Lauren Roberts

A text message in the summer of 2021 is the reason Lauren Roberts is sitting in a New York office reviewing pre-seed pitch decks instead of arguing cases in a courtroom. A friend mentioned an internship program in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Build in Tulsa. The Atenternship. Lauren went. And that week happened to coincide with the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre - the hundred-year anniversary of the burning of Greenwood, one of the wealthiest Black communities in American history.

She walked into a room full of Black investors, Black founders, and Black community builders, all gathered a mile from where Greenwood once stood. "It was the first time I felt seen and heard as a Black woman trying to pursue a career in business." She had been tracking toward law school. PIMCO internship, pre-law track, finance fundamentals, all the right boxes checked in the correct order. None of it felt like hers. One week in Tulsa and she switched her major entirely.

The daughter of two blue-collar workers and the granddaughter of a Korean immigrant, Roberts had always known she'd need to build her own map into whatever room she wanted to reach. She just hadn't found the room yet. At 21, in the summer heat of 2021, she found it.

The University of Oklahoma did not have a student-run venture fund when Lauren Roberts arrived. By the time she graduated, it did. She co-founded the Venture Capital Club with a classmate named Aaron Latham - not as a social organization or a resume line item, but as a genuine attempt to crack open a career path that most OU students didn't even know existed. The club evolved into Crimson Prairie Ventures, OU's first student-managed venture fund, which deployed roughly $50,000 in non-dilutive pre-seed capital each year to student founders.

That word - non-dilutive - matters. Roberts understood early that the terms of capital shape what founders can build. A $50,000 grant to a student with a real idea is categorically different from a $50,000 check that comes with a percentage of the company. Crimson Prairie deployed the former. That distinction didn't come from a textbook. It came from paying attention.

In the gaps between semesters, she was learning the craft at ground level. Boyd Street Ventures in Norman. Cortado Ventures in Oklahoma City, where she ran due diligence on early-stage companies in logistics, energy, and mobility. The Atento University Fellows Program. Then PIMCO - a different world entirely, managing mock portfolios and executing fixed income strategies, learning how the big institutional money thought about risk, return, and time horizon. She filed that knowledge away.

After graduating in 2023 with her BBA in Entrepreneurship and Finance, Roberts joined Atento Capital in Tulsa as a Senior Finance and Strategy Analyst. Atento is an unusual firm - it operates at the intersection of venture capital and city-building, investing in the Tulsa tech ecosystem while incubating ideas and companies from the ground up. The office sits near historic Greenwood. This is not incidental geography for Roberts.

At Atento, she moved beyond due diligence spreadsheets into the messier work of ecosystem-building: figuring out who the underinvested founders are, what they need besides money, and how to create infrastructure that doesn't disappear when the grant funding runs out. She became an MLT (Management Leadership for Tomorrow) Prep Fellow and a Cohort 4 member of the African American Leadership Academy - both programs designed to develop and accelerate Black leaders in business. She was applying the same logic to herself that she applied to founders: invest early, build deliberately, measure what matters.

The Tulsa chapter was about proving a thesis: that the best early-stage investment opportunities aren't exclusively in New York and San Francisco, and that the investors finding them don't have to look like the investors who came before. Roberts proved it, then took the thesis with her when she moved.

Forum Ventures is one of the most active pre-seed funds focused on B2B SaaS in North America. Founded in 2014 (originally as Acceleprise), it runs a fund, an accelerator, and a community for early-stage enterprise software founders. As an Associate, Roberts is in the deal flow - tracking emerging trends, evaluating hundreds of startups each year, and giving founders the feedback that most of them don't get until it's too late.

That last part is what she's built a reputation for. Forum Ventures' Instagram features her in regular content specifically about founder-investor communication: how to write a cold email that actually gets opened, how to make an investor pitch something an investor will genuinely remember. The feedback is direct. It names the specific things that don't work and explains why. This is rarer than it sounds. Most investors pass without explanation. Roberts explains.

Her filter for early-stage B2B SaaS is calibrated by pattern recognition accumulated across PIMCO, Cortado, Boyd Street, Atento, Crimson Prairie, and now Forum: what does a real market look like versus a plausible market? What does early traction actually signal? What's a founder who understands their customer versus one who understands their pitch deck? After evaluating enough companies, the gap between those two things becomes visible fast.

She published an essay on LinkedIn titled "My Journey into Venture Capital: Reflections of a Black Female Investor" that circulated widely in VC circles. The piece didn't romanticize the path. It traced the specific circumstances - a text, a summer program, a centennial, a room full of people who looked like her - that made the career possible. The implication was clear: those circumstances shouldn't have to be so specific. The pathway into venture capital should be wider, and she intends to help make it so.

At Forum Ventures, Roberts focuses on pre-seed B2B SaaS - the companies that have an idea, maybe a prototype, sometimes a handful of early customers, but not yet the metrics that most growth-stage investors require. This is the stage where the investor is betting almost entirely on people: the founder's understanding of the problem, their ability to sell the vision, their self-awareness about what they don't know. It's also the stage where the feedback most shapes whether a company survives the first year.

She evaluates market positioning - whether the founder understands who their real competitor is and why their solution wins that specific fight. She evaluates storytelling - whether the narrative is coherent enough to move an investor, a customer, and a first hire all with the same words. And she evaluates early traction signals - the difference between a letter of intent and a purchase order, between a friendly pilot and a paying customer who would be upset if the product went away tomorrow.

These are the criteria that matter at pre-seed. They are also, not coincidentally, the criteria that the most underrepresented founders are least likely to have been coached on. The networks that transmit this knowledge informally - the business school alumni groups, the former-operator circles, the Stanford and Harvard connections - have historically not included many people who look like Lauren Roberts. She is one of the people working to route that knowledge differently.