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- Day Zero #001
Day Zero #001
What is Day Zero & what are we building for the community?
Jonathan Chang
July 11, 2025
Hi! Welcome to Day Zero. Excited to bring this community to life in San Francisco.
dropped out of school, quit your job, or just landed in sf to build?
i’m putting together a series of intimate experiences this summer for early founders. think go-karting, pasta-making, poker nights, padel, basketball open gyms, topgolf, and more.
all designed for you to meet
— Jonathan Chang (@thechangj)
5:32 PM • Jun 24, 2025
What is Day Zero?
I started Day Zero as a place to bring together early stage founders that just started their companies & operators looking to start their next company or looking to join what is next.
The goals of Day Zero is:
Attract top emerging founder talent in the SF Bay Area
Support early builders with community, access, and early-stage funding opportunities
Host IRL gatherings to build authentic relationships among the next generation of founders
Help top operators find their next moves and connect them to the best founders
Who am I?
Most of you might have found my tweet but if you came though different sources, I wanted to give everyone a quick background about me.
I’m Jonathan, I lead the startup community and ecosystem at Brex, where I support founders and investors through events, partnerships, and programs across the U.S (and have hosted 200+ events in my 4 years there.)
I also run DayDream Ventures, a pre-seed fund backing overlooked AI and SaaS founders before they're obvious, with 10 investments since 2024. I started a fellowship for students looking to break into venture in DayDream Fellows and started SF IRL, the top events newsletter for tech in SF.
How Day Zero is Run?
When I was ideating about Day Zero, a big problem I had was how to bring new folks into the community while also keeping events high quality. With this, I decided to take a 2 method approach for Day Zero.
1) Is this newsletter that you are reading now. This newsletter will showcase, general events we host at Day Zero, features on top startups hiring, interesting folks to meet in San Francisco and more.
2) WhatsApp. We have an exclusive Invite Only Whatsapp for the top builders & operators. Currently invite/referral only and will open more spots as the events grow. Features everything from weekly SF event drops, exclusive Day Zero events, and a chat for folks who are building to learn from one another.
Want to Be Highlighted?
Every issue we’ll be highlighting some of the top folks we meet in SF. If you want to be featured, submit your info here.
Thanks! Be on the lookout for our first real issue soon. Share this with your friends 🙂