Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

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>Not much money to be made by saving lives, health, and billions of dollars in infrastructure damage?

I think you are confusing the money that can be lost due to damage from a fire being a large number compared to the amount of money available to spend on fire fighting itself. A private company in business to make money does not care about the money saved from things not being damaged. Insurance companies have an interest in that.

The only way for fire tech to make money would be to come up with an extremely vile scheme to ensure people used their services. Fire tech could extort insurance companies/private owners a percentage of their property's value in order to save their home from the fires. You'd then see door to door sales people using phrases like "it'd be a shame if something were to happen to this lovely home of yours". Some distopian level of society where your house is actively worked to prevent it from burning, but you neighbors house is now a pile of burning embers because they weren't a member while the team working your house stands there and watches.

If the space race can be disrupted then so too can this one.

Space was government only until very recently.

There is money to be made in lifting things out of the gravity well. It's an obvious pile of cash to go after. Comparing the two is a bit disingenious.

No money to be made by saving lives, infrastructure, and air quality?

You asked the question that I've already provided my line of thinking on, so why don't you share you're line of thinking on where that money is to be made?

There's money to be made of course. Tech could be used to help with home defense first, then neighborhoods, then could be scaled from there.

If you actually had a solution in hand for even small scale fires that was effective and could scale you easily make this profitable. I'd be the first customer. I live in a fire prone area.

Fear sells.

Everything that needs to be done can be mostly be done cheap and now... And people don't do it.

We've had very good idea of how houses burn for 30+ years and we keep designing things that are built to burn.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/

That's great that you've identified the very obvious service, but you've failed to identify the source of income. Who's going to pay for this service? Insurance companies? Bwahahahahah. Not a chance. Individual homeowners? They don't even pay for insurance. Renters? Nope. What about commercial? Those are also all renters, so why would they pay for something when they could piggyback off of any of the other tennants paying for the service? Landlords? Hell, they won't pay to for the most basic of service unless forced.

So you're panacea of if they build it, they will come isn't as realistic as you are hoping.

Edit: Also, you'd better have one hell of a legal team to draft up some BS ToS to protect from when ultimately your firefighting efforts fail. One lost property, and your valuation drops to 0.

Amazon and SpaceX were not profitable when started and remained unprofitable for many years.

Our collective heart is in the right place. I have my own plans to do something about it but I am not in the same position as say Elon Musk for example. Not yet anyway ;)

I am in tech however. And I believe passionately that tech can solve this problem. Even if it is just a symptom of global climate change.

I think we must start solving these problems fast and with novel approaches. The same old tired routine isn't working. We've kicked the can enough down the road with government and fire prevention. New ideas and methods are needed and needed fast.

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