HBR's 10 Must Reads 2020

Strategy for Start-Ups

by Joshua Gans, Erin L. Scott, and Scott Stern

AS A START-UP, RapidSOS was an easy sell: It would bring 911 calls into the smartphone age. Emergency-response systems had evolved in a premobile era, which meant that few of them could accurately identify the location of callers who were using mobile phones, compromising response times and medical outcomes. The founders of RapidSOS—Michael Martin, an HBS graduate, and Nick Horelik, an MIT engineer—had developed a way to transmit mobile phone locations to existing 911 systems that would require only minimal adaptation on the part of other players in the emergency-services sector. After attracting early-stage financing at business plan competitions, Martin and Horelik reached ...