Before I got into sales, I wanted to be a dentist. I had roommates who were dentists, friends whose parents were dentists, and a mom who was a dental hygienist, and so the dental industry intrigued me. As I kept thinking of business ideas, I heard of a woman who was an office manager in a dental office, and while she was on maternity leave, she was making calls to schedule appointments. I recalled how the summer sales company I worked for had a call center.
I knew of advancements, like creating a call center through a website, uploading an Excel spreadsheet list of names and phone numbers, and getting speed dialing capabilities. Because I knew about that, and I heard about scheduling appointments from home, I thought, “We can do that. I’ll get lists of patients from the dentists that I know that need appointments, and we’ll call them and schedule them for the dental office.”
Dental offices have tons of patients they can’t get a hold of because they call in the middle of the day while people are at work. It would be better if the dental office called at night, but dentists don’t want to do that because they don’t want to work in the evening. That’s the gap we filled. Give us a list of your overdue patients, and we’ll call them in the evenings for you, we’ll schedule them, and you’ll have those patients back—that was Recall Solutions.
We started in the attic above our garage. It was a finished attic, so it wasn’t bad, but it got hot in there. We had a couple employees who would show up every day and come in the front door, say “Hi” to my daughter and my wife, and go upstairs and work.
Early on, we were signing up enough new dental practices that we thought it was going to be a really big business. But by the beginning of the month, we’d have to generate new call lists, and that would take us a couple of days. We were only at 50 dental practices, but what if we had 500? We asked ourselves, “How can we automate this?”
We only reached a small percentage of people that we tried to schedule, and we thought, “Maybe if we send a text message, we can get a hold of more people.” As it turned out, most consumers would rather text than call. They’d prefer to schedule through text and do everything that way. Send me what you need me to do, and I’ll do it when I have time—that kind of asynchronous communication is really nice for consumers.
We kept thinking of ways to make Recall Solutions better. Eventually, we thought, “All of these things we assumed would be really good for our scheduling service might be better as a software package that we sell to dental offices—a phone service with text messaging capabilities that integrates with all their patient data.” So, in 2011, we started building it.
Rebranding to Weave
When dental offices call an overdue patient for a six-month cleaning, they call that “recall.” Recall Solutions was a name that pigeonholed us. In 2010, we changed our name to Weave. The idea behind the name change was that we were weaving everything together—the dental office’s phone service with text messaging and all their patient data. Besides, “Weave” was better for branding purposes.
Weave started as my idea, but a couple months later, I recruited my brother, Jared, though he didn’t join as a co-founder at that time. It wasn’t until Weave was in the software business that I realized this was going to be much bigger than a call center, and Jared became a co-founder. A little later, Clint Berry came on board as another co-founder.
Today, Weave works with all types of small businesses, and it’s now a publicly traded company. But in 2013, Weave was just about out of money. I was trying to raise funding and met with all the different angel investors and venture capital firms in Utah, but everybody said no. As a last-ditch effort, we applied to Y Combinator in the Bay Area. We couldn’t raise money from anybody in Utah, but we got accepted to Y Combinator. Within a month of being accepted, we raised a million dollars in funding.
Everybody wanted to put money in. It was the weirdest thing in the world. Nothing had changed about the business, but what changed was who thought the business could be big. Because Y Combinator thought Weave could be big, others said, “Hmm, I wonder what Y Combinator sees here.” Within two months, we went from questioning, “Should we shut the company down?” to “We don’t need more money.”
I remember the day Y Combinator said “Yes.” It was a phone call. The process involved filling out an application and submitting a one-minute video where you introduce yourselves and the problem you’re working on. If they like your application, they invite you to come out for an in-person interview. In-person interviews are 10 minutes long, and it’s usually a group of Y Combinator partners. I think we had four or five partners in there, and for 10 minutes, they fired questions at us. Based on that 10 minutes, they either send you a rejection email later that evening or they’ll call you.
We knew this was our last chance. If we didn’t get the money, nobody else was going to fund us. We flew out to Mountain View and had our interview at 11 a.m. Driving to the Oakland Airport to fly back home that evening, we got the call. We were like, “Holy cow. We just got accepted to Y Combinator!” No Utah company had ever been accepted, and Y Combinator had funded companies like Stripe, Airbnb, and Dropbox—it felt like the best news in the world.
Leaving Weave
Weave was an amazing journey. We spent 2014 to 2020 raising venture capital funding, scaling, growing quickly, and going through the ups and downs of scaling, then 2020 hit. We had just raised our Series D round at a $970-million valuation—almost $1 billion. Within a couple of months of raising that round, some of our board members invited me in and said, “We think it’s time to bring in a new CEO.” I was just like, “Really? What are we doing here, guys?”