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Inevitable
Building a Real-Time Wildfire Alert Platform with Watch Duty
01:06:25
John Mills is the Co-Founder and CEO of Watch Duty, the leading app for real-time wildfire alerts in the U.S. In this episode of Inevitable, John shares how Watch Duty became a vital public safety tool—rising to #1 in the App Store during the recent Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Watch Duty delivers live updates on fire spread, evacuations, and recovery efforts. While historically funded by donations and memberships, the platform now also offers a pro version for first responders, utilities, and emergency managers. John discusses his vision for building a mission-driven tech company that serves the public while scaling to meet growing demand in an increasingly wildfire-prone world.
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- [00:01]
Cody Sims
Today on Inevitable, our guest is John Mills, co founder and CEO of WatchDuty. WatchDuty has become the definitive app for public safety communications around wildfires in the US during the recent devastating Palisades and Eaton fires In Los Angeles, WatchDuty rose to number one in the app store, surpassing ChatGPT. The service offers live notifications and alerts on fire spread, evacuations and firefighting efforts, as well as information on recovery centers for fire victims. WatchDuty is a 501c3 nonprofit relying wholly up until recently on donations and memberships for its financing. But as I learned in the conversation, WatchDuty also now offers a pro version, still under the nonprofit umbrella that it sells to first responders, utilities and emergency managers. Part of what John wants to do with WatchDuty is build a different kind of company, one that is first and foremost a public service and one that is also a highly valuable technology enabled product with scale and resources. As a Los Angeles resident, I unexpectedly found myself dependent on watch duty in January. I hope that none of you who are listening right now ever find yourself in that situation, but in today's world, I'm pretty sure that's overly optimistic. And when Wildfire does hit close to home, I'm sure you will be as grateful as I am that John and the WatchDuty team have dedicated themselves to building such an amazing and thoughtful platform. From McJ, I'm Cody Sims and this is inevitable.
- [01:51]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
Climate change is inevitable already here, but.
- [01:56]
Cody Sims
So are the solutions shaping our future.
- [02:00]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
Join us every week to learn from.
- [02:03]
Cody Sims
Experts and entrepreneurs about the transition of energy and industry.
- [02:11]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
John, welcome to the show.
- [02:13]
John Mills
Thanks for having me, Cody.
- [02:14]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
Boy, I've been looking forward to this. Just for context for everybody, John, we booked this episode last fall. I met you at Red Sky Summit, which is a wildfire tech conference that our friends Bill Clarico and the Convective Capital folks put on up in the Bay Area. I'd never heard of WatchDuty. I'd never met you. I saw you on a panel and I was like, this guy's clever, kind of funny guy. And this app is really cool. I downloaded it sitting there in the conference. You gave away, I think a pro membership to the folks who are in attendance. Set up some alerts for my zip code and for a few family members I have in the Western U.S. just so I would know what was going on and I would get little alerts here and there. None of them were close to people that I was really all that worried about and I didn't really think A whole lot of it. And then on January 7th, which is the day of the fires in LA, I live in Los Angeles, I got a note about a fire in the Palisades. An alert popped up. I was like, oh, wow, interesting. And then 10 minutes later, my wife texted me a photo of a big plume of smoke saying, hey, it looks like there's a fire in the Palisades. And from that moment, for the next 10 days, probably of my life, I bet I checked watch duty every 10 or 15 minutes, including many times waking up in the middle of the night to check it. For your benefit and the benefit of listeners. Our home is fine. I don't live in the Palisades, but I did end up living in what became the evacuation zone. We were evacuated for a few days and there were a couple days there where it was really nerve wracking. And watch duty was the thing was incredible. And so with that context, I've been deeply looking forward to having you on the show and hearing your story.
- [03:58]
John Mills
Well, thanks for having me. And I'd like to remind people. You're welcome. And I'm sorry, I'm sorry that we need this. I'm sorry this is happening and I'm just glad that I could do something about it because I've been through this too. And I'm sorry I have to do it, but it's my pleasure to provide such a service to the world, especially as a nonprofit.
- [04:16]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
Why don't we start with what it is? I think anyone in California at this point and in most of the western US probably has used it or heard of it by now. But for broader listeners who maybe haven't, what is watchduty?
- [04:28]
John Mills
Watchduty, I mean really simply put, is emergency alerting platform for wildfires specifically. But that's where it started, not where it's going to end. But really, if you've been through fire before, you know that information is very sparse and hard to find, especially during the first call. It 24 to 72 hours is pretty bad. And so we do real time alerting from radio traffic of first responders fighting the fire. And that's how we do what we do so fast.
- [04:54]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
And it's mostly volunteer run, is that right?
- [04:58]
John Mills
Yeah, like many nonprofits, it's staff and volunteer supported. So the ratio is probably 1 to 10, I'd say. I mean, we have about 200 volunteers and about 15 of us are paid. Half of those are engineers and product. The other half are actually paid staff reporters that come from the volunteer world. And then there's only about 50 people who can actually post information on watch duty. And the other 150 or so volunteers are contributors. They're people who either don't want to post, can't post legally because of their job or whatever, but they do provide intelligence and they collaborate and work together with the reporters in real time.
- [05:30]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
And just for folks who haven't used it, I mean, it's basically a map. You can zoom in on areas of the map and. And it shows you active incidents and gives alerts and tries to define what's going on. It's actually sharing what the various fire departments are up to at any given moment in terms of where they're actively fighting the fire, as well as in some cases, what they anticipate the fire to do. How does that information make its way into the app?
- [05:54]
John Mills
Well, to your point, watch duty was really born out of the idea of fire Twitter, what it used to be called. It was all these Twitterers who were following the wildland fires. And that's all just text based, which is actually very helpful, but it helps to have geospatial information as well. So we have a map and a newsfeed. But the reality is, is that there's not much mapping data when this fire first ignites. The Palisade fire was eating a football field every two seconds, I believe, at its peak. And so there's not enough data and satellites to provide this. The future is not here yet when it comes to wildland fire, it's kind of wild. And so that lack of information is really why the radio reports are so important. So if you read the first couple hours of the Palisades fire, we have a lat long we know where the fire is, but we're telling a story where the wind is going. I think it was going south southwest at the time, throwing embers about three quarters of a mile or a mile ahead of the firefront. And houses were being impacted almost immediately. And so there's no visual data for that, unfortunately, except for the wildfire cameras provided by Alert west and Alert California. And you can see those publicly funded wildfire cameras. That helps you get an idea of where it is. But those are mountaintop fires. You can't see inside canyons and whatnot. And so it's really a storyline, if anything. It's almost like listening to a sports reporting of baseball on the radio. You have to visualize in your mind it's running on this canyon, it's going this direction, it's impacting Palisades Drive. Unfortunately, we don't Know where it is, other than what we hear on the first responder radios.
- [07:25]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
Was there resistance from the fire department when you started publishing maps of here's what the fire looks like, you know, who are these jokers, these people off on the side who are sharing official emergency disaster information?
- [07:37]
John Mills
Yeah, I mean, it depends on who you ask. We have a lot of really well to do fire chiefs on our advisory board, including Orange County Fire Chief Brian Fennesee, San Bernardino Fire Chief Dan Munsey, and just recently, the former US Fire Administrator Lori Moore Merrill just joined our advisory board. And so we have exemplary firefighters who put their neck out to do what is right, and they know what we're doing and they know how we do it. It was much harder at first because it was definitely like, what are these folks doing? This is like screaming fire in a crowded theater which results in lawsuits and deaths. And after a couple years of doing this, people understood our level of diligence, how we'd only report fire activity, not engine rollovers and helicopter accidents and other hearsay. It is directly from the first responders on the fire ground. It has taken its time, but trust is, you know, takes a long time to build and a second to lose. And so it's really important that we continue building trust with everybody, the community, the firefighters and first responders. Because frankly, all me tanker pilots and dozer operators tell me they're using watch duty in their aircraft. This has become a tool used by everybody. And so as long as we deliver a quality product day in and day out, I think we're on the right path and the good side of history here. And so it's really a fine line to walk. And I understand their fears. I get it. And we're slowly getting over that. Over these past three and a half years we've been operating.
- [09:04]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
I want to come back to the whole notion of watch duty now actually being used by first responders as an incident dashboard. Let's come back to that because I think that's a really important topic that is almost this strange full circle moment that you guys are now having with the service. I'd like to spend a little bit of time understanding what it feels like during an incident as the Palisades fire was happening. What does the volunteer staff, what's essentially the equivalent of the war room for watch duty look like?
- [09:37]
John Mills
It's interesting, that fire. There was only one reporter who is near that fire. The rest of us are scattered across the west, all over the place. And so I've been sitting in my room here with tankers flying overhead, going to a fire nearby. And it's very different when you, you know, they're fighting a fire near you. But that day, January 7, was definitely a wild one. We got the red flag alert probably a week or so before. I forget the amount of days. Probably four or five days before, maybe longer. But kudos to the weather service, and hopefully that's still around when this recording goes live. But it's important to be able to have these signals knowing that really potentially dangerous situations are going to be showing up. And so when that happens, we're not too dissimilar from the fire service. We start pre positioning people, not engines and equipment, but people. We say, hey, this is going to be one of the worst weather systems we've seen since we've been doing this. So if you had plans, cancel them. We were hoping nothing was going to happen. Unfortunately, it did. I remember I was in a meeting with one of our larger funders at around 10, I think, from 10 to 11. And then that fire started at 10:25. It was reported at 10:30. And then we started sending alerts at 10:32. So very quickly, we knew this was going to be catastrophic. You can see from the wildfire cameras that there was a decent sized head fire on it. The big cloud, essentially. And then the wind was pushing it, so it's not going up into the sky. It's pushed against the earth and being driven by the wind. And so very quickly, we knew this was going to be a catastrophic nightmare. And so pretty quickly, within an hour or two, we definitely started to clock pretty heavy traffic on our system in general. So the reporters start clearing their schedules.
- [11:22]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
The Eden fire started happening right around the same time, I think. Did it not the one in Altadena?
- [11:27]
John Mills
Yeah, it was a little bit after. I forget the exact time of that one, actually. I haven't done the after action review on that one. I've done the Palisades fire. It's something I need to do. My team does all this. We record and document everything, and so we learn from it. I have been so busy ever since then. It is March, and it still feels like January 56th. I mean, I don't even know where I am half the time anymore. It's getting a little easier. But I digress. Very quickly, everyone clears their schedules. We set up a specific slack channel just for these fires because they become so big and so noisy. We need to have a specific place for this, and we all start springing in action. So the engineers are throwing everything we have at it. Our system is very robust, but we started breaking records every other hour. I mean, the first day like 600,000 new users. By the next day it was one point something. A couple days later it was 2.5 million. We were doing about a hundred thousand requests a second, a peak which is about twice Wikipedia for a team of about four engineers, five engineers really. And so engineers were all hands on deck. Fires were blowing up at night. We were making phone calls to our providers, whether Amazon, Heroku, gcp, others, and saying we're having a catastrophic event here. Government sites were crashing themselves. And then of course, errant alerts were going out, waking up 12 million or so residents of LA and surrounding areas.
- [12:42]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
Not watch duty alerts, but official Amber alerts on your phone, kind of things that were going crazy here in LA a little bit.
- [12:50]
John Mills
And there were some ones that got sent out in error as well. And so then people go to the official government website, if you're lucky enough to get a link to one. And some of those WEA alerts, Wireless Emergency Alert is what that stands for, they went to those websites and they crashed. And then so everybody came to watch Judy and I think at peak we were doing, I don't know, about a million active users every 30 minutes. I mean it was a ridiculous number for a tiny team. And so that's just the engineering side, the reporters, man, those men and women are sleeping in shifts. We're door dashing of food. We're making them stop. You gotta take a break, man. It was really harrowing.
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Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
Where are they pulling all the data from on the reporter side?
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John Mills
Well, it's all from radio. It's all radio traffic. A lot of our more automated systems are easy. The fire perimeters and satellite hotspots and other stuff comes automatically. But everything else is operated by hand, even the evacuation zones and all that. We scrape, scan and mine, everything. But it's our staff who are the ones who are actually turning on and off those zones, who are hearing it from radio traffic, who are intercepting what's going on and then of course, listening to the radios diligently and then reporting on what the fire service is saying about the activity as it happens.
- [13:59]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
So this is the equivalent of listening to a police scanner, except it's the firefighting version of this. Is that right? You got it with fire service though, there are so many different departments. There's city, there's county in California, there's people coming in from Cal Fire. How are you listening across these in a big incident like this? Are all These groups talking together in one channel or are you having to listen to multiple versions of the same incident and piece things together?
- [14:23]
John Mills
It's a lot of everything. First of all, even a small incident, let's just call it a little one, you know, whatever, 20 acres somewhere. And there's Air Attack and a couple other units on scene. They'll have air to air, air to ground dispatch channels. And then there are tactical channels, which we listen to sometimes. But the tactical channels are more like individuals talking to each other. The channels we listen to are more of them signaling outside for more resources for Air Attack to do this or that. And really that's more publicly broadcasted. And that's really what we focus on. And so there'll be people who are listening to multiple channels at a time. I mean, some of these folks can have their headphones on and hear two channels out of one ear, two channels out of the other ear, and they can just parse all this. And then of course, we build tooling so that they can replay this easily and things of that nature so they can all collaborate in real time. And so sometimes they'll divide and conquer where it's like someone's listening to Air Attack and Dispatch and someone's listening to what's going on in the fireground, or someone's looking at all the new evacuation shelters coming up and the zones that are showing up. We get emails from everyone from World Central Kitchen to Red Cross who are like, I'm setting up a shop here for an evacuation point. I'm serving food, I'm doing this. So it's really real time content editing as the incident unfolds.
- [15:41]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
And most of these folks listening to radio. This is where the volunteer side comes into play. Most of the reporters for watch duty doing this are volunteers who have presumably gone through some kind of onboarding or training with you. But if you're dealing with a major incident like this, a lot of people are presumably dealing with it for the first time just because you're a rapidly growing service. What does that look like?
- [16:01]
John Mills
So there are, well, we just onboarded a couple more and now it's about, I'd say 10 of those reporters are paid staff. So their full time job is doing this. We can't only rely on the volunteers. Although they are avid fans of what they do, they were doing this well before they met us. And so we don't just find a volunteer off the street, give them the keys and just start going crazy. You know, it's not next door Facebook, where anybody can put their Thoughts and prayers out in the ether. Any of the reporters, whether they're paid or not, they showed up first as volunteers. They start as a contributor, which means they're listening to fires. They're adding value in the slack channels where the reporters and them are talking to each other, they're helping feed each other information. They go through training, then they become a reporter as they keep training, then they become a regional captain to help run a whole region. And then finally, if they want a full time job, we offer that to them as well. And so we do have 10 people whose full time job it is to listen to radios.
- [17:00]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
To me, it also just goes to show how much training, nuance and context is still involved in the world from a journalistic and editorial perspective. Just from the complexities of what I'm hearing you say, boy, I sure wouldn't trust an AI to take this over anytime soon. Seems like it requires an incredible amount of nuance and restraint, probably in terms of choosing what to share.
- [17:26]
John Mills
We often remind people that we're quick, we're not hasty. And so there's a struggle with some of the fire services starting to understand this, or law enforcement is like, just because we're fast doesn't mean that we just spread everything across the Internet that we hear. That's not helpful to the humans who live in the fire's path or the ones fighting the fire. And so you're absolutely right. You're one of the few people who understands that. People often tell me I'm going to lose my job soon and AI is going to take over. And A, I welcome it if they're going to solve it, but B, that's just not what's going to happen. It's too complicated. It's extraordinarily multimodal. Transmissions are not always great. Sometimes we wait on information because it feels shaky at best, or air attack's about to give us a size up from overhead. And so we have a lot of rules and whatnot that we run through to make these informed decisions.
- [18:19]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
Yeah, it feels like areas where you can be 80% accurate, AI is fine. But when you're dealing with evacuations and human lives and people making decisions about their homes that they own and their businesses, you can't be 5% inaccurate. You got to be incredibly diligent on what you share.
- [18:35]
John Mills
Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, we're not Luddites. We use AI internally, but the AI helps us sift signal from noise, so we use it for scanning and scraping and reading websites and other things of that Nature. The wildfire cameras have AI on them. We're definitely the recipients of AI and we are adding more of it, but that's more of a copilot model who just want more signal, less noise. And so it's really good at sifting and sorting. And then the humans figure out is this useful, is this relevant, or is there a better piece of information about to come out that we can wait on?
- [19:06]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
Yeah, it sounds like using it as a tool, much like you presumably are using large scale cloud computing as a tool that enables you to hit these peak volumes that you were talking about. You said watchduty essentially grew out of being fire Twitter. Twitter famously in the early days had the fail whale where it couldn't handle large amounts of traffic. And yet watchduty stayed alive, stayed cranking the whole time during these incredibly massive peak incident volumes. And I think that goes to show how you leverage technology to do what you do. But aren't outsourcing what you do to technology?
- [19:41]
John Mills
Yeah, I mean, not to discredit Twitter, but it's got its own little problems. But we knew who we were when we started Twitter did not. We knew the traffic patterns, we knew there'd be peaks and spikes. We built a lot of architecture around that idea. We have great partners like Fastly who allow us to do an incredible amount of edge caching to allow us to really hit incredible scale. Where there was just a fire in LA yesterday, you might have seen your phone go off and that sent 2.5 million push notifications in a minute. And then we take a huge amount of traffic when that happens. And so we build knowing how it's going to get used as best as we can. Now back to the point of audience. We didn't know it'll be first responders using it too. We can talk about that later. But. And we knew that it was a write light read heavy application, meaning we're not publishing that much, but it's being read constantly. So how do we avoid direct traffic to our application servers so that this thing can stay up at 3 o' clock in the morning when evacs are going out?
- [20:41]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
It's architected like a media platform. I guess in that case it's exactly the model.
- [20:45]
John Mills
It's just like a blog in some regards. It sends push notifications.
- [20:48]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
All right, let's back up and tell us a little bit about the origin story here.
- [20:52]
John Mills
Yeah, I mean, I'm sitting here in Sonoma county in the wildland forest, off the grid currently. And so I moved out here to move away from Silicon Valley. I've always wanted to live in the woods. I'm close enough, if I need to visit, I can. But I wanted to live out off the land and really do something different with my life and hopefully.
- [21:09]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
And John, you were a tech founder, you built a career in San Francisco in tech.
- [21:14]
John Mills
Yes, yes. I'm kind of like an anti tech techie as well. I grew up in a wood shop and so before I was on a computer, I was building furniture and restoring houses with my father, which I still do to this day. I build everything on the land here. I do my own plumbing, my own electrical monitor, maintain and manage my own infrastructure. It's just who I am. I like being able to understand the things in my reality and not having so many levels of abstraction where I don't know where my food comes from, how a binary computer works. It just doesn't work for me very well. So I like to be able to understand and maintain what I own. And frankly, I have to when I live out here in this type of situation. And So I spent 16 years in Silicon Valley. I was in San Francisco. I Left College in 2004, moved out to San Francisco, and I moved to Sonoma in 2020, actually almost five years ago this week.
- [22:08]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
You and I, both of our first jobs in San Francisco were with companies related to cnet, for what it's worth. Really weird small world thing there.
- [22:16]
John Mills
Yep, CNET was a very big publicly traded startup at that time, if you can still call it that. It was a great place to learn, but doing ad sales and clicks and stuff was not really fascinating to me. I like building the architecture, but after you learn enough about it, the how doesn't really matter anymore. It's the why. So I really focus on why I do these things and why they should get done, not how to do it. But anyway, I digress with more of a philosophy. And so living out here creates a lot of challenges. So I bought my ranch in 2019, October. And on November 17, there was a fire about quarter mile from me, from where my house actually sits, which is way too close, in an abandoned grow farm, which fortunately I have really no more neighbors now that they're gone. But they lit their place on fire. Helicopters are flying overhead. I thought it was a training exercise at first. I'm like, oh, it's weird. There's a helicopter circling overhead. And then another one shows up with a bucket on the bottom. And that's when I knew this was not a drill. He's like waving at me to get the hell out of there, I later realized. And I picked up a hose and started watering my house down. I don't know why I did that. I probably was ill prepared for the situation. Since then I've built sprinkler arrays and huge water cisterns and all sorts of stuff. But anyway, I had to learn all that. And so I'm on the news, on Twitter, trying to figure out why is this fire not being reported. And next thing you know, a big tanker flies overhead, drops retardant on it, and then all the helicopters are gone. I drove up there and there was one engine left. No sirens, no noise, no alert, nothing in the news. I was flabbergasted that the world operated this way.
- [23:54]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
You talked about watch duty being born out of this fire Twitter phenomenon, but you live in an isolated enough place that even fire Twitter wasn't paying attention to it. Is that true?
- [24:03]
John Mills
I don't think I knew about fire Twitter at the time. And that fire was only 2 acres probably it was moving quickly. They got it out. It probably would have picked it up. But I wasn't really very aware of fire Twitter at the time.
- [24:15]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
But it was very close to you. It was very real to you, even if it was small.
- [24:19]
John Mills
Right. And that's the problem. It matters to the people there. Even if it's a hundred acre fire. Well, there could be seven houses there. And so it's their natural disaster scale is a weird thing. The government oftentimes doesn't want to send these alerts out because it doesn't affect everybody or they'll get it under control quickly. But problem is, panic sets in. You're just like, what is going on here? I need answers. Even if the answer is, hey, a couple engines, small brush fire, whatever. What watch duty does well is de escalate incidents as well. Like you saw last night with that little fire. I think it was Glendale ish area. There was a small fire, it got under control quickly and everyone knew not to worry. And it makes people feel better. A little bit of information goes a long way. No information makes people freak out. And next thing you know, news helicopters are there and the alerts aren't coming out. And you're like, I'm watching this on the news, but no one's telling me anything what's going on. And so it's really a shame that that's the reality that we live in. That was only the first time a fire came. I think a month or two later, the Kincaid fire happened. That was on the Miacama Mountain range, which is 10 miles or so east of me. And that fire, they evacuated everybody all the way to the Pacific Firebreak, which is the coast. That's what one of our friends calls the California coastline, the Great Pacific Firebreak. And so that was a mistake as well. Again, they're learning. They're trying to figure this out, but they had so many incidents on the Micah Mountain range. They had the Tubs fire, the. The Glass fire, the Concave fire. Just so many fires there. It happened all the time. And so I think they overreacted on that one. At least they did something. But, man, people in Bodega Bay were like, what? I don't even know what you're talking about. That's 25 miles from me. And so it's just all over the place. So that happened. And then finally, the Red sky day happened in 2020, in August, when the CZU LNU and the MMU. Sorry, those are Cal Fire names. That's the Mendocino Fire Complex, the Napa Lake Sonoma Fire Complex, and the Santa Cruz Fire Complex happened. And so lightning came through without rain, lit Northern California on fire, and resources were drawn down everywhere. And it was a complete catastrophe that was really bad. And so that fire also ended a quarter mile from my property. I evacuated for seven days, I believe. And then eighth day, I came home, and that's where I spent day and night, listening to the radios, learning what was going on, digging through the Internet, reading forums, trying to understand what. What was going on and how fire was managed from a citizen's point of view. Essentially, that's what really got me thinking about this problem.
- [26:58]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
And where'd you go with it?
- [27:00]
John Mills
Well, I came home. It's funny, I was leaving my company, which hadn't sold yet. I had spent eight years there, and I was in the woods for almost nine months. And I was like, I can't be living in the woods doing zooms all day long, talking about retail food service software, which is what I did my last company, and I'd spent eight years building that company. And so that last week, I was actually leaving my company anyway, so I was going to retire for a bit, and then I immediately joined a friend's wildfire startup. I started riding in fire trucks, working with my local county.
- [27:30]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
This is Pano, right? Sonia. Passenger startup.
- [27:32]
John Mills
Yep.
- [27:32]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
Yeah, she's been on the show, too.
- [27:34]
John Mills
Yep. I've known Sonia for years, so I helped her get that company off the ground as an interim position. I knew I didn't want to have a job that way, although I'm doing 80 hours a week now. But I wanted to get involved and learn, and so I helped her get that off the ground. I was joining my wildland firewise groups. I was working with my local county dealing with the radio problems they have. We can get into that if you want to hear just how messed up the system is. I was building evacuation signs because I noticed that there's no such thing as an evacuation sign for fire. We have them for tornadoes and tsunami routes and stuff. We don't have them for wildland fires. I'm driving around looking during my fires and I'm seeing these four by eight sheets of plywood with spray paint on them saying dozer in the driveway, 20,000 gallon pool in the back. And just everyone's signaling to first responders, telling them that there's equipment and machinery at their disposal. I mean, it's all hands on deck. It becomes like a fog of war situation where it's just totally insane. No one knows what's going on and everyone's trying to help. And so I was doing 25 different things, just didn't know what it meant yet. But I was exploring. What I've learned now at my age is I don't think about the how, I think about the why. And so after digging through all these problems, that's when it occurred to me where I really could provide value. And it was doing signals intelligence and situational awareness, essentially.
- [28:54]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
And how was the initial concept of the app born then?
- [28:58]
John Mills
I think it came to me when I was in the 911 dispatch center here, probably in March of 21 or something like that, and it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I realized that A, they weren't going to solve it, and then B, the solution was going to be empower all the radio operators who guided me through my fires to ban them all together, convince them to work in a community and that we'd be more effective as a group. And then I would build them an app where they could talk to the world in a much bigger megaphone than they currently have.
- [29:26]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
So first a B2B thought for helping the radio operators communicate with each other better. It sounds like, yeah, it was all.
- [29:34]
John Mills
Part of the same thing. I mean, they're all just citizens doing the best that they can on Facebook and Twitter. Oh, sorry.
- [29:39]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
These were the citizen listeners of the radio. Yeah, not the actual folks running the radio transmissions themselves.
- [29:46]
John Mills
Now they have their own bureaucracy to deal with, unfortunately, which prevents them from doing what I've built. It's not that they don't want to it's that they actually just can't. But anyhow, it was really getting the radio operators to work together in unison and really solve a complex problem that was much bigger than just one of them.
- [30:03]
Yin
Hey everyone, I'm Yin, a partner at mcj, here to take a quick minute to tell you about the MCJ Collective membership Globally, startups are rewriting industries to be cleaner, more profitable, and more secure. And at mcj, we recognize that a rapidly changing business landscape requires a workforce that can adapt. MCJ Collective is a vetted member network for tech and industry leaders who are building, working for, for, or advising on solutions that can address the transition of energy and industry. MCJ Collective connects members with one another with MCJ's portfolio and our broader network. We do this through a powerful member hub, timely introductions, curated events, and a unique talent matchmaking system, and opportunities to learn from peers and podcast guests. We started in 2019 now and have grown to thousands of members globally. If you want to learn more, head over to MCJ VC and click the membership tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
- [31:04]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
It strikes me just hearing everything you've described for the last five minutes or so. Your journey is very much a typical founder journey of you don't start with here's the product I want to build. You start by just immersing yourself in the space and understanding all of the challenges in the space, everything from building evacuation zone signs to helping out with disaster relief to whatever. And as part of doing that, have a lightning bolt. Aha. Of oh, here's where the dots need to be connected.
- [31:37]
John Mills
Yep, I'm blessed to get to do that. And again, I like to think about all the skills that I've acquired. But I'm also a builder and so I have a tool belt on with all sorts of different power tools, but I don't take a drill to a nail. But often in Silicon Valley, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and so my skill is being naive and curious rather than applying my ideas to a world that doesn't need me. Some of the biggest problems I see in technology oftentimes is lack of empathy and understanding and really not digging into the problem enough and just applying what you know to a world that you know nothing about. Someone asked me on a podcast the other day, was it your advantage being a Silicon Valley white man? And I said absolutely not. It was actually harder because these firefighters deal with a bunch of tech bros who want to throw drones and AI at every problem and it's like, well, what problem are you solving? They're like, I don't know, the fire problem. And you're like, well, what part? Initial attack recovery preparedness is a spot fires is a wind fire. What do you mean? I mean, there's no blanket statement. And so I really had to convince people that I was part of the community, that I live here, that I care about this place, and I'm not profiteering, hence the nonprofit as well. But it was actually a disadvantage. So I had to convince people that, again, I wasn't a tech bro trying to make money off their misery.
- [33:07]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
Back when I used to have a career in production, one of the designers I worked with had written a book, and what she loved to do was to find cow paths and turn them into roads, which was to find ways that users were organically navigating their terrain and then build features that just basically formalized those things. And everything you've described around fire, Twitter, and how people or Facebook groups were imperfectly finding this information and sharing it with each other, to me, is that cow path. This is this organic activity that's already happening. And then you channeled a formal pathway for them to do it and gave them the tools they needed to do it.
- [33:47]
John Mills
Well, I'm going to use that analogy. I really like that. And it's funny. I'm actually building some trails right now, and I just follow the animal trails because they're pretty good at finding ways around things, and they just keep beating down the weeds there. So I just make a trail out of it. Just makes sense. I mean, there's a whole industry that they call biomimicry, and I just call it being a human. Actually being a human, like a hominid, not one that's thinking so hard. They're like, well, I'll just make bridges over this thing and pave it. It's like, well, maybe the animals knew what they were doing just naturally and following that model, I really like that.
- [34:19]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
So you said from the start you intentionally wanted this to be a nonprofit. What was the thinking there? And how did you formalize that? How did you decide you could do that in a way that could actually fund all the cloud compute costs and staff and everything you needed to do to do this effectively?
- [34:36]
John Mills
Backing up. I moved to the woods knowing I was going to build a nonprofit. And I actually had the paperwork in my hand in April of 21, which means I put the paperwork in about six or nine months before that, because I knew I was going to build a nonprofit, and I knew I was going to use technology to help underserved communities. My IRS determination letter mission statement is solving obvious problems for underserved communities. And so Watch Duty didn't show up until I was already having these ideas. And in fact, I wasn't really going to build Watch Duty until I realized that it was exactly what I wanted to see in the world. It fits my mission statement perfectly and I might as well put my money where my mouth is. Otherwise, again, I'm just some Silicon Valley techie who moved to the woods to start his commune and box everybody out and bring my Silicon Valley bros around rather than actually engage with my neighbors who have cattle, who grow grapes, who make cheese. They're part of this community, which I'm very much a part of. And so knowing that I was going to do that, it was a very easy transition to say, well, I'm already a nonprofit. This is what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. This fits the need, fits the mission statement. So let's just have at it. That's really how that all came to fruition. But stepping back, even if I didn't have that 501c3 started already, it's the right thing to do. This is like a government service. Someone should have built this a long time ago. It feels a horrible thing to do to try and profiteer off of it. This is people's misery and my own too. I live here and so it's important to me that this stays ad free, sponsor free, no login, no email, no tracking, no nothing. Just works. And that's part of our magic, that the onboarding process is very easy to do and that is on purpose. I've had many people in LA tell me, they're like, oh, I pay for this. And I was like, I appreciate that. Become a donor. Thank you. But we're not going to start charging anybody. That defeats the purpose of what we believe.
- [36:42]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
It's dependent on you either having talent willing to work with you on this for either volunteer or probably below market wage, or a tidal wave of donor funds being able to support the work you do, especially as you grow and scale. How did you chicken and egg that? How did you get it originally built? I assume a decent amount of goodwill. And now that you do have these incredibly expensive peaks because you're a top five app in the App Store in the middle of incidents, how do you make sure you can cover your bills?
- [37:14]
John Mills
One of the good things about being a nonprofit is you have a lot of in kind donors. Fastly, Heroku, Amazon and Google all give us cloud, compute and resources, so we don't really have many bills in that regard. And they see the goodwill of what we're doing. And in fact, google.org is one of our donors as well. They gave us $2 million last year. We get a lot of support from these places that frankly want to do the right thing and also it looks good for them. So everybody wins. It's really a beautiful symbiotic relationship on that front. But backing up, I started writing the code in May 17th of 2021. I wrote about 80% of it myself. And then I had a lot of other volunteers, including my cto, who is now CTO of the company, volunteering their time. And I didn't sleep much for quite some time. And then 80 days later, we launched WatchDuty on August 11th of 2021. It's a very simple app. It doesn't have to be complicated, it's gotten more complex, but it's still extraordinarily simple, even in its architecture, let alone the product. But for the first 18 months, it was completely volunteer run. No one was paid. I was the only person donating my time. That's opportunity costs, but didn't cost anybody anything. And so if you look at our annual reports, we publish all of our budgets. We're extraordinarily transparent. You can see our year over year P and L, which I'm very proud to publish. If we could talk more about how I want to change the nonprofit model. But ultimately we ran it for quite some time. We were doing a lot of traffic, was becoming very popular, and I knew it was a thing my company sold in 2022. And so I put a million dollars of that into the company. And that's when I called up some of my friends and volunteers. I said, hey, it's time. We're doing this for real and we're going to make a business and we're going to change the world and we're going to make a better blueprint for how nonprofits can operate in the future. Since then, we've hired more, we've grown more. We launched a membership model so people can donate $25 a year. We give you some extra features in the app, and last year, 80% of our budget was covered by just $25 donors, which is amazing. The software margins are pretty good. As you know from being in the industry. SaaS companies do 80, 85% margins if you're lucky. Ours are even better because we don't pay server bills. And so we just pay for people don't have an office. We have very little overhead. And so using what we learned in Silicon Valley and applying that to a nonprofit model has really been advantageous for us to attract donors, attract volunteers. I mean, we still have volunteer engineers who still write code. And I get to hire a lot of them. I've hired three or four of them out of really big companies, including Google and others. And they're getting a very competitive wage. They're well into the six figures. We're not where they were. But I want to change that too. I don't see why an engineer who is principal level Engineer isn't making $500,000 a year. Because they can go make more than that at Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google. So how do I get the best talent in the world to solve a really complicated problem?
- [40:12]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
I want to underscore something you said as part of that answer, which is that just because I want to make sure listeners really hear you say this and know this, you can donate right in the app. So anybody who's had their life impacted for the positive because of watch duty, you can open up the app today and make a donation to the app very quickly and easily. And I hope that anyone listening who, even if you haven't used it in an incident, just is inspired by John's story, takes a minute, pauses. This show opens up the app, downloads the app if you haven't, and contributes to the work that you're doing, John, because it's incredibly impactful.
- [40:48]
John Mills
Thanks for the pitch. I appreciate it. Right now, there's so much money needed for rebuild. I mean, that was a quarter trillion dollars disaster. It's hard to even fathom. And so we do need the money. It keeps us running. But it's also important to remember that people in LA are hurting right now, will be for the next five to 10 years because of this. But I will take your donations and we will give you some cool features in the app for doing that.
- [41:13]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
You mentioned that you have a vision for how nonprofits can change or a bigger vision for nonprofits. What is that?
- [41:23]
John Mills
If you look in other countries, Europe's a good example. There's a lot more functional nonprofits that are providing services. It's a little different than a 501, but it's similar. So for example, Ikea is a nonprofit. And same with Bosch. People don't seem to know that or understand it because you go into a store in America and you think you're buying Swedish hardware or whatever. But these organizations are nonprofits doing billions and billions in revenue. And they're very effective. And we even have some here in America. AARP is the old person magazine, as people probably know it, is doing 1.8 billion, I think in revenue last year. Huge numbers. They're providing a service, has a nonprofit organization and there's nothing from stopping technologists from using that to their advantage as well. Which again, like I mentioned, you get in kind donations. I don't pay tax on revenue. There's a bunch of other great things that you can do. And I can pay my engineers and staff high paying salaries. There's no law saying that I can't do that. It's just no one sees it and so they think that it's just not possible.
- [42:32]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
The famous example in the US which I assume is constructed this way for different reasons than what you're thinking about with WatchDuty would be OpenAI is a nonprofit. Right? Sorry, I had to go there.
- [42:47]
John Mills
I mean it is for now, not for long. Really funny people always ask me if I'm going to go do that. And I'm like, Sam's already doing that. He was already telling that story. You know, no one wants to read another one of those like, oh, something I really loved and believed in is now pulling the rug out from under me. So Sam's company is also like a lot of shell corporations as well. There's a lot of other LLCs and whatnot. Ownership's really strange. Ours is a pure nonprofit. We don't have any subsidies, other things. We may one day, but I don't really see any reason to anytime soon. It doesn't add any advantages. The only advantage it would raise is if we could go raise capital to go do this or do parts of the business. But then I would be forced to focus on irr, which means I would have to liquidate at some point. VC is, they don't want dividends, they want an outcome. They want a big outcome. And so it's fundamentally against what we believe. And frankly, this thing can't stop or change. It can't go away. It has to get bigger and we're going to focus on more and more disasters as we move on.
- [43:50]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
If you did structure the company like this and you think of it as a large entity, not a nonprofit app, what does it become? What does the Future hold for WatchDuty? If you had hundreds of millions under management as a nonprofit, for example, well.
- [44:04]
John Mills
Too much money is going to be a great problem. Again, I have to really teach people that you can make boatloads of capital as a nonprofit. There's nothing that says you can't carry money on the balance sheet. There's so much unlearning I had to do leaving Silicon Valley. It took me a very long time, because then you talk to Nonprofit lawyers and CPAs, and they're like, well, John, you can't do this. I'm like, well, show me in the 509 a letter of the law. I can't do this. And finally they realize that, oh, right, that's just not how it's done. I'm like, so you're saying it's legal? And so it took me a while to get all this unwound, to even realize what is actually possible, because the nonprofit industrial complex is such a bad rap in a lot of ways. Some are really good and effective that people really seem to resonate with world central kitchens. People seem to resonate with that direct relief and others, but they don't resonate with the homeless industrial complex. It doesn't solve the problem. They spend more money. And so it's really tough to sift through the cruft and figure out what you can and cannot do.
- [45:06]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
In the US it feels like most philanthropies are Band aids on the symptoms. They're not addressing the root cause of the problem. I mean, that is a vast generalization. But I would say if you talk to most people, they would say, oh, philanthropy helps the end user who's in need with their acute issue. It's not solving the root of the problem in many cases.
- [45:29]
John Mills
Yeah, I mean, I agree with that statement in some regards. But look, Watch Duty, the service doesn't put out wildfires. So I'm also a band aid. And I can also look at myself and be like, well, I don't fight fire. Software doesn't put fires out. It's really a solution to the information problem. It's not a solution to the wildland fire issue. As much as I want to throw stones, I also got to remember that part of my system here doesn't do. What I really wanted to do is stop so many damn wildland fires burning my community out of their home.
- [46:00]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
Right. Where do you go then, when you are achieving the vision you hope this organization is achieving? What other things are you doing? Doing? In addition to the current watchduty service.
- [46:10]
John Mills
That you offer now, currently, Watch Duty is focused on wildfire in 22 states. We're starting to plan our expansion A, farther eastward and then b, deeper into other disasters. I like to remind people fire isn't in the name on purpose. It's about citizens on watch duty watching over their community. And we're going to start deploying things for flooding. Next. We'll do earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes and everything else that shows up in our world that also doesn't have very good intelligence around it. But there are good role models for this. For example, tornado warnings, they work actually incredibly well. They've been going on for a very long time. There are sirens in towns. People have built basements for this purpose. The west hasn't figured this out yet. The getton's been good out here for a very long time. And so I do see other models that work well. But that said, I want one app or one piece of infrastructure that does this for all disasters where I know I'm going to get alerted no matter what happens, no matter what the disaster is. And so thinking about this more broadly, this should be the disaster platform first for the Americas and then for the world.
- [47:20]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
Super fascinating insight. Also on not to go into a specific that you said, but with tornadoes that we've built our infrastructure in those areas that experience tornadoes frequently to be more resilient around them. I grew up in Kansas, I grew up in tornado country. And yeah, every single friend that I knew had a basement. And sure, those tornado sirens went off and you went into your basement. No question. It was a combination of. I don't know if it was required from a regulatory perspective to build with basements or if it was just the market essentially wouldn't sell homes that didn't have them. And the government alert systems worked really well. And we did tornado drills in school. We knew exactly what to do when the sirens went off. And it was just part of living there.
- [48:06]
John Mills
This is what we need to do here. And now we're hearing more and more about hardening your homes and getting communities prepared. We're just behind. Tornado Alley has got a hundred years of history on us and you can look at architecture and you can tell what was going on. To your point, whether it's a law or not, everyone has a basement in Tornado Alley and they know they need them. And so it just seems like we need to learn how to adapt to a changing environment, that we're not really doing a very good job. And now we have too much built infrastructure as well. And so it's really, really challenging. But extrapolating farther, Watch Duty is also working on selling to first responders. We have that whole business that's standing up and we sell a lot of services to them. They buy the professional version and that helps support the free version for All. And then we're also looking at what it looks like to start building a preparedness database. Wikipedia for natural disaster. All this information is scattered all over the place and there's a lot of great info out there. You just have to really spend time searching for it rather than give me a YouTube playlist and show me how fire travels through landscapes and what hardened homes look like. This shouldn't be that hard. But people don't know where it all is. And so now that we have all this attention, I. E. Eyeball time, we want to use that to our advantage and the advantage of the community and help them prepare and change to this world that we're living in now.
- [49:28]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
And do you believe that app starts to. It's a nonprofit, but does it start to earn revenue from things beyond user subscriptions?
- [49:35]
John Mills
I mean, maybe it's not really my concern right now, but that's where the money is. PGE is A large customer, LA Unified School District just bought. We're working with the LA Emergency Operations Bureau. Lots of people are asking for more. They want more information. They want better solutions to these problems. And so all these tools are becoming extremely impactful. And so now we're going into the mapping space where we're allowing governments to upload data into the platform because frankly, they don't want our data into their platform. We have an API or used to for about a year and a half and no one wanted to buy it. And I couldn't figure out what it was. And then I figured it out. Oh, they don't like their products. This is never get integrated. Everyone uses WatchDuty. We're just going to give you our data. And so we're listening to the market and responding accordingly. And as far as I can tell, there's hundreds of millions of dollars of value in that organism alone.
- [50:31]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
This is an enterprise version of WatchDuty that has slightly different features for first responders and incident managers to have at their fingertips.
- [50:40]
John Mills
You got it. That's live right now and people are buying. We've sold about 7,000 licenses already of that.
- [50:45]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
When did that go live last year?
- [50:47]
John Mills
In the summer, I think it went live July last year.
- [50:50]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
Talk about your feelings about first responders using your app versus government having built these tools themselves, you're taking government data that is created by these agencies and you're just doing a better job than they are of organizing it.
- [51:09]
John Mills
Yeah, I mean, the misnomer is that it's our data. It's important to remember that it's the American people's data. Which means it's free for all we all pay for. We all pay to live here. And so it is our pleasure to repackage it and give it back as something better, especially most of it. Being free, we have a line where everything, life and safety related will always be free. That is what makes us powerful and important and selfless. That's what first responders are, that's in our DNA, is to behave like civil servants doing the right thing. But that said, the government has this information, but it's also really scattered. It's in disparate sources. And as we've all seen during mutual aid is you get firefighters showing up from different counties, different states, different countries who don't have access to this. And frankly, 70% of firefighters are volunteers. So they don't have access to this stuff either. So even if it does quote, unquote, exist, it's under lock and key. It's being held back and given to the people who they think need it. But when mutual aid happens, you got 5,000 firefighters out there from all different jurisdictions who have no common language, really, and way to look at all this. And so it just became a thing after maybe a year or two of using this. I had first responders reaching out to us and telling us that they were rolling engines and air tankers because of the information they were getting off of watch duty. And that's what just blew our mind. We're just like, oh my God, we're all in danger. The fact that these people who are flying the heaviest equipment into battle are relying on us, it just really is quite scary when you think about it. I'm proud. And I'm also upset that that's the reality.
- [52:53]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
Yeah. Though it makes sense. These are disparate departments who are doing disparate things. And it requires a coordinating body to build it. And a private, independent organization is likely going to be able to move faster than government when it comes to information organization and dissemination.
- [53:10]
John Mills
Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, the government isn't known for great software, as we've probably all seen. Although I gotta give props to the DMV because now I can get a text message line, which is amazing, but it's taken forever to get this stuff updated. We've all seen horrible stories of systems not working and Obama's system didn't work and called in the Silicon Valley techies to come help them. It's really bad. And these contractors are not the best at what they do. And then they're really trying to make money. So it's the cost plus Accounting, it's more expensive. It needs to be. And Silicon Valley can just run circles around some of these problems. It's sad. That's the state of affairs. And I hope that changes over time.
- [53:50]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
You're taking what Silicon Valley has actually done well for the last 10 or 15 years, which is aggregate and organize information and turn it into useful software. I mean that is the whole Web 2.0 social media thing that happened in the mid 2000s through today. Where do you see opportunities for other third party innovation to really help accelerate government's response or first responders response in this problem? I think of suppression. I think of you're obviously managing incident response detection of issues. Do you see other avenues where this model can apply?
- [54:35]
John Mills
My model is very strange. I don't recommend it for all parties. I love what I do. But if I was doing detection, I probably wouldn't be running a nonprofit.
- [54:45]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
Let me clarify, when I say this model, I mean the model of applying Silicon Valley style technology to the problem, not necessarily a nonprofit structure.
- [54:54]
John Mills
Yeah, absolutely. I mean there's people showing up now. We have the Alert west wildfire cameras which have AI on them, which are now 1500 and growing cameras out there. My friend is launching a company called Seneca that's delivering water via drones. There's satellites going up that can do early detection much faster. So it's happening, it's just not happening at the speed of wildfire growth. And so again, looking at the example of the disasters in the Southeast with tornadoes, they've had a lot of time to adapt and do things about this. We're behind the eight ball and in fact who are way too far behind. So it's coming. But even Earth Fire alliance, which I'm a huge fan of, what they're doing, they're launching satellites up in space. They're not going to have them global until 2030 if we're lucky. And so for me, who's sitting in the woods fighting fire with a shovel and radio, it's too little too late. So what's going to get us there? And that's what I'm really trying to pay attention to is what can I do now? And how do I skate to where the puck is going to and help as best I can. And for me and my organization, I mean, what I love to do is amplify the voices of the people that we are working with. So again, I'll bring up Alert west again with all the wildfire cameras is that they're one of our partners. They give us and the public the Information for free and watch duty. And in return, we get phone calls from all the power companies who want us both to come in there and pitch them because they want to buy both at the same time. I'm talking with a lot of other companies that I wish I could announce right now, and I can't because they're still too early. But there's a lot of other companies who are now realizing that we're the distribution platform. We don't charge anyone any money to give away information to the public. So if you have an amazing idea, new satellites, whatever it is, happy to put it in our product and then happy to direct my enterprise customers to you so you can go profiteer and make money and actually run a business, not go out of business. And then my users, myself, citizens and first responders get better access to information. And so I want to be the hub in that system that allows better growth and distribution quicker. Because the fire service is notoriously underfunded, trying to build a startup and sell to fire departments, I would not recommend that. I'd recommend helping them, but I would not recommend looking at them as a profit center because they're a cost center. And so that's the difference.
- [57:17]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
What other advice do you have for founders trying to build in this space of broadly, disaster relief, disaster recovery, Things that you've learned from trial and error of working with these disparate government agencies, getting them to see you as a friend, not a foe, see you as trusted, not profiteering or misinformation, sharing. What should other founders know?
- [57:42]
John Mills
I mean, the most important thing to do is to embed yourself in these communities. I don't think sitting in the Silicon Valley laboratory pontificating what the forest people need is a great business idea. This should go without saying, but it is amazing how many people show up with crazy ideas. They don't even know the past. They don't know what's worked, they don't know the market, they don't understand where the buyer is. They're just really lost. And so getting unlost is very important. Step number one. And then you'll find a lot of good confidants through that, including a lot of my advisors I found through asking them questions, digging in, trying to solve their problems, and thinking about it from their perspective, not mine. And something really important to do is don't ask permission, ask for forgiveness. I mean, proceed until apprehended at all costs. And if I asked, and I did ask my local departments, my firefighters are wonderful. I still work with them, but a Lot of the dispatchers and others that these emergency managers didn't give me the time of day. They told me not to do this. They still struggle with what we're doing. Again, many are coming around, but some of them, it's really hard to do because they can't control us, and we're not a vendor. And so it's really hard for some people. But if I asked for permission, I would not be here today doing what I'm doing. And so you gotta be empathetic and a little bullheaded at the same time.
- [59:07]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
Are there any moments you went through where you thought, oh, this isn't gonna work, or, oh, I'm gonna get told I'm hurting things by doing this?
- [59:15]
John Mills
We knew what we were doing when we started. We knew we'd meet great opposition. That was not a surprise. Honestly, this one's been different. My last company, I wandered around in the woods trying to find a market. This one, I really did a lot of diligence on what it was going to be like, how it was going to go to market, how it was going to scale, what was going to happen, and somehow it's all gone according to plan. So I hope that continues. But as Mike Tyson says, everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face. So we'll see if that continues.
- [59:45]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
Say, with this one, you didn't wander around the woods. You went and lived in the woods and turned into Henry David Thoreau or something. And then next thing you know, you got. You got a product.
- [59:53]
John Mills
Very true. It was a lot of diligence and a lot of focus on execution and doing the right thing.
- [59:59]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
John, anything else we should cover here today? I really appreciate you making the time, and again, really appreciate the work you and your team are doing with Watchduty.
- [60:07]
John Mills
I think I probably said it all, but I think it's important to really try and focus on the core principles of some of these problems and really peel the onion layer back and find out where you can help. It's really tough. I look at fire like I look at homelessness. I know they're unrelated, but they're really big buckets. So I used to work in homelessness a little bit, and I was really fascinated with helping. But some people just say, oh, they're all crazy. Oh, they're all on drugs and whatever it is. And it's just. It's a really horrible mentality to solve a problem because there's down in their luck. There's paycheck to paycheck who just living in their car. Now there's drugs, there's all this stuff. There's not one size fits all. And so similarly to wildland fire, the idea of using drones is great. The problem is in wind driven fires is not going to work. That's okay. But let's talk about the 90% of fires that aren't like that. Can I help fix that problem and work my way up into the wind driven black swan events? But coming into a problem and saying I'm going to go solve fire is like saying I'm going to go solve homelessness. It just has no understanding or bearing in reality. And so really living with these people and spending time with chiefs and digging into how you can be effective, I think is important. And then finally aligning your skill set to what you can actually do. I don't have the stomach for doing hardware. I've just never done hardware my whole life. I build with it as a hobby, but it's not what I'm good at. And so it probably wouldn't have been a good idea for me to go work on a helicopter drone suppression company. Not saying I couldn't do it. I'm saying it's not where my sweet spot is. And so I am also a tool in this situation and I need to figure out where I work best and how I can solve it. So wandering around and really asking questions and not being tied to the outcome, I didn't know where it was going to work. And I'm glad I found a place that fit me and fit my skill set really well.
- [61:57]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
Yeah, I'm hearing you say this is not a space where just brute force blunt sales is going to get the job done. It is about understanding existing process and designing product around it.
- [62:11]
John Mills
You got it. And that's the fun part. If you like building products. I like being in uncharted territories where no one's really solving a problem properly. And this is actually a great example of category creation versus category king. And if you look in the App Store, you're going to find 25 other apps that have all trying to do what I did. And they all paved the way for how this was supposed to work. Ish. But they didn't really see the mechanism and the missing portions of it. And so it was my opportunity to come in to be the category king. So it was a lot less work for me because I'd have to convince people this was a problem. I knew it was an issue, but I was able to come in and actually see how to thread the needle and make some value out of it. And so I learned from everyone else who came before me. And I'm just a fortunate one who could see what no one else could see and do what no one else was able to do.
- [63:02]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
Two other questions that jumped to mind while you were just giving those last answers. One is you've consistently in this conversation said wildland fire, not wildfire. Is there a distinction there in your mind? Is there a reason you use that phrase?
- [63:16]
John Mills
Wildfire comes from wildland fire. That's where the terminology comes from. And I live in the California wildlands, and I love living in the forest, and I love the Wild west and the untouched parts of the earth. It's really special to me. And living out here on hundreds of acres with really no neighbors, and being in this forest has really changed my perspective in the world I knew it would. And I grew up spending time in the woods, and I just have a special relationship to these wildland folks. And being in disaster really helps you to forget the politics of any of this. We don't concern ourselves with those things. All my neighbors want better crop yields, better grapes. They want healthier cows, they want better cheese, and they want to live off the land. Let's just say live with the land, not on the land. And so it's a really interesting thing to be having my hands in the soil and being around these wildland folks that have been overlooked for a long time. Some people would call them country folk or hillbillies or whomever. And I prefer wildland people. It feels a lot more human and wild west to me.
- [64:25]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
That's amazing. I like that answer. And then the last question I have, I guess, is, how have the LA fires, which have dramatically catapulted watch duty, into the public consciousness? How have they impacted what you do?
- [64:42]
John Mills
What's really interesting about LA and New York is that when it happens to them, the whole world listens. I'm from New York, and so for about the first 10 years we were in California, people would ask me when I'm coming home, and I always ask them when they're going to leave. And I get it. We think we're the pinnacle of the world. New York's an amazing, amazing place. But our mission's always been the same. We've been doing this for all these fires that have been affecting our communities. It was our world melting to the ground. And it just reinforces the idea that this is important and it matters. Nothing really changed, honestly. We learned a lot from it. We raised a lot of money, but we're doing the same thing. It's not going to change. We're not going to switch to a for profit and pull an open AI on anybody. Our ethos is our ethos and the people we serve are first responders and citizens and so we owe it to them to continue doing what we do and just hopefully get better. I don't know if that's the answer you're looking for, but it's the answer that I feel in my heart.
- [65:43]
Interviewer (possibly MCJ team member)
That's great, John. I so appreciate you joining and thanks again for building WatchDuty and for being of incredible service.
- [65:50]
John Mills
Thank you. It's my pleasure.
- [65:52]
Cody Sims
Inevitable is an MCJ Podcast. At MCJ we back founders driving the transition of energy and industry and solving the inevitable impacts of climate change. If you'd like to learn more about mcj, visit us us at MCJ VC and subscribe to our weekly newsletter at Newsletter MCJ vc. Thanks and see you next episode.