Venture Capital & Accelerators
I never saw myself here. If you’ve been keeping up with our story you know we spent most of our professional lives in healthcare. I worked in information technology, and Daryl in the operating room.
In 2020 we stumbled upon a major gap in the software technology space for small businesses. Through our experience developing a brand here in Hawaii, we learned a lot about what it takes to scale a service product as a Small Business, a pre-revenue small business.
Even with our extensive background with databases, project management, and lean management teachings onboard, finding the right tools and getting them to work consistently with each other is a challenge many owner / operators just don’t have time to meet.
So in 2020 we read a study from a group with Doctorates in the study of Travel, Hospitality, and Service.
This group confirmed our findings. That software tech is overwhelmingly complex. It’s constant updates difficult to manage, and the liability of getting it wrong so stressful, many businesses just avoid it, or do the minimum, great a Google Business profile.
As a consumer it was difficult to plan with so much of the information found online out of date, pricing difficult to gauge, and it wasn’t clear if the business we were building our plans around were legal, responsible, and most importantly delivering the experience they advertise safely.
When we started talking about this company in 2020, so many people pointed out their frustrations with downloading app after app after app, just to travel for vacation. Coming from the healthcare information technology industry this sounded risky and left a lot on the consumer figure out. Often someone who’s never visited a location is expected to become an expert, and manage expectations for others while… on vacation. Post-vacation, vacation is a thing.
As a new business owner, building a service brand selling an experience product (a relaxing beach day, you don’t have to manage). We knew technology could allow us to scale our product, connect with our community, and provide customers with a safe experience they can rely on.
Fast forward to today, and company after company is describing the same thing. Audi with its Circle, Disney with Disney with their flawed Genie. The list is endless. We bump into them daily as we research the space.
it's not easy to describe to consumers what we do because its not something humans alone can accomplish. Just the description is triggers people who see it as impossible to create, yet cruise ships do it daily. Hospitals do it 24/7 under far more stressful circumstances.
We’re talking about resources management. Workflow optimization, process improvement. Concepts larger corporations have invested billions in creating for themselves, we’re building for Small Businesses.
The process of finding funding for this idea has been a journey. Early on we explored Accelerators like YC and NewChip, as well as BlueStartups here in Hawaii. We came away from the experience puzzled, many of these orgs copy+paste each other. If there is a group doing the least… It’s this one. Often they feel like idea harvesting schemes. Taking in pitch decks, business plans, projections and processing that data to detect trends and create a response with the knowledge collected and most importantly network they’ve created. They say their reputation would be trashed. Yet article after article describes this culture as toxic, and ineffective.
So why are they still here? Money. On the odd chance they pick a winner, there are short term gains to be had in even the worst of investments.
The software technology space is interesting. I would equate it to art, or writing a book. Its feeding on itself constantly, see Uber, Doordash, Lyft. Copy+Paste.
Its this behavior that makes socializing an idea challenging. You need to talk about your idea to gain support, yet everyone you talk to has the potential to exploit your knowledge for their own personal gain. See Trump.
It’s a brand here in the US. The majority of people see the writing on the wall and for reasons, think money will isolate them from what’s to come. We’ve just started watching ‘The Last of Us’ on HBO, not gonna lie, episode 3 really spoke to the introvert in me.
No one in that future is thinking about wealth. In fact having any resources at ALL make you a target.
We think that future is a real possibility for humanity. And because of that we’re taking an aggressive stance in favor of personal development. For too long (basically from the start) we’ve neglected people in favor of huge profits for the few. As someone who’s experienced life on both ends of the wealth spectrum, I think it’s time we tried investing in People at scale.
Our company isn’t building with unproven technology, we’re using skills and knowledge available to us today. Many companies have seen massive success with the concepts we’re describing (all be it vaguely).
We’re a small shop, a group of people who’ve lived with this problem since we arrived on this planet. We have a practiced approach using established standards for deploying enterprise information technology. We’ve experienced the challenges technology can create for people in their work and personal lives, and we have a clear vision of how to fix it.
The problem is it opens the doors to too many people. If navigating live become too easy, some see that as a loss for them. If your stressed out self can’t be exploited, they’re not interested.
How do I know? You ask.
Because it’s what I’d do in their shoes. Their culture and lived experience is purely focused on quick wins with large gains. Its an option.
The problem now is the timing. By 2050 the world will be a very different place and require a new set of skills that billions of people never developed because the internet arrived and made it easier to avoid.
There is nothing we can do to stop this now. Any efforts we take will only slow it, but this ball is moving fast and we’re just along for the ride.
Seeing this trend in 2018, we realized we’d likely end up like that couple in episode 3 of ‘The Last of Us.’ Ugly crying drinking our wine.
We’re not built for that future. But we are built to solve problems today, our lived experience and success has made it possible for us to focus on this problem full-time. To listen to our community and create solutions that accept us for who we are.
Day Dream is a multi-revenue stream business model that supports consumers, service industry businesses, and popular communities. Our goal is to make it easy for people to benefit from enterprise grade technology in their recreational and professional lives. Our products will empower people to create sustainable, resilient services that help teach skills and share context.
As a Public Benefit Company, we’ll leverage profits to inspire creativity, innovation, and sustainable growth.
Just because you’ve only known exploitative capitalism doesn’t mean there isn’t a new version we can collectively choose to create now.
By downloading our mobile lifestyle manager, and creating fun things to do with others, you are supporting our mission for a more sustainable, resilient future powered by our collective experience.
This company won’t be funded by the established. Only you can make this happen. Join our waitlist to receive updates on our fund raising program and future product releases.