From dorm room to life-saving AI | Prepared’s story | Michael Chime (Co-founder & CEO of Prepared)

Michael: We got a lot of nos, early days. Customer nos, investor knows, parent knows. Like anybody that could say no was saying no.

Meka: Hey everyone, it's Meka Asonye. I'm a partner at First Round. For today's episode, I'm excited to sit down with Michael Chime. He's the Co-Founder and CEO of Prepared an AI assistant platform that transforms how 911 call centers respond to emergencies.

Michael: When you call 911, you'd be surprised to know that the technology's really old.

Meka: I first met Mike when I led first round seed investment in Prepared back in 2021. And while the early product demo showed just how powerful the technology could be, what really stood out was the founding team. They started out as three Yale students who realized they'd each been impacted by active shooter incidents near their hometowns.

Michael: My generation thought about safety more, in a way that's different than maybe my parents did. I was always acutely aware going to school that something bad could happen.

Meka: After just six years of building, they're announcing some massive news. Prepared’s just been acquired by Axon, and it's one of the wildest stories I've ever heard.

Michael: I was in the hospital for a week. I remember seeing this like little spot on my leg, it's like getting bigger. They gave me the talk, you know “Hey Mike, if this thing doesn't stop, you could lose it.” In between tests, I was just on zoom, talking about the deal.

Meka: In today's conversation, we dig into their path to product market fit in the notoriously difficult GovTech space, including why they chose to wait years before monetizing. How they expanded the product surface area and how they repositioned the company and the roadmap to take advantage of AI.

Michael: When we were saying initially, we're gonna have AI handle non-emergency calls, people were a little hand grabby about that. They were like “no, wait, what?”

Meka: Let's dive in. It's such a pleasure to have you here. Welcome to the show. I'm excited to talk a little bit about the four-year journey that we've been on together.

Michael: It's been a long time.

Meka: Yeah.

Michael: It's felt like 40 years and four minutes all at once. Yeah.

Meka: Maybe to start, you can tell the audience a little bit about what Prepared does.

Michael: So we are an AI assistant for 911 calls. So think when a 911 call comes in, we're sitting next to that operator helping them do things like type in the right notes and make sure that gets out to the responder or say the call's in Vietnamese. Today, it's dependent on waiting for a human interpreter and that could be minutes that turns into hold times while you're in an emergency situation while we come in and translate that fully. So we're sitting next to those people that are handling those calls and helping them do it better, faster.

Meka: We started the company in 2019. Our partnership started in 2021 and you've got some news today.

Michael: Yep. We're really excited. We just got acquired by Axon, which is huge. It's been a long road. I've always looked up to their company since the early days, gotten big, but still mission-driven shipping product fast. And the mission is, there's a few iterations of the mission statement, but one is Protect Life. And so you think about the context of the current technology and rate of change, what missions are more important than protecting life. And so that's small portion of what we're doing and so I'm really excited about the ability to scale that up and do it much faster.

Meka: I still remember as you were talking through this decision, I think one of the north stars that you kept coming back was this helps accelerate our mission, and it's so clear you guys are mission oriented.

Michael: You have to be to get through it, or it is to kind of persist for a long time. I think since the earliest of days, we've been super laser focused on how do we help people in their worst moments. And again, it first started not even as a company necessarily, it was this thing we were building college and that we thought might help people born from experiences that we all had, had. And so to be able to take that to what I think is the company that's making the most impact in the world on safety and see that scale out is super exciting.

Meka: I, Mike, just so excited for you and the rest of the team, but one of the things I think is really interesting is while this deal was being negotiated, you might have one of the craziest stories I've ever heard, so maybe you can just fill us in on what was going on.

Michael: I was in the hospital for a week. So maybe backdrop first. One, it was like two or three days before 4th of July, so everybody's on vacation, nobody's really doing work and we're negotiating back and forth this deal. I was supposed to go to a customer meeting and so I'm supposed to fly out to Tulsa, and I remember seeing this little spot on my leg two days before and I thought nothing of it. It was just this little red dot and I'm like, "Okay, that's fine." But two days later I'm about to fly out and it's getting bigger. It was not small anymore. And so I woke up in the morning, I'm like, "Ah, I probably should get this checked out, but I really got to go. The customer meeting was important." Anyway, decided to go to urgent care and I'm like, "I'm just going to check the box. I'll go and say I did it." Urgent care doctor freaks out.

Meka: That's always what you want to see is your doctor freaking out.

Michael: Yeah, they're like, "Oh, no, we're admitting you right now for two or three days. It's just getting bigger and bigger and bigger." And I'll save you all the details of what it looked like and all those things.

Meka: No, you sent me one of these pictures and I remember being legitimately terrified for you.

Michael: People are just probably not believing me that I have a spider bite or whatever. It's like, "What's in the picture?" And be like, "No, it's real. Look at this thing. This is almost my whole leg." Three days later, it's still growing and they gave me the talk. They're like, "Hey, Mike, this thing doesn't stop. We don't really know what it is yet. You could lose it. We're not doing anything now, but just mentally, you should think about that." And I was like, "Think about what? What do I do?" But, yeah, it was scary. And it turned out to be kind of a miracle type thing where they found out what it was and then they gave the right antibiotic, turned out to be very specific, and then it went down. But I was there for six days. And in between tests or in between IVs and stuff, you're just not doing anything, so I was just on Zooms talking about the deal, figuring out what the best next steps were, and so it's a crazy time.

Meka: Did the distractions help? Or were you like, "Why am I doing this when I might lose my leg?"

Michael: They definitely helped. I will say I was a little weird or unique on this point. I came to terms with it pretty quickly. It was like at night I was looking at Paralympic sports. I'm like, "I'm going to be great at wheelchair tennis or something."

Meka: As a former Yale football player, wheelchair tennis is your choice is an interesting one.

Michael: It seemed like the one that was best for hand-eye coordination, I don't know. And when you're playing football, I was playing D-line, you get good with your hands, I thought I'd be okay at it.

Meka: And the spider bite, you're okay now, you got your legs?

Michael: It's still like you have a little bit of scar, but I have both of them, which is good. It's better than one of them.

Meka: So today, I think one of the things that we really want to do is just build into the last six years of Prepared and really the journey around product market fit. I always like to start with the origin story and I think yours is a little bit tragic, a little bit interesting, but I remember you talking about you and the two co-founders and sort of the areas you grew up in, and maybe you can just tell that story.

Michael: So I started working on the company six-ish years ago. I was an undergrad at Yale of all things. So people ask all the time, "Why are you building in public safety out of school? That's a unique life choice." In the beginning, my parents, but now people ask me that all the time. And I tell the story, look, I, was always passionate about the space but didn't know it'd be a company. So I grew up in a town right outside of where there was an active shooter event in 2012 and thankfully I wasn't in the school, knew some of the kids at least at arm's length. And so it was like, "Wow, this is real. This could happen to people that you actually have seen and have met." I just think my generation thought about safety more in a way that's different than maybe my parents did. I was always acutely aware going to school as something bad could happen. And so as a kid, you're impressionable. You're thinking about your safety. March for Our Lives was at its peak when I was in high school, so I went to college really bringing that perspective and I met Dylan and Neil, two classmates that turned out to be co-founders later. 

And, yeah, they had a somewhat similar experience where they grew up in Connecticut. When they were in elementary school, Sandy Hook happened, and so our first product was not entirely ambitious, it was just like, "Hey, let's build something that might help." And we built this simple app schools would use in emergencies. And the basic idea was we'd go to a school and say, "Hey, as opposed to you using a walkie-talkie, RPA system, why not use your phone? It's a better, faster means of communication. Everybody has one." But it turned out to be actually really powerful in that if you look at some of the emergencies that happened like Parkland, roughly six-minute emergency, yet over three minutes of it was communication challenges. Because you have a central PA and the people need to go to or only a few people have walkie-talkies, fire alarms go off in that time. People go out in the hallways, and so just communicating better could do a lot of good. 

And then so the school would end up using it for fire drills and medical, and it became this communication tool throughout campuses. I did that from my first year of college all the way through my junior year. I often joke though and say if COVID doesn't happen, I'd probably just take a FAANG job after school. Even though it was working, we had a couple hundred schools on, it felt like now my entire senior class at Yale was going to take the year off school, so I'm like, "Okay, that's not a bad idea. I'm going to do that too. Nobody wanted to do Zoom classes." And that's when I applied and did the Thiel Fellowship and I loved it. My mom hated the idea, but I was like, "I'm going to take the year off anyway, might as well get funded." I fully intended to do the fellowship for a year and they would allow you to go back and I was going to go back and finish up my senior year. But it was in that year where a lot of the interesting problems we're tackling today bubbled up. We would go back to schools and say something like, "Hey, while you're out, what more could we do for you?" And they'd come back and say, "Well hey, we have all this data, we'd love to share it with 911. How might we do that?" 

In the beginning I'm like, "I don't know, just call them. Would anybody just call 911?" And they're like, "Well, no, all these things ..." I couldn't verbalize. It's things like pictures or videos or texts. When you call 911, you'd be surprised to know that the technology is really old. It's been basically the same tools for decades. The assumption was those calls are landlines and so you couldn't share data like a picture, or video, or text. They don't even have that basic ability to share that information, let alone are they using the power of some of the new tools like AI. I just found that conceptually fascinating. I wondered why if that were true, why am I better equipped right now to communicate to my friend? If I can't share that data to 911, that is from a total outsider, that means right now, I can share more information to you Meka, sitting here than I could to 911. 

And this is a little bit of a tangent, but the problems we're solving today, I just think it's crazy that I could pull up a web browser right now, type ChatGPT, and have more power than people that are taking emergency moments. That's ridiculous and crazy to me that, that's the way that works.

Meka: It's kind of shocking. We value life so much in America and hearing that our 911 systems are so antiquated, that's a little bit of a shock to me. Do you have any sense of what drove the market to be the way it is?

Michael: It was a shock to me too. I would knock on the door of 911 centers and just say, "Hey, I have all this data, I want to give it to you. I think it's saving. What's the next step?" And they kind of sit me down, be like, "Hey kid, I think you are pulling life-saving data, but I can't take it in." And then they'd walk me through the center. And I remember walking through a center for the first time having this clearly now naïve assumption that I was about to see the best technology in the world, that it was going to be like military classified, mission-critical stuff and I was going to be blown away. And when I went in, complete inverse. Like decades old tools. I remember there's a guy sitting there with headset on taking a call, typing as fast as he could trying to catch every single detail and that's sort of consciousness of notes was what somebody was going to run into a burning building with. 

The important question or thoughtful question is why. Why has it decayed that much? It's multi-variable. There's a lot of things that have led to it. I do think one is, I'm biased on this point, the absence of good vendors. I do think that there's not been a lot of people that come from a technology background or the best and brightest that have really thought about the space and we're trying to change that. No, I think it's very similar to defense in that regard where defense for a long time had the big primes and you're now seeing a swing where some of the smartest people in college are starting to think about defense and we think public safety is actually seeing a very similar shift and so it's talent. I think also there's structural things that make it quite hard to work with government that we've tried to be really thoughtful about, but they're actually in place for good reason. 

So procurement processes are long to make sure that things are done right and that officials aren't given contracts to their friends, those types of things, which very rarely happens now, but it was put in place for a good reason. I also think sentiment of the folks making decisions in these centers is one that's pretty risk averse, which also is very fair. And we'll talk about how we've approached this, but switching your 911 system when it's worked for years, you're not trying to be like, "How do I build a flashiest center?" That's not what you wake up and do. You wake up and say, "How am I not a headline? How do I ensure that every single time a call comes in, we at the very least answer it, we never drop one?" And so it becomes pretty daunting to switch out the tools that work and then it's kind of this self-reinforcing loop where the vendors play on that and push it and be like, "You can't trust startups." And then 20 years go by and you have the same stuff.

Meka: One of the things I still remember is our pitch when you texted me a link and I opened it up and all of a sudden you could see my camera, you could see my location just like a 911 dispatcher would, but this is two years after the company. And so I'm curious, what did your first product actually look like? And how did you know when it was shippable?

Michael: The very first product was this, again, communication app for schools. That was the very first thing and it was an app and I think that's useful now as we thought about 911. So there's this bridge product where I was convinced. This goes back to being a little stubborn. I was convinced, I was like, "Now on this, okay, 911 needs to change." And I had gone into a 911 center. I was just like kind of, "Hey, okay, we need to be able to get all the data I'd have in sharing to my friend, picture, video, text to a 911 center, and we had built this app for schools." And so I was like, "Okay, I'm going to get everybody in New Haven." Because that's where we're at in school and all the schools around to download our app. And I thought it's going to be great. Everyone is just going to change how they interact with 911. They're just going to use this app now. They're not going to call and it's going to be great thing. That didn't work. And I went through this process. I think we got maybe 100 downloads or something like that. We got some people to download the thing, but then as we spent more time with centers, it became clear to us that it might just be easier to get people to call 911 like they normally would and that might be hard muscle memory to break. 

It's actually interesting though. It's like we went through this whole exercise of why do people change behavior and when do people stick with their current behaviors, unbreakable, and when did they change. Because sometimes people do, change. For us, it was just like they didn't face the problem frequently enough to have a new muscle memory. It was just like hopefully, you don't call 911 every day, but when the time comes, that's just so ingrained, you're going to call 911. So anyway, we kind of ditched this idea of we're going to have an app that everybody is going to download. So we thought, "Okay, well, we still think this information should get to the center, how are we going to do that?" 

And then started building out this experience for 911 that would allow the operator to send a link. So you just call 911 like you normally would. Then when you're on the call, if the operator thought it'd be helpful, they would send a link to you, open up your browser, you could share all that information over the browser. You could just text back to them and it would show up in our product. So that was the first version of the product. And I think on the question, when do you launch that? I think a very, very basic version of that was in the center very quickly. The second you could start sending a link, they started using it on their non-emergency line, testing that out, and then slowly rolled it up to certain use cases in emergencies and we'd work with them on their protocols. 

That was actually a benefit for us. It's like they had protocols on exactly how to do everything so you could just do, "Hey, this incident, very low stakes." And then over time, when it worked, people wanted to use it more, put it into more things. And so the second that we could start getting any feedback, we tried to get something in people's hands, but that was the first product.

Meka: One of the things that I'd love to dig into is most people would think about GovTech in 2019 and say, "No way. There's no opportunity." And especially someone who's a Yale dropout who doesn't have gray hair and enterprise sales skills, why attack a market like that?

Michael: We got a lot of nos. Early days, it was quite hard. Not nos. When people say we got a lot of nos, you typically think they're talking about investors, customer nos, investor nos, parent nos, like anybody that could say no was saying no. I think the reason we persisted through was I wasn't trying to build a company initially. It was the first version the product was we experienced something like this or had an impactful experience and wanted to build something that was better. Just saw others experiencing it and wanted to do something, and then you just kind of stumbled upon 911 and it was just like ... I remember wrestling with it and I was like, "It just can't stay that way." There was a time, this is right before our seed round where I was like ... Like some of the bigger companies are starting to notice us. I was certain that we would not have success. I thought it was 1% chance that we were going to be successful. This was after 100 nos and I'm like, "You know what? I could either stop or I can just keep going and I'll probably be so annoying that the big companies will do a better job and that maybe it'll get slightly better." 

And so even that, it kept me going at that time. It forced us to get really creative on how to solve the problem. But to answer your question, why keep doing it was it was very passionate about the problem itself and didn't know it would become a big, big company. At least expect that it wouldn't. And so I think that was very important and it's carried through a lot of the difficult times. Difficult times in that product didn't always work perfectly. Now, it's become this real advantage where I think, I don't know if it's Altman or something, it's much easier to build a hard company than it is to build an easy one. We just have this real competitive advantage on mission that we can pitch now to top talent and just say like, "You actually have this binary choice of you can go and get paid the 100 million in Meta." And that's fine. I have no judgment or you can save lives. Either way, I'm happy because if that's what you want, that's not exactly what we want. And if you want to save lives, we're really excited about that. And so that's become a real strength over time. But anyone in government, I think it was excitement about seeing better in the world that really drove us.

Meka: In the hundreds of nos, was there something in those nos that made you say, "We're just one degree off or we're going to be able to power through?"

Michael: It's very hard for me if I don't see the why behind something to just give up on it. Other than the just catch all pushback of government is hard, we didn't get any really substantive negative feedback. It was more, "Hey, we just don't don't know about this market." Not just that it was hard to break in but market size and all these other things and I was close to it, and so I had conviction that these things could get much bigger. Now, it was going to be hard to splinter out. So I think that was one thing is that there wasn't a no, where logically, I was just like, "They're right." 

It did seem like we had insider info that made us more convinced and that also if we were right that this is a market not many people were in and we'd have a real advantage. That was one. And then, yeah, it was the mission. I think that really drove us through tough stuff. And then I think that the glass thing that pushed me into ... I've always been a little stubborn on this. I just-

Meka: Wait, you're stubborn? No way.

Michael: At times. Since I was a kid, had a little bit of a, you could do anything type thing. I think it's very clear in the moment when I can't do something and I'm very aware of that, but it was always like this. If I just spent enough time and put in enough hours, it's going to happen, and I can always have that belief. In some ways, more nos was like, "Now, I really got to do it, because I got to go prove that we can actually do it."

Meka: You mentioned earlier that you were a Thiel fellow and I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that program. In a moment like today with what's happening in the ChatGPT era, what advice would you give to sort of a young college student on whether or not to finish college, drop out?

Michael: The fellowship was very powerful. It was powerful at a time when we were just getting our start and credentialing mattered. I think people naturally ... You got into rooms that maybe you wouldn't have gotten into otherwise. I learned from and met a lot of people that had done it and saw around quarters. I think on the point of founding something, I actually think that's the more meta or the zoomed out question is, "Should you found something, yes, no?" And then I think timing is kind of a secondary question to that. 

My perspective is if you check the you should start something boxes, then no matter what, you should go do it right now in this moment. So whether you're in college or whether you're at a job, it's never going to be easy to do it. It just check the boxes for me. So maybe the question then is, when should you start a company? I think one that's really important, there's probably an 80-20 rule here. There's things that are much more important to solve for and then there's less important things. I think by and large, the number one thing is, are you ready to work on this thing for 10 years? Are you that passionate about the problem? You're going to be ready to work through all the hard stuff. Even if we've had a great last 24 months, it's been a lot of fun, exciting and whatever. Been a lot of hard stuff in there. And so even when it looks amazing externally, it can be quite challenging internally.

If I were talking to a founder today, that's where I would start and I would ask a lot of questions on why is this problem you want to spend a decade on? I would ask a lot of questions about the person's drive for the thing and then also the person themselves. Meaning, a good founder I think, and I've only done it once, so I speak very like, I know exactly. At least in my experience, a good founder is able to straddle these two things. They're certainly convinced, half conviction that thing is going to happen. Yet, in the day-to-day, realize they basically know nothing, and you're learning every day. You know nothing about how to scale a company, how to manage people. And even if you've done that your whole career, you probably haven't done it in this market. You probably haven't done it in this stage. So you sometimes you'll see people that have scaled Fortune 500 companies and then think they're going to naturally do really well in a startup. It's like I think learner's mindset. And that was one thing that I think is a real advantage if you're a college dropout. You have to be a learner because you know you haven't done any of this. And so you don't come in with a preconceived notion that you know a lot.

Meka: On the learner's mindset piece. One of the things that I came to really love about our relationship is you'd often call at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning to talk. And I wasn't sure if it was a 15-minute conversation or 90-minute conversation. And during these conversations there were times where I could figure out what answer you wanted to hear, but there were so many times where I could truly see you just searching out different data points being a devil's advocate to yourself. Why do it? Where did you learn that? Is that something that you've always done?

Michael: I could say why, I thought that was always useful. I think this and it's been very helpful internally, all I want is us to win and for us to get it right, not me to get it right, us to get it right. And so a big part of getting it right is trying to figure out what's right. It sounds like so intuitive, but I think that's where a lot of people get it wrong is they, somewhere along the way, lose sight of what are they actually trying to do in our positioning, posturing, whatever to be right on the thing, and I don't always get this right. Sometimes I'm back high school debate, I want to win the thing. But I think I've always tried to take a perspective of just like let's, as a company, get this right and create environment that's an idea meritocracy and the best idea is going to win. And so sometimes that was your idea, Meka. Unfortunately, you'd beat me up, but I think that was always something that was clear to me is that whatever we got to do to win. 

Maybe where it came from, I played sports. I think that had real impact on me and that's ... And I've actually tried to create the environment such that it feels like that in some ways. It's just like there's a scoreboard and you know if you're winning. It's very clear whether you're on track or off track when you're playing a sport. And so you kind of zoomed out from the individual stats and thought about, are we all pacing to this? At least I thought the best players did. And I saw firsthand there were certain players only cared about their stats or their book. And ultimately, I saw some of the people that I really looked up to who went on to play and you could just tell it was about what we were all doing and I always wanted to be like them.

Meka: I still remember one board meeting as we were talking through potential acquisitions. I probably was not very diplomatic. I think I said the offer was trash and that you'd be selling for 5 cents on your dollar. When you really believe in something and someone says, "No, Mike, that's wrong. That is so wrong." What's your strategy to go reason with that?

Michael: I think we've made a lot of not perfect decisions. I hope we've made a lot of really good decisions too. Looking at both of those, I think the second bucket where we've made good decisions often is when we zoomed out from the emotion of the thing. Often these things are very emotional and very hard and there's a fog of war. And I think the really good decisions, you're able to pull back from that and just say like, "Okay, what are the X's and O's, pro, cons, what are we solving for here? First, principally, what actually is the problem?" 

You're framing the question and then you reason through that with the information you have and try to make the best decision. And so again, I don't always do that right, but I've tried to as much as I can do that and just say like, "Okay, Meka says it's trash, it's probably got a point. Okay, why does he think it's trash?" And just abstracting from that and trying to say, "What are we trying to solve together?" 

And it comes from the similar mindset of just what we're trying to do, everyone's along. Maybe another thing, this has been helpful internally too, I think where people often mess up is when they get into these debates. You suddenly flip to think that you're on different sides of the table. And in a board meeting, you're not, right? We're all on the same side of the table. And I think that's a useful image is like, "Okay, are we shouting across from the table? Are we on the same side of the table looking at a whiteboard and thinking about the problem, trying to sift through that and make the best decision?" 

And so if I was looking at a whiteboard and you said that thing was trash, I'd be just really interested and like, "Okay, where did you see it was trash?" Whereas if you were pointed at me, I might take it think like, "Oh, he thought I was trash." And so I think that simple framing is helpful.

Meka: And by the way, I shared that example because I think there are so many times in this company where you were right. I remember zooming back to we had a series of board meetings where the question was, should we be giving our product away for free to get it in the hands of customers, or do we need to prove that people will pay for this? I always remember your conviction and we need to be in land grab mode and then we need to expand. What drove your conviction on that kind of decision?

Michael: Look, I think that this is a non-obvious thing we did early that I think paid off. When I first walked through a center, it was clear to me the technology needed to get better. It was unclear why it hadn't. You look at it more and it was not due to a lack of better alternatives. There was better technology out there. There were some vendors that were doing better, startups that were doing it better, albeit not very many, but there were few that had better technology who had been out for sufficient time and it was not everywhere. So said differently, if we just built it, people wouldn't come. Well, then what's the constraint? And we thought the constraint was the go-to-market distribution. I didn't think that problem was a typical or one that had not been solved. 

So you used to think about the large enterprise, it's still somewhat this way, but the large enterprise is a place where startups were not to be. Most antiquated technology, only the Fortune 500 were to sell to the Fortune 500 and they would just interact together due in large part to systems IT just blocking everything. Startup could never get in because they didn't trust them. And then you saw startups like a Yammer or Slack or some of these others go straight to the end employees. And originally, people were like, "No, what? They're in an enterprise, you can't just go to the end employee, you need a contract." And it's controversial, but they did it and it worked. They got the employees on their side and went back to systems IT and bottoms-up was born. And so very early on, I thought that procurement and government might be the systems IT equivalent. 

I think a startup always has to shift the rules. So if it's just played by the current rule set, why would you win? You're like rinky-dink, you got a couple of people, you have no funding, all this. Why would you win? And so I thought the rule shift in government might be crazy idea. We might actually make decisions on who has the best technology, not who has the best lobbyist, who has the best sales rep, not all these things that are not product. And then, okay, now how could we ... And I thought, if we did do that, we would win. And if our technology, we were not able to beat the current technology, we didn't deserve to win. And so then it's all about how do we change rules such that, that's the environment because we thought we'd be successful in it. 

And so kind of a simplistic way to do this, but build good thing, make it free, and just reduce the barriers, let them start using it, make it about technology. You're making a bet somewhere early in the company. Our bet was we could build a lot of value on top of the initial product such that if we built trust and that it was a technology thing, people would buy other stuff from us over time. We thought there was a lot of opportunity in technology. So that was one reason is we just thought that was actually the constraint. It was stopping innovation. It was not a technology one. 

Another thing that we would experience early days was we would go and talk to a customer, they would agree our product is really good, and then they would say, "Oh, well, X big company said they have thousands of customers and you have two, why should they trust you?" And so all these arguments were authority. It was just not about the product. Again, we wanted to make it about the product. So not about the product, about I've worked with you forever, I have a relationship and all these things. So we're like, "How do we solve that?" Get a lot of people using the thing. And quickly, we started saying, "Oh, wait, yeah, I heard that they said that, but we have 500 people that are using this thing, and we only do this, we only do video." So on this specific thing, that company, that big company doesn't have 500, we're actually the authority. Why do you listen to them? 

So we knew that was really important and the credibility in our space and trust in our space, they need to go talk to other customers and see that they had used us and worked with us. So the two things were like process was stopping innovation and credibility was stopping innovation. And so I was kind of like dead set on not the specifics of how we go solve those things, but that we needed to go solve those two things. And that's turned out to be very beneficial to us long-term is that we have been able to build. 

Now, we got very lucky that this guy, Sam Altman, came out with this ChatGPT thing. That AI happened and there was a lot more opportunity to build exciting new features on top of our current product set, but that turned out to be true. We could build a lot of value on top of our current, and today people really trust us.

Meka: But how did you land the first user, the first person who took a bet on the rinky-dink startup with no customers?

Michael: The first 20 customers were just like this yellow bubble where everybody in Connecticut I was trying to get to sign up, and so I would just call them. I remember at one of our first investor pitches, he goes, "Well, what's your outbound method? Do you just call 911? Do you just drive around?"

Meka: "I have an emergency, I need funding."

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's like, "Well, they just have to answer." And then it was actually kind of good, because I was like, "Well, not always, they don't always." Funny side, but that's kind of it. I mean, I would call the non-emergency number and I would ... Here's maybe something that is useful. The starting block was just me going out and doing it.

Meka: In person, or on the phone, or email?

Michael: A lot of times in person. I think the thing that was very important in the early days that has been very important now even to this day is I was never trying to sell. So I still say this to our customers today. I'm like, "I want to be terrible at sales." And they're like, "Wait, what do you mean by that? You aren't you trying sales?" I mean more just I want to be terrible at the thing that you think is sales, and this idea of I have a square peg, you're round hole and I'm trying to fit it in. Once you sign on the dotted line, you're not going to see any of the value that I'm saying you're going to see. 

And so when I go into a pitch, 99% questions, I'm deeply trying to understand, do we have a problem? Or do we solve a problem that you have? And if we don't, great, we have product work to do. And if we do, then the sales pitch is literally just turn it on. And in our space, that is so different than anybody else. It is ultimately we get all this FUD. People will say like, "Oh, I do this thing, I do this thing just like them." And literally, every time, we'll just say, "Yeah, great, awesome. Turn it on. Turn them both on." Just literally turn ours on, literally turn theirs on. And then again, and I'm saying that genuinely, if you turn it on and choose them, I have a lot of work to do, so that's also great. And if you turn it on and choose us, great. That's awesome. And so I always had that kind of mindset going into the early customers, anything that was different. I was just like, "Well, what are your problems?" I think we have something that's going to solve them. 

By the way, also, it was free. Early days easy too, and it did. It solved a problem. And what we've tried to do now is just solve bigger, more important problems over time. But we've always been able to take that position of just like, "Hey, I'm not here to sell you anything. I think we could probably solve something here." And then it's just a question of like, "Is it worth the value that we're saying it's worth?"

Meka: When you give something away for free, how do you know if that customer is willing to pay 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, a million or 10 million a year?

Michael: I ask them. Originally, you don't know. I said that kind of flippantly, but I think that was the core thing is when we were starting to figure out, so we had checked the boxes like, "Okay, we can get the technology in. They were really using it." We were ruthless about tracking engagement and then we're starting to build credibility. People would trust us, they'd use it and they'd call our friend and tell them that it was really good. So we'd checked all those boxes. Now, we're like, "Okay, what is the premium tier?" We would go to centers and we have a lot of ideas on what was the best thing for them. So initially, when we were thinking through what to charge, there's a couple of schools of thought. One was which, and this was my idea, and it turned out to be really wrong. It was there's 6,000 911 centers, but there's 72,000 agencies, a police, fire, EMS. And I was like, "Okay, we'll just build a great neat UX for them. They'll get all the data that we're collecting and then we'll charge them access for it and it'll be great because centers will use it and then we'll charge them." 

It didn't work. I feel like there's still some interesting stuff there, it turned out to be half right. Meanwhile, the reason I bring that up, we would have centers nearly every day, 911 centers come to us and say, "Could you build this for us? Could you build that for us?" And I remember going back and being like, "No, our favorite F word is focus. We're focused on responders." And it took 10 times and that's an arbitrary. Enough times where it's like, "Dude, you should really listen." And I would just go back and I remember begrudgingly, I'm like, "Okay, what do we want? What do we want to build?" And they're like, "Well ..." They showed me one of their problems. So in our first month, we had 350 incidents on the platform. A few months later, we had 60,000 monthly messages. And they came to me and they're like, "Mike ..." I was so excited, we had all this engagement. And they're like, "Mike, bad information is worse than no information." I was like, "What do you mean?" 

And they're like, "Look at this. I get a text and it comes in Spanish. Now, I have information. I've literally no idea what to do with it, so I have an emergency, I got to respond to this, but I have no idea what it is." And they would take our text, put it in Google Translate, and then go back to us and toggle between these two things. And we just brought in Google Translate and we just started signing 10, 50, 100k contracts on that kind of simple thing. I had to learn that lesson like, "Okay, maybe you should build the things that they're asking you to build."

Meka: When I think about where you started in 2019 and where you were when we met in 2021 to where you are today, the product surface area has expanded dramatically. And I went back to the original pitch deck and I don't think so many of these revenue line items that have done really well for you were not in that pitch deck. How do I understand that the journey, the ability to go from a wedge product to where you are today? What laid the foundation for that, the ability to really leverage the AI moment? How did you so quickly and the organization so quickly adapt?

Michael: I would say the framework was always the same. So we say this a lot internally, we don't care about AI. We don't care about the underlying technology at all. We care about problems for customers. It's like our mission statement is we want every emergency to get a perfect response. An emergency is never going to be perfect, but what we mean by that is all of the things that we could control in responding to that emergency, we do. We make them better. And that's very, very pie in the sky. It probably won't happen. That's our goal. And so we care about that, and we throw whatever technology we possibly can and resource we possibly can at trying to get that done. 

And so when AI came out, certainly, we were getting a lot of information or data that, that technology could be really interesting at solving problems. I'll give you some of the trends. So one, in our product, we were seeing people use us or feel real pain around data synthesis. So this idea of, okay, bad data is worse than no data. For us, it was very powerful. We were seeing that in the product. So we started doing text language translation, not even tracking the audio, just over text. You could start a language translation, usage goes up. And so like, "Okay, if we can grab the audio and start translating that, that's going to be really powerful for our centers." And so I already knew that was a big problem. So one, we were seeing it in the product that, that was really important. 

The second thing is there was macro trends that our centers were experiencing that I think made us really convinced that this could be really valuable. One was that you just roughly see year-over-year 911 call volume go up. It doesn't necessarily mean there's more emergencies. A lot of those are non-emergent, but there's just more calls. Side by side, less people. And so that's not a very good trend. You have more emergencies, more calls, less people. How are you going to handle it? And what happened was you'd have hold times. People wouldn't answer non-emergency calls. Sometimes you'd have hold times on 911 calls. Or you'd have people so overworked that they would miss things. It wouldn't get out to responders, and so I think those things made us really confident. The fact that we were seeing it in our product, they were solving problems in roundabout ways through the product and that they were experiencing that generally speaking, got us really excited about launching the first product, which was this Copilot transcription for call takers. 

But then once we had the data, you follow the usage to see where the pull is past that. Now, we've launched non-emergency, which is a voice agent for non-emergency calls in cities. Basically, if you go to a couple big cities in California, they have this 10-digit line that you call if you have a noise complaint or parking ticket. Our AI handles that from end to end entirely autonomously. So we answer the call all the way to putting it in the system, handling it. We now probably are going to process 30 million calls this year. We're going to process a lot calls. A huge portion of the US volume we just saw in the transcripts, 40%, 60% of those calls are non-emergent. There's things like noise complaints and parking tickets. We just have this huge data set to try to understand, and then we'd go to them and be like, "Do you want to answer these calls?" And they'd be like, "No, by the way, there's hold times on them because we don't have the people and the call volume is really hot." So not only do we not want to answer them, we're not answering them. It's like, "Okay, it's a big problem." And then you could show, okay, if we answered 30% of your call volume in your city, how important is that for you? And it turns out it's pretty important. 

Focus on getting as much information as you can, as much data as you can. If I were to do something over again, I would be really early days focused on data. What information could I go get from a customer, whether that's just a bunch of meetings or that's in the product? We've launched a product that does quality assurance for cities. Basically, it's looking at their protocols of what they should say on a call and then checking did they actually do it. In a lot of big cities, that was a manual process where literally people would go in, listen to calls with paper and pen and they would just check the boxes by hand and they get to 3% of calls a year. We saw that directors were starting to flag keywords like CPR, and then we'd just ask them and we'd be like ... I remember this one guy, he's like, "Wayne, why are you tracking CPR calls?" And he'd be like, "Well, I'm trying to do QA." And then he walks me through QA and it looks like he's only doing 3% of calls a year. And we see like, "Wait, can you just give us that form?" Okay, we took in the form, check it against the transcript. Now, we're doing 100% of calls in that city to zoom all the way out. It certainly didn't come up in the pitch deck because we had to see people use it. 

Initially, I think we did the things we said we were going to do in the pitch deck and it was wrong. And so I think we just switched to not be like, "Okay, we just know where the world needs to go." Sometimes you need some of that, but we just know where the world is going to go to go to literally look at what they're doing now. And is there things that we can build off of that aligned to this idea of a perfect response?

Meka: So the product has evolved from a small wedge solution into a full product suite that many people are utilizing and are getting a ton of value from. And it sounds like your approach in getting there was very data oriented and almost letting your customers tell you what to build. I think there's other schools of thought that says you have to be innovative, you have to decide what to build. What are your thoughts on that?

Michael: I think both are simultaneously true, similar to when we talked about what traits do you need to have to be a good founder. They're in conflict. It's like this idea of you have conviction, but be a learner. How do you have utmost conviction and also be learning all the time and challenging your assumptions like those that you're constantly wrestling, those two things? I think the same is true on those two axes or those two principles. 

On one hand, especially in a market like ours, 911 dispatch, I've not done it for 20 years. I've not been in the seat. I've not dispatched a call, I've not answered a call, and so I can't know everything about their job and what needs to do. So I need them as we go about building product. It is also true that I don't think most of them in centers are thinking all day about new technologies like AI. And so you yourself need to be straddling those two things. The company needs to straddle those two things. I think if you looked at an org chart of our team, we have people that literally came from public safety and no tech background at all. And we have people that literally came from the best and brightest of Silicon Valley and we mashed them together because of those two things. 

And so I'll give you an example. We started to get an inkling of the problems that we could solve by talking to customers and looking at the data. So we thought it was really interesting that 40% of calls in some big cities were non-emergent. No customer told us we should use AI to handle those and that we should have a voice agent go in and they should take it all the way to CAD. None of them brought that up as the solve. When we were going through QA, the director did not say, "Oh, yeah, I'll send you the protocols and you'll just check them all. You'll do 100% of it." Then no one gave us the solutions. So you certainly need to know what is possible and project that out. And sometimes, you have to go against your customers. When we were saying initially, "Hey, we're going to have AI handle non-emergency calls." People were a little hand-grabby about that. They were like, "No, wait, what? I know I said this is a problem, we're not answering them, but you're not going to have AI answer them, are you?" And I'd walk them through and I'd be like, "Guys, just so we're clear what we're talking about, this is not person versus agent, this is agent versus nothing. No one is answering, I'm pretty sure we could do a better job than nothing." And so they came to terms with it. But not only did they not give us a solution, they didn't like the solution initially. 

And so I do think you need to find that conviction. Think through based on the information that they're giving you, what is a solve, what is a way that you can go, use technology to make it much better and you got to push that through. But I don't think you should do that completely in a vacuum, completely in a style that you should just close your room, turn the lights off, not look at any data and not talk to any customer and just say, "This is where it's going." You may get some stuff right. You probably need to be Steve Jobs to do that, but I bet he even talked to people. 

I think both are simultaneously true that you got to pull people forward, especially now, because a lot of the ... AI is like an iceberg and 10% above the surface. We're going to find out where the value is. We're going to find out what the actual products to be built that are going to be sustainable are, so I think you need to be doing that more, projecting out what the solutions are, but I've always found that you understand the problems better by talking to customers and looking at data. They're not going to give you the solutions, so you need to go find those.

Meka: You started building before public safety was hot. And now, I mean, it feels like the surface of the sun. Do you have any thoughts or reflections on building during times of headwinds and building during times of tailwinds?

Michael: The early days were hard. I think in those times, just have to have a lot of conviction in the face of a lot of people saying no, and that's hard. I think the best way to sift through that is try to be as logical as you can about the feedback. Just the fact that nobody was able to give me a really strong reason this was not good. There was just generally the market was not good, made me even more excited. It's like, okay, if we can crack it, we're going to be the ones to do it. It's just harder in the early days when people are not aligned on it. Now, it's been really exciting to see people ride the wave. 

Just probably a lot of markets that have not been touched that, for a lot of reasons, very hard to break into, procurement, whatever it is. Or just not a lot of technical people thinking about it that are sleepy and that people should spend more time on. If I were an investor tomorrow or founder tomorrow, I would look for those markets and try to understand, just be very curious. It would just be hard for me to make market feedback be a no in the current environment. I think there's a lot of reason to say no, but market feedback is probably not the best one, especially if you're convinced of all the other stuff.

Meka: Public safety is a bit of a small market where there's a couple really big players. And one of the things I've always found fascinating is that sometimes, a certain player is your competitor. Another time, it's a partnership opportunity or a channel that you could sell through. Do you have any reflections on that strategy or how founders should think about this?

Michael: Think about partnerships, or competition, or building product. There's generally applicable rules that I would apply to all of those that help you tease through when you should partner with somebody, when it's probably going to be a competitor. The first thing is just knowing ... This sounds simple, but it's been helpful for me. It's like at the core, I think company is just its strategy and its execution. It's like what are we trying to do? How are we trying to do it? 

For me, every single week on Sunday, I go through, look at both of those things and it'll say, "What are we trying to do? Is that right?" And I do a strategy check and then execution check, and I go through all the OKRs across business where are we on track, off track, et cetera. And then I ask myself, "What are the biggest risks?" If we're on track right now, and there's certainly ... The easier stuff is saying, "Okay, this thing is off track and what are we going to do to try to make it on track? What's the commentary from the person leading it, et cetera?" And there's hard problems solved there, but you'll work through them. To simplify on purpose, like a company at its core is two things. It's like what is your strategy, what's execution? And a ton of complexity within those two things. But for me, every single week, I go through Sunday, this is my routine. Go through, look at the strategy. And I actually asked myself the question, "Is the strategy right every week? Are we doing the right thing?" We're paddling so hard. Do we actually want to get to this island? If we want to go the opposite direction, even if we're going really fast, we're paddling really fast, we're going farther away from the goal. And so consistently saying like, "Okay, pick our head up, are we going the right place?" And then you start to say, "Okay, how are we paddling? Are we fast enough? Do we have the right ORs?" And I think of whatever the example. And you go through all these things. 

The separate exercise for me is like, what are the risks? If all these things are right and nothing is ever all right. Directionally, are we going in the right place? We're not executing here well and we got to change this, this, and this, and we're working on that problem, we could do it faster. But then you ask, what are the risks? There's going to be these buckets of existential ones that could literally just crush you. You should spend a lot of time trying to mitigate those risks. And then there's other risks, and there's also risks that you may not be able to control. Throw them on your list, because maybe you should just give it some thought as to, could you control them? But for us it's like if someone said ... If there's just regulation that AI couldn't be used in government, that would not be good. 

And so you just have these series of risks. And I think about competition, partnership, all these things in the bucket of risk, or in the bucket of execution. Anyone that can help me get to the island faster, I want to work with them to do that. Conversely, anyone that could keep me from getting to the island faster, maybe they wouldn't be able to help me or not willing to help me but could keep me from getting to the island faster. I think a lot about how do I make sure that doesn't happen. And so I think that simple framework for me applies to every single partner. So our strategy would become, we'd first do that, right? And say like, "Okay, who's so big?" And it changes over time. When we were very small, a lot of these people could just crush us and launch competing product. I mean, we'd worked through it, but launch competing product, do lawsuits, whatever they want to do. And so a lot of the early days was trying to mitigate, find partnership angles, do things to make sure that we were able to get to that, that we wanted to go to. Now, it's like, "Okay, as we're getting closer and closer, we're getting bigger, et cetera." It's less of an existential risk thing, but it's more, "Okay, if I work with these people, they could actually move me faster." And so I think it's very hard if I'm not a founder in a market to say, "You should partner with that person or you should compete with that person." But I think that framework has been helpful for me is know exactly where you want to go. Know how you're doing, going against that, and then try to understand what could keep you from getting there and loop in purse. And if somebody can move you way faster ... 

But think long-term, don't just start a partner that can move you faster for today, but get crushy for tomorrow. You got to contemplate. You can't just say what for the next week, but use that as a frame to understand how you should think about partnerships. And it also will tease out if you should do anything with the person. Sometimes partnerships are fake, they're not actually going to move anything forward. And when you look at that and you go like ... If you ask yourself a question like, "Okay, what is this actually making better?" You can't say anything that's probably theater, it's probably performance. But if you can answer that and you're clear-headed on it, then great.

Meka: When you think about the partnerships that have paid off and others that haven't worked so well, in retrospect, is there anything that you could have known or asked yourself that would've been revealing as to which way this partnership might go?

Michael: Generally speaking, I think we've tried to, on purpose, make partnerships a small part of the overall strategy. And I think that's the most useful lesson is to all these things that are on the periphery, make sure that, that's how much time and effort and weight you're giving them, right? At best, they're win at your sales, they're not rolling. And if they are rolling, then kind of problem. Can beholden the partners as actually a risk. And so there's probably ways they could have accelerated a slightly more or maybe been less of a headwind, but nothing that pops to mind that was really game changing.

Meka: What I've seen in some of our most successful founders is there's one archetype that does not care what their competition is doing. It's very internally focused. And I've seen others who are competition obsessed and know everything. Do you fall closer to one camp or the other?

Michael: I'd say much closer to the focus on what we're doing and not focus on competitors track. I'll give you an example. So when we're building product, we try not to think about competitors at all. I remember one of our competitors had this big announcement, they had some big partner, they were doing some offering with. It looked flashy, it was very exciting, Fortune 400 to 500 company and our team was stressed. Everybody was going through Slack and all this stuff. And I'm in meetings and I have 100 notifications and I remember I was a little annoyed because I have 100 notifications. And I literally just put in one sentence, "What does the customer think?" Literally just put in, "What does the customer think?" 

And it turns out we started asking the customer and they're like, "Yeah, it's kind of useful, but this thing is the biggest thing." And the response was like, "What an opportunity then." What we're saying is they're building something the customer could give two craps about. We're building the thing that matters the most. And I think over the long term, if we build our roadmap off the customer and the competitor builds their roadmap off of us, we should win. And so now, that's the only product, we got to do distribution well, we got to do those other things well, but from a product perspective, build off the customer. 

Now, this is where I think the competitor becomes very important. Now, if they would've asked that question or if I would've asked that question, what does the customer think? And the customer would've said, "Yeah, this is 20x better than any shit you're doing." We better build that thing. We better build something 10x better than that. But it's not through the lens of the competitor, it's through the lens of the customer and in both I'm very interested. 

So the framing question is, what does the customer think? And we should build that thing. But default, he is the customer. Now, in a startup you always want motivation and so winning is fun. And to win, you have to I guess have someone to compete with. And so if that gives people motivation, I'm all for that, but I find it really fun, build important thing for our customers and then feel like it's making real impact.

Meka: You've always been able to fundraise, but what I've found funny is that there's never been a process. You always just call me and you said, "Hey, someone wants to invest." It's always been preempted. And so I'm curious, do you have advice to other founders on the way to play a fundraising strategy, especially in today's market that is incredibly frothy?

Michael: I think a lot of the advice you typically get, we didn't do and I don't think it's right. You'll typically get the advice, you ought to run a process and you should set out time and you should do it for three months and you should line up all the meetings and that's going to actually save you time. That's going to be time. You should take up full quarter and just fundraise. And conversely, people would say, "Well, you shouldn't. Unless you're in that bucket, take meetings with any investors, you should only be focused on building the business. You should send these one-liners, heads down, or something like that."

Meka: Heads down, building. I've got many mills for it.

Michael: So you got to have the catchphrase ready and that's the kind of common advice is that you should go through this process. I did opposite. We would meet with investors sparingly and catch them up on progress. I thought that was very powerful for a couple of reasons. One, I actually think I spent way less time fundraising than any of the founders that I know. But two, it's like I think that when ... So what's important in a fundraise? Certainly, it's having a great business. So, yes, if you have coffee chats every couple of months, your number one focus is building a great business, and so I think that's going to come through. 

But putting that aside, you're not talking about the mechanics of a fundraiser. Relationship is very important. Having experience with this person, seeing their thinking over time, how they've gone about problem solving, the kind of like said you were going to do it, done it thing, I think that's very powerful. And so I don't think you get that by just saying high last fundraise and then high next and you just send them this big memo and they don't get any of that. At least if I'm talking to a candidate, that's what I'm trying to get and it'd be better to know somebody over two years than it would be in this truncated process of 90 days. So that was one. I actually found that I built better relationships spending less time. 

The second thing was I think it's all about timing momentum in a fundraise. We've done a lot of fundraisers. I've classically never been raising, but truly though, I would go into the meetings, coffee meetings and be like, "I would have them." I guess if you're saying that having a coffee meeting is fundraising, then sure I was fundraising, but I would have the meetings not trying to raise money and I would go in and say I would be very focused on building a great company. I would share what I think we need to do where I think the market's at and talk about how big of an opportunity that I think it is long-term. And the result of that is people were interested in that. 

And then when they were and we were excited about the terms and all these things, then we would go into a short process, but we would do so with people already ready to do it. And so that I think drives it and you could bring these processes down to a couple weeks, because people were already ready to do it. And again, I wasn't going in and saying, "Hey, I want a term sheet at the end." It was like we were very clear about. And again, I had never done this three-month process, so each quarter we're hitting numbers and we're going way faster. We were spending 99.9% of our time outside of coffee chats building the business. I think that was so powerful for me. So that'd be my advice. 

In the early days, I got hundreds of nos and people wouldn't respond to my cold emails. And it took Carl, which I've told you that story of he saw me. I was in a college class and he lectured and I had to walk him to the Uber and pitch him. It's very hard in the early days, but I think once you start to see traction, you're hitting your numbers that it's probably better to do these casual coffee chats than it is to run this process. I found that more time-consuming.

Meka: I've also heard from some founders that they just want investors who give them money and get out of the way. And then I've heard of other people who feel like the folks around the table are strategic partners. Any preference, thoughts, learnings?

Michael: It's super hard to be black and white about those things. I think that certainly, the investor that's just pinging you every week saying status check, right? You don't want that. Or this is another example of a similar investor. You also don't want the investor that's just so strong in their opinions that you want ... And I try to take this when I bring up ideas to you all is you just don't know that much about the market or about what's going on and this person spends all day on it. You also don't want the investor that's just so confident that they know everything because they've built another company. I don't care if you've built five. You don't know everything about the market or the time or all these other things. And so those are investor profiles you don't want. 

Now, at the same time, I think there's an abundance of money and capital. So if the perspective is that that's all I want, I think you're shortchanging yourself that you should be thoughtful about the people you're bringing on.

Meka: How has your role as a founder had to evolve as Prepared has gone through these various different stages? And is there any specific area where you feel like you really had to level up the most?

Michael: Definitely, it's changed a lot. I think the hardest thing about being a founder is you're likely always bad at your current job.

Meka: How's that feel?

Michael: Not good.

Meka: Especially for someone who likes to win.

Michael: Yeah, no, it's really bad. If you're doing a good job, then you're bad at the job. And so early days, everybody in Connecticut signed up and I was going out and running the product roadmap and was pitching. I'm still doing a lot of the roadmap stuff, but the point being, I was the only person doing these things going out and selling and pitching. And then quickly, it became like, "Okay, we have a team, a small team of people that are going out and selling the product and you got to manage them." And I was bad at that. It was like, "I just want to do it." They didn't do the thing exactly the way I would want to do it. I would just jump over to get in the email, join the call and then leave the call and give no feedback and just do the thing. And I didn't even realize I was doing that. 

And this is also personal thing. Always playing team sports was the lead by example. I would just play my role. I never had to be a coach. I actually have a lot more appreciation for my coaches now. I used to think in sports that it's just the best players win games and now I understand how, why coaches have a job. Then that was the first one. It's like you have to be a good manager, and it sucks because then you start to get good at that and you're like, "Okay, they're starting to do it the way I would want to do it or even better than I would do it." They learn things from the market before or they'd come from experiences that I didn't have and they're doing better. 

And then suddenly now, you have another level or maybe two levels and this culture thing becomes important. And it's not a management job anymore. It's almost like when you get to a certain level of execs, you try to manage them and it's like, "Oh, that's cute." The 27-year-old is telling me how to manage. And it's more about you're leading through clarity on what you're trying to do. You're leading through a set of values that you really all agree we're going to share and holding the line on those things. You're thinking about how do you engineer those things in a lot of different time zones. Those are just very different skill sets and you're very bad at them, so you feel bad for them. 

So that's maybe the learning for founders. I think where founders don't scale is when they're not self-aware enough to know they have a new job. They're still doing the old job. I probably wouldn't have scaled if I just always kept selling and didn't manage, probably won't scale past the next thing if we don't build a great culture and we're trying to try to do that now, and I think we've got a team of great managers that can go and do things, but how do we all make decisions? And I'm sure there's another phase, it's like 500,000 people and people talk about it. It's like your city and it's totally different. You always have to be learning and be okay with the uncomfy that comes with that. And it is really challenging for most founder archetypes, because you want to win and most times you're not.

Meka: Was there a moment when you knew this was going to work when you felt the proverbial product market fit, the fish jumping in the boat?

Michael: I still don't feel like we've made it. I'm so focused on the things that are not working that it's hard for me. Even when you ask that question, have a visual visual reaction of like, "It's not working. What do you mean it's working?" It just feels like there's a lot of stuff that we got to figure out. I think though, to be more practical on that, when we started turning on audio, the transcription translations there, it was just like we had access side-by-side customers to every call and it was like, I don't know, there was an example where large city is in the first couple of weeks of turning it on and a guy calls in, in Mandarin and he goes in Mandarin. 

The call taker, they're still used to their old way of getting an interpreter, so they hit the button, wait on the line, they're just training on Prepared, so they kind of forget they have it, but then they hit the button, they're waiting and they look up and in Mandarin the guy is screaming, "My daughter was shot, my daughter was shot." And she's like, "Okay, wait, I can dispatch out the call taker." She's like, "I can dispatch that." And so she sends that out to police and EMS, they get on scene. By the time that they got on scene, the interpreter had just gotten on. So they're pretty certain they wouldn't have saved the girl, and that's a couple weeks of turning on. And we had done stuff like that, but we were not the system sitting next to the call taker processing calls. And it was like then that started happening every few weeks. And so it was like, "Okay, clear. This is going to be very impactful and it would change things." And that turned out to be true.

Meka: It seems almost unfair that you get to lead a mission-driven company because you can tell stories like that where you're saving lives. Would you ever build a company that is not mission-oriented?

Michael: I think because of all the reasons that we said, it's just very hard to build something new. You got to be really passionate about it. I don't think I could have built Uber Eats and gotten pumped about getting somebody their food faster. I get that and I love Uber Eats, but through the hardship, it's like I don't know if I could have gotten out of bed to do that. So now, knowing what I know ... I mean, for somebody that hadn't done it, maybe that's fine. It's easier to build an important company than it is to build something that's not important. 

And the best people want to work there, the best investors want to invest in that, like Meka. But you get the point. I think it is harder in the early days, because you're saying this thing is really hard, very important. People have probably thought about it or maybe they hadn't thought about it, but you get the point. It's like for some reason this thing hadn't happened. It's very hard to get the ball rolling uphill. But once you do, it's very motivating to work on that problem, and it's very easy to get people excited about working on the thing that really matters.

Meka: What is the hardest thing about building Prepared that you may not have anticipated?

Michael: I think the early days hiring talent was difficult, especially exact talent. That was more an age thing. Who's going to sign up to work for the two-year out-of-college kid? So that was hard to get people. What I found was being clearer firstly to myself and then outwardly about what I was good at and what I was not going to be good at all. And I've come to terms with that now in the company too. It's like I didn't try to convince the exec that was really good at managing that I was going to be this great manager, that I had come out of a dorm room ready to build a billion-dollar company.

It was kind of like, "It's going to be a learning thing. I might lean on you for management advice at certain times, but I'll be really good at those. I'm striving to know the customer better than anyone. We're going to think deeply about what products we're building. Those are things that I'm really going to be great at. And hopefully, I'll be great at the management thing over time too, but we're going to do this together, and I would pitch that as a strength. That's why it's so exciting to be here is that we can build this together. The things that you're going to be great at, I'm going to lean on. Hopefully the things that I'm okay at. You might learn one thing, what company." 

And so that was hard, but the learning was just lean into yourself and don't try to convince. We do the same thing with customers. Don't try to convince them of a thing that's not true. Don't try to convince great people. You may get away with people that are not that great doing that, but really great people, you'll see right through it. And so that was pretty hard early days and a lot of lessons to be learned that helped. And then I've just been humbled so much by building the company. Building products was really hard. Again, we had thought, I had thought, I'm just going to know what to build. And it turns out it's also just the customers don't know and I don't know, both don't know. But the reasoning through how to get closer to knowing was very helpful. 

And I landed on this idea of they're always going to know the problem. They're never going to know the solution. And so you need to understand the problem deeply through them and then describe and pull people towards the solution. In the early days, I would probably, again, just say it was that or just totally index on the customer and just build exactly what they said.

Meka: Is there someone in your life who's had a disproportionate impact on what to do, how to figure all this stuff out?

Michael: All my graceful coaches, I think about this a lot. So I had this in elementary school. My football coach was a former NFL quarterback. I've only have recently thought about how important that was, right? So when I was a kid, super impressionable. The things that were being pushed to me was we talked about why the team matters, not your stats, and why you should do things for the right reason. You should do things for each other. And they're just tactical, those types of things, but the lessons pulled down from that level of competition I had as a kid. 

And so some of the things that we've talked about have just been DNA things. Not because I woke up with them one day, but because that's what I saw when I was really impressionable as a kid. I think everybody should play sports and have a great coach. But that was really impactful for me. And I find myself thinking a lot about things that I was taught then, but then I would learn through sports. It was reinforcing, and so I was really lucky to have that as a kid.

Meka: Well, Mike, it has been such a pleasure and an honor to be on this journey with you. Thank you for sitting down with me today, and congratulations again to you and the rest of the team.

Michael: Thank you, Meka. We appreciate you.