A misspelled surname, a car phone in a movie and years spent making smartphones taught Anand Janefalkar the same lesson: technology works best when it gets out of the conversation. UJET is his decade-long attempt to make customer service behave accordingly.

One experiment with a pile of neglected sales leads revealed a $400,000 answer. Chris Bache spent the next decade turning that answer into Hatch, then carried it through Y Combinator and a $270 million acquisition by Yelp.