. Founders here tend to take sales and building a real business very seriously, while San Francisco is the undeniable frontier of technology. 

There’s not really a question of which city is the best “tech city” (it’s SF), but what founders need to ask themselves is: is it more important to my business to be at the cutting edge of new technology, or to be close to customers beyond tech?

Your start in NYC was at AppNexus, an early NYC ad-tech unicorn. You often talk about how “everything is ads” - what do you mean by that?
Ads are the invisible economic engine powering nearly every free product on the internet, and that pattern keeps repeating itself across every major platform and technology wave. OpenAI adding ads is just the latest proof that no matter how idealistic a tech product starts out, it almost always ends up in the same place. 

Anthropic's anti-ads super bowl ad was a flop that flew over most people's heads and didn't land with anyone outside the AI bubble. The most ironic part: they had to buy an ad to tell the world they don't do ads. When they eventually do run ads down the line, they'll have made things so much worse for themselves by taking such a loud stance now.

To people who take a moral stance against ads: grow up.

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.