Breakfast Club This Coming Wednesday
+ Hard Hitting Interview with Lori Berenberg
+ 2 Companies You Should Know About

First off - if you haven’t registered for this month’s Breakfast Club please go ahead and use the Luma links below. I’m giving you three different options this week: a button, plain hyperlinked text, and a cool embedded box

https://lu.ma/re2u5ohu

Breakfast Club Member Spotlight:
Lori Berenberg

Lori has been a supporter of the NYC Tech Breakfast Club since the beginning (I think she came to the second ever meetup) and we also cohosted January’s breakfast club. January was such a success that we broke Popchew’s elevator and they had to climb 6 flights of stairs for a week - sorry Popchew!

Besides being grateful for her tweets (high banger to dud ratio), I’m also super appreciative of her enthusiasm for socializing before noon. She's been a big part of the success of the breakfast club!

• Investor at Bloomberg Beta, investing early in the future of work.

  Currently interested in platforms that serve workers outside of the corporate world

• Mother to her dog Penny, a nine year old rescue mini dachshund

• Grew up in the Bay Area, came to NYC for undergrad at NYU Stern and never looked back

• Before VC, Lori worked as a PM at MongoDB and AppNexus
  

  Why jump from product management to VC?: Always loved serving founders and felt like PM skills could help as an early-stage VC

  Why Bloomberg Beta?: The team deeply believes in transparency and founder service, and they were willing to take a bet on someone without an investing background

  Most surprising thing about VC so far: They actually make you sign a contract saying you'll tweet (kidding)

  Favorite Startup Fraud: Athletic Greens (eat a vegetable)

  Why breakfast?: Getting to see a lot of the same smart, kind people monthly over coffee rather than drinks

  What’s your #1 tip for writing a viral tweet?: Write down the witty things you say out loud and then the stupidest ones will hit big

  Proudest Accomplishment in the last year: Getting to back Deborah and Angela from WorkTorch as they work to solve the employee retention problem in the service industry

Companies That I’m Excited About: Saving The Planet Edition

As always, if you’re interested in getting in touch with the founders of the companies I highlight to invest in or work with, just respond to the newsletter -

• Rainmaker - All my homies hate Malthus and I’m obsessed with geoengineering.

  Augustus, the founder of Rainmaker, is aiming to solve water scarcity not by more efficient use of existing resources but by increasing production of freshwater. I had heard of cloud seeding before. Some ski resorts will pump silver iodide into the sky to coax precipitation. Rainmaker improves upon the current process with better targeting, better delivery, and better nucleation agents. Turns out spraying silver iodide with a 60 y/o retrofitted crop duster isn’t ideal. After chatting with Augustus, I’m cautiously optimistic that we can solve water scarcity in the southwest and I love his audacious vision of terraforming deserts.

• Avol Aerospace - Nate Poon, a mechanical engineering PhD, and his cofounder, Matt Sargeant, an Aeronautical engineering PhD, are building an autonomous blended wing electric cargo aircraft that reduces air cargo costs for logistics carriers like DHL.

  What does that mean? Well, flying an electric autonomous aircraft that has one wing means you can carry more cargo (and not just a little bit more - substantially more, like 50%+ more) for less money directly between distribution hubs.

  I was supposed to discuss Avol’s prototypes and how they are stacking LOI’s with logistics carriers, but I got distracted by these photos of Nate at his first startup, SuitX, that built exoskeletons for industrial workers.

See you Wednesday!

Best,
Morgan