One snowy night in Lake Tahoe, Adam Smithline and his brother-in-law Mike Demele were doing a calculation familiar to anyone who has tried to arrange a life around a dog. They had paid a small fortune to board the animals for two days. The dogs were safe. The humans were skiing. The arrangement still felt absurd. Demele asked a question that sounded almost lazy in its simplicity: what if they could use their phones to open the sliding patio door when nobody was home?
There are founders who begin with a laboratory breakthrough, founders who begin with a grand theory, and founders who begin by resenting a bill. Smithline and Demele belonged, cheerfully, to the third group. They built a prototype. Friends saw it and asked for one. In 2018, they formed Wayzn and gave themselves a deliciously silly title: “brofounders.” The joke made the family connection sound casual. The work was anything but.
The essential insight was not to design a better flap. It was to stop thinking about the flap. A house with a sliding glass door already has a large opening suitable for nearly any dog. The problem is that the opening requires a hand. Wayzn set out to supply the hand: a low-profile motor attached to an existing door, connected to Wi-Fi, controlled by an app, motion detection, voice routines, or eventually a tag on the animal’s collar. No saw. No permanent alteration. No tiny vinyl portal asking a German Shepherd to negotiate with architecture.
A career spent translating signals into action
Smithline arrived at connected hardware by a route that looks less crooked when viewed from the end. He studied business at UC Berkeley’s Haas School, graduating in 1992. He worked at Autodesk, then left in 1996 for PointCast, one of the early internet companies whose push technology briefly seemed capable of rearranging the web. Later roles took him through everyone.net, fusionOne, Robert Half, and mobile-services company Buongiorno. The names changed. A pattern held: marketing, data, software, and the practical business of getting people to use a new system.
He then co-founded two analytics businesses. Opticity turned casino data into marketing and operating intelligence. LeapFrogBI served smaller and midsize businesses that needed analytics without creating a small department devoted to admiring dashboards. Those companies dealt in invisible machinery: databases, customer behavior, decision tools. Wayzn translated the same habit into a household object. A pet approaches. A sensor notices. A motor acts. Software people might call it an event-driven system. Riley, Smithline’s Black Shepherd rescue, would call it Tuesday.
Riley is part mascot, part product requirement. In a founder interview, Smithline and Demele reported that the rescue dog loves cucumbers and understands only the chase-and-eat portion of fetch. Demele’s Labradoodle, Cooper, appeared in Wayzn’s video. This was not focus-group intimacy invented in a deck. Both founders had lived with dogs for most of their lives. The product came from the small daily negotiations between a pet’s schedule and a person’s.
The first version opened more than a door
Wayzn’s early momentum was swift. A crowdfunding campaign reached its goal in hours. The product appeared at CES in 2020, where it collected industry recognition, including a CES Innovation Awards honor, a Protolabs Cool Idea Award, and the Consumer Technology Association’s Mark of Excellence Award for Emerging Technology. Protolabs used stereolithography to make large, durable prototype parts, allowing the team to test and revise physical components faster than conventional tooling would permit.
Awards are pleasant because they occur under lights. Product development mostly occurs under fluorescent ones. The first Smart Pet Door units began shipping in 2020. Smithline later wrote that the company shipped before the product was fully ready. The team believed the physical hardware was right and that firmware could improve remotely. Customers supplied a blunter assessment. Complaints arrived, and Wayzn spent much of the following year improving the firmware and mobile app.
This is where Smithline’s story becomes more than an agreeable origin anecdote. He did not sand the rough edges off the record. In his own product postmortem, he acknowledged the decision to ship early and the consequences that followed. An experienced founder had still underestimated part of the job. Hardware is especially gifted at making abstractions answerable to gravity, friction, weather, Wi-Fi, pets, and the startling variety of sliding doors installed across America.
Smithline and Demele had described their risk practice years earlier: treat company growth as a series of gates. Clear one milestone, reduce a particular uncertainty, then take on the next increment of risk. It is a sober method for a physical product, where one wrong assumption can become a warehouse of wrong assumptions. Yet gates only help if the team recognizes which uncertainty matters. Customers soon identified the next one for them.
Customers did not want half a round trip
Motion detection could let a dog out. Owners still had to use the app to let the dog back in. The requests were remarkably consistent: give the animal a collar tag. The desired experience was wonderfully simple. A dog approaches from either side, the system recognizes the right dog, and the door opens under the rules its owner has set. The implementation was a trapdoor disguised as a feature request.
Wayzn explored other routes, including an Alexa skill that could connect cameras and routines. It worked, but asked too much technical labor of the customer. Research told the company it was missing the promise. If Wayzn meant freedom for people and pets, the animal needed a reliable way back inside. In early 2021, the company began defining a rugged, waterproof collar tag with scheduling, sensitivity controls, and logic for a dog lingering near the door.
Bluetooth created a fundamental complication: it is directional and poor at judging distance. A trusted adviser with deeper technical expertise warned Smithline early and repeatedly. Smithline faced a choice between an elegant, difficult form factor and a more cumbersome design that would be easier to execute. He kept the clean design. His reasoning was understandable: better to struggle toward a product customers would want than efficiently build one they would reject. His later judgment was more nuanced. Commitment to the vision had begun to interfere with his reading of the risk.
The Pet Tag finally began shipping in July 2024, after three years of work and substantial personal investment. Smithline marked the milestone not with a victory lap but with an essay titled “Founder Blind Spots Along the Product Development Journey.” He put the mistakes mostly on himself. That choice is revealing. Plenty of founders celebrate endurance. Fewer publish the map of where endurance became stubbornness.
A customer’s sentence describes the benefit. It does not describe the engineering. Price those separately.
Persistence is useful. So is a good postmortem.
Asked about his superpower, Smithline answered with one word: tenacity. He participates in adventure races and other endurance events, pursuits that reward training, discomfort, and continuing after enthusiasm has packed a bag and gone home. Hardware startups offer the same pleasures without scenery. Wayzn had to contend with disrupted supply, tight capital, and a market in which manufacturing mistakes cannot be patched with a keystroke.
But tenacity is not merely the refusal to quit. At its most useful, it is the willingness to remain in conversation with reality. Wayzn changed its firmware. It built the tag customers kept requesting. It used outside manufacturing expertise to accelerate physical learning. Smithline eventually converted his own difficult decision into advice for other product builders. The persistence mattered because it was paired, however belatedly, with revision.
The company culture Smithline and Demele described follows the same logic. Wayzn is a family business built on mutual respect, open communication, patience, and a focus on customer needs. Even the “brofounder” gag carries a small management lesson. A tiny company does not need to impersonate a cathedral. It can be serious about safety and candid about mistakes while keeping the atmosphere human.
Smithline’s work now extends beyond pet access. In late 2023 he founded Outset Career Prep, an organization focused on helping college students prepare early for internships and recruiting. Its problem looks entirely different until it does not. Students often discover too late that career opportunities have hidden calendars, requirements, and signals. Outset tries to make those mechanisms visible. Wayzn gives an animal agency over a physical threshold. Outset tries to give a student agency over an institutional one.
A small philosophy of useful invention
Across Smithline’s career, the most interesting move is not invention from nothing. It is noticing dormant capacity. Casino databases contained marketing intelligence that Opticity tried to release. Small businesses had data they could use if analytics became more accessible. Sliding doors already offered generous passage if someone could make them intelligent. College students already possess ambition, but often lack the timing and translation that recruiting systems demand.
There is modesty in this kind of entrepreneurship. The world need not be demolished and rebuilt. Sometimes the useful thing is already in the wall. The founder’s job is to see it differently, attach a mechanism, and then suffer through the details until the mechanism deserves trust.
Smithline once summarized Wayzn’s purpose as making dogs free and happy. It is a line with the cheerful directness of a refrigerator magnet, and that is precisely why it works. Behind it sit sensors, encryption, motors, industrial design, firmware, mobile software, customer support, and years of decisions. The promise stays simple because the product cannot.
Riley, meanwhile, does not need the postmortem. The door opens. The yard awaits. Fetch remains negotiable.