For the past 3 years, we’ve hosted the Red Sky Summit, a conference that brings together leaders who are working to solve the wildfire crisis. What started as a small dinner now hosts the top 600 leaders across the industry from fire chiefs to utility CEOs to Senators.

We’re incredibly proud of the mark it has had on wildfire: helping transform a technological backwater into a rapidly growing ecosystem of startups, government agencies, utilities, insurers, investors, and philanthropies working together to fund and build solutions. Over $1 billion has been invested into Firetech by the venture capital ecosystem – up from effectively zero 10 years ago – and our event has helped play a role in that.

This year, we’re expanding to Resilience Week.

Resilience is the ability to prevent disasters, withstand them, and recover quickly when they hit — whether that’s wildfire, grid failure, flooding, extreme heat, water scarcity, or vector borne disease. It matters more every year: the US now sees a billion-dollar disaster roughly every two weeks, down from every 82 days in the 1980s.

In many cases, the people working on grid resilience, extreme heat, flooding and other hazards are where wildfire was five years ago. They’re solving real problems with emerging budgets and growing momentum, but without the benefit of a robust community. We want to help build one.

With the Red Sky Summit as the anchor, we’re curating a week of events focused on broader resilience challenges hosted by great partner organizations like Congruent Ventures, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, The Westly Group, Watch Duty, Megafire Action, and Climate Capital.

Host an event

We want Resilience Week to be built by the people doing the work. Host a dinner, a demo, a tour, or a closed-door session around a problem you can’t solve alone.

You own the event and the guest list. We’ll provide a registration system through Luma and help cross-promote it to the Red Sky Summit community — fire chiefs, utility and insurance executives, government leaders, investors, and philanthropies already engaged in resilience.

Host application form →

We’ll publish the event lineup in about two weeks.

Apply to attend the Red Sky Summit →

Most people think insurance is boring. But what if it’s the best tool we have to protect our communities from wildfire?

That’s the idea behind Stand, an insurance company that models property-level risk to protect homes from wildfires, hurricanes, and other climate-driven disasters.

In this episode of Disasterproof, Bill joins Stand CEO and founder Dan Preston at a customer’s home in California wine country to see what this model looks like in practice.

The wildfire problem is also a housing problem

“Insurance availability in California has become more and more challenging as we have more of these wildfires,” Dan says.

As disasters get more frequent and more expensive, insurers are pulling back from high-risk markets. That breaks a lot more than insurance. Most buyers need coverage to get a mortgage. No coverage means stalled sales, falling property values, and builders who stop building.

When insurance breaks down, the housing market breaks down with it.

Redefining the role of insurers

Insurance has traditionally been reactive. A disaster happens, a homeowner files a claim, and the insurer helps pay for the damage.

Stand asks a different question of the insurance industry: what if insurers helped prevent the damage?

The company models the physical risks facing an individual property, recommends targeted improvements, and connects those improvements to coverage. If the home survives a wildfire, the homeowner, insurer, lender, and surrounding community all benefit.

“If we can build a system where it is less expensive to make your home safer and get insurance,” Dan says, “it should lead to a much safer world.”

How a house actually burns

Stand frames wildfire risk as two questions: will fire reach your home, and will your home burn once it gets there?

On the second question, homes ignite in two ways. Radiant heat from nearby flames can catch the exterior. More often, wind-driven embers get in through vents, under decks, into gutters, and the fire starts from within.

Every firefighter learns this: the embers get more homes than the flame front does.

That’s why there’s no universal checklist. The house, the landscaping, the terrain, and the wind all interact as one system. Stand builds a 3D model of each property and uses computational fluid dynamics to simulate how fire would actually move across the land, then finds the likely points of failure and tests fixes before recommending them.

Resilience doesn’t mean bulldozing the garden

The simplest way to eliminate wildfire risk would be to cut down every tree and pour concrete. Nobody wants to live that way, and it turns out you don’t have to.

One Stand customer had a century-old olive tree planted by their grandfather. Rather than remove it, Stand found other ways to cut the risk: clearing the brush beneath it and hardening the nearby parts of the home.

Same with wooden decks. The danger often isn’t the deck — it’s the debris that collects underneath and ignites when the embers arrive. Fixing that costs hundreds of dollars, not the tens of thousands it takes to replace a deck.

From wildfires to hurricanes

Stand started with insuring high wildfire risk homes in California, but the same approach applies to other disasters.

In Florida, the company models how hurricane winds load a roof, where debris might strike, and what happens if a home’s exterior is breached. Different hazard, same question: what fails first, and what can we change now?

“A dollar spent on mitigation is going to be more impactful than a dollar spent on insuring your home,” Dan says.

At Convective we call this concept the Franklin Ratio. Ben Franklin wrote "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" in The Pennsylvania Gazette on February 4, 1735 — and he wrote it about fire safety, urging Philadelphians to clean their chimneys and handle hot coals carefully so towns didn't burn down. (Ben Franklin also founded America's oldest property insurance company, so he was talking his book.)

We believe Stand is building one of the most important companies in resilience, but most importantly, we just want fewer houses to burn.

Watch or listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

The Great Salt Lake is disappearing. Since 1850, it has lost more than half its surface area and nearly two-thirds of its volume. Right now, 800 square miles of dry lakebed sit exposed, and the heavy metals in that cracked surface are blowing toward Salt Lake City, one of the country’s fastest-growing metro areas.

This is a water scarcity issue, but it’s also a public health problem, an impending ecological catastrophe, and, if nothing changes, the Salt Lake area may become unlivable.

So, what do you do when the water a state has relied on for generations is at risk of drying up?

In this episode of Disasterproof, I went to Salt Lake City to meet a founder with an answer that sounds almost too simple: make it rain. Or more precisely, make it snow. Rainmaker founder and CEO Augustus Doricko believes his company’s cloud seeding technology can do something extraordinary: stop the desiccation of the Great Salt Lake and the depletion of the Colorado River.

Before studying up on Rainmaker, I thought of cloud seeding as a fringe new technology. Look it up online, and you’ll see that it’s surrounded by misinformation and even a few conspiracy theories. So it surprised me to learn that the US has been doing it for over 70 years, and it’s been studied closely for as long.

Historically, the biggest challenge was never whether we could seed clouds; it was that we couldn’t measure the results. It was hard to tell how much rain was being produced by the process. Rainmaker is changing that. Their drones fly into clouds that commercial airliners actively avoid, and their radar can validate every flight. Rainmaker, alongside the Utah Department of Natural Resources, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of Utah, and Utah State University, says it can finally prove that cloud seeding works and that it can produce millions of gallons of precipitation in a single operation.

The stakes are high. This year’s snowpack was Utah’s worst in 50 years. And on the other side of the planet, the Aral Sea shows how this story ends if nothing changes: over 90% of it is gone. The fishing economy collapsed, and the dried-up seabed created toxic dust that caused severe health problems for the region.

After meeting Augustus, Scott Hotaling, and Jon Jennings for this episode, I was struck by the scale of what Utah is up against. I also came away impressed by Rainmaker’s ambition and the state’s willingness to bet on a young startup.

If cloud seeding proves as effective as recent validation studies suggest, it would be one of the few approaches to water scarcity that actually adds new water to the system. That makes it an incredibly compelling technology to watch.

Watch the full episode on YouTube.

Eight days after the Sandy Fire tore through Simi Valley, we recorded this episode standing inside the burn scar.

More than 2,000 acres burned, nearly 10,000 homes were evacuated, but thanks to a remarkable response from the Ventura County Fire Department, only one home was lost.

It’s an unusual place to record a podcast, but being there made the conversation about wildfire feel a lot less theoretical.

Congressman George Whitesides joined us there. Before running for Congress, he was Chief of Staff at NASA, CEO of Virgin Galactic, and later co-founded Megafire Action. He’s spent much of his career thinking about complex systems, technology, and government, so I was curious how someone with his background thinks about wildfire from inside Congress.

The thing that surprised me most wasn’t anything he said about forests. It was what he said about affordability.

Wildfire isn’t just destroying specific communities. It’s making life more expensive for everyone.

Insurance premiums continue climbing — or they disappear altogether. Without insurance, buying or keeping a home becomes much harder. Utilities spend billions reducing wildfire risk, and those costs eventually show up on our electric bills. Even people hundreds of miles away pay through the health impacts of smoke.

Wildfire is an affordability issue, and if affordability is one of the defining political issues of our time, wildfire deserves a much bigger place in that conversation.

The only disaster we can interrupt

If wildfire is becoming one of our biggest affordability challenges, what can we do about it?

One line from the conversation stuck with me: “Wildfire is really the only natural disaster that you can get in the action loop of before it becomes catastrophic.”

You can’t stop a hurricane. You can’t stop an earthquake.

But you can detect a new ignition quickly. You can reduce fuels. You can harden communities. You can attack small fires before they become megafires.

As the Congressman put it: “We have human agency over this problem. And we should use that agency.”

What space can teach government

Rep. Whitesides’ background in aerospace shaped the way he thinks about innovation.

I expected him to talk about satellites or AI, but he spent most of the conversation talking about procurement.

His argument is that America already has extraordinary entrepreneurs building wildfire technology, and the bottleneck isn’t a lack of ideas. It’s getting those ideas into the hands of firefighters.

The same changes that helped unlock commercial space — competition, faster procurement, better pathways for startups, and funding through the “valley of death” — could do the same for wildfire.

The lesson from space isn’t just better technology. It’s building better systems for getting technology into the hands of the people who need it.

Are we investing like we believe this is a national priority?

Every year, disasters cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars, and perhaps as much as $1 trillion.

Yet, we spend relatively little trying to reduce those losses before they happen.

Representative Whitesides’ vision is to create something like the Defense Innovation Unit for wildfire: a dedicated fund that helps get tech firefighters actually want into the field.

We know these losses are coming every year. The gap between what we spend responding and what we spend preventing is a choice.

One of the few places Congress still works

The conversation also reminded me that wildfire remains one of the few issues where bipartisan cooperation still feels possible.

Rep. Whitesides talked about two pieces of legislation he’s helping advance: the ACERO Act, which expands NASA’s role in wildfire technology, and the Fix Our Forests Act, a bipartisan effort to speed fuels management, reduce permitting delays, and improve wildfire intelligence.

Whether you agree with every provision or not, wildfire is still one of the rare places where lawmakers seem more interested in solving problems than scoring political points.

Congressman Whitesides ended with a simple request: if this issue matters to you, tell your senators to support the Fix Our Forests Act.

Congressman Whitesides evacuated his own home during the January 2025 LA fires, just days after being sworn into Congress. He understands this issue as both a policymaker and someone who has lived through it.

When I think back on this conversation, I don’t think about a specific bill or policy proposal. I think about the fact that wildfire is one of the few disasters where we still have agency.

Wildfire risk is increasing. But unlike almost every other natural disaster, it’s one where our decisions still shape the outcome.

Watch the full conversation with Representative George Whitesides on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts

2,000 acres. 10,000 evacuations. One home lost.

In late May, the Sandy Fire tore through Simi Valley on a hot, windy afternoon. By the time it was contained, more than 10,000 residents had been evacuated, but only one home burned.

That number isn’t luck. It was earned through years of preparation and a fast, coordinated response.

California Congressman George Whitesides describes wildfire as existential for the state. He calls it the defining risk of an era increasingly shaped by fire — and the Sandy Fire is exactly the kind of threat he means.

In this episode of Disasterproof, we go on the ground with Whitesides and the Ventura County Fire Department to understand how they held the line. The answer is layered: strict defensible space requirements gave firefighters room to work. Remote sensing aircraft and satellite heat detection tracked the fire’s movement in real time. And when the wind reversed mid-afternoon, air tankers and hand crews pushed back on steep, dangerous terrain.

The Sandy Fire is proof that this crisis is solvable.

Listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

The world is getting warmer and our infrastructure is getting older.

The convergence of these trends has fueled a historic increase in volatility and disasters. America now suffers a billion dollar disaster once every 18 days, a startling frequency that has tripled since the 1980s.

These disasters come with heartbreaking human and environmental costs, but also a staggering price tag: over $1 trillion per year. The cost is comparable to our spending on defense or interest on the national debt.

While the trends are obvious, the market still underestimates the opportunity in protecting the physical world from disasters. Most people are perplexed by the tragedy of the commons: who pays for these shared costs?

Convective began as a specialist in wildfire technology backing founders audacious enough to take on this challenge. Our work there confirmed that entities with exposure to the physical world - utilities, insurance companies, government and asset owners - are so desperate for solutions that they are willing to try new things.

Facing bankruptcy, financial losses and market failure, these institutions are investing billions and shedding their historic orientations towards bureaucracy and tradition. Hundreds of their leaders come to San Francisco every year to the Red Sky Summit to learn about new technologies. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars with our Fund I portfolio companies to better measure, reduce and insure risk.

We’re incredibly proud of the work that’s been done so far, but we are very far from declaring the world safe from disasters. That’s why we’re excited to announce that we’ve raised $85M for our second fund.

We’ll make a similar number of investments (~18) as in Fund I, but we’re writing bigger checks across pre-seed, seed and Series A and expanding our focus from wildfire to the disaster resilience market.

Our Fund II investments so far span supply chain, manufacturing, forestry, design and grid resilience and include companies like Drafted, Edge, The Lumber Manufactory and Voltair.

We’re thrilled to have the backing of LPs like the Arbor Day Foundation, John & Patrick Collison, Pathstone, StepStone Group and WovenEarth Ventures as well as two insurance companies, several foundations and a pension fund.

With more scale comes more resources for our founders. We expanded the team late last year and launched Disasterproof to tell stories of successful companies in resilience. Updraft, our network of practitioners in the physical world, is now 10,000 people strong and has generated over $100M in revenue for our portfolio companies.

The venture capitalist in me is excited by the opportunity to build companies that put a dent in the world. The father in me is excited for a future where my kids will be safe, thrive, and able to enjoy this incredible planet of ours.

A resilient future is within our grasp and building it is the most exciting business opportunity of our time. Thanks for joining us on the ride.

Seventeen years ago, Bill sat in a garage in Palo Alto and interviewed for Y Combinator funding. It was the summer of 2009 — the height of the financial crisis. Nobody knew if the startups YC was funding would be able to raise money the following spring. The stock market was cratering, and it felt to many like the world was in free fall.

For our first Disasterproof podcast episode, we went back to Palo Alto and sat down with Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, YC’s co-founders.

A lot has changed. And a lot hasn’t.

“There’s always some kind of disaster going on,” Paul said. “It’s almost a rule of thumb at Y Combinator. Just like in a hospital, there’s always somebody who’s coding.”

What YC learned to do, and what the best founders learn to do, is build things that don’t just survive disaster, but get stronger because of it. Paul and Jessica call them cockroaches: founders who are so determined, flexible, and indestructible, that chaos becomes an advantage instead of a threat. During the 2008 crash, YC deliberately looked for these people. They funded Airbnb — three guys selling 2008 campaign-themed cereal in their apartment, renting air mattresses to strangers. They seemed unkillable.

We talked about what that kind of resilience actually looks like in practice: how Jessica spots it in founder interviews (hint: the inflexible ones don’t answer your questions directly), how Paul thinks about the two risks that are truly game over — AI and climate change, and what it takes to stick to a North Star when the world is trying to blow you in twelve directions at once.

We also got into why climate and energy startups face a different fundraising reality than most, why “guilt” is a terrible foundation for a business model, and how the best ideas grow out of founders who couldn’t stop pulling on a thread long before they ever thought about starting a company.

Paul’s line that stuck with us: “You should never not start startups when the world’s changing.”

Listen to the full episode on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

In red flag conditions, there’s a narrow window right after a wildfire ignites — roughly 20 minutes — where a well-positioned initial attack can still stop the fire. Miss that window, and you’re no longer talking about suppression… you’re working on evacuation.

The problem is that it is almost impossible for modern firefighting equipment to get there in time.

The agencies doing the hardest work in wildfire response are chronically under-resourced, spread thin across multiple incidents, and dependent on aircraft and ground crews that take time to mobilize. During peak fire season, red-flag conditions mean a single spark can blow into a thousand-acre fire within hours. The gap between ignition and first response is often the difference between a contained incident and a community-level disaster.

That gap is exactly what Stuart Landesberg is building Seneca to close.

I spent a day in the field with Stu and his team, and I watched as they set a Sonoma field on fire. With a press of a button on a tablet, I was able to put it out with their autonomous drone system. The system is built for exactly the high-risk, low-resource moments where fire agencies need options most: it deploys with just one or two operators, can get on scene fast, and can run a sustained suppression effort for 30 to 40 minutes while ground crews mobilize or handle other incidents.

See the future of aerial firefighting in our latest episode of Disasterproof.

Watch the Seneca episode on YouTube →

To our partners and friends,

We are living in a moment defined by uncertainty. There’s a growing sense of volatility and disruption – from rapid advances in AI and geopolitical tension, to institutions and systems that feel increasingly fragile.

That instability is most visible in the physical world. Climate change, aging infrastructure, and decades of underinvestment have turned once-rare disasters into regular events. In the United States, a billion-dollar natural disaster now occurs roughly every eighteen days. Insurance markets are under pressure, public budgets are stretched, and many of the systems meant to protect us were designed for a more stable century.

Winston Churchill famously said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Throughout history, periods of existential risk have been followed by breakthroughs: predictions of mass starvation gave way to the agricultural revolution; Operation Warp Speed demonstrated how quickly science, capital, and coordination can mobilize under pressure. Volatility is not new and neither is our ability to adapt.

Today, advances in software, AI, sensors, robotics, autonomous systems, and energy storage make it possible to manage rising physical risk in entirely new ways. Technologies that once felt theoretical are now deployable, scalable, and economically viable. After decades of pushing the limits of how fast we can move bits, technological gains are finally extending to the world of atoms.

At Convective, we’re building on our foundation in wildfire to be the investor of choice in resilience: risk management for the physical world. It’s not a single sector or market, but a way of understanding risk in the modern world and a framework for capturing the value created by reducing it. It leverages our strengths built in wildfire while reinforcing them with broader positioning and a broader network.

The opportunity in resilience is immense. Real estate is the largest global asset class at $217 trillion, and 20-30% is exposed to high physical and climate-driven risk. Floods, wildfire, storms, drought and heat are rising in both frequency and severity, resulting in over $300 billion in losses in 2024. There is a desperate need to help better understand, mitigate, and insure this risk.

The opportunity in resilience is timely. The surge in volatility is being met by new technological solutions that have never before been possible and McKinsey estimates that resilience technology spending will exceed $1 trillion per year by 2030.

The opportunity in resilience is intertwined with wildfire. Our analysis shows that 90% of Firetech companies address multiple disaster types, meaning that an expanded footprint in resilience stands to benefit our existing investments in wildfire. As an example, utilities purchase Overstory not just to manage their fire risk, but also to manage the risk of outages from storms. As we looked at the broader resilience market, we realized that over 40% of the market addresses wildfire in some way. It is that overlap that gives us the enviable starting position of being the #1 investor in resilience by active portfolio size.

Our Team

2025 was a formative year for Convective as a firm.

We expanded the partnership with the addition of Mike Trapanese and Kat Manalac, building on the strong operational and investment foundation established in 2024 alongside Amy Brown and Jay Ribakove. This team brings complementary strengths across investing, operations, platform, and community – and reflects the kind of firm we want to build for the long run.

We also continued to grow and strengthen the ecosystem around Convective. Red Sky Summit expanded into a full week of programming this year, bringing together leaders across utilities, insurance, government, public safety, and technology.

Looking ahead to 2026, we are excited to build on this momentum:

• This week we’re launching the first episode of Disasterproof, our video series and podcast featuring the people building, financing, and ensuring the future. We’ll talk to investors, entrepreneurs, first responders, CEOs, and elected leaders about how they think about risk and resilience in an era of rising volatility.

• We’ll be launching a new brand and website soon that speaks to the opportunity in broader disaster resilience.

Resilience: Risk Management for the Physical World

When we started talking to LPs and investors about wildfire tech, the thesis was simple and clear: wildfires are getting worse, the infrastructure to detect, prevent, and respond to them is woefully underprepared, and venture capital had largely ignored the space. That clarity gave us conviction — and early traction.

Resilience is a bigger, messier idea. It spans energy, insurance, real estate, public infrastructure, and more. But here’s how we define it: Resilience is risk management for the physical world.

Disasters now impose trillions of dollars in losses across energy, insurance, real estate, and public budgets. At the same time, spending on resilience technologies is projected to exceed $1 trillion by 2030 – while venture investment remains a small fraction of that total. The gap between risk and investment creates both urgency and opportunity.

Resilience sits upstream of many of the themes investors now actively pursue – deep tech, American Dynamism, defense, the energy transition, and physical AI. These are not speculative markets waiting to be invented; they are urgent, operational problems where customers are looking for solutions.

These markets are also not easy. Building in resilience requires navigating fragmented buyers, complex regulation, long sales cycles, unclear budget ownership, and conservative end customers like utilities and insurers. Historically, these challenges have kept resilience on the margins of venture capital – much as fintech, defense, and space once were, prior to their inflection points. We believe resilience is at a similar moment today, and we are building Convective for that opportunity.

This is where specialization and our wildfire-first strategy create a durable advantage. Wildfire is one of the most complex and regulated risk categories in the world. Working in it has required regulatory fluency, deep technical diligence, and trusted relationships across utilities, insurers, operators, and public agencies. Wildfire also touches over 40% of the entire resilience market. That foundation now gives us a rare vantage point into how physical risk is measured, priced, and mitigated across sectors.

Over time, this focus has also produced what we believe is the strongest network in resilience: a dense portfolio of category-defining companies, deep founder relationships, and an expanding ecosystem of customers and partners. That network drives proprietary deal flow, stronger references, and credibility in competitive rounds.

We believe this combination of focus, relationships, and accumulated expertise gives Convective a clear right to win as resilience becomes a defining investment category.

Trends We’re Watching

A few themes we are paying particular attention to:

An energy system in flux. The grid faces growing threats from fire, storms, and heat at the same time demand is surging from AI, electrification, and EVs. Generation is becoming more distributed, economics more fragile, and reliability more critical.

Insurance under strain. Incumbent insurers have been slow to adapt and are retreating from catastrophe-exposed markets. At the same time, new entrants – including companies like Stand and Delos – are proving that modern underwriting and risk mitigation can unlock profitable growth. A more competitive insurance market is emerging, driven not by incumbents but by challengers.

Federal volatility, local resolve. While the federal landscape has been turbulent, we see a growing willingness to make pragmatic change – particularly around wildfire management, procurement reform, and public-private collaboration.

AI everywhere. AI is reshaping the companies we invest in and the way we operate. At Stand, a handful of engineers have built systems that once required teams an order of magnitude larger. Expectations and markets are changing rapidly. And inside Convective, we are integrating these tools into our own workflows – bringing new levels of intelligence, efficiency and data to our investment firm.

Structural scarcity. In niche but important ways, our capacity to respond to and recover from catastrophes is ill-suited to the scale of the problem. The average age of an air tanker, which douses fires from above, is 34. Our pipeline of conifer seeds has been contracting for a generation as the need for reforestation has massively expanded. Across so many physical industries, the skilled workforce has been shrinking. We are intrigued by emerging opportunities to rebalance supply and demand in these and other service markets.

Measuring Resilience

Our portfolio companies monitor nearly 70M acres for risk, have physically reduced risk on nearly 273K acres and protect assets worth over $200B. We measure this to showcase our impact, but also to communicate the economic, environmental and social value our companies are creating.

Wildfire resilience is difficult to measure objectively and consistently across the many business models in which we invest because our companies mitigate risk in different ways. Gridware and Overstory, for example, help utilities to maintain their distribution and transmission assets and limit the risk of ignitions. Pano spots fires early so they can be extinguished while they’re small. FireAside helps communities to prioritize their investments in hardening. BurnBot proactively treats land to make it less hospitable to catastrophic fire.

These model differences in how a company mitigates risk are why we tailor how each company measures and reports impact data. Likewise, we report three different wildfire metrics to enable each company to select the metric or metrics that best reflect their approach.

If you're thinking about resilience as an investor, operator, or builder, we'd love to talk. Reach out.

The Convective Team

As you read this, more than 700,000 acres are burning across Nebraska. The Morrill Fire alone has already become the largest wildfire in state history. Towns are evacuating and a state of emergency has been declared.

This is becoming the rhythm of our fire seasons — and why we made this episode.

But for every fire that burns out of control, there are a handful of stories that show what’s possible when we plan ahead.

One of these stories starts in a small town in Texas. On a February morning in 2024, the Windy Deuce Fire tore across the Texas Panhandle. Within days it burned more than 140,000 acres and became part of the largest wildfire in Texas history.

The fire was headed straight for Borger, a town of about 3,000 people. Borger might have met the same fate as many of the towns that burned down around it, but something strange happened.

The flames reached the edge of town…and stopped. Why?

Months earlier, the Borger Fire Department deliberately set fire to the land surrounding the town. It was a prescribed burn, designed to remove the grass and brush that feed catastrophic fires. The burn stretched seven miles along a 250-foot wide ribbon of land on the edge of town, creating a black line of cleared earth between Borger and the wildfire bearing down on it.

They created a halo of protection around the city.

What happened in Borger isn’t a fluke. A 2024 analysis in Forest Ecology and Management found that prescribed burning reduces the severity of subsequent wildfires by 62–72%. When a wildfire hits land that’s already been cleared or burned, it burns far less intensely.

Sometimes the effect is cinematic. During the 2022 Midnight Fire, flame heights dropped from 200–300 feet to just 2–3 feet within minutes when the fire reached a previously burned area. The fire didn’t disappear. But it became manageable.

Nearly every acre of forest and grassland in the United States needs regular clearing — prescribed fire, thinning, or mechanical treatment — to reduce wildfire risk. The U.S. Forest Service says at least 63 million acres of national forest land face high wildfire risk, and they’re overdue for treatment. In a good year, we treat about 2–3 million acres with prescribed fire, and most of that happens in Florida, not in the Western states where it’s most needed.

At the current pace, it would take decades to catch up — and every year the backlog grows as vegetation accumulates.

It’s why companies like BurnBot exist. BurnBot builds machines that automate prescribed burning — making it possible to treat land faster, more safely, and at a fraction of the traditional cost.

In this episode, we visit BurnBot’s factory to meet CEO Anukool Lakhina and see the machines — the RX2 and the Masticator. We also talk to Archie Stone, the Wildland Fire Coordinator for the Borger Fire Department.

Their work points toward a different future — one where communities are prepared, not just lucky.

If we get this right, wildfires will look very different.

Instead of seeing megafires tear through overgrown landscapes, we’ll see smaller, lower-intensity fires that firefighters can manage and communities can live alongside. The air will be clearer. Ecosystems will be healthier. And what happened in Borger won’t be an unusual story — it’ll just be what communities do.

Sources

• Davis et al., 2024 — Prescribed burning reduces wildfire severity by 62–72%
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037811272400197X

• Kelp et al., 2023 — Midnight Fire flame height reduction in previously burned areas https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022EF003468

In the last 100 days alone, floods in Indonesia killed nearly a thousand people, AI has made staggering leaps forward, and a new war erupted in the Middle East.

It’s easy to feel like things are falling apart.

But in 1798, Thomas Malthus predicted mass starvation — and the agricultural revolution proved him wrong.

What keeps us optimistic is this: somewhere out there, someone is building the solution to the crises we fear most.

We started Disasterproof to find these people and tell their stories.

We’ll meet the people building, financing, and safeguarding the future — from frontline responders and scientists to CEOs, investors, philanthropists, and elected officials.

For us, this is personal. Kat was born in the Philippines, one of the epicenters of climate-driven disasters. It’s a country fighting for its future against stronger typhoons and sea level rise. Bill watched wildfire reshape daily life in California and went on to found Convective Capital, a venture fund dedicated to wildfire and resilience tech.

We have two formats — a video series and a separate podcast. In the video series, you’ll see drones fighting wildfires, hear from leaders preparing their countries for rising sea levels, and you’ll get a glimpse of what the future of weather prediction and disaster response looks like. You’ll even learn how to disasterproof your own community.

In the podcast, the conversations go deeper. We’ll explore what people across the resilience ecosystem fear, what gives them hope, and what it will take to prepare for what comes next.

Subscribe on YouTube, here on our Substack, or follow us on Instagram. And if there’s someone you think we should talk to, send them our way.

Episode 1 featuring prescribed burns, the town of Borger, Texas, and BurnBot drops next week on Tuesday, March 17. Join us!

A special thank you to our partners, The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, for helping make Disasterproof possible.

Utility-caused fires almost always start the same way: aging equipment on a remote and overgrown span of line, no one watching it, a fault that builds slowly and then suddenly isn’t slow anymore.

The Camp Fire. The Dixie Fire. The Eaton Fire. All of them trace back to infrastructure that nobody caught in time — not because utilities don’t care, but because continuous monitoring of hundreds of thousands of miles of remote power lines is genuinely hard.

The U.S. grid has roughly 5.5 million distribution line-miles, plus hundreds of thousands of miles of transmission lines. Drone inspections, when they happen at all, run around $500 per mile — and only a fraction of the grid gets inspected annually. Global overhead line inspection is already a multi-billion-dollar market, and we think that number grows significantly as risk increases and better tools make more of the grid economical to monitor.

Drones have changed the economics of inspection in a lot of industries. But for power line work, the battery problem is severe. Given power lines are linear and long, 30 or 40 minutes of flight time doesn’t enable very much inspection before you need to land and recharge. “Drone-in-a-box” systems help at fixed points, but most of the highest-risk rural distribution lines — long spans through remote terrain, far from anything — still can’t be monitored economically. They get inspected on a slow cycle, if at all.

Voltair’s insight is simple and powerful: use the grid itself as the power source through a large network of low-cost charging pads. Instead of building expensive enclosures, build drones that are rugged and impervious to the elements. These two insights: inexpensive pads combined with ruggedized aircraft - enables frequent observation of infrastructure at a small fraction of today’s cost.

The long-term opportunity is even bigger.

A globally distributed network of autonomous observation drones would create a new layer of physical-world sensing infrastructure — a system capable of continuously observing critical infrastructure and our environment at global scale. With a charging network deployed across the grid, Voltair could serve existing multi-billion-dollar markets in road, rail, and telecom inspection at dramatically lower cost — while unlocking entirely new applications in hyperlocal weather monitoring, forestry, construction, search & rescue and insurance.

The incredible Voltair founding team: Ronan, Hayden, Avi, and Warren — built multiple generations of hardware, validated landing and charging, and completed real inspections in the field all before we met them - tremendous progress in a difficult industry.

Today we’re excited to share that we’ve invested $2.5M alongside Y Combinator in this team. Ronan is relentlessly focused — the kind of technical founder you want tackling a hard hardware problem. Hayden previously worked in power system protection at Seattle City Light, which means he understands utility operations from the inside. Avi has done the essential work of early customer development, turning co-ops into real design partners. And Warren brings the operational discipline needed to scale something this complex.

In the near term, Voltair will help utilities find faults before they spark — a meaningful step toward preventing the next catastrophic wildfire. And they are making fast progress towards a world that is better understood and managed because of their technology.

You can learn more at voltairlabs.com.

The aerial firefighting industry is facing a dangerous misalignment: while the wildfire threat escalates, the fleet tasked with containing it is aging into obsolescence.

The average large air tanker is 34 years old. These are converted commercial aircraft that are modified, maintained, and operated at significant expense to drop retardant. Likewise, the air attack fleet — aircraft that command and surveil the airspace over a fire — relies on turboprops that ceased production 40 years ago.

The problem isn’t a lack of technology or will, but a mismatched contracting structure. Today’s short-term, episodic procurement vehicles offer limited revenue certainty, making it challenging for institutional investors to back fleet expansion or modernization.

Fortunately, change is in the wings. Federal wildfire agencies are signaling a desire to crowd in private capital and rethink the contracting regime. As an investment company focused on wildfire, we see this as a pivotal moment.

To bridge the gap between public need and private capital, we propose five concrete changes that agencies can make.

1. Change option structures to reward performance, not churn

The current MATOC framework has the outline of a multi-year contracting vehicle, but in practice task orders can be re-competed every year. That structure injects unnecessary uncertainty and discourages long-term planning.

Agencies should adopt a 3- or 5-year base award followed by multi-year option blocks— two or three years at a time — with automatic renewal tied to objective performance metrics such as aircraft availability, safety record, and mission effectiveness. By retaining the requisite “termination for convenience” language, of course, the agency will always have an “out” if circumstances change. The key shift is not the elimination of discretion, but rather a new default.

Competition should happen at the front end. Continuity should be earned through performance.

2. Commit to exclusive use contracts with real minimums

Fire seasons are no longer confined to a few summer months, and federal agencies now compete directly with states and other jurisdictions for aircraft availability. Yet many federal awards still provide limited or no guaranteed utilization.

Leaning more heavily on EU task orders with meaningful minimum availability periods — 120 days or more per season — would dramatically improve revenue visibility. That visibility is what allows operators to finance aircraft upgrades, retain experienced crews, and invest in maintenance capacity before the first ignition.

3. Selectively issue exclusive use awards conditional on development and delivery

“If you build it, they will fly” is already the unspoken rule of aerial firefighting. Operators routinely invest in aircraft modifications on the expectation that, if the platform performs, the government will eventually put it to work.

Developing or converting a new large air tanker can take years and many millions in upfront capital; well before any contract revenue is available. Today, that risk is borne by operators’ balance sheets, sharply limiting competition and the pace of fleet renewal.

Federal agencies could unlock outside capital by selectively issuing exclusive-use awards that are contingent on the successful development and delivery of a new aircraft by a specified date. Under this approach, the government would make no immediate financial commitment, but would provide forward visibility: meet the performance and certification standards, and an exclusive-use contract follows.

That kind of conditional commitment would shift risk from “will the government buy?” to “can the operator deliver? This is a risk that the private equity industry is better equipped to underwrite.

4. Replace LPTA with Best Value

Aerial firefighting is not a commodity business. Aircraft performance, reliability, crew experience, and technological sophistication all materially affect outcomes on the fire line.

Lowest Price Technically Acceptable evaluations encourage a race to the bottom and actively penalize investments in safety, reliability, and innovation. Shifting to Best Value trade-offs would realign incentives toward capability and long-term effectiveness.

Price discipline matters. But price should not be the only thing that matters.

5. Scale back the use of small business set-asides

Federal agencies contract with more than 2,000 vendors for firefighting services. Each of these is a prime award.

There are real economies of scale in operating and sustaining a fleet of heavily modified, mission-critical aircraft. The current reliance on small-business set-asides in the most capital-intensive segments of aerial firefighting limits access to capital and discourages consolidation where it would improve safety and reliability.

This does not mean excluding small operators across the board. It means recognizing that some missions — for example, anything requiring fixed wing fleets or heavy lift helicopters — require balance sheets, engineering depth, and capital structures that small-businesses struggle to achieve. This is especially pronounced under categories where the SBA defines “small” in terms of revenue.

In practice, today’s use of set asides significantly limits the types of capital providers that can participate. This both limits the availability of capital and increases its price.

Encouraging scale in these segments would strengthen the overall system.

In conclusion

The United States needs to undertake a generational capital upgrade cycle in aerial firefighting. The private sector is eager to finance new aircraft, new technologies, and new operational models. But capital requires visibility.

By adjusting how federal agencies contract for aerial firefighting, we can unlock that capital and build a fleet worthy of the challenge ahead.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the catastrophic wildfires that tore through Los Angeles, claiming 31 lives and causing an estimated $250 billion in damages.

As the damage came into focus that evening, I drafted the essay below to wrestle with the question: how does one actually stop catastrophic wildfire?

That night, my wife went into labor, my attention shifted to welcoming our daughter, and I never posted it. In the meantime, the discourse has become a hunt for an easy scapegoat: an empty reservoir, a prior fire left smoldering or a faulty electric line. Ignored have been the underlying conditions that set the stage like unmaintained vegetation, aging electrical equipment and inappropriately built homes for fire country.

So is there one thing we can do to prevent fires like these?

No. But we can build a systematic and layered defense. Here’s my essay from January 2025:

How to stop wildfire

Last week, catastrophic wildfires swept through Los Angeles. The city joined communities like Paradise, Lahaina, Santa Rosa and Boulder – and more across the world – that have been redefined by wildfire in the last decade. With the fires still burning, many people are grappling for answers.

During Santa Ana wind events, the volume of energy released by wildfire can rival that of nuclear weapons, and many times they simply cannot be stopped. There is no panacea – and no fire department, no matter how heroic, resourced or skilled, can stop all ignitions in these conditions. Instead, we must build and rely on a layered defense-in-depth strategy, built in advance.

The same concept is used in cybersecurity. Password protection alone can’t protect against hackers, so we use a layered defense of firewalls, VPNs, anti-virus software, email screening, security training and multi-factor authentication to harden targets against security threats. Taking wildfire seriously means constructing a similarly layered defense.

A comprehensive strategy would be hundreds of pages long and too difficult to implement. But there are five things within our control, which if done together will significantly reduce the negative effects of catastrophic wildfire:

1. Forest & fuel management

2. Stop utilities from starting high-risk fires

3. Improve detection & response times

4. Harden homes & communities

5. Reform our insurance markets

Forest & fuel management

Forests and grasslands in the Western United States have co-evolved with fire over millennia, with a historic fire regime characterized by high frequency and low severity. But starting in the early 20th century with the development of the timber industry, policies of “maximum suppression” were developed. Quickly eliminating wildfire starts became the priority. This disrupted the natural cycle of frequent and low severity fires, thereby increasing forest density. Western forests are now three times denser than they were a century ago. Furthermore, homes and towns built in wildland areas have eliminated our ability to let wildfires burn uncontrolled. By putting out small fires, we created megafires.

However, we can employ techniques such as logging, thinning and prescribed fire to reduce fuel loads. The scale of our current efforts here is laughable – hamstrung by regulation, permitting, NIMBYism, asymmetric risk and a lack of political will. As an example, California has 17 million acres that are at “very high” risk of fire, yet treated only 36,400 acres last year. Alongside regulatory reform and community support, technology can help: companies like BurnBot have made prescribed burning safer and more efficient. If we performed fuel treatment on the 10M most at-risk acres over the next 10 years at a cost of $2,000 per acre, it would cost us $20B or $2B per year. This would protect a very significant portion of the state on an ongoing basis, and would do so at a price that is less than half of what the LA wildfires will cost us.

Stop utilities from starting high-risk fires

In California, utility-caused wildfires account for 11% of fire ignitions but nearly 50% of damage. Utility ignitions are particularly dangerous because the same high winds that cause grid failures are the same conditions that lead to rapid fire growth.

The Camp Fire in 2018 was started when a 97-year-old “C-hook” on a PG&E transmission tower failed, sending sparks into dry grass and destroying the city of Paradise, killing 85 people. PG&E entered bankruptcy in 2019 as a result of liability from this fire.

These ignitions are addressable by improvements to our electrical infrastructure and operations. Utilities can employ several strategies to reduce ignitions:

1. Increase vegetation management programs along powerlines and use technology to make them more effective.

2. Make circuit breakers on powerlines more sensitive, and cut power to high-risk portions of the grid in advance of large wind events (known in the industry as EPSS and PSPS).

3. Increase investment in energy infrastructure:

   1. Underground lines in high-risk areas

   2. Modernize towers and lines

   3. Install more sensitive breakers, and replace century-old equipment.

This will mean accepting higher electric bills as the cost of energy increases to reflect the risk in delivering it.

2026 note: Investing billions, PG&E has made tremendous progress in implementing these strategies in the last five years and ignitions are down significantly as a result. But work remains, both in their territory and even more so in other utility territories across the US.

Improve Detection & Response Times

In high wind, wildfire grows exponentially and every minute counts. A wildfire might be only two acres after 20 minutes, but can grow to 300 acres in another 20 minutes. Letting nature run its course is often our only choice once wildfires reach escape velocity; this moment is usually marked by an exasperated “she gone” on the radio. A recent study from the Moore Foundation confirmed that a 15-minute reduction in response time could reduce uncontainable wildfire and yield billions of dollars in economic benefit. This can be achieved through a combination of faster detection and response.

Faster detection using satellite and ground-based cameras is improving our response times, but current efforts need to be scaled. Companies like Pano AI alongside nonprofits like ALERTCalifornia and FireSat are helping detect fires earlier and improve situational awareness, but their coverage is limited. 20,000 additional camera stations across the American West paired with a dedicated satellite constellation would change the nature of wildfire response and cost $1B annually, a tiny fraction of the damages they could prevent.

If detected early, there’s a lot we can do to stop wildfires while they are small. Pre-positioning resources like aircraft, fire engines, and trained personnel in high-risk areas during peak fire seasons ensures immediate availability. Effective communication networks and tools like Watch Duty enable coordination between agencies. Tools like predictive modeling to anticipate fire behavior can further enhance response times.

The SoCal Quick Reaction Force (QRF) is an example of a successful public-private partnership that has saved lives, property, and taxpayer money by prepositioning large, night-capable aircraft for rapid response and using them liberally in the early stage of wildfire response. There is a tremendous opportunity to take these learnings and scale them globally using autonomous aircraft and drones in addition to traditional aircraft. Recent changes to drone regulations allowing Beyond Visual Line Of Sight (BVLOS) operations and improvements in overall capabilities make now the right time to do so.

2026 note: Convective announced its investment in Seneca, a company building autonomous fire suppression aircraft.

Harden Homes & Communities

The wildland-urban interface (WUI) is the geographic area where undeveloped wildland meets human development. In the last 30 years, the number of housing units there has increased by 46% – creating more vulnerabilities, but also more fuel and ignitions from human activity and power infrastructure.

The body of research on structure protection continues to grow, but it is clear that characteristics like defensible space, Class A roofing and dual pane windows are all effective in reducing structure ignition when paired with ongoing monitoring and maintenance. These efforts are even more important in the perimeter areas of communities where they interface with the wildland.

This research must be crystallized into ordinances and embraced and enforced by local communities. Software such as Fire Aside can help fire departments implement defensible space inspection programs and ensure their effectiveness in a collaborative way with residents.

2026 note: We are particularly excited about the promise of AI and how it could help design buildings that are both resilient and beautiful. In this vein, we recently announced our investment in Drafted AI.

Reform our Insurance Markets

Insurance acts as the economy’s shock absorber, allowing individuals, businesses, and governments to function and thrive in the face of uncertainty. Without it, the cost of risks would deter investment and development, leading to stagnation and credit and mortgage markets grind to a halt. It is an essential tool to manage and share catastrophe risk.

But regulatory policies have prevented insurance rates from reflecting actual risk, driving insurers out of the market and causing historic increases in the FAIR plan, California’s state-mandated insurance plan of last resort. Recent changes in California to allow insurers to incorporate the cost of reinsurance and to use forward-looking catastrophe models are a good first step, but more needs to be done.

There is a tremendous opportunity for insurance to create incentives for good behavior like home and community hardening. Non-smokers pay lower rates for health insurance – why shouldn’t homes that are hardened and well-maintained reap similar benefits?

Unfortunately, distorted market forces and regulated pricing prevents this from taking hold in homeowners insurance. Recent regulatory changes require insurers to offer discounts for home hardening, but these discounts total approximately 4% and predictably, homeowners have shrugged.

Companies like Stand and Delos are leading the charge on this new model of insurance in the non-admitted markets where pricing regulations are less prescriptive. (However, homeowners must be denied by three separate admitted insurers before they are permitted to purchase non-admitted policies.)

Underlying Forces: Climate change, policy, technology and workforce

Aside from specific strategies, there are underlying forces that can either work for us or against us in the fight against catastrophic wildfire. They include climate change, policy and regulation, technology, and our workforce.

A warming climate exacerbates fire behavior by creating longer, hotter, and drier fire seasons and increasing vapor pressure deficit – that is clear. Continued warming will make fires worse. It is unknown how much of recent catastrophes were due to climate change – certainly not none, but not 100% either.

Given the planetary timescale, uncertainty and politics of climate change, the more immediately addressable constraint is policy. Well-intentioned regulations – designed to protect consumers, the environment, or incumbents – have distorted market forces in ways that now actively impede risk reduction. When prices cannot reflect risk, capital does not flow to mitigation. When liability is asymmetric, behavior becomes defensive rather than preventive. When permitting takes years, fuel accumulates faster than we can remove it.

The good news? We have solved similar problems before. Structure-based urban firestorms destroyed parts of New York in 1835, Chicago in 1871 and San Francisco in 1906 - ultimately leading to building codes, sprinklers, hydrants and reimagined fire departments.

Wildfire demands a similar shift. Allowing utility rates to reflect true delivery risk would incentivize grid hardening, undergrounding, and advanced operational controls. Easing restrictions on sustainable forest management would encourage prescribed burns, mechanical thinning, and biomass utilization – reducing fuel loads while creating quality jobs in rural areas. Insurance reforms that reflect actual risk and reward mitigation, such as defensible space and fire-resistant construction, would align homeowner behavior with public safety. Unburdening the system does not mean deregulation – it means outcome-driven policy that unleashes innovation rather than constraining it.

With healthy markets in place, technology becomes a force multiplier. Real-time sensors and drones can detect faults on power lines before they spark ignitions. Smart grids can localize outages instead of shutting down entire regions. Better risk models can make insurance both fairer and more affordable. Fire-resistant materials and smarter home designs can become standard rather than exceptional. Technology does not replace people or policy – but it dramatically increases the leverage of both.

The final – and indispensable – pillar is the workforce. The men and women of the fire service are the backbone of any wildfire solution. Wildland firefighting is grueling, dangerous work: 24-hour shifts, extreme heat, heavy packs, steep terrain, and relentless smoke.

For this heroic job federal wildland firefighters are paid a whopping $15 per hour – a recent increase that is still wildly insufficient. Employment is often seasonal, forcing firefighters into off-season work and leaving us underprepared during what are now year-round fire conditions. If we expect a professional fire service capable of using advanced technology, conducting off-season fuel treatment, and responding at the speed modern fires demand, we must offer fair pay, year-round employment, and long-term career paths.

In Closing

The first step in addressing catastrophic wildfire is acknowledging that there is no single solution. This is a systems problem, and it requires a systems response.

The second is acknowledging that many of the necessary actions will be unpopular. No one wants higher electric bills, smoke from prescribed burns, landscaping restrictions, or higher upfront construction costs. But the alternative – repeated community-level catastrophe – is far more expensive in both moral and economic terms.

We should treat catastrophic wildfire the way we treat national defense or space exploration: as a solvable problem worthy of sustained investment, technological ambition, and coordinated execution. The future we should be building toward is one where forests are actively maintained rather than left to accumulate fuel; where ignitions are rare and rapidly detected; where communities are designed to withstand fire; and where suppression is fast, precise, and overwhelming when fires do start.

In that future, satellites and ground sensors detect ignitions within minutes. Aircraft, both crewed and autonomous, are pre-positioned and airborne quickly. Utilities operate hardened, intelligent, risk managed grids. Insurance rewards resilience. Firefighters are well-paid professionals equipped with the best tools available and not heroes of last resort placed in impossible situations.

If we seize this moment, catastrophic wildfire does not have to be a defining feature of the American West and a problem across the world. The technology exists. The capital is available. What remains is aligning policy, markets, and willpower to deploy these solutions at scale.

Bill is the founder of Convective Capital, a firm investing in resilience.

Thanks to Paul Graham, Brian Fennessy, Kat Mañalac, George Whitesides, Genny Biggs, Matt Weiner, Rich Aberman and Dr. Lori Moore-Merrell for reading drafts of this essay and providing feedback.

Nick Donahue has been obsessed with making housing more accessible and more beautiful for as long as he can remember.

His parents were builders, and from an early age he was immersed in the realities of how homes are actually made — the constraints, the tradeoffs, and the challenge of creating something that’s both well-designed and attainable. That obsession led to Atmos, his first company: an ambitious attempt to help people design and build custom homes, end-to-end.

Atmos took on one of the hardest problems in the real world — and it worked. Nick and the team spent seven years in the arena, building real houses and learning exactly where the bottlenecks are. Ultimately though, Atmos wasn’t scalable — not because the problem wasn’t real, but because the constraints of construction are unforgiving.

Then something changed.

With the advent of generative AI, there was suddenly a new way to attack the same problem: how do you make great, custom home design accessible to far more people? That insight became Drafted.

I was an angel in Atmos, and when Nick mentioned he was thinking about applying AI to architecture and home design, I knew immediately I wanted to be involved. Also, I had just spent several frustrating weeks trying to use ChatGPT to help with a home remodel — struggling to get anything that truly understood space, constraints, or aesthetic intent. It was obvious that general-purpose models weren’t enough.

At Drafted, Nick and the team are rethinking how models should work when applied to design. They’re building foundational technology to teach computers how the physical world works, from architectural design principles to structural, civil, and cost constraints.

After a coffee at Postscript, I offered to invest on the spot — and since then, progress has been extraordinary. Drafted has assembled an exceptional team that’s built a tool that can create instant floor plans and matching exterior renders with unlimited design variations. Something that used to take weeks or months and cost thousands of dollars, can be done in seconds for $.002. They’re already signing up 10,000 users per month — and this still feels like the very beginning.

But why did we, a firetech and climate resilience focused firm, invest in an AI home design company? What excites us is what this unlocks beyond aesthetics and accessibility.

Historically, making homes more resilient to disasters — storms, floods, wildfires — has often meant accepting tradeoffs in beauty. “Home hardening” measures like defensible space or clear zone zero have been treated as necessary but ugly constraints.

Drafted opens the door to something better.

By designing homes from the ground up with intelligence and intent, resilience no longer has to be an afterthought — or a compromise. Homes can be beautiful and disaster-ready, integrating fire-resistant layouts, smarter materials, and safer site design without sacrificing character.

If you’re curious, you can try it yourself at drafted.ai.

— Bill

Why we invested in Drafted was originally published in Convective Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m thrilled to share that Kat Manalac and Mike Trapanese are joining Convective as Partners.

Convective was started in 2022 with a simple idea: wildfire was one of the defining challenges of our time — and technology would be essential to solving it. Working alongside our founders and community, a lot of exciting things have happened since:

• Firetech has become a word — and also the hottest category in climate resilience (bad joke).

• The sold out Red Sky Summit has grown to a full week with 600+ annual attendees.

• Our portfolio has collectively raised over $515M to scale their Firetech efforts.

• And most importantly, our portfolio founders are proving that innovation can save lives, protect communities, and create lots of value in the process. Convective companies now protect over 30 million acres and over $140B of assets.

But as the historic and tragic fires in Altadena and the Palisades showed us this past January, we still have a lot of work left to do. That’s why I’m so excited for Kat and Mike to join us as partners.

• Kat brings unmatched experience building communities and platforms for founders from her years as a Partner at Y Combinator. She’s a builder, storyteller, and operator who knows how to help great founders scale their vision. We’re excited for her to bring that energy to Convective — growing and activating our ecosystem by connecting founders, investors, the fire service, utilities, and governments around a shared mission of resilience and innovation.

• Mike has spent his career as an operator then investor across industries where volatility is the norm — from fintech to food systems to paper manufacturing — most recently as a Partner at Behrens, a New York-based private equity firm. He’s seen firsthand how shocks like wars, pandemics, and commodity swings can threaten even the most essential businesses, and how the right capital partner can help them thrive. He’ll bring that perspective to Convective, where he will help companies navigate uncertainty, structure risk, and scale solutions for a more resilient world. He will help Convective build world class finance & operations functions to support and grow our investment business.

In addition to their impressive resumes, it’s worth mentioning that I’ve known Kat for over a decade and Mike for two.

I originally got to know Kat as a founder myself at YC — benefitting from her amazing events, community building efforts and storytelling — and then getting to work alongside her at YC as a part-time partner. If you ask anyone in the Y Combinator community, they’ll tell you that Kat was the heart and soul of the founder community, beloved and known by all and the driver behind Startup School, the Female Founders Conference and many other amazing moments. We, our founders and the broader fire & resilience community are incredibly lucky to have her at Convective.

Mike has been one of my best friends since our time together at Boston College and has been a close thought partner to me throughout my career at WePay and the early days of Convective. We also once spent six weeks driving the US together in my parents’ 1996 Volvo 850 station wagon. (I think he has finally gotten over that experience and so decided to join up this year). Here’s one of his startup ideas from 2008 (note that we’ve since gotten up to speed on magnetic bearings):

I feel incredibly fortunate to now work with two people I’ve admired for a long time and to leverage their talents in service of Convective’s mission: to help humanity thrive in a volatile world.

Some days the world seems darker and more unpredictable than ever, and that can be a scary prospect. But spending time with our founders, our community and the Convective team gives me hope. Never bet against entrepreneurial energy and great teams facing big problems. If you’re building solutions, we’d love to hear from you.

— Bill

New Partners, Old Friends was originally published in Convective Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Yesterday marked Earth Day — an important time to reflect on our planet and the need to take care of it. It also marked two years since our first fund close and offered an opportunity to reflect on what we’ve accomplished and where we’re going.

Our founding mission at Convective is to inspire and back founders who are solving our wildfire crisis. It’s been a fun two years in pursuit of that. We launched our $35m fund with some great coverage, hosted our inaugural Red Sky Summit, helped tell the story of Firetech, and most importantly partnered with the founders of 14 portfolio companies.

Two years in, we continue to be humbled by the magnitude of the challenge so we decided to accelerate our work and become not just a fund but a firm. With that in mind, we’re excited to welcome some new folks to the team:

• Amy Brown, Director of Operations

• Jay Ribakove, Principal

• Lia Kennett, Chief Marketing Officer

• Avery Paulick, Marketing Coordinator

Together with Managing Partner Bill Clerico and part-time partners Anukool Lakhina, George Whitesides, and Ilya Volodarsky, they form the Convective Capital team. We’re now a team of eight united by this important mission!

Amy

Amy Brown is joining Convective as our Director of Operations. Amy brings a wealth of operations experience from her background in nonprofit development, events, and executive search. Her sister’s house burned in the Tubbs fire and she has a strong connection to our mission.

Jay

Jay Ribakove is joining Convective on the investment team as a Principal. Jay brings tremendous investment experience from Munich Re Ventures and Tekfen Ventures where he sourced some of their top investments. His work in the insurance world will be beneficial to us as we think deeper about wildfire and climate resilience.

Lia

Lia Kennett joined the Convective community as the producer of our inaugural Red Sky Summit in 2023, and we’re excited that she has agreed to come on board on a part-time basis to run marketing for Convective, inclusive of our events strategy. Lia brings deep founder empathy from her experience running her own event production company for the past 20 years and has produced conferences like Code, All Things D, and The Lobby Conferences, among others. She also worked with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg as COO of Recode and started her career at Apple. She lives in Tahoe where wildfires are an ever-present reality.

Avery

Avery Paulick is joining Convective as our Marketing Coordinator. Avery brings expertise in content strategy after leading event programming and marketing at multiple mission-driven organizations. Her primary role is serving as an event producer alongside Lia at Kennett Productions where she was introduced to the Convective community at the inaugural Red Sky Summit.

As we build our portfolio, our expanded team gives us the capability to scale our work. We are excited about this next chapter of Convective and our increased ability to serve our founders and community.

That’s all for now! Please be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to learn about upcoming events, updates from our portfolio companies, and Firetech news.

From Fund to Firm was originally published in Convective Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After WePay’s acquisition by J.P. Morgan, I spent most of my time at our cabin in Boonville, CA — a rural community, population 1,000, in the bucolic Anderson Valley. Coming from San Francisco, it was shocking how much wildfire impacted daily rural life:

• The 2018 Peach Fire was a 90 acre fire that not only threatened our property but also burned along our only escape route.

• My homeowners insurance was dropped — sending me to the CA Fair plan, a very expensive and poor form of insurance.

• On September 9, 2020, many of us woke up in San Francisco to an apocalyptic and indescribably dark and orange day.

• The smell of smoke had become an ever-present part of life in the late summer — causing health impact and affecting everyone’s ability to enjoy California’s beautiful weather.

In addition to local impact, fire also causes broad problems:

• Lives: Research shows that the air quality impact of wildfire is responsible for 33,500 deaths annually.

• Land: In the U.S., an area the size of California (over 100m acres) has burned since I started WePay in 2008.

• Property: Wildfire has caused over $30 billion in property damage in the last decade.

• Carbon: In 2021, wildfires emitted 1.8 billion tons of carbon, an amount larger than all of U.S. transportation or power generation.

• Market Value: The 2018 Camp Fire resulted in $25 billion in liability for PG&E, a guilty plea for homicide and erased over $80 billion in market capitalization, a deficit which continues today.

And while $5B in record funding for wildfire is on its way via the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) and the Inflation Reduction Act, the U.S. Forest Service estimates that $50B in funding is needed to adequately de-risk our forests. The gap is still huge.

Given the intractability of the issue at scale, I first tried to learn as much as I could about wildfire at the local level. Our neighborhood organized a Firesafe council. I joined the Anderson Valley Fire Department as an eager (and still green) rookie. I commenced projects around our property to reduce fuels and improve fire safety. But the more I learned about fire, the more I couldn’t help but think about how technology and startups could play a bigger role in addressing it — both locally and globally.

Throughout my career, I’ve seen over and over how technology and startups can impact the world in an enormous and positive way. As the CEO of WePay, we powered payments for GoFundMe and as partners we helped millions of people give directly to those in need. As an angel investor, I’ve been privileged to back small teams who have impacted the lives of people across the world — like Deel, Lattice, Cambly, Boom and Mercury. The fact that wildfire hadn’t benefitted from this type of innovation felt like a big gap — and opportunity.

I started to learn about the large and growing markets hungry for new solutions, like utilities, insurance companies, landowners, businesses and homeowners. I sought out startups building solutions to wildfire and investing in them— backing Gridware, Delos, Rain, Overstory, BurnBot and Treeswift — and discovering that Firetech was an early but burgeoning movement.

Today, I’m excited to share the next phase of that effort — the close of Fund I of Convective Capital, a $35M pre-seed and seed fund dedicated to backing founders building solutions to wildfire. The market opportunity for fire solutions is large and unfortunately growing fast, and yet venture funding and startup activity is a fraction of what it could be. We are excited to help close that gap.

I’m also thrilled to share the amazing folks that are working alongside me in this exciting mission — including three talented former founders and my longtime chief of staff at WePay:

• Anukool Lakhina, Partner: Founder and former CEO of Guavus (acquired by Thales Group) and co-founder of Wonder-labs.org

• George Whitesides, Partner: Former Chief of Staff at NASA, former CEO of Virgin Galactic (NYSE: SPCE) and Chair of U.S. Megafire Action

• Ilya Volodarsky, Partner: Founder and former President of Segment (acquired by Twilio) and founder of Wildfires.org

• Erin Wood, Director of Operations: Former Executive Assistant and Chief of Staff at WePay

• A world-class advisory board bringing relationships and expertise to the firm across forestry, research, philanthropy and the fire service.

Lastly, I’m excited to share some of our initial fund investments in amazing and ambitious teams:

• Pano— camera-based fire detection using AI

• Overstory — satellite-based vegetation analytics for utilities to analyze power line risk

• Plus two others still in stealth!

We have a number of challenges ahead in addressing our wildfire crisis, but we’re excited to do our part — backing founders who are inventing new solutions in concert with government agencies, utilities, insurance companies, landowners and firefighters. Technology cannot solve this problem alone, but it is a powerful force multiplier.

Firetech is the most exciting opportunity in climate, if not all of technology — and we’re thrilled to now be able to share our work at Convective publicly! We envision a future where technology works in concert with firefighters, land managers, homeowners and community leaders to make us all safer and protect our resources and environment.

Technology gets even more exciting when it works together. Imagine the power of a Pano camera detecting fire early followed by a Rain drone extinguishing it. Or Overstory identifying high-risk vegetation and BurnBot treating it. We’re excited to help make these ideas a reality, along with ones we haven’t thought of yet.

Please consider:

• Signing up for our newsletter

• Getting in touch if you are building something in Firetech

• Following Convective and me on Twitter

Introducing Convective Capital was originally published in Convective Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.