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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Prepared built AI for 911, scaling via customer-led growth strategy
- Chime’s motivation stems from experiencing a nearby school shooting at age 12, shaping a mission to improve emergency response outcomes.
- Prepared evolved from a school safety alert app into a 911-focused platform after discovering dispatch centers couldn’t easily receive modern data like photos, video, or reliable mobile-context information.
- Rather than replacing fragile legacy 911 infrastructure, the company prioritized integration to avoid operational risk and accelerate adoption.
- Product development was driven by observing real call-takers at work, leading to features like live video for CPR coaching, multilingual transcription/translation, and AI voice agents for non-emergency calls.
- Prepared overcame slow government procurement by seeding free deployments to end users (“bottoms-up” adoption) and expanding once centers proved value in real incidents.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasMission clarity can sustain you through high-friction markets.
Chime ties long-term perseverance to a personal, emotionally rooted problem: bad 911 experiences happen everywhere and feel unacceptable to ignore.
In critical infrastructure, integration beats disruption—at least initially.
Replacing core 911 systems risks dropped calls, so Prepared designed around existing workflows to ship improvements without destabilizing operations.
Let frontline users “write” your roadmap through observation.
Sitting next to call-takers surfaced concrete gaps (like copy-pasting Spanish into Google Translate) that directly became paid and expanded products.
Bad information can be worse than no information in emergencies.
The team learned that low-quality or misunderstood details degrade response, motivating translation/transcription and higher-fidelity caller context tools.
Data scale reveals the next product—look for load, queues, and repetition.
As Prepared processed millions of calls, they identified hold times and non-emergency volume as a bottleneck and introduced an AI voice agent to offload routine calls.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesYou just recognize, like, hey, safety is something that's not a given.
— Michael Chime
Somebody calling 911 and 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, right?
— Michael Chime
The dashed stream of consciousness of notes is what someone was gonna run into a burning building with, and my mind was blown.
— Michael Chime
One of the things that became clear was if you had bad information go into 911, that was actually worse than no information at all.
— Michael Chime
But it does seem true that if we just stop tomorrow, the world would be less safe, um, that the technology would likely kind of fall back into the status quo of being okay with decay, being okay with inequation, and the result of that would mean everyday lost lives, and I don't feel okay with that.
— Michael Chime
SPEAKERS
Michael Chime
guestFounder of Prepared, an emergency-response/public-safety technology company building tools for 911/dispatch centers.
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
