How Vibrant Planet turned Congressional testimony into a GTM credibility | Allison Wolff

**Allison Wolff** (0:00)
There are 1,000 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.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:15)
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 go to market. Of course, 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 Allison Wolff, CEO of Vibrant Planet. Allison, welcome back to the show.

**Allison Wolff** (0:53)
Thanks for having me. Excited to reconnect.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:55)
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.

**Allison Wolff** (1:05)
Yes, there have.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:06)
Are you seeing more demand than you could possibly have imagined?

**Allison Wolff** (1:10)
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 in to all three if you want.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:26)
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.

**Allison Wolff** (1:39)
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 US 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 should we spend to get the most impact on the wildfire problem.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:33)
Where's the data coming from? Is it satellites or is it a mix? What's the source of data?

**Allison Wolff** (2:38)
Yeah, it's a lot of data. We have hundreds and hundreds of data sets, some of which we produce ourselves that are 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 a mind twist, and then branches fall down and needles fall down and leaves, and so there's all this, I call it kindling. There's all this dry stuff on the ground, just like when you try to start a campfire. 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 got to cut this tree that's too close to that house or you need to 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 the spatial and the temporal currency and resolution that we need.