If you’ve ever met me in person, it’s most likely been in Boulder, Colorado at some startup event. I was working as a fractional CTO, and spent almost all my free time among CU Boulder’s many programs, at Galvanize, or at the dozens of meetups that made up the pre-covid entrepreneurship scene. And then… I just vanished. But not because of Covid (exactly). I had the amazing opportunity to join a brand-new company at the juxtaposition of two passions that have made up most of my professional life: startups and Public Safety.
MD Ally was mostly an idea for how to solve one of the biggest problems in Emergency Medical Services: the scarcity of resources in a system that is overwhelmed with non-emergent users. During my 18 years as a Paramedic, I experienced this every day. I don’t fault the patients, of course. They were using the only form of medical care available to them. But every time someone with a cough or an expired prescription used us to get to the hospital, someone in the midst of a life-threatening emergency waited a few extra minutes for our strapped system to find them an ambulance.
I was immediately drawn to the project for two reasons: First, the solution of integrating telemedicine directly into the 9-1-1 workflow was an incredible solution and sat directly in the center of my career experience in 9-1-1 technology. Second, the company was about to enter Techstars Seattle. Going through Techstars had been on my bucket list for years, and the opportunity to build a brand new public safety product and company from idea through Series A is my “sweet spot.” (There are a handful of founders who can make the journey from scrappy startup through IPO. I’m not one of them. I do my best work when resources are limited and everyone is wearing several hats.) So I put my head down and got to work.
When I lifted my head back up — we were in a whole new world. It was three years later, AllyNet was deployed at PSAPs (9-1-1 centers) in multiple states, and the company was growing quickly. As the velocity increases in a startup, the role of CTO transitions from being the wearer of many hats to the manager of many people. That’s not my passion, so I transitioned to a senior architect/principal engineer role so that a growth CTO could help shepard the team towards the Series A. In the meantime, I got to keep my fingers in all the pots: building out new features, expanding the infrastructure and resiliency, and helping bring about two clean SOC2 audits.
MD Ally has closed it’s Series A, and continues its meteoric rise as a “real” company. And me? I’m ready to start again: working as a fractional CTO and helping founders get their ideas from the napkin to the real world.