Weekly writing about how technology and people intersect. By day, I’m building Daybreak to partner with early-stage founders. By night, I’m writing Digital Native about market trends and startup opportunities.
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To Go Broad, Go Deep
When I was at Stanford, I had the chance to interview Priscilla Chan about her career.
Chan is most famous for being Mark Zuckerberg’s wife and one half of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), but she’s also a practicing physician. Even as she built up CZI as Co-CEO, Chan was working as a pediatrician at the University of California San Francisco.
One question I asked her centered around depth of impact vs. breadth of impact.
My brother, I told her, is also a physician. And he cares more about depth of impact. “Rex,” he’ll tell me, “if I help one patient in my life, that’s enough.” I, of course, am drunk on the Kool-Aid of startups and venture capital (at least I’m self-aware about it!). I’ll push back: “But what about the broken system? Why not fix healthcare more broadly?” There’s no right answer here; it’s a difference of personal motivation.
I relayed this story to Chan, then asked her how she balances depth vs. breadth.
To go broad, she told me, you have to first go deep. When she was working at UCSF Medical Center, she said, she noticed something interesting: the number one determinant of whether her patients got care was a factor she wouldn’t have expected—it was whether the BART public transit system was running on time. If the BART was delayed, patients wouldn’t make the trip to the hospital and risk missing work.
That experience gave Chan an important insight: she should invest massively in improving the BART, which would have trickle-down effects through the city and the health of her patients. This insight informed her philanthropy and work with CZI. “I never would have had that perspective,” she told me, “if I hadn’t worked in the hospital. You have to go deep before you go broad.”
I think about that story all the time.
I like it because it carries a good lesson about being in the weeds and then zooming out, one that’s applicable to startups. Building a company is often about one or two key insights—insights that few other people have. Those insights often stem from direct experience, experience that comes from going deep. After that depth of insight, of course, startups become all about scale. Breadth eventually is all that matters.
The depth vs. breadth exercise is a worthwhile one for both current and future founders:
For current founders, the question is: how do you stay deep as you scale? This typically means talking to customers. Figma’s Dylan Field was famous for reading every single tweet that mentioned Figma for years. One founder I know is building tools for therapists, and she’s continued practicing as a therapist herself one day a week—she finds this helps her keep her finger on the pulse.
For future founders, the question is: what have you gone deep on that’s given you the perspective to now go broad? Build what you know. Think of Shopify’s Tobi Lutke building the e-commerce platform he himself needed when launching Snow Devil, his snowboard brand. Or think of Patreon’s Jack Conte building the monetization platform he wished he had as an artist. Depth of insight is hard to fake.
In hype cycles, like our current one with AI, we often see people set out to build companies for the sake of building a company. These are like hammers in search of a nail. A derogatory term for these founders is “PowerPoint founders”—people who whiteboard out markets and look for opportunities. Good companies can be built this way, sure, but great companies are typically born from a key insight derived from personal experience.
I’m skeptical of companies that declare themselves “an AI company”—the best founders center on the problem to be solved. The technology may create the “why now” moment for solving that problem, but everything should revolve around the customer and the problem/solution. (Soon, it will seem silly to call something an AI company; every company will use AI.) For people looking to start companies, a good place to start is asking yourself: what have you experienced—where have you gone deep—that gives you an unfair insight into a problem space?
It’s interesting the trace the origin stories of compelling startups. Most stem from a founder who had a unique lived experience or work experience that delivered an insight (depth!), that then informed the vision for a broader business (breadth!).
Putting Depth → Breadth into Practice
We’re a year into building Daybreak, and most of our companies fit this mold; here are five examples:
💉 IVF and Egg Freezing
One of our Stealth companies builds software for IVF and egg freezing clinics. The business was born from the founder’s personal experience freezing her eggs, seeing firsthand the frictions and inequities in the process. Her co-founder / CTO saw the same thing when his sister went through it.
🐄 Animal Health
Another of our Stealth companies—and one of our more unique companies—is building a platform for animal health intelligence, helping farmers monitor and mitigate the spread of livestock and poultry disease. The founders had deep experience using wastewater analysis to understand the spread of human disease (remember that during COVID?), and saw the opportunity to do the same thing for animals, stemming the $300B farmers lose from livestock disease each year.

⚖️ Tort Law
One of our recent companies is building AI tools for tort law—think, thousands of plaintiffs suing Johnson & Johnson for Talcum Powder’s links to ovarian cancer. The company builds an operating system for attorneys to ingest medical records, draw out insights and patterns, then manage the tort law process end to end. Its founder, Sara, worked at McKinsey where she worked with clients managing large healthcare datasets full of unstructured medical records. She realized that LLMs provided the “why now” for sifting through this data, turning tasks that would take a legal team months to complete into something achievable in a matter of days.
📱 A/B Testing
Another company in the Daybreak portfolio is building an AI-powered experimentation and optimization platform—basically, a way for AI to constantly be testing and improving a company’s features to drive conversion. In this case, the founder had gone deep at his previous company: he was at Uber for a number of years, working on—you guessed it—experimentation and optimization. This is a common founding story—identifying a gap through your own work—particularly for B2B SaaS / AI companies.
♻️ Resale Commerce
Another Stealth company is building the operating system for resale, the fastest-growing segment of commerce (growing 11x faster than broader retail) powered by Gen Z shopping behaviors and the growing importance of sustainability in fashion. The founders have direct commerce experience at top startups, sure, but more importantly they are the customer: they’ve spent countless hours of their Saturdays uploading photos of wrinkly clothes to Poshmark and Depop and Vinted and messaging back-and-forth with dozens of prospective buyers. They get the pain-points, and they’re building a better solution.

I tried to choose five very different businesses here—a range from healthcare to commerce to AI apps, both consumer and enterprise—to get the idea across: whatever space you’re operating in, it doesn’t matter: it helps to take a hard look at your unfair advantage. What have you gone deep on, by nature of the work you’ve done or by how you live your life? Then how does that experience going deep cascade into a broader vision?
Final Thoughts
“Founder-market fit” is an overused term in VC circles, but it captures these same concepts. Most Digital Native pieces dive deep into a market or an emerging trend; this piece is somewhat different, and probably belongs to a sub-category of more tactical pieces about company and product building. Other examples:
This one can slot in at the front—the idea stage. Last week’s piece centered on the $100B opportunity in consumer AI—The Second $100B AI Company. Most of the next generational companies won’t be born from market-mapping or searching for a gap in an industry. Most will be born from a founder looking inward to think about what insights they have from their personal experiences, then turning those insights into big visions.
Priscilla Chan’s BART example isn’t a startup story, but it captures the same idea—get into the weeds to find the key pieces of information that help you zoom out and reinvent the system at large.
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