Transcriptly

This 25-year-old founder quit Yale and Big Tech to save 100 million lives | Michael Chime, Prepared

EO17:52Added Aug 31, 2026

Michael Chime, co-founder & CEO of Prepared, is revolutionizing America's 911 system. At 12 years old, a mass shooting in his neighboring town gave him a brutal awakening: safety is not a given. Years later, Michael and two Yale classmates dropped out, moved into a small apartment with folding tables, and started building.

Watch on YouTube →
Contributed by 刘嘉琪

Transcript

Transcript format

  1. Intro

  2. 00:00I kind of landed into technology and startups just by seeing that emergency happen in my community as a kid.
  3. 00:08A second student has died from Monday's school shooting in Chardan, Ohio. All schools in Chardan are closed today. The seven it was an active shooter event when I was 12. I was in third grade, I think.
  4. 00:18And yeah, someone came on site and brought a weapon, shot students, and I think there were four people that passed
  5. 00:25away. my town borders the town where the emergency happened. My school walked down cuz it was so close. And as a young kid, right, I was 12 when this happened.
  6. 00:34And so like you just recognize like, hey, safety is something that's not a given.
  7. 00:40[Music]
  8. 00:44I'm Michael Chime. I'm one of the co-founders and the CEO. Prepared is an AI assistant for 911 calls that helps them process the calls better, faster,
  9. 00:52with higher quality. We are in all but one state I think so 49 states we cover about 100 million in population
  10. 00:59technology all around us is moving really rapidly but it's not in public safety somebody calling 911 and having a
  11. 01:06really bad experience that's happening everywhere uh was an undergrad at Yale of all things so people are like why are you building in public safety that's a unique life choice I actually don't know
  12. 01:14if I'll be successful but I think I'll regret not having tried so I grew up in a small town outside of

  13. From a School Shooting at 12 to a Lifelong Mission

  14. 01:24Cleveland. I think I wanted to play sports after college. I was always naturally drawn towards things that were challenging to do and felt important and
  15. 01:32so sports was the best way for me to to do that. Um I probably would have played sports or just taken a fang job after school. That's probably what I would have done. Uh I don't think pre that
  16. 01:40event I ever really thought about safety or the idea that I wouldn't be safe. And you know, like as a kid you're like, "Oh my goodness, this is not a drill." And
  17. 01:47the teachers are actually nervous. um be it comes real quickly that you know you're not always safe. Seeing that happen in a place where you actually
  18. 01:55knew the people, I think it really hit home. Emergencies could happen and they could impact people you actually know or you that was, you know, in the back of
  19. 02:03my head. It was a thought that I had all throughout my childhood. And then then when I went to high school and was thinking about these things more, Marshall lives at its at its peak. And
  20. 02:11so our generation was really starting to take a stand and say, "Hey, this is not so great. We should change things here." And that was compelling and exciting to
  21. 02:19me. When I went to college, I met two classmates that turned out to be co-founders later, Dylan and Neil. Grew up in a very similar environment. They the town over from them was Sandy Hook.
  22. 02:29And so I think just generally speaking, we thought about it more as kids. And we didn't think we would build a company.
  23. 02:33We just thought we would build this simple tool schools would use in college and then we would go off and do whatever our jobs etc. after.
  24. 02:43Yeah. So our first product was an app for schools and we had a couple hundred schools across the country launch that solution and that's how we got into 911

  25. 3 Yale Dropouts Develop 'Active Shooter' Alert App

  26. 02:51was schools would say they were running a drill, right? They would take a picture of something on site and then they'd want to share it to 911, right?
  27. 02:57Because 911 would respond to that situation. In doing that work, we'd want to share data to 911 centers. But what I realized is that that simple idea,
  28. 03:06sharing a picture to somebody in emergency, that the current 911 systems weren't set up to do that. I don't think many people know this, but still today,
  29. 03:13most of the 911 centers are using technology built on the assumption those calls are landl. So the first problem we attempted to solve was that how do we
  30. 03:21make sure that when we call the systems are intelligent enough to take that information in? I think we can hold the line and say, okay, when somebody has that situation, how do we hold a really
  31. 03:30high bar and make sure that we use whatever technology possible to try to make that the best possible response?
  32. 03:39what was going to be senior class at Yale was like taking the year off school. So I'm like, "Okay, I guess I'll do that, too." And I took the year off.
  33. 03:44That's when I applied and did the teal fellowship. The pitch to my parents who did not like the idea of me doing the fellowship at all. My mom actually hated it. So both parents are like, "Michael, you're one year away from graduating.
  34. 03:54Why not just finish up? Like why not just go all the way through?" And this was it was nonobvious that we were going to have any success. It was like our first office was an apartment and the
  35. 04:02master was the office and it was just folding tables with monitors. And so I was like, "Mom and dad, I'm going to go and live here and I'm going to work on this thing." So it was a hard pitch. I
  36. 04:10said to them what I said here, which I really believe is just like, you know, mom, dad, like the problem that we're talking about here, somebody calling 911
  37. 04:17and having a really bad experience that's happening everywhere. I actually don't know if I'll be successful, but I think I'll regret not having tried,
  38. 04:25right? And they let me do it. And so this is when I just started knocking on the door of 911 centers and then they, you know, walked me through the center.
  39. 04:34I remember that moment walking through a 911 center for the first time really vividly. It was like, you know, I again, I had come in with this assumption that
  40. 04:42I was about to walk in and see the coolest technology I've ever seen. I was about to see the best technology in the world. And I saw the complete inverse. I remember the first time I sat next to a
  41. 04:50call taker and they were doing their best work, but the guy, you know, like he's taking a call. Someone was very urgent. He kind of had like the headset on his ear. He's typing as fast as he
  42. 04:59can every single detail that this person's trying to describe. like clearly missing stuff and anybody would I would miss stuff if I was in that same seat but the that dash stream of consciousness of notes is what someone
  43. 05:07was going to run into a burning building with and my mind was blown it's very daunting to rip out their current technology if you rip out center and you
  44. 05:15miss one single call that's like a really big deal and so what we had to do was architect okay how do we fit within the systems we sit there and we say hey
  45. 05:24like I can appreciate why the technology is that way it's very hard it's difficult to switch systems how do we actually build our solution
  46. 05:31around your concerns which are valid, right? And I don't think any vendor's done that or any technology company has done that before. They've just, you know, said, "Well, why is that so bad?
  47. 05:41Let's just rip it out." And I think that you need something more thoughtful than that to to see real change. We should solve it today. We shouldn't wait 10 years to go and solve that problem. So,
  48. 05:49we thought the best, you know, kind of most speedy way to start making progress was integrating with the systems as opposed to ripping them out. the next
  49. 05:57generation of 911. The Orlando Fire Department is upgrading its dispatch center with new software that allows callers to live stream videos and pictures.
  50. 06:05I remember when we first turned on our product for 911 centers. Within our first week, people used it to save a life. I think it was a CPR call. So, someone calls in, they're with their
  51. 06:14friend and they, you know, pass somebody on the street that was passed out and they were like, "Okay, we're going to initiate. We're going to do CPR." But
  52. 06:21they had no idea how to do CPR. They had never done it before. and the call taker was trying to walk them through it over the phone but couldn't understand where
  53. 06:29their hands were placed if they were breathing at the right time and they remembered oh I have prepared and they turned on live stream and so the friends started streaming CPR with the phone on
  54. 06:37speaker and the call taker saw it and was able to coach them through live and the guy comes back to to life and so that was in our first week of deploying the technology and you're like okay
  55. 06:45that's pretty cool so I think early on that was a real driver and motivator and now I mean we are on track this year to process well over 30 million calls every
  56. 06:54day. You just get stories of how people are using it to save lives.

  57. Let Customers Evolve Your Product

  58. 07:03One way to make sure that we internalize the weight of what we're doing is spend time with the centers. You go into a center and you see somebody take a call
  59. 07:12and just kind of like feel the weight and the pain of not being able to handle that call cuz they're sitting on language line or they miss a key detail.
  60. 07:19And so like the impacts of those things are life-changing. Every new product that you've seen us launch has been sitting next to a center who's actually
  61. 07:27using it and we just watch them have a problem and then we go and and solve it.
  62. 07:31In our first month where we launched the very first version of our product which was again you could send a link to a citizen and they could live stream and share pictures, videos etc. Our first
  63. 07:39month we had like 350 incidents go through the platform. Shortly thereafter, 3 months later we had 60,000 monthly messages going through the
  64. 07:46platform. saw a huge uptick in emergencies. And so you had this large amount of data that you can go in and talk to customers, hey, why are you using it this way? One of the things
  65. 07:54that became clear was if you had bad information go into 911, that was actually worse than no information at all. Language translation is an example.
  66. 08:03Initially, we would see people text back that link in Spanish. And we literally have centers go into our platform, get
  67. 08:10that text in Spanish, copy and paste it into Google Translate, translate it, and then go back to us. like they were toggling between these two screens and we're like, "Oh my goodness, like we'll
  68. 08:18just bring that in." And so our first paid product was this just language translation over text and centers used it. You know, the next evolution of our
  69. 08:26product was oh wait, why even text them at all if they don't speak English? Why can't we just, you know, translate it right on the call? And so our next
  70. 08:34product was could we plug in, pull out the audio and start translating on the audio as opposed to moving them to text?
  71. 08:40And then yeah, we launched that product and centers across the country started using that transcription and translation. And then now this last year we started launching new versions of our
  72. 08:49or new modules on top of our product because we saw new problems. We started processing millions of calls a month.
  73. 08:55And you just look at those calls and you see, oh my goodness, one, we have hold times on non-emergency calls. And two, when emergency calls come in, I'm rushing between, you know, call to call.
  74. 09:04Why do we have the critical resource, a human agent focused on noise complaints or parking tickets? AI could do that
  75. 09:11job. And so we launched a voice agent that could handle non-emergency calls.
  76. 09:15And now some of the biggest cities in the country are fully offloading those calls to us. But we've just kind of consistently looked at the usage in our
  77. 09:23system and then gone and solved problems now. And so we've just really gotten focused on how are they using the system and then what new problems are coming up
  78. 09:31that they're trying to use the system to solve and then how we just actually solve those with what I've learned is that like often the centers are telling
  79. 09:38you exactly what you should build and the problems that they have. And if you just stay really tight to them and build those things quickly, you'll probably have a lot of success. Now I spend a lot
  80. 09:47of time in centers just sitting next to them. I think you know even even as we've gotten big I've tried to spend a week or two weeks a month in centers
  81. 09:54sitting next to them and it's just been like such an advantage for us is that like okay how are they actually using it and you'd be surprised how many founders
  82. 10:02or companies don't do that just don't sit next to the centers and say how are they actually using it that a lot of the decisions get made in rooms like this totally away from anybody that's
  83. 10:10actually using the technology and so it's something that we've tried to stick to as we've we've gotten bigger

  84. How We Hacked B2G- Launch Your Product for Free Now

  85. 10:19I remember when we were first starting and we were pitching investors, they would tell me, "Don't work in government. Don't work in 911." One,
  86. 10:26it's very hard to do, very hard to see change, which is certainly true. But also, there's not much money in 911.
  87. 10:32It's not a big enough market. And I remember that advice of like, you know, starting small and focusing on something niche was actually a good thing. And so I stuck to that and it worked out. One
  88. 10:40of the things that had blocked invasion was this long, arduous process to even get in working with the center. There were startups that in other markets that
  89. 10:48had faced similar two decades ago selling to the Fortune 500 companies for a startup was very difficult. Normally that was just like Oracle or Salesforce
  90. 10:56or any other big company was able to actually punch at that weight and the reason was you had these large systems IT units in public companies. They would
  91. 11:05block everything. They would say like no you can't work with the startup. We're going to work with the big guy. And then naturally the big companies didn't face any pressure. So the technology got
  92. 11:13really decayed. And so you had fortune 500 companies with really antiquated tools. So startups started to change their model. So companies like a Slack or a Yammer started to give their
  93. 11:22product to end employees. And at the time that was very controversial.
  94. 11:25They're like wait you can't just give your technology to the end employees.
  95. 11:28You got to go through it first. You got to do all these things. And they did it and it worked. And bottoms up was born.
  96. 11:34This idea of starting with the end employees then going back to the kind of processes of the big company. But at least now you have the users at your back. You've already shown them they
  97. 11:42have something better. And the reason that was really innovative was now the large companies could no longer just defend on process. They had to actually
  98. 11:49defend on technology because you were getting in, right? Our idea was that government was the same thing or that procurement was the systems IT
  99. 11:57equivalent in in government and that if we could get our technology in the hands of end users and make the discussion about technology and not procurement
  100. 12:05that uh we would win. And so that was a big part of our initial strategy. So our first product was no cost for centers and the only goal was to get our
  101. 12:14technology in build the best solutions show them that there was a better way and then we thought that if we did do that we'd be able to expand from there
  102. 12:22and so our first roughly thousand cities and we have over thousand cities now across the country that use us paid us nothing but they saw like oh my goodness there is a better way and that was a big part of our initial strategy.
  103. 12:34Startups should really think first principally about what is the reason the thing that they think should happen has not happened. Every good company starts
  104. 12:41with a vision of a better future right and to you it's clear that that future should come to pass but it hasn't right.
  105. 12:48So it's really you know sitting on the question why it hasn't come to pass. So in our space there was a lot of companies that had actually built better
  106. 12:55technology but nobody used it right the real constraint for us was nobody had hacked distribution. Most times the hard problem with government is actually
  107. 13:04getting in. And so again, like counterintuitive idea because a business should make money, but if my goal is to get the technology side by side, what
  108. 13:11should you do? Give it for free. Remove all the barriers and all the friction needed to get your technology next to theirs. Sometimes it's not obvious. It's not just build a better system.

  109. Unlearn Fast, Change Faster

  110. 13:23I I think the hardest thing is especially at the rate that we've grown.
  111. 13:27We were in that apartment office only 3 and 1/2 4 years ago and now here we're plus 100 people might double in the next
  112. 13:35year. I think the hardest thing is the job is changing every month or every day. So like when we first started first customers I was selling. I was going out
  113. 13:43and having the conversations with them very quickly. we need to scale that and grow that and I was no longer selling and now it was about managing people
  114. 13:50that are going and having those conversations now selling it actually and managing people who are selling it very different jobs doing it versus
  115. 13:58managing it and the hard things for me were letting go of the past job and getting good at the new job cuz it's not so fun. you like feel like, "Oh, I'm just starting to get good at this
  116. 14:06selling thing, and now I got to go and do something I've never done before, and that's uncomfortable." And you're not so good at it initially. And I learned like, "How can I get good at
  117. 14:14communicating why I would do it this way, working through whether their way is actually right, agreeing on some solution, and then them taking it, you
  118. 14:22know, it's like your baby and you want to do it." Now, as we have like very professional managers on the team, it's really about building a culture. We don't really compromise on are we
  119. 14:30customer obsessed. I think it's incredibly important that even as we get to a thousand people that we're still sitting next to customers. We're not going to budge on that. But there's
  120. 14:37certain things we absolutely need to budge on and change because the company's changing so much. So like how do you do that at scale across a lot of
  121. 14:45people is very different than management which was the last job. Like letting go of the last job being like okay this is the new job and being okay with learning
  122. 14:53against it and the uncomfort that comes with learning. And I think that's where a lot of founders get shirped up is they just keep doing their last job even though the company needs them to do
  123. 15:00their new job. And sometimes it's really hard because the people want you to keep doing your old job. But if I spent my whole day with one-on- ones with every team member, I probably wouldn't talk to
  124. 15:08customers very much. I probably wouldn't make very many decisions that are important. And so it's difficult to let go of the last the last job.

  125. The Hard Way is the Easier Way

  126. 15:18I I think it's actually easier to build a hard company than an easy one, if that makes sense. there's this thing in the world that nobody's done yet and us a
  127. 15:27group kind of like ragtag people you put together we're going to change it that's like an inherently confident maybe arrogant thing thing to say yet though
  128. 15:36it's very easy to get people rallied around that right like so when you say something like our mission is to ensure that every time somebody calls in
  129. 15:43emergency they get the perfect response they get the best possible help people get excited about that very very hard very very difficult we can't take that
  130. 15:51lightly but people get excited so You attract better talent. You attract people that are willing to work harder towards that thing. It's much easier to
  131. 15:59get the right talent necessary for a startup if you do the ambitious thing.
  132. 16:03So people are like, "Why are you building in public safety? That's a unique life choice." I don't know if I ever thought it had to be me. I guess I still think it doesn't necessarily have
  133. 16:10to be me. I I I think that one of the most compelling reasons to work on the company is we legitimately believe if we didn't do the work, it wouldn't get
  134. 16:18done. And I would say most days it feels quite uncomfortable. I I did not come out of a dorm room ready to build a company. And so most of the day is doing
  135. 16:28things that you you haven't done before, but you have to do quickly. You have to learn really really fast. And so a lot of days I think, oh my goodness, why me?
  136. 16:37But it does seem true that if we just stopped tomorrow, the world would be less safe. Um that the technology would likely kind of fall back into the status
  137. 16:46quo and being okay with decay, being okay with antiquation. And the result of that would mean everyday lost life. And I don't feel okay with that. Our work
  138. 16:54seems to be raising the temperature of the space. And so, you know, as we go out and launch new things that the space hasn't seen before, so too are the big
  139. 17:02companies, which is also great, right? I tell the team a lot too that, you know, like look, if we build things and then they get mass distributed by somebody
  140. 17:09else and it saves millions of lives, that's freaking great, too, right? And and our work will be, you know, super successful even if somebody else does it on our backs. That that's amazing for
  141. 17:17the world. Yeah. It just feels like we have to do it less that it has to be me.
  142. 17:23[Music]