Venture Step

Dalton Anderson (00:01.39)
Welcome to Vintroset Podcasts where we discuss entrepreneurship, trends, and the occasional book review. Today we have a wonderful guest on the show, Valkyrie Holmes. She has done an incredible amount of stuff within a short amount of time, but she likes to keep this mantra of you're not special. And I'll let her go into a little bit more detail about that later on. But I just want to give a highlight of some of the things that she's worked on. So one project was related to

it's this hive mine drone application for fire suppression that used vortex cannons. And what, that really means is she uses drones to detect if there was a pending wildfire, go to those areas that might be highly have a high likelihood of a fire. And then from there map out with the drones, the approach and shoot high velocity air at the fire to either change the direction or slow the path or

if it's small enough or caught early enough, the idea was to completely suppress the fire to extinguish, to be extinguished. And then from there, she's transitioned over to building her own company related to wildfire and climate change. And that is called Fora. And that's what we're here to talk about today. But Valkyrie is an interesting individual and someone who is a 776 fellow, which is a foundation or venture capitalist fund that

funds young folks that seem to be what we would call cracked. And those folks get to tinker and build some of the ideas that they have, like the vortex cannon or what for is building now. So I just want to give Valkyria a chance to talk a little bit about herself before we get into the episode and what is for from her own perspective.

Valkyrie Holmes (01:54.553)
Yeah, sounds good. Well, thank you so much for having me, Dalton. Yeah, so, you know, I started in climate from a pretty early point of my career. I graduated from high school, went straight into working. And I think COVID gave me a good amount of time to reflect on what I actually wanted to do and what I really stood for. And what I realized was, okay, at the end of the day, I want to be working in interesting

spaces with interesting people, typically in spaces that most would consider boring. Because a lot of the, a lot of society runs on these community organizations and these local initiatives that ripple out into federal government and all these different areas. So it was always really interesting to me from the climate perspective that people would talk about.

reducing risk and building these things that had connecting pieces and then they just wouldn't do it. Like they would build this super niche thing and then it wouldn't really get further than this niche concept which really doesn't solve the problem. We need a lot more people solving those problems. And so from an early age I think I focused a lot on this idea that no one is special but that means that everyone has something in common with another person.

So you can take the you're not special mantra and be very pessimistic about it Which I was for a long time, but now I much more view it as Everyone has something going on that you can relate to so you got to find that little something And position it in a way that that benefits other people. So that's what for aims to do like for is Specifically around environmental resilience and property resilience

specifically on survivability and we can talk you know loads more about what FORA does but the positioning there is really important to me.

Dalton Anderson (03:50.808)
Yeah, I think a cool point about the you're not special thing is it's one for yourself to stay, stay heads down, keep building, keep pushing. The other piece is for other people that are looking at like your rap sheet, like doing that, all of these things before 21.

they look at what you've done in a short amount of time. They're like, wow. Like that's, that's the reason why I haven't done what I want to do. Like these kinds of people are out and about in the wild and this is who I'm competing against. But really it's, it's, you're not special. Like everyone has the opportunity to execute and it is if you have the right opportunities, you either make them through either luck, perseverance,

Valkyrie Holmes (04:09.873)
So you know how do that.

Dalton Anderson (04:38.286)
a multitudes of suffering and other variables, or you can take it the other view where it's like, okay, well, I guess I never had a chance in the first place, you know? So, obviously you wanna have the better outlook, but it also is a good point of view for other people looking externally to others and comparing. You're not supposed to really compare yourself to other people, but people just do it innately, but.

Valkyrie Holmes (04:50.129)
Yeah.

Dalton Anderson (05:03.842)
The view that no one is special allows the outlook that, I can do this too. My idea that I have that I think is important or something that I want to do is doable because at the end of the day, no one is inherently special. It's just executing at the end of the day and being persistent, right?

Valkyrie Holmes (05:22.073)
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I think that I truly believe that the majority of people can do something crazy in their lifetimes. And most people would say running a startup or doing anything that I've done is crazy. But I think it's just about being in love with the problem and finding a solution that fits. But it could be just something that's like something you want to do. I always have this mentality of, you know, like

just kind of this like why not idea, but more specifically when I'm thinking about doing something, it's separating it from a good amount of emotion, especially if it's something that you might not wanna do. So we can use a classic example of I really love to work out, but there are some days where I really don't want to. But if I separate the idea that working out is going to be painful or boring or whatever,

it makes it a lot easier to just be like, okay, well, this has to be done. Well, I have to do this. So separating, like making it more of like a neutral activity because it's something that has to be done. I use that in our company all the time. Like I don't necessarily want to be reaching out to people and doing lead gen and like all these like more boring administrative tasks that come with every startup, but.

If it has to be done, it has to be done. So as much as I can, trying to remove myself from the fact that this is something I don't want to do, I think I found that very helpful. Yeah, that's an excellent point. Simply because people will talk about startups saying, oh, we're just seeing general ideas. like, oh, well, I don't know if it's the idea that I want. It's not my idea.

Dalton Anderson (06:51.724)
Yeah, that's an excellent point simply because people will talk about startups saying, or just any in general idea. They're like, well, it's I don't know if it's the idea that I want. Like it's not my idea. It's not the idea that really drives me, but really just got to get started and getting started and getting things done. Then you can figure out the rest later. But like there's this whole notion about I can't do a startup because like I don't have the

idea, like my perfect idea. Well, there is no perfect idea. Like 50 % of startups like within like Y Commodore, they pivot to a new idea in the incubation period. And so consistently people don't have the perfect idea. It's just getting started. But also just because you're not necessarily interested in the idea doesn't mean that it's not different if you had the perfect idea on anything that you're doing. Like there's still stuff that you're not going to want to do that you're not interested in.

and that it just needs to get done either in your personal life or businesses or relationships. there's just, it just stuff that life throws at you that may or may not be your favorite, but it still needs to get done no matter what you do. So that's a great, I think that's, I think that's an excellent point where you just, you're removing emotion, removing your emotions of, of priority tasks that you don't want to do, but it doesn't really matter if you want to do it or not. You just execute.

Valkyrie Holmes (08:05.584)
Yeah.

Valkyrie Holmes (08:20.239)
Yeah, exactly.

Dalton Anderson (08:20.718)
Yeah. And anyone could take that. I mean, you don't have to be a, you don't have to be a founder. You don't have to be some kind of a CEO or executive. that's anyone could, that could be a takeaway for anyone regardless of their role in a corporate life or what they like to do. Yeah. So transitioning over, you want to talk for a, and maybe a good point is I know that four has a unique.

perspective, but something that it's a funny inside joke. We don't actually do this in insurance, but we say sometimes it's like, we'll just exclude it as a joke because it's just funny. Cause like that's, that's like the notion of like the industry. Like if we're not comfortable with something, then it's just excluded versus like finding, like finding a solution. But sometimes the solutions take longer to build because they're not aligned with the government. And then the government takes a long time to warm up to the idea of a new approach.

Valkyrie Holmes (08:56.785)
Yeah

Dalton Anderson (09:16.814)
And for is a new approach. So I would like you to maybe talk about like how for is a little different. From other applications of wildfire discovery or defensible space, and I would say our audience is probably pretty technical, but not knowledgeable in insurance. So. Just like things like OK, like the satellite view and the other nuances. I mean, I'm sure you've done this before, but I'm just throwing that out there.

Valkyrie Holmes (09:45.777)
Yeah.

No, yeah. So as kind of like a primer, when an insurance company is looking at property risks specifically, they're using a ton of tools and a ton of internal data to make a decision about first, whether or not they want to actually insure this property. And then second, whether or not they want to price it in a specific threshold. So what we saw initially was, okay, survivability of properties is something that we know is really important that all

of local communities know is really important, but isn't really talked about too much in the insurance industry. And the reason for that is because we haven't needed to. We really haven't needed to focus on whether or not a property we're insuring is still going to be standing there in the next five to 10 years.

So with that in mind, we started thinking along the lines of, okay, what are insurance companies currently using? Insurance companies right now are using traditional climate models. And those models are essentially saying for this property, this is the likelihood that a disaster will happen in this area. And that's really important. That's worked for a really long time in terms of including business and excluding business or pricing more appropriately. And we've had to change a lot of things around climate.

as it became more of an issue. But now we need this extra level of granularity because what we realized was we're using these climate models, we're using all this property data, we know generally what properties look like, and yet we're still losing billions and billions of dollars every year when a disaster hits.

Valkyrie Holmes (11:22.499)
So that gap has been something very interesting to us for a long time. And what we kind of realized was it all comes down to quantifying property risk. From our perspective, we took the approach of quantifying resilience, AKA survivability of a property. So what we do on that front is essentially we work with traditional climate models.

And we built our own survivability models for any given property in the US. So we can say, OK, send us an address. You know this property is high risk based off of your traditional climate vendors. We will tell you whether or not this property will actually survive a disaster if it does come in contact. So whereas before, you would have to manually search through property characteristics, there are still companies using Google Street View and Zillow listings to underwrite properties to get a better look at the property.

So instead of using all that information and having it be a pretty inefficient process, you can just use a for us survivability score and report that says, okay, for these high risk properties, these are more likely to survive. These are less likely to survive. And for the ones that have lower scores, here are all the things you really have to worry about on that property. So if we can take an example here, let's say we have two properties in a neighborhood that are both extremely high risk properties.

Normally, if you're an insurance company with a specific kind of appetite for risk, you may or may not insure both of those properties. So you could basically decide to say, OK, I'm excluding both of these because it's too high risk for us. Or you insure both of them at a really high premium or higher deductible or whatever it might be.

So in that circumstance, instead of giving them both around a similar rate or spending a lot of time to underwrite those properties, we would say property A is a 65 % survivability, property B is like a 25 % survivability. So that gives you more range on what you could pass through as a viable structure and how you can price more effectively.

Valkyrie Holmes (13:27.953)
In addition to that, when we look at a property, it's not just about the overall survivability of the structure, it's also about damage ability. So for that property A, 65 % survivability, we can say, okay, the roof score is around an 85%. So that's pretty good. There's not that many things that we can change on the roof to improve that score, but the foundation score is like a 15%. So now you're an underwriter.

you're looking at this property, you know it's high risk, you know the survivability score is around that mid-range area, typically 70 % and above is pretty resilient, and then now you know that the foundation is going to be the biggest issue that I'm looking for on this property that I can use to make that decision a lot more efficient.

So that's kind of how I describe it as like the most bare bones terms, but we do that for wildfire, we do that for hail and flood and hurricane and a bunch of other perils. And I think it's like a really important conversation we need to keep having.

Dalton Anderson (14:22.208)
And question about the foundation example. So the foundation example, like a 15%, like how would you, without spilling out the secret sauce, like what are some things that you're looking for? Is that from the home inspection, like the images, the AI images that are coming back and being processed, is that included in the survivability model? Or is there different attributes that you're looking at to determine whether the foundation is in good shape or not?

Valkyrie Holmes (14:49.558)
Yeah, so it depends on the tool the insurance company is using. So we have a couple different tools. There's a couple that are purely based off of property data that we ingest ourselves or vendors that we rely on. So in that case, you would just have to ping us with an address and then we give you the report from there. So there's no involvement of the policyholder. It's just give us an address. We give you the score and the report, and then you make a decision based off of that.

for the foundation in a lot of cases, especially for something like wildfire, it's going to be things like defensible space, what the foundation is built out of, whether or not there is any flammable material that's in that zero to five foot area of the home.

There are things that you can get from on the ground views that we have adjusted over the last couple of years that you can't get from a traditional satellite and aerial vendor. So we're using on the ground and up in the air imagery to get the most holistic view of the property.

But overall, that's kind of what we're most focused on is the characteristics that are closest to that foundational score. And then you mentioned the inspection side. We have a digital assessment tool. So you as a policyholder get a text. It pops up on your device. And then you walk around your property and collect all the information we need to calculate a survivability score and the report. So that one involved more of the homeowner.

and some people prefer to do that, some people don't. I think it's really important to let people know what their survivability is and if there's any mitigation activity they can do. But that's not up to me. That's up to Gary or we're gonna...

Dalton Anderson (16:28.696)
question about the boots on the ground thing. So I was just thinking in my head when you were describing that I was like delivery, I was thinking like delivery dudes are like Uber eats. Like they're just like snapping photos of the bushes, like other bushes like 50 feet away from the house. And yeah, from my, I thought that was funny. Like how, how are you, I guess, is it, is it similar to like a, like you would hire like a contractor to like go and look at these like neighborhoods to see what's going on in.

Valkyrie Holmes (16:35.877)
Do you your favorite movie?

Dalton Anderson (16:59.006)
One thing that we have, not, I say we, but like insurance in general, like you have these requirements of defensible space and these other, other nuances regarding fire or different perils. And the data that we're possibly doing an analysis on, or you're trying to underrate on is the five years old. Like the, the images that you're getting from the satellite vendor might be a year old or

If there was recently just a large event, it might be two weeks, but a lot of times it's quite dated. And so what the environment looks like on the property is substantially different than what you're underwriting to. And so it could either be in favor of the homeowner or out of favor. And I'm talking about homeowners insurance, because the people listening to this call are probably more concerned with homeowners than they are with some large corporation. Like, oh, wow, the corporation that owns $500 million worth of buildings is having trouble getting insurance, ooh.

Valkyrie Holmes (17:47.727)
Yeah.

Dalton Anderson (17:56.27)
So I'm more or less emphasizing homeowners, but in that sense where people have these flow systems, because if you're outside of insurance, homeowners is typically, depending if it's high net worth, but if it's normal buildings for a homeowner, that's considered what is called flow. So it comes in, you read through the characteristics, and if things look a little wonky, then an underwriter would look at the account and they'll see if they want to put it in the book or not.

Valkyrie Holmes (17:56.716)
Yeah.

Dalton Anderson (18:26.516)
if you are trying to determine if you could write the property or not and their data is old, then you're necessarily missing out maybe on good risk or risk that you don't want. And I think that's what you're trying to get at is like, like we've got updated data. This is what the property really looks like. Here's your actual risk versus what you expected it to be. And we actually think what you're saying about this property is untrue because we've got updated data.

I think it has defensible space here and I think this is a good opportunity to pick up some premium here.

Valkyrie Holmes (19:01.243)
Yeah.

Yeah, mean, it kind of goes a couple of different ways. The first way that we originally emphasized more, but now is kind of secondary to the first instance, is the idea that you can find more business that you would have completely overlooked otherwise. So if you're just relying on a typical climate model and you get an extreme risk score on a property, for most people, depending on their risk appetite, depending on how many properties they want to have in a condensed space or how much high risk business they want,

they would exclude those properties because it's not business that they think is going to be profitable for them in the long run. But if they actually factored in the structure information and didn't use only that as the initial filter, then they would see, actually there is quite a bit of business here that has mitigation work that is less likely to burn down that we find.

not only more profitable but higher margin for us. So not only are you getting homeowners more insurance policies, like more insurance in areas they wouldn't have been able to find it, but now you have more profitable business that continues to renew year over year.

So that's one piece of it. And then the second piece of it is kind of the reduction in losses. So for a while, my pitch was very much like, you can find more business in these areas that you overlooked previously. And while that does resonate, we take the example of like when the LA wildfires happened, no one's talking about all of the business that they found that did survive. Everyone's talking about the business that caused them to pay out billions of dollars in losses.

Valkyrie Holmes (20:37.427)
So now we focus much more on if you know what the survivability of properties is, then that helps you reduce your potential losses by incentivizing policyholders to reduce their risk and stay more profitable. So ultimately, you're understanding way more about which areas of your portfolio are more likely to survive or more likely to cause you losses and what the range of that is.

I think both are very important, but when you see images of LA, you're definitely thinking more about the destruction and potential destruction that still waits in these areas as opposed to the property. You're thinking about the properties that survive are extremely lucky when in reality there's probably ways we could have quantified that and we are continuing to quantify that. Yes, good point.

Dalton Anderson (21:30.146)
Yeah, it's a good point. just insurance in general, it's very finicky and all over the place. Like one year it's wildfires and finding the right place within those, the needle in the haystack to get the premium. And then people get burned. And then the next thing is, okay, like now we just got to make sure we understand our portfolio. Like where is our risk? Like, well, what stuff do we, do we need to?

Valkyrie Holmes (21:39.13)
What?

Dalton Anderson (21:57.454)
get more reinsurance for, what stuff do we have to shut the books? Everything kind of flows down from these recent events and it changes people's mindsets. On a likes of Switch, it just completely alters because a lot of these folks, I not speaking of State Farm or a very large homeowners company, but many homeowners companies, or insurance companies in general, they...

Valkyrie Holmes (21:57.841)
can't

Valkyrie Holmes (22:09.649)
I don't know how I can introduce them to sleep in the mall, sleep in the office, but I say that.

Dalton Anderson (22:25.294)
have reinsurance, so it's insurance on their insurance. And it's not that they aren't paying out money. I don't want it to be confusing, too confusing and technical, basically all the risks that you're putting on the books for the people listening, all the risks that you're putting on the books, insurance companies don't have enough capital if there was a total loss of all the money. So say that you had $1 billion on your books. If everything,

was a total loss, $1 billion needs to get paid out. And there's certain requirements from the government, likely so, that A, we know that you don't have that much cash on hand or liquid assets. You need to provide coverage for what would be a one in 10,000 year event. And so the reason why they do reinsurance is because the events aren't that often and typically people reinsure to the years one and 250, so a 250 year event.

And so there's always a possibility that those events can happen, but they're a little likelihood. So then you don't need the capital on hand, but you do need to know that if something like that would happen, you would have coverage. But with these large events like the wildfire, like stuff burning down near the ocean, like we've never seen that. Like it was so close to the actual sea. People were freaking out because it's like, we've never seen a fire get so close to the

Valkyrie Holmes (23:24.977)
Hmm.

Dalton Anderson (23:53.822)
actual city of LA and houses burning down on the beach, on the ocean, that stuff is unprecedented. I don't know if your time at NASA, there was flat earthers or people that didn't believe in climate change at NASA, I assume no. there's still this notion that climate change isn't a thing. But if you just look at the hardcore data, this frequency, how often something is happening.

and the severity if it happens, like how bad is it with storms of any peril from wildfire to hurricanes or tornadoes is greatly increased over the last 10 to 15 years. And it seems to be a steady trend increasing in the unfavorable mindset, not mindset, but offset of what we would want. And so things like that, yeah, they just switch on the, on the, they just switch so quickly. Like one day it's, we're worried about this. The next day we're worried about something else.

But the main reason is you can't get capital if you're not appeasing the people providing the capital over top.

Valkyrie Holmes (25:00.367)
Yeah. Yeah, I mean...

I didn't have any run-ins with Flat Earthers or anything, and any space tech company I've ever been at. But I think it's, there's so many people that not only, it's not about denying that things are changing, it's denying the way that they're changing. So I made a very deliberate effort to stay away from saying that we're like a climate change company, mostly because regardless

of how you think things are happening, the world is getting warmer slash colder depending on where you are, weather patterns are changing, and that is impacting us like monetarily.

So again, I think a lot about positioning. So when we think about our company, I think about us more as an insure tech company than I do a climate company. And a lot of that is because we are very focused on the resilient infrastructure that protects us from natural disasters. And so

I honestly, I could care less if someone thinks that climate change is happening or not, know, regardless of my personal beliefs, because at the end of the day, it is something that you have to think about now, where it was like a whole thing that people in New York for the first time didn't have to go outside on Halloween, like kids were sweating in their costumes instead of being cold because it's fall. And then same thing with I grew up in Las Vegas and Vegas has gotten...

Valkyrie Holmes (26:37.263)
colder and hotter every single year. So there's a lot of things that you can point to in those areas that correlate, but yeah, regardless of what you think, it's still happening. So in terms of our positioning now, I think a lot more about the fact that profitability-wise, we as an industry need to figure out a better way to evaluate risk. And I think it was a big

no-no for lot of early insure techs to go to insurance companies that have been around for hundreds of years and say, we can underwrite better than you. It got a lot of people upset about insure tech. And at end of the day, that's not what we're saying. We know that companies have the data that they need to make these decisions, but it's about making it more actionable and making it easier for us to make these decisions and standardizing that. So we very much take the approach of, you know, we...

help you take advantage of the data you already have and make it more efficient while still underwriting a similar way that you've always underwritten. It's more just about getting more information in front of you so that you can make those decisions much more frequently. So we're not trying to change the game from that perspective.

Dalton Anderson (27:56.886)
Yeah, I think the perspective would be whatever reality you want to live in, there is a monetary cost to weather events and we're here to help you either understand that cost or mitigate.

Valkyrie Holmes (28:07.793)
You know what to

Thank

Dalton Anderson (28:13.198)
I was just thinking off the top of my head, like your expertise is more data science and like, I would say understanding, like building models to understand, like the first thing that you built was the Firefly, I'm pretty sure it was called, and that was building a data science model that would detect high risk wildfire areas, which is, you know, helped you with other ventures. But when you transitioned over into like an intro tech,

Valkyrie Holmes (28:13.617)
Thank

Dalton Anderson (28:42.56)
One thing I was surprised when I went to ITC and when we originally first met, you're very knowledgeable about insurance, but then I met with some other folks that like requested to have meetings with me or they had like reached out to me while I was like eating lunch or something. And they didn't even know, like they didn't know like random things. they're like, you know, a claims company and they didn't know like what an appraiser did or like how do they put like

they just didn't know like fundamental stuff. And I was wondering, you know, how did you prepare to become an expert in insurance or at least, at least knowledgeable enough to understand the problem and understand how to communicate to executives at these companies, which I think is important.

Valkyrie Holmes (29:24.687)
Yeah, yeah, I don't really talk about that too much, but I think it was very much me going into it with a completely open mind. So again, like it's about being really obsessed with a problem. And so the problem was, okay, our properties are not built to withstand disasters and we need to do something about it. So we approached insurance,

with this idea that if we could get people and insurance to act and provide homeowners with resources, then that opens the stage up for realtors and lenders and governments. And if we prove it out in one industry, can kind of have that snowball effect move further. So I basically just started reaching out to people. And I...

originally was just reaching out to a bunch of people from a bunch of different roles to learn anything and everything about insurance. I read a bunch of books, I watched a bunch of videos, listened to podcasts. And so that was the first stage was just whoever would spend any time with me, whoever would get on a call with me.

I will happily take it because it's one thing to understand generally what's going on in the industry. It's another thing to speak to it and know the insurance language. So in talking to people day after day, was booking like tens of probably at this point, like thousands of calls on.

people and like what they're doing in their roles. Through that, you start to use the language that other people have spoken about in calls and you write down some notes and then you repurpose them and then you speak to another person. And some people will correct you, some people won't. There's like, I can't remember when the last time this was, but there were definitely instances where I used a term that was not correct for a long time and someone finally was like, does that mean what you think it means? So, you you have to kind of get checked on that.

Valkyrie Holmes (31:27.887)
But that was the first thing. And then the second thing was repurposing a lot of the conversations I had and turning it into content. So for those of you who like don't know too much about Fora, we grew a ton on LinkedIn. So I started posting every day, virtually every day.

about almost two years ago now. And originally it was a way for me to post about what we were doing and our progress and just like building in public. And then it started to become more of like a lead generator for us because now all of a sudden I had a call with someone, they talked about something, I researched it, I repurposed what I researched and turned it into a post. And I figured if I could talk about insurance in a way that made sense to me and made sense to other people, then

I knew the concept way more than if I had just left it in my head. So I started doing that and it was like a slow effect at first and then we went to these conferences and then it just became a multiplier. So I feel like most people, if they don't find us on LinkedIn, they reach out to us from LinkedIn and it's been just like a really, really great tool for us.

But that's a big part of how I learned about the insurance industry. And obviously going to conferences and having more of these client conversations and everything, that also teaches you. in the beginning, was anyone that will book a call with me, I am down for that. And then anything that we talk about, I am going to try to condense into something that makes sense for the average person, not only just someone with insurance expertise.

Dalton Anderson (33:12.844)
Yeah, no, I have a, remember a story from like a startup that they founded like a gas company or gas card company for truck drivers, but they didn't know anything about trucking. So what they did was they just drove to the truck station and just started trying to talk to truckers. And like a lot of times when you're at the truck station, like you're trying to sleep, like you're just trying to relax and like, like, can I ask you questions on like how your day is and like what your, how your job goes? So I know it can be difficult.

Valkyrie Holmes (33:13.189)
Yeah, we are.

Valkyrie Holmes (33:23.853)
And, sorry.

Valkyrie Holmes (33:30.228)
and just throw it in.

Valkyrie Holmes (33:37.261)
So.

Dalton Anderson (33:43.118)
and hard to get information from folks and consistently doing it. Once you get going, it starts to get easier, but to get going is difficult because then you don't have an environment to find everybody. But once you build out somewhat of a network, it kind of just does its own thing, network effects. LinkedIn, I quite like your LinkedIn posts because I think other folks will do like a build in public, but then they're

Valkyrie Holmes (34:06.245)
Yeah.

Dalton Anderson (34:12.664)
they're building in public, it's like everything is polished and it's, it's filtered and it's almost like they're reading off of, off of screen and like, okay, well, Hey, my name is Dalton and I'm here to show you what I've worked on today. And like, it's like almost like a legal document that they're, they're discussing. Whereas your approach is more like, all right, like here's what's going on. Like here's the fires, like why this is important. Like,

Valkyrie Holmes (34:30.864)
Yeah.

Dalton Anderson (34:39.916)
what's going on in the industry related to climate, here's recent events, this is how we can help. And it's more personable and it's down to earth. It's not like you have a suit on and you're at some desk and the lighting is perfect. It's almost like a selfie video and then you're putting stuff on the screen, you're explaining papers or other things, whereas it doesn't seem like an ad, whereas it would if it wasn't.

Valkyrie Holmes (35:04.849)
Mm-hmm.

Dalton Anderson (35:07.458)
It's a new term, maybe you could be one of the first TikTok company influencers, I guess. Not TikTok, but LinkedIn is what I meant to say. Because everyone has an Instagram influencer or TikTok, but then there's LinkedIn is a new category where you can get a ton of leads. And that's actually how someone at my company had found you was LinkedIn. And I guess you guys had connected.

prior and then he introduced me to you at ITC and said that you were quite interesting and we should chat and maybe get on the episode and here we are. things just work out. Wondering how, talking about building fora, wondering how you repurposed your original brainchild, the Firefly and like how you repurposed that to like help build a company like that deals with.

Valkyrie Holmes (35:44.517)
Yeah.

Dalton Anderson (36:02.698)
understanding weather risk, like catastrophic weather risk. And then I think your your founder before that with with Firefly was Jesse Pound. And then your new co-founder for Fora is Amanda Southworth. Right. Yeah. So maybe maybe talk a little bit about like your experience with the Firefly and then what things like translated over and then how

Valkyrie Holmes (36:21.073)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, perfect.

Dalton Anderson (36:32.384)
it was to build a company like from scratch, like you have to build the wildfire models, like how does it all work? And then maybe a little bit about like Amanda and how the company's going, like how it's been successful and how you recently just did a funding round.

Valkyrie Holmes (36:49.669)
Yeah.

Yeah, no. Yeah, I mean, I've been in wildfire for quite a long time now. Just like general natural disaster risk. But the first company that I ever started was a company with my good friend, Jesse, who's now like one of my best friends. And we had done a project back in school that was specifically focused on wildfire risk, specifically like on drone technology. when you first, at least, you know, at this point, it's like five or six years ago.

now, but when you first looked into wildfire as someone that had no expertise in wildfire, my first inclination was, there's a bunch of funding that's dedicated to this. Governments are dedicated to this. I don't see why this is a big deal. And then you start to look into it and you're like, oh, wow, we actually have a lot of work to do. And this is not going to be solved anytime soon. So we really need to get our stuff together. So we dove into it.

originally with a suppression based idea because suppression really hasn't changed too much all in the last, you know, 50 or so years. There really hasn't been too much movement. It's all relatively similar water suppression. And now there's a couple companies that are doing things differently, but at the time it was like a very, very new thing. Firetec was a very new thing.

So we approached it from this idea that, okay, we have to keep people out of harm's way. So how do we reduce the risk for frontline workers? And then how do we improve the current methods? And what we found was if we use drones equipped with these things called vortex cannons, that minimizes the amount of water we need to use because it's just using the outside atmosphere and blowing it into the fire.

Valkyrie Holmes (38:37.357)
Now that takes people out of harm's way because drones are now in place there. And it is a lot more beneficial for the fire because we're using it as an alternative method of containment. So building that was really interesting. We worked with another company that doesn't exist anymore, but they were building some of the drone manufacturing parts and had gotten going from a couple different research projects. And then

we slowly realized that suppression isn't really, there's a lot of people focusing on suppression and not very many people focusing on mitigation. So a big part of me kind of hopping off of that was the fact that it wasn't really solving the root cause of our issue. Again, like talking about the fact that there's like connecting pieces inside of it. There was not many connecting pieces inside of that. So.

Moving into Fora, I actually found my co-founder on a wildfire subreddit. So I was posting about what I wanted to do and she responded to me and she was training to be a wildfire EMT at the time. I just about to start the program and I roped her back into tech. She's been in tech for over a decade. She's done work for Apple, Target, Godiva, was one of the first Apple developers on the App Store. Just like very, very...

cool, knowledgeable co-founder that cares a lot about any problem that she's working on. And it kind of lined up for me when we had our first conversation. We sketched out the first MVP of the product and then just kept building from there and incorporated before we ever actually met each other, which I don't know if I recommend that to everyone, but we got the vibes. We got it all worked out.

Dalton Anderson (40:27.65)
Hahaha

Valkyrie Holmes (40:34.223)
So yeah, and ever since then, it's kind of just been slowly chugging along. Insurance is definitely a hard industry, but we are, I think we have the advantage of A, being semi-first movers in the industry from the resiliency survivability standpoint, and then B, being at a time that this is on everyone's minds, so the timing could not be more perfect, unfortunately.

So yeah, it's been going good. And then we just raised around. So we raised $3.5 million from a couple of different investors and we announced it this past February. So that's been very exciting to be able to grow the team and hire and do all those wonderful things. So.

Dalton Anderson (41:18.314)
Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. The thing about the Vortex cannons, mean, just to say that, we built the Vortex, I mean, it just sounds sick. Like send out the Vortex cannons, like just launch the Vortex, like you got some like Vortex cannon button, you're like, send them out, like, and it sends all the air. Yeah, I just thought that was interesting. Interesting, the approach with the subwoofer, like how was that designed with the subwoofer where it...

It's a subwoofer with like a compressor attached where like the subwoofer gathers the air and then it stores it into a tube that's wide and then it narrows at the front and then it shoots out the air pretty quickly. yeah, I mean, how did you do that for say, was it like a 3D print thing or how did you repurpose a Walmart, a Walmart subwoofer or what subwoofers were these 18s or these 12s or?

Valkyrie Holmes (41:58.886)
Mm-hmm.

Valkyrie Holmes (42:11.276)
Hahaha

Valkyrie Holmes (42:15.261)
Yeah, so we got a lot of our parts from this other company that we were working with because they specialized in drone manufacturing. So we were mostly on the cannon side and we were building cannons and the drones in conjunction with that. So yeah, but it's interesting because if you have something powerful enough, it doesn't matter.

what size it is, what metrics we're using. If you plug enough power into a cannon that has this funnel piece, this long barrel, and then the subwoofer, then it basically just collects any outside air and shoves it into this barrel at high enough speed to the point where it folds in on itself and creates this forward-moving loop that disperses a fire, fuel particles, but also oxygen that helps fires grow.

So yeah, it was just like a lot of very interesting science that we learned about very early on. But yeah, it was a very cool thing. I enjoyed the fact that I got to work on vortex cannons very early.

Dalton Anderson (43:28.902)
Yeah, it's just sound. It's just sounds sick. Like the whole idea sounds sick. And then the fact that the drones were like 16 feet or something like something like they're a massive drone, like they weren't small and just the whole thing just sounds like it sounds sci fi ish, you know, that's what I like about it. But it's transitioning. So you had a, you know, congratulations on the funding round. That's awesome. I do you want to walk through a little bit of what you can walk through? It like, how does that even work? Like not everyone's familiar with how like you

Valkyrie Holmes (43:38.041)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dalton Anderson (43:58.062)
fundraise, but basically, you know, how would that work? Like who do you, who do you go to? Is it the flying around? Like how do you, what was your like, you know, I guess people that don't know how fundraising work and you give them like a couple sentences of like, I don't know, it's, it's hard or it's not very fun or it's fun. It's awesome. I don't know.

Valkyrie Holmes (44:06.289)
Thank

Valkyrie Holmes (44:20.369)
Like you're talking about specifically with a startup is kind of the goal there. Yeah. I mean, with startups, I think it's important to realize that that you are doing something very unconventional and that people will love you and not like you for that. And I feel like I have a lot of good people in my life that are there to support me on.

Dalton Anderson (44:24.758)
Yeah, yeah.

Valkyrie Holmes (44:48.805)
the fact that this is a crazy thing that people do. Like starting a company in general is pretty wild and hard and there's gonna be a lot of things that pop up that you don't really expect. But from my perspective, if you are united with other people in building something that's meaningful, then it makes it really worth it. Like when we look for people that are applying for jobs at Fora,

One of the biggest things we look for is, do you care about the climate first off? And then like second is, are you efficient at your job? Because if we don't have people in the culture that can be really excited about the like mission at Fora, then it's not going to contribute well to the culture.

That's really like the biggest thing that I try to say is if you care about the problem and you want to find the best solution and you want to surround yourself with people that want to find the best solution, then it starts to really move fast. But I think it's also important to note that startups are hard and they move really fast, faster than you can really ever imagine. So I get overwhelmed a good amount of the time. That's not a secret to anyone. And I'm pretty open about that.

So the balance there, you have to find somewhat of a groove before it starts to be something you can maintain. So it will be unmaintainable for a long time before it is maintainable. I worked in startups for five years before I felt stable and had a social life and could do whatever I wanted to do while also growing the company. So it's definitely trial and error.

Dalton Anderson (46:36.046)
Yeah, so the personal life where are you able to, I mean, there's a notion where startups just take over your whole life or more of the life than you originally expected. Are you able to really do as much as you would, I mean, you're probably not going to do everything you want to do, but you're able to do some of the things, maybe like 40 % of them.

Valkyrie Holmes (46:51.057)
I'm really used to it.

Valkyrie Holmes (46:59.271)
Yeah, I mean...

I don't know if I could quantify that, but there's definitely more that I am able to do now because I match up my schedule. And there's things that I enjoy doing as part of Fora in my free time just because there's so much to do. But I don't know, I would say I have a pretty good structure. I'm not complaining about anything that I don't get to do, if that makes sense. Yeah, you gotta dial it. Yeah.

Dalton Anderson (47:27.438)
Yeah, you got it dialed now. Like you're dialed in, got your work, you're getting a lot of work done, but you're also having a little bit of fun. And there's some people that like feel more comfortable with doing like 80 % work versus, and then 20 % leisure versus other folks are like, oh, it's gotta be like a 40, 60 or 50, 50. Some people just are wired where they're just like, I really like what I do and I want to do more. And so that's fine too. As far as the, like the building,

Valkyrie Holmes (47:36.593)
10 % than 8 % for a person than 20%.

Dalton Anderson (47:54.882)
the new products or launching new products and acquiring new leads, mainly that's coming through LinkedIn and the success there. And you talked about fundraising and I talked a little bit about, you talked a little about fundraising for employees and coming from the ground up and resonating the mission of Fora to everyone else. And that would also translate to other folks.

if they wanna invest in the company or if they want to sign on as a client. And so I think that the takeaway there was, make sure like what you want is very clear and you're open or, and this is also like how you run the company or like how you present everything as like when I'm as ITC, like everyone, when I say everyone, it's really you and Amanda, but it's two people that I see ITC.

but everyone was pretty open about like the outfits you wear. Like it's just the whole thing. Like it's not like all buttoned up, like you're not hiding anything and everything is to be seen. Like it's out in the open. Like, okay, this is what we think is important and this is how, how we are. And if you, if you want to interact with us, we can, but if not, then I hope that you change your mind. But

How do you maybe convince someone that isn't necessarily on board right away? Is there a way where, okay, given the California wildfires, our clients had performed better or they were better off by, not by X, is that the pitch? Or just trying to understand when you have a lead, how are we closing?

Valkyrie Holmes (49:17.488)
Yeah.

Valkyrie Holmes (49:43.969)
Yeah,

From my perspective, it's really all about data. So I will do my typical pitch of here's how we help, here's how we integrate. We do a couple of demos. That's all felt well and good. You understand what we do. Now here's how it's worked for other companies. And I typically go through a number of studies that we have and we walk through all the individual data sets and we can predict survivability with 95 % accuracy now. So it's pretty high.

all things considered on each individual book of business. And once people see that, I think they start to understand how this really impacts them. So I like to say there is a lot of potential here for people to make more of an impact on how they think about underwriting decisions. So.

If I can illustrate how other people have also made those decisions, then that kind of correlates all together with something better.

Dalton Anderson (50:48.94)
Yeah, it's always good when you could provide.

Like maybe not an event as severe as like the most recent wildfire, but if you were able to provide to the client, okay, here, us some data and then you could predict, in this wildfire three years ago, like these are the homes that survived or like we think they survived, let us know what you think. And they're like, wow, you got,

pretty much all of them right. And they're like, wow, we need this. We need this. we're, we're all in like, please, where do we sign? And that, that makes a big difference. Cause it's very actionable. As you said, like, okay, it, it is one of the best metrics, especially for a catastrophic risk that you know that it would likely survive. I mean, not a hundred percent, but you have a better idea than just pointing, pointing a dart on a, on a wall.

saying, okay, here. So that is great. How do we get the consumer educated? So the insurance companies are aware of the issue and they are looking for solutions, like insure tax or things to do internally or working with the reinsurance partners. But then how do we get either the watchdog groups or the government or the consumer? I think the consumer, like a general sense, even for smart people, they're like, insurance is a scam.

People just don't understand how insurance is priced or what things are excluded or why they're excluded. And a lot of times it's not really our choice. It's like, okay, the people giving money, the reinsurance company, they don't want to cover this. How do we get the homeowner and the customer educated in understanding how survivable that their actual home is?

Dalton Anderson (52:51.81)
How do we increase that role with the, guess, the insurance company or some kind of education group? I'm not sure. Any thoughts there?

Valkyrie Holmes (52:51.942)
Yeah.

Valkyrie Holmes (53:01.401)
Yeah. I mean, for homeowners, it's just about education first. So if we let people know what their risk is, that's a first step. Most people don't know what their risk is to start. So we get them to think about that. And then,

afterwards is about giving people the resources they need to streamline that process. So for homeowners, if you say, hey, your property is at risk, you're at risk of losing your most valuable asset and everything in it, that gets certain people to move just as a function of learning about it. And then from the other perspective, if you give them everything they need to take a step towards reducing their risk, that makes it a lot easier for people to.

to do that and then maintain it over time, which also helps because we're working with insurance companies, which is something that they very much need. So insurance is kind of this enforcement mechanism that can help people realize that this is a big deal and that this impacts more than just them losing their home. It could be losing their home because they lost their insurance policy, and their mortgage relies on that. So there's a couple different areas there that we kind of play around in. I have to hop.

to a call though. So I'm going to move through, but that's my general take.

Dalton Anderson (54:16.664)
Yeah.

Dalton Anderson (54:22.158)
All right, I'll let you go and I'll close out the episode. Thank you for being on the show Valkyrie and hope you have a great day.

Valkyrie Holmes (54:26.063)
Thank you.

Yeah, thank you so much, Charlton.

Valkyrie Holmes (54:36.945)
I think I have to stay in to finish uploading. Okay. Right? Okay. Right? think I have to stay in to finish uploading. Do I not?

Dalton Anderson (54:41.998)
Okay.

Dalton Anderson (54:49.358)
All right, let me just say, wherever you are in this world, good afternoon, good morning, good evening. Hope you have a great day. Thank you for tuning in. Have a great day and talk to you next week. See you everyone, bye.