Valkyrie Holmes: Building Faura & Quantifying Climate Risk

TL;DR

Faura is revolutionizing insurance by quantifying a property's survivability against climate disasters, turning overlooked high-risk areas into profitable opportunities. #InsureTech #ClimateTech #VentureStep

INTRODUCTION

As climate-related disasters grow in frequency and severity, the insurance industry faces an existential challenge: how to accurately price risk when historical data is no longer a reliable predictor of the future. The traditional model of excluding high-risk properties is becoming unsustainable, leaving homeowners vulnerable and insurers missing potential opportunities. This gap in the market is where innovators see a chance to build a more resilient future.

In this episode, Dalton sits down with Valkyrie Holmes, a 776 Fellow and the founder of Faura, an insuretech company at the forefront of this challenge. Valkyrie shares her unique founder philosophy, "you're not special," not as a pessimistic outlook, but as a powerful motivator for execution and empathy. From developing drone-based fire suppression systems with vortex cannons to building a venture-backed startup, her journey is a masterclass in being relentlessly problem-focused.

Valkyrie breaks down how Faura is moving beyond simply predicting if a disaster will happen to quantifying whether a specific property will survive. By providing a granular survivability score, Faura empowers insurance carriers to make smarter underwriting decisions, reduce catastrophic losses, and find profitable business in areas others have written off. This conversation is a deep dive into building an industry-changing company, becoming an expert from scratch, and the mindset required to tackle one of the world's most pressing problems.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The "You're Not Special" mantra is a powerful tool for empowerment, encouraging founders to stay focused on execution rather than waiting for a perfect, unique idea.
• The future of insurance depends on shifting from predicting disaster likelihood to quantifying individual property survivability.
• To enter and disrupt a legacy industry like insurance, you must become an expert through relentless networking, listening, and sharing your learning process publicly.
• Effective founders are obsessed with solving the root cause of a problem, not just its symptoms, which can lead to pivots from suppression technology to mitigation and data analysis.
• Data-driven proof, like demonstrating 95% accuracy in predicting property survivability, is the ultimate key to closing enterprise clients and building trust in a traditional industry.

FULL CONVERSATION

Dalton: Welcome to Venture Step Podcast where we discuss entrepreneurship, trends, and the occasional book review. ¹Today we have a wonderful guest on the show, Valkyrie Holmes. ²She has done an incredible amount of stuff within a short amount of time, but she likes to keep this mantra of you're not special. ³And I'll let her go into a little bit more detail about that later on. ⁴But I just want to give a highlight of some of the things that she's worked on. ⁵

Dalton: One project was related to this hive mine drone application for fire suppression that used vortex cannons. ⁶What that really means is she uses drones to detect if there was a pending wildfire, go to those areas that might have a high likelihood of a fire, and then from there map out the approach and shoot high velocity air at the fire to either change the direction, slow the path, or if it's caught early enough, completely suppress the fire. ⁷And then from there, she's transitioned over to building her own company related to wildfire and climate change, and that is called Faura. ⁸And that's what we're here to talk about today. ⁹

Dalton: But Valkyrie is an interesting individual and someone who is a 776 fellow, which is a foundation or venture capitalist fund that funds young folks that seem to be what we would call cracked. ¹⁰And those folks get to tinker and build some of the ideas that they have, like the vortex cannon or what Faura is building now. ¹¹So I just want to give Valkyrie a chance to talk a little bit about herself before we get into the episode and what is Faura from her own perspective. ¹²

Valkyrie: Yeah, sounds good. Well, thank you so much for having me, Dalton. 13I started in climate from a pretty early point of my career. 14 I graduated from high school, went straight into working. And I think COVID gave me a good amount of time to reflect on what I actually wanted to do and what I really stood for. 15And what I realized was, at the end of the day, I want to be working in interesting spaces with interesting people, typically in spaces that most would consider boring. 16Because a lot of society runs on these community organizations and these local initiatives that ripple out into federal government. 17

The "You're Not Special" Philosophy

Valkyrie: So it was always really interesting to me from the climate perspective that people would talk about reducing risk and building these things that had connecting pieces and then they just wouldn't do it. ¹⁸They would build this super niche thing and then it wouldn't really get further than this niche concept which really doesn't solve the problem. ¹⁹ We need a lot more people solving those problems. And so from an early age I think I focused a lot on this idea that no one is special but that means that everyone has something in common with another person. ²⁰

So you can take the you're not special mantra and be very pessimistic about it, which I was for a long time, but now I much more view it as everyone has something going on that you can relate to so you got to find that little something and position it in a way that that benefits other people. ²¹

Valkyrie: So that's what Faura aims to do. Faura is specifically around environmental resilience and property resilience, specifically on survivability. 22We can talk loads more about what Faura does but the positioning there is really important to me. 23

Dalton: Yeah, I think a cool point about the you're not special thing is it's one for yourself to stay heads down, keep building, keep pushing. ²⁴The other piece is for other people that are looking at your rap sheet and all of these things you've done before 21. They look at what you've done in a short amount of time. ²⁵They're like, wow, that's the reason why I haven't done what I want to do. ²⁶These kinds of people are out in the wild and this is who I'm competing against. ²⁷ But really it's, you're not special. Everyone has the opportunity to execute. If you have the right opportunities, you either make them through either luck, perseverance, a multitude of suffering and other variables, or you can take it the other view where it's like, okay, well, I guess I never had a chance in the first place. ²⁸The view that no one is special allows the outlook that, I can do this too. ²⁹My idea that I have that I think is important is doable because at the end of the day, no one is inherently special. ³⁰It's just executing and being persistent, right? ³¹

Valkyrie: Yeah, for sure. ³²I truly believe that the majority of people can do something crazy in their lifetimes. ³³And most people would say running a startup or doing anything that I've done is crazy. ³⁴But I think it's just about being in love with the problem and finding a solution that fits. ³⁵

Removing Emotion To Execute on Hard Tasks

Valkyrie: I always have this mentality of, why not? But more specifically when I'm thinking about doing something, it's separating it from a good amount of emotion, especially if it's something that you might not want to do. ³⁶So we can use a classic example of I really love to work out, but there are some days where I really don't want to. ³⁷But if I separate the idea that working out is going to be painful or boring or whatever, it makes it a lot easier to just be like, okay, well, this has to be done. ³⁸ I use that in our company all the time. I don't necessarily want to be reaching out to people and doing lead gen and all these more boring administrative tasks that come with every startup. ³⁹

If it has to be done, it has to be done. So as much as I can, trying to remove myself from the fact that this is something I don't want to do, I think I found that very helpful. ⁴⁰

Dalton: Yeah, that's an excellent point simply because people will talk about startups or just any general idea. ⁴¹ They're like, well, I don't know if it's the idea that I want. It's not my idea. ⁴²It's not the idea that really drives me, but really just got to get started. ⁴³There's this whole notion about I can't do a startup because I don't have the perfect idea. ⁴⁴ Well, there is no perfect idea. 50% of startups within Y Combinator pivot to a new idea in the incubation period. ⁴⁵ And so consistently people don't have the perfect idea. It's just getting started. ⁴⁶There's still stuff that you're not going to want to do that you're not interested in, and that it just needs to get done either in your personal life or businesses or relationships. ⁴⁷

What Problem Does Faura Solve for Insurers?

Dalton: So transitioning over, you want to talk Faura. Faura is a new approach. ^48484848So I would like you to maybe talk about how Faura is a little different from other applications of wildfire discovery or defensible space. ⁴⁹

Valkyrie: So as a primer, when an insurance company is looking at property risks, they're using a ton of tools and internal data to make a decision about first, whether or not they want to actually insure this property, and second, whether or not they want to price it in a specific threshold. ⁵⁰What we saw initially was, survivability of properties is something that we know is really important, but isn't really talked about too much in the insurance industry. ⁵¹And the reason for that is because we haven't needed to. ⁵²We really haven't needed to focus on whether or not a property we're insuring is still going to be standing there in the next five to 10 years. ⁵³

Valkyrie: Insurance companies right now are using traditional climate models. ⁵⁴And those models are essentially saying for this property, this is the likelihood that a disaster will happen in this area. ⁵⁵And that's really important. ⁵⁶But now we need this extra level of granularity because what we realized was we're using these climate models, we're using all this property data, we know generally what properties look like, and yet we're still losing billions and billions of dollars every year when a disaster hits. ⁵⁷

So that gap has been something very interesting to us for a long time. And what we kind of realized was it all comes down to quantifying property risk. From our perspective, we took the approach of quantifying resilience, AKA survivability of a property. ⁵⁸

How Does FauraCalculate a Property's Survivability Score?

Valkyrie: What we do on that front is essentially we work with traditional climate models, and we built our own survivability models for any given property in the US. ⁵⁹ So we can say, send us an address. You know this property is high risk based off of your traditional climate vendors. ⁶⁰We will tell you whether or not this property will actually survive a disaster if it does come in contact. ⁶¹So instead of using all that information and having it be a pretty inefficient process, you can just use a Faura survivability score and report that says, for these high risk properties, these are more likely to survive, these are less likely to survive. ⁶²And for the ones that have lower scores, here are all the things you really have to worry about on that property. ⁶³

Valkyrie: Let's say we have two properties in a neighborhood that are both extremely high risk properties. ⁶⁴Normally, an insurance company might exclude both of these because it's too high risk. ⁶⁵Or you insure both of them at a really high premium. ⁶⁶Instead of giving them both a similar rate, we would say property A has a 65% survivability, and property B is like a 25% survivability. ⁶⁷So that gives you more range on what you could pass through as a viable structure and how you can price more effectively. ⁶⁸

Valkyrie: In addition to that, it's not just about the overall survivability, it's also about damageability. ⁶⁹For that property A with 65% survivability, we can say the roof score is around an 85%, so that's pretty good. ⁷⁰But the foundation score is like a 15%. ⁷¹So now as an underwriter, you know the foundation is going to be the biggest issue that I'm looking for on this property that I can use to make that decision a lot more efficient. ⁷²We do that for wildfire, hail, flood, hurricane and a bunch of other perils. ⁷³

Dalton: And question about the foundation example. How would you determine that? 74Is that from images that are coming back and being processed? 75Or are there different attributes that you're looking at? 76

Valkyrie: Yeah, so it depends on the tool the insurance company is using. ⁷⁷ We have a couple different tools. There's a couple that are purely based off of property data that we ingest ourselves. ⁷⁸For the foundation in a lot of cases, especially for something like wildfire, it's going to be things like defensible space, what the foundation is built out of, whether or not there is any flammable material that's in that zero to five foot area of the home. ⁷⁹There are things that you can get from on the ground views that you can't get from a traditional satellite and aerial vendor. ⁸⁰So we're using on the ground and up in the air imagery to get the most holistic view of the property. ⁸¹We also have a digital assessment tool. ⁸²So you as a policyholder get a text, and then you walk around your property and collect all the information we need to calculate a survivability score and the report. ⁸³

The Challenge of Outdated Data in Underwriting

Dalton: One thing that we have in insurance in general, is that the data we're possibly doing an analysis on is five years old. ⁸⁴The images that you're getting from the satellite vendor might be a year old, or if there was recently just a large event, it might be two weeks, but a lot of times it's quite dated. ⁸⁵And so what the environment looks like on the property is substantially different than what you're underwriting to. ⁸⁶If you are trying to determine if you could write the property or not and their data is old, then you're necessarily missing out maybe on good risk or risk that you don't want. ⁸⁷ And I think that's what you're trying to get at is we've got updated data. This is what the property really looks like. Here's your actual risk versus what you expected it to be. ⁸⁸

Valkyrie: Yeah, it kind of goes a couple of different ways. ⁸⁹The first way is the idea that you can find more business that you would have completely overlooked otherwise. ⁹⁰If you're just relying on a typical climate model and you get an extreme risk score on a property, for most people, they would exclude those properties. ⁹¹But if they actually factored in the structure information, then they would see there is quite a bit of business here that has mitigation work that is less likely to burn down that we find not only more profitable but higher margin for us. ⁹²So not only are you getting homeowners more insurance policies, but now you have more profitable business that continues to renew year over year. ⁹³

Finding New Business vs. Reducing Losses

Valkyrie: And then the second piece of it is kind of the reduction in losses. ⁹⁴For a while, my pitch was very much like, you can find more business in these areas that you overlooked previously. ⁹⁵And while that does resonate, we take the example of when the LA wildfires happened, no one's talking about all of the business that they found that did survive. ⁹⁶Everyone's talking about the business that caused them to pay out billions of dollars in losses. ⁹⁷So now we focus much more on if you know what the survivability of properties is, then that helps you reduce your potential losses by incentivizing policyholders to reduce their risk and stay more profitable. ⁹⁸

Dalton: Yeah, it's a good point. ⁹⁹Just insurance in general, it's very finicky and all over the place. ¹⁰⁰The frequency and severity of storms of any peril from wildfire to hurricanes or tornadoes is greatly increased over the last 10 to 15 years. ¹⁰¹

Valkyrie: I made a very deliberate effort to stay away from saying that we're like a climate change company, mostly because regardless of how you think things are happening, the world is getting warmer or colder depending on where you are, weather patterns are changing, and that is impacting us monetarily. ¹⁰²

It was a big no-no for a lot of early insure techs to go to insurance companies that have been around for hundreds of years and say, we can underwrite better than you. It got a lot of people upset about insure tech. And at the end of the day, that's not what we're saying. ¹⁰³

Valkyrie: We know that companies have the data that they need to make these decisions, but it's about making it more actionable and making it easier for us to make these decisions and standardizing that. ¹⁰⁴

How To Become an Expert in a New Industry

Dalton: You're very knowledgeable about insurance. How did you prepare to become an expert, or at least knowledgeable enough to understand the problem and communicate to executives? ^105105105105

Valkyrie: Yeah, it was very much me going into it with a completely open mind. ¹⁰⁶Again, it's about being really obsessed with a problem. ¹⁰⁷The problem was, our properties are not built to withstand disasters and we need to do something about it. ¹⁰⁸So I basically just started reaching out to people. ¹⁰⁹Originally, I was just reaching out to a bunch of people from a bunch of different roles to learn anything and everything about insurance. ¹¹⁰I read a bunch of books, I watched a bunch of videos, listened to podcasts. ¹¹¹So that was the first stage, just whoever would spend any time with me. ¹¹²

Valkyrie: The second thing was repurposing a lot of the conversations I had and turning it into content. ¹¹³We grew a ton on LinkedIn. ¹¹⁴I started posting virtually every day about two years ago now. ¹¹⁵Originally it was a way for me to post about what we were doing and our progress and just building in public. ¹¹⁶Then it started to become more of a lead generator for us because now all of a sudden I had a call with someone, they talked about something, I researched it, I repurposed what I researched and turned it into a post. ¹¹⁷I figured if I could talk about insurance in a way that made sense to me and made sense to other people, then I knew the concept way more than if I had just left it in my head. ¹¹⁸

From Vortex Cannons to a Wildfire Subreddit

Dalton: I'm wondering how you repurposed your original brainchild, the Firefly, and how you repurposed that to help build a company that deals with understanding catastrophic weather risk. ¹¹⁹

Valkyrie: Yeah, I've been in wildfire for quite a long time now. ¹²⁰The first company that I ever started was with my good friend, Jesse. ¹²¹We had done a project back in school that was specifically focused on wildfire risk, specifically on drone technology. ¹²²We approached it from this idea that we have to keep people out of harm's way. ¹²³ So how do we reduce the risk for frontline workers? And then how do we improve the current methods? ¹²⁴What we found was if we use drones equipped with these things called vortex cannons, that minimizes the amount of water we need to use because it's just using the outside atmosphere and blowing it into the fire. ¹²⁵

Valkyrie: But we slowly realized that suppression isn't really—there's a lot of people focusing on suppression and not very many people focusing on mitigation. ¹²⁶A big part of me kind of hopping off of that was the fact that it wasn't really solving the root cause of our issue. ¹²⁷Moving into Faura, I actually found my co-founder on a wildfire subreddit. ¹²⁸ I was posting about what I wanted to do and she responded to me. She was training to be a wildfire EMT at the time. ¹²⁹I roped her back into tech. ¹³⁰She's been in tech for over a decade, done work for Apple, Target, Godiva, and was one of the first Apple developers on the App Store. ¹³¹We sketched out the first MVP of the product and then just kept building from there and incorporated before we ever actually met each other. ¹³²

Navigating the Challenges of Fundraising and Startup Life

Dalton: Congratulations on the funding round. That's awesome. ¹³³For people that don't know how fundraising works, can you give them a couple of sentences on what it's like? ¹³⁴

Valkyrie: Yeah, with startups, I think it's important to realize that you are doing something very unconventional and that people will love you and not like you for that. ¹³⁵Starting a company in general is pretty wild and hard and there's going to be a lot of things that pop up that you don't really expect. ¹³⁶

But from my perspective, if you are united with other people in building something that's meaningful, then it makes it really worth it. If you care about the problem and you want to find the best solution and you want to surround yourself with people that want to find the best solution, then it starts to really move fast. ^137137137137

But I think it's also important to note that startups are hard and they move really fast, faster than you can really ever imagine. I get overwhelmed a good amount of the time. 138

Valkyrie: It will be unmaintainable for a long time before it is maintainable. ¹³⁹I worked in startups for five years before I felt stable and had a social life and could do whatever I wanted to do while also growing the company. ¹⁴⁰So it's definitely trial and error. ¹⁴¹

Using Data To Prove Value and Close Deals

Dalton: How do you convince someone that isn't necessarily on board right away? ¹⁴²When you have a lead, how are we closing? ¹⁴³

Valkyrie: From my perspective, it's really all about data. ¹⁴⁴I will do my typical pitch of here's how we help, here's how we integrate. ¹⁴⁵ We do a couple of demos. That's all felt well and good. You understand what we do. ¹⁴⁶Now here's how it's worked for other companies. ¹⁴⁷I typically go through a number of studies that we have and we walk through all the individual data sets. ¹⁴⁸

We can predict survivability with 95% accuracy now. So it's pretty high. And once people see that, I think they start to understand how this really impacts them. ¹⁴⁹

Dalton: Yeah, it's always good when you could provide that. ¹⁵⁰ It's very actionable. As you said, it is one of the best metrics, especially for a catastrophic risk, that you know that it would likely survive. ¹⁵¹

The Final Hurdle: Educating the Homeowner

Dalton: How do we get the consumer educated? ¹⁵²How do we get the homeowner and the customer educated in understanding how survivable their actual home is? ¹⁵³

Valkyrie: For homeowners, it's just about education first. ¹⁵⁴If we let people know what their risk is, that's a first step. ¹⁵⁵Most people don't know what their risk is to start. ¹⁵⁶Afterwards is about giving people the resources they need to streamline that process. ¹⁵⁷So for homeowners, if you say, hey, your property is at risk, you're at risk of losing your most valuable asset and everything in it, that gets certain people to move just as a function of learning about it. ¹⁵⁸Insurance is kind of this enforcement mechanism that can help people realize that this is a big deal and that this impacts more than just them losing their home. ¹⁵⁹It could be losing their home because they lost their insurance policy, and their mortgage relies on that. ¹⁶⁰

Dalton: All right, I'll let you go and I'll close out the episode. ¹⁶¹Thank you for being on the show Valkyrie and hope you have a great day. ¹⁶²

Valkyrie: Thank you so much, Dalton. ¹⁶³

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Faura
• 776 Fellowship
• Y Combinator
• InsureTech Connect (ITC)
• LinkedIn
• Reddit
• NASA
• Apple
• Target
• Godiva

INDEX OF CONCEPTS

Valkyrie Holmes, Dalton Anderson, Faura, 776 Fellowship, vortex cannons, environmental resilience, property resilience, survivability score, insuretech, climate tech, defensible space, underwriting, Y Combinator, reinsurance, NASA, Jesse Pound, Amanda Southworth, Apple, Target, Godiva, InsureTech Connect, ITC, LinkedIn, Reddit