Make no mistake, COVID-19 is a disaster of epic proportions: Team Rubicon CEO Jake Wood

Jake Wood, co-founder and CEO of Team Rubicon, joins The Final Round to discuss his organization's shift from natural disaster relief to assisting with COVID-19 relief efforts including PPE delivery and fundraising with a wide range of organizations.

Video Transcript

JEN ROGERS: You've probably heard of Team Rubicon before. They work on disaster relief. They mobilize veterans to continue their service, leverage their skills to give back. But you've probably heard of them more when it's related to maybe a hurricane or Superstorm Sandy. Right now, they are getting involved in the fight for COVID-19.

And I want to bring in Jake Wood. He is co-founder and CEO of Team Rubicon. So Jake, again, when I initially think of Team Rubicon, I'm thinking disaster relief-- filling sandbags, delivering water. What are you doing in this pandemic right now?

JAKE WOOD: Yeah, sure. Well, thank you, first, for having me on. And you're right. Team Rubicon has really made a name for itself over the last decade for having served in places like hurricanes, and tornadoes, and wildfires. But make no mistake, COVID-19 is a disaster of epic proportions, and this is a "whole of America" crisis that requires a "whole of America" response.

Team Rubicon pivoted our operations very early to get into this fight. We repositioned our emergency medical teams to open up hospitals in both northern California and on Navajo Nation, where we continue to serve one of the most vulnerable populations in America. We've been running mobile testing sites in North Carolina, and now most recently in California in conjunction with an Alphabet portfolio company called Verily.

And we've also partnered with Feeding America and their food banks across the country, helping to supplant or supplement their operations and logistics teams to make sure that we're getting food support to those people who are most vulnerable.

MYLES UDLAND: And you know, Jake, you talk about how this is clearly a disaster. It's just not the kind we're used to, right? Hurricane happens, you know what needs to be done-- how to get there, who you need to contact. How long did it take for you guys to kind of get your heads around what was needed and what your process could be like to be most effective in each of these different areas?

JAKE WOOD: Yeah. Well, you know, we do respond internationally, as well, so we were tracking this virus as it was making its way through China and trying to anticipate how we might be able to respond, thinking that that would only be necessary internationally. When this thing made the jump to the United States, we immediately reorganized the entire infrastructure of our team into task forces to rapidly develop new capabilities in order to address this head-on.

You know, I'll give you a good example. We launched our first efforts in the opening week of the lockdowns nationwide. And you know, we put out a very hasty playbook for how we were going to approach that situation. That playbook has been revised nearly 50 times over the course of the last eight weeks. That just shows you how quickly we are learning lessons and rapidly implementing those lessons learned into our operations manual to continue to improve the response that we're having.

- And Jake, I've heard you talk to a few times already about how you've had to evolve or adjust very quickly to this pandemic, in comparison to kind of the natural disasters you would have responded to. But I'm curious what has struck you about how different this challenge is. You know, is it about the people that you're serving? Is it about the way in which you have to go about, given that you don't want to worry about the virus spreading?

AKIKO FUJITA: I mean, what has stood with you in terms of how difficult this is, compared to what you've responded to before?

JAKE WOOD: Yeah, great question, Akiko. I think that every disaster is defined by its chaos, its ambiguity, its lack of resources. And those are things that, as military veterans, many of us became familiar with working in on the battlefield. And so this organization has become very adept at navigating those environments. But I think what we found here was this pandemic brought a level of ambiguity and complexity that we had not seen before, and I don't think any agency in the US had quite seen before.

And remember, this is the first time in our history that all 54 states and territories in the US are under an emergency declaration. So this is as unprecedented in scale as we've ever seen anything.

RICK NEWMAN: Jake, it's Rick Newman. How do you decide where to go? This is not like a hurricane that hits one place on a map and one place only. There are hotspots popping up everywhere, and it changes. Urgency changes. We had the Navy hospital ships. One of them went to New York City, and it turned out not to be really needed, for example. So how do you figure out where to go?

JAKE WOOD: Yeah, another great question. You know, we can't boil the ocean here. We ultimately put out a form that allowed agencies at a local, state, or federal level to request Team Rubicon's assistance through formal channels. We've had nearly 300 of those requests for assistance over the last eight weeks. We've responded to nearly 200 communities across the country.

As an organization, we always prioritize the most vulnerable people. So that's either going to be based off of income level. In this situation with COVID-19, it could be vulnerability specific to their susceptibility to the virus. I spoke earlier about the work that we're doing establishing a hospital and an ambulance corps on Navajo Nation.

You know, again, this is the largest Native American reservation in the United States, and a truly impoverished community, truly vulnerable, and the highest fatality rate outside of the tri-state area. So this was critical for us to direct our resources to a place like that.

JEN ROGERS: Hey, Jake, how do you decide when you're done? I mean, is there a rule of thumb when you have a regular-- I mean, I hate to say regular natural disaster-- but a hurricane, you say, OK, team. We're going to be in here. It usually takes x amount of time and then we'll be moving on. What are you thinking around this pandemic? What is your timeline?

JAKE WOOD: Well, in a regular disaster-- and I agree, there's no good word for that-- we typically stay in a community until the work is done or until our resources have been exhausted. And every situation is different. I mean, here with COVID-19, we are planning for the long haul. I think that anybody that is trying to predict how long this lasts is a fool.

If we are listening to the experts, they do not know how long this is going to last. So we are moving in. To use some military parlance, we're getting out our entrenching tool. We're digging our foxholes. We think it's going to be a long fight. We anticipate being in this fight for as long as is necessary. And we're making the necessary structural changes to our organization to allow us to sustain that level of operations for as long as it's needed.

JEN ROGERS: And part of sustaining is raising necessary funds, and you have some partnerships on Wall Street. Goldman Sachs Wealth Management has been working with Team Rubicon. Can you tell us a little bit about that relationship? David Solomon himself jumped on a Zoom party and made a big donation to you guys.

JAKE WOOD: That's right. I don't know if you've heard, but this father-daughter duo out here in Los Angeles, Richie Whites and his daughter, Demi, have been hosting these private Zoom events with all of these amazing musicians over the last couple of weekends. And about two weeks ago, Goldman Sachs Wealth Management sponsored one of those concerts for us.

And David hopped on. The firm committed $150,000, and rallied 500 of their high net-worth clients, who were on the call listening to John Legend, and Rick Springfield, and all these other amazing musicians-- rallied them, and in total, we raised over $500,000 at the event, which is just amazing.

JEN ROGERS: Wow. Well, Jake Wood, thank you for all the good work you're doing, that Richard and Demi are doing. Everybody is getting involved, and it's great to get a chance to talk with you about Team Rubicon.

JAKE WOOD: Yeah. Thank you for having me on. It was a pleasure.

JEN ROGERS: All right. Good luck. Hopefully we'll talk in the end when there's a--

JAKE WOOD: Absolutely.

JEN ROGERS: --lull in your work, if there ever is.

JAKE WOOD: I'll come on and give you stock tips next time.

JEN ROGERS: Exactly. [LAUGHS] We'd like that.