That’s the question I was asked at the Dorm Room Venture Capital Fund yearly retreat. In the room, there were 30 entrepreneurial student investors and founders, and most of them already knew the polished version of Prepared’s story — the acquisition, the product success, the media coverage.

But the students and founders weren’t interested in the “official” story. What they really wanted to know about was the unvarnished truth of the early days. What worked, what didn’t, and how we pulled it all together.

I understood that curiosity. In the early days, we also dove into the ‘self-help’, ‘tech bro’ books and watched all the YC YouTube videos. We wanted to apply all the advice we could find, because we didn’t have any prior ‘lived experience’ to lean on.

In retrospect, many of the outside frameworks we tried to apply did not work. As it turns out, no one had ever tried to change public safety response the way we wanted.

So when I’m asked about what made Prepared work in the early days, my take is that much of the success of Prepared came from the composition of the founding team — and in part due to that team’s complete lack of experience.

The synergy of inexperience

Michael Chime, Dylan Gleicher, and I started Prepared as Yale students who didn’t know anything about how to run a business. What we lacked in experience and expertise, we made up for in man hours and sheer effort.

Michael led the way. He has incredible leadership skills and the kind of charm that gets people to say yes. He met with principals every day, sought out students from different states and counties, and was constantly in and out of meetings with customers, fully determined to fulfill their needs. He relayed customer demands to Dylan and I, which dictated our task prioritization on getting it built.

This style of reacting purely to customer feedback made it really easy to put our heads down and go, go, go. Part of it, I think, was that we knew our customers saw us as inexperienced, young college students. If we couldn’t deliver, they would have no problem dropping us.

So we didn’t let ourselves get distracted with traditional long-term planning; we didn’t have time. We needed to make real, tangible progress on the product to serve the customer.

It helped that Michael was a former D1 football player. Michael was our captain, and we ‘practiced’ whenever we could for our ‘games’ — going live with schools. We were a team. Like true athletes, we even took all the same classes so that we could split the work.

Two months into the COVID-19 pandemic, we hired other employees for the first time. Most college students were stuck at home, looking for things to do, so we scraped the Yale and MIT student directories and sent out mass emails: “Hey, we’re hiring interns who want to build software to save lives.”

We hired ten interns. On paper, they were all impressive — super smart, flawless resumes. We gave them real ownership over projects and mostly stayed out of the way, partly because we didn’t really know what “traditional management” was supposed to look like. It became a sink-or-swim environment almost by accident.

Eight interns sank. Two didn’t just swim — they cut through the water. Srikar and Miranda stood out immediately. When they reached hurdles, they didn’t wait for Michael, Dylan, or me to walk them through the problem. They pushed forward, found their own way, made mistakes, owned them, and kept getting better — even without feedback.

Startup advice we often heard at the time was: “The best indicator that someone will do well in a job is whether they’ve done that exact job before.” Yet Miranda and Srikar had never worked anywhere before. They were just college students, like us. Within weeks, they were designing our product and onboarding customers completely autonomously.

This has been a key lesson for me: don’t over-intellectualize the hiring process. Over our history, we had often underweighted high slope growth and overweighted experience.

The synergy of being together

The question of bringing Miranda and Srikar on full-time had nothing to do with what their position would be or how their skills would fit into the company structure. Instead, we rented a six-bed apartment in New Haven, convinced Miranda’s parents to let her drop out of UChicago1, and got them both to move in with us.

We turned the sixth bedroom into a makeshift office, put whiteboards for every corner, and used a ping-pong table as our dining table. It sounds ridiculous, but none of us cared about formality anyway. We had what we needed.

We worked together, cooked together, socialized together, and worked out together. Inevitably, we made mistakes together, grew together, and triumphed together. At that point, of course we would run through walls for each other.

Everyone acted like a founder, treating Prepared like their own company. Nobody was just along for the ride. Each individual took initiative and went above and beyond what was “required”. This was also true for Alex and Chris, founding engineers who worked remotely from Chicago and SF.

There’s a saying that launching a startup is like “building the plane as you’re flying it.” For us, it was more “learning how to build the plane, then building it, while already flying it.”

I remember Miranda saying, “This place is going to run like a real company!” And then, she figured out how to build a company operating system from scratch, relying purely on her own research and raw organizational skills, for our logistics, finances, hiring, and onboarding.

It helped enormously that people naturally fell into the right positions: Miranda owned design and operations, Alex owned frontend, Dylan and Chris owned backend and infra, Chime on go-to-market and vision, I oversaw the product, and Srikar filled in all the gaps found along the way.

But our synergy came first, and from there, everything else flowed: a collaborative spirit, deep trust, shared values, an iron discipline, and clear ownership. Our work ethic and cohesiveness meant we outworked everyone and anyone. Mistakes, learning, our growth, building the right product — it was all fast-tracked.

Fast-track learnings

If you work 40 hours a week in a normal environment, clocking in and out, attending meetings here and there, you’ll probably achieve 20, maybe 30 hours of deep work. But our work and home life merged into one, meaning we crunched 70-80 hours a week (including Saturdays and Sundays), and our entire mental capacity was laser-focused on the mission with no outside obligations or ‘distractions’. As a result, we probably achieved something like 60 hours of deep work a week.

I’m not saying that this is healthy or worth replicating, but that was the reality of our situation: a non-stop, 24/7 reality. In two years, through our wins and mistakes, we learned what might normally take five!

I’ll end with a story from when we were in talks with a hospital in New Jersey. Their emergency operations center was interested in our original panic button app for schools. They wanted to see how it worked, and whether it could monitor threats across a massive hospital campus.

There was just one small problem: that version of our app didn’t exist. So we built it.

For two weeks, all hands were on deck building a new version of our product, complete with a desktop app experience that could track activity across different floors and wings — features that hadn’t existed before.

We finished at 2 am the same morning we were scheduled to visit the hospital. After submitting it to the App Store for emergency approval, we drove three hours, arrived around 9 am, and immediately began training the staff.

It was insane. After a single onboarding session with everyone crammed in one room, we locked down the hospital. Someone walked around the entire campus in a vest to simulate an active shooter, and our product worked near perfectly2.

This hospital story captures how our founding team always found a way to overcome problems that came in our way – we simply didn’t know any other way. We pushed one another to take every idea as far as we could, executing until we built a product that reached escape velocity. We weren’t afraid to fail, pick each other back up, and learn from it.

Our incredible rate of progress — our early ‘success’ — resulted from the loyalty, closeness, and grit of this founding team. It didn’t come from structure or any traditional business model. We bonded as people first.

And yet, I never really gave up. Nor did the rest of our team. Our do-or-die instincts kicked in, and we kept looking for another way. Over time, the ways we managed to solve these problems and overcome our toughest obstacles — our tenacity — shaped and defined our identity.

Without it, Prepared wouldn’t be here today.

I want to highlight three of these moments from the earliest parts of Prepared’s history:

1. [Pre-funding] The Uber that led to our first institutional investor.

2. [Seed] Chasing police around town to land our first 911 center customer.

3. [Series A] Creating “Most Wanted”-style posters to win over Apple.

[Pre-Funding] Shooting Your Shot

People often talk about success as a result of “luck” — being in the right place at the right time.

I partially agree. I think life can put you in opportune situations, but you still have to be the one to shoot your shot, as Michael, Dylan, and I found out when we were still students at Yale.

At the time, we had dozens of schools signed up, waiting to go live with our first product: a panic button for school shootings.

But we didn’t have the staff to support this demand, especially after two accelerator programs had already handed us rejections (we got rejected by YC!). We couldn’t get a “yes” from any investors, leaving us with just $30,000 in the bank.

Then, our Yale School of Management class booked Karl Alamor, managing partner at VC firm M13, to talk about his early days at cloud infrastructure provider Digital Ocean. With two decades of experience building businesses, he was exactly the type of tech investor and advisor we needed.

At the end of his presentation, our professor asked if anyone wanted to walk our guest speaker to his Uber. My co-founder and Prepared CEO Michael seized the moment. On the walk to the car, he pitched Karl the app we had built, and our mission to end school shootings.

Karl was hesitant. But he at least gave Michael his number and said: “Come back in six months when you’ve solved these four things.”

Those four things were:

• Proving the fundamentals of the underlying business model.

• Finding an edge to get massive distribution.

• Understanding the larger vision beyond “schools.”

• Why we were the right founders for the space.

We didn’t wait six months. Michael, our other co-founder Dylan, and I worked our asses off in the apartment we shared, and we got answers to him in three weeks. And that’s how Karl became our first institutional investor — the anchor to our first $1.8m pre-seed round.

We were “lucky” to be in that Yale class. We were “lucky” that a high-caliber VC came in that day. And we were “lucky” that the professor asked for someone to chaperone Karl to the Uber.

But the key difference was that we manufactured our own luck. Michael recognized who and what was placed in front of him… and shot his shot.

[Seed] The Prepared Police Chase

The first schools went live with our product, but they requested that we build a direct connection between the Prepared school safety app and the heart of emergency response, the 911 center. We also knew how crucial this connection would be, because it meant Police/Fire/EMS could be notified immediately in the event of a school shooting.

We tried everything to make it happen, cold calling and emailing dozens of 911 directors. Naively, we figured that since we were already in schools, improving school safety, the 911 centers would automatically work with us — this made logical sense. That was not the case. We heard nothing in response.

“Why is no one responding to us?” After three weeks of radio silence, Michael was fed up with inaction. “F*** this,” I remember him saying. “I’m borrowing your car, Neal!”

He drove around New Haven, CT, with one mission in mind: to find a cop who’d introduce him to the police chief, with hopes that the chief would introduce us to the city’s 911 director.

You might have already guessed that Michael is the headstrong type who fights for every inch. Sure enough, by the end of the day, he flagged down a cooperative officer who he pitched in the street. “I’ll speak with the chief,” said the cop. Two days later, Michael was pitching the chief … and we had our introduction to the 911 center.

Before we knew it, we were sitting alongside the dispatchers in New Haven, which, in turn, led to the creation of our blockbuster live-video-to-911 application — Prepared Live.

All because Michael refused to accept a reality where our app compromised safety. Saving lives was what mattered most, and if getting an “in” with 911 centers made the difference, he knew he had no choice but to make it happen.

[Series A] Winning over Apple

We proved that live-video-to-911 saved lives with several of our first customers. Despite this, we were finding it exceptionally hard to convince agencies to use it consistently throughout every life–or-death situation.

One big reason was that the live video process was still too slow — “going live” took upwards of two minutes using SMS:

During one critical robbery-in-progress, it took 2 mins 40 secs. When every second counts, that’s far too long. We urgently needed the user experience to be faster and more seamless.

The solution? Removing the link all together and making it work like ‘facetime’:

When we simulated this one-click sequence on our phones, it only took 25 seconds!

To go live with this upgrade, we needed Apple to integrate our software into iPhones as a native feature. Which felt like a pipe-dream. Until I met the man who could make it happen.

Let’s call him “Jay.” He oversaw emergency services integrations at Apple, and I had first spoken with him in 2022 at the NENA (National Emergency Number Association) Conference, the biggest industry event of the year, in Grapevine, TX.

Back then, he didn’t bite. Why would he? We were a tiny 15-person startup with only 30 dispatch centers as clients. But I persevered. I tracked down his business card and found his email address. I sent him emails requesting a meeting. No response.

When our live-video-to-911 software was used to save a life in a novel way, I sent him an update email. No response. For an entire year.

It got me thinking: How do I initiate contact with Jay? It was time to manufacture my own luck.

Here’s what I knew: Jay always showed up at the NENA Conference. So I returned to Texas in 2023 as a man on a mission.

On day one, I found his LinkedIn profile, screenshotted his photo, and shared it like a “Most Wanted” poster to our sales team’s Slack. “If you see this face,” I told everyone during our morning huddle, “Don’t let him out of your sight.”

Operation Apple was in motion. A few hours later, a sales rep named Luke located our man at a competitor’s booth. I sprinted to insert myself in front of him at a competitor’s booth!

To my surprise, Jay couldn’t have been more receptive. “I know Prepared,” he said. “You’re the guys making waves with live video.”

Maybe he had been reading my emails after all…

“We could save so many more lives, with Apple’s help,” I said. I pitched him on the spot … and that proved to be our breakthrough — Jay saw the opportunity to improve safety for all iPhone users, and he agreed to work with us.

Fast-forward a year and we launched the native video interface as the keynote at NENA 2024. To the surprise of every other vendor, our small startup was name-dropped by Jay at the Apple keynote. And then Emergency SOS Live Video was featured at the next iPhone launch — Apple’s crown jewel marketing event.

A similar story occurred with Google, too. At first, they laughed at our pitch. Insiders described us as “kids.” They told us native live-video-to-911 on Android would never happen. “The ecosystem is too fragmented”. But we kept knocking on their door.

In December 2025, Prepared’s Live video was officially integrated as a single-click upgrade on all Android phones.

Creating change in these massive companies seemed insurmountable at one point. We stuck to our vision, our belief in live-video-to-911 to be the future of emergency response. We knew it was a question of when it would happen, not if it would happen, and that’s what made the difference.

Hire High Agency

The figure-it-out-and-find-a-way mindset has become a company-wide standard.

It’s not exclusive to me and my co-founders — we’ve made it clear across all teams that everyone needs to think outside of the box and show personal agency.

To this day, our teams present me with “impossible” situations. But I’ve seen that when we identify the right people for those tasks, they still get it done. Recently, we slashed a $100,000 implementation cost from one of our products, simply because someone created a new solution to bypass a VERY large, long-standing brick wall.

High-agency hires lead to a team that brings this mindset every single day, to every single burning fire. I need to know that every conceivable creative avenue has been explored before anyone waves a white flag or any product lines are abandoned. Failure, in this environment, is a feature, not a bug.

Ingrain this sense of resilience into your culture, and you will create generational impact.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are my own and do not reflect the official stance or policies of Prepared or Axon. While I have drawn from my experiences working in public safety and emergency response, these personal opinions, based on my own journey, are intended to spark conversation and reflection.

It speaks to the work of the unsung, unseen heroes involved in every emergency response — the 105,000 dispatchers who receive, manage, and steer every 911 call across America.

Known as “the calm in the chaos” when every second counts, they are experts at multitasking, de-escalation, and prioritization. I know because I’ve witnessed their incredible professionalism first-hand.

In the spring of 2021, I was a fly-on-the-wall of 911 and emergency operations on both day and night shifts. What I learned during weeks spent in the center led to a dramatic pivot in Prepared’s strategy, and radically shaped my perspective on how to build a product.

Mission control

I had expected a 911 call center to be like something out of a Mission Impossible movie. Advanced tech. Large video walls. High-resolution digital display monitors. Touchscreen interfaces. In my head, they had to have the best technology to be able to help people in their most critical moments!

But then my Hollywood expectations ran into reality.

I was shocked at how outdated the systems were. A call-taker received a text message on one screen and then retyped that message, word for word, on another — unable to copy and paste between two computers.

Another call-taker flicked through a flipbook, trying to locate a certain protocol on a ‘trouble breathing’ call. At the same time, they were taking down details and asking questions about the emergency.

And then I noticed how the system didn’t actually tell dispatchers about the precise location of officers, just the general regions!

The very people who are Americans’ first line of help in every emergency were operating with outdated tools that didn’t meet the urgency of their work. More importantly, those tools didn’t seem to serve the best interests of dispatchers or callers.

Nothing was integrated, and everything felt clunky. I soon learned that when technology doesn’t solve a particular problem, they build workarounds. Everything was a workaround, built on a workaround, on top of a workaround. Layers of duct tape holding process together.

Even as emergencies became more complicated in recent decades, the systems in place didn’t change. So agencies were left to add new tools to solve new problems, leaving them with dozens of different, disjointed solutions that human operators had to correlate and connect.

Yet the dispatchers — headsets on, sitting in front of 8 screens — were unfazed, bringing everything together to deliver their best in an intense, fast-paced, high-pressure environment.

To them, “the system works just fine.” We were just students with zero understanding of how they worked.

But we understood the numbers: Every year, Americans make 240 million 911 calls. That’s 657,000 a day. And 80% come from mobile devices.

On that basis, more than half a million daily opportunities to share life-saving data were being lost. From our ‘naive’ first principles standpoint, it didn’t make sense to rely on an outdated system built for a world where calls came in from landlines only.

We had first spent time in call centers with the intent to improve emergency communications during school shootings, with an eye on developing our panic button app.

But those visits then led to a pivotal moment for Prepared, and it was one that forever changed the direction of the company: the development of our live-video-to-911 software.

It was in sitting with the dispatchers — our customer — that I discovered two approaches that were most effective in shaping our strategy.

1. Bring genuine curiosity

2. Be the contrarian.

By adopting these mindsets, and by taking the time to truly listen to the customer, we had breakthroughs that wouldn’t have otherwise happened. And we certainly wouldn’t have built the live video product that is now nationwide, providing coverage for 60 million Americans.

Bring Genuine Curiosity

No matter how many times I’ve traveled to sit with a customer, I’ve always come away with added clarity on Prepared’s vision and new ideas to shape our future.

It’s not enough for me to brainstorm ideas in a room, to whiteboard the problem being solved, or to compile a presentation based on theory. I leave the office. I have abandoned the Zoom interviews. I need to live their life a little.

Since 2021, I have sat with telecommunicators in around 75 emergency communication centers — at one point, I visited 40 in four months — and in the process worked with hundreds of directors, call takers, and dispatchers.

I knew that if I couldn’t be genuinely curious, I wouldn’t be able to win them over. Without this level of attentiveness, sitting with the customer is ineffective.

To me, ‘Genuine curiosity’ is about asking questions that you have no reason to ask. It moves the focus away from the product and instead takes the time to truly understand the customer, their process, their life, and their thinking.

I’ll never forget when I was chatting with a dispatcher about panic buttons and school shootings, and she said: “That kind of emergency in a school happens once in a blue moon but every day in the city.”

I had just watched her field a rush of calls about a house fire, and noticed three things: a) she strained to hear what a hysterical caller was saying; b) she struggled to obtain an accurate description of how big the blaze was, and c) she could not get a precise location of the caller.

In between those calls, she turned to me and said: “Now, if you could tell me where this person is, that’d be helpful!”

It was a throwaway remark — she certainly wasn’t thinking about software — but it was a defining moment that opened our eyes to a wider problem, requiring us to build an entirely new solution.

That was the unlock to Prepared’s success.

We thought: What if we could ‘upgrade’ 911 calls to be more than just ‘audio’? What if we turned a caller’s cell into a video feed to give dispatchers eyes and ears on the ground — just like a Facetime call.

But still, even with the development of that new product, dispatchers pushed back.

Their goal, they explained, is to get callers off the phone as fast as possible to be able to take the next emergency. Adding another step and more software would make the call longer.

It seemed obvious to us that being able to see would make it easier to assess the emergency, making the call faster. But their resistance to change proved stronger than the logic we presented.

And so began six months of pain, attempting to get agencies to use live video to 911.

Our first strategy: If we sit with them, they’ll have to use it right?

No. They didn’t. Their pre-existing habits persisted.

To change their behavior, we had to truly understand where they were coming from, and map our contrarian vision of the world to theirs.

Be the contrarian

I’ve found that changing minds is best done in person. But being a contrarian is uncomfortable.

From my experience, truly great ideas are rarely accepted without resistance. It has required poking holes and prodding into someone’s world, someone’s way of working, and even someone’s identity.

But as our co-founder Michael Chime says: “Sometimes, you have to go against the customer.”

As I poked holes in a calltaker’s workflows, asking “Wouldn’t it be better if you could see the caller’s video?”, the same answer nearly always came back: “That would not help… I’m doing it just fine right now. This is just how it’s done.”

My takeaway is that humans can tolerate pain (and clunky technology) if that pain is familiar. People don’t like change, even if it’s in their best interests.

During my initial visits, I learned the root resistance to our live-video technology lay in the uncomfortable truth that upgrading technology would essentially mean admitting that old systems may have cost lives. That’s a tough realization to digest.

Despite the consistent ‘no’s and inaction, we disagreed and we were persistent with our belief in our product. Because we knew it would save lives if we could scale it nationwide.

We pressed on. We asked unconventional questions, proposed disruptive ideas, and challenged industry traditions. We were persistent with our belief in our product.

And that’s when, in August 2021, one man’s life was saved thanks to the intervention of a video call. For the call centers, seeing was believing.

Five years later, hundreds of folks are alive today that might not be because of our live-video-to-911 solution.

I sometimes imagine if our curiosity had been limited to just connecting ‘panic buttons’ to 911! We would never have had the conversation that led to the breakthrough that led to the live-video-to-911 idea.

In walking with the customer, it allowed us to transform their world — and live video, as it turns out, was just the start.

We’ve continued to bring genuine curiosity to onsite visits, and we’ve doubled down — every Prepared employee is expected to visit a 911 center shortly after joining the team.

These visits, and these mindsets, have resulted in a dozen new product lines over the last few years. And I like to think that we’ve played our part in dragging emergency response technology into the modern era.

We were just three students at Yale. Studying computer science. Working out of a dorm room-turned-office. We didn’t know anyone in the safety sector, let alone a cop, and our understanding of the 911 world we were seeking to impact was… zero.

I’m glad no one calculated the odds of us “making it” back then.

Though I’m not sure that would have deterred us, for one simple reason: Our mission was to build software that saved lives.

And our starting point was school shootings — a subject we knew way too much about.

Dylan Gleicher and I attended the same high school in Westport, Connecticut. In 2018, we were locked down because of an active shooter threat. Six years earlier, a mere 30 miles away in Newtown, 20 children were killed by a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary.

That same year, 14 students and 3 staff members were killed in Florida at Parkland High School, where Dylan’s cousin worked as a counselor. In the following four months, the US saw another seventeen school shootings.

It’s why we had monthly drills. Closing blinds. Barricading doors. Hiding under desks. Huddling in corners away from windows. That was part of our education. As it was for our fellow cofounder, Prepared’s CEO Michael Chime.

In 2012, the same year as Sandy Hook, his community was affected by a shooting at Chardon High School, Ohio, where three students were killed by an armed teenager.

For us, school shootings were front of mind, not some abstract possibility. And it seemed that everybody knew somebody who had been affected by one.

As a result, our generation thought about safety far more than our parents ever did, and we felt the need to act.

As Michael put it plainly:

“We have to do something in schools.”

Seven simple words. One clear objective.

Even if we had no idea how to go about it.

“This Is Not a Drill.”

On February 27 2018, I was 17 and sick in bed with a virus when the first text messages came through from friends at my high school, Staples. “Active shooter!” one friend texted. “We’re in lockdown!” said another. “This is not a drill!”

This came two weeks after the Parkland shooting. Was this a copy cat?

A Staples student with access to guns had stated he wanted to shoot a teacher. Thankfully, nothing happened, but police later confirmed that “the student did have thoughts of executing a mass shooting at the high school.”

What stayed with me from that day were the emotions: the realization that a school shooting could actually happen in my small town, and the helplessness of not having any ability to change that.

So I was determined to help moving forward, and that motivation would shape a moment in our dorm room at Yale one year later — the day Prepared was founded.

Our startup was born out of the hope that we could make a difference, and motivated by memories we couldn’t forget.

How Hard Can It Be?

In those early days, all we knew how to do was build mobile applications for schools.

I had previously built a sports scheduling app, CTSports, used in 120 high schools in Connecticut. Then, as a sophomore, I teamed up with Dylan to create iStaples, a scheduling app specifically for our high school. Out of 1,800 students, 1,200 used it every day — usage that taught us the power of technology. It made us believe we could build anything.

When it came to figuring out a school shooting app, we thought: How hard could it be?

I live by the figure-it-out-as-you-go rule. My parents weren’t engineers, but I still went into school determined to figure out how to build robotics and learn programming. My attitude has always been ‘Give me a fun problem and I’ll figure it out.’

So when Michael and Dylan asked for my help to build Prepared, I didn’t hesitate.

I saw the problem: communication breakdowns in an emergency. I believed in the mission: build software that saves lives. I was immediately all-in.

Michael was the visionary who could sell anything, Dylan the super-technical genius, and in theory, I was the product/engineering brain, and it was my second week at Yale.

The first thing we did was dive into incident reports from dozens of shootings, and we learned that each one involved communication challenges exacerbated by a central PA system — the only means of issuing an alert.

The whole alert process was what we called “the relay race”:

Student sees a shooter → student finds a teacher → teacher finds a phone → teacher calls main office → office has to answer → someone runs to PA system → lockdown announced over PA system.

In Parkland, this relay race took 3 minutes before the school went into lockdown — with students evacuating due to the fire alarm going off. The shooting itself lasted 6 minutes.

Michael’s idea was simple: Everyone has a phone, so let’s turn that into a panic button, creating a decentralized, faster communication system.

Faster response times = saved lives.

“This Looks Childish.”

Dylan, Michael, and I stayed up all night in our dorm room to build a rudimentary mobile panic button. Within 48 hours, we were ready to show it to a principal Michael had been talking to.

We walked into that meeting anticipating praise or at least some helpful feedback. We received neither. “This looks childish,” he said, point blank. Translated: “Nice idea guys but why are you wasting my time with this?!”

For some people, that harsh response might have wrecked their self-belief. Not us. We thought “Amazing, how can we make it look more professional”?

Dylan and I kept burning the midnight oil, doing research and bouncing ideas around while continually finessing the UX in Photoshop (it’s all we knew at the time 😅).

Dylan, Mike, and I took the same classes to reduce our time on homework. And when we weren’t studying, we were in our dorm room focused on Prepared, determined to make the app perfect.

When a suite-mate went abroad to study, we converted his dorm into our first office. A tiny room filled with monitors, programming, and the three of us, surrounded by pizza boxes and mugs. I would regularly get back to my bedroom at 3am, and take naps to survive.

The product was straightforward: In a school shooting, a teacher would press the in-app button to send a critical alert to the phones of teachers and administrators, triggering a lockdown. The app then allowed for a roll call per class, the sharing of locations, and messages between staff.

Eventually, our hard work started to pay off: In February 2019, we signed our first school a few months later in a $24,000 contract for 12 schools in Louisiana. And since we paid ourselves nothing, we were instantly profitable!

Two months later, we hit another milestone. We secured a $40,000 grant after winning Yale’s Top Tech Startup competition.

Not only that, but we were making waves at a time when Alyssa’s Law, named after a victim of the Parkland shooting, was being passed, mandating silent panic alarm systems in public schools, linked to 911 centers.

Everything seemed to be falling in our favor. But then we had a reality check.

After launching in 44 schools across New Haven Public Schools in September 2021, the limitations of our product became clear.

Whenever we went “live” with a school, something always seemed off. It felt like pulling teeth to get teachers to even download the app. Plus, a teachers union started to throw around what I refer to as FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt), posturing about staff using a school-sanctioned apps on personal devices.

In addition, we came to realize that our “solution” may have helped with an internal school response but it did nothing to improve reporting to 911. A big disconnect.

Teachers wanted information collected by our app — GPS data of the panic activation, number of students in a class, everyone’s locations, a suspect’s descriptions, and video from people’s phones — to be conveyed to 911 centers and police in the moment.

In short: No one downloaded it. When it was downloaded, no one ran drills. When drills were run, it didn’t resolve that emergency. So what was the point?

Pivoting Without Losing the Mission

The root problem lay with the archaic systems that the whole emergency system relied on. A panic button was going to be a layer of duct tape covering a gaping hole.

So we kept hackathoning and trying different things to solve the root problems. I knew there had to be a better way.

We created a panic button for hospitals, hotels, and places of worship. We locked down our first hospital chain in 2021.

We created a mental health app called GRACE (Giving Resources and Care Everyday) in the hope such a resource might prevent school shootings, connecting students with mental and physical health sources.

These solutions each brought in six figures in revenue but did not scratch our product market fit framework. So we kept on going...

We dug deep into how to connect emergency services with our schools, hoping to get first responders on scene faster with better context than ever.

That question is what sent us into emergency call centers on a research mission (which will be the subject of my next post!)

That insight led us to hackathoning the idea that put our name on the map: our live-video-to-911 software.

What Six Years Taught Us

Six years on, and after joining forces with Axon, the trajectory of our story has taught me a valuable lesson: To land on the one idea that truly takes off, you must persist, be obsessed about the problem you are solving, and keep iterating on ideas, unattached to any given solution.

We were so passionate about our mission to save lives that we were willing to keep pivoting and pulling all-nighters to prove out every idea and give it a fair shot. And I’m incredibly grateful that we were able to work with folks who were willing to hear us out.

I often think back to the three naive students we were at Yale. We probably seemed audacious to some. Overconfident to others. But our unwavering vision was our North Star that always kept us on track.

Looking back, it was our tenacity, and being a little delusional in our own abilities that enabled us to make real change. We just were not afraid to fail.

I recently came across the Winston Churchill quote that truly resonated with our journey ↓

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

In that window of time, so many futures were irrevocably altered by one routine 911 call.

An unconscious man was brought back to life, a caller became a hero, a 911 dispatcher shifted the dynamic of emergency response forever, and a company struggling to find momentum was catapulted into a whole new direction.

It was August 2021 — a day when Prepared Live’s streaming technology proved to be a tipping point for us as a company.

Just one month earlier, my co-founders and I had pulled all-nighters to finish the beta version of our new live-video-to-911 software, without knowing if it would be useful in the real world.

Our theory was simple: If we could allow 911 dispatchers to utilize a caller’s phone and turn it into an on-the-scene camera, they would have eyes and ears on the ground, creating a more efficient emergency response.

It felt crazy to us that calltakers were flying blind, limited to audio only. It meant descriptions and details were often unclear from a caller in an emotionally heightened situation.

Yet it struck us that people had been walking around for years with mobile devices capable of live-streaming video…but this capability hadn’t been used by emergency services.

Until that day in August when our product was used for the first time.

We received a Slack notification as a dispatcher in Nevada created an ‘incident’ using our software. Five of us — almost our entire company at the time — jumped on to watch the video feed from our ‘hacker house’ apartment in New Haven¹

Dispatchers had grown used to relying on hope that a stranger could execute such life-saving advice over the phone. But this time, by using Prepared Live software, Shamoya was going to be ‘transported’ to the scene.

Eyes on the ground

Shamoya sent a video link to be opened on the caller’s phone, meaning she could “go live” and have eyes on the scene via the phone’s camera livestreaming to her screen.

In Nevada, other dispatchers gathered around Shamoya’s bank of screens as my co-founders and I were glued to the same footage in New Haven.

I found myself holding my breath as all efforts were focused on getting a man to breathe again. He had collapsed and was both unconscious and unresponsive.

From the moment we launched Prepared, our guiding mission was to build software that saves lives. And now we were seeing that mission become real.

We watched as the caller held the phone, a bystander carried out CPR, guided by Shamoya and her supervisor — and that’s when she noticed the resuscitation was not being carried out properly.

His hands were too low, but she was able to correct this error not once, but three times — a crucial intervention, made possible by our live video feed.

At that point, an EMS unit arrived … and the feed was cut, Shamoya jumped onto another call, and we were left hanging. What happened? Did the guy survive?

For Prepared, this was a make-or-break moment. For Shamoya and team, this was a routine incident. Typically, they wouldn’t even find out what happened to a patient, but, this time, they asked.

“He made it,” said the EMS unit.

When we heard that news, the five of us in the apartment looked at one another in a state of disbelief. It’s one thing believing in a mission, but, trust me, it’s another thing to actually see someone brought back from the brink of death because of the software you created.

When you consider that out-of-hospital cardiac arrests have an incredible low survival rate — approximately 90% of patients die — that visual guidance was critical.

That’s when one thought hit me: If we had not stayed up all night building that software, would that person be with us today? According to the experts, probably not.

And yet, in the weeks before, we had started to doubt if Prepared’s products even had a viable future.

Overcoming resistance

Our live video capability had been largely dismissed as another burden for already over-tasked dispatchers. In fact, only two centers had agreed to give the software a try: New Haven in Connecticut, and Nye County in Nevada.

The nationwide usage we had anticipated — that we built for — wasn’t materializing. And the pushback was loud and clear:

> “We’ll never use live video. Calltakers sit behind the desk because they don’t want to see the other side of a call.”

> “Our staff already has too many screens without adding another.”

We understood that resistance, too. Dispatchers work in a pressure cooker environment, already multi-tasking without having to adopt and learn a new system. In addition, call centers were dealing with more calls than ever before, using more tools than ever before, while having less staff than ever before.

But we believed passionately in the value of live-video in emergency response, and knew there was a gap in the market.

“Imagine if you the dispatcher could SEE what was going on before responders arrived, and what a difference that immediate assessment could make,” we had told them.

So that one incident in Nevada — those 210 seconds — proved to be a collective “ah-ha” moment. It changed everything. Especially for the dispatchers who started to evangelize among themselves about using the product on more and more calls.

As Shamoya said: “The experience was a mixture of ‘Wow, we’re actually there’ and ‘Wow, what a difference this makes!’ It was amazing.”

From that day, word spread center to center, state to state.

Within the next two months, thirty agencies signed up for the product.

The Turning Point

It proved to be a huge turning point for Prepared. At the time, we had two other products — our reactive panic button app and our proactive mental health app — both designed to mitigate school shootings. But they had never saved a life. So we had a choice to make.

As an early-stage startup, you can only truly focus on one thing, one product. Multi-tasking and a split focus might work in the world of dispatchers but not for an eight-person team.

We reminded ourselves that our goal was to build software that saved lives… and we all had the same thought: Could we repeat this life-saving incident? What would happen if we scaled across the US?

It was a lofty ambition, but there really wasn’t much to think about. Prepared Live had to be our focus. Meaning we had to throw away the last 2.5 years of work in schools, plus a six-figure revenue, to pursue a free product (but that’s a story for another time).

It proved the right decision. Since then, we hear weekly stories featuring Prepared’s live-video-to-911 being used in creative life-saving ways. For example:

• During a “house fire” in Knox County, IN, the caller mentioned her “single story” property. But the dispatcher identified, via video, that it was a mobile home and gas tanks were inside. With the caller standing 30ft away, the dispatcher ordered the person to move 100ft away to safety. Moments later, there was an explosion.

• In Iowa County, IA, a caller reported “a cut” to his arm from a weed whacker. The dispatcher was able to see the wound and noticed significant blood loss. Seconds later, the caller started to drift in and out of consciousness. A Med-Flight, not a paramedic, was sent up, saving critical minutes…and the man survived.

• In Anoka County, MN, a man was injured after being held hostage in a hotel but was able to discreetly live-stream from his cell phone, allowing the dispatcher to guide a SWAT team so they could make a successful rescue and arrest two suspects.

To date, live video has been used in the most critical calls: thousands of fire calls, vehicle related incidents, and medical emergencies. And we’ve helped deliver babies when the ambulance didn’t arrive in time.

Today, we partner with more than 1,000 agencies in 49 states and protect nearly 100 million people.

Prepared is now regarded as an indispensable tool. As Shamoya told us: “If it was taken away now, we’d go back to how things were, which left a lot of questions as we were not able to see what was going on. I’d probably feel helpless in a lot of situations.”

The Future

Had that man’s life in Nevada not been saved, I suspect Prepared would have floundered. We struggled to get our software to be used — live-video included. But the conviction we had in the mission, fueled by witnessing that single incident, made us determined to crack the usage code.

We trusted in what we had built … and that faith paid off. After 12 months of iterating and testing idea after idea to get live video to be used, we cracked the code.

And we learned one valuable lesson: If your product makes sense from a first principles perspective — if it feels like a well-reasoned solution when stripped down to its fundamental purpose — you have to be willing to trust your gut and run through barriers to get it adopted.

Making a real impact often requires seeing the non-obvious answer. Breaking new ground requires an unwavering personal conviction and product confidence.

So know that your vision will be tested. As will your self-belief. But remember: it’s not supposed to be easy.

Be bold, believe in what you’re doing and why you’re doing it… and don’t be afraid to redefine what’s possible. Maybe you’ll save a life along the way.

About Neal Soni: Co-founder at Prepared — specialists in emergency response, driven by a mission to save lives. Launched in 2019. Acquired by Axon in 2025 for $640m. And as VP of Product, Neal writes about his journey, insights, and learnings as one of the architects of that success story.