Career Path of a CEO at Blue Dot Motorworks

I have a mechanical engineering degree from MIT. My first internship was at Ford, chosen because I was a lifelong car nut and wanted to work in the automotive industry.

That internship made it clear I didn't want to work in the automotive industry, at least not the mainstream OEM aspect. It was a bit slower moving than suited me. However, it did give me my first exposure to how effective large-volume production is at making things inexpensive. This played a big role in my later career and what I'm doing now.

My next internship was at GE Aircraft Engines. I figured being much higher tech would be better suited to me. While the technology was interesting, the large company environment still didn't sit right with me. I was pretty sure I didn't want to go into a large corporation.

My undergraduate advisor suggested either grad school or a job with a bizarre, skunkworks engineering company in New Hampshire called DECA. I ended up going that route. DECA was Dean Kamen's engineering firm. He co-founded the first robotics competition for high school students. The company created the Segway scooter and several medical devices, making it a really cool place to start work.

I joined their Sterling Engine development project. For a mechanical engineer, it was a great project to cut my teeth on, with so many different things going on. High temperatures, high pressures, high-speed reciprocating components, and mechatronics – I was drinking from the technical fire hose on that project. It was a great place to start.

After a few years, I moved to the medical side of the company, designing therapeutic devices. Then I decided to stay in medical and went to another company doing contract development for larger companies. This involved a lot of automation, thermal, and fluid work. I was sponging up as much technical experience and skills as I could. I also started getting into technical leadership as a lead mechanical engineer on projects.

I then moved to the west coast and took a job with a company called Synapse, doing product development. I was made the lead engineer on a global sanitation project funded by the Gates Foundation. That was my introduction to that space, and I've been quite hooked on it ever since. Being a lead engineer on a project was also a great experience for developing technical leadership skills. It involved multi-domain work, allowing me to have intelligent conversations with software and electrical engineers as a mechanical engineer, especially when developing system architectures.

In 2014, I branched out on my own and started my consulting company, Carbine Enterprises, focused on engineering and product development. I tried to keep my work aligned with the impact and global sanitation space. At any given time, I had up to four or five people working with me, and we did a whole variety of projects. The vision was to use this consulting work to fund the generation of new technology that could eventually spin out as its own startup.

That's how Blue Dot came to be. I saw a big gap in the solution set for climate change, where we didn't have a viable path for dealing with existing cars. There was no way we could throw them away fast enough to make room for a whole new fleet of electric vehicles. So, I started working on ways to convert existing cars into plug-in hybrids in a scalable and cost-effective manner – two missing components in previous retrofit approaches. I've been working on that ever since, becoming full-time on it around 2019.