Noah, David and Adam Belanich of Joyride host a coffee tasting at the New York-based technology and design company Barrel. (Photo: joyridecoffeedistributors.com)

It was a chilly February morning when a young man with shaggy blonde hair sauntered into BuzzFeed’s new Flatiron office, quaint brown bags with small colored labels tucked under his arm. The zombiefied techies, engrossed in determining “The 25 Faces Fans Make Right Before Being Hit With a Foul Ball” initially took little notice of the visitor, but soon the whispers began. “Wasn’t that boy here last month?” “Is that…the coffee guy?!” Whispers gave way to a standing ovation as the surprised coffee delivery boy, otherwise known as Noah Belanich from Joyride Coffee, slowly made his way to the break room, Stumptown blends in hand.

Joyride first rolled down New York’s streets in 2010, the brainchild of brothers Adam and David Belanich and their friend Lev Brie. Since its founding, Joyride has started delivering Stumptown, Blue Bottle and Dallis Brothers blends to more than 70 caffeine-starved offices around the city, around 70 percent of which are in the tech or computer industries. These caffeine-crazed techies, who include the employees at Twitter, Tumblr and Gilt, will pay anywhere from $12.75 to over $25 a pound (with no delivery fee for orders over $50) for Joyride’s services. “The tech industry really loves coffee,” as Adam put it. “They get in a little bit later than other businesses, but you get emails from them at like two in the morning.” Between the bizarre hours and mid-afternoon meetings, the industry has become “fundamentally linked to coffee,” he said.

A customer-submitted photo of Joyride's pour over coffee. (Photo: Facebook)

Tech’s affair with coffee can be as romantic as Jack and Rose, but at times as volatile as Sid and Nancy. Many techies meet with investors or colleagues at coffee shops, convenient for a mid-day pick-me-up over which to close a friendly deal. At the same time, the coffee shop meeting has become a tired trope. Naval Ravikant, cofounder of AngelList, bought idontdocoffee.com because he was so tired of coffee shop meetings, he told the New York Times. (He redirected the domain to a Quora thread on manners and etiquette: “How do you politely turn down someone who wants to ‘grab coffee sometime’?”)

But coffee shop fatigue doesn’t mean techies are tired of coffee—far from it. Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts and K-Cups have fallen out of favor. In fact, techies’ palates are more refined than ever. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what drives the tech industry into the arms of designer coffee blenders, aside from the national trend toward the artisanal and slow-brewed. But BuzzFeed has “an unusual number of coffee snobs,” admitted Scott Lamb, BuzzFeed’s managing editor. Boxee co-founder Idan Cohen didn’t hesitate before rattling off two local cafes his employees prefer: Cafe Grumpy and Ports Coffee. Nina Paige, the officer manager at Behance, imported her coffee sensibilities from her hometown of Seattle and converted the rest of the staff.

But how to grab a brew without running into your least favorite investor or, worse, a chatty wantrepreneur? Enter Joyride.

At Gilt’s offices, a couple of engineers dissatisfied with the “overall coffee culture” hired Joyride, said Gregory Mazurek, a front-end engineer for Gilt Groupe who roasts coffee in his apartment and penned a scathing rant against poorly-made iced coffee for Gilt Taste’s website. “It began to essentially raise the bar for coffee, and it was a bar that could not be reversed,” he said.

Mr. Brie on a Joyride delivery. (Photo: Facebook)

Their techie clients may be particular about their morning coffee, but the Belanich brothers have an equally sophisticated taste for the gourmet. Adam’s love of city street food even tops his addiction to NPR and skiing. Noah, who joined the company in 2011 around the same time as Mr. Brie left, cultivated strong taste buds when backpacking through Thailand. While attending school in Los Angeles, he would drive an hour to eat authentic pad thai at Krua Thai in West Hollywood. He can also name his favorite soup-dumpling and Szechuan restaurants off the top of his head. David, a former political philosophy major, prefers thinking about politics with a single-malt scotch.

The boys understand the difficult lives of overworked tech nerds. Adam is a former “Special Instructor” at Dartmouth College, and David was pursuing a Ph.D. at Yale before dropping out to run the business. “Nobody’s really doing it the way we are,” Adam said. “They’re roasters who happen to deliver their coffees. We’re more focused on doing coffee distribution. It requires a certain level of understanding of how things actually work in an office setting.”

Mom was also fairly good-natured about the whole quit-school-to-sell-coffee-out-of-a-rainbow-truck affair. “My mother is kind of confused as to why I’m not a lawyer and David isn’t a professor, but she is pretty supportive, all things considered,” Adam said.

In 2010, Joyride’s founders, leaving behind cushy futures in law and academia, packed their caffeine-infused fro-yo and trendy, hipster brown lunch bag-esque coffee bags into a rainbow FedEx truck, tweeting their location to loyal followers. However, realizing that the real opportunity lay in deliveries, the brothers sold their truck in 2011 to become to go-to coffee distributor for startup offices that value their perks.

The brothers deliver bags of whole beans to offices with their own espresso or grinding machines, or deliver bags of ground coffee beans to offices where employees then make the coffee themselves. Joyride stops short of providing clients with a bow-tied barista, but the company leases Fetco or Bunn brewers to around two-thirds of its clients. The brothers also host coffee tastings (Stumptown’s Hair Bender has proven to be the favorite) and the occasional milk frothing class. In a recent job listing, Joyride client Birchbox made sure to note “great coffee” as a reason to work there.

Prior to Joyride’s applauded appearance in BuzzFeed’s offices, the trend-setting startup underwent a “brief nightmare period,” Mr. Lamb said. Employees were forced to drink coffee from “robots,” straining the sanity of many workers and encouraging others to leave passive-aggressive notes for whoever dared to drink the last cup of pre-ground coffee delivered fresh from Staples.com. “Those were very dark days for us,” he said.

Gavon Laessig, an avid coffee drinker and BuzzFeed's News Editor, takes his first sip in the morning. (Courtesy: Ashley McCollum)

The Belanich brothers reached out to BuzzFeed, offering to do a taste test at the office. Not long after the employees first tried Joyride’s Stumptown and Blue Bottle blends, the three brothers started delivering to their office regularly. “It is a joy because every morning we come in and there are these two huge canisters filled with really delicious coffee,” Mr. Lamb said.

Occasionally, Adam said, he will walk into an office and glimpse a few techies standing around the coffee maker “literally watching it brew.”

After winning the loyalty of New York’s finest tech nerds, Joyride catered F.ounders, a lively event that brings together the brains behind New York tech startups. “That was insane,” Adam said, noting that the roughly 225 people in attendance drank over 1,300 cups of coffee. That is “maybe four or five times as much coffee as you would expect a normal person of that size to drink,” he said.

Notwithstanding the techies’ occasionally overzealous love for coffee, Adam said he really enjoys working with these companies.

“It’s very invigorating – to be around these people who are doing what they think is really cool,” he said. He even stays up-to-date on his clients’ latest funding rounds. Joyride recently posted an article supporting its client Boxee in its battle with the FCC, calling it a “real life David and Goliath story.”

The love is mutual. “In some ways, we both support each other, because they’re excited about what we’re doing, and we’re excited about what they’re doing,” Boxee cofounder Idan Cohen said.

This photo and interview brought to you by Twitter.

Andrew Cove moved to New York from Santa Monica on May 1 planning to join NYU's ITP program. Oops. Somehow the entrepreneur, fresh off his first failed startup, wound up at an internship at IA Ventures which "opened some interesting doors"--and one of those doors eventually led to the startup-investment matchmaker AngelList. A happy coincidence, it seems, as Mr. Cove was somewhat down on his luck before he moved to the city.

"There was baggage--I had just killed a startup," he said. "I just kind of wanted the experience of living in New York City. It never occurred to me to consider I'd be working for something based in San Francisco."

New York is the second-most active market on AngelList. Based on the deals companies reported to AngelList, which is far from comprehensive, Silicon Valley is responsible for 53 percent of investments, followed by New York with 18 percent, AngelList founder Naval Ravikant told The Huffington Post.

Los Angeles accounts for six percent of deals; then Austin with five percent, Europe and Boston with four percent and Seattle with three percent.

AngelList, which has no revenue and is supported by a grant from the Kaufman Foundation, has been growing by leaps and bounds since launching in 2010. AngelList now has 2,500 registered investors and 13,000 startups, Mr. Ravikant told HuffPo. To recap: startups list their vitals and how much they're looking for on AngelList, with options for who can see the information. Investors can then "follow" startups and get a feed of updates from interesting, mostly pre-funding companies. AngelList says it has recorded more than 750 individual investments in an estimated 400 companies, a low number because many deals aren't reported.

Mr. Cove is the newest "venture hacker" on AngelList's nine-person team. He works out of Dogpatch Labs in Union Square, helping companies polish their pitches and guiding investors through the site. "It wasn't actually a concerted thing to have people in New York," he said. "It turns out to be advantageous because so much is happening in New York."

Betabeat welcomed Mr. Cove to New York with a hearty call-out in the rumor roundup. He followed up with us this week--and he says AngelList is changing in a very interesting way.

How did you get introduced to AngelList?

I was primarily familiar with AngelList through when it first appeared on Hacker News, and when the explosion of coverage came out of that. The startup I was working on probably wouldn't have been able to succeed on AngelList largely because it had no traction at the time. But AngelList was exactly the sort of thing that would have been a great tool for me because I was undernetworked. I came out to San Francisco from L.A. wanting to do a web startup, having no connections.

What was your startup?

I was doing--there's actually a Y Combinator company doing this now-- it was QR codes for social networking for businesses, where businesses and ultimately individuals could connect Facebook and LinkedIn and get a QR code for it.

Who are AngelList's competitors?

There are a few. I would say that we're aware of them but we're so heads down focused on our own product that it's not--not that we don't think about it, but they don't influence how we develop our product.

So AngelList is focused on product. What were some recent changes to the network?

We revised a bunch of messaging stuff recently to make it much cleaner. Probably the biggest thing we added recently was reviews for investors. If there's a negative review of an investor you don't actually see the negative review, you just see x number of reviews out of y number of reviews were positive. It's specified by the user whether it's positive or negative.

Are you seeing anything interesting in the data?

New York is hugely active both from the investor side and the startup side.

The biggest thing that's happening now is there's a growing number of companies that have a presence on AngelList even if they aren't raising money. They're starting to treat AngelList as a Facebook for companies. It's interesting for a lot of reasons ... certainly interesting because companies used to ask us every now and then, "I'm done fundraising can you guys close the profile now," and now it's starting to sway with startups keeping their pages up to show followers [their progress].

For some people, AngelList seems to carry a stigma--like it's a second, third or last resort for startups that can't raise money. Is that changing?

I think the percepton of what the site is for will start changing. Part of the benefit of this is, we have confirmed connections between everyone who's invested with the startup. We're collecting the data as it happens. We get really good data on funding events. That's why the stuff happening off the site, closing that loop and collecting that data is important. The foundations are there to have a really cool collection of prominent events in startup history from an investment standpoint.

And now there are a number of companies who have come to AngelList with funding, with very strong leads and with multiple options. And the benefit of being on AngelLlist is that the previously serial process can now happen in parallel and out in the open. When you're trying to figure out who you want to close your round with, and you know there are some options available to you, you basically create a storm because all the investors you're talking with will see everyone else who's following you and taking an interest in you. That speeds this process up so that everything happens more rapidly.

There's a bunch of misperceptions about the site. There are four characteristics that you need to be exceptional in one of on the site and social proof is just one of those.

Are we going to start seeing more from AngelList in New York?

Yeah! I'm doing a Skillshare class in November. We're throwing events. There's stuff in the works.