From Firefighter to Tech CEO
By Tanner Osterkamp
I didn't go to Stanford. I didn't intern at a startup in my twenties. I spent my twenties running medical calls, fighting structure fires, and learning how to stay calm when everything around me was chaos. I'm an active firefighter and paramedic, and I also run multiple tech companies. People always ask how those two things connect. The honest answer is that the fire service taught me almost everything I use as a CEO.
The Fire Service Is a Systems Problem
Most people see firefighting as physical, reactive work. Show up, put the wet stuff on the red stuff, go home. The reality is that fire and EMS operations are deeply systematic. Protocols, incident command, resource management, triage — it's all structured decision-making under pressure with incomplete information.
That's also a pretty accurate description of running a startup.
When I started building software, I didn't have a CS degree to lean on. What I had was a decade of experience making decisions with imperfect data, managing risk, and executing under time pressure. Turns out those skills translate directly.
Building What I Knew
My first real product came from frustration. I watched crews — myself included — fumble through protocol binders on scene. The information existed, but the delivery mechanism was stuck in the 1990s. So I built Protocol Guide, an app that puts county EMS protocols on a phone screen where they belong.
I didn't build it because I saw a market opportunity. I built it because I lived the problem every shift. That's the advantage of building from domain expertise — you don't have to guess what users need because you are the user.
From there, things expanded. JudgeFinder came from noticing how opaque the legal system is for regular people trying to find information about courts and judges. TheFireDev grew out of other businesses asking me to build what I'd built for myself. Each project started the same way: a real problem I either experienced or watched someone else struggle with.
What the Fire Service Teaches You About Building
Three things transfer directly. First, urgency without panic. On the fire ground, urgency saves lives but panic kills people. In business, urgency ships products but panic leads to bad decisions. Learning to operate at high speed without losing clarity is the single most valuable skill I brought from the firehouse to the office.
Second, team trust. On a fire engine, you depend on your crew completely. You don't micromanage the nozzle operator while you're running the pump. You trust them because you trained together. Building a company works the same way — hire right, set expectations, then get out of the way.
Third, after-action reviews. The fire service does post-incident critiques without ego. What worked, what didn't, what do we change. That same mindset applied to product development accelerates learning faster than any methodology.
No Punchline
There's no inspirational arc here. I'm still a firefighter. I still run calls. I also write code and run companies. The two lives inform each other in ways I didn't expect when I started. The fire service made me a better builder, and building software made me a better problem solver on scene. That's it.