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- [00:01]
A
There are a thousand communities that have the same risk profile as Altadena, California, which just burned to the ground. If we don't act within the next five to 10 years, they will all burn.
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Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by Frontlines IO, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with Venture backed founders and marketers where they talk all things build a market. If you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now with all that said, let's jump into today's episode. Our guest today is Alison Wolf, CEO of Vibrant Planet. Alison, welcome back to the show.
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A
Thanks for having me. Excited to reconnect.
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B
I know it's been about three years since you were last on, so good to see you again and super excited. It's been fun following along with the progress. There's been a lot of fires since we last spoke.
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A
Yes, there have.
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B
Are you seeing more demand than you could possibly have imagined?
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A
Yeah, demand has definitely ticked up with our land management and community protection customers, as well as utilities. And as you can imagine, insurance is becoming a pretty interesting part of our conversation. So we can dig into all three if you want.
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B
Yeah, let's do it. Maybe let's take a step back. Let's just talk about the company at a high level. Like I was kind of referring to there. You were on the podcast three years ago. A lot of the audience that's listening today probably wasn't listening three years ago. So maybe let's start with just a high level overview of what the company does.
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A
Yeah, we were just babies back then. Yeah. So Vibrant Planet is a wildfire risk monitoring and forecasting platform that also supports decision support. So it helps agencies like Cal fire or the U.S. forest Service or a fire district prioritize where should I go to mitigate the most risk that affects the most people or natural resources? And so it basically helps. It's a recommendation engine that spits out where they should go to get the most bang for the buck. Basically because there's always limited resources. It would cost a trillion dollars to treat the entire west to actually mitigate risk, getting forests and other ecosystems restored, doing all the home hardening and community hardening and defensible space work we would need to do. So our customers are Always trying to figure out where, where should we spend to get the most impact on the wildfire problem?
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B
And where's the data coming from? Is it satellites or is that a mix? What's the source of data?
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A
Yeah, it's a lot of data. We have hundreds and hundreds of data sets, some of which we produce ourselves, that are kind of foundational to the way the system works. And then we're also a master curator of data to help at any scale make sure that the agencies and utilities and other customers we're working with have the data they need to work with at their fingertips in a scenario planning environment. So one of the breakthroughs that we've had as a company is our investment in machine learning, a form of AI to build out a very fine scale vegetation structure layer the way fires become big. A big part of that is the vegetation structure. So in a forest environment, for example, you can imagine a forest that's got really tight trees that are very close together. A lot of those get sickly because there's often too many trees, which is sort of a mind twist. And then branches fall down and needles fall down and leaves. And so there's all this sort of, I call it kindling. There's all this dry stuff on the ground, just like when you try to start a campfire. And so when that catches fire and then trees close together, it enables the fire to ladder up into the canopy instead of staying on the ground, which can be actually a really beneficial force. Then it can turn into a catastrophic fire, which can move really fast with high wind speeds and things like that. So having that vegetation structure mapped very specifically is an important input to our fire modeling, to our monitoring of overall forest health or ecosystem health. And then the treatment design of like, you gotta cut this tree that's too close to that house, or you need to, you know, thin out this area of this 2 million acre forest so that if lightning strikes or something, the fire stays on the ground and actually puts carbon back in the soil and is actually a good thing in cleaning fuels out. So the specificity is really important and then the time currency is really important. And so we do use satellite imagery. We've got an algorithm that was trained on LiDAR and then it is refreshed with satellite imagery. And so we're able to have both the spatial and the temporal currency and resolution that we need.
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B
And for the agencies you work with, for the utilities, do they have a line item for this already or do you have to go out and convince them to spend money on a category previously were spending $0 on more and more.
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A
That has been a really big problem. Most of the money in the federal system goes to the actual treatments on the ground. Of course that is very necessary. But if the treatments are not in a prioritized, objectively created system, it's whoever was loudest in the grant cycles gets money. It's not strategic on what is going to reduce the most risk or get the greatest outcomes on forest health. And so we're bringing that scientific objective consistent data to help with where we're putting those budgets to get the most effects. And there is a lot of legislation happening from Congress but also at state levels like in the state of California where outcomes driven land management is mandated. And so now we're waiting for Congress to put budget behind that and then of course that points right at us. In the meantime, as usual, the state of California is way ahead of everybody else. Prop 4 passed last year the climate resilience bill and that bill has $1.4 billion allocated specifically to wildfire risk mitigation. Actually I can maybe announce this on your show. We've just signed a statewide deal with Cal Fire to serve all 21 units, six contract counties to help them take that and other pockets of budget they have beyond Prop 4 to make sure that they are setting priorities at a statewide scale and then aligning the local tree house level work to those statewide priorities again helping them figure out where do we deploy 1.4 billion? Sounds like a lot. It is not enough. Where do we put that money to make sure we're protecting communities as best we possibly can in the state of California?
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B
Earlier today I had on the head of global comms and public policy at Mozilla and the theme of our episode was just talking about how for startups now they have to really be thinking about policy. And I think previously there were, you know, a general view that, you know, maybe it was for big companies to be thinking about policy and trying to influence policy but now a lot of startups are doing it and a lot of startups I talk to that's you know, top of mind for them. For you. Are you spending money? Are you investing in a lobbyist and trying to influence policy?
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A
We are, yes. It is a little bit of a sad thing in our society that policy is so shaped by corporate America and we are one of those but hopefully as a public benefit corp doing the right kind of lobbying. So yeah, so we have a lobbyist who helps us mostly with congressional lobbying but also with some of the agency leadership for the new U.S. wildland Fire Service, a new agency that has been set up under Doug Burgam and Department of Interior, which will be the nation's new fire service and then Forest Service under usda. So he mostly focuses on that. We are just starting to think about state level lobbyists because like I just said, Cal Fire has figured out it really needs to invest in risk mitigation, not just fire suppression. And so there's significant money in Prop 4 that passed. Other states do not have that kind of budget. They have very small budgets for risk mitigation work. And all the money really goes to fire suppression, which is exacerbating the problem because there's more and more fuels. So we are building some storytelling to help the state legislature side in key states in the west really understand why they need to move money up into the risk mitigation side before a fire breaks out to make sure fires are not as catastrophic. In doing so, hopefully we can influence some budgets and get more community risk mitigated.
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B
And when you say building some storytelling out, like, what does that look like? What's the output of those efforts?
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A
Yeah, so one of the great things about moving from literally when I started the company with my co founders in 2020, people were working on paper maps with really crappy data. Try scenario planning in that environment. So being able to bring all of this data together in a rich interactive environment where you can build visual scenarios and display information on risk and how much have I bought down that risk If I put this much budget in, how much have I bought down risk for my neighborhood? Being able to show that output helps people understand, oh wow, we really need to do that. And we can show different treatment scenarios, types of intensities of treatment, things like defensible space or forest thinning, prescribed fire versus no action. Right. Like if you continue to not invest, this is what your community looks like or this is what the western US Looks like, which is I testified in front of Congress for the Fix our Forest act. Since we spoke last. When was that? Like nine months ago. And showed some really powerful visuals to the Natural Resources Committee showing just that. Like, you know, it was on the heels of the Altadena fire. And I showed them a map of there are a thousand communities that have the same risk profile as Altadena, California which just burned to the ground. If we don't act within the next five to 10 years, they will all burn like it's 100% probability. So we gotta move faster. And so being able to show that where those senators, the states they sit in were like, oh, shit. Okay. So, yeah, it's been very effective, and I really hope we can help unlock some more state money for not just us, but the whole ecosystem, the whole economy that needs to stand up to actually make these areas more resilient.
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B
What was it like preparing to go testify like that?
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Well, our lobbyist helped a ton. Just coaching me on, you know, it's a pretty wild experience. You know, I had, I think, seven minutes to make my case with the visuals. So, you know, really tight, powerful storytelling. And then you're there for two hours getting grilled as an expert. So, you know, just being ready. And it was really interesting. So it helped me practice for what kinds of questions they expected to come up. And incredibly helpful.
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This show is brought to you by Frontlines Media podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you're a founder, you may be thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast. I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit Frontlines I.O. podcast. Now back to today's episode. I just watch, you know, on Twitter, I always see, like, the sound bites. And what it seems like oftentimes in those types of testimonies is, you know, they're just kind of there for the gotchas or, you know, certain people are there, they're curious, but some of the politicians are there for, like, the kind of gotcha moments due to the nature of what you're doing. Is it, like, controversial? Like, was there anyone asking you gotcha questions or anything like that? Or is it true? Just curiosity?
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A
No, I really didn't feel that. I mean, I think people were sort of using me in a way to make a point they've been trying to make about why society needs to invest in the risk mitigation and resilience building space. So, you know, asking clearly pointed questions to get the right thing to come out of my mouth, because you could tell that she or he had been arguing with others in the group. But the cool thing about Wildfire with how, you know, we're in our filter bubbles, my friend Eli Pariser coined, we're so politically divided, obviously, the one thing I've seen is that on fire, there is no political division. There is complete agreement on what needs to happen. And even in the risk mitigation space, I mean, nationally, everybody gets that we have to balance budgets for not just fire suppression. Of course we have to suppress fires to keep communities from burning down. But we have to put at least as much money into the risk mitigation front. And it is apolitical. It's one of the only issues I think in our country that is apolitical right now.
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B
That has to feel good.
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A
You can navigate it, it's really cool and like they're really working together to try to figure this out and what
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needs to happen to have everything kind of shift to being more proactive here and have mitigation. Like what needs to change? Is it unlock funds and then that's it? Or what else would have to change?
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A
I mean there literally has to be a whole industry stood up. So we have to think about the entire system. Like we help with the prioritization and the planning and that helps with the predictability of how many burn bosses do you need to do prescribed fire in the west or in a state over the next three years if you're doing mechanical thinning where sometimes forests are so overgrown and unnatural, like they look nothing like they used to before we cut them all down and they grew back too thick. Right. Like there's a lot of biomass that needs to come out right now that biomass just gets stacked up out in the forest and sometimes they'll do a prescribed Bayer and burn it and all those emissions go into the atmosphere or it just rots and emits methane. Right. There's a whole bunch of wood products that wood can go into from biochar to put in crops to make them more climate resilient to buildings. Like cross laminated timber is one of my favorite wood products. Where we can take small crappy wood from California and other forests and we can laminate it or dowel it together and then it becomes building blocks for super low carbon affordable housing. Like there's so many cool things we can do with this material, but it hasn't been investable because it's been really hard to have supply certainty to drive investment. And so our system like literally can provide the supply of the biomass so that investors can invest in biochar and other super cool climate smart industries. So my hope is that we're producing the foundational analytics and predictability and then you know, a workforce, an industry that can utilize wood, you know, trained workforce of scientists and foresters and burn bosses and people can set up businesses and buy million dollar machines that go do that work. But that whole industry has to set up. So it's truly a super wicked problem. And we are out of time. And so it's like, how do you stand up a whole resilience economy overnight to get all this work done?
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And what's the plan? How does that get stood up overnight?
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A
It's been really cool just since I got into this. There's a lot of philanthropy that's moving into this space. There are investors like convective Capital that are specialized in wildfire solutions, and they're really looking comprehensively at the space. And where does an injection of capital become catalytic philanthropy, too? Like, the Moore foundation has been absolutely incredible as a catalyst for just funding early stage companies or nonprofits or tribes or others to make sure that we're starting to seed the whole system, that whole resilience economy, starting to get seed capital so that it can actually grow. I think the big question is how do we kind of fan the flames to stay in the fire metaphor, to make sure that all these things succeed? Because they have to. Like, we don't have a lot of time for things to fail. So, yeah, I don't know. That's what I know at the moment about what's going on.
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B
And this is probably a dumb question, but, like, how does the problem of fire Compare to like 100 years ago? Like, is it getting worse and worse? And are you surprised with where it is today compared to when you started in 2020, or, like the stuff that I'm seeing in the news, like all of the fires, like, what do you see those things? Are you just like, exactly what I expected five years ago, six years ago?
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A
Yeah. I mean, our fire science team does all the forecasting nationally, so we know what it looks like. We know the thousand communities are that look like Altadena and they've been like that for years. So, yeah, I mean, things have definitely gotten worse and they will continue to worsen. I mean, we're just kind of at the tip of the iceberg right now, which is probably why we have to move faster. So, I mean, the history of why it has become so bad, if you want me to just kind of lay that out quickly. So there's different types of fires, but when we're talking about wildland fires that then catch communities on fire, the reason that is happening more and more is a lot of that starts in forests. It's often also in grasslands and shrublands, which is a little bit of a different issue in grasslands and shrublands, like down in Southern California in non forested areas. So like the Palisades fire a year and a half ago now, that was more shrublands. Grasslands catching fire. And that is a very climate driven event. Severe winds, hot drought, not a ton you can do other than harden homes and make sure you have really good evacuation routes and things like that. The Altadena fire that happened at the same time was butt up against a forested area. And in that case we did some post fire analysis. Our system is deployed down there in four U.S. forest Service forests that abut Altadena. We did some post fire analysis that I shared in Congress. If $9 million, just $9 million had been invested in strategic areas to thin out the forest along the wild urban interface of Altadena, we could have potentially slowed the fire down enough. We wouldn't have stopped the fire, but we could have slowed it down enough for a more successful defense to be set up by firefighters. There were $40 billion worth of insured losses of people's homes that burned down. So imagine if we put $9 million up front in the right places, avoiding potentially $40 billion of real estate or at least a large portion of that we believe would have not burned down. So those are the kinds of going back to the communications. We can do those sort of analytics and show people an animation of here's how the fire moved, here's where we could have slowed it down is super effective. This show is brought to you by the global Talent company, a marketing leader's best friend. In these times of budget cuts and efficient growth. We help marketing leaders find, hire, vet and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70% less than their US and European counterparts. To book a free consultation, visit GlobalTalent co.
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B
I mean that seems like a no brainer for an agency that doesn't go with you. Like what's their reason? Why wouldn't they. Agency, utility, end customer. Like if you're being told no, like why are they telling you no? Are they not understanding it? Or like in the sales process? Why would they say no?
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A
They're saying more and more yes now partly because of the intensity of the problem. I'll go back and finish the history here in a sec. Part of it is we've got a track record, right? Like we've been at this, we've been deployed in, you know, dozens of millions of acres for a while now. And so we've got the reputational credit and some of it is red tape. You know, we've been proving ourselves that the US Forest Service with the administration change, a lot of things got cut and there's new red tape. There's always been red tape. We'd kind of mastered Getting through that. Now there's new red tape and new policies on technology purchasing and stuff like that. And, you know, I think the Forest Service would really like to scale with us, and we cannot get through the contracting process. It's really difficult. So some of it is just, you know, the bureaucracy that is well known and being in the way of intent. So that's some of it. And then there's also, like, when we first started, there was very much in the natural resource agency, whether it's a state natural resource agency or a federal resource agency. There's a lot of researchers and scientists inside, and they're very dubious of the private sector. Natural resource agencies work very differently from the DoD, where DoD has very clear pathways for public private partners partnerships where R and D might happen in the dod, and then they'll work with a Boeing to build the plane that was maybe conceived, and then Boeing builds on that design, and then they sell it to the dod. Right. So we don't have those kinds of pathways in natural resource agencies, but there's a big call for it. That's one of the benefits of the Trump administration. There is actually language in Congress and from the White House about this that is appropriate. Like, we really do need to bring the best of the public sector and the best of the private sector together to move as fast as we need to move. So if you want, I can go back, like, the forested area that I was talking about near Altadena and many forested areas across the west, but really all over the United States now. I mean, we're seeing fires in the Southeast, right. We have a history in the US of we cut everything down. Like, we played out the Lorax in the Western US there's only about 7% of actual old growth left. So we literally wiped out. It's like the children's book the Lorax. And then we didn't really manage the regrowth, and species that weren't fire adapted grew into these empty places that are pioneering species. And so we've got an absolute mess that has been growing and growing for the last 150 years since we cut it all down. So now we've got this tangled mess of forest. The other thing is we've always had fire from lightning. And then Native American tribes used fire a ton to manage land. And we stopped all that. We put every fire out. We've had 100% fire suppression policy in the US for 100 years. And we removed tribes from the land. And so there was no one managing with fire. And so These systems evolved with fire, and fire is how they keep an appropriate number of trees per acre. It's how fire calls down the number of trees, cleans out all the downbrush, all that kindling. It's how these forests cycle carbon, how they cycle nutrients. And we've completely disrupted the natural ecology and structure of the vegetation and forests. And so it's biting us in the ass now. So now when a fire starts, like I was saying earlier, it can ladder up, it can go up to the canopy, and then you're screwed. You're just evacuating people. So we have to look really holistically, how do we eliminate some of the fuels to keep fire on the ground? We actually want more fire, ironically. We just want to have the right kind of fire that's cleaning the forest out, calling the babies down a little bit so that it keeps it from getting overgrown again. And then that also protects communities. And then we also have a lot more people that have moved into the wild urban interface, including myself. I live right in a forest, and it's beautiful. But we've chosen to live in this place that has always had fire. So we need to adapt our homes, our building materials, our roofing materials, and how we might want to have bushes right up against our house because it's pretty, but we can't if that's where we choose to live. Right. So we can adapt and live within these landscapes, but we haven't really done it right yet. And so all those things sort of add up to what has become this gnarly perfect storm and this super wicked problem, because now we have to make everything more resilient, and we have to do it overnight.
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B
I grew up in Lake Arrowhead, California, for a number of years when I was younger. And, like, I'm probably traumatized from it, but, like, I can remember, like, five or six, like, evacuating our house. Like, that was just a common thing that you did in Lake Arrowhead, California. And I think I realized, like, that's not common for people who, like, didn't grow up in the mountains and don't know, like, how scary that is, Especially as, like, a child. We were like, okay, grab all your toys and everything you can. Like, we're evacuating. Luckily, we never had, like, our house never burned down, but it was still scary. That was, like, a thing that was constantly on our mind. Yeah.
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A
And we don't think about fire in the Southeast, but, you know, we've got big fires in Florida and Georgia, and, you know, the Northeast forecast is not looking Good. I mean, it is everywhere. And, you know, I think the fires in Lahaina, you know, we think of Hawaii as tropical and like, what? But Hawaii's got some of the highest fire danger of the entire United States, even higher than California. So, yeah, I mean, it's just helping the public and policymakers understand the gravity of the problem. We know what to do, but there's a lot of mobilizing to actually, you know, get the solutions in place.
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B
Well, hopefully, hopefully everyone wakes up because I'm. I'm going to end this call a little bit more scared than when I started the call.
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A
Sorry.
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I want to end with what we
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know what to do.
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B
Yeah, I know what to do. Now, one final question for you and just to tie it back to the founders that are listening in, what advice would you have to founders that are sitting there realizing that they need to go out and they need to hire lobbyists and they need to influence policy? Like, what's your advice to them?
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A
Yeah, I think that our society, I mean, humans have always been storytellers, and I think that now storytelling is even more important. Unfortunately, our storytelling has turned into shouting and a lot of misinformation and it's very hard to break through. But I do think that so much of success is telling your story and making sure you have a really clear, powerful narrative that helps influence your sector. And yeah, I mean, I think it's, you know, creating a policy environment that helps streamline your sector and your company's success is really important, obviously mobilizing customers. So many of our decisions are emotional, no matter what we're buying. And so I think that's one of the really key things that founders need to think about. I think sometimes founders are not thinking about themselves as storytellers when they really
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B
have to be amazing, that's where we're going to end things. This has been so fun. Great catching up with you. Where should we send people if they want to follow along with you and your journey?
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A
Yeah, thanks again for having me back. So, yeah, you can go to vibrantplanet.com and you'll see our story. And yeah, we're doing a lot of updates now reflecting all of us are moving into this agentic world. So that will be an ever changing story on our website and some of the things that we plan to offer here soon. So, yeah, find us there. I'm on LinkedIn. And yeah, thanks again for having me. Of course.
- [27:01]
B
Well, that's all for today's episode of Builders, brought to you by the Frontlines. If you want more amazing content like this, visit Frontlines IO, where you'll find a library of more than 1500 interviews with founders, marketers and other GTM leaders, where we unpack the tactical technical lessons from their journey. And of course, as always, if you do want to launch your own podcast, we'd love to have a conversation with you. Visit Frontlines IO podcast as a service. Mention that you listen, mention you love the show, and we'll give you a 10% discount. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode.