billclerico

I sat down with Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston to discuss resilience and building things that endure at their home in Palo Alto.

Thanks aberman! Here in the comments if I can answer any questions.

Probably the most effective thing we could do is re-imagine Smokey Bear from a "put out your campfire" mascot to a spokesperson for effective forest management & prescribed fire.

congrats!!

Also worth mentioning her new podcast (along with Carolynn Levy), The Social Radars, which is sort of a podcast version of Founders At Work: https://www.thesocialradars.com/

I’m a VC specializing in startups addressing wildfire. If I can be helpful to anyone thinking about this problem, I’m bill at convectivecapital.com

important tool for landscape management

I think it's a false assumption that when something burns in a high severity fire, it returns to a healthy state afterwards. Historically, natural fire was low severity because it was high frequency, burning through once a decade (or even more frequently). This left large trees and soil intact, and so dense regrowth was limited, since there was still shade.

With high severity fire, two things can happen. Trees can be totally wiped out (called a stand-replacing fire) which causes extremely dense, brushy regrowth (prone to another high severity fire). Or in really bad conditions, the soil can be damage so no regrowth happens, causing strange moonscape-like forests that are completely dead. This affects watersheds, causes mudslides, etc. Neither is good.

If we could burn large swaths of landscape with low severity fire, that would be a huge step in the right direction but is extremely difficult. We are treating only a small fraction of the acreage in that manner.

Note: This varies from landscape to landscape but is directionally correct. For example, in some climates, stand-replacing fires are healthy and normal. But in most climates, bad.

One thing I find frustrating in the discussion of wildfire is that it frequently dumbs down to one thing vs another, usually "We must treat the landscape with thinning and prescribed fire" vs "We need better firefighting resources and equipment". This is a false choice and we need both.

The principle of Defense in Depth in infosec is illustrative. No one would debate whether or not you need secure passwords vs role-based permissions. You obviously need both and they reinforce each other.

The same is true in fire. To end megafires, we need: 1) Landscape Management 2) Community Resilience 3) Fast & aggressive suppression

Better technology can help play a role at all three levels.

Pano will have a great business even if megafires are ended, since fire will always be a part of the landscape. One of their major usecases is monitoring controlled burns.

There was an enormous & destructive lightning fire in the Santa Cruz mountains in 2020 called the CZU complex: https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/08/16/two-years-later-czu-f...

There are plenty of economic models that can support cures to recurrent issues. For example, internal sprinklers & smoke detectors have dramatically improved survivability of structure fires, but that "cure" supports a whole industry of sprinkler and alarm system companies.

Most experts agree that 3 things are required to end megafires: Landscape management, community resilience and fast & aggressive suppression. It's a layered approach - similar to infosec models. No one layer is an effective solution.

Some of the examples in the article are focused on suppression (since that is a bit easier to grasp) - but there are some really exciting examples that exist outside of that. BurnBot, for example, is a robotic device that helps make fuel management more efficient. Overstory uses satellite imagery to help utilities prioritize line trimming and avoid ignitions.

Disclaimer: I am mentioned in the article as a Firetech investor

congrats Garry!! you are a founder's founder and will do great things at YC.

The liability for prescribed burns is a big issue. If the government agreed to co-insure landowners against escaped burns, it would make prescribed burning significantly easier. But right now, landowners have less liability if they just let fuel accumulate and it burns "accidentally" but dangerously than if they undertake controlled prescribed burning operations to reduce fuel loads (the right answer).

This used to be true, but really no longer is with modern logging practices and regulation

The encouraging comments on these threads are reminiscent of old Launch HN at its best. Great idea, dang.

One thing that often gets overlooked with respect to payments is consumer preference (and this is actually the primary driver of cost).

Why do credit cards cost 2-3% to process? Because of expensive rewards programs given to the consumers who use the card. Why are there expensive rewards programs? Because consumers like them! And they insist on paying with a credit card because of them. Except in edge cases, merchants have no choice but to accept credit cards despite the cost.

While Visa, Mastercard & Amex frequently get the blame, the lions share of the processing fee flows to the issuing bank of the card, and the lions share of that fee goes to fund rewards programs. (There are other perks to credit cards that encourage consumer usage, including chargeback protections, free 30 days of float, near universal acceptance, etc)

Payment costs won't materially decrease unless someone invents a form of payment that consumers prefer which doesn't have these cost burdens. Or if you, as the merchant, have such market power that you can mandate a less preferred but cheaper form of payment (like cash or debit card or ACH - this is why you often can't use your credit card to pay a parking ticket or your taxes)

I think it is more likely that the economics killed Concord ($20k per seat), not the route, and it appears that Boom thinks like they can deliver a luxury, supersonic experience at a far cheaper, business class price.

And if transoceanic supersonic travel becomes popular, pressure will mount to define overland supersonic corridors, or manufacturers will invest to reduce the noise, or both.

Boom is a YC company building a modern, supersonic passenger airliner: https://boomsupersonic.com/

The key innovation is that they are building an economic, supersonic airplane. That was what SpaceX brought to space travel, and what has never been built in supersonic air travel.

I am really sorry to hear that - that is unacceptable. Would you mind sending me an email so I can make sure we improve? bill@wepay.com

It's a smattering of options: PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe & Braintree are all good ones. We have folks that start with us from day 1, but typically fraud isn't too much of a concern until you start to really scale, and so our value proposition isn't as strong. We're working on ways to change that!

Thanks for being an early customer. You can still use WePay to do online invoicing through one of our partners like Freshbooks (WePay Clear, our whitelabel product, powers Freshbooks Payments) or InvoiceASAP.

Thanks for the kind words. (Bill from WePay here)

We keep a relatively low profile, since we focus primarily on marketplaces & platforms with >$10m in annual payment volume and take a pretty deep, enterprise approach with our customers vs focusing on a broadly available, self-service developer platform. One day we hope to get there too, but for now we like to go narrow and deep for the sake of focus and providing a killer customer experience.

As far as product differentiation, we focus on marketplace fraud & risk management above all else. It's a tough problem to solve - most fraud systems are built to protect retailers from bad buyers, but the most insidious fraud risk on marketplaces is from bad sellers. We guarantee our customers against this type of loss while still providing a great overall UX.

Happy to chat more! bill@wepay.com

congrats Slava, Mike & team. in an age of thin apps getting shipped in weeks or months, the patience you showed in spending 5 years developing some pretty hard-core technology is amazing. really excited for you guys!

10-25% seems too high to me for an options pool. I think market is closer to 7-10% for a Series A company

WePay cofounder here. Would love to better understand why you say that so we can improve. Bill@wepay.com

I'm sorry to hear you had a bad experience but would be happy to chat if you'd like. It's hard to say what exactly happened without some investigation. Bill@wepay.com

One side note (from a cofounder of WePay here). WePay is 100% focused on serving the needs of two-sided platforms like marketplaces - and now we're the only company that can claim to do so.

We're bummed to see Balanced go, as I think they have a great product - indicative of what a focus on the space can produce. But we're excited to carry the torch forward.

We process billions annually and have crossed the scale chasm that the article describes (and have raised a fair amount of money to boot).

If any Balanced customer (or other marketplace) would like to chat, I'm happy to do so. Shoot me a note at bill@wepay.com