Tough Day Webinar Recording and Investment Link

Dear Friends of Red Bear Ventures:

Thanks to those of you who joined Wednesday's webinar with Tough Day. It was a great turnout and we really appreciated all of the terrific engagement and Q&A (as did the Tough Day founders!).  

For those of you who could not attend, you can find a recording of the webinar here. The password for the recording is U4?Y5dmw and you can see the slides presented during the webinar here.

If you'd like to consider investing, please follow the AngelList link below:

https://angellist.com/i/UGZA6-r

This link will allow you to join the Red Bear Ventures syndicate on AngelList, where you will be prompted to set up an investor account (if you do not already have one).

From there, you can review the Tough Day deal specifics and choose whether or not to invest. All commitments must be made by 5pm ET on Wednesday February 26th.

The minimum investment is $1000. 

If you choose to participate, you will be prompted to a) submit evidence of your accreditation status to AngelList and b) fund your AngelList funding account to fund your commitment. These steps must be completed by 5pm ET on Friday February 28th, at which point the syndicate will be locked.  

More detail on the accreditation process can be found here. If you have any questions as it pertains to the AngelList-specific steps outlined above, please reach out directly to the AngelList LP Relations Team: lp-relations@angellist.com.

If you have any questions about the company or the investment opportunity, please don't hesitate to reach out to us.

Thanks!

Dan and Gus

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[Sent 02/11/25]

Dear Friends of Red Bear Ventures:

Per the email below, many of you have already RSVP'd for the Tough Day webinar tomorrow, and we're looking forward to seeing you on the Zoom. 

For those of you who plan to attend tomorrow but have not yet RSVP'd, please shoot us a quick email (gus@redbear.vc and dan@redbear.vc) so we can add you to the calendar invite.

Thanks!

Dan and Gus

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[Sent 02/07/25)

Dear Friends of Red Bear Ventures:

RBV has secured a $200K allocation in the pre-seed financing of a very exciting company, Tough Day, that spun out of Cornell Tech last year and which was co-founded by Katherine von Jan (“KVJ”) and Alberto Escarlate.

KVJ was most recently the Chief Strategy Officer at Salesforce and Alberto is a serial CTO and the co-head of Startup Studio at Cornell Tech.

The company describes itself as follows: Tough Day superpowers workers to self-manage and succeed in a manager-lite workplace. It is the digital replica of a company's ideal manager - always available on demand to provide every employee with confidential, contextual, expert guidance that works.

The company’s investor pitch is here and we have scheduled a Zoom webinar with KVJ and Alberto for Wednesday, February 12th at 1pm ET, which you can join here.

We are incredibly enthusiastic about Tough Day for multiple reasons:

• Tier 1 founders and team

• Remarkable customer traction in a very short period of time, including pilots with Google and Teneo, a paid pilot with Hawaii Employers Council (which works with 700+ companies), and a significant strategic partnership with Fisher Phillips - a top global labor and employment law firm

• A qualified revenue pipeline of $33M which includes Microsoft, ServiceNow, Gensler, Accuity, the State of Hawaii, and many others

• A large and untapped market opportunity driven by two important macro trends in the labor market:  “Unbossing” and “The Great Flattening” (detailed in the deck)

• Currently, no direct competition

• A technology moat which includes Constitutional AI, Hallucination Defense and Accountability Agents

• An AI data training moat based on partnerships with Fisher Phillips (see above), Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Charterworks.com (Future of Work research and reporting by former WSJ, NYT, Wired writers), Equipt (for early career coaching), and Band of Sisters (authors and advisors on bias and unwritten rules of business)

• A go-to-market strategy based on large distribution partners which is already proving out, and which should allow Tough Day to capture a leading share of the market. This first-mover advantage is critical as it should give the company access to the most ongoing AI training data, which should in turn further improve Tough Day's model, thereby creating sustainable, long-term differentiation for the platform.

• A “sweetheart” deal that RBV only has access to because of the Cornell ties to the company: this is a small $500K SAFE at a $10M cap. The company is doing this small round because it provides them with the additional capital to do a larger seed round this summer at a materially higher valuation once they have signed some significant customers in the pipeline (see above).  

Please join us for the webinar, after which we will distribute the Tough Day investment link via AngelList.  The syndicate will close on Wednesday, February 26th at 5pm ET.

Thanks!

Dan and Gus

Red Bear Ventures (RBV) is a community-first investment platform which invests exclusively in companies founded by, or managed by, the students, faculty, staff, and alumni of Cornell University, one of the world’s most innovative and entrepreneurial universities. RBV invests across stages and verticals and syndicates investment opportunities to the RBV community via special purpose vehicles (SPVs). RBV is an independent platform wholly managed by its Managing Partners - it is neither affiliated with, nor endorsed by, Cornell University.

More information can be found at www.redbear.vc.

Red Bear Ventures is a service mark used under license from its owner, Red Bear Angels Management LLC, which operates the angel group, Red Bear Angels. Please see www.RBAngels.com for information.