SXSW Startups: Geospiza
The Forrest Four-Cast: February 21, 2019
Fifty diverse startups will aim to impress a panel of judges and a live audience with their skills, creativity and innovation at SXSW Pitch Presented by Cyndx. Winners in 10 categories will be announced at the Pitch Award Ceremony at 6:30 pm Sunday, March 10, at the Hilton Austin.
A finalist in the Enterprise and Smart Data category, which will pitch at 12:30 pm Saturday, March 9, Geospiza uses big data analytics to save lives in disaster. They automate data integration and provide rich, evidence-based decision support to emergency managers, elected officials, and corporate continuity planners.
Additionally, they provide the public safety world with a suite of tools that help them monitor and evaluate the work they are doing to fully understand, document, and learn from impacts and outcomes. The Geospizatool set facilitates rapid learning and iteration so that limited resources are efficiently managed to have the greatest risk reduction and resilience enhancement.
Sarah Tuneberg, co-founder and CEO, answered some questions about the company.
Your background includes over a decade of work in the areas of public health and emergency management. Talk to us about how you propose setting new standards with Geospiza.
I have spent my career largely focused on two areas that come together in Geospiza. First, bringing data and evidence to bear in all public safety decisions and, second, reducing the disproportionately poor outcomes we see affecting historically marginalized and underrepresented people including older adults, people with disabilities, and people of color.
Geospiza’s mission is to save lives in disaster, and we know that the same underserved groups are the ones far more likely to die. So we are literally on a daily mission to change that paradigm. We’re tackling it by giving emergency managers, elected officials, corporate leaders, and others tools that make data easy to access, understand, and integrate into daily work. We have built tools to infuse data into daily practice in a way that makes our customers’ jobs easier and more effective, not an extra burden or project.
In a time when people are often reluctant to read the news, because of so many political and natural disasters, tell us about how the tool you’ve created weeds through the data and noise.
When the media can give a sense of PANIC! all the time, we work hard to bring the evidence and data related to disaster to bear. For example, people almost never panic. Aside from in stampede situations, the stereotype of people freaking out and behaving crazy, irrational, or aggressively is completely false. Decades of research finds that in major stress situations, including emergencies and disasters, people are largely calm and make the best decisions they can with the information they have. And the more accurate information they can get, the better their decisions are.
People in emergency management worry about crafting messaging to “avoid panic,” but people don’t panic. It’s a waste of effort, time, and, ultimately, disempowers the people we are trying to help. Helping our customers get accurate, accessible, and timely information helps them equip their stakeholders with the same.
Currently Geospiza is set for 29 dynamic scenarios. Can you share more information about those?
Everything in emergency management starts with a hazard agonistic perspective, which we call “all hazards.” We start there too as it helps us to help our customers be prepared for anything. To determine the scenario-specific models, we work with our customers to determine the scenarios that are most common and concerning to them and prioritize those for development.
The scenarios include natural hazards (flood, hurricane, earthquake), man-man (such as terrorism), and technological (such as a widespread power outage). We also work to model the human-related causes and consequences that can be interlinked, for example how human development and forest management increases the risk from natural wildland fire.
Our team acutely feels the threat of climate change-related disasters and we are investing lots of resources to help our customers, including those in the private sector, to understand and, where possible, predict some of the impacts we can expect from climate change-related disaster on people, products, supply chains, the larger environment, and the economy. It’s all interconnected and we’re working hard to be able to model those cascading consequences
Your product is a master tool for emergencies. Do you see Geospiza implemented on a larger scale?
We have developed a product that first meets the needs of public safety agencies and organizations, but we have seen a ton of interest from corporations across multiple verticals — hospitality, oil and gas, travel, and others — who are vulnerable to the consequence of emergencies and disaster, especially those related to climate change. We’re excited to explore these new opportunities in 2019.
What are your goals for Geospiza in 2019?
We had our first opportunity to work with Chef Jose Andres and World Central Kitchen, in support of their #ChefsForFeds effort, and we are very excited to continue our partnership in 2019. They are doing such great work in disaster feeding and our missions to find new approaches in meeting very human needs to align in a powerful way that motivates our team in what we’re doing.
What are you hoping to get out of attending SXSW 2019?
On the big stage, I’m excited to see Senator Mazie Hirono and Guy Kawasaki. The Senator is someone I really respect. I’d love to hear what she has to say on the entrepreneurship and government.
I’m a big fan of Eli Pariser and will be at his session for sure! I think he’ll have interesting insights directly applicable to my business.
My fingers are crossed that I get a seat at the big Jake Tapper+Daily Show hullabaloo. Sounds like it’ll be pure hilarious magic.
Lastly, I’m excited to wander a bit and take in live music. The kismet of finding a great, new to you band at SXSW is one of the greatest pulls of the event.
Has Geospiza been involved with other pitch events?
Pitch events have been a big part of our early days. I learned to pitch well via Techstars Boulder and am forever grateful for the rigorous process in that program. Most recently I won $100,000 investment from Chloe Capital in a pitch competition. You can’t underestimate the value of being able to concisely articulate the story, value, and traction of your company.
Geospiza is based in Denver. Tell us about the startup ecosystem there.
The Denver startup ecosystem is generous and supportive — truly living the “give first” mantra pushed forward by Techstars and the Foundry Group. The ecosystem functions as a strong community where people make time to help, support, make intros and
Looking at the entire tech industry, what trend is your team most excited about?
I really am happy that we, as a tech community, are having deeper, more honest conversations about data and privacy. I hope that this is just the start and we can get to a place that is more transparent and less gross about profiting off of people’s very personal data. Also, it’s time that people realize that nothing is free. Anytime you’re getting some very cool tech for free, you and your data are the real product. Facebook, lots of google, etc. We should be more critical, and also more thoughtful of the real cost of our favorite tech.
I continue to be inspired by the work of Black Lives Matter, Me Too, and other organizations that are fighting for diversity, inclusion, representation, and workplaces free of the power imbalance that leads to abuse and marginalization of women and people of color.
What’s some advice you wish you’d had that you’d give to others wanting to join the startup journey?
Talk to your customers. Early, often, and then do it some more forever.
You don’t have to raise VC. If you can fund your tech startup by services first, consider it. There is a myth that taking VC is success in itself, but it isn’t always. Lots of the customer-funded ventures I’ve seen are solving their customer’s problems more effectively and efficiently than lots of others.
Look for more interviews with other SXSW Pitch finalists in this space between now and March.
Click here to see all 50 finalists for SXSW Pitch 2019, along with the links to their interviews on Medium.
Also, if you are an entrepreneur, check out all the cool panels and presentations in the Entrepreneurship and Startups Track, which runs March 8–12 at SXSW.
Hugh Forrest serves as Chief Programming Officer at SXSW, the world’s most unique gathering of creative professionals. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium. These posts often cover tech-related trends; other times they focus on books, pop culture, sports and other current events.
