Watch Duty’s toughest fire season yet

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

JOHN MILLS: Right now, lots of things are on fire. We’re having an extremely catastrophic year. It’s only mid-August right now. It’s going to get worse. In Oregon, for example, we had lightning strikes all across the state last month. They are still burning out of control, so we need more staff. Some of them are working 10, 15, 16 hours a day, six days a week. I’m trying to make sure that our staff can live, eat, breathe, and sleep. That’s what really keeps me and the team up at night.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s John Mills, co-founder and CEO of Watch Duty, a nonprofit delivering real-time, life-saving wildfire and flooding alerts across the United States. We last had John on the show in the wake of the devastating LA wildfires, when Watch Duty shot to the top of the App Store. A year on, British Columbia and Washington state are ablaze, setting records and making wildfire mapping all the more critical. Amid the chaos, Watch Duty has doubled revenue, doubled head count, and surged in growth that even John says is getting a bit much. We talked about the challenges that come with scaling fast, Watch Duty’s controversial partnership with Ring, what most of us are still underestimating about natural disasters, and more. John is an endlessly fascinating character, offering humorous, no-BS lessons about operating in extreme conditions. So let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

I’m here with John Mills, co-founder and CEO of Watch Duty. John, great to see you.

MILLS: Thanks for having me back. It’s good to see you again.

Copy LinkHow Watch Duty detects fires before most people hear about them

SAFIAN: So last time you were on the show, we talked about the LA wildfires, how Watch Duty played a key role for residents, firefighters, and emergency personnel, sharing information that government resources didn’t or couldn’t. Right now, big wildfires are burning in British Columbia, with a province-wide state of emergency, and of course near Spokane, Washington, fires purposely set, apparently, that have burned through more than 10,000 acres, destroyed hundreds of homes, and forced 65,000 people to evacuate. Can you give us a snapshot of where things sit in the Pacific Northwest and what Watch Duty’s operations look like, and who and how it’s being used this season?

MILLS: Yeah. It’s been a harrowing experience up in Spokane. Unfortunately, that area is not all that fire-prone. It was really a catastrophic event. Once our communities start getting impacted, we really spring into action and sleep in shifts. It gets a little tiring for the team, but we love what we do, and it’s great to be of service.

SAFIAN: How did you first hear about the fires in Washington? Did you know immediately they were a big deal? You must be getting pinged about fires all the time.

MILLS: Yeah, we know very early. We either know when the firefighters know, or we know before the firefighters know. Let me explain how that happens. The obvious one is when a firehouse gets what’s called toned out. That means the siren goes off and the apparatus bay door automatically opens, actually. The other way we get alerted is often through things like wildfire cameras that have AI detections on them. There are lots of different signals that we are scraping and mining 24 hours a day, every minute. When that happens, our system gets a ping that says, “Hey, at this lat and long, there was a tone out for a vegetation fire.” Then we look it up in our system and say, “Oh, that’s Spokane, Washington. Go find that channel in Slack. Ping that channel,” and everybody springs into action. Every fire’s a big deal, right? Because we don’t know what it is yet, so we treat them all like a life-and-death emergency. In this case, we knew very quickly that there was more than one fire, there was wind on it, and it was near structures. That’s when it starts to become an all-hands-on-deck situation. This happens in a matter of minutes.

It’s very quick.

SAFIAN: Last year’s LA fires, which we talked about, the local authorities were having trouble coordinating their information. You were talking to residents, but you were also being used by officials. Is that the same in Washington, or is their system tighter?

MILLS: It’s kind of the same everywhere. It’s a challenge. At Watch Duty, we have one job. Our job is to listen to first responders and report on that activity immediately. The challenge with any major city is that the PIOs, public information officers, aren’t just responsible for talking with incident commanders and the fire service. They’re also getting pinged by mayors. Their phones are blowing up. They can’t actually put their blinders on and just do one thing, and that, frankly, should change. The bureaucratic process is part of the problem. So that’s our advantage, and unfortunately, this is going to continue until they really start to say, “Here’s one person. Here’s a computer. Go in that room, lock the door, listen to what is going on out there, and broadcast it.”

SAFIAN: The way Watch Duty itself is operating, say, in Spokane, compared to the way it operated a year or a year and a half ago in LA, is that still roughly the same? Is your system the same?

MILLS: Yeah, our system is the same, yet more robust. What happens after every event, similar to the fire service, is we’ll do what’s called an AAR, which is an after-action report. We’ll go through what we did, what we could have done better, and what could have changed. It’s like a retrospective, right? Our SOPs, sorry for all the TLAs, three-letter acronyms, our SOPs, our standard operating procedures, get more hardened and more robust. We learn something every time this happens. So the system is identical. It is the same. It is just better, stronger, and more durable.

SAFIAN: And I guess faster?

MILLS: It is, but actionable and accurate is higher than speed, right? So if we’re one minute later and it’s more accurate or more precise, we will do that, and that’s always been part of our mantra.

Just because we’re speedy doesn’t mean we’re hasty, which is what we had to get over early on with a lot of government agencies. They’re like, “You’re so quick, you’re doing X, Y, and Z, and it’s not correct.” I’m like, “Look, I can see on the camera the fire’s burning through the town. I’m hearing reports that this is happening. We know this is true.” So again, speed is a feature, but it is not at the expense of being accurate and actionable.

Copy LinkWhy Watch Duty expanded into flood monitoring

SAFIAN: When we talked after the LA fires, you were considering ways to expand Watch Duty’s reach beyond fires to other emergencies and natural disasters, and you recently announced flood monitoring across all 50 states almost exactly a year after the Texas floods that killed more than 130 people. Was that incident what focused you on flooding, that so many residents in that Texas tragedy didn’t receive better warnings?

MILLS: What triggered it, actually, was that this was always part of the plan. Ironically enough, at the end of the year of ’24, we were planning on starting our flooding research and development in January of 2025. Then January 7 happened, and we scrapped the project for a whole year because, frankly, we spent two months in the LA fires. So we really doubled down on focusing on fire. The incidents are unrelated. Frankly, I wish we did it earlier so we would’ve been ready for the Texas floods, but we were not, unfortunately. It took us, I don’t know, probably nine months of research and development. We brought on meteorologists to help us. We have a staff meteorologist. He’s one of the 99 incident meteorologists in America who does this. He was actually incident meteorologist on the Palisades and Eaton fires.

SAFIAN: What’s different about flood risk versus fire risk? I’ve heard you say that a lot of people underestimate the danger of water, that the average person doesn’t understand the risk the way they might with fire.

MILLS: Yeah, it’s interesting. People will ford the river in their car, and yet they will run away from a wildfire. But we have fire in our stoves in our house, you know what I mean? It’s really interesting to look at the sociology and psychology of how these events happen, how people die, and how they misjudge these events. A great example is, Bob, I think you’re a New Yorker, if I’m correct, right?

SAFIAN: I am, yes.

MILLS: If you remember, before Sandy, there was a, I shouldn’t say a false alarm, but there was a storm that came through New York, and they told everybody to evacuate. I have friends who evacuated, and then they got stuck in endless amounts of traffic coming and going from the city. Then when Sandy came, guess what they did?

SAFIAN: They didn’t leave.

MILLS: They didn’t leave.

SAFIAN: Right.

MILLS: Right? And so it’s a real problem when you’re not telling the story as properly as you can. We try not to sensationalize as much as possible. But floods behave a lot differently. First of all, there are more wildfires than floods, so there are so many fires to track. There are only about 15 to 30 catastrophic floods a year, and usually fewer, so the reporting cadence is different. You usually have more time, though not always, and there’s a lot more digital data. What I mean by that is there’s Doppler radar, there are USGS stream gauges, precipitation sensors—

SAFIAN: The U.S. Geological Survey.

MILLS: Yes. We have a little more of a leg up than most when an ignition happens and the wind hits it, and the next thing you know, Spokane or Palisades is happening.

SAFIAN: Because people emotionally react to flood differently than fire, does that mean the way that you communicate with them on the app is different?

MILLS: We rely on the great work of NOAA and the NWS, and they’re putting out reports constantly. Sometimes they’re three pages long. It’s a very long PDF talking about very nerdy things, and it’s not really consumable by the end user. We’re able to take that information, rebroadcast it, and then add color to it as well. We’ll add data from precipitation gauges: this river is flooding north of you. It’s hitting a catastrophic level. It’s hitting a floodplain. When you get a longer storyline of events, that helps you gauge the disaster.

Rather than just saying, “Get out of Dodge,” it’s more like, “No, this is getting worse and worse and worse.” Let’s use the river community here in Sonoma County, where I live. The Russian River floods every five or six years. Everybody on the river is very aware of their number, the flood gauge. There are flood gauges all along the Russian River.

SAFIAN: In other words, how high the river has to get before they’re in danger.

MILLS: That’s right. Everyone has their magic number in their head. In the app now, you can say, “Alert me when this hits 20 feet, 28 feet, 30 feet,” and it’ll send you a push notification. So you’re able to set your threshold for pain as to when you need to know. The weatherman says the worst rain ever happened. It’s a bomb cyclone and whatever new words we’re making up in the weather service, or in the news. To an end user, you’re just like, “Man, I’ve heard this before. Just let me know when the river’s at 24 feet, and then I really have to get the hell out of Dodge.”

SAFIAN: Right.

MILLS: So we’re trying to add more color and allow them to set those thresholds for themselves.

SAFIAN: You said we’re not spreading enough information fast enough on as many channels as possible. How much of that impediment is technology, how much of it is money, and how much of it is disciplined attention?

MILLS: I think it’s ingenuity, right? Clearly someone else could have done all this. We’re not recreating the wheel. I frankly think that most government websites don’t work very well. The IRS is the exception. They’re very good at taking money and counting. I wish there were more folks who would show up and bring their entrepreneurial and product skills to civic technological problems.

Copy LinkHow Watch Duty uses AI

SAFIAN: Obviously, the big obsession in the technological world right now is AI. Does that impact how Watch Duty operates?

MILLS: I’d say we’re AI native, but not AI first. We’re using AI all over the place. You think about what Watch Duty is doing: we’re literally sifting and sorting information as it comes in. The military would call it signals intelligence processing. Is it good? Is it bad? And how do we vet it? We’re using a lot of AI now that helps us do that faster.

Taking it a step further, we just finished a six-month fellowship with Google.org, where they gave us a bunch of engineers, product managers, and designers, and they built a speech-to-text system for us that listens to radio traffic and pulls out keywords. We are adding more and more AI to allow the reporters to listen to what is important and ignore what is not. We can’t miss a signal. It means life and death, but the humans are the ones doing that analysis. I don’t want the AI doing that.

There are lots of times when there are running simulations or training exercises over the radio, and we know that because we are paying attention to everything going on around us. Some people would just start broadcasting that. We’ve seen this already, actually. There are other apps out there that are just doing police activity scanner traffic. They don’t know the difference between what’s a training exercise and what’s not, and they start broadcasting misinformation. So we’re very slow and steady in how we add this new technology and do the right thing for the right reason because our system works, and we’re not anti-human. Some AI companies seem to be all about job replacement, and for us it’s about how we make those humans more powerful so they can hear more and do more faster.

SAFIAN: For someone who stresses going slow and steady, John is reacting in real time to so many disasters and needs. So how does Watch Duty balance its ambition for impact with the priority to stay trusted? And is its new partnership with Ring cameras really a good idea given public concerns about surveillance? We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, Watch Duty’s John Mills talked about this summer’s devastating fire season in the Pacific Northwest and the challenges of expanding into flood monitoring. Now he talks about operating a high-growth startup as a nonprofit, the controversies and breakthroughs around Watch Duty’s partnership with Ring cameras, and why he compares being a digital first responder to running a taco truck. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkWhy Watch Duty is choosing disciplined growth

Since the LA fires, where your downloads of your app shot up, the organization has grown dramatically. You’ve doubled your head count. Funding and budgets are way up. You said it’s been a little too wild, that your aim is to slow down a little bit, which we don’t hear too often from CEOs.

MILLS: Look, in Silicon Valley, they say triple, triple, double, double, right? Your company size. We quadrupled multiple years in a row, and then we just doubled last year. We are shooting to do maybe 60, 70 percent growth this year, which is still high, but we’re really trying to stabilize the organization, whether it’s people and personnel or our processes and systems. We’re all over America now. We do fires and floods. We want to do more disasters in the United States as well, and so we will continue to grow, but we’re not all of a sudden next year going to be in Australia and Canada. We have a lot more to do to really make sure that we can support that type of growth.

I’m very leery of just continuing to grow for growth’s sake because we don’t have investors, right? My investors, quote-unquote, are philanthropic donors and tons of people paying $25 a year to support our application. We have enough money to do what we do. No one’s telling us how to do it, and so we’re going to do the right thing and make sure that we can support our quality of service because, God forbid, if that goes down, we lose everything that we created.

SAFIAN: You deliberately created Watch Duty as a nonprofit because it helped build trust, but as you describe it, of course, as a nonprofit there are constraints of funding cycles and resource limitations. How do you think about running this business model when lives literally depend on you not running out of money?

MILLS: The good news is we’re in the black, and we’ve always been in the black, which is kind of wild to think about. If this was a start-up, you’d call it a bootstrap start-up, right? We’re able to make enough money to support ourselves. I think we’re doing about $6 million or $7 million a year in revenue right now. That’s a good amount of money right there, and then we have donors and others who come to our rescue and help fund more of that. So we aren’t forced to do anything we don’t want to do, and that was very much by design.

Every year, we look at our budget, we plan, and we execute against that, not on the idea that, “Oh my God, I’m going to have to go raise my next round. I have to get my numbers up so it looks like there’s going to be IRR for the investors.” Again, I come from Silicon Valley. We take a little bit of a different approach. It’s not actually that hard if you’re just patient. It’s just a little bit of diligence. I’m not comparing myself next to Anthropic or some other rapid-growth company where I’m like, “Oh my God, they’re going to suck all the money out of the room, and no one’s going to fund me again.” We have the luxury here of operating out of abundance, not out of scarcity, and that’s how we keep everything going.

SAFIAN: There is more private-sector activity around disaster preparedness: insurance companies, tech companies, real estate platforms. Where does Watch Duty sit in that ecosystem?

MILLS: How we got here is through partnerships. We work with a ton of organizations. Our bigger customers, like PG&E and Xcel Energy and the other folks who are buying from us, are consuming our product because we built a lightweight, usable product that can be used in the field. To your other point, some of the incumbents are very mad at our existence because it was their opportunity that they could not acquire or achieve, and now we’re undercutting them.

If you look at Silicon Valley as a role model, all software costs go to zero, right? Look what Salesforce did to Siebel, and look what HubSpot and Copper and SugarCRM are doing to Salesforce. It’s this continuing pattern of software getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Our goal was, let’s just go to the bottom and make this as free as possible, and then our paid services are so cheap that we’re going to try to play a high-volume, low-ACV game and sweep up the market.

Copy LinkInside Watch Duty’s partnering with Ring

SAFIAN: You launched a partnership with Ring cameras this year. A lot of folks, at least on social platforms, seem to be wary about surveillance, especially coupled with AI. So why go this route, and how do you protect trust for Watch Duty?

MILLS: Yeah, it’s a great question. Trust me, we had a lot of internal conversations about this, and we’re going to be adding a lot more cameras too, so it’s about to get even wilder. These cameras already exist out in the world, so they’re already watching and seeing this stuff. But let’s talk about Ring in particular, because that one is what really freaks people out, and I frankly don’t blame them.

But I do like Ring, and Jamie’s become a friend, the founder. I like what they’re doing, and they actually do have a good head on their shoulders. You saw they just blew up that whole Flock deal they were going to do, which I’m glad they did. That’s a whole different can of worms. But what we’ve done with Ring is very, very simple, and it’s very opt-in. There are like 100 million Ring cameras out there. I have access to a total of zero of them until an end user gets a notification that there is a fire nearby, and then they can opt in to share screenshots with us.

A couple things happen there. One is I’m not seeing full-motion video imagery, and second, we use AI on that, so if there’s a person in there, we’re not showing that. If it’s one structure on fire, we’re not showing that. If it’s someone’s street with no fire on it, we’re not showing that as well. So it is opt-in, it’s AI-cleaned, and then finally, my team and staff are the ones approving every single image that goes out there. We get a very tiny subset, and then even fewer go public when they don’t show a story or help anybody. We look at it as any other sensor out there. I know the world has other feelings about Ring, but from my experience, Ring is really trying to do the right thing for the right reasons, and I hope they continue to do that and actually help the world.

Rather than be some sort of Big Brother looky-loo. Because that doesn’t make them money. That’s not what they care about, right? They want to sell more cameras and help communities. So I hope that they continue to do that, but we’re obviously keeping a close eye on it.

SAFIAN: And so for you, the Ring cameras are not like an early detection system. It’s when you already have indications of something.

MILLS: That’s right. What’s also really cool about it is we allow Ring camera users to get notified of fires through Ring, not through Watch Duty. The Sandy Fire in Simi Valley, there was one house that was lost, and that one house happened to have Ring, not Watch Duty, at the time. He got notified by his Ring camera because of Watch Duty, shared the images with us, and was able to get himself and his parrots and his wife out of the house before it burned. So we’re trying to get our tendrils out deeper to make sure our alerts get delivered through other mechanisms, and we made a difference that day through that partnership.

Copy LinkConnecting displaced residents with relief services

SAFIAN: You mentioned expanding ambitions for you. I noticed that World Central Kitchen’s former CEO, Erin Gore, joined as your chief impact officer. Does that indicate that even broader relief efforts might be on the horizon?

MILLS: We’re not going to be serving sandwiches outside of a disaster, I can tell you that much, right? That’s not our skill set. That’s atoms, not bits. But what we do want to do is help those organizations reach their end user, their audience, our residents who’ve been displaced by fire. What you can see already in Watch Duty is temporary evacuation points, feeding sites, animal shelters, and all those organizations are emailing us and messaging us to list their location on Watch Duty, and it is working. It’s super cool to have that. We actually have a deal with Direct Relief that will be going out shortly. We are building a way for Direct Relief and World Central Kitchen to have their own login to manage their own locations, all for free, obviously, because it’s not how we make money. Frankly, selfishly, it saves us money because during a major incident in Spokane, we are getting emails from large animal shelters, farms, fairgrounds, World Central Kitchen: “I’m open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the parking lot. I have burritos and vegetarian tacos.” And it’s just a constant battle for us to keep all the data up to date. So what if we just give them a login to be able to post their own shelters and their own information on there? You could almost look at it like a social network. I hate that term, but it’s a tool for them to reach our mutual users, i.e., humans experiencing disaster. That’s how we’re going to help that industry.

SAFIAN: As you talk about these additional services and opportunities that are there on the app, I guess you also have to balance that with not wanting to make the app too noisy and have too many distractions and too many different things on it, right? How much is too much?

MILLS: It’s a good question. We get tons of inbound requests for all sorts of kooky things that we can’t go solve, but that has nothing to do with the app itself. It has to do with our mission. Does this fit our mission? Can we be of service here? And then finally, is it ours to do, right? There are certain missions that aren’t ours to do. We’re digital first responders, right? We get to help them accomplish their goals and their mission rather than spread ourselves too thin, get over our skis, run out of money, and cause a different issue. I like to use the analogy of a taco truck for our business. I want to be the best taco truck in the world. I do not want to become the Cheesecake Factory, where you have every option and all of them are bad. So it’s really critical to be the best in the business. How do we be the digital glue between these organizations?

Copy LinkWhy every community should think harder about disaster readiness

SAFIAN: In the big picture, the impacts of climate change seem to be rising. Natural disasters are more frequent, more severe, hitting places that didn’t used to be at risk or didn’t seem to be at risk. Does that mean that every community needs to think of itself as disaster-vulnerable?

MILLS: I’m not telling everyone to be a doomsday prepper, but I’m a Boy Scout, and I grew up spending time in the woods. I’m in my machine shop right now, where I build, and I take care of my ranch. It’s important to me that we as humans remember how to fix things and make things and figure out where things come from and know how they work. We’re entering an age of abstraction, where now coders have no idea what binary is, how bits work. They can’t really fix what they’ve created. I think that’s a dangerous endeavor for humanity, frankly, that we can’t fix anything anymore. So I think it goes back to spending time on the land and touching grass, as the Millennials say or the Gen Z kids say. I don’t know who says that now. I guess I’m a Xennial, so I don’t really know what’s going on anymore. But ultimately, I think it’s important that we take care of ourselves, our friends, our community, where we come from. So whether it’s a disaster or just being able to fix something, I think it’s important that we spend time with our hands and touching things that we understand and feeling some sense of accomplishment and self-satisfaction and being able to be a self-sufficient man or woman on this planet. Disaster just exacerbates the issue.

SAFIAN: John, you’re such an interesting character because on the one hand, you talk about being a digital first responder, and so much of Watch Duty is digital, and at the same time, you feel like it’s important for us to get our hands dirty.

MILLS: I’m a walking contradiction. What can I say? I live in the woods as a techie. I live off the grid. I make my own power. I maintain my own infrastructure. I have to manage all my water systems, power systems. I’m the sewer department, the fire department. I’m all these different organizations, and yet I make money on the internet.

Copy LinkWhat is stretching Watch Duty most during a brutal fire season

SAFIAN: What’s at stake for Watch Duty right now?

MILLS: Well, right now, lots of things are on fire. We’re having an extremely catastrophic year, and it’s only mid-August right now. The hypothesis is that it’s going to get worse. As you’ve seen in Oregon, for example, we had lightning strikes all across the state last month. They are still burning out of control. It is absolutely ridiculous what is happening, and frankly, it looks like it’s going to be coming here at some point because of the Super El Niño. So the meteorologists tell me when the ocean gets warm, it starts to cause lightning storms, and oftentimes it breeds dry lightning storms, which is what happened in 2020 when the West lit on fire and the sky turned orange for the first time at scale, and no one had ever seen that before. So we need more staff. We’re hiring constantly. We’re bringing on retired and injured firefighters who can’t work this season. We’re onboarding several new reporters every single day. I think our staff is at 70 right now. They’re working, some of them, 10, 15, 16 hours a day, six days a week. So we are staffing up, getting them more time off, getting them fewer hours in the day, doing whatever we can. We provide them mental health services. We DoorDash them food. We are doing whatever the hell we can to keep this thing going. My number one concern right now is more staff, more personnel. I’m trying to make sure that our staff can live, eat, breathe, and sleep outside of this job, which is their passion and now their job. That’s what really keeps me and the team up at night, frankly.

SAFIAN: If listeners want to help, can they become a watcher, or is a donation just as good?

MILLS: If you have cash and don’t want to listen to radios all day long, watchduty.org/donate is where you give money. But if you happen to be an analog radio person like me or grew up a ham listening to scanners, we could definitely use the help, and that’s watchduty.org/volunteer.

SAFIAN: John, as always, thanks for your efforts, and thanks for chatting.

MILLS: Thank you. I had a great time, as always.