Networking Success Is Served with a Side of Eggs
A Wall Street relationship manager combines her two loves — startups and brunch — into brunchwork, a networking community for millennial entrepreneurs that grows from a side hustle into a mid-five-figure monthly business with a team of 25.
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“It's more important to curate your community than to collect contacts.”
Being part of the digital age gave millennials a lot — but despite all that connection through screens, organic, in-person interaction declined, and with it came a quiet sense of isolation. Paulina Karpis felt it acutely. In 2015 she had a stable career as a Broker Relationship Manager at JP Morgan, but she was daydreaming of building something of her own — and as an ambitious young professional raised on Google, she didn't feel there were adequate resources, or in-person communities, for people like her.
Her idea combined two things millennials love: startups and brunch. She'd host weekend workshops with business speakers — weekends because that was the only time her job allowed — and include food as part of the package. If she could just find the right venue, she figured, everything else would follow: she could work the cost of the space into the ticket price and pay little out of pocket.
The trouble was, she had no real business connections and no hedge fund. In fact, she was broke — she could barely afford her own weekly brunch habit. So she started with a mission statement and a simple email sent out into the world, eager to meet with anyone who showed even the slightest interest.
Two meetings changed everything. One was with Jon Levy, a behavioral scientist and author who'd just drawn attention for his secret "Influencers Dinner." Paulina invited him to speak — but he saw so much potential that he came on as a partner instead. The other was with an executive at Greenhouse, an HR-tech company, who agreed to be her first speaker and offered their office as a venue, free of charge. Keeping costs low, they did the design in-house and built a free site with WordPress and MailChimp. Four months after that first email, brunchwork held its first event, with 30 people in the room.
For most of year one, they ran a single $40 event a month. Getting 30 to 60 people together once a month was never going to pay the bills — but starting as a side hustle was exactly the point, giving Paulina room to learn, grow her network, and level up. In year two they moved to two events a month and, on a suggestion, added a membership model: $70 a month with three guest passes and a six-month commitment, so they could count on repeat income. As events grew to four a month, they introduced tiers — Opportunity ($70), Ambition ($95), and Unlimited ($140).
Growth was gradual and entirely self-funded. Monthly RSVPs climbed from about 30 to over a thousand, helped by strategic expansion into San Francisco and LA, and profits doubled year over year to mid-five figures a month, with a team of 25. Eventually it outgrew side-hustle status, and Paulina left Wall Street to run it full-time. It hasn't all been mimosas and Eggs Benedict, though: planning events without your own space involves a lot of logistical "plumbing" — sometimes literal, like showing up to find a venue's bathrooms out of order.
Her biggest lessons, shared with her partner Jon Levy, are about community. First, curate it: "You may have 3,000 contacts in your phone, but if none of them have expertise or connections in your industry, it doesn't matter." Second, find a way to connect — go where those people already are, ideally at events built around a speaker or a shared activity rather than "networking." And third, be generous, but not to a fault. In other words: be intentional.
