We Went to the Fire and Put It Out

Ross Puritty walked into a fire station and asked the crew a question. Do you have the same problem the military does? Do the lessons from your calls disappear the moment the huddle breaks?

They did. They told him that after big fires they talk it over, and if you aren’t in the huddle you never get the lessons. Then he asked to see an after-action report. The first one they showed him was from a major multi-alarm fire. The entire report said the department went to the fire and put it out.

Puritty is an Army veteran and West Point graduate who finished Yale Law School this past May. He recognized the fire station’s problem because the military has the same one. After a training exercise or a mission, a unit gathers and the most experienced NCOs and officers share what went right and wrong. But if you weren’t standing in that circle, you never hear it. And if you were, it was probably 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. “How much of that are you gonna actually remember?” he says. The information disappears because nobody writes it down.

He decided to fix that. Hotwash, the platform he built, captures after-action lessons by voice. A crew riding back to the station records what happened while it is fresh, in next to no time. By the next morning, the whole department can learn from it.

The fire service turned out to be the sharpest version of the problem. With separate stations and separate shifts, it is “particularly asynchronous,” he says, and it loses this kind of information even more than the military does. Retention issues, among other things, have left a seniority gap in the middle. The senior officers came up going to three fires a day. The younger firefighters stepping into leadership go to fewer, and modern materials in homes burn quicker.

“You don’t have that middle layer to pass some of these lessons down and share them,” he says, “but you also are going into pretty dangerous situations with people that don’t have as many reps as they have in the past.”

Hotwash is in 16 fire departments across seven states. Puritty started the company at the very beginning of 2025 with a classmate at Yale Law School who had been a wildland firefighter. After a big fire, his co-founder’s crew would stand around the truck and talk, with the conversation weighted toward the senior people. The younger firefighters didn’t say much, and nobody wrote anything down. Puritty recognized it from his own service. They started building immediately and stayed at it when his co-founder later went into practicing law.

Building Hotwash at Yale is a particular kind of contradiction. The joke at the law school, Puritty says, is that everybody keeps all their options open for as long as possible, and “you end up on a path where you don’t make any decisions at all, which is also not good.” He found himself drawn to entrepreneurship in a place designed to produce lawyers. But he describes it as risk-free. Practicing law would still be available if the company wasn’t a fit, and he was already deferring a salary to be in school. “It’s extra runway,” he says.

He graduated in May with the company already making money. This summer he brought on a CTO and co-founder, Chris McClelland, who built the platform out to work for really any industry. So far, that is the whole company.

The risk-free part was starting. Selling is harder. “It is an uphill battle to bring something to market that doesn’t yet exist,” he says. When he calls a fire chief and says he has an after-action review platform, the first response is “What is that?” A records management system is a category buyers understand, and the saying is that a replacement has to be ten times better to get anyone to switch. Chiefs also worry about buying software that nobody on the line wants to use.

“Fire chiefs don’t buy from Facebook ads,” he says. Word of mouth from departments already using Hotwash multiplies, and once a department is in, it provides “a little bit of a moat.”

You have to be very judicious about how you spend your time. “You know what you need to do? Go talk to your customers,” he says. “They’ll tell you what their problems are. Go build them something. They’ll tell you it sucks. Make it better.” The instinct he had to fight was the one he brought from law school, the research circle of needing to learn more before acting. “Just go try to do something.”

The best leadership he saw in the Army came from that same instinct to listen. His battalion commander in 2nd Battalion, Colonel Armstrong, ran each morning with someone he rated or senior rated. A new person every day for two or three months, and then he started over. “You just have to show people that you care, and people want to be heard,” Puritty says. That is the idea inside Hotwash too, he says. Give people a voice and a chance to improve the organization. Inside the company, te tries to do the same with Chris by checking in as much as he can, and the company runs after-actions of its own.

Veterans weighing entrepreneurship or law school call him, and he takes the calls. If they can get into a startup early, he says, that is a good path. Law school needs a good reason behind it, because “three years is a long time.” The conversations help him as well. “Those conversations are rejuvenating to me,” he says.

Outside of work, Puritty is trying to catch a striper. He has not succeeded. “I love fishing. I’m so bad at it,” he says. “I’ve caught a bunch of very small fish this summer, and I’ve been hunting to get a striper and I have not done it.” He fishes the surf around Boston without a boat, studying maps for rocks where they might be and trying to play the tides and the light.

“If I could get one of those,” he says, “that would be a great summer.”

Ross Puritty is the Founder and CEO of Hotwash, an after-action review platform that lets crews capture the lessons from an incident by voice and share them across a department. An Army veteran and West Point graduate, he earned his law degree from Yale Law School in 2026 while building the company. Hotwash is used by 16 departments across seven states, primarily fire departments.