Jumping out of airplanes — and landing safely on the ground — demands some level of perfection: The chute must be packed right, the rigging strong, the techniques practiced. Failure is not really an option in skydiving.

But that's where Mary Haskett learned to be an entrepreneur. "To me, being an entrepreneur is about risk-taking, my first business was a skydiving school so it isn’t foreign to me," she explains. "I didn’t think of myself as a business owner, I was a skydiver, but we negotiated contracts and did all these things and yes, you have failures but part of the lesson is when you fail, the only failure is if you stop. You pick yourself up, you learn as much as you can from it and then you keep going."

After spending time at some of the world's largest corporations and the U.S. Defense department, Haskett found herself working with Alex Kilpatrick, a technical developer. They decided to team up, and last year launched Tactical Information Systems (TIS), a biometric driven start-up specializing in fingerprint, palmprint, iris, and face matching.

"We basically decided we just needed to make a clean break and take the plunge do the start-up full time," says Kilpatrick. "In retrospect, I think that was absolutely what we had to do. If you try to just say I’m going to work a couple hours a week on my start-up you’re never really gonna get there."

"I knew I wanted to do another start-up I really like working with small companies and we knew we had experience with this technology, but we really went through a pretty long process sort of brainstorming ‘what is the best use of this.' It has to be something you feel really passionate about."

Haskett and Kilpatrick are passionate about helping people find other people. Haskett cared for her mother-in-law as she battled Alzheimer's disease, Kilpatrick is a parent. "The first product we’re launching is called Wander ID," says Haskett. "It’s an identification system for at-risk individuals. So our first target is special needs children or Alzheimer’s patients, senior citizens with dementia, people who can't reliably identify themselves in case of emergency."

Wander ID allows care-givers to easily upload a photo to the TIS servers. That photo is entered into a secure database with that person's contact information. On the other end, law enforcement officers and first responders have a the Wander ID app on their smartphones. When first responders find an unidentified individual, they can take a photo using their smartphone, upload it to WanderID cloud servers and the TIS database can match the facial characteristics within minutes — with upwards of 99 percent accuracy.

TIS won Austin's IBM Smartcamp last spring which landed them an office at the Austin Technology Incubator. It's a small office, hardly of the sort either are used to after working high in the corporate structure, but with little more than a couple of desks and a white board with cryptic notes, it's a place Haskett and Kilpatrick say they are more than comfortable.

"I don’t think I could go back to working in a large corporate structure," explains Haskett. "I think I’m spoiled and I’m just going to be a start-up, small company person because there’s just nothing like it, it is so much fun."

"There’s sort of this illusion of security and job security that was probably true 20 years ago or 30 years ago. I don’t believe that’s true anymore," adds Kilpatrick. "There’s really not much job security in a regular job. The nice thing about being a start-up is you see all the disasters coming, in a regular job you don’t see them until they’re on top of you."

Back to that idea about learning from failure. It's a truism shared by most innovators. "The only way to truly fail is to quit," says Haskett. "I don’t think we’ll ever stop, we’ll always be developing that next product because that’s the part that’s really fun."