Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
Disasters are growing in frequency and severity, but the systems designed to help people recover haven’t kept up. Bright Harbor empowers communities to recover from disaster. Their platform reveals what survivors need, launches programs that get aid moving quickly, and coordinates every stakeholder so a community can work as one. Their mission is to help every disaster survivor find their way home. Bright Harbor puts survivors at the center of recovery and gives the governments serving them real-time visibility into their communities’ progress.
Founder and CEO, Joel Wish is a serial entrepreneur and early-stage investor. Bright Harbor began when Joel’s friend Bill lost his house in the Marshall Fire and he saw firsthand the struggle Bill went through to recover. For Joel, it became painfully obvious that one of the most tangible human impacts of climate change is the devastation left behind by natural disasters. He saw that communities needed better tools to navigate recovery and that every survivor deserves a clear path home.
What’s Bright Harbor’s North Star?
Our mission is to help EVERY disaster survivor find their way home. Every is a really critical word for us. It means building a platform that reaches everyone. There are so many barriers to getting help and certain people are not being reached. Some issues are demographic and sociographic, but others are structural blind spots in data and programs, like how small disasters don’t get federal assistance and the states don’t have money to support them.
What sets Bright Harbor apart?
Our team is absolutely incredible. We’ve done a really good job finding people who are true generational talents, that are passionate about the mission and live up to our leadership principles. We have a number of people on the team who were early hires at huge tech wins such as Airtable, Lemonade and Corvus. We also have the former Administrator of FEMA who literally ran the country’s COVID response in the first Trump administration.
Beyond the team, what really sets us apart is our experience working directly with survivors. We’ve spent the past two years working 1:1 with thousands of survivors, helping them navigate forms, insurance, government programs, and the emotional challenges of recovery. That firsthand experience gives us a deep understanding of where the system breaks down and allows us to build better experiences for survivors while helping governments make better decisions about how recovery programs are designed.
Tell us about a recent milestone that Bright Harbor crushed.
We recently deployed in a state experiencing an active fire at extraordinary speed. The state contacted us on a Saturday, contracted with us on Sunday, and was live on Monday. The first survivors entered our system within 48 hours. That is the kind of speed disaster recovery requires. When people have lost their homes, they need to receive help as soon as possible.
How does Bright Harbor inspire ‘customer love’?
For the survivors, we’ve finally brought a consumer-level experience designed for people going through trauma to them. They don’t need to tell their story to 27 different people. They tell our system that information once and we’re able to relay that to dozens of systems and provide a level of “it just works” that nothing else they are dealing with has. For governments, we’re giving them access to insights they genuinely never had, and reminding them why they do this work. I’ve seen a remarkable number of government officials cry (in a good way!) about the types of help they can finally offer their survivors.
What inspires you as a founder?
I started building at a young age, and once I saw that I could take an idea from my head and turn it into something real, there was no going back. I find the process addictive: imagining something, building it, and then hearing from someone you do not know that it truly helped them.
That moment, when a user says, “Wow, I love this,” is what keeps me building. I want to create things that are real, useful, and meaningful to people’s lives.
Fun fact:
I’m the father of twin daughters, who appeared in an H-E-B commercial last year that was featured during the Super Bowl.
From the archives: Listen to Joel Wish with Jenny Fielding on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Bright Harbor Amid Natural Disasters. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!
