John Mills is co-founder and CEO of Watch Duty, a nonprofit service that alerts people of nearby wildfires and firefighting efforts in real time, provided by a team of over 200 wildland firefighters, dispatchers, first responders and reporters via the Watch Duty app. Mills has been developing software for over 30 years. He is an advisor to Convective Capital and Pano AI, both of which focus on wildfire. In 2012, he founded Zenput, focused on retail food services operations, and was CTO until its acquisition in 2022. Mills has also worked in senior digital engineering roles at Buyer’s Best Friend, Webtrends and Transpond, among others. He started Watch Duty after moving to Sonoma County off the grid in 2020 and finding that rural communities lacked information to make informed decisions about wildfires.