Episode 321: Building for Chaos, Not Compliance with Bailey Farren – Perimeter

Episode notes

Bailey Farren is the co-founder and CEO of Perimeter . In 2017 she was evacuated from the Tubbs Fire, and what she saw that night, people with no way to know where the danger was or where to go, became the problem she has spent the better part of a decade solving.

Hello Smart Firefighting Community!

Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy.

Perimeter is a real-time map that gives first responders, emergency managers, and the public one shared picture of an incident. One link. No app. No training. This conversation is about what it takes to build technology for the worst moment of a person's life, and why the future of public safety depends on getting it right.

Topics covered:

Why Perimeter is built for the public's worst moment, not their best intentions

The Google Maps test: public safety tools that need zero training

Miscommunication versus misinformation, and why agencies keep losing the source of truth

How one shareable link goes viral during an incident

The Davis Fire in Washoe County and a 40% drop in non-emergency 911 calls

Where AI actually helps, and where it should stay out of the decision

Blue sky events: concerts, parades, and the World Cup

What hundreds of investors got wrong about selling tech to the fire service

So take a listen to hear what she has to share.

Head to www.smartfirefighting.com to discover how SFF accelerates innovation for emergency responders, to find out when our next event is, or review our curated resources.

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Chapters

1. 0:00 Intro
2. 1:35 The 30,000-foot view of Perimeter
3. 4:13 Will the public follow instructions?
4. 8:13 Improving evacuations
5. 10:56 Beyond wildfire: events and hurricanes
6. 17:07 Pulling together weather, roads and more
7. 18:51 Customer story: Washoe County
8. 23:58 Verifying information
9. 25:04 What's next
10. 26:39 Words to live by

Questions answered in this episode

What problem is Perimeter designed to solve?

Bailey Farren says the challenge emergency managers face is that the public struggles to understand what is happening during an incident. Perimeter was designed so people don't have to do any advanced planning, because research shows only 5 to 10% of people opt into alerts and even fewer download safety apps.

Hear it at 4:13

How does Perimeter use AI in evacuations?

Bailey Farren says AI helps in the planning phase by pulling data from different systems to identify choke points and figure out where to station law enforcement and traffic control points. She believes AI should support decision makers in public safety by analyzing vast amounts of data, not replace them.

Hear it at 8:13

How does Perimeter reduce the burden on 911 dispatchers?

Bailey Farren says Perimeter has shown a 40% reduction in non-emergency 911 calls across many deployments. People learn they can go to Perimeter for information instead of calling a dispatcher to ask if they are being evacuated or if something applies to them.

Hear it at 19:15

How does Perimeter pull together emergency information?

Bailey Farren explains that Perimeter integrates data from individual counties and states, pulling together state road closures, local evacuation zones, weather, traffic and other layers that are normally spread across 45 different maps. The platform also lets departments add data on the fly for situations like hazmat incidents.

Hear it at 17:36

How do people verify that a Perimeter link is from an official source?

Agencies point people to their region by sharing a link like Perimetermap.com slash the county name, such as slash Washoe. All links use the same database backend, so a user clicking any Perimeter link will see information for their location, even if they are a tourist in an unfamiliar area.

Hear it at 23:58

Transcript

Machine transcript of the published audio. Names may be misspelled and some sections are missing.

Ep 321 transcript

Building for Chaos, Not Compliance with Bailey Farren – Perimeter

Speakers: Kevin Sofen, Bailey Farren

Source: Whisper medium.en machine transcription of the published Podbean audio (no original transcript found in Drive), lightly cleaned. Speakers were separated by voice clustering and then checked and assigned by hand at every speaker change. Gaps where the model returned no usable text are marked [inaudible m:ss].

[0:00] Bailey Farren: The problem that we are committed to. [inaudible 0:30] first responders

[1:35] Kevin Sofen: Perimeter give me the 30,000-foot view of what Perimeter? Yeah So when I was evacuated from the [inaudible 1:41]

[2:05] Bailey Farren: is the fact that these

[2:35] Kevin Sofen: I didn't have to take you're not only designed for the incident commander - [inaudible 2:56]

[3:19] Bailey Farren: folks who need [inaudible 3:21]

[3:49] Kevin Sofen: contr follow

[4:13] Bailey Farren: I actually disagree with that. I don't think that function is that the public won't follow instructions. I, think the challenge that a lot of first responders and emergency managers face is that the public struggles to happening and because I have a firefighter dad. I have heard the term firefighter proof a that I can promise you. but it's easy to understand and visual [inaudible 5:07] immediately jump to so. [inaudible 6:12] Advanced situational awareness advanced planning et cetera. I'm. [inaudible 6:50] evacuated again. And so Perimeter was designed not to force people to do advanced planning because research that shows only 5 to 10% of people opt into alerts. Even fewer people will download an app related to their safety or an app in general. It's really hard to get people to download things today. Besides Chad's, people are not going to the App Store much. And so Perimeter was designed so that you don't have to do any advanced planning because the truth of the matter is most of the people in

[7:36] Kevin Sofen: your community simply aren't going to. And as we were walking on the trade show floor and I'm sure you are being in a tech time, you can't go five conversations or a ten without hearing the word artificial intelligence and AI being this tool that is of course has a lot of different promise but also maybe a lot of things that make you scratch your head and kind of barf inside when you hear about all AI this, AI that. But I'm curious how Perimeter is approaching AI? What's the AI strategy look like for Perimeter? And how is AI being built into the system to continue to enable better experiences for people that again are trying to just find the best

[8:13] Bailey Farren: route of evacuation? Yeah, well on the evacuation specific front there is so much that can be done that we're actively doing to ensure that in the planning phase or even during our first responders and our emergency managers can look at the areas that might be impacted and understand where the choke points, where do we need to if let's say I have to get a certain area evacuated in less than two hours, I need to know where to station law enforcement officers, traffic, control points, et cetera. And so AI and being able to pull data from all these different systems is something that can answer that question with a lot more ease for decision makers. I personally believe that AI should not replace decision makers in public safety, but support them by ingesting and analyzing all the vast amount of data that is out there to help those decision makers make the best

[9:08] Kevin Sofen: best decisions possible. So when you are continuing to go to these shows or you I mean, it seems like you have to meet with a lot of different stakeholders to different stakeholders to ultimately get them on board. I mean, you've got the city managers, you've got the incident commanders, you've got the emergency, you've got the mayor, you've got the interested people at the city council meetings. How do you approach talking to these different stakeholders? I mean, I think in the end, I would think everyone just wants to have better safety outcomes, and that's usually kind of something we can all agree on. Obviously, everything's political these days but how does Perimeter sort of tailor the message to these different stakeholders and everyone's got an opinion and how do you manage that?

[9:53] Bailey Farren: I think that we can all agree about wanting to increase life safety for our communities but that doesn't necessarily mean that someone's is willing to stick their neck out and try a new solution and maybe try a solution at all. And so the way that I think about building all of those relationships and working across the different agencies is I find one champion. I find one person who is that tip of the spear human who is ready to both acknowledge the challenges that exist and say make a difference

[10:56] Kevin Sofen: that you've leaned into, but then also now it's evolved into some tertiary markets kind of like the event space and concerts and things like that. What problems do they have and kind of how does the Perimeter solution kind of appeal and solve the problems of people who are coordinating the Coachella's and the World Cups of the world?

[11:14] Bailey Farren: world. It's interesting, because my exposure to this world and this problem was the wildfire lens, that's definitely where we started always have coordination happening behind the scenes by these different public safety agencies and first responders. And so even though it's not a disaster use case, everything that where to go

[12:08] Kevin Sofen: daydreaming about the Perimeter solution of it thinking about like what happens there's a while fire about to happen or they expected while fire to happen in the community or there disasters but there's the first six hours of an incident and there's the 72 hour incidents then there's all of a sudden you know what happens to four or six weeks down the road How do people experience and interact with the Perimeter solution in the first 24 hours, first 7 days, you know, is there any sort of difference in how the product is used and experienced?

[12:44] Bailey Farren: Yeah, absolutely. So, let's take a hurricane, for example. You might have, right away, when you're starting to share information about what's happening, you might want to communicate, here are the polygons, the zones, the areas that are expected to be impacted by this hurricane. So, at this point in the planning phase, because we have a little bit of notice, you're starting to think to think about what those evacuations are going to look like. So in the planning phase, you might be using AI modeling to figure out where are choke points going to be, where do we need to station traffic control points, et cetera. And then, during the actual evacuation, you'll be able to keep a shared picture between agencies about which areas have been cleared. And once they've been cleared, obviously, you're pushing information to the public two that says, hey, this is like, you're not allowed to come back into these zones. And so that's a big question for people like me who have been evacuated. We always want to know, when can I go home? And

[14:10] Kevin Sofen: for us is ensuring that the [inaudible 14:37]

[16:07] Bailey Farren: because if you are sharing it on Facebook, that information is not going to be disseminated based on its challenges that currently exist when people are, you know, even if they have the best intentions. They're

[17:07] Kevin Sofen: Perimeter is gathering these different data points from weather to road closures. I know it's very multi-factorial. There's so many variables that go into like, what the heck is actually going on and how does that go into creating with confidence that this is the best route to take, or this is when it's actually safe to go home. This maybe ties into some of the software and AI behind the system. Tell me more about the magic that helps Perimeters model like truly give the cleanest and most verified source of information.

[17:36] Bailey Farren: we ingest a lot of and there are places that we can go to for information that just needs to be pulled into one place. But there's also something unique about the path that we've taken, which is we also integrate with all of these individual county and states data as well. That makes a huge difference, because today, you might have state road closures on a map and a layer over here, and you might have local evacuation zones or something over here, and, then, you've got weather and other relevant data like that here or traffic, et cetera. Perimeter pulls all of that together, and so even if you have 45 different maps and layers across the state that are maybe answering one or a few questions really well, it can be really challenging to try to create that picture yourself. Perimeter does that automatically. So we pull all those different types of data. You mentioned quite a few of them, traffic, weather, road closures, et cetera. But we also give our departments the ability to integrate and ingest their data and give them a space to add data on the fly if there's something that hasn't been pre-planned, like a hazardous material situation. You're putting that in the platform on the fly.

[18:51] Kevin Sofen: Do you have any customer success story that you can glean on, whether it's a small department or an agency you can glean on whether it's a small department an agency that you again it's like obviously the goal end goal is safety and creating safer outcomes whether there's an outcome that created a safer outcome or maybe even some like unexpected outcome that happened that you think about that just you're like wow that how cool is it like an unintended way that people use the software yeah anything that comes to mind

[19:15] Bailey Farren: yeah definitely in one of our deployments with Washoe county that's where we know is they had a huge incident called the Davis fire and something that was so interesting about this incident is when you have a fire in a place like Washoe County, you don't just have multiple counties that are responding to this incident. You also have multiple states because California is looking to see hey is this crossing into our counties? How are we going to evacuate the public in that situation? How are we going to maintain a consistent message? And I think Wash County did an absolutely phenomenal job not just as the emergency managers keeping information up to date and accessible, But pulling in all of the other agencies who are responding and that was an early incident for us that also proved the virality of the platform. Perimeter is going to go viral because people are going to share it online and the media is going to pick it up. The media wants to provide value to people and this is the link that stays up to date and has that map. And so the media will automatically pick it up. So I thought that was really an incredible use case, but an unexpected thing that we learned from deployments like that is during emergencies, people call 911 looking for information and Perimeter across many of our deployments has shown a 40% reduction in non-emergency 911 calls. Because people learn when they have a place they can go to for information, they don't need to call a dispatcher and try to figure out, am I being evacuated? Does this apply to me? And so that was an unexpected consequence of deploying Perimeter that makes people's lives a lot easier.

[20:57] Kevin Sofen: I mean, that's one of the biggest challenges. You have all these people calling for reasons that really don't require a 911 call. A lot of us probably just wanting to know, is this road closed? Where should I go? And now that's freeing up the bandwidth and mental cognitive bandwidth to just allow the dispatchers and the team members to do something else.

[21:15] Bailey Farren: Yeah. And have you ever been on the phone with 911 and had a wait time? It's terrifying. And I have, you know, it's so interesting. My mom was telling me this story recently. So she's a-a retired paramedic-and she saw a-a collision when she was driving down the freeway and she pulled over, classic paramedic or first responder move, she pulls over and there's a seven year nervous and they want to know if something's happening. But then they call 911 and the phone lines go down. So if we can give them a place to go to so they can find that information, we free the 911 lines for the people who really need it for immediate medical attention.

[22:24] Kevin Sofen: Man, I mean it gave me some of the chills about the real human examples of again like what happens when the phone lines go down and I haven't had that experience of call 9-1-1 and not having to pick up. I live in an urban environment and again it's somewhat unthinkable but at the same time what happens when the grid goes down? What happens when this goes down? And those are real scary consequences and Perimeters and in a sense sort of helping fill a necessary gap where it's not necessarily the end-all be-all solution but it's just a it's a information broker in a sense of different people as you're kindof midst of chaos or before during and after chaos just providing some sense of truth and is it sort of kind of like lockstep co-branded in the sense like when you have an agency whether it's like a northern California agency like how does that work with like does the agency kind of say like hey this is the acme fire department's Perimeter link and how does like incarnate again navigating through the misinformation mistrust like how do people know that this is like, okay, I trust this. Because I know, especially in like election time, and you can't even tell whether the video is now, it's real or not. How do you continue to, I know this is re-circling back in the misinformation question, but I feel like how to just continue to be like, this is true, this is coming from the sea, it's not like some burner account. I don't know, how do you manage and approach?

[23:58] Bailey Farren: Yeah, verification of the information is so important. The way that agencies will point people to their particular region is it's still going to Perimetermap.com, it's the same database, but they point people to their region by saying Perimetermap.com slash Washoe as an example. And so if they're sending out the link that's slash El Dorado County, it's taking people right to that area. However, by default, if you go to any Perimeter Map link that isn't going to a specific county, it will jump to your location. And the reason that we don't have individual maps for every single department is, I would never want someone to click a link, let's say they're in your hometown, they're in Chicago, and they click a link that they thought was for Chicago but actually it's for Springfield. That doesn't help them. But if we have the same database and the same backend, then we can let people click the link wherever they are. Maybe theyh they're in Chicago as a tourist. They

[25:04] Kevin Sofen: Love it. So I know you've got to get going soon, but maybe one or two final questions. So what's something that excites you right now, whether it's Perimeter or base, fire service tech base,

[25:13] Bailey Farren: like just fires Bailey up right now. I am really excited about all of the success stories that have been created over the past two years because when I started this, hundreds- hundreds and hundreds of investors told me and my team that this would be impossible to build, impossible to sell. They starting a company around this. And so it's really exciting to see so many people embrace new technology, because of course in the fire service, they say 200 years of tradition, unimpeded by progress. And that is true in some areas. Obviously there's a reason that the phrase exists, but I think the industry is changing very dramatically. People are getting excited about new technology. Before, there was this idea that nobody gets fired for buying IBM, but today,, I think people are tired of the old guard solutions and excited about companies that are really challenging the status quo and the way that things have been. So that makes me really excited. I love the people that we work with. I'm so grateful that I'm in public safety because this is a space where I think technology is more critical than any other industry where it's being

[26:39] Kevin Sofen: deployed. Final question what is a quote or words of wisdom that you live by something that is whether it's written up on your wall or something you think about when you wake up in

[26:49] Bailey Farren: the morning that you know that inspires Bailey? This might be a little cliche to quote Steve Jobs but I love this idea that you can only connect the dots looking backward and I never expected to start a public safety company to spend every single day thinking about wildfires and hurricanes and flash flooding. But it's pretty wild to look, and see how many wildfires I was evacuated from while I was working in AI, or studying data science, or being a homeschool kid who's growing up at the firehouse. There are all these things that felt so disparate in my life. and super grateful that now all of those dots are connected and it just makes a lot of sense to me.

[27:36] Kevin Sofen: Hey, only one path forward. Keep going, Bailey. All gas, no brakes. All gas, no brakes. Just follow the Perimeter map and all things will work out.

[27:44] Bailey Farren: Awesome. Thanks, Kevin.

[27:45] Kevin Sofen: I appreciate the time today and look forward to continue collaborating and keep up the great work.

[27:49] Bailey Farren: Thank you rock.

[27:53] Kevin Sofen: Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Firefighting podcast today. If you enjoyed what you heard and got any value, Please drop us a rating, leave us a comment or reach out to us on social media. Have a great day and together we can advance the future of smart firefighting.