Meet Dayton Mills

Builder of the Week

Listen to the full interview:

Many people are struggling to connect and have meaningful spontaneous conversations with others as they transition to remote work
Branch is striving to help companies produce serendipity in remote work via their virtual office app
Employees can walk around the virtual office and their voice and video move with them
Has been building Branch since March 2020
Dayton has tons of remote experience through managing remote teams and playing video games
Had the idea to marry the remote work experience with the online gaming experience
Currently, there are 13 team members working on Branch who have built the first version of the product in just 4 months

Grew up in small-town Missouri and spent his time playing video games like Minecraft
Many people don't know, but there is a whole micro-economy within the world of Minecraft
Created a few Minecraft servers as a 14 or 15-year-old and brought in a few hundred dollars per month
One of his first creations was Statscraft, which was kind of like Google Analytics for Minecraft servers
- Was helping track metrics for server owners
Statscraft was eventually acquired by Buycraft, the Shopify of the Minecraft sphere
Left Missouri and moved to California and joined a cryptocurrency project
Eventually felt the founder's itch again and left to found Beekn, a social meetup app
Was in a bit of a rocky place after Beekn and started doing contract work on the side and looking for work
Eventually got in touch with his current co-founder at Branch, who he'd known for a long time, and started building Branch

"It comes to you"
- You can't force the idea, it will come to you
- Don't stress too much
- Sometimes you have to let the creativity come to you
It can be good to put that itch away for a while and eventually you will feel the need to scratch the itch again
It's okay to not have a project, but when the idea hits you, act on it immediately