Startup.info Interview: COVID & Innovation
November 13, 2020
MākuSafe’s Co-Founder and CEO was recently interviewed by Startup.info about how the pandemic has changed his life and business.
Gabriel Glynn, MākuSafe’s CEO: How COVID has Made Me, Our Company, and Our Product Stronger!
First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times?
Gabriel Glynn: Like many families, we’ve had to learn to adjust a lot of things in life, beginning with our expectations. The world has changed, and we can no longer safely do many things that we took for granted. That’s okay and hopefully temporary, but we needed to adjust our expectations, so we didn’t find ourselves depressed and unhappy about life.
My wife and I are both working full time and putting in 50+ hour weeks. We’ve also learned to be kindergarten and 3rd-grade teacher, and we help with our kids’ classwork while in between work zoom calls. Our kids went back to school full time about a week ago, so that has helped lighten the load, but it’s looking increasingly likely that they’ll be back home for school as the number of Covid-19 cases rise.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded MākuSafe.
Gabriel Glynn: I am a serial entrepreneur with multiple startups over the last 13 years. MākuSafe has certainly been the most challenging but also the most rewarding. The company’s idea came about 4 and a half years ago when I learned about how workplace accidents get investigated and how OSHA conducts environmental audits to determine if a workforce is at risk because of environmental factors. I felt like those practices, done after something bad happens, could be much more effective in PREVENTING losses if data was gathered and action was taken in real-time. That was our goal four and a half years ago, and today we have a product that does just that!
How does MākuSafe innovate?
Gabriel Glynn: It’s really all we do when it comes to our technology. We have weekly team meetings to discuss priorities on our technology, and that includes people from sales, account management, leadership, and our technical teams. This allows us to make sure that what we’re hearing from customers and prospects is aligning with our technology roadmap. Our solution consists of wearable safety tech that gathers data about potential industrial hazards and risks with IoT sensors and provides that intelligence to leadership in our SaaS platform enables proactive and preventative management. We provide to industrial end-users but also to forward-thinking workers compensation insurers who want the ability to engage with their policyholders to mitigate risk before claims occur.
