Last updated 7/18/2023.

My professional mission is to maximize my personal impact on mitigating climate change. Everything I do professionally is in pursuit of this north star and I often get asked why I am drawn to this mission so I wanted to share my thoughts.

I grew up in Boulder, CO, right next to the flatirons. As a kid, I didn’t appreciate what I had growing up until I moved to Atlanta for college. I never viewed myself as the environmentalist because I had peers who were much more outdoorsy than I was or inclined to petition the city to start initiatives like paying $0.10 for plastic bags while in middle school. I recognized climate change was important but I didn’t see it as my problem to solve. However, in talking with other Georgia Tech students taught me that 1) it wasn’t normal to grow up right next to the mountains and 2) without an appreciation or closeness to nature, many people either didn’t know about the extent of climate change or didn’t think it would effect them. After a couple of particularly frustrating climate denial conversations, I decided that I actually needed to contribute to the solution and not wait for others to solve it.

As an 18 year old with lots of ambition but very few skills, I sought out experiences to gain credibility first. I studied Mechanical Engineering and did research in a variety of research labs and robotics teams. I got an incredibly lucky break my sophomore year when someone from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory thought that my research on modeling damage accumulation from hydrocarbon storage in underground salt caverns had some connection to Mars rovers and decided to give an interview. I miraculously passed and eagerly accepted an offer as a Spacecraft Mechanical Engineering Intern on the Mechanical Integration team for the Perseverance Rover’s Corer (drill). I spent 8 months making every CAD, part drawing, and dyno testing mistake an intern could make but I learned a ton in the process. There was a lot of talent exchange between JPL and SpaceX, so I read the Elon Musk biography to learn more and ended up resonating much more with the Tesla mission. I applied through every recruiting channel I could think of and eventually landed a job with their Drive Systems Manufacturing team. I spent the summer of 2018 in Reno at the Gigafactory ramping up stator manufacturing lines during the week, laughing at the ridiculous initiatives like setting up tents in the Fremont parking lot for general assembly line 4, and delivering Model 3’s on the weekends. I later transitioned to the Battery Module Design team in Palo Alto, CA that fall because I knew batteries would be a critical part of the energy transition and Tesla was leading the industry at the time. I spent most of my time supporting the design for manufacturing intiaitives and researching how to extend battery life by optimizing cooling. By the end of that internship, I learned 2 things 1) I didn’t believe there was a silver bullet technology for climate change and 2) the level of innovation I saw at JPL and Tesla was quite similar, but Tesla’s impact on the industry was much larger and driven by a business case I didn’t fully understand.

I decided that it was more important for me to learn about the business case that scaled Tesla’s impact rather than going deeper into any decarbonization technology that I didn’t have conviction would be the silver bullet to climate change. This led me to working for an entrepreneur I knew growing up, JP O’Brien. I shadowed him for a summer as he pulled together the first Human Performance Summit and brought together elite operators across the business, military, and athletic world to collaborate on how to unleash peak performance. Despite not having the bandwidth to understand each business and technology to the depth my engineering instincts wanted, I saw the impact of JP’s leadership skills and sought out similar development.

This led me to joining McKinsey after graduating from Georgia Tech. I started out in the operations practice, mostly doing product development & procurement including building out should cost models to negotiate with suppliers on cost, mitigating inflationary prices during 2021 when steel, lumber, and freight had all 3-6x’d in price, and developing McKinsey Transformation’s new procurement diagnostic playbook. I did some manufacturing and supply chain work and eventually became a Sustainability Fellow where I spent time on Scope 3 decarbonization, private equity sustainable investments, and decarbonizing hard to abate sectors with hydrogen hubs. I realized that we would never decarbonize unless the sustainable alternative to our fossil fuel incumbent processes was at cost parity and while McKinsey was a great place to help identify the decarbonization technology coming down the cost curve to adopt later on, we needed more people building that technology. I left McKinsey to join Google X as a Strategy Associate and support a Green Hydrogen project in building out its business plan, financial model, and investor presentation along with providing portfolio level support and analyzing X’s investments with the greater climate VC ecosystem.