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Entrepreneurs for Impact

The Leading Flood Mapping Platform — Bessie Schwartz, CEO of Cloud to Street

Oct 20, 2022
41:34

My guest today is Bessie Schwartz, the Co-founder & CEO of Cloud to Street.

Cloud to Street is the leading flood mapping platform designed to protect the world’s most climate-vulnerable communities.

By harnessing global satellites, advanced science, and community intelligence, they monitor worldwide floods in near real-time and remotely analyze local flood exposure at a click of a button.

Their mission is to ensure that all vulnerable governments finally access the high-quality information they need to prepare for and respond to increasing catastrophes.

In addition, she is…

  • A Strategist - Yale Program on Climate Change Communication
  • An Echoing Green Climate Fellow
  • Research partner - Data-Pop Alliance - a global coalition on Big Data and development created by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, MIT Media Lab, and the Overseas Development Institute

In this episode, we talked about the following:

  • The relevance of her work to the recent flooding in Pakistan, leaving ⅓ of the country underwater
  • How flooding is the #1 climate-related weather impact
  • The history of their company 10 years ago in partnership with Google
  • The difference between information and motivation to make the right decision
  • Their business model of aligning incentives to help insurance companies underwrite more policies that accurately capture flood risk
  • The need to invest in climate adaption – which BoA estimates to be a $2T market in a few years – and not just climate mitigation
  • How they use 17 satellites, stratospheric balloon imaging, and drones to measure every square foot of the earth every day
  • What parametric flood insurance is a breakthrough for climate risk management
  • And lots more

Hope you enjoy!

And give Bessie and Cloud to Street a shoutout on LinkedIn or Twitter by sharing this podcast with your people.

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Entrepreneurs for Impact is on a mission to help climate innovators grow faster with new investment capital, share best practices among peers, expand their networks, and reach their full potential.

Learn more:

  • Climate CEO Mastermind Peer Groups — Our invite-only cohorts of 12 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls. Today’s highly curated Mastermind members represent over $8B in market cap or assets under management.
  • Newsletter — A 3-minute weekly summary of climate tech, startups, better habits, and deep work.

Programs are led by Dr. Chris Wedding — 3x founder, $1B of investment experience, and Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill professor, with 60,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself.

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