Introducing Lunchclub — we’re using AI to connect people in real life
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I’m thrilled to announce we’ve raised $4M in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz to optimize offline professional connections. Lunchclub is an AI superconnector that makes introductions for 1:1 lunch and coffee meetings. Our mission is to power a future of work where making new connections is easy, meaningful, and fun.
Talent is universal, while opportunity is not. I’m driven to broaden opportunities for women and minorities using technology to benefit humanity at scale. I’m excited to share my journey to joining the Lunchclub founding team and our vision of the future.
In early May 2018, I spoke on a “Closing the Gender Gap in Venture Capital” panel at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. Another speaker, Danielle Dudum Baxter, partner at Cherubic Ventures, mentioned she used a product called Lunchclub and that it was the most authentic and high quality AI connection tool on the market. She was using Lunchclub to meet new professionals with shared interests in San Francisco, and was loving it!
After the panel, I immediately signed up for Lunchclub with the goal of meeting other women entrepreneurs. I couldn’t believe how well the product worked — Lunchclub had a profound impact on the lives of the people I met. The results of connections made through Lunchclub are truly inspiring: cofounding relationships, startup and entertainment investments, hirings, new friendships, consulting and more.
I quickly became Lunchclub’s biggest fan, and invited many people to join. Soon after, I met Lunchclub’s cofounders Vladimir Novakovski and Scott Wu. Vladimir built two multi-billion dollar quant hedge fund businesses, started Quora’s machine learning team, and is experienced in applying machine learning to scalable real world problems. Scott is a world-class expert at algorithms and building systems. He was the top-ranked competitive programmer in the world in 2014. Not only are Vladimir and Scott the most brilliant people I’ve ever met, but they both are extraordinary human beings. I deeply respect and admire them.
We were aligned on Lunchclub’s mission, vision, and product and decided to work together closely for a few months out of South Park Commons before becoming cofounders. I officially joined the Lunchclub cofounding team January 1, 2019 before we began fundraising for our seed round.
I chose to join and build Lunchclub because I believe now more than ever, the world needs products and services that meaningfully bring people together and increase empathy. We live in a network-bound referral-based society where people have the tendency to pattern match in ways that end up giving more opportunity and dollars to people with similar backgrounds. Most investing and hiring is sourced from personal networks, which excludes industry outsiders and underrepresented communities.
Now more than ever, the world needs products and services that meaningfully bring people together and increase empathy.
Lunchclub has the potential to change the world — to democratize opportunity and completely reinvent how people connect bringing to fruition the original promise of the internet and social networks. Lunchclub will become a centerpiece of the future of work that’s faster, more efficient, and actionable. It is a consumer product that helps us to live our real lives — rather than a substitute or surrogate for that life.
We’re not a product of the attention economy. Each week, Lunchclub users spend seconds using the product and then an hour making a meaningful new offline connection. We’re live in seven cities and users can use Lunchclub in travel mode to meet new people in any city in which we’re active.
We measure success by the number of new in-person meaningful connections made and the results of how those connections are advancing people’s careers and lives, not by time spent swiping or number of messages sent. Our average user makes 10 new meaningful connections a year in real life. Subscribe to our company blog to learn more about connections made through Lunchclub and recent wins.
We’re excited to build the next legendary startup. We’re hiring people from underrepresented backgrounds and making culture and diversity a priority from Day 1. Will you join us? We’re hiring! You can see jobs here: https://jobs.lever.co/elliot.
Read about us in TechCrunch, Forbes, and Business Insider.
Sign up to join our waitlist here: lunchclub.ai.
A Final Thanks
I’m so grateful to our incredible users and team for making Lunchclub possible and for your reciprocity.
Thank you Andrew Chen and the a16z team, LocalGlobe, and Abstract Ventures. We’re thrilled to be working with you all!
Thank you to everyone who advised and helped us along the way: Marc Bodnick, Michael Ovitz, Sarah Smith, Soleio, Deon Nicholas, Tracy Chou, Kevin Liu, Lucy Guo, Brian Ma, Dmitry Shevelenko, Erik Torenberg, Christian Van Der Henst, Dan Seider, and Chris Messina. All of your help and advice was invaluable.
Stay Hungry,
Hayley
