Orchard Street is a seed fund that invests in workplace-shaping ideas — pairing funding with deep strategic advising around comms, operations, and culture-building.
Come and grow something fresh with us.
Come and grow something fresh with us.
New York / Miami / Los Angeles
grow@orchardstreet.vc
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Delivery is how an idea meets the real world; it’s the moment when people get their first taste of what you’ve created. How does it look and feel? Who created the idea, and how did they do it? Why should anyone care enough to come back for more?
Early stage startups spend so much time obsessing over the product and not nearly enough time honing both the internal and external comms needed to show that a product matters. Because of that, when it’s finally time to launch, these companies end up looking and sounding like something we’ve seen before. They introduce themselves to the world with the same growth playbook, launch headline, uninventive culture perks, and a tired mission statement about “disruption.”
This is the moment of truth when most startups stumble and never recover. As a team that has leveraged comms and culture to transform hundreds of companies’ success tracks, we’ve seen this critical mistake being made countless times. Companies that make it past the launch stage have to come to people like us (and spend tons of money) to build the reputation and culture they really needed from day one.
At Orchard Street, we’re coupling our checks with intensive strategic advising for early stage founders who need hands-on guidance through the crucial, foundational decisions that can shape the path of their success.
Need to tap into our years of fine-tuned, organizational and cultural docs, processes, and manuals? Get launch announcement support? Introductions directly to journalists? We are that hands on: your true accountability partners across comms and culture.
We believe there’s no time to spare: a new generation of founders is working on truly transformational, workplace-shifting tools, and we need the best of these to succeed. Orchard Street is here to make sure they nail the delivery from the beginning, when it matters most.
The modern workforce is evolving before our eyes, due to the combined impact of AI, the economy, generational cultural shifts, and more. Orchard Street invests in the companies that will usher in the workplaces of the future — especially within industries like communications, design, HR, healthcare, and retail. These are the tools that will help the next generation of brands stay ahead of the curve with the way they are servicing the contemporary workforce.
We’re experts in what it takes to create a sustainable, scalable workplace, and our portcos will benefit from that — culturally, and financially.
With a background in journalism and documentary films, Orchard Street GP Alex Daly began launching crowdfunding campaigns to raise money for the films she was producing — and the crowd went wild. Before long, she had garnered the nickname The Crowdsourceress.
Creators started coming to Alex to help craft their story and tap into crowdfunding’s unique power to fundraise by inspiring loyal communities to act: including Neil Young (for his $6.2M campaign); the producers behind the first documentary about writer Joan Didion; musical sensation TLC; Standards Manual’s NYCTA & NASA reissues; Freitag’s first-ever travel bag; media artist Scott Thrift’s MoMA-bestselling clocks; and more.
During this time, Alex raised over $25M across hundreds of campaigns; published a book with Hachette; was featured in global publications as a “guru,” “wunderkind,” and “whiz”; and named a Forbes 30under30.
Crowdfunding clients — who were equally blown away by their newfound brand awareness as they were by the funds Alex and her team helped them raise — began asking for ongoing PR support to help sustain that impact.
That’s how Alex’s current comms agency, Daly was born.
Prior to Daly, Ally spent 5 years as a book publicist at Penguin Random House, managing national publicity campaigns for acclaimed expert and celebrity authors in the business, health, wellness, food, and psychology spaces. She simultaneously moonlighted as a freelance writer, publishing stories across reported articles and branded content features, alike.
Ally has always been obsessed with nailing just the right message about her clients and reporting subjects. As a New York Times Magazine article once put it, Ally’s press pitch about a client “managed to concentrate the zeitgeist of contemporary female celebrity into its purest form.”
In joining Daly, Ally quickly expanded beyond her publicist role by proving her strengths as an operational superstar — becoming a Partner at Daly in 2021, and working alongside Alex to responsibly grow Daly’s team from 3 to 12, and increase revenue by 200%.
All of this, even amidst a global pandemic, rampant inflation, and ever-present recession fears — while still ensuring Daly’s culture, values, and operations were scaled and adapted, at pace (and because of these efforts, Daly was named an Inc.’s Best Workplace in 2023).
In 2023, Alex and Ally rebranded Daly as a comms+ agency. They’d been aware that the old way of PR hadn’t been working for a while, and decided to act on the growing sense that they needed to start doing things differently
Now, Daly offers highly customized, cross-category support that helps its clients truly stand out and shine — including everything from launch comms to ongoing media relations support, to affiliate marketing, brand repositioning, intimate media event strategy, micro-influencer campaigns, and much more.
Founders who work with Orchard Street will get exclusive access to Alex and Ally, who will apply the same expertise they used to scale Daly to help their portfolio companies launch in the best way. This is access that’s not available to just anyone — and will be exclusive to Orchard Street’s portfolio company founders.
What Alex brings to the table in the form of visionary founder and fundraising experience, Ally brings in the form of helping companies build the operational and cultural foundation they will need to succeed at scale.
Together, they’re eager to match their checks with strategy, and to become deeply-embedded thought partners to their portfolio companies.
Let’s grow something special together.
New York / Miami / Los Angeles
GROW@ORCHARDSTREET.VC
