Allison Wolff has worked in Silicon Valley for 20 years, helping firms like eBay, Google and Facebook establish internal sustainability programs. However, in 2018, she wondered how she wanted to develop her profession outside of consulting work. Then Paradise, California burned down. The forest fires seemed more urgent than ever, and Wolff wanted to help.
Two years later, Wolff was a co-founder Vibrating planet to improve land management. By actively responding to the needs of the entire ecosystem, including the health of animals, water bodies and other plants, sensitive land management might help reduce the severity of wildfires. The following yr, the company launched its proprietary cloud-based land management tool that uses data to help land managers, fire districts and other stakeholders create dynamic forest health plans.
Last yr was crucial. They began operations across the Western United States in December 2023, improving management of greater than 35 million acres in the region. Numerous latest clients were added in the spring, including their first major enterprise client, Pacific Gas & Electric, and further platform updates were introduced this summer. All this made Wolff a finalist in our list of 20 progressive leaders “Entrepreneur 2024”.
Before using Land Tender, many of your clients used paper maps for land management. Have you encountered resistance due to very outdated standards?
We built a system that might work for large federal agencies like the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior, and these are understandably risk-averse people. They are not paid to take risks – there is no guilt involved. But our government is not focused on innovation. It’s much higher to sit back, let time pass and not stick your neck out. Since 40% to 60% of land ownership is federal, we want to involve federal agencies.
They are starting to emerge, but so far it has been difficult. We are latest people, and they are not used to working with strangers at all, let alone a private company. They often work with non-governmental organizations, but not on all these problems. Over the course of 4 years, we had to prove ourselves and build trust and credibility to get to the point where we could really scale up.
Given that climate change is such a huge problem, how do you measure your success on a day by day basis?
At the highest level, it is simply a day by day query: “Are we on track to achieve the mission and how are we going to get there?” People are anxious about safety and the house burning down. I’m also anxious about my house burning down, I’m in a very high fire zone. We continually strive to help people make higher risk reduction, home and community decisions.
There is also a constant battle to keep our enterprise capital very focused on motion – but still – [investors] I purchased the longer vision. This is expensive and difficult to operationalize the science. It’s a constant tension and I’m faced with the query: “Are we winning this?”
You said you didn’t want to be a top-down CEO. Can you tell me about your approach to leadership?
I have an inverted pyramid diagram. At the top are our customers, then our customer support team, our sales team, and then our scientists who work with customers to design these response capabilities into the system. Then there are the engineers who build the hardware and all these teams – the operations a part of our organization – as we go down to the lower levels [toward the point of the pyramid]. I’m type of at all-time low. I see myself as someone who will help with all of this, in terms of cash, some of the contracting mechanisms and some of the infrastructure that we want as a company to make sure that every part above me can occur, ultimately serving customers and nature. I also see nature as a client.
Of course, I want to establish a vision – where we are going, in what order and what resources we have to achieve it. So it’s from top to bottom. But we have the most incredible thought leaders in all scientific disciplines. Some of our machine learning specialists pioneered machine learning in places like Meta, where it was first developed for smarter ad serving. They say, “I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to work on climate solutions.” My philosophy is to first organize the team properly and give them what they need to achieve success and work well together, and then get out of the way.