#1211 Bill Clerico On Investing MILLIONS To Solve Wildfire Crisis

Bill Clerico is an investor at Convective Capital. He is an early investor in 50+ companies, and he is the former CEO of WePay which was acquired by JPMorgan. In this conversation, we talk about Bill's investment thesis - his entire firm is focused on investing in technology, software, & hardware related to wildfires. Bill and his team are looking for startups that are trying to help mitigate, treat, & prevent all of those issues. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 235,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Bill Clerico is an investor at Convective Capital. He's an early investor in 50-plus companies, and he is the former CEO of WePay, which was acquired by JP Morgan. In this conversation, we talk about Bill's, dare I say, wild investment thesis.

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  His entire firm is focused on investing in technology, software, and hardware that is related to wildfires. That's right. Those fires that you read about in the news, Bill and his team are looking for startups that are trying to help mitigate, treat, and prevent all of those issues. I really enjoyed this conversation. This is exactly one of the types of conversations as to why I started the podcast. I learned a lot about a brand-new area, so I hope that you enjoy this. Here is my conversation with Bill Clerco.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  The action's on the court, and as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch, and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside, 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to U.S. residents 21+. Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details.

• 1:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Bill here with me. The reason why we're talking is because I put out a tweet and I said, who are the best young investors that I should be talking to? Paul Graham responded and he said, you being one of them. And so as I go ahead and I take a look at what you guys are doing, you are using venture capital to help fight wildfires or forest fires.

• 2:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, maybe we should just start with like, what's the difference between a wildfire and a forest fire? And then why do you care so much about this problem?

• 2:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. So, you know, thanks again for having me on. I'm super excited to talk about this. You know, I think ultimately wildfire and forest fire is the same thing, but I think the reason that people are increasingly using the word wildfire to talk about these, these phenomenon is that it refers to sort of uncontrolled explosive wildfire. You know, fires have always burned in the forest for thousands of years in a very natural controlled state. And it's really a recent phenomenon that those fires have got become, become sort of wild wildfires. And so that's sort of the name is referring to, you know, out of control fires in the, in the wildland.

• 3:13Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Now you've got a very personal story with this. You were kind of living out in the woods, right? Or kind of in a more rural area and you were actually seeing these fires happen. They were coming up along the property line. You were having some of the health, you know, kind of impact to you, family, friends, et cetera. Talk a little bit about that experience and like, what, what spoke to you so much to go and spend, you know, a considerable amount of your time, energy on actually trying to solve the problem?

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I was a fintech entrepreneur. I started and sold a company called WePay to JP Morgan. And then I was spending some time at JP Morgan as, as part of that acquisition and, you know, as part of that, spending a lot of time in rural Northern California, a town called Boonville in the Anderson Valley. And certainly over the last five years, we've seen an explosion in fire, particularly in Northern California. We saw the campfire, the tubs fire and a number of other just sort of large, large incidents. And those, you know, we had direct impacts that, you know, a fire called the Peach Fire burned on the access road to our property. And then the indirect impacts of smoke and all that, that sort of comes with it. It just kind of got to this point where I was just seeing it so constantly. And I was like, there's gotta be something that we can do about this problem.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  And, you know, as, as I left JP Morgan, wanted to work on something new, wanted to sort of dive into a new topic. And I was just like, this is right in my backyard. It seems important. It also seems like technology can play a role in helping solve it. And so it just kind of piqued my interest to, to learn more.

• 4:35Anthony Pompliano?

  So my understanding of these wildfires is, as you mentioned, they have happened forever, essentially. And there's actually a natural explanation and an importance to having the fire. There's a clearing out of brush and kind of this like natural process. Explain maybe like the positives and like why we actually need some fire, but then what happens when we cross over into these negative impacts? Is it just that like humans have moved far enough into the woods that all of a sudden now they're endangering themselves? Or is there something else going on that takes it from like that natural evolution of, you know, fire and nature to now we actually have to solve the problem or stop these fires from spreading?

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's partially people moving into harm's way, but the much bigger issue is, as you said, for thousands and thousands of years, like fires burned in the landscape and they burned very frequently, but they, because they burned so frequently, they burned at low severity. So maybe every five, six, seven years, you'd have a low severity wildfire come through. It would burn, you know, ground cover and brush. It would leave the mature trees. It would leave the forest in this very resilient state. And those fires would start because of lightning, but also because indigenous people would actually light them to help manage the land and create, you know, pathways and clear brush and stuff like that. And then 100 years ago, we, you know, a little more than 100 years ago, we went and colonized the, you know, west coast of the United States and we started putting

• 5:57Speaker 02

  out these fires at much greater rates. You know, we, we had timber and agriculture and grazing and we had these assets to protect. And so we created, you know, these forestry departments that would actually go and suppress these fires. And that actually worked fairly well for 50 or 100 years. You know, we were able to control these fires, but it was kind of this spring that we've just been loading over the past century where we've just been suppressing so much stuff, stuff's not burning. Now you've got just tremendous fuel density out in the forest. And so, you know, you take that, you know, huge fuel density, some people estimate it's about four or five times denser than it was 100 years ago. You layer on climate change where, you know, now the fire seasons are longer and hotter. You go

• 6:41Speaker 02

  put a bunch of houses right in the middle of it and then you stream hundreds of thousands of miles of power lines through it all. And that's kind of the recipe for disaster that we've created, but it's largely self inflicted. I think the good news is that we can, we can undo a lot of that. And I think it is a solvable problem, but that's sort of the situation we're in.

• 6:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Before we get into some of the technology that you think can solve the problem and some of the numbers behind this, talk a little bit as to kind of the human interaction with the forest or with these fires. So on the east coast, something that people would be familiar with is like flood zones, right? When you buy a house, they tell you, hey, you had a higher susceptibility to a flood. And so insurance changes, people may not buy the home, homes could be built on stilts. Like, there's all these things that happen around floods. Is the same thing happening now on the west coast around these fires where people are getting zoned? And so they know that there's a higher susceptibility? Is there insurance premium changes? Are there homes that are being built in a different way? Like, just talk about maybe some of the things that are happening now that this is becoming a more frequent occurrence.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're just starting to figure a lot of that out. You know, floods, I think, have been a pretty well-understood phenomenon for a long time. But, you know, extreme wildfires are actually a fairly recent phenomenon. It's eight of the 10 most destructive wildfires in US history have happened since 2017. So it's like, you know, it's really become only in the last, say, five to 10 years, it's reached this tipping point. And you're right, it's driving all of those types of changes that we've seen with other types of natural disasters. But we're still kind of at the very early days. You know, we saw in California in the last couple of weeks, you know, all states stopped writing new homeowners policies, State Farm has as well. And so you have these insurers that aren't really sure what to

• 8:21Speaker 02

  do. They're kind of ill-equipped to understand the real risk to these homes. All they know is it's going exponential. And so they're trying to kind of step back until they can figure it out. I think that's the opportunity for entrepreneurs and for, you know, founders in particular to step in and say, okay, there's solutions we can build to these problems, right? We can manage vegetation around homes. We can build homes of different materials. We can, you know, cover gutters, cover ember vents, or cover vents to protect them from embers. So there's things we can do, but I think a lot of the housing stock has not been built with that in mind. And that's sort of where we are today.

• 8:55Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's talk how these fires get started. If people just read headlines, they always remember the one that like got started by the idiot who like set off a firework or, you know, did it being malicious or nefarious. Is that the majority or are these natural occurrences where maybe lightning strikes? Or like, just talk, you know, kind of what are the ways the fires were started? And then is there a probability or like a distribution in terms of human driven versus nature driven?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah. So, so lightning definitely causes some fire. It's on the order of magnitude of maybe 15 or 20% of wildfires started by lightning. I think, you know, the vast majority is caused by humans in various ways. It's, you know, the campfire that, you know, someone didn't watch enough Smokey the Bear ads and so they left, left the campfire burning. It's the gender reveal party. It's stuff like that. But one of the really big and important causes is that utilities cause a huge amount of wildfire. It's about 11% of ignitions get caused by utilities, but it's actually about 50% of the damage gets caused by utilities. Because it's those same high winds that cause a tree to fall on those power lines are the same high winds that cause that wildfire to go from a small fire that can be contained

• 10:04Speaker 02

  quickly to, you know, a huge inferno, you know, in sort of record time. So, you know, humans definitely cause it. It's definitely sort of carelessness on the, on the part of people that causes a chunk of them. But really utilities cause the majority of the really extreme wildfires. And that's, and I think that's a really important thing to know because it's a, it's a solvable problem by these utilities, or at least, you know, it can be mitigated in pretty large ways.

• 10:31Anthony Pompliano?

  So we have a fire that gets started. It starts spreading. Obviously, wind and other things can really kind of accelerate these. If anyone's seen the movie Only the Brave, I think it was the Granite Mountain Hot Shots is the group there. I had to look that up to remember it, but they look awesome, right? Like they're like, you know, going into the fire, they're digging the trenches, they're trying to fight these things, control them. Talk a little bit about maybe the reaction that people have today and kind of how we're treating it before we get to things that you all are trying to do, you know, in kind of a preventative way. But like, what is the hot shots and kind of this forest fire fighting, you know, forces that we have that we deploy whenever these things kick up?

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have an incredible heroic workforce that, you know, we have US Forest Service, we have state agencies like CAL FIRE in California, we have local fire department. And like for 99.9% of the wildfires, like that apparatus works really flawlessly. You know, 911 call goes in, they dispatch, they can contain stuff quickly and early. And I think that really does work and it's worked really well for a long period of time. I think the challenge is that we're just seeing this like crazy new fire behavior that's never been seen before. And you can get these starts in the wrong conditions where it's 70 mile an hour winds outside, it's incredibly dry, it's the feeling of a giant hair dryer everywhere.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  And you start a fire in those conditions, there's almost nothing you can do to stop it. Like it's just, it grows so quickly and exponentially that even if you had the crews really close and unseen and, you know, could get there immediately, it's just really, really difficult to contain fire in those, um, those conditions. And so I think that's what sort of leads you to say, okay, suppression alone cannot be the solution. We have to actually think about how do you mitigate, how do you do things to mitigate fire damage and fire intensity long before they start to give those suppression resources a chance in those extreme conditions?

• 12:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's talk some numbers real quick. So you guys came out and when you announced that you were going to do this, you had about a $35 million fund. I'm assuming that you guys have aspirations to raise future funds and kind of continue to grow the capital base that you can go and deploy into this. There's about $5 billion in the latest infrastructure bill that is specifically devoted to these issues and, and kind of complex challenges. But the US Forest Service, I've seen you say, estimate that there's about $50 billion that's going to be needed to actually handle this stuff. How big is kind of the addressable market? When you look at it as a venture capitalist and you say, okay, we're going to go deploy capital into this, are we talking about there can be $100 million outcomes, billion dollar, multi-billion dollar outcomes? How many of these companies do you think are going to be built? Like just talk a little numbers and kind of what the opportunity set is as an investor.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I believe there's going to be over a dozen unicorn companies built in fire tech. I think it's that big of a problem and that big of an opportunity. And you're right, there's a, there's record federal spending on wildfire. You know, we've got money in the infrastructure bill, money in the IRA. The agencies are really doing land treatment and suppression and investing in technology at, you know, sort of record levels, given the, the depth of the challenge. And I think that's, as we've talked about, only the beginning of what's actually needed. But, you know, for entrepreneurs, you know, government dollars and public dollars is one potential market. But there's really big opportunities in helping utilities adapt, insurance companies adapt, timber companies adapt, real estate companies adapt.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  These are, you know, huge, huge industries, some of the largest industries on the planet, that are being turned upside down by wildfire in some really important regions. You know, you think about PG and E, who's the, the major utility in Northern California. They lost $80 billion of market capitalization after the campfire. They went bankrupt, they got fined $25 billion, the CEO lost their job. You know, that is not a small thing, you know, that is not a small disruption to operations. It literally turned the company inside out. And so now they spend, you know, seven or eight billion dollars a year on wildfire mitigation across the board. That's one utility. And you can bet all the other utilities are watching that kind of stuff and don't want that to happen to them. And so, you know, the utility sector in particular spends a huge amount of money on wildfire mitigation,

• 14:35Speaker 02

  which is, you know, maybe tripled over the last couple of years. Insurance industry is losing between 10 and 15 billion dollars a year in the US. Again, huge dollars at stake. You think about like the real estate industry, say, take hotels. And some of the more recent Napa fires, some really large resorts burned to the ground. Air quality affects travel and occupancy. You know, again, these are like really big dollar amounts affecting really big businesses. And there's a real willingness for these businesses to spend on, on solutions. So, you know, we, if you take all of that together, you know, we estimate that spending in the US is about $50 billion a year on wildfire mitigation across all these different sectors. I think it's a really attractive market and it's growing quickly. And there's an even bigger one internationally, too.

• 15:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's talk about some of the companies that you guys have already invested in. One of the big categories, I think, is what I'll call kind of detection or camera and satellite type imaging. Maybe you can describe one or two of the businesses that you guys have funded there and like the importance of, it seems, at least from my perspective of identifying, you know, where could fires be occurring? Like what are like the preconditions, if you will, and kind of higher likelihood areas. But then also like, hey, is there a fire or is there not a fire? It sounds like you've got a couple of companies that are doing that as well.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so one of the companies we've invested is called Pano AI. And so Pano puts cameras on tops of mountains and cellphone towers and uses AI to analyze the video so that you can quickly detect a fire start. You think a fire, again, growing exponentially, if you can catch it in that first five or 10 minutes, your chances of being able to intervene before it gets really big go way up. And in addition, you also get situational awareness to know like, hey, what's the rate of spread? Where's it going? You can tailor your dispatch. Whereas maybe previously, all you'd have is a 911 call if someone says, hey, there's smoke behind my house. You got to send an engine. It takes 15 or 20 minutes for them to find it before they can sort of call out the full dispatch.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  You're short-circuiting that whole process so that you can make a smarter decision. Has a huge impact on the ability of suppression and it's a great application of technology. Their big customers are landowners, but utilities as well that are trying to sort of think about, how do they de-risk fire starts in the regions where they're responsible?

• 16:50Anthony Pompliano?

  So those cameras are obviously, as you said, kind of near the ground. I've seen also that you guys have looked at things from satellites and kind of satellite imagery, things from that front. What do you think is possible from satellites that maybe the cameras can't do? Or have you guys said, hey, look, maybe the satellites actually can't help?

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I think detection will be solved by a kind of a layered approach. You know, cameras are really great at covering, you know, 50 or 100 square miles and giving you real-time situational awareness, which is, which is awesome. Satellites can cover much broader areas, but have much lower resolution in terms of understanding what's actually happening and, you know, much lower sort of frequency or so much higher. Latency in terms of seeing what's actually happening. So you know, it's kind of a layered approach. You might use a satellite to monitor really rural areas like, say, the interior of Australia. But you might use cameras to monitor the wild and urban interface around a town in Northern California. And so I think it's kind of both working in concert. Having said, we also

• 17:49Speaker 02

  are investors in a company called Overstory, which uses satellite imagery in a slightly different way. They actually help utilities understand vegetation risks to their power lines. So they'll help, you know, someone like a PG&E say, hey, you've got a diseased 40-foot Douglas fir tree, you know, within six feet of a power line. That's a very high-risk tree. You got to go take that out. And it brings some visibility to a really big distribution network and helps them prioritize where they're going to do tree trimming, which is a huge way they prevent wildfire.

• 18:19Anthony Pompliano?

  So we've got kind of camera detection, satellite detection, et cetera. Once the fire starts, are there opportunities to invest around how to actually treat the fire, how to cut the fires, you know, path of movement off? What are some of the things that you guys are either invested in or excited about in that area?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  The action's on the court. And as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch, and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside, 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to US residents 21+. Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've seen a bunch of different, you know, work happening there, you know, ranging from, you know, new types of chemicals to, you know, to put out fire in a safer, more environmentally friendly way, to, you know, all kinds of new types of machinery to try to think about fire suppression. The thing that we're probably most excited about in the suppression category is drones or other types of technology that can help with rapid initial attack. So, you know, again, those first five, 10, 15 minutes of a fire are so critical. You know, if you can detect it and then you can get retarded there quickly. You have a chance to catch it before it gets out of control in some of these really adverse conditions. And so we're investors in a company called Rain that builds autonomous drones to do

• 19:47Speaker 02

  fire suppression with the idea being that you could you get that fire start, you can actually have an aircraft in the air almost immediately and on its way there to be able to A, give you a size up and understand what's happening, but B, actually start suppression operations, which again, short circuit that cycle as other other resources are kind of making their way on site.

• 20:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that makes it 10 cents. Talk to me about the home. You mentioned earlier covers, you mentioned maybe building materials. What are you guys seeing there? What are you investing in? What's exciting?

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we're we're investors in a couple of things in that in that space. One is a company called Delos. And so Delos is building a new type of homeowner's insurance. So trying to basically, you know, these insurers are struggling to price wildfire risk. Delos is a bunch of really bright, you know, ML and AI scientists that are better understanding the dynamics of fire, better modeling it, and are able to price risk more intelligently, which means they can ensure more homes than insurers might otherwise be able to. We're also taking, you know, a couple hard look at looks at some other companies in that in that space that actually analyzing the home itself and saying, you know, hey, this is what's this is what's attractive about this home in terms of its wildfire defensibility. Here's what's unattractive and helping trying

• 20:58Speaker 02

  to quantify some of that risk and ideally help the owner make those changes. And we're investors in a company that is called Fire Maps that sort of helped analyze those homes and actually helps the homeowner say, okay, I'm going to make these improvements or changes, put a new roof on my house, or put a gutter guard to protect against ember intrusion, which is actually helping mitigate the risk of the home.

• 21:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And when you see other categories, is there anything else that sticks out to you as like, hey, these are the really, really big opportunities. This is where we can go put money to work, pre seed, seed, and we think that it can grow and compound for a number of years?

• 21:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think the other, so if you think about wildfires as a problem, I think suppression is one, one solution. You know, sort of asset protection or community hardening is another solution. So protecting homes. I think the third category is really around landscape resilience. So this is like, how do we take these really big forests? And return them to a state of resilience, back to that natural state. And so we invested in a company called Burnbot that has actually built like a large robotic tractor device that has, you know, basically blow torches underneath it and a big fan. And that can basically crawl through different terrain and conduct what's called prescribed burning. So you're actually going to burn fuel underneath that device, but you're doing it in a really contained way that's safe.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  You know, you're pulling a bunch of oxygen through so you get really efficient combustion, which A makes it faster, but B reduces the smoke by a lot. So you can now do, you know, kind of fuel treatment in areas that you might not otherwise do, or, or in times of the year when you might not otherwise be able to do it safely. This is a device that sort of is, is making fuel treatment more scalable. That's a huge part of the solution is actually returning good fire to the landscape. In ways that had happened historically. That's the only way we're going to get this back in equilibrium.

• 22:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, many people will be thinking about air quality right now as we talk about wildfires, forest fires, because in New York City, for like the first time in forever, there was this horrible air quality. It was, you know, kind of orange looking. All the pictures went viral online. It didn't come from New York. It obviously came from the fires up in Canada, but you had a statistic, when you guys announced your venture capital firm, that just blew me away. That 33,500 deaths annually are attributed to the air quality impact of wildfire. 33,500 deaths annually seems like such an absurdly high number for air quality specifically related to wildfires. So talk about kind of what you all are seeing, West Coast, East Coast, obviously the thing in New York.

• 23:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And then are there potential solutions there that you all think are investment opportunities that can not only save lives, but also return capital?

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a pretty stunning statistic, isn't it? Someone took, you know, basically air quality, air quality data and then looked at mortality rates and sort of correlated the two and determined that that air quality from wildfires sort of contributed to deaths of this huge scale. You know, wildfires in a bad year will kill 100 people directly, which is, you know, a big tragic number, but it's nowhere near the scale of, you know, 33,000, which, which the air quality impacts. It's just less directed, it happens later, and so it's, it's a little bit harder for people to wrap their heads around, but that's really the real danger of wildfires, this air quality that we're seeing. And it makes wildfire also not a West Coast regional issue, but truly a national or global issue as, as we've seen.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  And so, you know, I think there's opportunity though for companies to, to help with that, you know? You can think about air filtration in homes, you know? How do we, we certainly, during COVID, everyone had their sort of local little air filter, but is that really the best we can do? Is that the, is that the end all be all? Or is there whole home filtration systems? You know, is there a future where, you know, built into your furnace or into your air conditioning, you've got, you know, real filtration for smoke because you're going to need that from air quality? The forecasts for air quality are also quite depressing. You know, we, I looked at a study from NASA that was saying that in, you know, by sort of 2060, 2070, the average air quality in the Bay Area will be equivalent to like our really terrible summer of 2020 when we had that orange sky day in San Francisco.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  And that'll just be an average year. And so I think if we don't get the fire problem under control, we're going to have to deal with this air quality issue and it's going to become a global public health crisis. So, you know, I think there's opportunity for technology to help in terms of forecasting, in terms of filtration, but, but it's a pretty significant problem that needs to be taken seriously.

• 25:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Another thing that you called out was the impact on market value. And again, these numbers just kind of blew my mind. You said the 2018 campfire resulted in $25 billion in liability for PG&E, a guilty plea for homicide, and it erased over $80 billion in market capitalization. $25 billion liability, $80 billion market cap wipeout, and then a guilty homicide plea. I don't think people who haven't spent the time to look at this stuff really understand just how big those numbers are, what the impact is, et cetera. Describe a little bit more about that situation and kind of what the, what led to these, you know, kind of massive numbers to be impacted.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the Campfire in Paradise was a just a total absolute tragedy. You know, it started on a, you know, based on a faulty piece of equipment on a transmission line, quickly within the span of a few hours, you know, burned down a paradise and, you know, just, you know, killed a bunch of people and destroyed the entire town. It was, I mean, it's just truly, I think, a horrific tragedy. There's some documentaries that have been done on it, and I think if folks are interested or want a visceral sense of what this stuff is like, it's worth, worth watching. You know, ultimately, it was traced to a faulty hook on a transmission tower. That hook had been, you know, hadn't been replaced in nearly 100 years.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  And so it sort of slowly wore down and eventually caused, you know, in these, this high wind condition, it was, I think it was about 70 mile an hour winds. The hook failed, the wire fell, hit the tower, sent to shower sparks, and then those same 70 mile an hour winds just carried those flames quickly through the, through the town. You know, PG&E, the utility is liable, is liable for that. And, you know, and that's, you know, particularly when you think about the negligence involved in the, in maintenance. Now, since then, they've dramatically changed their approach to this. They're, you know, upgrading infrastructure left and right, and definitely do not want to do this again, and are, you know, investing in infrastructure at sort of record levels.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  But, you know, the, the reality remains, they have 200,000 miles of power lines in Northern California, you can't upgrade that overnight. And even if you do, there's certain conditions where, you know, fires are still going to start. And so I, I think it's a really serious thing for utilities. It's really the only, one of the only reasons a utility CEO can lose their job in the span of a weekend is, you know, they can go home on Friday and come back on Sunday and be out of a job if, if they start a wildfire. So it's not just PG&E that has this, this liability, it's, it's utilities, you know, across lots of wildfire exposed areas, which is a big percentage of the country and world.

• 27:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Who's starting some of these startups? So are these like, you know, wildfire firefighters who are like, hey, I'm really familiar with the problem? Are these people who live in these communities? Are these tech entrepreneurs who are like, how do I get as far away from a, you know, cubicle and office as possible? And let me get out into nature? Like, who, who are you running into as you're kind of evaluating these companies and seeing, you know, who, who really the founders are?

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a mixture of all those things. I don't think it's like a homogenous community. You know, we've got, you know, the CEO of Pano, Sonia, was a product manager at Google, you know, on Nest and really, you know, spent a bunch of time doing hardware design for cameras and then said, hey, I want to apply this technology that I know a lot about to a problem that's a little bit more meaningful than tracking the Amazon package showing up on someone's driveway. And, you know, thought about that, hey, you know, computer vision could be used to detect wildfire and help protect people. And I think it was sort of the mission that drew her into this, this category. You know, the CEO of Overstory, which is the, the satellite-based vegetation management solution for utilities, he's a

• 29:01Speaker 02

  really accomplished data scientist that was working on climate analytics and realized that one of the highest leverage problems in climate is wildfire prevention. And so, you know, kind of went deep on wildfire and thought about how he could apply his skillset there, too. So, you know, it's a, it's a mix. And we, you know, certainly across all these teams, we've got firefighters and foresters and, you know, various types of practitioners that, you know, kind of bring the real world experience and can kind of combine it with the technology. And so I think that mixture is, is really the secret sauce.

• 29:34Anthony Pompliano?

  What are you seeing in terms of valuations? And you mentioned earlier, a dozen $1 billion plus companies you think can come out of this sector. So what does that really look like in terms of how much capital they'll need to get there, right? Some businesses, especially that are outside of just pure software, they're incredibly capital intensive. Some businesses are incredibly capital light. What are you kind of anticipating here as you guys really kind of pioneer investing in this specific sector?

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's a mix. You know, we're, we're sector focused, but we're kind of technology agnostic. So we have some companies like Rain or Burnbot that are building, you know, real serious hardware, you know, I would say heavy machinery, flying heavy machinery, which obviously is very capital intensive. And then we've got software companies that help, you know, fire departments do home inspections and some of those companies are profitable. So, you know, it's, I think there's kind of a mix. It depends a little bit on their approach. I think one of the things- About being pretty like vertically focused, though, is that a lot of our companies are just really close to their customer. They've got significant revenue. You know, these are not like, we're going to go build a social network and sell ads later kind of businesses. They are, we're going to

• 30:40Speaker 02

  co-create with our customer. We're going to get paid along the way and sort of grow, you know, grow alongside them. So, you know, it's kind of a mix. I don't think there's really any one, one type of company that we're funding.

• 30:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And then when you look at kind of co-investors, one of the things that at the pre-seed and seed level is always interesting to me is like, you need other people to come along, right? Usually, you're not going to take down an entire round. And then, obviously, you need people to follow on in series A, series B, series C. Who are you seeing participate in these deals? Are these just generalist venture capitalists? Are there other kind of, I guess, fire funds that are out there? What are you seeing, you know, in some of the round constructions?

• 31:18Speaker 02

  I haven't met anyone else crazy enough to start a fire fund just yet, but, you know, maybe one day. I think maybe my job will be done when that, when that happens. But there are a lot of other firms that are investing in wildfire as a, as a market. You know, there's certainly climate firms that, you know, see wildfire as a subset of climate and happy to talk about that relationship. It's pretty interesting. But there's also just generalist VC firms that's want to invest in software or AI or data companies and see the opportunity in this market as well. So, part of my job is to be a bit of an evangelist, to try to invite those folks in and to see the opportunity here and help co-invest alongside our companies.

• 31:59Anthony Pompliano?

  You mentioned the relationship between wildfire and climate. Describe that.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so wildfires cause 5% of global CO2 emissions. It's huge. It's bigger than the country of Russia. So, you know, you could, as you think about trying to solve climate change and reduce carbon dioxide emissions, you know, you can put a heat pump in hundreds of millions of people's homes, or you can totally re-engineer the transportation sector, or we can find ways to intervene in wildfire and to create resilient landscapes and dramatically reduce the emissions caused by wildfire. And we can do it in a relatively short period of time. So I think it's actually in terms of like, dollars in and time required, I think one of the easiest ways To reduce carbon emissions in the short term, you know, is to is to try to solve this wildfire problem and we can really make a dent in global emissions if we do so because it is this negative

• 32:46Speaker 02

  feedback loop, you know, wildfires cause carbon emissions, which causes warming, which then causes more wildfires. And that's kind of a bad loop to be in. But the good is is we can interrupt it. And if we do so, I think it'll be one of the largest shortest term levers on reducing carbon emissions.

• 33:01Anthony Pompliano?

  My last question for you is about your team. I noticed that you have a whole collection of people with very unique backgrounds. What's the pitch to get them to come work for you? How do you figure out who's got the skills and the experience versus just who's enthusiastic about this? You know, what are you looking for in some of those team members?

• 33:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. So I think the thing that attracts people to this market in general and hopefully to connect it as well is that, you know, we're working on a really important problem and mission. Like if we can put better tools in the hands of practitioners, you know, we can save people's lives, we can, you know, help save our environment and we can have a massive impact on on the climate crisis. So I think that mission helps attract people, you know, our team is myself. I've got three part time partners who are all former founders of really successful technology companies. One is George Whitesides, who is the CEO of Virgin Galactic. One's Ilya Volodarsky, who co founded Segment. And then one is Anakul Akinu, who sold a company called Guavas to the tails group. And then

• 34:00Speaker 02

  we were joined by our director of operations, Aaron Wood, who was my assistant at WePay for 10 years. So, you know, the five of us have kind of built companies before and we've been, we know what that means and we're really attracted to the mission here. I think that's a really good combination, you know, we, we think we can be helpful advisors to, you know, founders as they're as they're building their companies. And we all just kind of get it. We know, we know what the process is like. And, you know, we get excited about building companies having big impact.

• 34:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes makes complete sense to me. Where can we send people to find you on the internet? Or if they've got a company that they think potentially could be interesting to you guys, send it to you?

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, just on Twitter at Bill Clerico, or you can send me an email [email protected]. Always happy to chat with folks working in the space.

• 34:42Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. And now my last question, you've been investing for a while now. What is the one thing that has surprised you the most before you started investing that you know now that would have been helpful to know back then?

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think one of the mistakes that operators make when they turn to investors is they get excited about the idea and they think about how they could go execute that idea. And I think what I've realized now as an investor is it's actually much more about the founder and the person. You know, the idea is part of it and it's easy to get excited about the idea, but you have to get excited about the person. And if and they're the ones that are actually going to do that work. And that's, you know, so much more of our underwriting now around investments revolves around the founders versus the the idea itself.

• 35:23Anthony Pompliano?

  That is a great piece of advice. Bill, I appreciate this. I learned a ton today. I never thought that I would be talking in such great detail about wildfires, but I feel better informed now when I see it in the news. And obviously, you guys are doing fantastic work. Not, you know, and I think what's so inspiring about it is not just that you're trying to solve kind of the hard technical problem of the fire itself, but the ramifications of saving lives, saving property, etc., is is quite commendable. So I appreciate everything you guys are doing and we'll definitely do this again in the future.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me on.