Factory Reset - Resilience Edition feat. WindBorne and Seneca
We’re back with another Factory Reset, this time in partnership with Red Sky Summit Resilience Week featuring our special guests, WindBorne Systems and Seneca.
Factory Reset is a gathering series for founders, engineers, investors, and industrial leaders rebooting how the world gets built, moved, and powered. We're excited to build this community to trade ideas, make intros that lead to pilots, share who’s hiring for specific roles, shoot some pool, and unwind over drinks.
Join us for a special edition of Factory Reset as part of Resilience Week, a week of community-hosted events anchored by Red Sky Summit that brings together the people working on wildfire, grid, water, heat, flood, and insurance resilience.
This month we’re thrilled to feature John Dean (CEO of WindBorne Systems) and Stu Landesberg (CEO of Seneca) sharing the work their companies are doing to promote resilience across the built environment.
==
The Westly Group: a multi-stage VC firm founded in 2007 backing entrepreneurs transforming the world’s physical industries such as manufacturing, industrials, energy, supply chain, and other adjacent sectors making up more than 50 % of global GDP. We lead pre‑seed through early‑growth rounds with $500 K-$20 M checks and count nine IPOs and four multi‑billion‑dollar exits within our portfolio, including Tesla, Luminar, SentinelOne, and Procore. Our family of funds is anchored by industry leaders such as ABB, Alaska Airlines, Audi, Oshkosh, Bridgestone, Hitachi Energy, Trane, CNH, Xylem, State Farm, and dozens of energy developers and utilities.
J.P. Morgan: there’s always been an innovation economy - we just never put a name to it. Whether it was automobiles or artificial intelligence, every generation has had its own opportunities to disrupt. Founded in 1799, J.P. Morgan exists to financially empower high-growth companies that are shaping the present and building the future. We are committed to being the leading bank of the innovation economy - bringing together founders, startups, investors, and ideas. Find out how J.P. Morgan can help you build your future.
John Dean & WindBorne Systems: John Dean is a cofounder and CEO of WindBorne Systems. At WindBorne, he has leveraged his background in machine learning to build AI weather forecasts and autonomous balloon flight software. His passions are perhaps best embodied by his time as co-president of the Stanford Student Space Initiative, Stanford’s largest hands-on engineering group. He cares deeply about engineering, but is also fascinated by the ways human beings communicate and work together in different organizational forms.
WindBorne is a planetary intelligence company building the planetary nervous system. The company designs, manufactures, and operates the world’s only constellation of smart, long-duration sensing balloons that power the leading AI global weather forecasts. WindBorne's data is assimilated into government forecasting systems and used by government agencies alongside a growing base of commercial customers. Founded in Palo Alto and backed by Khosla Ventures and Galvanize, WindBorne is building the accuracy layer that modern weather forecasting has been missing. Learn more here.
Stu Landesberg & Seneca: Stu Landesberg is the Founder & CEO of Seneca, a resilience technology and infrastructure company that builds autonomous drones and AI-driven software to support firefighters, utilities, and landowners. Seneca's mission is to eliminate wildfire risk across 500 million acres in the US and allied nations by 2035. In 2025, Seneca announced the largest venture capital financing in fire technology history.
Prior to Seneca, Landesberg founded Grove Collaborative, a leading sustainable consumer product and technology company which he took public on the NYSE as CEO in 2022 for $1.7 billion. Under his leadership, Grove raised over $500 million, generated over $2 billion in revenue, and served over five million American households. Landesberg started his career at Lehman Brothers and TPG Capital, a private equity firm with over $250 billion in assets under management. Landesberg graduated magna cum Laude from Amherst College and lives in Marin County with his wife, three kids, and dog Wallace.