RapidSOS EC-1 Part 1: Origin story

The irony of 911 is that it’s a quantity that everybody is aware of (not less than within the United States), and but, nobody actually thinks about it. Few of us will dial 911 greater than a handful of occasions in our lives, and even after we do, we’ll meet the law enforcement officials and paramedics who reply, by no means the 911 name taker who dealt with the dispatch. These methods and the individuals behind them garner meager consideration, whether or not from Congress, state legislatures, the general public or anybody else exterior the emergency response group.

Except, that’s, for Michael Martin.

He, together with Nick Horelik and Matt Bozik very early on, turned fascinated by the complexity and lack of innovation within the sector. “Uber had just come out. I could press a button and get a car. Why can’t I just press a button and get an ambulance? And then it sparks this curiosity,” Martin stated. He sought information, however for such a important system, info was sparse. “The Wikipedia article on George Clooney is way longer than the one on 911,” he famous.

So started an almost decade-long journey with RapidSOS that may see Martin and his workforce first try and construct a consumer-safety app known as Haven earlier than pivoting completely to serving to dozens of tech corporations, together with Apple and Google and machine corporations like SiriusXM, hook up with a myriad of 911 software program distributors. Along the best way, they skilled the complete vagaries of startup life, frenetically pivoting from product to product as they tried to get shoppers to even care about emergencies.

It wasn’t straightforward, and it took years earlier than the corporate lastly hit its stride. But RapidSOS’s story is certainly one of a mission, a group, a workforce and a dream that each emergency ought to have the most effective probability to be resolved as positively as doable.

Indiana: The callroads of America

Martin grew up exterior the agricultural city of Rockport, Indiana, inhabitants about 2,500 at the moment. His mom was the native physician, and he and his brother habituated to the openness and ennui of rural farming life. “We grew up on 35 acres of land; we had an enormous garden and a little hobby orchard and stuff like that,” he stated. “We had ‘Drive-Your-Tractor-To-School Day.’”