Career Path Of A CEO And Co-Founder At Gaiascope

Yeah, absolutely. Like most college freshmen, I went into college with no idea what I wanted to do, what I wanted to study, or what the real world looked like. I ended up majoring in mechanical engineering because I thought I wanted to be an engineer. I enjoyed problem-solving, math, and science, but I couldn't pick a specific engineering field.

I chose mechanical because it seemed like the most general option. I also double-majored in physics, purely because I loved the professors in that department and kept taking classes because they were interesting. Partway through college, I realized I could easily double major in it, so there wasn't a ton of thought that went into that decision.

It wasn't a ton of thought either that went into what I would do with these majors afterward. The experiences I had more naturally came up throughout college, and those are what led me to where I am today. The most impactful one was a freshman seminar I took my first semester at MIT.

The professor stood up and said, "Your job for this semester is to design a plan to decarbonize the entire world in a hundred years." That was really all the professor did, gave this one question, and I just fell in love with it. It was a fascinating intersection of technology, economics, and social impacts.

It ended up being a question I kept coming back to. Any project I had in a class, I always wanted to do something related to it. So, any topic I got to choose, I just kept returning to that question. I didn't even realize this was the underlying question I was following until I was a senior at MIT.

I was talking to one of my advisors, saying I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. He helped me put the pieces together. He pointed out that I always came back to this topic, even in my internships. He mentioned my first-year internship at a carbon capture and sequestration startup, the next year doing electric mobility and electrification of vehicles, and the year after that working at Microsoft Research on climate visualizations.

He said, "This is clearly something you're interested in." It was almost funny when somebody put those pieces together because I realized, "Oh yeah, that makes total sense. That is the problem I want to tackle." So, my senior year, I applied to a ton of different things under his advice.

He suggested I apply to grad school, fellowships, and jobs. He believed that was the best way to see what I liked because going through the application and interview process, envisioning myself there, would reveal what truly interested me. He said I would quickly see what sparked my interest.

That was really true. As I did that, I decided I loved academia, I loved studying, and I wanted to go more deeply into solving problems of climate and energy. So, I decided to pursue a PhD in climate science. In grad school, I had an amazing opportunity to not just work on interesting climate research but also teach classes to undergrads about the energy transition.

Again, for me, that's really what resonated. I loved teaching, I loved talking about the energy transition, and I loved thinking about the future world we need to get to in order to solve the problem of carbon emissions. So, leaving grad school, once again, I was in that state of not knowing what to do.

I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do next, so I followed my professor's advice again: cast a wide net, talk to industry people, explore postdocs, explore academia, and also explore startup life, which some friends had guided me toward. That really is what led me to where I am now.

I had a friend connect me to my co-founder for my startup. She and I resonated really well on what problems we cared about in the world, how we wanted to tackle them, who we were as people, and what we wanted to build together. It was that connection that gave me the courage to say, "Let's take the leap of faith. Let's try startup life."

Let's try to actually take all these problems we've been thinking about, studying, and understanding, and implement solutions in the real world. Get solutions into the hands of business leaders as much as we possibly can. So, I did not plan to end up here. It was a lot of fortuitous events and personal discovery along the way that, at the end of the day, led me to where I am.