Watch Duty App Creator Says He’ll Never Pull an OpenAI

Watch Duty topped the Apple App Store charts on Wednesday, racking up nearly half a million downloads in just a day as three brutal wildfires raged in Southern California, killing at least five people and forcing thousands evacuate. The app provides users with the latest fire alerts in their area and has become a vital service for millions of users in the western United States battling the seemingly constant threat of deadly wildfires. This is one of the main reasons why the app recorded more than 360,000 unique visits between 8:00 and 8:30 a.m. local time Wednesday. And the man behind Watch Duty promises that, as a non-profit, his organization has no plans pull OpenAI and become a profit-seeking enterprise.

Watch Duty was created in 2021 by John Mills, founder and CEO, who was inspired to create the app after experiencing frightening wildfires in 2019 and 2020 near his home in Sonoma County, California. Mills, a technology entrepreneur who sold his company Zenput several years ago, said he couldn’t find the information he needed online and did extensive research on who would have the most up-to-date information. Mills evacuated his property during the 2020 Walbridge fire and decided he needed to take action.

“I spent day and night for eight days, just staying up all night, listening to the radio, surfing the Internet, and just realized this is a broken, broken problem,” Mills said. “And many of the people who helped me through that fire are now actually employees of my company.”

Mills said that these people were helping him solve his problems, and it took him about six more months before he realized that the same people who helped him were the key to this problem, because Watch Duty is not just a guy, who wrote the application code, although Mills did it himself. It’s a team of people who really make things work. Watch Duty covers 22 states and has 15 full-time employees, seven of whom are reporters who provide updates on the app, and dozens of volunteers.

“Surprisingly, it only took us about 80 days to get [Watch Duty] from the ground,” Mills said, noting that it is a fairly lightweight application. “Actually the key was the reporters themselves, the radio operators, right?”

Mills said he just needs to explain to people who might be working on the app that he’s not “some Silicon Valley tech bro trying to profit from a disaster,” but just a guy who’s worried about protecting his property during wildfires and thinks about it. may be useful to others. They launched in just three California counties in August 2021, but attracted 50,000 users in just a couple of weeks. Watch Duty had 7.2 million users last year, up from 1.9 million the year before.

“Engineering taught me engineering, but then as I got older, you realize if you build it, they won’t come, right?” said Mills. “Maybe why are you building this? Why does this matter, right? How to bring this to market? How can we actually use technology to change the world for the better?”

That’s when Mills fell in love. He told Gizmodo that it was all about getting emergency radio observers who had the latest information and putting what they knew into the app as reporters.

The organization was founded as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and is committed to being transparent about its finances and work in the public interest. The app is free, but users can sign up for additional features that are convenient but not vital to keeping people safe, such as information about where air tankers may be flying at any time.

Last year, Watch Duty received $2 million in revenue from 65,500 paying members, an additional $600,000 from individual donors and a $2 million grant from Google. The organization also received a $1 million grant from a wealthy businessman who chose to remain anonymous, Mills tells Gizmodo. The Watch Duty website has Annual report 2024 this shows where the money is going and what the organization’s goals are for 2025.

“We’re trying to find a way to create a sustainable nonprofit that supports the free version without having to do this terrible idea of, like, fundraising in December because you’re not going to do your budget in January and have a bunch of galas. and asking people for money,” Mills said.

In 2012, Mills founded Zenputa technology platform used by restaurants for inventory and scheduling, and sold the company in 2022. His father was both a carpenter and an IBM executive, which is one of the reasons he has worked with computers since childhood.

“I grew up in a wood shop with a computer, right? So, I’ve been writing code since I was eight years old. Before that, I grew up working with my hands. So a lot of my life is about technology,” Mills said. At eight years old, he was too young to work with the power tools his father used to make carpentry, so he “went on the computer and started hacking.”

Mills understands the gravity of what he has created and the vital resource that can be found in life-threatening situations. “When the Watch Duty turns off in your pocket, it’s because something bad is happening,” Mills said.

The app has gained recognition both locally in California and nationally, thanks to an invitation to the White House Innovation Roundtable last year. October 2024. The organization plans to expand its activities to other states and cover other types of natural disasters such as floods.

“We specifically call this company “Traffic Service” and not “Fire Service”, right? said Mills. “We knew from the very beginning that we were talking about geospatial issues. If people have to migrate, this is the business we want to be in.”

Mills promises that his nonprofit has no plans to switch from a for-profit model to something more profitable, as OpenAI recently did, raising a lot of eyebrows.

“Unlike OpenAI, we don’t change. We don’t sell. This is absurd behavior,” Mills said, describing OpenAI’s insidious corporate structure. “There are no shell companies. The corporation specifically doesn’t have another owner or anything.”