In 2025, when wildfires tore through Los Angeles — one of the most industrialized, resourced cities in the world — response services couldn’t keep up. Emergency alerts lagged or were sent to the wrong areas. Water systems, built for ordinary structure fires, ran dry under the strain. The same high winds that drove the fires in the first place grounded the aircraft that might have helped contain them.
A close friend of mine lost his home in the fires and stayed with me for a few weeks after. In the conversations we had during that time, we kept coming back to the same question: How, with everything modern society has built (technology, capital, and the sheer drive to reinvent entire industries), are we left so ill-equipped while wildfires level some of the most advanced regions on the planet?
We’re both investors in Silicon Valley, working with founders building some of the boldest, most ambitious technology in the world, yet we’d told ourselves that natural disasters are a natural part of life that we can’t do anything about.
This excuse doesn’t hold up. We’ve built this kind of readiness for defense, aviation, energy, and other complex, dynamic environments where safety is paramount and speed, precision, and strategic clarity are non-negotiable. We have satellites that can spot a missile launch from orbit, sensor networks that allow us to make split-second decisions, infrastructure that balances an entire country’s power grid in real time.
Yet we’ve never aimed this capability at disasters that can and do happen somewhere, every year, without exception. Wildfires, floods, and failing infrastructure are causing catastrophic impact with increasing frequency. Every time, we look to volunteers, underfunded agencies, and heroic improvisation to fix it.
It’s impossible to predict the exact second a disaster will strike. But you don’t need to predict that exact second. You just need to have the capabilities already in position to respond when it does. A truly resilient response system isn’t assembled in the chaotic aftermath; it’s already in position before the threat even exists.
