How we work
We work our founders’ hours; we’re reachable day and night. There’s no question too unformed to ask and no topic too small or uncertain to pick up the phone for.
That said, our founders don’t need us: the people we back tend to know what they’re doing. If we vanished from Earth, our founders would still build large companies.
Our job is to increase the odds of that happening, even slightly. We think about this job as the relentless pursuit of inflection points: we want to consistently find specific ways we can tilt upward the trajectory of your business.
Examples of potential inflection points:
IDEA REFINEMENT
In an ideal world, we meet founders before there’s anything, and we can help shape what’s to come. We’ll help you brainstorm, narrow down potential ideas, find design partners, test messaging, and share our own market research.
For example, Adam had just sold his last company and was itching to start another. Together, he and Daybreak helped concoct a vision for System Labs: the vertical platform for safe, American-made peptides.
We committed to lead Adam’s first round before the company was incorporated.
HIRING
If we do our job right, we’re your best recruiter. We’ve sourced and closed dozens of early hires to Daybreak companies, both technical and not. If we’re doing our jobs right, we find someone who completely inflects the business.
Usually this means tapping our networks, but occasionally this means brute force. For Barnwell, which has built a platform for animal health intelligence, we sourced Max, Employee #5 and the first business hire, through cold LinkedIn outbound.
CUSTOMERS
We should also be your best sales rep. We have a good network, and it now belongs to you. Our job is not only to facilitate customer introductions but also to finesse the most critical ones.
Just recently, we drove 5 of the first 20 customers for one of our companies still in Stealth, building a customer intelligence platform. Daybreak represents about a third of first six months revenue.
“THE OTHER STUFF”
Early-stage company building requires specialized knowledge and playbooks. Every day brings a strange request, a new vendor, or an unforeseen obstacle. This is what we do all day: our job is to unblock you.
- Getting a founder out of jury duty
- Finding a way to overcome a founder’s rejected visa
- Unblocking a major enterprise deal held up in endless security reviews
We have a portfolio of many companies; you’re an n of 1. We won’t ever tell you how to run your company—you’re the founder, not us—but we’ll tell you what we’ve seen work and which pitfalls to avoid.
We have a very lengthy (and ever-growing) document called The Daybreak Guide to Building a Startup. And we have a strong community of Daybreak founders facing similar challenges and decisions; bringing together this community is a key focus of our work.
We’ve named companies and matched co-founders. We’ve introduced founders to their first engineers and to their first customers—and even once to Elton John (it’s a good story).
Our job is to help you build a big company. Put us to work.
