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Just a year ago, I was a firefighter speaking to a mentor about the vast difference between the level of training in our volunteer and professional departments. Why would the training at a volunteer department be different from the training at a fire station just down the road? And what about today’s technology in comparison to the technology of the fire service? Why is it possible to open an iPhone app that shows live satellite tracking of “singles” walking around the area of your local pubs, but we in the fire service cannot see where our fellow firefighters have taken their last steps? Why can’t I find critical life saving techniques on the Internet, when I can knock on the door of the firehouse down the street and easily find the answer from the words of a fellow firefighter? 

Last summer, just before the conversation with my mentor, I read a news article that quoted Bill Gates’ prediction that within five years the world’s best lectures would be online and they would be completely free. I asked my mentor, Sam Lanier, if he would be interested in sharing his 15-year career with the rest of the fire service, online and for free. My exact words were, “Sam, this is going to be a lot of work and I need your help. I know that you are a good person, you volunteer, and you go to Africa every year to help sick people. So, you can’t say no, because by not helping, people will die.” Sam looked somewhat stumped by this plea for help and replied, “Ok, I will help. I only have one question, how can we sustain free education?”

We turned to our friend Sondra Suazo to get to the bottom of a question that no group or government has successfully answered in the history of human existence, “How can we sustain a first-class education for anyone, anywhere, and make it 100% free?” We worked with Sondra to develop an educational platform based on what she called a “Social Enterprise” business model. Sondra is an MIT graduate who has worked in the tech industry.  Her unique background would prove to be a perfect fit for the FireWhat mission. She explained that her family’s non-profit organization, Bundles of Joy, was limited by inconsistent donations and that without countless unpaid hours of hard work, Bundles of Joy would not survive. A social enterprise however, can use profit from a business model to sustain its non-profit-like mission statement.

Here’s how it works: FireWhat Inc. provides a free platform where firefighters can share life saving techniques. Manufacturers and businesses are then encouraged to share life saving techniques and information too. Who knows more about products and how to use them than the people who invented them? FireWhat, firefighters, aspiring firefighters, EMS professionals, and supporters of firefighters use our advanced social media platform to rate and review educational content, positioning the creators of this free education as true experts in their industries. Who do you want to buy gloves from, the guy who showed you how to prevent third degree burns and what to look for in a glove make and fit, or the slightly cheaper glove manufacturer that ships right to your door from China?

FireWhat allows sponsors to show just how great they are by providing world-class trainings and education. Firefighters come to FireWhat to find the world’s best trainings and education and to help their fellow firefighters by sharing experiences that have saved and lost lives. FireWhat researches where the best information online is and points firefighters in the right direction with the most complex categorization of emergency service information. Various companies pay to advertise to this highly-engaged niche audience, thereby funding FireWhat’s free educational platform. BAM! Firefighters and sponsors are given the tools to create free education, companies advertise, and world-class free education is sustained.

Today, we have a unique platform that is different from any other website on the Internet. We have supported our educational sharing platform with over 1,500 emergency service categories. Each category will contain everything from YouTube videos to government documents. Imagine clicking on an educational topic and finding all the resources that are out there. Time wasted searching on Google is eliminated. This content is rated so that you know other firefighters value the information. If you think the content is terrible, you can rate it as terrible and add the link to quality content instead! If the content does not exist, we will inspire firefighters and manufacturers to create the content. Then, you can bring it all together and share it with fellow firefighters in the form of a “Lesson”, creating your very own custom, free firefighter education.

FireWhat will list all classes that cannot be completed online, such as fire academies and hands-on trainings. We will also list all firefighter job postings and advice to support our aspiring firefighters who want to help their community. FireWhat will lower the national cost of fire department spending by allowing all firefighters to participate in rating emergency service products (coming soon… very soon). Our most impressive feature is a live fire imagery and weather information-sharing platform. For the first time in history, firefighters will be able to see live satellite thermal imagery of fires, the weather that dictates where the fires will go, government information on the fires, and all forms of social media that allow users to communicate what the fire is actually doing.

How did the two firefighters and an MIT grad do it? By December of 2010, we realized that our prototype and business model had potential for something great. Sondra was being prepped for a promotion at CBS, a dream job for many Americans. So naturally, Sondra quit her job, cashed out her retirement and life savings, and became the fulltime FireWhat COO. I took a 6-month leave from the firehouse and worked on FireWhat full time. Upon returning to work, I was promoted and now work 100 plus hours a week as FireWhat’s CEO and as a fulltime professional Fire Apparatus Engineer.  Our third co-founder, Sam, continued to be a professional Fire Captain, lead college fire instructor, and full time FireWhat CSO. I’m not sure if Sam sleeps. We all took on personal loans and hired John and Karen, two great professional researchers who have started the process of finding life saving information. We also have a firefighter Research Analyst who works for free, thanks Ryan!

How is this really happening? The small snowball of free emergency service training and education has turned into an avalanche of support. On behalf of FireWhat, I would like to thank all of our supporters. Thank you to our official FireWhat Launch Sponsors: San Francisco Police Credit Union, FS3, and Supply Cache for proving that our social enterprise business model will work to sustain free education. Thanks to FireWhat’s advisors for your valuable time and for introducing us to the leaders of the fire service. Thank you to Weather Underground for a partnership that will immediately save lives with accurate fire behavior information. Thanks to all of our emergency responders who have and will share life saving techniques for free. Most importantly, thanks to all of our friends and family for supporting our dreams! Together, we have created a self-sustaining educational platform that will provide a world-class education to any emergency responder, anywhere.

Cordially,

Jeremy Orozco

FireWhat CEO