How Brandon Rodman founded Weave, and now Previ: This is only the beginning.

• Author: Rodman, Brandon

I GREW UP IN EUGENE, OREGON. My dad always ran his own company. He was a general contractor, and my mom worked in the deli of a grocery store until I was in middle school, when she decided to go back to school and get her dental hygiene license. Something I learned there was you're never too old to take a step back, slow down a little, then spring forward.

At baseball tryouts, I was that annoying player who thought they were much better than they were. As a sophomore, I wanted to make the varsity team. I tried so hard during tryouts, but the coach told me, "I know you really want this, but the guy ahead of you will be playing every single game. You'll never get playing time. He's probably going to get drafted. We're not going to put you on this team so you can actually get some playing time." That was devastating.

I think baseball is the perfect sport for entrepreneurship. It's a sport of failure. If you look at the pros, the hall of fame players still fail seven out of 10 times--that's what a .300 batting average means--but you keep going. I played baseball all through elementary, middle, and high school. Failing just meant I was one step closer to finding success. I think that got ingrained in me over the years. In 1999, I came to Utah to attend BYU, went home over the summer, worked two jobs to save up for my mission, then left in October 2000 for my mission in Romania. I came back to BYU in January 2003, and four months later, summer sales started. In the summer of 2003,1 started my six-year journey into door-to-door sales--another job related to failure. Most doors are going to be a "no," and you just keep knocking to get that one "yes."

There are a lot of similarities between door-to-door sales and serving a mission. The hardest thing in the world to sell is religion, and to sell it in a foreign language. To every day get rejected--that's an underlying theme in my career pursuits. Things are hard, and if it's not hard, and if there's not a lot of failure associated with it, then I guess I'm not interested.

In 2008, I was given an option by the company I was working for to take a significant pay cut to stay, or I could leave. I thought, "Do I want to get a job after six years of door-to-door sales?" I was on 100 percent commission; even though I wasn't going to make $1 million a year, the potential was there. I always liked having unlimited income potential. A flat salary, no commission, no upside at about half of what I had been making before--I mean, that's what they were offering--I just didn't like that kind of cap structure.

STARTING RECALL SOLUTIONS

I had no idea how to start a company, and I considered getting a job somewhere else, but the idea of a flat...