☕️ Will McKelvey, Breakfast Enjoyer

+ Tech Breakfast Clubs in NYC and SF

Author

Morgan Barrett
February 27, 2026

Today’s Menu ☕️

👋 Hi, Breakfast Club Members!

Welcome to the last business day of February - I'm so pumped for March!

Scroll down for an interview with Will McKelvey, Principal at Lerer Hippeau.

Tech Breakfast Club News:
Congratulations to the Queen of NYC Tech Breakfast Club, Lori Berenberg, on her recent promotion to Principal at Bloomberg Beta. She’s only the second person to ever be named a principal at the fund.

Job Postings for Friends of Tech Breakfast Club:
Eden is hiring founding operators in NYC. After building the first zero-downtime, fully automated database migration platform—and partnering with Microsoft, Redis, and Datadog—the team is scaling into enterprise GTM. They’re seeking a Head of GTM to own the revenue engine and a Chief of Staff to operate across fundraising, launches, and ops. Ideal for ambitious builders excited about shaping a generational data infrastructure company from day one. Connect with Cofounder Sofia Assab on LinkedIn.

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, March 12th)
Investors and founders gather for the most important meal of the day in the most important city with Will McKelvey of Lerer Hippeau

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)

Tech Breakfast Club 🤝 Rho

Time to upgrade your business banking?

Will McKelvey Updates

I didn’t get a chance to press record and you’re throwing hot takes at me - can you repeat what you just said?
The most important thing for any founder figuring out their pre-seed and seed fundraising strategy is not fine-tuning your deck or rehearsing whip-smart answers to expected questions. Instead, it’s understanding how to get in front of the VCs you plan to pitch. Every week I talk to 15–20 companies. On Monday, I can usually say with about 65% confidence which one or two are going to get me really excited—and it’s almost always because of how they were introduced and by whom. When a portfolio founder of a company that’s doing well—someone I think is really smart—says: “this is one of the best people I’ve ever seen operate. I’ve known them for years, and I’d hire them if I could,” that’s the type of introduction that makes me want to schedule the meeting immediately, and I show up ready to be excited.

When a founder reaches out cold, it gets lost in the deluge and usually gets missed.

So what’s the “ranking” of introduction quality from a VC’s perspective?There’s a pretty clear taxonomy of intro value for most VCs. The most valuable introduction is from one of their portfolio founders. The second most valuable introductory path to them is through another founder who they know and respect, even if they never invested in them. The third most valuable is from an operator they know. The fourth is from a VC that they know, and there’s a lot of gap between three and four. And then the fifth is cold outreach. Do whatever you can to avoid going in cold. 

Okay, bring us up to speed - I haven’t seen you since Lerer Hippeau promoted you. Congratulations! 
Thanks, man. Every promotion adventure is funny, because your job almost never changes from a functional perspective. Promotions in VC are mostly lagging indicators of trust and respect, so I see it as a huge vote of confidence from my colleagues who have been doing this for years. There are really five things that all have to go right if you start junior and want to work your way up in VC. You control: Are you good at this? Do you love this? You don’t control: Is your firm doing well and able to raise subsequent funds?
Does your firm like and trust you personally?
Does the market reward the kind of investments you’re making?

You could be obsessed with fintech, start your VC career in 2021, and then watch your whole category melt down—that’s largely out of your hands. I’ve been lucky at Lerer Hippeau so far: the firm’s doing well, we’ve raised subsequent funds, and some early bets I’ve led have gotten strong external validation. But nobody should kid themselves: the feedback loops in VC are so long they can be almost invisible. Who knows if I’m great at this yet. All I know is that I love doing it, and I love the Lerer Hippeau team.

Yeah, I think you might be good at this job. For those who haven’t been following along, what’s the update on your portfolio - 
I’ve now led nine investments across AI, hardware, deeptech, and gaming. I think that where I've been able to show the firm that I add value is that I bring a diverse, weird network to augment our network-driven way of doing the job. I've had some investments get recognized by the market as doing particularly well, like Augmodo, which is building wearables for the enterprise and raised a $30 million series A last year, or P-1 AI, which is building an agentic hardware engineer and raised a $17.5 million seed round last year. There are also a bunch of fantastic companies that are crushing it on traction but have been much quieter.

Importantly, I don't think this job is just about markups. It's about the way you carry yourself and the people you do business with. The firm learns to trust you also based on the people that you bring to the table. I've been lucky enough to bring portfolio companies into the Lerer Hippeau family who have shown themselves to be the type of people that we want to be in business with for a long time.

Lerer Hippeau is often associated with consumer hits but you’ve really leaned into hardtech and deeptech – why? 
We’re victims of our own consumer success. People know us for our early 2010s investments in Allbirds, Warby Parker, Casper, Venmo, Resy, and so on. But in the same era, we were also investing in deep tech, hardware, and manufacturing that just didn’t grow at the same flashy pace. These types of companies require real technological advancement, but can still get just as big as, if not bigger than, the consumer companies. For example, Zipline [drone delivery and logistics] just announced a raise at a $7.6 billion valuation. We invested in that seed round 14 years ago. I think we've always been generalists who believe that our job is to follow great founders solving hard problems, regardless of category. We’re still doing doing everything. Now, I think we’re one to two years away from the “GPT moment” for robotics and hardware. When that hits, there will be a huge explosion of opportunity and interest in the category, so I’m making investments there now. 

Twitter keeps getting nuked by these AI doomer blogs. Even the stock market fell on monday because of a Citrini blogpost. How do you feel about that?
A lot of what’s happening in AI right now is genuinely scary—from a founder’s perspective.

You’ve got foundation model companies that have raised unimaginable amounts of capital, and customers saying, “Why am I paying you when I can do this in Claude?” I think it comes down to being deeply embedded with your customer. A lot of defensibility comes from being so integrated into your customer’s workflow that ripping you out is painful. Companies that are really focused on tangible, boring, daily-life improvements – instead of how cool the technology is-- will do really well. 

Electricity itself was cool, but the light bulb was what meant that I could stay up past dusk and exist without risking burning my house down. I think we've got to be focused on the light bulb builders, even while these people are doing fantastic things around electricity. 

You made a provocative point about where the “real AI bubble” might be. Can you explain?
Every big technological shift comes with a bubble. That’s not always a bad thing. The best bubbles torch a lot of short-term investor capital, but leave behind lasting infrastructure that benefits everyone. This happened in the 90s with the telecom boom and bust.

Everyone talks about GPUs and data centers as having that potential today, but in reality, the real bubble that could be great for all of us in the long-run would be in energy generation. Cheap, abundant energy—fossil or renewable—is what has driven most of humanity’s prosperity over the last 200 years. If companies realize they cannot just exhaust local grids to power their data centers, then they would have strong incentives to build and/or co-locate their own energy sources. Some of these projects will pencil out, but with enough of a glut, plenty will fail to make money. But, the cheap power generation infrastructure will remain, and it will make so many aspects of our lives better and more affordable.

Right now, you’ve got data centers getting blocked by local residents because AI leaders have not done a good enough job of selling the abundance theory of what the world could look like. No one wants to have their electrical bills hiked by the thing that’s allegedly taking their jobs. Sam, Dario, and others need to paint that picture of prosperity.

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.