Speaker

Roy Bahat is the head of Bloomberg Beta, the early-stage venture firm backed by Bloomberg L.P. that invests in startups making work better. Bloomberg Beta treats founders as its customers and was the first venture capital firm to focus on the future of work and the first to focus on artificial intelligence. The firm sees Bloomberg L.P. as an inspiration for startups: founded on a powerful idea, led by its founders for decades, reaching global scale, and embracing technology as part of a strong, transparent company culture. Bloomberg Beta has invested in Replit, MasterClass, Slack, Flexport, Campus, and Weights & Biases, among other companies.

Before starting Bloomberg Beta more than a decade ago, Roy started a venture-backed company, was a corporate executive (at News Corp.), in government (at New York's City Hall), in media, and in academia. He was named one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business.

Roy chairs the Aspen Business Roundtable on Organized Labor, convening "labor open" business leaders to explore new ways of relating to organized labor and worker power. Following work he did with New America to understand the long-term effect of technology on work in America, Roy was a commissioner on the California Governor’s Future of Work Commission. He also created #thisisnotadvice, a community-edited guide on how to work, and hosts the [Going to Work] conference.

Roy teaches at U.C. Berkeley, at the Haas School of Business, including a first-of-its-kind course on organized labor and another on the media industry. He was named one of the favorite MBA professors.

Roy served on the board or as an advisor to several non-profits including the Abundance Network, Stanford's Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, the Economic Security Project, and the Center for Investigative Reporting. Roy is also a senior fellow (non-resident) at the Brookings Institution, where he writes about AI. 

Roy graduated from Harvard College and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.