Most people think insurance is boring. But what if it’s the best tool we have to protect our communities from wildfire?
That’s the idea behind Stand, an insurance company that models property-level risk to protect homes from wildfires, hurricanes, and other climate-driven disasters.
In this episode of Disasterproof, Bill joins Stand CEO and founder Dan Preston at a customer’s home in California wine country to see what this model looks like in practice.
The wildfire problem is also a housing problem
“Insurance availability in California has become more and more challenging as we have more of these wildfires,” Dan says.
As disasters get more frequent and more expensive, insurers are pulling back from high-risk markets. That breaks a lot more than insurance. Most buyers need coverage to get a mortgage. No coverage means stalled sales, falling property values, and builders who stop building.
When insurance breaks down, the housing market breaks down with it.
Redefining the role of insurers
Insurance has traditionally been reactive. A disaster happens, a homeowner files a claim, and the insurer helps pay for the damage.
Stand asks a different question of the insurance industry: what if insurers helped prevent the damage?
The company models the physical risks facing an individual property, recommends targeted improvements, and connects those improvements to coverage. If the home survives a wildfire, the homeowner, insurer, lender, and surrounding community all benefit.
“If we can build a system where it is less expensive to make your home safer and get insurance,” Dan says, “it should lead to a much safer world.”
How a house actually burns
Stand frames wildfire risk as two questions: will fire reach your home, and will your home burn once it gets there?
On the second question, homes ignite in two ways. Radiant heat from nearby flames can catch the exterior. More often, wind-driven embers get in through vents, under decks, into gutters, and the fire starts from within.
Every firefighter learns this: the embers get more homes than the flame front does.
That’s why there’s no universal checklist. The house, the landscaping, the terrain, and the wind all interact as one system. Stand builds a 3D model of each property and uses computational fluid dynamics to simulate how fire would actually move across the land, then finds the likely points of failure and tests fixes before recommending them.
Resilience doesn’t mean bulldozing the garden
The simplest way to eliminate wildfire risk would be to cut down every tree and pour concrete. Nobody wants to live that way, and it turns out you don’t have to.
One Stand customer had a century-old olive tree planted by their grandfather. Rather than remove it, Stand found other ways to cut the risk: clearing the brush beneath it and hardening the nearby parts of the home.
Same with wooden decks. The danger often isn’t the deck — it’s the debris that collects underneath and ignites when the embers arrive. Fixing that costs hundreds of dollars, not the tens of thousands it takes to replace a deck.
From wildfires to hurricanes
Stand started with insuring high wildfire risk homes in California, but the same approach applies to other disasters.
In Florida, the company models how hurricane winds load a roof, where debris might strike, and what happens if a home’s exterior is breached. Different hazard, same question: what fails first, and what can we change now?
“A dollar spent on mitigation is going to be more impactful than a dollar spent on insuring your home,” Dan says.
At Convective we call this concept the Franklin Ratio. Ben Franklin wrote "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" in The Pennsylvania Gazette on February 4, 1735 — and he wrote it about fire safety, urging Philadelphians to clean their chimneys and handle hot coals carefully so towns didn't burn down. (Ben Franklin also founded America's oldest property insurance company, so he was talking his book.)
We believe Stand is building one of the most important companies in resilience, but most importantly, we just want fewer houses to burn.
Watch or listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
Thank you. Chat with Shane Smith at Alera