This Week in Startups - Coinbase CEO reflects on “mission” manifesto + Kettle’s Nat Manning on fire insurance | E1295

Episode Date: October 1, 2021

First Jason covers Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's reflections on last year's blog "Coinbase is a mission focused company.” Then, Nat Manning joins from Kettle, to chat about better assessing fire risk with data, how California can prevent home damage from increasing wildfires, outperforming actuaries & more.

Okay, it's been a year since Brian Armstrong's incredibly controversial blog post. Coinbase is a mission-focused company. Today, a year after, he did that incredible, incredibly bold mission statement that we will not talk about social issues at Coinbase and he took all the hours. Well, now he is taking the Hornets Nest into the end zone and he is spiking the ball. Wow. I mean, it is a charged tweet storm. and then Nat Manning from Kettle is with us to talk about how his startup is using machine learning to figure out where the next fires are going to be in California's crazy, insane fire zones in

California and all these homes burning. We go deep into extreme weather. We go deep into protecting homes. And should people be allowed to rebuild in a fire zone, you're going to find out on this amazing episode. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Inbroker's startup insurance program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Save up to 20% off traditional insurance today at imbroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist. LinkedIn Marketing. To redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com slash

this week in startups. And Zendesk. Qualifying startups can join the Zendesk for Startups program and get six free months of Zendesk products. You'll also get access to an exclusive community of startups for advice and connections. Visit Zendesk.com slash twist today to get started. Okay, it has been one year since Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote his controversial blog post and Tweetstorm,

Coinbase is a mission-focused company. And today, he updated what's happened in the year since in a 13 tweet thread. Also, during this time period, Coinbase went public in April and is no longer an $8 billion company. No, it's worth $49 billion. Here's the most important tweets from the thread, which you can read on your own. One, you know, it's a number starts a thread on Twitter, so I'll include the number. So the first tweet, it's been about a year since my mission-focused blog post. wasn't easy to go through at that time. But looking back, it turned out to be one of the most

positive changes I've made at Coinbase, and I'd recommend it to others. Okay, this is incredibly bold that he's coming out. And basically, he's not kicking the hive, you know, the beehive right now. He just grabbed the beehive. He ran into the end zone, and he spiked the beehive. And now this, people have forgotten about this whole controversy. He literally is bringing it back up. Brian Armstrong, say what you will, is fearless and a great leader. And whether you disagree with him or agree with him, fearless is definitely the number one descriptor of what he's doing. Number two, we have a much more aligned company now where we can focus on getting work done

toward a mission. And it has allowed us to hire some of the best talent from organizations where employees are fed up with politics in fighting and distraction. So if you remember, basically his manifesto was, we are going to work at work. There will be no more discussion at work about political issues. And this was an incredibly challenging thing to do at the time because he did it during Black Lives Matter. And he did it specifically about people talking about police violence, George Floyd, etc. So to decide on social media as a large technology company and tech companies are hated right now that he is going to say no more discussion of Black Lives Matter.

or Israel, Palestine, or any issue was really, really, how do I say this? Like, I mean, it was, you know, he was kicking the hive. And he got stung a lot. People were very, very, very upset. And this was, people said this would be the death of Coinbase, that they would never be able to get great talent. And my position on this was for every person who doesn't want to go work there, I think there's going to be 10 who do. Because my perception is we hear from the people who care very much about political, social, woke, ideological, wealth disparity, Israel, Palestine, whoever's really into those things, those causes, me on human rights.

People would say I'm annoying. I mean, many people have told me to stop talking about human rights issues and that I'm annoying and they don't want to hear it from me. but I will keep talking about human rights issues because it's something I'm passionate about. You know, to say you can't talk about these things at work, yes, it gets rid of the vocal people, but for every vocal person on Twitter or social media or, you know, in the press or on TV or on podcasts, I would say there's 20 people who do not want to talk about these issues. Just like if you go to your, I don't know, holiday meal with all of your family and the extended family's there, and you've got 50 or 75 people in your house,

and it's a big, giant party. And there's like five people who want to talk about politics. And the rest of the people just want to hang out, play softball, drink a couple of beers and have a good time and gorge themselves on Turkey or whatever you have at your family gatherings. Those five people can ruin it for the other 70, right? You've been there. People start talking about, you know, whatever,

George Bush versus the Clintons or Trump versus Biden. It just turns into chaos, and they ruin it for everybody else. And that's basically what he found. More people now are coming to work at Coinbase because they agree that work is for work and that politics and social issues you should do on your own time. And to Brian's further defense here, he was very clear, listen, it's not that you can't talk about these things on your own time. It's not that these things aren't important. It's that we want everybody in the company 100% focused on our mission, which is something in the wheelhouse of making people financially literate and independent. And so we can do more good in the world by staying

focused on our mission. And there might be other companies with the mission that you're passionate about, whether that's the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Uyghurs in China, Black Lives Matter, wealth disparity, go work at a company that's focused on that. That's not what this company is focused on. And it's important for every company to be focused on something, just like Rick Warren said in the purpose-driven church. The premise of that book was, a church needs to have a purpose. There needs to be one thing that your church is really good at

and that you're focused on so that people know what to do when they're there and they have a sense of mission. You'll see that here. We took our Slack and we said, the Slack is now for one purpose, organizing meetups for this weekend startups. And once we said, hey, that's the mission of the Slack,

not for marketing your products and services. Everybody sort of got a line. The people who were there to market, left and the people who were there to do the meetups became supercharged. So let's continue with this story. It's very important, I think, for every organization to have a clearly defined purpose and not drift from that. Tweet number three in the storm, one of the biggest concerns, and this is Brian Armstrong, one of the biggest concerns around our stance was that it would impact our diversity numbers. Since my post, we've grown our headcount about 110%. So that means they

doubled, while our diversity numbers have remained the same or even improved on some metrics. So there's a key. People did say no black people will ever work, no people of color will ever work. Women are not going to work at Coinbase. And obviously, that has not been the case, which would be directionally correct if you believe the fact or if you come to it with the premise that the overwhelming majority of people, 90%, 95%, do not want politics, do not want social issues at work. I think anybody would actually say that. If you talk to 10 people, 9 would say they don't want to have this be a focus at work. But they wouldn't say it on Twitter. So therefore, we're getting a warped perception of the world. And if you're on Twitter, you get a very warped, or any social media, you get a warped perception of the world. On Instagram, you think everybody's then and looks great with their shirt off and a bikini, whatever, and that everybody's constantly on a global vacation, yolowing it out.

And if you're on Twitter, you think everybody is obsessed with social justice and virtue signaling. And you get the idea. And on Facebook, you think everybody just had three babies. It's just each of those social networks has a certain leaning. and Twitter can give you a deranged view of the world. Number five, what was amazing was the contrast between the news following my post

and the reaction from employees and people who spoke to me in private, while the media reports were mostly negative and it even spawned some retaliatory and intellectually dishonest hit pieces, the reaction from both employees and people I spoke to in private was overwhelmingly and positive. Yeah, that's directionally correct. I think people are scared to talk about this in public.

On episode, I think nine of All In, we talked about this issue and I talked about it here on the podcast. And I think uniformly, we were in favor of this. Sax, Friedberg, and myself and even Chimuth, who is a person of color, he didn't think that the blog post was written very well. It was a little bit rambling, which it was long. He thought they should look at everything through the lens of their mission and he could have said it more deftly.

And Saxon, Freeberg thought, yeah, in their experience, people don't want to come to work to talk about politics. They want to do that on their own time. And my position was at the time, and still remains, a lot of this is exacerbated because people aren't actually talking to each other. They're chatting with each other. If you're chatting, there's no empathy. You're doing this in a Slack room. It takes over the entire organization more so during a pandemic because everybody lives in Slack. Your company manifests itself in Slack as opposed to a real world location. What's going to happen? All of a sudden, you see 78 messages in the random folder. Everybody rushes over there. Oh, why? There's 78 messages. Oh, and it's seven people out of 700

fighting about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Uighurs in China or Black Lives Matter or police violence. And then people are like, hey, you know, maybe his point of view is good or, oh, hey, I kind of love this. And then it just takes over. And now the entire company, instead of working on the mission is spending 90% of their emotional energy and 20% of their actual time in those rooms. And it is exhausting. I mean, you ever been in a like a Twitter, feed or an I message thread when people are going at it about politics or religion or abortion or gun control. It might only take, you know, 30 minutes of your day to deal with that, but it might emotionally and spiritually and energy-wise take half of your energy from the day.

And it could put people in a mood where they want to quit the company or they feel hurt and you know how it is when you feel hurt or when you feel misunderstood or you feel attacked. You ever have that where you feel attacked or misunderstood? and, you know, for two or three days you're thinking about it. Now put that on the entire company. You're basically making the entire company feel those feelings. If you don't have business insurance, you've failed one of the first steps in being a great entrepreneur.

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their real stakeholder? I can answer that for you. The press is broken up into four buckets. I'll expend that in a moment. but essentially one of those buckets is two of those buckets are particularly enamored with any kind of a fight because it drives page views, it drives likes, and it drives subscribers. So I can tell you, the reason why it's so positive inside your company and the press is so negative is because not all the press is using your story, Brian, in order to get page

views. The two buckets that are the content farming group. So content farming group would probably be a large portion of BuzzFeed, but not all, because they have also some really great investigative journalists. But, you know, the folks who are just trying to, you know, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, you know, doing link baiting stuff, they're going to do content farming on this story and spin it. However, whatever, their spin will be determined by what will get them the most clicks. And they actually test this by using Facebook and they'll test five different headlines for the story, which everyone gets the most clicks, gets the most reaction, gets. the headline. And they'll do that, and they have separate writers to write the headlines who are good at writing

controversial headlines. They get you to click. Those content optimizing folks do not care about the truth. They care about the clicks. Obviously, if it's controversial, they don't care if it's the truth. They care if it gets clicks. That's one bucket. The next bucket is the Virtue Siguring Press or the agenda-driven press, the advocacy-driven press.

And advocacy press has always existed, but it's very much in fashion now. And it is becoming a larger and larger percentage of writers. So if you look at the New York Times, they're hiring writers specifically who are anti-tech and who want to hold tech accountable. Literally, the New York Times has predetermined that tech is guilty and is making hiring decisions based on who is the most anti-tech. Let that sink in. The New York Times, the paper of record, is hiring the most anti-tech journalists they can

find and they're explicitly saying, we're hiring journalists because they have a proven track record in being anti-tech and holding tech accountable, and we need to do that. The most cynical view of that would be the Bology take, which is they see technology companies as their adversary, like Facebook and Google are taking all their money and their attention, and therefore they are attacking them and using their journalistic firepower to attack. And that feels pretty smarmy, but I don't think that's exactly accurate. So the other two pieces of the press and buckets would be the direct to consume, you know, the subjects going direct like myself and all in and, you know, CEOs who have big followings on Twitter or Andreessen Horowitz, you know, failed content attempts that they

copied from my playbook and they just did poorly and they don't get any attention for. And then finally, there's the old school press, you know, Carras Swisher, uh, Kade Metz, you know, just the old school press who just want to tell the stories as accurately as they can. And, uh, remember, I interviewed Kade on episode 1187 and his talk was, his, he talked with me about that slate star codex article. Um, I asked him who wrote the headline and for the article Silicon Valley Safe Space and he was, you know, he kind of indicated that he did it in collaboration.

He didn't want to throw the person under the bus, but you, you could kind of infer that he would have preferred he wrote it, but basically it was an editor. And, you know, the headline really didn't match his article, which then leads to, you know, this whole sort of feeling of animosity between the tech world and press. And listen, tech has, because of Facebook and other bad behavior, tech does need to be held accountable. And we've seen great moments in investigative journalism about tech companies, whether it's John Carrieroo, old school journalist with Theranos, or the Wall Street Journal with the

Facebook paper. So you can't paint the press with one brush. It really is four specific buckets. And there's the content bucket, just content optimization. They're ruthless, ruthless, horrible people who just want to get clicks. They don't care about the truth. Then you have the advocacy, which, you know, say what you will about them, but they are advocating for their position. Some of them are explicit about it, like Fox News and MSNBC. Other ones are kind of not as explicit about, like the New York Times, who are kind of saying that the paper of record while they're actually, they've picked aside, basically. And consumers are hashing that out.

So, anyway, enough on that. Let's keep going back to Brian's tweets for him. Nine, the biggest lesson I took away from the whole ordeal is that if you believe something is the right path, it's worth speaking about, even if it's controversial. My take on this is, number one, people should be allowed to talk about whatever they want. They should have whatever positions they want. and the founders of a company should decide if they want to have a company that embraces that debate or having debates at all, or the founders of the company can decide they want to have no debates. In my small company, I love having debates.

I can handle it. It's never gotten out of control. I am a strong presence within the company. I've hired and had a great, I think I've done a great job building the specific culture that I want. And if people don't fit into that culture, they're not going to stay here. Now, these are under 20 person companies inside.com and launch. So it's a lot easier for me to do that. Once a company gets big, you start to lose that ability for me to have a personal touch with each employee,

each team member. So I think that this is going to be the future of companies. And if you want to work at a company that has a specific mission, pick that. You know, if the New York Times position is tech is bad or largely bad and we need to hold them accountable, the great, then people who want to take that position and go there. If other journalists want to say, I'm going to try to find the truth and I'm not going to come to it with a predetermined position, then I will go work for the economist or financial times or whatever other publication is trying to, you know, just be objective, right? So you can pick where you want to go. If you're an advocate,

you can go work for MSNBC or Fox or Jacobin. Is that how you pronounce it? Jacobin. Anyway, I I love, love listening to Jacobin, you know, writers, I love motherboard and vice writers. I love to understand their positions. I don't agree with them, but I love that those publications

exist and I can take their, then there's like the kids from Jacobin and whatnot do like this machine kills. I listen to that podcast. And they pick good stories. I mean, they're completely uninformed in their positions because they're so anti-tech or so anti-capitalism that they have this crazy

blind spot, but I like hearing their wacky positions because they do alert you to how some people think about the world, and that's good. I like to be more informed. And they pick good topics, right? They find things that are on the margins really interesting. In fact, the way I was alerted to the Amazon driver controversy was Jacobin, whatever the socialist magazine is, and this machine kills, they alerted me to this article about drivers being upset about being under cameras to watch their driving ability. And, you know, so kudos on, you know, really finding the edge cases or the bubbling up stories. Does any public company have a more dynamic founder with the authority than Coinbases does right now is a question that has come up here in my notes from our audience?

And so, yeah, I would say, you know, Tesla, Brian Armstrong, maybe Jack at Twitter and Square. I'm trying to think of iconoclastic leaders who do not care about what other people think about them and are brave. Benioff, Michael Dell. Jeff Lawson is from Twilio is pretty outspoken to, yeah. And he takes the other side of this, right? So they're out there. It's kind of hard to be very candid when you're a public company because you're responsible for the share price and the shareholders and the stakeholders. So you don't want to be too cavalier.

But I think Brian has absolutely walked the line here. And I think this is part of the reaction to perhaps the hysterical or extreme culture we've been in, whether it's the Trump trolling or the historical left and socialists. I think the world is rejecting those two groups of people and saying let's get to let's get back to some more moderate way to have discourse. And I'm very proud of All In because I feel like being the creator of that podcast and bringing all those guys together has been my way of saying, hey, let's see if we could have a reasonable discussion. And it's why on that podcast, you don't hear me giving my takes that much. I consider myself the point guard or the conductor of a great conversation. So I've been really trying to develop a new muscle for myself, which is, can I be the greatest moderator of hard conversations and keep the conversations moving, keep the conversations fun,

get a couple of laughs in, and then maybe ask basic questions on behalf of the audience. So some people are like, Jay Cal is really stupid. He's asking stupid questions on All In. And I'm like, when I ask a question that's very basic to a best, Do you think it's because I don't know the answer? Really? Or do you think I might be asking that very basic question for the benefit of the guest or the bestie and the audience? So when I ask something very basic, like I asked Bology, like, well, when you say that the blockchain is better for truth and it's immutable and that's the strength, what if somebody puts your social security number on it or a lie?

How is that mitigated? Now, I know the answers. I've researched that I've discussed it a hundred times with very qualified people in the tree. truth business and fact-checking business and also in crypto. I'm asking that question to start a dialogue. So for people who are not understanding why he has very basic questions on this podcast or the other, it's called the job of the moderator, the interviewer. So hats off to Brian Armstrong.

I think he has set the new standard. I think every company is going to take this position. Even the woke companies are going to start taking this position, which is going to be, if you want to talk about it with your employees, do it on your time. Here's the mission of the company. stay focused on the mission. And I think they're going to take my advice, which is delete the random channel on your Slack immediately. It should not be there by default in a business setting. It only gives people this outlet and pressure cooker to put stuff that's going to cause

suffering down the line and misunderstanding. No political discourse, no social discourse on the Slack channels. If you want to do that, do it in person. Do it on a Zoom call. And you'll get a much different result. All right. That's my take. And I hope you enjoyed it. If you have have comments come to this week in startups.com slash slack. And you can talk about it in our Slack channel or you can interact with us on Twitter. All right, question that came in, if you're a retail investor and you see an econoclastic outspoken, very mission driven founder like Brian Armstrong, does that make you more likely to buy the stock or less likely? Of course, it makes you more likely unless their position is absolutely deranged and sociopathic, which I'm trying to think of an

example here, maybe Nicola or one of those companies where you have like a certain amount of confidence that is unearned. Sure, yeah, that might be a sell signal. But I think uniformly founder authority in a publicly traded company is magical. I don't think that, you know, Tesla as an example, could have done something like the cyber truck if Elon wasn't the CEO. You can only make a bold choice like that if you're the founder. I think Apple can't make bold choices anymore because Steve Jobs isn't there to say, you know what? We're doing. this. We're going to build a car or you know what, we're going to buy this company. The founder authority is absolutely critical for bold decisions. The reason my Facebook was able to buy WhatsApp

and Instagram was because Zuckerberg had control of that board. He had all the voting power. He informed the board he was doing it. That's how the story goes on those two acquisitions. Any other company that was going to acquire those companies would have had a dialogue and research and consultants, you know, debate it with, you know, Jack was in Evan and whatever, Dick Costello were going to buy Instagram as an example of Twitter. The reason they weren't able to buy it was because they had to have a discussion about it. And Zuck just took Kevin's sister for a walk, explained why this was a great idea, and put the number down.

And the same thing with WhatsApp founders. So you do want to look for founder authority. You do want to look for bold, empowered founders with a point of view. So, yeah, that's my answer to you. your question. Before we get into the ad, I just want you to go to LinkedIn.com slash twist right now, LinkedIn.com slash twist and post your first job for free. What a deal. Incredibly supportive of you, LinkedIn, to give that free job to our listeners. And you know, small business owners are busier than ever. The time spent searching for and interviewing wrong candidates, let's face it,

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They had a huge boom during the COVID. And sadly, the wildfires here in Northern California started up again, creating absolute chaos. We have people in Louisiana and Florida dealing with floods. And there must be ways to ensure these products and keep people safe at the same time while really dealing with this issue in a big picture. which means probably fire materials, fire-retarded materials and buildings, building houses on stilts, all kinds of new building materials. And of course, addressing climate change by sequestering carbon, building more nuclear reactors, working on the Hail Mary of fusion reactors, which is getting there.

Could be in the next decade or two. We stop talking about energy as an issue and start moving on to. to the next issue with me today to discuss his startup kettle, which is a reinsurance company that uses data and models to create better priced policies for forest fires specifically is Nat Manning. Welcome to the program, Nat. Thanks for having me. Nat, how many people are living in fire zones today? How many homes are at risk every year here in America? So there are two ways to go about this. So there are about 14. million structures in California.

Okay. Last year was the third worst year in history for fires in 2020. And about four million acres burned down out of about 100 million across the states, or about 4%. Four percent of the state. Of the forest land in our state, not the state's total land mass, but the forest of the... Actually, no, the whole state is about 100 in change. So about 4% of the total acres of the state burned down. But there's more to this.

So it seems like it is a big number, right? That is a, no, wait a second. That seems like a ginormous number. What was it 20 years ago? What would we typically see in a fire season? Okay. So that's the right question. So there are two answers to that.

So 20 years ago, we're looking at a couple percent, less than a percent. But a hundred years ago, 150, 100 years ago. go through kind of prehistoric ages, that number was actually like seven to ten. Ah. And so we, you know, showed up in as, you know, in our, in culture as humans. And we, you know, we started building everywhere. And we said, hey, we're going to suppress these fires. I don't want them to burn things down.

It makes sense, right? Right. A lot of different stuff goes into this. But essentially, it is very healthy for fires to burn. But the difference is now you've got these huge fires. that are going everywhere and are getting totally out of control whereas before that 7 to 11%

is actually many, many, many smaller fires burning smaller amounts and then going out and they don't get that dangerous and they don't get that destructive. And so while the number was bigger, the type of fire and the destruction of that fire was different. So that's worth pausing on for a second.

You have a quantity and a qualitative change occurring at the same time, which as a man of statistics, I'm assuming running an insurance company and tried to assess risk, it's very hard to have a discussion with this in a very politicized environment because you could pick different statistics here, the 7 to 10% statistic, the 1% or less statistic from 20 years ago and the 4% now, and play all kinds of games with that. That's right. but what is even harder to have a reasonable conversation with about is that qualitatively,

what you're saying is the fires today are much more intense, localized, and bigger as opposed to spread out in little pockets. That's right. Am I accurate in understanding your assessment of the situation? That's exactly right. So, you know, give you a couple other numbers to put that in context, right? like back to 100 plus years ago, you know, we didn't have humans running around putting out fires.

So there's actually about 10,000 fires a year in California. 14 of them last year caused 99% of the damage. So we actually put most of the fires out, right? And then what happens is you have one to 10 that get totally out of control and create these mega fire situations. Whereas before, you know, a large portion of those 10,000, would kind of burn and then burn themselves out and naturally stop because they'd hit a stream. The forests, you know, had, were better managed by, by, by, maybe the wind died down.

It does seem like wind is, am I correct as a neophyte in this area that these high winds seem to determine the intensity of these? They're a huge factor. Yeah. Yeah, they're a huge factor. And then the other one, you know, there are two parts to this. There's the reality you can't deny that there's less rain than there used to be. The seasons longer and it's hotter than it used to be.

Okay. You know, we don't need to get into why that is and argue about it. It's just true. Yes. The fact is it's hotter. Yes. And it's drier. And if it's hotter and drier, that creates more kindling.

Exactly. It creates fuel. Which is fuel. And from my Boy Scout days, you know, we learned pretty clearly the small amount, the smaller these fibers, the smaller the twigs,

you would start with small dry things and then build up to bigger logs. It's not that we have bigger logs everywhere. It's that we got a bunch of this small debris everywhere, which is just absolutely perfect for starting these fires up. So we're basically creating massive, massive amounts of kindling,

which led to this cavalier statement by one of our former elected officials that we need to rate things up more like Norway or other places, which seemed cavalier and silly, but also seemed to ring true that keeping some of this kindling and cleaning up the underbelly, the ground under trees would help because we know that that is factually correct. Is it factually correct that if we swept up I mean, it's a stupid way to say it, but if there was more deep, what do you call the act of taking the kindling out or waking up? Is there a term in the industry for that? And is that actually a viable thing.

It is, it's called forest thinning. And then the other thing is controlled burns. And that's exactly right. I mean, like, the weather, that's one factor of it. There are things we could have been hopefully possibly could have done decades ago or we'll continue to do now. You mentioned energy and fusion. These things long term will help change in these weather patterns and hopefully bring some stasis back.

That's going to take a while. And in the meantime, you've got forest management and you've got what do you do with the fuel that's there today. And what you can do is forest thinning and controlled burns, which are both proven methods. it just takes a, I mean, we're not going to get, but the long and short is we should put a lot of people to work doing that, and it would help. In California, how many people would we need to thin the forest to take the 4% of the state being on fire to say 2%? Or is it even possible through thinning and control burns to do that?

I'm not even for a no specific number of people. Like if we were to ballpark, are we talking about thousands of people full-time, tens of thousands? I think it's tens of thousands. But I have seen some analysis from a numbers point of view. So I saw 10 billion as a number that we should start spending annually to do this. The other thing to know, though, so part of this is what's California's responsibility. 60% of the land in California is owned by the federal government. So the other problem is that you've got land and forest that are owned by local communities.

You've got land and forest that's owned by the state and you've got land and forest that's owned by the federal government. And all of those require different political actions. The federal government is also very busy, I would say. So if the federal government is busy and they own land here, they're kind of like an out-of-state resident that turns over every 48 years. They're not on the ground. Would this not be an interesting moment to think, and listen, I'm a capitalist who thinks about economics and you are as well,

would it not be time to rethink their ownership of that? land and stewardship of it and say, hey, maybe the federal government can own it, but we're going to give a hundred-year lease on this section of it to the federal government and say, hey, this should be developed in some way that creates revenue that would then result in this being cleared. So if we created a park or we rented out part of it or we developed part of it with homes, I know people are anti-development in the state, generally speaking, but if there was some way, to create a revenue stream for that plot of land, whether it was through

tourism or homes or something. It could even be bike trails, whatever. There's some way to create revenue stream. Create some revenue from it, have the local folks manage it. Then there would be some ownership. Therefore, somebody would actually be responsible

for doing the thinning, and it would be an expense on their P&L. That's certainly, yeah, it's certainly possible. And, you know, one of the answers So that was, you know, the, the park, national park solution in California. Like, go back. Like, that's what Yosemite is, right?

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at Zendesst.com slash twist. Yosemite must be massively profitable because you can't get a tent. You can't get in. You can't get in. So they're sold out and they could just keep raising the rates. So why not add five Yosemites

make the prices even more expensive? and then use it to then. And then, of course, you can give people, you know, lower price things to make sure everybody can use it. But you could make some premium products there to drive revenue streams. Because it seems to me that there is a who's going to pay for it kind of moment going on here and finger pointing. Is that correct as well?

That is. But I'm going to transition this way. So one of the other solutions. Yeah. So government for sure. But the other one, one of the reasons why I love insurance is that the incentives all become aligned, right? So, if I run an insurance company that's, you know, just writing insurance against wildfire like I do, now it is entirely in my interest to invest any profits I have into

mitigation. And so like one of the things with us as an insurance company is we make all of our insights, we make all of our insights available for free to anyone that's working in mitigation, whether that's government, whether that's folks doing controlled burns and forest thinning, we say, hey, we'll tell you exactly everything we know. Because if you can go out there and use that to do a better job doing defensible space, do a better job foresting, then great. That reduces our risk, right? And who knows long term?

Like, maybe we're, we get growing big enough like the old Berkshire Hathaway flywheel, right? Like, we can start taking that those profits. Let's describe what Kettle does here. You're trying to use big data to predict where these fires are going to be and then do better insurance for individuals, for the state, for who? So we operate at the reinsurance level. Explain that what that is to people who don't know. Happily. Reinsurance is insurance for insurance companies.

And so before your eyes all blaze over, what that essentially means, right, is like it's insurance companies cover anything that could go wrong with your house. say you have home insurance, your roof leaks, you get robbed. They pay all these things. What they aren't set up financially to manage and what they go buy insurance for are when a fire comes through and wipes out 500 homes at once. They buy an insurance policy the same way that you have an insurance policy. You're like, okay, I fix my, you know, I'll call an electrician when there's a small thing and over here, but then when it's a big thing, I'm going to call my insurance company.

They do the same thing. And so what reinsurance is is really the business. of insuring against catastrophes, which are being exacerbated by climate change. There's been a three-x increase in billion-dollar events in the last decade in America. So if I were to reflect that back to you, the correct way to think about this is, I'm an insurance company,

I've done my job, I've got everybody to buy their insurance. Right. Now I'm looking at it going, holy cow, this group of people, the subset of people I sold it to, are in a high-risk zone. if some, you know, once in a hundred year flood comes or once in a hundred year fire comes, I'm insolvent. Right.

I have not done my actuary tables or I don't know what you would call that act in insurance of predicting for the worst case scenario. But said another way, these insurance companies are not designed to withstand the worst case scenario, are they? That's right. And they're not designed like from, that's the plan, right? And so the regulators say, hey, you need to offload this tail risk or sell or buy reinsurance, essentially, for that one in a hundred year event. And then they go to the reinsurance world and do just that. As you've studied this, what data sources seem to be the best predictors of where these fires will happen next?

because my understanding is, of these 10,000 fires that occur, some number of them are dips starting fires at a campground or doing something really stupid. In other words,

arson or accidental fires, I don't know what percentage of that equals, but it does seem like we keep getting stories of like, hey, by the way, that fire was caused by this person.

Yeah. So tell us if that is actually true or it's just so memorable when it does happen that we overestimate it. And then how on earth could you predict something that's occurring by an accidental person creating a fire or at worst, an arsonist doing this for some deranged sociopathic reason? Yeah. So we run two models.

One is the ignition model trying to predict where fires will start. And then the second is a spread model, trying to understand how fires spread. And the two most important data sources into that are geospatial data, essentially satellite imagery. And what's incredible over the last 30 years, right, is we now have 30 years of incredible satellite data from NASA and then increasingly from private companies putting it up. It's a cool time to be alive. And then the second is weather data. So same thing. Noah has been collecting weather data for years, making it available.

And those two things can give you a lot. And then we're writing machine learning models, right, that are looking at what's happening. Right. And they, so you're exactly right. Like, there are all these different factors that are, when they align in the wrong direction, they become one of those 14 fires, right? And so, if you think about it, it's what we've talked about, right? Okay.

Well, first off, a lot of fires start right along a road, right? And you look at, the satellite imagery is looking at this gray, pixelated straight line, and it doesn't know. but the model's like, oh, fires consistently start next to these things. Why? Because there's electricity lines there. People throw trash out of the windows, cigarettes, etc. Now, most of the time, that fire goes out because it's pretty, you know, good chance the fire station can get to it.

But if you have something happened and you have the winds blowing at 90 miles an hour, you know, to the east, and then you have many miles of dried out trees with no access to them. Suddenly, the model's going, wow, this looks exactly like all those other fires that turned, those 14 fires last year that turned into really bad events versus one that happens. And it's right next to a Walmart parking lot. And they go, oh, that fire started. But then it, you know, it went out pretty quickly because it ran into this big fire break. It's how the model's like looking at it, right?

And so silent imagery and weather data is really the main too. That make a tremendous difference. Now, six of seven of the top largest wildfires ever measured in California were in the last 13 months. So it is getting much worse. And I think saying much worse or dramatically worse would probably be an understatement of what we've just witnessed in California. Is it going to get? much worse and dramatically worse than this already dramatically worse year

based on the information that you've learned from satellites, etc. In other words, should we be terrified right now because it felt terrifying the last two years here as a Bay Area resident. I'm nowhere near the fire zone. But watching three weeks

of not being able to leave your house during a pandemic because the air turned orange in the Bay Area just made me and many other people think we need to have an escape plan, not for fire in the Bay Area. Thankfully, it's harder for the fire to get here. It's so developed, but we need to have an escape plan to get out of the smoke. Yeah.

Is it going to get dramatically worse? And how bad was this year? Am I overreacting? Okay, these are the right questions. So, as I mentioned earlier, 14 million structures in this. Last year was third worst year in history. Actually, one of the recent history, like one of the worst. from Acres burned, we said 4%.

Right, 4 million. But actually only 11,460 structures burned down. And that's really, you know, that's terrible. Like that's 11,000 families and businesses that lost. But again, out of 14 million. So while it feels like the whole state is burning down, actually less than 0.1% is actually burning down a year, right? Of structures. If we look at structures.

So this is why statistics and metrics and having a thoughtful conversation of this is important. So while six of the seven largest fires ever measured with the last 13 months, the campfire was much more destructive. That one, that 2018 one in Napa area. That's right. Exactly. Do we lose 20,000 in that one? It was 20,000 in those two, yeah, in that year and 20,000 the year before actually as well.

So those were the two worst from structures, even though half as many acres burned down that year. Right. It just got the, it got an area where people were living. Yes. Should people be allowed, in your estimation, as somebody who has skin in the game in a massive way, should people be allowed to build or rebuild homes, I should say, in places where we've had dramatic fire activity? Yes or no? It should be highly discouraged.

Okay. How do you practically get people who, who are unable to build homes because of the nimbie red tape of California to not take the opportunity to rebuild a home where they're legally allowed to rebuild it and there are no homes available we're in a massive housing crisis. You have to think that if we weren't in such a housing crisis and didn't live in such a goddamn nimbie state, that people would not feel the need to rebuild in these zones because they would be allowed to build in other places. Does the Nimbianism and red tape of the state exacerbate the problem?

People should be able to build in places where there are good jobs and low risk of climate change. Got it. That would be a good thing. Yeah. So you're being diplomatic. The fact is we're not allowed to build in the places that are safe. And if you're at home burned down in the campfire fire, because you had that as a previous lot, my understanding, I could be wrong, someone who will fact check me, if I am,

producers hopefully, you could just rebuild on that. There is, because it was your home and you have insurance and you're entitled to that lot. So it is a lot easier to rebuild in the fire zone than it is to rebuild in a non-fire zone in California. That's true. And one of the things that's happening, well, I will say one of the things that does happen because it's financial is that you do have a system where people are losing their home insurance. So a lot of those folks might be able to rebuild, but this has changed in the last couple of years. They might not be able to get insurance for that home anymore.

And that, honestly, is maybe a good thing if it's in a really high-risk area. It's a great thing, right? Yeah. You know, like, it depends exactly. You know, once a place is burned, it also means it's not going to burn for a little while, but things grow back. Like, we won't get into it by, like, you can, For instance, is not natural to the state.

It grows extremely fast and it explodes, right? Whereas redwoods, they store moisture and actually are made to withstand fires. So there's just some, that's a long-term solution. But, you know, if I could wave a magic wand, I'd put a lot of redwoods back and get rid of those eucalyptus. But what's happening, right? So those people can't rebuild. Well, they can't get insurance maybe. so maybe they decide not to rebuild there.

Maybe they can and they do. But there's such panic in the insurance world that now a lot of people can't get their home insurance who actually aren't in that risky even area. Like I'm in the Bay Area, right? I'm up in the hills in the East Bay. And I lost my insurance. I got dropped this year because of wildfire.

You know, great irony, right? So what does that mean practically for you? You basically are responsible if that house burns down. I was able to get additional insurance. I obviously know some people. But in that interim, yeah. Yeah. Well, actually, what I would have had to do was I would have had to go to the Fair Plan,

which is the government-sponsored, like, high catastrophe plan. And they're required to provide insurance, but it's not a good policy, right? It's like you get health insurance when you already have cancer. Got it. So it pays very little? And it costs a lot? Yeah, it pays little. It costs a lot.

you know, there's, it's not an ideal structure. But you also, they're basically saying you're not insurable here. The thing that's happening, right, as I talked about earlier, that that 0.1% of the state actually burns down is that tons of people are getting kicked onto the fair plan who really aren't in that risky of an area. And there are some people who absolutely should be and we should not be building there because they're in super high risk areas, right? Like for us, our underwriting is we don't insure in the top 25% of areas.

but what's happened is there's been such panic in the insurance markets that the reinsurers have pulled out, right? And it's very similar to post-2008, right? You had all these people go, I'm not going to write loans anymore, no way. And then the tech world realized, and they came in and they said, you know, there's actually a lot of, like, I'm happy to write a student loan to someone that graduates from Harvard or MIT. Like, that seems like a good bet. And then you have companies like SOFI be able to move.

into this space when everyone sort of panicked and moved back. And that's essentially where we are today where you say the supply has dried up. Everyone's like, I'm not, the supply of reinsurance. I'm not going to insure, which means the price has spiked. And what we come in and do and we say, hey, we're going to apply a much more analytical machine learning based model to this and be able to bring some stability back to the market and be able to hopefully be able to help people get their insurance, you know, shore up the real estate market of California.

Are the insurance companies for fire insurance specifically looking at the foliage around a house today and saying, listen, you have Italian Cypresses, those things are matchsticks and you put them like a row of matchsticks around your house because you love Tuscany? Yeah. Because I was in Tuscany and I was looking at them and my friend said, yeah, you can't have those in Italy, you can't have those Italian Cyprus in Los Angeles anymore,

or some places. Can't get insurance at your house. If you have them, you've got to cut them down. I don't know if that's true or not, but that's what somebody told me. It is true. Yeah. So there are two ways,

two things I would say about this to be a little nuanced. One is totally true. And yes, there are a lot of services and underwriters now who are looking at that. They're like, hey, you have these. Italian Cypresses, you have trees that are hanging right over your roof. This is no longer insurable. And it's called Defensible Space or Home Hardening, this kind of stuff.

And that is important work. At the same time, it's looking at it from a really micro point of view. And the truth is, if you are in the parameter of one of those 14 fires inside, it does not make a difference whether or not you have Italian Cyprus is or not, right? Whether you have a tree that's five feet from your house or 15 feet from your house. What really matters there is that big picture macro level weather and geospatial data, in the 10 miles edge of the perimeter of the fire where these embers are being thrown, it makes a huge difference because that ember hits your house and hits that Italian Cyprus,

bad news. The house next door might have gone done through the smart work of closing up their vents, not putting Italian Cyprus in, and that one's not going to burn down. It's going to have enough time for the fire. What is the closing of the vents do? I've heard that before. Yeah, it's so that embers don't get inside your house and burn up all those old Amazon boxes

that you have stored in your basement, basically. So something as simple as that can change the fate of one of these fires and structures. I had this idea that we could take the blankets that people use to put out car fires or things and throw them over a house. I found out that during this wildfire, somebody actually wrapped their home

in a fire blanket and it worked and they wrapped the biggest redwood tree in the Bay Area got wrapped with a fire retardant blanket. Where are we at with, because I'm looking for a startup to fund based on that idea. Have you seen anybody come up with a bulletproof solution for a home not getting put on fire and how, you know, for $10,000 per home, couldn't we just put blankets around them or have a blanket system that dropped over them, or there are all these gels and stuff that people use to put out fires or protect stuff. Why don't we require or incentivize putting a tank on the top of these homes with the gel when it hits a certain fire temperature instead of just putting on

water, which obviously gets cut because they're using it to cut fires and they have to fly it in with helicopters and planes because there's so little water pressure, you could just drop that goo over the home and keep it from going on fire. Why are those things not being deployed? Or are they? There's a lot of insight and research going into this. You know, another one to add to you is that that I saw a startup doing is that dry ice actually just sucks up fire. Like it's just, it's amazing. And so someone's trying to figure out how do I deploy these in drones and will you introduce me to them? Don't say their name on the program. I don't want anybody to front run that. Will you introduce me to them? Yeah, I'll find, we'll make that connection. I am so. So the idea would be if you put the dry ice around

a building where you had some sort of dry ice system where you made a wall of dry ice, like the white wall, like the ice wall in Game of Thrones could stop the red walkers in this case, the fire. Exactly. Wow, that is fascinating. Yeah, there's some cool stuff going on there. And it's incredibly important. To your point about the other ones, you know, yes, there are a lot of good mitigation

things that could be done from a household perspective. The blanket one, I love that, the wrapping the house and things like that. And that's what you can kind of do as an individual, right? And then I just want to like, Claire, at the same time, that forest thinning and controlled burn at a statewide level would make a tremendous difference. And really, because the other thing with that is not only does it say, okay, now we're no longer, there's going to be less fires and there'll be less dramatic

fires, but as we talked about earlier, it actually reduces the smoke. right and so as we're saying it was actually the risk of the fire hitting your house is still you know only point less than point one percent a year burned down however you know as california like that smoke is awful um and we had 200 i don't know where it was by you but we had 200 300 particle days yeah on the peninsula pretty regular yeah uh and i was just like you know this is and then you look at poor taho you know it was incredible jewel of california even the jewel of the United States. And, you know, the fire is going to hit there eventually, right? I mean, it's just an inevitability in your mind? It's a high probability? You're doing the metrics. I mean,

tell it to a straight. Chances Tahoe gets hit by one of these fires in the next decade. Certain? 50%. Uh, so two, two answers this. So it is a high risk area for sure. Um, it is a, you know, a very high risk area. At the same time, what we saw this last year, right, is that, and you see this in Napa and Sonoma as well, the fires get very close. And what happens is, you know, we, as I said, we're actually, firefighters are incredible and we're getting pretty good at this. And so we put up just like that final wall, like you were talking about the wall of ice,

like we're putting it in and we're not going to let South Lake Tahoe get hit. Or you look at the fires in Nappan, right? they have gotten right next to the 20 and like right like they're just come right to the edge and they're taking out wine but like the the main the homes we managed to stop them just in time so it's hard to say um is the answer is you we're going to have to fight fires all the time in Tahoe and uh and and and the wine in wine country and in South you know in South California too until we can get these bigger fires under control like I talked about um But, you know, people are pretty resourceful and incredible and they're doing a great job of stopping it before it really hits those major towns.

But then you have other examples, right? You have Paradise where it doesn't, right? And every once in a while, it comes straight through or that big corner of Santa Rosa. That's our, it's our wind issue. It's a wind issue. No, no, no, it doesn't matter the bravery or the quantity of these firefighters. If that wind is up, they can't stop. the wind. Nobody. It's so hard. Yeah.

So here, just as we wrap up here, and thank you for doing the work you're doing and being such a great guess and explaining all this, there is fire roads very naturally stop these fires. We're correct in that, yes? And that's why they're created and they're highly,

highly, highly effective, is my understanding. And they tend to be one or two lanes wide, and that's enough for them to be effective. Am I correct there? It makes a big difference. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, again, like, If it's 90 mile an hour, Santa Ana wins and the fires kind of gone, it's not going to make a difference. But these are some of the main reasons why, you know,

the vast majority of those 10,000 fires do get put out before they cause major damage. So I wonder if we haven't wanted to create more roads through our forest land because we don't want animals to be run over by trucks. and we don't want to spoil it. That being said, you know, you're going to have a lot of animals dying in these fires and a lot less would die if we had more fire roads built and more access roads built. So should we not go on a major project? Because I saw people in Napa doing this during the last couple years.

People were just taking their own bulldozers and just driving straight through the forest and just knocking down everything in sight and creating their own fire roads. They were not asking permission. They were just, you know, they went rogue. If we created, you know, our Appalachian Trail, as it were, or other, you know, type of roads, we could create this incredible hiking trail,

biking trail that could be used by everybody. Don't put trucks on it. Just let it be used by humans to travel over a lot of these mountains that are otherwise inaccessible. It would be a win-win. And you could, you know, charge for use of them or make them in some way like a national park, you know, people want to go take their mountain biking or camp along them. It could be extraordinary like we did with the high line in New York. So do you think there's this opportunity to make the greatest bike path slash, you know, fire road in the world?

Because the fire roads in California, people use for hiking southern California all the time. Like the Santa Monica Mountains are filled with them. Yeah. And people hike them. There are lots of them throughout Northern California too. Like they're extremely useful and important. And the long short is, yes, we should have more. Anywhere where there's danger, right?

They're throughout, you know, the hills in the East Bay of the Bay Area, right? And for a good reason, because they're trying to block anything that might go wrong and all that protected land that's on the other edge of that hill. Why don't we have more of them? Is there some, is it just the expense of it? Or are there people fighting it because they think it's not? good for, you know, whatever plant. I haven't seen people fighting it hard.

You know, I actually in my community in the hills that we actually expanded ours, you know, the neighborhood just kind of organized and does the work. And so there, there's more and more happening and, you know, and fire chiefs are really leading like we're going to put a break here, we're going to put a break there. You know, I think honestly, a lot of this is like, this is, to remind us like pre-2016 it was a different world, right? We did not have this as much. And now it's changed over the last five years.

And so we're playing a little bit of catch up. Yeah. And there's no way this is a fluke. I mean, I think that's one of the things we're going to have to just agree. No, this is the new reality. This is a reality. It's not stopping. It's going to get worse in all likelihood.

I mean, as I said earlier, we've got to put a lot of money to work, you know, at a, at doing forest management, forest and things. I wish there was a way to reduce the temperature. and do those things, but that's, it's not going to happen. And so what we need to do is reduce the fuel load. And that just takes a lot of inserted effort and work and then protect people and incentivize them not to build in places that are high risk. And that's the new reality.

And you've raised money for your company. You didn't get into YC, but you did raise money. And you've been growing this business. I'm assuming you're hiring if somebody wanted to work on this really incredible project, We are, yeah, yeah, we're hiring, always looking for great, great machine learning, engineers with great earth science backgrounds, infrastructure engineers. Where can people find out more and track your progress over time?

Yeah, our website is our O-U-R-K-E-K-T-L-E-T-L-E dot com. Same handle on Twitter. Is that because the kettle is boiling now and we have to keep an eye on it? That's right. Yeah, that's one of the ways. The other one was, you know, there's an old saying, like, we're all in this kettle of fish together. And it was like, you know, this is one of the things I love about insurance is like,

it's this system that allows humans to cooperate at this giant scale, right? Like, what we're doing when you pay your premiums, even if it's terrible, is you're actually putting your money together and saying, hey, J. Cal, if you get hit by that, you know, fire this year, I got your back. I'll throw you a buck. Beautiful. And we'll do it. It's beautiful. It's totally beautiful. And it's like,

you know, we can make this thing work better. And the reality is the models that are being used have been not really updated. Like, this industry was the OG data scientists, like invented data science. The industry 500 years ago of the actuarial tables, it hasn't had an update. And, you know, we can now land spacecraft and have cars drive themselves. This original data science should get an update. Absolutely. Absolutely. Are drones playing a role yet in the data that you're using or low planes?

Image capture. Yeah. We're not doing ourselves. You use third party services? Yeah. Yeah. I think there's also the blimps and stuff like that, like Project balloon and some of those like balloons that are able to get like really good data. So, I mean, it's really interesting. We have all these data sources that are looking for people to build machine learning and computer visualization on top of them. and you're an example of one of them. So it's super cool.

All right, thanks for coming on the pod and we'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.