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Allison Wolff had worked for 20 years in Silicon Valley, helping companies like eBay, Google, and Facebook establish sustainability programs in-house. But in 2018, she was figuring out how she wanted to grow her career outside of her consulting work. Then Paradise, California burned down. Forest fires felt more urgent than ever, and Wolff wanted to help.
Two years later, Wolff co-founded Vibrant Planet to improve land management. By proactively responding to the needs of the entire ecosystem, including the health of animals, bodies of water, and other plants, sensitive land management can help limit the severity of forest fires. The following year, the company launched their signature cloud-based land management tool, which uses data to help land managers, fire districts and other stakeholders create dynamic plans for forest health.
This past year has been pivotal. They launched across the entire Western U.S. in December of 2023, improving the management of over 35 million acres in the region. In the spring, a range of new customers were brought on board, including their first big corporate client, Pacific Gas & Electric, and further updates made to the platform this summer. All of this made Wolff a finalist on our Entrepreneur of 2024 list of 20 innovative leaders.
Related: How Entrepreneurs Can Navigate Change By Creating an Ecosystem of Resilience
Before using Land Tender, a lot of your customers were using paper maps to manage land. Have you encountered resistance because of the very old-school standard?
We built a system that would work for big federal agencies like the Forest Service and Department of Interior, and understandably these are risk-averse people. They're not paid to take risks — there's no blame there. But our government is not set up for innovation. It's much better to sit back, let the time pass, and not stick your neck out. With 40% to 60% of land ownership being federal, we have to engage the federal agencies.
They're starting to come around, but it's been hard until now. We're the new people, and they're not used to working with outsiders at all, much less a private company. They work with NGOs a lot, but not on these kinds of problems. It's been a bit of proving ourselves, building trust and credibility over four years now to get to the point where we can really scale out with them.
Given that climate change is such a massive problem, how do you measure success for yourself on a day-to-day basis?
At the biggest level, it's really just a daily question of, "Are we on track to achieve the mission and how are we going about that?" People are worried about safety and their house burning down. I'm worried about my house burning down, too, I'm in a super high fire area. We're constantly striving to help people make decisions better around risk mitigation, around home-level, community-level decisions.
There's also this constant battle of getting our very impact-focused — but still venture-capital — [investors] bought into the longer vision. It's expensive and hard to operationalize the science. It's a constant tension, and I'm measuring myself against, "Are we winning that?"
You've spoken about not wanting to be a top-down CEO. Can you tell me about your approach to leadership?
I have a diagram of an upside-down pyramid. At the top, there's our customers, then our customer success team, our sales team and our scientists, who are working with customers to get those response functions engineered in the system. Then there's engineers building stuff and all these teams — the operations part of our organization — as you go down in tiers [toward the point of the pyramid]. I'm kind of at the bottom. I see myself as the enabler underneath it all to help with the money and some of the contracting mechanisms and some of the infrastructure we need as a company to make sure that everything above me can happen, ultimately to serve customers and nature. I see nature as a customer as well.
I have to set the vision, of course — where we're going and in what order, how do we resource to do that. So it's top-down for that. But we have the most incredible thought leaders across every scientific discipline. Some of our machine-learning people pioneered machine learning at places like Meta, where it was first created to serve ads in a smarter way. They're like, "I don't want to do that anymore. I want to work on climate solutions." My philosophy is mostly to organize the team in the right way and give them what they need to be successful and work together well, then get out of the way.
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