Every wildfire season seems to be getting more intense than the last but today’s guest is here to tell us that wildfires actually have a good side. Today on Found, we’re joined by Allison Wolff, the co-founder and CEO of Vibrant Planet, a cloud-based planning and monitoring tool for adaptive land management. Wolff discusses why the wildfires we’re seeing today are hotter and spreading more quickly than we can contain and how proper land management can help create the environment needed for the lower, slower burning fires forrest need.
Every wildfire season seems to be getting more intense than the last but today’s guest is here to tell us that wildfires actually have a good side. Today on Found, we’re joined by Allison Wolff, the co-founder and CEO of Vibrant Planet, a cloud-based planning and monitoring tool for adaptive land management. Wolff discusses why the wildfires we’re seeing today are hotter and spreading more quickly than we can contain and how proper land management can help create the environment needed for the lower, slower burning fires forrest need.
They also talked about:
(0:00) Introduction
(2:07) Vibrant Planet is modernizing land management
(11:31) Adapting land management to climate change
(16:45) Scaling nature-based climate solutions
(20:16) The benefits of a for profit company
(30:00) The importance of Indigenous knowledge in land management
(35:01) Host discussion
Dom Davis 0:02
Every wildfire season seems to be getting more intense than the last. But today's guest is here to tell us that wildfires actually have a good side. When fire burns low and slow. They help manage the land by getting rid of undergrowth and brush to help beat the soil on the forest floor. But sadly due to over planting invasive insects, higher winds and temperatures, the wildfires we're seeing today are actually hotter and spreading more quickly than we can contain.
Becca Szkutak 0:26
You're listening to found TechCrunch this podcast that brings you the stories behind the startups from the folks that are building them. Today we're talking to Allison wolf, the co founder and CEO of vibrant planet, a cloud based planning and monitoring tool for adaptive land management. I'm Becca ScrewAttack. And learning about the nuances of caring for a forest floor is my amazing co host, Dominic
Dom Davis 0:46
Midori Davis. And before we get into our conversation with Allison, we have our two truths and a lie. And at the end, of course will tell you which one is not true. So listen carefully to these statements to see which one is a lie. Okay, first, there's one unified group that handles lead management and most of the US to machine learning experts were the earliest hires on the vibrant planet team, or three Viberate planet spun out of a nonprofit, you
Becca Szkutak 1:10
will all have to listen and find out but before we dive into the meat of the conversation, we have one little request for you, dear listeners, if you have been loving found, which we assume that you have been if you wouldn't mind going and giving us a rating or review on any of the platforms you're already using to listen to this podcast. It helps us out a lot gives us great feedback and allows us to continue to make this great show. So if you want to go and do that right now, take a couple of seconds and then dive right back in. Here's our conversation with Allison.
Carlson, how's it going?
Allison Wolff 1:49
Good. How are you doing? Well,
Becca Szkutak 1:50
Dylan with a little one of those, like colds that automatically comes when the weather starts to change for the spring. But can't complain. Yeah, well, good. Hopefully it stays low level. But probably a good place for us to dive in today is maybe you want to start by telling us a little bit about vibrant planet. Yeah, so
Allison Wolff 2:07
vibrant planet is a science and technology platform that is creating what we call a common operating picture for wildfire resilience and nature, resilience. We're sort of taking the term common operating picture from the military, and from firefighting. And it's sort of how it sounds, it means urgency, it's critical, coordinated decisions. And we're using it in the natural resource management and wildfire resilience building space, because we have to, it's very urgent, and we've basically modernized a very slow, often multi year, even tenure, conflict ridden process of multi jurisdictional planning. So we're sort of stealing that term to bring urgency and speed. And the best technology and science have to offer to a very big problem.
Becca Szkutak 2:56
And maybe we want to break that down a little bit. For those of us who are not as familiar with some of the terminology and those processes, like what does this look like for, say, a vibrant planet user? And who would use this? And how would your customers approach this? Yeah,
Allison Wolff 3:10
so our customers are land managers that work for the Forest Service Bureau of Land Management, state parks, national parks, like Yosemite, Yellowstone, those kinds of parks, also fire districts. So fire chiefs and folks that work for them, counties, so those are paying customers, it's an annual subscription that we sell by the acre. And it's enabling a multi jurisdictional planning process that's happening now. But it's happening on paper, believe it or not, so land management was one of the last areas that hadn't really moved to the cloud yet. And so we've built a really robust data driven system. There's a lot of machine learning in there as well that I can get into if you like, but we essentially have everything that has value in a landscape. So imagine, like your own neighborhood, you might have at your house, your neighborhood, maybe a city or a small town around you. And that around that town, there's usually lots of land. And often once you get further out into bigger landscapes, you're dealing with federal and state lands, so parks and Forest Services, those kinds of lands, those planning processes become complex. There's a lot of environmental regulation, thank goodness, there's regulation around archaeological sites and things like that, thank goodness, we have to protect all those things. And so once you're in, especially the broader landscape, planning space, there's a lot of negotiation. We also over the last 10 years have seen this really rapid rise in severe wildfire behavior because of land management decisions, which I can get into as well as climate change, exacerbating grossly over fueled forests. Because the way we've managed them for the last 130 years, and so we've got fires moving at 1,000,002 million acres. And so that's sort of forcing inherently consensus driven processes, but consensus is really difficult when there's a big lack of trust among different landowners, tribes forester As BLM and the public and then nonprofits that their whole job is to protect specific species, like spotted owl, for example. And so we basically facilitate much better collaboration. So helping people see each other's perspectives, the system enables real time scenario planning so that they can basically play out virtually this treatment versus this treatment. When I say treatments that's mechanically thinning, overgrown forested areas, putting beneficial fire back on land with prescription, those are the treatments that our system basically recommends. And this is happening in real time. So imagine moving from a multi year paper driven process where nobody trusts the data, the data isn't fine scale enough to actually be accurate. And you can't actually play with this versus that and weigh the way the different trade offs of plan. So we've basically brought this very powerful cloud based data driven system together to enable that to happen in real time, very collaboratively with spatially overlapped plans. And then it also becomes a monitoring system. So we really haven't monitored natural resources, we don't really know the current risk to water sources, carbon, biodiversity, and even communities. It's been pretty inaccurate to date. So we bring a lot of accuracy to those things in both forecasting and then monitoring current conditions to help prioritize and deploy right now billions of dollars that are moving from the infrastructure bill and the inflation Reduction Act. And
Becca Szkutak 6:24
there's so much there. That's so interesting. And I'm curious, with this going from being a paper process being a process that took so long having that sort of inaccurate data set, what was it like for you guys to build vibrant planner to fix some of those issues? What was that process like, getting to where you guys are now.
Allison Wolff 6:42
So I came out of Silicon Valley and did a lot of product strategy. And a lot of user experience design. I was a lead marketing and a lot of the early user experience design at Netflix. And then did a lot of that work at Mehta and Google and other big tech. So came in with a very kind of user centric design ethos, and spent over a year and a half talking to more than 100 people across emergency services, land management, and the scientific community to understand what are the gaps in planning? Where's it frustrating and hard? What do you wish? What do you dream existed. And so there was a lot of input from representative stakeholders, and customers spend a lot of time with tribes as well, really important to start to bring indigenous knowledge into our space, they manage all of all of our land for 20,000 years. And then European Americans unfortunately, screwed it up. So yeah, got a lot of input, and then literally sat side by side with people from CalFire, and Forest Service and scientists drawing what became our current platform that is an adaptive management platform, the hardest hurdle was creating a fine scale, what we call foundational model. So vegetation, of course, is sort of at the base of the ecosystem. And so we had to map at very fine scale that could hand off to permit processes. So individual trees, individual brush and grasslands was a huge breakthrough technologically, and that's where we apply machine learning very, very advanced, we have some of the most advanced machine learning talent in the world on our team that really wanted to kind of take what they had developed inside companies, you know, ad platforms and apply it to keeping our planet intact. So we're really lucky to have an incredible tech team that works with our scientists to make sure we have scientific accuracy and efficacy in vegetation mapping. So we've basically mapped the entire western United States at one meter scale. So we're seeing individual trees and forest structure, troubling and grassland structure. And then we basically the other technical feat is to normalize all those other things that have value in a landscape. So built infrastructure, of course, we know has known value, real estate. And then we bring in biodiversity data, key species of plants and animals, water data, carbon data, recreation data, right like a lot of the western United States as a recreation economy. So recreation values are very, very important in Colorado and California and Washington, Oregon, right. So all of that data gets curated in we find best in class data, we're filling gaps as well, where there's gaps, we saw a gap in the vegetation data and fill that. And then we normalize the format. So I was watching Forest Service fuels people, for example, pull down 60 different data sets, and then try to massage them for over a year to actually make them workable to actually create one scenario of a land management plan. It was so painful to watch. So we've basically normalized all that. So everything that has value landscape is represented by best in class data and science. So that's all ready to work with in this powerful scenario planning capability. So a forest service person is managing our public lands for carbon water, biodiversity, recreation value, and they're also trying to make communities in and around their forests fire adapted. So the tool basically lets them optimize a plan that has all those values, waited for outcomes they want so they want all those things sort of equally successful at the end of a treatment plan, and then they can Put in the constraints they have. So how much budget they have time acreage that they want to address in a certain period of time. And then the system basically optimizes, and it basically spits out a recommended treatment plan, that sequences actions, that's really important. Now, with things changing so fast on us, it's all about prioritization. So the system helps them with go here first, because it's the highest risk, you're gonna get the most benefit from ecosystem enhancements, and then go here, second, here, third, if you've only got $10 million to pay workers to go in, and then out forest and prescribed fire burned bosses that get in there and put good fire back on the land. So that's really how this system works. And then it's monitoring. It's monitoring where the forecasted benefits, right? And then it's actually year upon year starting to understand which treatments worked best in what socio ecological context? And then how are we seeing resilience trending across these vast landscapes. So you can imagine the Chief of the Forest Service, being able to aggregate a bunch of insights nationally, and then figure out like, Okay, where do I go next, with my next $10 billion from the inflation Reduction Act, to make sure that money's going out equitably? We've got a lot of frontline communities at risk that are really hard to map and how do we know that it's actually safeguarding our communities, our carbon sinks, our biodiversity hotspots in our water?
Dom Davis 11:17
Okay, no, all of that is so amazing. And so really fascinating. I would love to hear your thoughts on how the practice of Land Management has changed as the climate crisis continues to get worse. I know that's kind of broad, but I would love to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah.
Allison Wolff 11:31
So let me quickly dip into history, because I think a lot of people don't know what wild or natural is. So in the western US, as pioneers moved west, you know, 150 200 years ago, we literally cut everything down. So we had these vast forests, we had 600 million Beaver, that were creating all these marshy, carbon rich biodiversity rich wetlands because they blocked all the streams up, right? We didn't have water channels, as much as we do now, other than the really big rivers. So the the western US where we've got this really catastrophic fire problem happening was radically different than we see today and that we live in. And of course, there were hardly any people living in these wild lands. They are concentrated in cities like San Francisco, or Seattle. And we built everything from what so mines, railroads, towns, everything was made of wood. And so we literally played out the Lorax, we cut every tree down, we drained and ditched really carbon rich meadows, and ran cheap on them to grow wool for World War One and World War Two uniforms. Like we really, really messed with the system. There's only 7% Old Growth labs. So just picture The Lorax. I mean, that's literally what the West looked like. And so that fundamentally disrupted the ecosystem function. And then things grew back, but not not in a natural way. So that there we had a new forest Shevlin and grassland structure, meadows didn't recover for the most part from what we did with them. By the way, a lot of our meadows in the western US store as much carbon as Indonesian peatlands when they're left alone and healthy. So what's happened is we've got all focus on forests, because that's where we're seeing really catastrophic effects and forests converting to grasslands, and shrublands that don't store as much carbon. They don't host the biodiversity that forests typically host right when they convert to other ecosystems. And it's happening really quickly. So we basically have to get in there. So we've got these forests that grew back, they grew too thick, and then we started suppressing fire 100% of the time, 130 years ago, so we put fire out. So I've been talking a lot lately about humans desire to control nature, right? So we have air conditioning and way of heating. We don't like it too hot, we don't like it too cold, we killed off all the predators. And we're seeing lots of evidence that that was a really bad idea, right? And so that's why we've got wolf reintroductions, and things like that happening. Because we need the top of the food chain to exist for the bottom of the food chain to be healthy. We didn't know that. And then with fire, we controlled fire. We don't like fire. We don't like smoke. And so we've put every fire out. And a lot of the new technology is early fire detection systems that we're just getting better and better and better at that. And it's biting us in the ass right. So we have these unnaturally structured forests from clear cutting everything. We've got a ton of fuels in there down branches and things. We've got a lot of trees dying from diseases like bark beetle that are killing billions of trees across the west and Canada. And so we've got these very unregulated forests with tons of fuel. So think about a fireplace or a campfire where you've got a lot of kindling, right to get the fire going and a little bit of wind, we've got more more extreme winds from climate change. And so we've created this perfect storm of Tinder dry tons of load. And so when a fire sparks whether it's, you know, a cigarette, but a lightning strike or a utility pole, the fire is more likely to become catastrophic, where it has ladder fuels, so it doesn't stay on the ground. It actually ladders up into the canopy of the forest. And then climate field winds are moving these fires at speeds we've never seen before to the point where we can't get people out like we saw in Lahaina like we've seen in paradise and killer fire and many others. So what we have to do is sort of mimic the role beneficial fire played for 20,000 years. So both tribes in the West as well as lightning fire, like we didn't have plains with red retardant to put fires out fire rolled through these drier Western forests. Same in Mediterranean Europe, Australia, Chile, there's about half of land on Earth that adapted with fire. So the ecosystem needs fire to cycle carbon to cycle nutrients and to regenerate some of the seeds of coniferous forests only plant if there's Goldilocks temperature fire. So we've created a catastrophic, severe, very hot kind of fire instead of a low intensity regenerative fire because of our actions. And so what our system does is it basically prescribes based on typography, and then also where we can get the most bang for the buck in terms of reducing risk to ecosystems and towns, as well as enhancing ecosystem services like carbon sequestration, water reliability, biodiversity hosting, it basically spits out this prioritized, sequenced plan that I talked about that helps you get the most bang for the buck. We call it restorative return on investment. So where do you go to get the most benefit with the funds that you've got, and the people that you've got, and then it basically says, you need these types of workers in this quantity in these places, you're gonna have this kind of biomass that can go into climate, smart wood commodities, for buildings, biochar in crops, those kinds of things. So it gives a lot of predictive analytics that helped create a whole economy around resilience, eventually, also nature based climate solutions, which I can talk about, because it quantifies the ecosystem benefits that we can start to build markets around. And
Becca Szkutak 16:35
there's so much there. And it's you're obviously very knowledgeable about this space. And I'm curious, what got you interested in land management in these kinds of climate adaption techniques? What got you interested in this space to begin with?
Allison Wolff 16:48
Yeah, so I had spent most of my career in Silicon Valley, working with amazing leaders like Bill Weil, and others at Google and Facebook, which became that, of course, mostly on on climate solutions. I was sort of in the for good world at those companies really trying to figure out with leadership teams, how do we tilt these global platforms towards getting we had some really big successes and some big frustrations as well along that journey. But a lot of that work was focused on climate solutions and leveraging the weight of the tech world to do what we could. So things like creating a space race for who could have the most efficient data center design, and then getting every company to open source their design so that others can use it, rather than it being an opaque kind of competitive advantage, building coalitions to go into call base states to green the American grid. So bringing jobs building data centers, and philanthropy and things like that, and then creating new Truly additional renewable energy in places like Kentucky or Texas, building huge wind farms to power the grid that was powering the data centers. So after spending a lot of time really working on trying to contribute to that tipping point of making renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels, which we finally hit right, I started to get really interested in nature based climate solutions, mostly inspired by Paul Hawken, who's a prolific author and leader in the sustainability and climate movement. He wrote a book and created an organization called drawdown, I helped with the book launch and in working with Paul started to learn how powerful nature based climate solutions are, and how ready they are compared to things that are very long term investments like direct air capture to truly get those things to scale. So just start to learn more and more about nature's ready now, most of it's a management problem. So how we've managed crop lands, we need to move to regenerative AG, which we know rebuild soil and the right type of AG is a massive carbon sink like we can restore prairie lands in the Midwest. Some say that that could pull down all the carbon the world emits annually. Forests are the same thing when they're operating functioning as normal, they store a third of the carbon that we emit every year and there's all these other co benefits of hosting biodiversity we forget we depend on other species to survive, but we need other species right? They also 70% of water comes from forests and so water is moving through evapo transpiration forest like in the Sierra Nevada where I live there this massive refrigeration machine for all the snowpack right, so if the canopies wide enough, and just enough snow lands underneath and it's shaded by the canopy right now our canopy is so thick, the snows evaporating without hitting the ground which is causing our ground recharge of water. It's not happening like it used to. And when we have big fires, you can imagine black soil with no canopy shading it the water just melts off too fast. Right? So we've got to get back to these functioning systems that are delivering carbon sequestration, clean water and biodiversity services and then beautiful places to play right like we love recreating in the West.
Becca Szkutak 19:53
more from this conversation right after a quick break
Dom Davis 19:59
and right Before you launched private planet, I saw that you are running your own nonprofit. And so I'm curious to know, what is the jump been from running a nonprofit? And now running a venture backed company? Have there been a lot of lessons, a lot of ups and downs? Like what has been the learning lessons?
Allison Wolff 20:16
Yeah. So I started originally when I got passionate about this space. So I ended up in the fire focused space, because as I was getting more and more passionate and wanting to land in nature based climate solutions, I was really wanting to probably land in regenerative AG, I started to see this catastrophic fire problem and how fast it was happening, and how severe the damage is going to be in a very short period of time to add water, you know, air quality, all of these things. And so turn my attention to trying to work on how do we make ecosystems and communities resilient to fire and more broadly, climate change before it's too late before all those ecosystem services that are going to drive nature based Climate Solutions blow up literally, because it's happening like in the next couple of decades. So I so I started a nonprofit originally six years ago, to really do some of that digging on, what are the solutions in this space? How do we convene the best thinkers to solve these problems started to see this technology problem very clearly saw a public communication problem, people don't have an understanding of what a healthy forest looks like. They don't like fire even prescribed fire. So when I got into this a few years ago, I was seeing lawsuits to the Forest Service demanding that the Forest Service pays for their curtains to get cleaned when there was a prescribed fire. And I was like, oh my god, do you realize you have the choice between prescribed fire and a little bit of smoke or catastrophic fire and breathing like 600 PPM smoke for a month, it was just like this complete lack of understanding people don't like trees cut, right? Because we've had it hammered into us to don't cut trees don't cut trees, don't cut trees, plant plant plant, right. But that's very context specific. That's really appropriate in some places like the East Coast, perhaps, and tropical areas. But where we've created these hazardously, overgrown forests, we have to pull some trees out to save forests, right. So we have to think more systemically. So the nonprofit it was really focused on identifying the big gaps in this space originally, educating the public educating big funders, like the giving pledge families on the catastrophic fire problem, why is it happening? What are the solutions? Once I saw the tech play that just somebody had to build the platform that we've built, I really struggled with how a grant funded system would actually be able to serve actual customer needs grants often force a focus on what the grant is mandating not what a user needs, right? I also worried about being able to scale something fast enough, because we are so out of time on this issue. I can't emphasize that enough. And so I felt like venture backing with a killer tech team. And often tech people will only join if they have some ownership, right? Like some folks are finishing their career in Silicon Valley and moving to a nonprofit. But you know, if they can build something that has value and makes a difference, that's a big preference for all those reasons decided to spin a public benefit corporation out of the nonprofit, we have a hybrid structure where the two work together. And on the public benefit Corp, where I now sit, we build this killer data, and this killer tech all these applications to answer questions like land management, where do I go with my money to get the most bang for the buck, we'll get into more software as a service for carbon water biodiversity project developers, we'll be getting into insurance and solutions for utility sectors, leveraging our same kind of data core and our capabilities we've built now in decision support, monitoring those kinds of things. The nonprofit is now it's honed its focus to be what we call a Data Commons. So as we build out data, like our fine scale vegetation data, we make that data publicly available to the agency and scientific community to further science. So use our billion tree map to understand all kinds of functions about forests and study lots of things using remote sensing data. And we'll have we'll have all kinds of novel datasets that we we make publicly available. So that's one of our big impact pieces as a public benefit Corp is to give that data away and let the scientific community have at it. And I'm
Becca Szkutak 24:14
curious what it has been like fundraising for this company, knowing the background knowing it spun out from the nonprofit and also doing the data piece that you just mentioned, people love Moats. People love proprietary data, investors love all of those kinds of buzzword terms. And so how has it been fundraising?
Allison Wolff 24:32
We have been really lucky, partly because of past relationships to get some incredible people behind us early. Our own Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt, who is the Chief Product Officer at Netflix for 18 years, he built the platform we all enjoy saw I worked with Neil a long time ago. He saw the potential here. He's a forest landowner. He owns a little bit of land in the Sierra very, very worried about fire, very, very worried about climate change. And so when I tell told him what was needed in the space and what we intended to build. He. And when we, when we formed our public benefit Corp, he jumped on the board and gave us the initial funds to build a minimum viable product that could actually show what was possible with a remote sense data driven decision support tool. So I'm very grateful to him, he later jumped in with both feet, pulled himself out of what he was working on before. He's our chief product officer, also still on the board with me and really guiding this company. It's such a pleasure to work with him again, other people like Chris Cox, who's the head of product at Mehta also saw the same kind of potential. He's a big climate investor. So we had a few folks Grantham Foundation, big climate investor that really wanted to see the modernization of these kinds of nature's climate solutions, and also risk mitigation that got behind us early that gave us enough to hire up a team that could really demonstrate what we were talking about. Because you can imagine in sort of an old world space was like, What are you talking about, like, change is very hard in these sort of slow more bureaucratic spaces. And so that really helped us and then later, we got incredible investors like ecosystem integrity fund, the partner that we work with there, Jamie Everett is a former forester, he totally got it. So we've just been lucky, where we've gotten just the right introductions to folks that saw the need, knew what we were building was absolutely audacious at first, because we basically, this wasn't a typical kind of software business where you could build sort of a nice consulting business or a little kind of pilot app and then slowly grow it as you had demand for it, we had to build sort of Full Tilt Boogie, we had to invest a ton in the team that we've got scientifically and from a machine learning perspective, to build that foundational model I talked about and to normalize these really complicated datasets, because we're basically doing our best to mimic nature and nature is very, very complicated. And so it took a lot of people that are very, very, you know, top end scientists and engineers to actually build this foundation. And then we also sell to government. And that takes a long time. So we finally have a federal blanket purchase agreement, we're starting to have a really deep partnership with the Forest Service and starting to work on other federal agencies like the Department of Interior and others tribes, too. And so now we're at a point where we've got enough traction, we've been able to attract investors like Microsoft and city Impact Fund and others that are now helping us into this new growth phase and really, really tackle new markets.
Dom Davis 27:18
And talking a little bit about yourself. I guess, growing up, did you always want to start a company like did you ever think that one day you would start a company like this? Hell no.
Allison Wolff 27:29
Never did. It's funny, I almost feel like I fell into it. It was just sort of a couldn't not do this. I did run my own consulting firm for 20 years. But it was just me with a Stable of writers and designers and others that I would pull in for different projects. When I was working with eBay, Google and Facebook. And there, I was sort of like an insider, even though it was a contractor, I really worked inside with teams very deeply for many years at a time. So yeah, I never imagined I would co founder and be the CEO of a tech company. In some ways, though. It's like so many other things in my life and others lives where you kind of look hindsight, in retrospect, it all makes sense. You know, I've worked with some of the most incredible CEOs in my career, like Reed Hastings at Netflix, and Mark Zuckerberg at Mehta and the leadership at Google. And so I've been able to pick up along the way, leadership styles, some of my work was sort of culture change oriented to over those years where I was helping some of those leaders set vision set strategy, and then galvanize big groups of employees around where a CEO or a leader like Chris Cox wants to head. And so you know, just started to learn what works. And so trying my best to apply that in my own company that is, you know, now inherently, one of the hard things is, as a consultant, you're sort of only as good as your client. And I saw this as an opportunity to build a company that inherently does good, like the core of the company, it's making money for the investors, but it's not quite yet, but it will. And it's inherently having this massive social and ecological impact. And so that feels really good. And that was something that always felt a little bit, add some dissonance around that with companies I've worked with, you know, in the past,
Becca Szkutak 29:09
and what is it like working with all of these different groups? Because I know sort of throughout this conversation, you've mentioned the government working with people like firefighters, also working with indigenous tribes and people who have known the land a lot longer than a lot of us have, what is it like kind of being able to bring all of these groups together on a platform? Because I know, I'm sure they all have different needs. They all approach these issues differently. I can imagine indigenous tribes who would be a little distrusting of sort of new solutions coming in as well, for good reason. What is it like bringing everyone together on this issue and being able to kind of create the platform that can allow for that collaboration? Yeah,
Allison Wolff 29:46
it's been it's been really interesting. I mean, a lot of this was starting to happen in that paper driven process I described earlier. Anyway, so you know, at least different jurisdictions, Forest Service BLM. National State Parks, private landowners, they were already trying to build consensus around what do we envision in this watershed? 300,000 acres, a million acres, it was just really hard. So collaboration had started partially, like I said, forced by severe fire crossing boundaries, right? Like fire doesn't care who owns the land, right bark beetles sweeping killing billions of trees. It doesn't care who owns the land. So consensus driven processes had already been birthed. Tribes, however, have sort of been doing their own thing. And there's a really significant change happening right now. There's a new mature and old growth bill that came through congress that's been in the news a lot lately. For example, that bill mandates the fact that Western science and indigenous knowledge have equal weight in planning how we protect and manage in and around old growth for the United States. That's kind of a first of its kind legislation that puts indigenous knowledge on the table with equal weight mandated in a bill. So I'm very excited about those kinds of moves, especially if the Biden administration is able to proceed. Of course, Deb Holland, at the head of the Department of Interior is our first tribal member that's leading the biggest natural resource agency in the country. So there's real opportunity to infuse and sort of reintroduce indigenous knowledge and how we manage land, which there's wide acceptance, there's almost a fervor for that. In fact, tribal leads, like Margo Robins in the Karuk tribe in the Pacific Northwest is teaching, she runs a big burn boss training program to help teach people all over the country how to apply a beneficial fire, there's a lot happening, my hope is that our platform can help tribes manage their data as sovereign data, they are their own countries, right. And so there's a lot of sensitivity around that. But with advanced technology, we can keep those things secure, right? Like we don't want to expose where ancient tribal sites are, where ancestral archaeological areas are, because silly people will go dig them up. So some of these things have to be handled very, very carefully. And I think the weird thing is we can bring modern technology to an ancient issue and also help everybody see and sort of reconnect with land, the way tribes manage it for 1000s of years. I mean, that's the holy grail is to is to really get back to the reciprocal relationship that you know, tribes had with nature for 20,000 years, we've got to basically, instead of trying to control going back to the control thing, instead of trying to control everything, we really have to connect with what's around us and understand what's healthy, and what we need to do to move things to health and resilience and be active in it. So that's really what our system is helping people do. It's just funny that it's, we're kind of meeting people where they are with advanced technology to reconnect to what we should have been doing 20,000 years ago, and
Dom Davis 32:58
I could listen to you talk forever. Oh, my gosh. Before we leave, we have one more question. And that's what's next? And then on top of that, like, are you going to tackle water next? What is I want to know what's next? Are you going to hit all the elements? Yeah, we
Allison Wolff 33:13
basically are now because our system is helping to manage across the elements water, biodiversity, carbon, and fire in terms of what's next. So we're just about to our system will be available West wide in all western US states, we now have the methodology to export that. So our hope is this year will start to move internationally in places like Greece, Portugal, which have horrible fires, Chile, our chief scientist just did a fellowship down in Chile to work with them on some of their their strategy for fire, they'd had horrible fires this summer for them a few months ago. So that's one goal is to take this where it's needed most in the world. But again, before it's too late, before we permanently lose some of these critical ecosystems, we're also really starting to think about we've got all this sort of nature accounting. So we've got all these values of natural capital inherently in our system, and then how doing this or that affects those values positively or negatively, sometimes. And so we're starting to think about the sort of nature accounting space and the need with ESG. Also, the taskforce on nature disclosures is sort of an emerging framework that a lot of companies are signing on to, I think we can be really helpful to, you know, again, connect corporations to ecosystems and understand the effects of what they invest in, what they're buying those kinds of things. So that's a sort of an emerging space that we're thinking about. And then finally, we have some pilots starting to happen with our partners at American Forest Foundation, incredible organization, if you want to support a great org that's really pioneering the highest quality forest carbon for small family landowners. So we're starting to bring the program that they birthed working with small family landowners on forest carbon offset programs to create a new source of income for small families. We're bringing that West in Fire Adapted landscapes, starting with some pilots this year, so I'm super excited about that.
Becca Szkutak 35:01
This has been a total pleasure. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Allison Wolff 35:04
Thanks so much for having me. It was so much fun talking to both of you.
Becca Szkutak 35:12
And that was our conversation with Allison. And before we move on looking at what was the lie, the lie was that there's one unified group that handles land management, and most of the US, which was pretty interesting to know. I mean, I know that I don't understand anything about what happens in government oversight, who does what, whatever I feel like any question I have, I always have to look it up. But I think that is kind of what makes his platform. So interesting is the collaboration part of it, if so many people oversee the land. And then of course, there's so many groups that would care about having cylinder care about how to develop it, or how to prevent things. It's like interesting to think of building a platform that caters to everyone all at
Dom Davis 35:53
once I know in the US is big, massive, huge. I often say it's too big, but not going into that. But just imagining the different type of environments that the land used to have before the colonial settlers came in. And just thinking about what is needed to take care of that land, and really knowing the wants and the needs, especially as the environment changes. How do you take care of a land that you never really knew, which is also really good? Why the company works with indigenous tribes? Because they know how to take care of this land. They've been doing it for like 1000s of years. Yeah,
Becca Szkutak 36:30
no, I thought that piece of it was not only super smart, it's just like a business strategy wise, but also just like the right thing to do. Like, if you're trying to build this, and you are going off of just new technology or new approaches, it just isn't the full picture. Like if you're trying to get back to a space especially which like, it seems like a lot of us are trying to do where it's like we have less of a harm on the environment less of an impact, building a platform that doesn't account for how people took care of the land prior to the impact we've currently had would just be kind of silly, like the information is right there. Like why would you not work with the people who know what they're talking about and stuff. And I feel, especially with indigenous groups, I feel there's mistrust of how people are treating their land and how the government approaches things like that, which is very well founded mistrust for sure. So it's nice to see that this is just bridging a lot of gaps I feel in that space.
Dom Davis 37:21
Yeah. And it seems to be such a nuanced issue, just thinking about everything that goes into, like going back to when did I have biology and like the seventh grade biodiversity, and I just remember, there's like, there's a lot of it, I can't even go into the details about it. But just understanding the biodiversity, the vegetation, the what it takes to put all of this together, and then creating a technology that can specifically address those issues. But then doing that for the United States, which is once again, big girl, like I really liked this product. I think it's timely, it's needed. And I really do like the collaborative aspect of it.
Becca Szkutak 37:58
Yeah, cuz like bar diversity is so huge. I know, there's a new venture firm I wrote about their launch, it was sometime during 2023, I want to say Mubi in the summer called super organism. And their whole thesis is backing companies that preserve biodiversity or like preserve nature, because they're like, it's crazy how little people realize that if we work to preserve certain things it like, takes care of some of our other issues. So it's like everyone wins in this scenario. But I definitely want to talk about the AI piece here too, because it seems like it would be kind of a difficult model to train just with how much biodiversity there is, even if it is less than there used to be. It's so complex and complicated. It seems like it'd be hard to train an AI model on this dataset. But I could definitely see where because this is such a fluid area that once it did learn, it would be really helpful to have something like AI to help scale this technology.
Dom Davis 38:53
Yeah, I was also going to bring that up. It seems to be such an intricate thing. I truly don't know how you train an AI model on this. But I'm also I'm not a machine learning expert at all. But I imagine no one's asking us to do it. No one's asking me. But I also imagine it could be because it seems like there's also new biodiversity that comes out. Like there's so much about this world that we don't know. And so how much can you train an AI model? When it comes to the environment like this, about even a world that we're still trying to figure out? Like, imagine the AI trying to figure out the ocean, and we only know like 5% of it? Maybe the AI can learn more? Because we can drop it down there to the depths or something? Or maybe not like because what are we looking for? I think it's also a pretty good use for AI. Like we should put AI on the front lines of this and figure this out. I love
Becca Szkutak 39:41
the thought of putting AI on the front line. Like let's throw them on the front line. But yeah, you get a little robot yo I mean stuff like that. It's like just using this technology makes so much sense here because I know back in college, I took this environmental reporting class, which was a lot of fun, really a lot of fun. And one of the field trips we did a lot of field trips with took a field trip to a marsh, and the guy who was running the research on the marsh Rumney marsh in Boston, if anyone is familiar with it, he was a Egnyte. And he's like, Yeah, we like Come here. Every day, we take these huge advanced computers, and we throw them in the ocean. He's like, No, we collect them. And then we take the data off of them. But just he's so like, if I just take a big piece of technology, and just toss it right in the ocean, and so like thinking of like, applying tech to, like, draw out these maps and get a better hold on these biodiversity issues, because I mean, in theory, I'm thinking Marian, like Sims brain, right? Now, if you were like making a patch of grass or something, say it's an analogy for a field out on the west coast, the biodiversity in the one square is probably going to be the same if you blew it up to 10 squares, like 10 square feet or something. So I feel like once you figure stuff out, train the AI, that kind of scale, like for forests and things like that definitely makes a lot of sense here.
Dom Davis 40:52
I just keep thinking about those life size robots from Glacier and then having them hike up mountains. And just saying, like, hike, and then having them go up and look around, figure it out. Yeah. and figure it out. Yeah.
Becca Szkutak 41:07
So that's where we're headed. That's where we're headed.
Dom Davis 41:08
Hey, I think that's a good use case for robots. Vm pro robot. But you know, what else was really interesting that we didn't talk to her much about was her previous working experience, which she has been everywhere.
Becca Szkutak 41:21
Oh, I know. And she tried to like, downplay the fact that she was like, Oh, well, you know, like the first company I founded and I never wanted to be a founder. And I'm like, I don't know, I would consider running your own consulting firm that got hired by people like Google, Apple, Facebook, palmetto, but like, I would definitely give myself more credit for that. Yeah.
Dom Davis 41:39
When I saw she was at Netflix, back in the day, I was like, Oh, my gosh, she's been everywhere.
Becca Szkutak 41:43
She's worked with a lot of the great quote, unquote, like tech minds of the last decade, the great, so yeah, I think she definitely underplays that a little bit, which I think she should
Dom Davis 41:53
know. Yeah, this is definitely She's amazing. And don't underplay
Becca Szkutak 41:58
it. This episode could have easily been like three hours long.
Dom Davis 42:01
I know I wanted to know more about everything. I felt like I was back in like college lecture.
Becca Szkutak 42:06
Oh no, but like actually interested taking note actually found is hosted by myself. TechCrunch Senior Reporter Becca Skuta. Alongside Senior Reporter Dominic Midori Davis founders produced by Maggie Stamets with editing by Cal our Illustrator is Bryce Durbin phones, audience development and social media is managed by Morgan Liddell Alisa stringer and Natalie Kreisman TechCrunch is audio products are managed by Henry pic of it. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week.
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