I want to tell you about two nights that changed the direction of my career. One involved a tow truck in the Mission. The other involved a park in San Jose and a Labrador named Tiger.
Both nights ended the same way: with me realising that a basic, obvious piece of infrastructure simply does not exist. And that the gap between what should exist and what actually exists was wide enough to build a company in.
The Night the Mission Marathon Found My Car First
It was a Saturday in October. I had parked my new BMW on Valencia Street the night before, legally, as far as I could tell. No posted notices on that particular block. No temporary signs that I had seen. I went to sleep at midnight.
At 3:07am, a tow truck operator in the Mission District was attaching a hook to my front axle. He had a job to do. The SF Marathon had road closures beginning at 4am, and my car was in the route. He had every right to tow it. He did not have my phone number, my email address, or any way to reach me. So he did not try.
I woke up at 7am to move my car before the sweepers came, and found an empty stretch of asphalt.
"For thirty minutes I walked the block three times, convinced I had the wrong street. Then I saw the tow-away zone sign. It had been posted at 1am, two hours after I parked."
What followed was a four-hour ordeal I now know by heart:
Here is what I kept thinking on the ride to the impound lot: the tow truck driver had been standing next to my car for several minutes. He had looked at it. He had attached equipment to it. At any point, a 30-second interaction, a knock on my door, a note on my windshield with a callback number, anything, could have resolved this before it started.
But there was no mechanism for that. No way to identify me. No way to reach me. Just a hook, a truck, and $718.
What I Did Next, and Why It Did Not Work
After that night, one month after driving my new BMW off the lot, I did what any engineer does with an annoying problem: I tried to solve it with the tools that existed.
- A phone number sticker on my windshield. I lasted three weeks before a parking enforcement officer told me this was technically a violation and, more practically, that I was now handing my personal number to everyone who walked past my car on Valencia Street.
- A neighbour alert app. Requires the person noticing your car to already have the app, know your username, and live within notification range. None of which applied to a tow truck driver at 3am.
- Registering with AutoReturn's alert system. Alerts you after the tow, not before. Also requires pre-registration every time you park in a new zone.
- Posting my plate number on a local Facebook group. Not doing that.
None of these solved the actual problem: a stranger needs to reach you about your car, right now, without knowing who you are, without downloading an app, and without exposing your personal information. In 2025, no product was built for it.
Why San Francisco Makes This Worse Than Most Cities
SF is a particularly acute version of a universal problem. The city has over 120 special event parking restrictions per year. Marathon routes, Pride corridors, Giants game days, Carnaval in the Mission, each one creates a wave of temporary no-parking zones that appear with as little as two hours' notice.
The city posts physical signs. They are often placed after residents have already parked. A meaningful percentage of those 50,000 tows are from residents who did nothing wrong except park before a sign went up. The math is brutal, and it is structurally unavoidable, not because people are careless, but because the notification infrastructure does not exist.
Tiger: The Dog That Made It Personal Twice
Six months after the Mission tow, my dog Tiger, a four-year-old Labrador with a fondness for squirrels and a total disregard for leash discipline, slipped his collar in a park in San Jose and disappeared into a tree line.
He was found 40 minutes later by a family having a picnic. They had no way to reach me. Tiger had a standard engraved tag with my name on it, but not my current phone number. I had changed it eight months earlier and forgotten to update the tag. The family held him for two hours, posted to three Facebook groups, and finally surrendered him to a shelter at closing time.
I picked him up the next morning, $220 in shelter fees lighter, after a night I would rather not describe.
Two incidents. Two moments where a stranger had physical proximity to something that mattered to me, my car, my dog, and had no mechanism to reach me anonymously, instantly, and without either of us compromising our privacy.
The Question That Became Wavr
I have spent most of my career building data platforms and privacy infrastructure for large organisations. The technology to solve this problem is not exotic. Anonymous contact relay, QR-based identity abstraction, push notification infrastructure, none of this is new. What was missing was someone building it as a consumer product, with the right trust and safety layer, for the specific context of physical assets in public spaces.
That is what Wavr is. A scannable tag that connects anyone to you: instantly, anonymously, and without a trace. About your vehicle, your pet, or your property. Your phone number, location, and identity never leave your control.
If a tow truck driver had scanned a Wavr Mark tag on my BMW at 2:58am, I would have woken up, moved the car in four minutes, and gone back to sleep $718 richer. If Tiger's collar had a Wavr Fetch tag, the family in the park would have scanned it, I would have received a push notification with their GPS location, and reunited with him in under 30 minutes.
Neither of those outcomes required magic. They required infrastructure that should have been built years ago.
cost you $718.