We believe that startups have transformative potential for the people that create them, the people that work at them, the people that invest in them, and the people that use their products.
We want to give the first two groups of people the opportunity to reach this potential. Even more, we want to give anyone, who is smart, ambitious, and hard-working enough and regardless of their socioeconomic status, background, pedigree, and gender, the opportunity to reach this potential by starting up.
That is why we started the DayOne founder program.
Why start a startup?
There are many reasons not to start a startup. Startups, by all accounts, are hard work, with a highly uncertain result. But there are specific individuals that thrive in uncertainty and hardship. In the words of Michael Seibel,
“there is a certain type of person who only works at their peak capacity when there is no predictable path to follow, the odds of success are low, and they have to take personal responsibility for failure (the opposite of most jobs at a large company).”
What’s more, a startup is a venture with potentially massive returns, and founding one that succeeds might mean that the founder’s life has changed forever. However, even startups that do not succeed in financial terms are successful in making their founders better leaders, allowing them to grow professionally and enabling them to build a transferable set of skills that few, if any, day jobs could provide.
How do we benefit?
We benefit by creating more deal flow of extraordinary startups that we, and other ecosystem stakeholders, will be able to invest in.