The following interview is a conversation we had with Allison Wolff, CEO at Vibrant Planet, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $34M Raised to Build the Future of Land Management Restoration
Allison Wolff
Yeah, thanks for having me, Brett.
Brett
So I’d love to kick off with just a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Allison Wolff
Yeah, so I am CEO of Vibrant Planet. We are a tech platform that’s focused on resilience building in the face of catastrophic fire and other climate driven calamities. And yeah, I have a long background in tech. I was in Silicon Valley for most of my career, and a lot of that career was focused on climate solutions and sort of the sustainability green side of the industry and kind of stumbled my way into this very big wildfire problem and climate resilience building later in the career.
Brett
So I have to ask about your time at Netflix. I see that you were the director of marketing from 1997 to 2000. What was that like at Netflix back then, and what did you learn from that experience?
Allison Wolff
Yes, I was there back when were a weird DVD rental mail order company. But yeah, I was head of a lead brand and marketing for the company reported to Reed Hastings. That was a wild ride. And yeah, really everything that we still see about the brand and even I ended up by default because there weren’t very many of us at the company, ended up running a lot of the user experience design as well. So it was incredible to be part of an early tech company that early, especially with leaders like Mark Randolph and then Reed Hastings and others. Actually, one of my co founders at Vibrant Planet was also there, Neil Hunt, who was the head of engineering and then became head of product and engineering at Netflix. And he was there for 18 years.
Allison Wolff
So it’s just, it was incredible to be part of something in that first dot era that had, you know, major impact on our lives and actually became something pervasive.
Brett
Was it obvious back then to you and everyone working there that Netflix was going to become the giant that it is today?
Allison Wolff
No, not. Not like it is today. But I was part of helping to write the narrative that the company would basically operate a streaming platform at some point at the time. Back then, we didn’t have. We didn’t have fiber optic cable aid. I mean, it was. Talk about selling the dream. It technically wasn’t possible to have millions of people hitting play, rewinding fast forwarding video over the Internet. That wasn’t even possible back then. So it’s hard for people to even imagine that. So it was sort of an early experience for me to be part of selling a dream because were trying to go public and it was hard. We were sort of at the tail end of that early.com wave.
Allison Wolff
It was hard to get an ipo out the door when the core infrastructure to enable what were selling to investors wasn’t even there yet. But Reid had came, and Neil Hunt actually, too, had come from that space. And so Reid knew exactly when it would happen. He said, in one decade, we will all be able to stream movies online, and we’ll be able to fast forward and rewind the sections that we like. So he had the vision, and he was spot on. He was exactly right.
Brett
That’s amazing. And sure, that was such an incredible experience. I could probably ask you another ten or 15 questions about Netflix, but I want to switch gears now and dive into everything that you’re building today. So, just to kick things off at a very high level, what problem does Vibert planet solve?
Allison Wolff
So we are in the middle of the risk mitigation space, so we’re very focused on wildfire, but we are getting into other risk management. But the way we mitigate risk is by restoring ecosystem function, which also unlocks environmental markets. So we’re sort of a nature based climate solutions company that started in the risk mitigation space. So I can explain more why those two things are all one thing as we go on in the conversation, but that is where we operate.
Brett
And just to talk about the history of the company a little bit. So it looks like you were a consulting company for the first time, 1516 years, and then he decided to launch it as a tech platform, is that right?
Allison Wolff
Well, actually, we just borrowed the name from a consulting firm that I had for a long time. So after Netflix, I went to an incredible firm called Sy Partners that works on vision, strategy and culture change with big organizations, I think like 300,000 employees worldwide, and really learned the art of setting vision and then mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people around that vision. While I was there, I got really passionate about climate change and sustainability and also social justice and equity. And I spun out my own firm called Vibrant Planet in 2004 and really focused on working with leaders on the legacy that they want to leave and really galvanizing more focus on the public than internal culture change, but really thinking about culture change that pertains to issues like climate change and sustainability and how you make them.
Allison Wolff
Social norms, the solutions social norms. So did that for 20 years and was fortunate to work with some of the big tech giants on their foundational sustainability strategies, launching data for good programs, and put a little bit of a dent in climate solutions through work with Silicon Valley.
Brett
Trey and then take us back to November 2020. When you launched this version of Vibrant Planet, what was it about this problem and this company that made you say, yep, thats it. Im going to go dedicate the next three 4510, maybe longer years of my life to building this company.
Allison Wolff
Yeah. So I was doing some work with some impact investors and one of them lived in the Lake Tahoe area and wanted to build sort of like a Rocky Mountain institute or an Aspen institute type of center in the area that would take on something unique in climate change. And so I was mapping the space to try to figure out what a new center could take on that would actually matter. And as I was digging into that, talking to lots and lots of locals and also global scientific leaders, also, I started to hear only about wildfire. So paradise, California, burned. We had the 2018 fire season in California and Australia, and all anyone would talk about was wildfire.
Allison Wolff
And so I started really digging into that topic and started to see that we really are facing catastrophic failure in about half of land on earth. So about 53% of ecosystems on earth or landmass on earth, is fire adapted, which means those ecosystems evolved with fire in some way. And it’s also where all the people live and where we continue to build. Started with small cabins in the forties and then giant $20 million homes today in places like Lake Tahoe, it’s places that we love to live. And with COVID you know, supercharging that. And so we’ve gotten better and better over time at suppressing fire to protect property. And we really don’t like fire. One of the things humanity is really good at, but which also kind of bites us in the ass, is we like to control things, right?
Allison Wolff
So we like to control the temperature by putting air conditioners in our homes. We don’t like fire. And so we started controlling fire and we’ve gotten really good at it. So almost every fire gets put out within seconds. And because of that, we’ve created some very unhealthy ecosystems. Again, in half of land on earth that is dependent on fire to regenerate, cycle carbon, to cycle nutrients, to coal, down number of trees and forests. It’s how a lot of these species regenerate. And by withholding fire all this time, we’ve really broken the foundational ecosystems by trying to control it. And so now what we’re getting is out of control fires. We’re getting these explosive, catastrophic fires which are wiping out ecosystems and also wiping out our communities.
Allison Wolff
So as I dove into this problem, I discovered how broken the land management, planning and monitoring capabilities are, so they really hadn’t been modernized yet. So as I dove into the problem for this impact investor, I started to see a really big tech opportunity to modernize how we manage natural resources, both for risk mitigation, not just to communities, but also to the ecosystem services that keep us alive, but to also sort of enhance the carbon, water, biodiversity, recreation services that we all depend on.
Brett
And who are the types of customers that you’re selling to? Is it just governments?
Allison Wolff
Yeah, so we work with the US Forest Service, Department of Agriculture, we work with utilities like PG and e, we work with fire districts, counties, states. We actually are starting to work with Cal fire in California. Yeah. So basically anyone that’s working on risk mitigation and natural resource management is our customer.
Brett
Some of the other founders that I’ve interviewed who sell to the government, they say it was very hard to find VC’s that would support that journey and wanted to be part of that type of business. Is that something that you experienced as well? Was it hard to find investors that were up for the journey of selling the government?
Allison Wolff
Yes, we definitely struggled. So we came into being as there were a lot of exciting, kind of flashy, forced carbon companies coming onto the scene as well. And were a little bit behind them. And what we do is really complicated. We’re basically doing our best to mimic the complexity of nature. And so we invested heavily in the science and data engineering. We’ve got a very sophisticated engineering team and science team to build out a fine scale vegetation structure. And then land management is a very complex thing. So, you know, the forest service, for example, has to manage for carbon, water, biodiversity, recreation values and protecting communities that are in and around their forests.
Allison Wolff
And so there’s this inherent complexity where we had to represent all these things that have value in a landscape within a data structure in order for tree level permitting decisions to be made literally on what trees to cut to protect homes and improve forest health and where we can safely apply prescribed fire and things like that. They’re very complex scientific and technical questions. And so we would get a little bit of the glaze over just because of the complexity. And then to boot, the biggest customer when you’re dealing with land management in the western US is the US government. So that’s 40% to 60% of land ownership. And in order to solve the wildfire problem, you have to serve them.
Allison Wolff
And so, yeah, government contracts scare a lot of investors, although the investors that get it also understand once you land them, they are very big, sticky customers. And so were lucky to find our people, and then they helped us bring more of our people together around the company. And so we’ve got this incredible group of investors that really do get the value that we bring as we deploy westwide in the United States now, where all the fires, the bad fires happen, what that catalyzes, because now that we’ve got that coverage, we have really strong commercial plays coming as well. So now it gets really interesting. So the bet paid off.
Brett
What about those first paying customers that you’re able to land? If you reflect on that, how do you think you were able to pull it off? Because as I’m sure you’ve experienced, every startup struggled with getting those first paying customers to say yes. So how’d you manage to get them to do so?
Allison Wolff
Yeah, one of the things I learned working in Silicon Valley for my whole career was you have to show people what’s possible. So were able to raise enough investment that we built an incredibly robust, minimum viable product that was actually functioning in a very high profile area of California that was one of the highest risk areas. And were able to get early customers that we gave the system to. And we really co designed the system with them as they were going through a risk management workflow. We built it side by side with them, and then they became our earliest and biggest paying customers once they saw the potential of the system to help do what they needed to do. So then were able to grow it from there.
Brett
Trey, when it comes to your marketing philosophy, how would you describe it?
Allison Wolff
So this company is really new for me, having done a lot of b, two b and business to consumer marketing my whole career. This is a very relationship, trust driven space. And so all of our early customers were deep relationships that might either some of my team who are foresters, or long time people in government from like EPA and bureau, land management and US forest Service, where they had deep respect. I earned that respect coming in as the newbie from Silicon Valley. You know, took several years of many conversations to also build that kind of rapport with folks. But it’s the most relationship driven business I’ve ever experienced.
Brett
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Allison Wolff
Yeah, so I can tell you that within a year and a half. So we sell our system by the acre, and it’s annual subscription. We have gone from 300,000 acres by the end of December last month to 18 million acres across the western us. So that’s about half the size of a state like Pennsylvania, to give you a little bit of a sense of size. So we’re now in California, both northern and southern California, which are very different ecologically and socially, Oregon, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico. So it’s super exciting to start testing the system in radically different social ecological context.
Brett
We’re just now starting the year, so we’re just finishing up the first week of January. What’s a big goal for 2024 in terms of acres?
Allison Wolff
We are deploying in about 300 million acres. So the system’s available in about 300 million acres, and we will hopefully be serving customers in the vast majority of that area. We are hoping to really support at all scales of government so that we can support the deployment. What the system does at its core is it’s sort of harkening back to Netflix. It’s basically a recommendation system for where you can deploy what resources you have to avoid the most losses and to unlock the most ecosystem services benefit. So think carbon, water, biodiversity, recreation again.
Allison Wolff
And so where we can help with that at the top level of the government, where billions of dollars are moving from the Inflation Reduction act and still from the infrastructure bill for wildfire risk mitigation, and to manage the nation’s carbon, water, biodiversity and recreation, we are able to work at that national scale as well as at the hyper local scale where permits happen. So, you know, where you’ve got a local watershed and multiple collaborators working across land ownership jurisdictions, helping them figure out where do we deploy our capital at that smaller kind of community or watershed scale.
Brett
How do you think about your market category? So in the intro, I labeled you as a land management restoration platform. I think I stole that from your website or LinkedIn or I stole that from somewhere. Is that your market category or what is the market category?
Allison Wolff
Yeah, that’s right. Natural resource management, but also wildfire risk management are the two categories that we operate in.
Brett
What are those categories look like today in terms of competition?
Allison Wolff
There’s a lot of competition in the fire response side of fire. So if you think about fire, there’s sort of three phases. There’s before the fire, what you do to mitigate risk. And if you think about concentric circles, there’s what do you do around your house, a defensible space, what’s your roof made out of? Do you have a propane tank in your backyard? That kind of thing. Then there’s community risk, and then around the community, the wild urban interface, it’s called. And so that’s making sure that emergency responders can get in and people can get out. So that’s ingress and egress routes on roads, making sure those are clear and as fuel free as possible, power lines coming into communities, those kinds of risk mitigations.
Allison Wolff
And then you’ve got these broader wildlands where, because, again, because we’ve been suppressing fire for a very long time, we’ve got this massive buildup of fuels and unhealthy, unresilient lands that have been starved of beneficial fire for over 100 years now. And so what we’re seeing more and more is lightning fires or transmission lines sparking fires in these hazardously overgrown forests and other wildlands. And then they grow to these kind of tidal wave fires that wipe out ecosystems, and then there’s nothing you can do to stop them. You can’t suppress those fires. All you can do is evacuate people. You know, once that fire is getting near a community.
Brett
As I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised 34 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?
Allison Wolff
Well, it’s been interesting to do several raises now. We just finished our series A. Raise. As were raising our series A, the market really shifted under our feet, so were kind of in the middle of it as things started to tighten up pretty radically over the last eight, nine months. And what I saw early on, were lucky with connections that we had. And I do feel like I and my team did a good job selling the vision and the dire need for what we’ve built. We really are facing catastrophic failure. If our company’s not wildly successful, there aren’t many in the rear view mirror. And so were really, I think, able to convince a key set of investors that were very influential early on, and that helped us propel future rounds where the stakes got higher, especially in a difficult market.
Allison Wolff
Due diligence got harder and harder as went, even in the series A. So, yeah, I mean, I think early stage vision sells, and so I think being able to articulate a big vision with, hopefully, a big business behind it is absolutely critical.
Brett
How do you think about messaging between selling to customers and then selling to investors? Is it the same pitch and the same story and same narrative, or is it totally different?
Allison Wolff
It’s pretty similar for us. We’re really selling this core message of modernizing land management that had not moved into the cloud until we built our platform. It was not happening with data that was high resolution enough, which created a chasm between scientists and land managers that was really just a data downscaling problem more than anything else, and then the ability to collaborate effectively. Part of the problem we’re solving is the way management planning happens today is a consultant or a fuels lead for the forest Service, for example, will put together a bunch of data layers and print a physical map and then get different jurisdictions that are adjacent to a Forest Service landowner or whoever’s leading the charge.
Allison Wolff
Getting the group of people that need to look at watershed scale over several million acres, because, of course, fires moving across millions of acres, that’s forcing collaboration across jurisdictions. And often there are nonprofit groups that will wait, sometimes for legitimate reasons, to litigate a plan so that the plan doesn’t actually get implemented because they don’t trust. Well, I don’t see your spotted owl data, or I don’t feel like you’ve been inclusive of this tribe and their interests. Right. So there’s a lot of reasons to stop a project. So the system that we built is really geared to bring transparent data and collaboration to an inherently collaborative process. And so that’s a very hard science problem. It’s a very hard data and machine learning problem, and then it’s just a really good cloud based product.
Allison Wolff
And so we’re selling that both to our customers, and it’s also the story we’re telling our investors. It was sorely needed, and we’re filling a massive gap for the customers that we now sell to every day.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision that you’re building?
Allison Wolff
Ultimately, we are a nature based climate solutions company, so we’re in a way, leveraging the hyper focus on the wildfire crisis to get people focused on resilience building. And a lot of that is major investment in standing up a viable private sector around natural resource management. So all the sciences, foresters, tech jobs like my team does to spatially map forests and understand all these intricacies of nature, it’s really building a nature tech company that brings resilience back to very unresilient, damaged wildlands because of our actions. And again, like, we’re focused right now on the half of land on earth that is fire dependent so that we can actually live safely with fire. Again, the holy grail is getting more good fire back on land to keep this land healthy and fighting fire with fire.
Allison Wolff
So having more beneficial fire helps us stave off catastrophic fire. It is the solution. And fire, ironically, is also how we’re going to unlock carbon, water and biodiversity markets in, again, half of land on earth. So that is really what we’re focused on right now, what we’ve built. We’ve become experts in decision support and collaborative decision making and monitoring. And so we can export that into the tropics. We can export that into other categories like land use. So right now we’re in land management, but we can help with broader land use decisions, including like where should we cite renewable energy to do the least damage and not put it in the risk of harm. So there’s a lot in the future of the company that we can get after we’re looking heavily at insurance, for example.
Allison Wolff
And how can we play a role in keeping insurance in a state like California that has a really big fire problem? So lots of new, fun things for us to apply the core of what we’ve built to you in the future.
Brett
Amazing. I love the vision and I’ve really loved this conversation. We are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here before we do, if there’s any founders that are listening in, that want to follow along with your journey, where should they go?
Allison Wolff
You can go to vibrantplanet.net and reach out to us, please. Love to hear from you.
Brett
Amazing. Allison, thank you so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it.
Allison Wolff
Yeah, thanks so much, Brett. Thanks for having me.
Brett
Keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media. Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio, if you’re a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit Frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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