Fighting Fire With Founders

Silicon Valley startups are taking aim at deadly wildfires. But saving lives will require cutting through red tape, fast.

- By Kevin J. Ryan

Dave Winnacker stood on a hill in Northern California as flames devoured the houses below him. The Ala meda County Fire Department division chief had fought wildfires before, but the 2017 North Bay Fires felt different. A sense of helplessness overcame him as he watched them burn.

“I had engines assigned to them,” he says. “But you couldn’t stop it.”

A former Marine (and now a fire chief in the Bay Area’s Moraga-Orinda Fire District), Winnacker was one of more than 10,000 firefighters who battled the infernos, which raged for three weeks. The blaze tore through a quarter-million acres, killed 44 people, and destroyed over 6,000 homes. At times, it spread at a rate of one football field every three seconds. The damage totaled $13 billion, a new U.S. record that would fall the following year.

A few weeks later, Winnacker and his friend Robert Shear, a product manager who spent years developing internet-connected devices, were canoeing on the San Francisco Bay, talking about the disaster. Winnacker felt there had to be a better way to protect people from wildfires. Out on the water, he persuaded Shear to use his Silicon Valley experience to build a solution. What he envisioned felt inevitable. But it was an inevitability that hadn’t yet been invented: an “evacuation autopilot” that would use sensors to detect sudden temperature spikes and determine who should evacuate and when.