We were lucky to catch up with Brendan Michaelsen recently and have shared our conversation below.

Brendan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

The idea for Our Wave was born in late 2018, when my friend and colleague Kyle Linton approached me about building a scalable way to empower survivors of sexual violence. We both had loved ones that had been impacted by traumatic events and were determined to make an impact with technology. We sat down with a notebook and a laptop and hashed out a rough plan at that first meeting – we would need a dedicated group of specialists in design, advocacy, and outreach to build a scalable platform and community. I was a full-time software developer at the time, and dedicated my energy to architecting the first version of Our Wave’s platform, knowing that security, data integrity, and overall user experience would be really important to protect survivors and offer a supportive experience.

Most importantly, we knew we needed to reach out to survivors, advocates, and healthcare professionals to guide our design and development process. Over the next year, we had dozens of meetings with subject matter experts as we iterated on our designs. We showed early prototypes of the platform to focus groups of survivors and implemented their feedback.

At the same time, Kyle and I began recruiting talented people to join the team from our personal networks. Soon, we were a team of ten, meeting regularly after work with a whiteboard and a room full of passionate people. These meetings often went long into the night, as we debated and designed our mission and platform.

On the organizational side, we knew we need to incorporate as a nonprofit organization to fully commit to our mission and vision. Most of our early operational revenue would come from donations, so we needed a legal entity to support that growth. We found help almost immediately. Wyrick Robbins, a local law firm in Raleigh, loved our mission and offered to handle the legal creation of Our Wave, pro bono. Within a few months, we had our official 501c3 status. A huge shout out to the Wyrick team here, their hard work really helped us get off the ground quickly.

The culmination of all the feedback sessions, design work, late night development, and brainstorming meetings came in September 2019, when we officially launched the first version of the Our Wave platform, less than a year after our first meeting. Stories and experiences from survivors came flooding in almost immediately – we were all overwhelmed by the support.

Brendan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Hello! My name is Brendan and I am the co-founder and CTO of Our Wave.

My career started all the way back when I was an engineering student at Purdue University. I co-founded my first startup, PearCircuit, with a team of fellow entrepreneurs in our dorm room during my freshman year and led it successfully for more than seven years. Along the way, we consulted and developed software for startup clients and large organizations across the healthcare, human insights, productivity, and education markets. We developed and spun off a product company, Liven, to a large investment group in the Midwest, and I split my leadership efforts between both organizations. After many years of growth, PearCircuit was acquired by an Indianapolis-based tech company in 2019.

In late 2018, my friend and colleague on multiple startup projects, Kyle Linton, approached me about building a scalable way to empower survivors of sexual assault. We both have had loved ones impacted by traumatic events and were determined to make an impact with technology. We assembled a volunteer team of researchers, designers, and engineers passionate about making a difference, and got to work.

In 2019, Our Wave launched our first online platform for survivors to share stories, receive customized support, and join a community of understanding. While collecting stories and messages of hope, we seek to empower survivors, educate society, and strategize to develop smarter prevention methods. As CTO, I develop and manage our platform, security infrastructure, and data initiatives, and work to ensure our technology is as welcoming as possible for our users.

The purpose of Our Wave story sharing is to collect stories of struggle, strength, and healing to foster a community of hope for survivors. We believe that stories are powerful and have the ability to build understanding, cultivate empathy, and ultimately create change. Together with our partners, we are working to distribute this empowering opportunity to survivors worldwide.

To learn more, check out our award-winning film, Finding The Strength To Heal: https://discover.ourwave.org/exhibit/finding-the-strength-to-heal

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

At this moment, Our Wave is a completely volunteer-led organization. We rely on the incredible passion of each of our team members for the work they do and the unique skills they bring. Managing a volunteer team requires effective communication and tremendous self-discipline for each of our team members. We meet frequently to collaborate on projects and unblock each other, but most of the work of growing the organization is done behind the scenes by each of us. Having a good communication tool is the key here – we use Slack (which offers a free premium tier for nonprofits) and requesting that our team members post updates frequently is a great way to help everyone stay on track.

This being said, the work we do at Our Wave is very sensitive. We work with accounts of trauma and violence, and this can have a profound impact on our team. To help, we created a team policy that encourages anyone to leave the room at any time if they feel overwhelmed, no matter how important the meeting or discussion, no questions asked. We take mental health and wellbeing very seriously at Our Wave, and we constantly check in with one another.

Because we are a volunteer organization, we could not do what we do without high team morale. We take time to celebrate wins, both big and small. We strive to make sure everyone is aware of the enormous positive impact they are making in other peoples’ lives, even through small actions. One great way to do this is by sharing internal metrics on how the organization is growing and quantifying our impact. We keep track of milestones reached by our community, journeys of healing, and messages of hope sent by survivors. These metrics are really impactful for everyone and help bring us closer as a team.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

As an organization, we communicate constantly with a community of survivors and advocates to give us feedback on everything we do, from the direction of the organization down to the survivor-centric language on our website. We put together a board of advisors with working experience in the sexual violence prevention space – leaders of state-wide SV prevention coalitions, healthcare professionals, academic researchers, and legal professionals. These relationships are a vital part of both our outreach efforts to new partners and our ability to build a platform that earns the trust of our survivor community, which we are here first and foremost to empower and support.

Most importantly, our team comes across in introductions and partnership meetings as earnest, passionate, and focused, We are very transparent with our goals as an organization and how our platform works. We even try to do a virtual walkthrough of our entire platform (admin tools and all) on each of our potential partner calls. This has really helped us build trust and lasting relationships with organizations and communities across the sexual violence prevention spectrum.

As a team of innovators, it can be at times challenging to not come across as a perceived threat to organizations that have been in this space for a long time. We’ve found that our radical transparency has helped break down these trust barriers and given us room to make our case on the impact of our platform.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.ourwave.org
• Instagram: ourwavestories

Image Credits
Erica Holmsen