Episode 35
January 5, 2021

Putting Out Fires

with Bailey Farren, Co-Founder and CEO of Perimeter

About this episode

Bailey Farren is the Co-Founder and CEO of Perimeter. Perimeter is a real time disaster visualization and collaboration platform for public safety agencies. The Perimeter platform allows first responders to map incidents in real time, gain access to information posted by other emergency personnel, and issue alerts to the public. As the daughter of both a firefighter and a paramedic, Bailey realized the challenges that first responders face in using paper maps to navigate their way to fires and other emergency incidents. Inspired to help solve this problem and bring public safety agencies into the 21st century, Bailey started Perimeter in 2019. She talks with us about her take on what it means to be an entrepreneur, how she thinks about leadership, and what it's like selling to government agencies.

This episode is sponsored by

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In This Episode You’ll Hear About:

  • How being homeschooled in a house and neighborhood full of kids gave Bailey a love for learning and time to be creative, while also getting lots of experience in seeing how her parents’ jobs as first responders mattered and affected them
  • Why she loved her time at Santa Rosa JC and then UC Berkeley, providing more opportunities for her love of learning and earned her the nickname, Leslie Knope
  • How she started college studying rhetoric and added cognitive science after a summer entrepreneurship program that took her abroad where she learned how important it is to have skills of empathy and understanding people when it comes to running a successful business 
  • How she got the job at Anodot, even without being qualified, and why that was such a rich learning experience and growth opportunity for her that would be so valuable as she began Perimeter
  • Why selling cookies door to door as a kid, going through Rejection Therapy during her summer abroad entrepreneurship program in college, and going to business door to door with Anodot built her confidence and her ability to be comfortable with rejection and how that has helped her as a Founder today
  • How she began to research geospatial information and what was available to first responders after her family was evacuated during the Tubbs fire of 2017 and found the alarming truth that they did not have updated systems in place to provide the geo information they needed
  • How fundraising looks different for a company like Perimeter, what has worked for Bailey already in her pre-seed round, and what answers to questions she has already prepared as she confidently goes into her next fundraising round soon
  • Why their vision as a company is not just about the big emergencies but also the day to day basic medical emergencies and common scenarios as well, so that first responders are provided with the best real time geospatial information available to keep them and their communities more safe consistently 
  • What Bailey has learned as a Founder and how important it is to keep pressing forward with big vision goals as well as smaller incremental ones so that you can accomplish things quickly, especially in difficult situations such as COVID

To Find Out More:

PerimeterPlatform.com 

Quotes:

“Being able to empathize with your customers, understand their pain points, and understand what they need is so important. And it's really not a skill that many people talk about when they talk about what it means to be an entrepreneur.”

“I think what it means to be an entrepreneur is to be someone who pays so much attention to their environment that they recognize when the status quo isn't good enough for people who are being affected.”

“There's always a reason behind why someone is gritty and why they're resilient. And I think if you feel the pain of your user, you really understand where they are coming from.”

“As a Founder, outreach has to be a major skill set of yours. And that could be reaching out to customers. It could be reaching out to the venture capitalists and angel investors that you need to work with or even recruiting new talent.”

“First responders are primarily relying on paper maps and radios to contain some of the biggest wildfire, floods, hurricanes, tornado incidents that we've ever seen.”

“You can't overwhelm someone with information that isn't relevant when what they need is to respond.”

“I would know whether or not I chose something to be kind of safe and comfortable for me, or knowing that I did everything I could to protect the lives and livelihoods of the communities that are so affected by wildfires and other disasters.”

“We're sending them to these fires with World War II technology. And we can and we have to do better than that.”

“The government is the largest buyer of goods and services in the world. And so some of my earlier investors, I think when they started to hear about the work that we were doing, I think a lot of them got pretty excited.”

“I think there's a big difference for us between operating tactically versus operating strategically.”

“If you're not willing to get out there and do something imperfectly, then you don't stand a chance at creating the thing and having the impact that you want to have.”

“You don't lose when you get knocked down. You lose when you stop standing up.”

“I think one of the most important things about achieving those larger goals have to do with being able to break it down and set my mile markers that we can see that we can immediately achieve.”


Read the transcript

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