The Climate Torch: CEO Interview with Ahmad Wani of OneConcern
Led by CEO Ahmad Wani, OneConcern integrates next-gen AI and machine learning with human-centric hazard science to predict impacts from climate change.
Why did you start the company?
I’m an entrepreneur by accident. I was in the process of getting my PhD in earthquake engineering from Stanford in August of 2014 when I visited my parents’ home in Kashmir, India.
During my time there in that August, there was a flood that quickly swamped three floors of my parents' home. For almost seven days, we were forced to live on our roof. But we were fortunate: 85% of the region was underwater, and many people died. This event drove me to think more about preventative disaster response, advanced warning systems, and ultimately climate change, which is the root cause of many of these events.
When I really dug into this space, I realized that much of the statistical analysis of these events was rather primitive. Moreover, the real value in disaster response is actually the proactive work done before the disaster happens. So, I went to work on exploring better risk analysis systems. Along with a couple of AI-focused research colleagues and a number of professors at Stanford, we were able to develop model improvements to more accurately predict these types of disasters. Ultimately, this became our proof of concept that launched the company.
How do you describe who your company serves, and who are your clients?
Our company's mission is to improve resiliency with a focus on safety, sustainability, and equity.
There is a resiliency ecosystem that exists today that serves everyone, including homeowners, small business owners, and governments at all levels. The manifestation of this ecosystem at the homeowners’ level is the various types of insurance and related risk management products.
We started with a focus on improving this ecosystem and offering value to local governments on the West coast of the United states. We’ve also recently expanded into Japan where we are working with one of the largest insurance companies in the country and a number of business enterprises.
Since the value of resiliency is in being proactive rather than reactive, our focus is really on these early stages of longer-term forecasting and risk management. That’s not to say we don’t do shorter term forecasting. For instance, we are working on a project in Japan to forecast the impacts of rainfall and produce typhoon forecasts with time frames of less than a week. However, to maximize impact, we are working to be the platform to help organizations and governments to proactively understand risks, with the financial and policy help that they need to make those decisions.
How would you characterize One Concern’s link to climate change?
Climate change has increased the importance of resiliency. And if the need to focus on resiliency wasn’t clear prior to this year, then I think Covid has really demonstrated the value of this type of proactive long-term planning and risk mitigation that we seek to provide through our platform.
As it applies to climate change, we want to make the case to companies and governments that it is important to get ahead of the risks encapsulated in climate change. Part of our job is to convey the risks to these organizations in a manner that is more concrete and understandable to their specific business and use cases (versus the information that comes out of an IPCC report, for instance).
Many companies have significant amounts of infrastructure that is well built and located in relatively safe geographic zones. This isn’t just a matter of anticipating disaster impacts for a coastal beach house. As a consequence, many of the companies we work with initially feel that they are in a good position to tackle most of the natural disaster risks we might think about.
However, the portion of the broader risk picture that they often miss is the impact of these adverse events on supply chains, employees, and customers. We aim to educate customers and partners while also providing the platform by which they can develop plans to directly mitigate these risks.
How do you think about competitors?
Our biggest competitor really is the status quo of not preparing for these scenarios.
There are a number of risk modeling companies with relatively niche applications such as flood risk modeling. We don’t want to be a risk modeling company. Instead, we are focused on “resilience as a service.” We want to enhance the ability of our clients to see the distribution of risks for their business cases, and we want to be a partner in the mitigation of some of those risks.
Ultimately, we want to make sure our clients understand the full picture and that they’ve pursued a mitigative course of action with which they are comfortable. Our true mission is to increase the resiliency of the end user.
How do you think about business model innovation? For instance, have you considered the opportunity to be an RFP manager given your ability to model and understand the broader structural and systematic risk picture?
It’s interesting that you bring this up. Consumers and companies are willing to pay more for a solution if they recognize that it confers additional value. We are looking to apply this to our business, where the additional value is in the form of resiliency, rather than, say, engine performance, but the principle is the same.
For example, consider the impact of a power outage at the Stanford hospital. A hospital that has critical surgery cannot withstand enduring power outages, and with PG&E increasingly resorting to shut offs to avoid legal liability due to wildfire risk, this is becoming an increasing problem. By being able to identify the locations with the highest vulnerability to power outages, and then being able to offer solutions that adequately address these vulnerabilities, we create a lot of end user value.
However, this is a shorter time horizon solution. Ultimately, we believe that we can be part of a broader solution where we can provide the analysis that demonstrates the cost of infrastructure vulnerability to the businesses and people to which it provides value, and then use this analysis to unlock project level finance that pays for the solution by capturing some of the cost savings.
How has Covid impacted your business and how you think about the field of play?
Covid has created a lens through which our customers and ultimately investors have been better able to understand the importance and value of mitigating these types of tail risks. On a broader level, Covid and its disparate paradigm shifting impacts has been the ultimate demonstration of the value of long-term planning to companies and governments around the world.
As a consequence, we were able to successfully close that round. Surprisingly, Covid has been an accelerant to our business model. However, I do want to highlight the human level impact that we have all felt through the pandemic. Beyond immediate health consequences for family members, we’ve had to retool how we think about work, and what a digital first workplace looks like for our interactions with clients. I certainly don’t want to pretend as if it's been an easy process.
On a broader level, I’d also like to highlight the inequities and widening gaps that have been created by Covid. Whether its access to affordable high-speed internet or the ability to work from home, it’s clear that much of the economic and perhaps racial divides that exist in our country have been exacerbated by this pandemic. It's incumbent upon all of us as business leaders, academics, and especially at the government level to address many of these inequities as we make infrastructure investments in the near future.
I think it’s often easy to see companies such as yours as overnight successes with few challenges. To dispel this notion, can you talk about an example or a perspective you’ve developed in your experience handling the challenges of entrepreneurship?
It's really an important question that I wish people would ask more often. More than anything else, I think persistence is key. In our first attempt to raise money we met with 60 investors. Some of these meetings lasted five minutes and ended with investors telling me and my co-founders that we should be working on the next Snapchat rather than wasting our time on such a project as One Concern.
It took me eight months to raise the first 25 thousand dollars. I was a structural engineer and didn’t speak the lingo, so it took some time. But once you get the basics and are able to start raising money, the real challenges are letting your first employee go, or downsizing when the company has grown a little too big for the revenue it's able to generate.
These are moments where logically it often makes sense to give up. It requires some amount of irrationality to persist through these incredibly challenging early days. Personally, I felt that I couldn’t let my cofounder, who I can honestly say is my best friend, down by giving up. I think it's important to really find that source of enduring motivation and persistence to overcome the inevitable challenges along the way.
Do you have any personal habits or practices that you use to maintain focus and motivation?
I’m really passionate about cooking. It’s kind of meditative to me, it helps me relax and unwind. As fate would have it, I've developed a lot of relationships through the years by making good food. While I was at Stanford, I would cook for a very close group of 12 friends, and ultimately many of these individuals ended up working at One Concern (says laughing).
But in terms of the bigger picture, resilience is all about global perspective. It's easy to be swept up into the bubble of Silicon Valley and Menlo Park, but it's so important to maintain a sense of perspective by stepping outside of that bubble, acknowledging our privilege. I’m also Muslim so I find a lot of peace in prayer throughout each day.
Are there any quotations, podcasts, or books that you enjoy and think others may find useful?
To be honest, I prefer talking to people more than I enjoy reading. However, I am a fan of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech. Starting a company is very difficult. There are a lot of days that are rather painful, but at the end of the day, the audacity to establish that goal and pursue it for the mission and benefit it will provide if successful is really what it's about.
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Note:
THE TORCH is an interview series from Entrepreneurs for Impact. We profile CEOs and investors mitigating climate change. Our goal is to highlight their work and inspire others. As we deal with multiple crisis, from Covid and racial injustice to climate change and economic recession, we need some of this positive light in what seem like dark times. Onward and upward.