The daily operating brief that gets sharper with every decision you make.
Not a news feed. Not a dashboard. A structured daily brief built around the decisions you are actually making - with clear priorities, sourced signals, and recommended actions. Delivered before your first meeting.
What is a daily operating brief?
An operating brief is not a new concept. Military commanders have used them for centuries. CEOs of Fortune 500 companies receive them from their chiefs of staff every morning. The brief answers three questions: What changed? What does it mean? What should I do?
The problem is that creating a good operating brief requires someone who understands the external landscape and your internal priorities. For most founders, that person does not exist. You are the one synthesizing competitor moves, market shifts, and regulatory changes against your own product roadmap, hiring plan, and fundraising timeline. You are your own chief of staff.
DESTA changes that. It is an AI that understands both sides - what is happening in the world around your business, and what you are working on right now - and delivers a structured brief that would take a human analyst two to three hours to produce. Every morning. Getting better every day.
A feed gives you everything and asks you to sort it. A dashboard gives you data and asks you to interpret it. A brief gives you the interpretation and asks you to decide. That is the difference.
Inside a DESTA operating brief.
Every DESTA brief has four sections, designed to be read in order. The full brief takes 8-12 minutes to read. If you are in a rush, the Decision Snapshot and Priority Moves give you the essentials in under 3 minutes.
Decision Snapshot
A four-field summary at the top of every brief. It shows your current operating mode (Execute, Explore, Planning, or Overloaded), your bandwidth level, your top active priority, and what DESTA is optimizing for today.
This is not decorative. The Decision Snapshot determines how the rest of the brief is structured. In Execute mode, the brief is tighter, more action-oriented. In Explore mode, it surfaces more frontier signals and emerging patterns. DESTA adapts to how you are working, not just what you are working on.
Priority Moves
Two to four items that require your attention today. Each one is tagged by urgency (Critical, Important, FYI) and paired with a specific recommended action: DO, DELEGATE, WATCH, or IGNORE.
Priority Moves are not just the biggest news. They are the items most relevant to your active decisions, weighted by timing. A competitor move that affects the deal you are closing this week ranks higher than a market trend that will matter next quarter - even if the market trend is objectively “bigger.”
Signal Cards
Detailed intelligence cards for each significant signal. Every card includes the category (Competitive, Market, Regulatory, Talent, Technology), a priority level, a headline, a context paragraph explaining what happened and why it matters, and linked sources.
Signal Cards are designed to be self-contained. You should be able to read one card and understand the signal, its relevance, and its implications without clicking through to sources. The sources are there for verification and deeper exploration, not because the card is incomplete.
AVOID TODAY
This is the section most intelligence tools do not have, and it might be the most valuable. AVOID TODAY tells you what not to do - which decisions to delay, which actions to hold, and which signals to actively ignore because acting on them now would be premature or counterproductive.
Knowing what to ignore is a skill that separates experienced founders from overwhelmed ones. DESTA automates that filter. When a competitor makes a noisy announcement that does not actually change anything for you, AVOID TODAY tells you to keep your head down. That is as valuable as any positive recommendation.
Why daily? Why not real-time?
Real-time alerts train you to react. Daily briefs train you to think.
We deliberately chose a daily cadence for DESTA because the best decisions are not made in the moment a signal arrives. They are made when you have context, a clear head, and a structured view of what changed. A daily brief creates that window - a dedicated 10-minute slot where you absorb, prioritize, and decide.
Real-time notifications create urgency where there often is none. A competitor launching a feature does not require a response in the next five minutes. It requires a response this week, after you have thought about it in the context of your own roadmap and priorities. The daily brief gives you that thinking space.
That said, DESTA will surface truly urgent signals via priority alerts - like a regulatory change with an immediate compliance deadline, or a competitor move that directly affects a deal you are closing today. The daily brief is the default, but DESTA knows when to break the cadence.
A day in the life with DESTA.
Brief arrives
You open your DESTA brief while drinking coffee. The Decision Snapshot shows you are in Execute mode - tight bandwidth, top priority is closing the Acme deal. Today's brief is optimized for action over exploration.
Priority Moves
Two items require attention. First, your main competitor quietly updated their pricing page - they dropped their enterprise tier by 30%. This directly affects your Acme proposal. DESTA recommends you adjust your pricing deck before the 2PM call. Second, a regulatory update in the EU could affect your data handling. DESTA recommends delegating it to your compliance lead - not urgent for you today.
Signal Cards
Three signal cards. The competitor pricing change is detailed with sources and context - it was not announced, DESTA caught it via a changelog and archive comparison. A market signal about Series B funding tightening in your vertical. A talent signal about a key engineer leaving a competitor. You scan all three in four minutes.
AVOID TODAY
DESTA tells you not to start the vendor evaluation you had planned for this afternoon. The competitor pricing change means the evaluation criteria need to be updated - wait for their full announcement before committing. Good call. You would have spent two hours on something that needed to be redone.
Done
You close the brief. Total time: 13 minutes. You have two clear actions, one delegation, one thing to avoid, and the context to walk into your first meeting knowing exactly what changed overnight. You mark the pricing signal as "acted on" - DESTA learns from that for tomorrow's brief.
Why not Google Alerts, newsletters, or manual research?
Every founder we talk to has tried some combination of Google Alerts, industry newsletters, Slack channels, and manual research. These tools have their place, but they share a common flaw: they deliver information without context, priority, or recommended actions.
| Google Alerts | Newsletters | Manual Research | DESTA | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Personalized to you | No | No | Somewhat | Yes |
| Prioritized | No | Editor picks | Your judgment | Decision-weighted |
| Actionable | No | Rarely | If you synthesize | Always |
| Cross-source | Single keyword | Editor scope | Your effort | All sources |
| Time to value | 5 min setup | Subscribe | 1-2 hrs/day | 10 min/day |
| Learns from you | Never | Never | N/A | Every brief |
Google Alerts are free but noisy - they match keywords, not decisions. You get mentions from irrelevant sites alongside the one signal that matters. No priority, no context, no action.
Industry newsletters are well-curated but generic. They serve the median reader, not your specific situation. A newsletter about your market will cover the top stories, but it will never know that the third story is the one that matters most because it affects the decision you are making this week.
Manual research is the most targeted but the most expensive. Two hours a day is 500 hours a year - time that a founder could spend on product, customers, or team. And manual research is fragile. It degrades when you are busy, which is exactly when you need intelligence the most.
DESTA replaces all three with a single structured brief that is personalized, prioritized, actionable, and gets better over time. Not because the other tools are bad, but because founders deserve a format designed for how they actually work.
Your first operating brief is ready.
Set up your DESTA account in two minutes. Tell us your industry and competitors. Your first operating brief arrives tomorrow morning.
No credit card required. No setup meetings. No sales calls.