Inevitable

Alan Cooper is co-founder and CEO of ON.energy, a Miami-based company building battery-backed power systems for AI data centers. Its flagship product, AI UPS, sits between the grid and a data center, creating a buffer that isolates the grid from the massive volatility of AI workloads while providing uninterrupted power to the entire campus.

In this episode of Inevitable, Cooper explains how a career spanning oil and gas, geothermal, battery storage, and grid services ultimately led to ON.energy's focus on AI infrastructure. He breaks down why gigawatt-scale AI data centers create a fundamentally different challenge...

Siva Yellamraju is the co-founder and CEO of Fourier, a company building modular, on-site hydrogen systems for long-duration energy storage and distributed hydrogen production. Fourier’s approach combines lithium-ion batteries for short-duration needs with hydrogen storage for longer durations, packaged into a single system designed to operate like a microgrid.

In this episode of Inevitable, Yellamraju explains why hydrogen has long been considered promising for multi-day, seasonal, and even multi-year energy storage, but has struggled because of the cost and complexity of transporting it. He argues that producing hydrogen where it is needed can remove that transportation ch...

Willie Phillips is the former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and now a partner at Holland & Knight. During his time at FERC, Phillips helped lead major reforms to transmission planning and the electric grid’s interconnection process. He now advises the companies and utilities he once regulated, giving him a unique perspective on how developers can navigate the regulatory system.

In this episode of Inevitable, Phillips explains how FERC works, what companies routinely get wrong when engaging with regulators, and why early participation and pre-filing conversations can dramatically improve the odds of success. He al...

Yasir Arafat is the co-founder and CTO of Aalo Atomics, a company developing factory-manufactured modular nuclear power plants designed for AI data centers. Before founding Aalo, Yasir led the MARVEL microreactor program at Idaho National Laboratory.

In this episode of Inevitable, Yasir explains how Aalo became one of four U.S. nuclear startups to achieve criticality by the July 4, 2026 deadline. He breaks down what criticality means, why the milestone matters, and how the team went from a small startup to sustaining a nuclear fission chain reaction in less than a year.

The conversation explores why...

Fiona Spruill is CEO of Overstory, a company helping electric utilities reduce power outages and wildfire risk using satellite imagery, aerial data, and AI-powered vegetation intelligence. Since joining as employee number 10 and later stepping into the CEO role, Spruill has helped Overstory evolve from a vegetation mapping startup into a resilience platform serving many of North America's largest utilities.

In this episode of Inevitable, Spruill explains why vegetation management is one of the largest operating expenses for utilities and how improving grid resilience starts with better risk prioritization—not simply collecting more data.

The conversation ex...

Arch Rao is Founder and CEO of SPAN, the company behind the smart electrical panel that has expanded into utility grid management with SPAN Edge and distributed AI infrastructure with XFRA. What began as a smarter way to manage home electricity has evolved into a platform designed to digitize the electric grid, enable mass electrification, and unlock new AI compute capacity using existing residential infrastructure.

In this episode of Inevitable, Rao explains why SPAN's vision has grown beyond the home electrical panel, how utilities are using software-defined power management to avoid expensive infrastructure upgrades, and why distributed...

Noah Schochet is the co-founder and CEO of TerraFirma, a construction technology company rethinking how infrastructure gets built. Founded by two former SpaceX engineers, TerraFirma combines robotics, remote operations, and software into a construction business that performs projects directly rather than selling technology. By vertically integrating its tools with field operations, the company aims to make construction dramatically faster, safer, and more affordable while addressing labor shortages and enabling the next generation of infrastructure.

In this episode, Noah shares how his experience building Starship at SpaceX inspired TerraFirma, why he believes construction—not autonomy—is the real bott...

Jake Jurewicz is the Co-founder and CEO of Blue Energy, a nuclear power plant developer. Blue Energy starts with proven, light water reactors and builds everything around them — prefabricating standardized nuclear plants as massive modules in shipyards and fab yards, then barging them to site.

It pairs that with a patented gas-to-nuclear approach that energizes the plant on gas turbines first and converts to nuclear later. The goal is to make nuclear cheap enough and fast enough to build that private lenders will finance it, rather than the taxpayers and ratepayers who've carried almost every plant built so...

Pete Johnson, Co-founder and CEO of Koloma, joins Inevitable to break down geologic hydrogen — naturally occurring hydrogen found deep underground — and why he believes it could be the first new primary energy source since nuclear power in the 1950s. Koloma has raised more than $400 million from Khosla Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund, Osaka Gas, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and holds roughly 20 million acres of exploration rights across the U.S. Midcontinent, the Philippines, Australia, and Canada.

Pete explains why Koloma's first commercial target isn't power generation but ammonia and fertilizer production in the U.S. M...

Shannon Miller is Co-founder and President of Mainspring Energy, a company developing a new category of power generation technology called the linear generator. Mainspring’s systems generate electricity through a low-temperature, flameless chemical reaction that converts fuel directly into electrical power.

Shannon has been at this for about 15 years. She started the company on technology she developed while earning her PhD in mechanical engineering at Stanford, and took it from a lab experiment through commercial deployment to hundreds of megawatts in development and running in the field. Mainspring closed a $258 million Series F in 2025, led by General Ca...

Michael Spencer is the Founder and CEO of Zeno, an electric mobility company building electric motorcycles, battery-swapping infrastructure, and distributed energy systems across East Africa. Drawing on experience from nearly a decade building businesses in East Africa and four years at Tesla during its hypergrowth era, Spencer is applying lessons from EV charging infrastructure to one of the world's largest transportation markets: two- and three-wheel vehicles.

In this episode of Inevitable, Spencer explains why electrifying motorcycles in emerging markets may be one of the most efficient ways to reduce transportation costs and emissions. He discusses how Zeno...

Marc Berte is the Co-founder and CEO of Overview Energy, a startup developing space-based solar power systems designed to turn existing solar farms into around-the-clock power generators. By placing satellites in geosynchronous orbit, collecting near-continuous sunlight, and beaming energy back to Earth as safe near-infrared light, Overview aims to dramatically increase the utilization of solar infrastructure already deployed around the world. 

In this episode of Inevitable, Marc explains how space solar works and how Overview’s approach differs from decades of prior space solar concepts. He talks about the economics of “photon fuel,” the company’s gigawatt-scale agreement...

Edward Shenderovich is the Founder and CEO of Roebling, a software platform that helps industrial companies evaluate, design, and finance manufacturing projects before breaking ground. After initially setting out to solve bottlenecks in biomanufacturing, Shenderovich and his team uncovered a broader challenge: the economics of scaling physical infrastructure are often poorly understood until it's too late.

In this episode of Inevitable, Cody and Edward explore whether the US is making the same mistake with domestic manufacturing that climate tech once made with the “green premium.” If consumers were unwilling to pay more for cleaner products, will they pay...

Haroon Inam is Co-founder and CEO of DG Matrix, a company that makes the world's most compact Power Router, aggregating distributed energy for GenAI datacenters, microgrids, fleet electrification, and associated systems. As AI workloads drive unprecedented electricity demand and legacy grid infrastructure struggles to keep pace, DG Matrix has commercialized the world’s first multi-port solid-state transformer to meet the energy needs.

In this episode, Inam explains why transformer bottlenecks, distributed generation, and 800V DC architectures are reshaping the future of power delivery for AI infrastructure. He discusses DG Matrix’s product strategy, manufacturing scale-up plans, and the...

Peter Carlsson is Co-founder and former CEO of Northvolt, the European battery manufacturing company that raised more than $13 billion to build a homegrown battery supply chain for Europe, before filing for bankruptcy at the end of 2024. Before Northvolt, Carlsson spent more than a decade at Ericsson building global supply chains and later served as VP of Supply Chain at Tesla during the launch of the Model S.

In this live episode of Inevitable from the AENU Summit in Berlin, Carlsson reflects on the rise and fall of Northvolt, the realities of competing with China’s electro-industrial stack, an...

Rob Black is Cabinet Secretary of the New Mexico Economic Development Department, and Bruce Brown is Head of Strategic Climate Initiatives at the New Mexico State Investment Council, the state’s $72B sovereign wealth fund. Together, they are driving one of the most ambitious state-level strategies in the U.S. to turn energy wealth into long-term climate innovation and economic growth.

The conversation also features MCJ portfolio founders building in the state: Carrie von Muench, Co-founder of Pacific Fusion, developing modular fusion energy systems, and Carl Hoiland, Co-founder and CEO of Zanskar Geothermal, using AI to discover an...

Eddy Chiang is Co-founder and CEO of Moment Energy, a company building commercial-scale energy storage systems from repurposed electric vehicle batteries. By testing, certifying, and remanufacturing second-life battery modules, Moment Energy is creating lower-cost alternatives to new lithium-ion storage while extending battery lifespans by decades.

In this episode of Inevitable, Chiang explains how a growing wave of retired EV batteries is reshaping the energy storage market—making recycling alone economically unviable. The conversation covers the technical and regulatory challenges of certifying second-life systems, how Moment Energy became the first company to achieve full UL certification, and why sa...

Joel Gratz is Founding Meteorologist and CEO of OpenSnow, a weather platform used by hundreds of thousands of skiers, snowboarders, and outdoor enthusiasts to track snow conditions and forecast powder days. What started as a text thread among friends has grown into a profitable, bootstrapped business combining expert forecasting, data science, and increasingly AI-driven weather models.

In this episode of Inevitable, Gratz breaks down one of the worst Western snowpack seasons on record and why he believes it’s not as simple as blaming climate change. 

The conversation explores the role of atmospheric variability versus lon...

Dave McColl is Executive Director of Stanford Climate Ventures (SCV), a program designed to help students build climate companies through rigorous go-to-market strategy and hands-on company building. SCV is a project-based course at Stanford University that has helped launch dozens of startups across energy, infrastructure, and industrial decarbonization.

In this episode of Inevitable, Yin Lu, General Partner at MCJ,  sits down with McColl to unpack the SCV playbook—from “earned secrets” to the importance of customer discovery.

The conversation also features three founders who came out of the SCV ecosystem:

John Dean is Co-Founder and CEO of WindBorne, a company building next-generation weather balloons and an AI-powered forecasting layer to improve global weather prediction. WindBorne’s balloons can stay aloft for weeks — collecting critical atmospheric data across oceans and remote regions where traditional weather infrastructure doesn’t reach.

In this episode of Inevitable, Dean explains why weather forecasting has remained largely unchanged for decades and why better data—not just better models—is the key to improving weather predictions. Our conversation explores how WindBorne’s balloon constellation captures atmospheric data at a global scale, how AI models like Weather...

Alex Blumberg is Co-founder and CEO of DaisyChain Energy, a company building a hardware-enabled software platform that turns commercial buildings into flexible grid assets. Best known as the founder of Gimlet Media and co-creator of Planet Money, Blumberg’s second venture focuses on solving one of the most overlooked problems in climate: the misaligned incentives inside buildings.

In this episode, Blumberg explains why building decarbonization has stalled—not because of smart grid technology, but because of economics. The conversation explores how DaisyChain uses submetering and rate arbitrage to create immediate financial value for building owners, while unlocking the...

Ashvin Dayal is Senior Vice President for Power and Climate at the Rockefeller Foundation, where he oversees the Global Energy Alliance (GEA), a multi-billion-dollar initiative backed by the Rockefeller Foundation, the IKEA Foundation, and the Bezos Earth Fund to expand access to clean, reliable electricity worldwide.

In this episode of Inevitable, Dayal explains why energy access remains one of the defining development challenges of the century, with roughly three billion people still lacking enough electricity to meaningfully power economic activity. The conversation explores how philanthropic capital can unlock private investment in markets that commercial investors often avoid...

William Layden is Co-founder and CEO at Rune, a company building modular, behind-the-meter micro data centers that plug directly into solar and wind plants. These units operate on a fully electric, DC-to-DC architecture—bypassing the traditional grid and unlocking new economics for compute at renewable energy sites.

In this episode of Inevitable, Layden explains how solar clipping and curtailment leave vast amounts of clean power stranded—and how Rune’s “RELIC” units turn that waste into usable compute. The conversation dives into DC architecture, Bitcoin as a beachhead market, and why traditional data centers are ill-suited to an era of...

Varun Sivaram is Founder and CEO of Emerald AI, a company building software that makes AI data centers power flexible. As AI data centers become one of the fastest-growing sources of electricity demand, grid constraints are emerging as a critical bottleneck for compute deployment.

In this episode, the conversation focuses on why power availability — not GPUs — is increasingly the limiting factor for AI. Data centers concentrate massive electrical loads in specific locations, creating grid stress, long interconnection delays, and rising electricity costs for surrounding communities. Traditional grid expansion alone is too slow to meet near-term AI demand.

Eugene Kirpichov is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Work on Climate, a global community helping professionals take action on climate across industries and disciplines. Originally created to help people transition into climate-related careers, the organization is now evolving toward a deeper goal: empowering individuals to become climate leaders—people who transform their companies, sectors, and communities from within.

In this episode of Inevitable, Kirpichov shares why the “get a climate job” model is no longer enough, and why systemic change depends on how professionals use their power. The conversation explores the concept of regenerative economics, the breakdown of sil...

Stu Landesberg is Co-founder and CEO of Seneca, a company developing autonomous aerial systems to detect and suppress wildfires before they grow out of control. Designed for rapid initial response, Seneca’s technology deploys robotic aircraft that launch within minutes, helping protect homes, infrastructure, and communities in fire-prone regions.

In this episode of Inevitable, Landesberg shares why he left Grove—his first company focused on sustainable consumer goods—to tackle what he sees as a civilization-level challenge: early wildfire intervention. The conversation explores how climate conditions, outdated fire cycles, and insurance market failures have converged to threaten life i...

Augustus Doricko is Founder and CEO at Rainmaker, a company using cloud seeding, drones, and radar to increase rain and snow as water scarcity and drought intensify across the West. In this episode of Inevitable, the conversation focuses on why cloud seeding—often misunderstood as science fiction or geoengineering—has existed for decades and why it has only recently become possible to prove it actually works.

The discussion centers on the industry’s core constraint: attribution. For years, operators couldn’t measure whether precipitation would have occurred anyway. Doricko explains how advances in dual-polarization radar and targeted flight p...

Philip Johnston is co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, a company building data centers in space to solve AI's power crisis. Starcloud has already launched the first NVIDIA H100 GPU into orbit and is partnering with cloud providers like Crusoe to scale orbital computing infrastructure.

As AI demand accelerates, data centers are running into a new bottleneck: access to reliable, affordable power. Grid congestion, interconnection delays, and cooling requirements are slowing the deployment of new AI data centers, even as compute demand continues to surge. Traditional data centers face 5-10 year lead times for new power projects due...

Kurt Terrani is CEO of Standard Nuclear, a company focused on a part of nuclear energy that gets far less attention than reactor designs but can become the true bottleneck: fuel.

In this episode, Kurt provides a nuclear fuels 101, walking through the front end of the fuel cycle from uranium processing and enrichment to fabrication. He explains in plain terms what makes TRISO fuel different, why it appears so frequently in next-generation reactor designs, and how fuel performance shapes reactor economics, safety, and scalability.

The conversation also unpacks Standard Nuclear’s origin story, which emerged fr...

Aleks Gampel is COO and Co-founder at Cuby, a company rethinking how homes are built in the middle of a nationwide housing crisis. The cost of housing has soared while construction productivity has barely budged in decades, and today’s homes are still built through slow, wasteful, and carbon-intensive processes that aren’t designed for escalating climate risks. Instead of shipping prefab boxes across the country, Cuby asks what it would look like if housing finally had its assembly line moment—and the factory moved to where homes are needed. Their mobile microfactories are inflatable, rapidly deployable facilities that manufa...

Carrie von Muench is the COO and Co-Founder of Pacific Fusion, a company building the first pulser-driven inertial fusion system designed for net facility gain. Fusion has long promised limitless, carbon-free, dispatchable power, but only recently have breakthroughs—from ignition at the National Ignition Facility to major advances at Sandia and new high-efficiency pulse-power technology—shifted fusion from scientific aspiration to solvable engineering challenge.

The Pacific Fusion founding team came together after these 2022 milestones revealed a credible, engineering-driven path to fusion energy. Backed by a landmark $900M Series A led by General Catalyst, the company is developing a hig...

Alex Modon is CEO and Co-founder of Unlimited Industries, a company transforming infrastructure development through AI-driven automation. Unlimited tackles one of the biggest bottlenecks in climate and industrial innovation: the outdated, risk-averse world of engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC). Traditional EPCs are often misaligned with the needs of first-of-a-kind projects. Unlimited flips the script by using AI to generate thousands of design permutations, drastically cutting feedback loops, iteration time, and overall cost. Alex shares how his background in software, combined with childhood exposure to industrial environments, inspired him to take on this hard problem—and why he believes the on...

Trey Lauderdale is the CEO and Founder of Atomic Canyon, a company bringing artificial intelligence into the nuclear energy sector. Atomic Canyon recently deployed the first commercial on-site generative AI system at a U.S. nuclear facility. While AI’s growth is creating massive demand for reliable, clean baseload power, Atomic Canyon explores the reverse question: does nuclear need AI just as much to solve workforce shortages and accelerate new reactor deployment? Trey’s path to nuclear is unconventional. After building and selling a healthcare communications platform, he moved to San Luis Obispo and discovered he lived 10 miles from Cali...

Boris Sofman is the CEO and Co-Founder of Bedrock Robotics, a company turning existing construction equipment into fully autonomous fleets through same-day hardware upfits. With over $80 million in funding from Eclipse, 8VC, NVIDIA Ventures, and former Waymo CEO John Krafcik, Bedrock is tackling a major bottleneck in the global economy: a massive construction labor shortage just as demand for data centers, clean energy projects, housing, and manufacturing is skyrocketing.

 In this episode, Boris shares how his experience building autonomous vehicles at Waymo inspired him to apply similar AI and machine learning approaches to heavy equipment. He explains w...

Chase Lochmiller is the CEO and co-founder of Crusoe. If you’re a regular listener, Crusoe isn’t new to the pod. This summer, Cody sat down with Chase’s Co-founder and COO, Cully Cavness, during our live event in Austin.

This latest episode was recorded live at the inaugural MCJ Summit in San Francisco at the beautiful Autodesk Gallery. Cody and Chase dive into how Crusoe is building data centers at the intersection of AI and energy. Chase traces his path from MIT soccer captain and mountaineer to climate-focused entrepreneur, and how those experiences shaped Crusoe’s core va...

Juliann Edwards is Chief Development Officer at The Nuclear Company. The United States has 93 operating nuclear reactors providing about 20% of the nation’s electricity. After decades without new builds, Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia finally came online—despite cost overruns and delays that nearly derailed the project. Meanwhile, China has dozens of reactors under construction and is on pace to surpass the U.S. as the world’s nuclear leader by 2030.

At the same time, an energy-demand gap—driven by AI data centers, reshoring of manufacturing, and widespread electrification—has put nuclear back in the conversation. Hyperscalers like Micro...

Steve Oldham is CEO of Captura. Captura develops Direct Ocean Capture (DOC) technology that removes CO₂ from seawater, triggering the ocean to draw more CO₂ from the air to rebalance. With CO₂ concentrations ~150× higher in seawater than air, Captura’s closed-loop process uses electrodialysis to create acid and base on site—no added chemicals, no waste—and can run largely on off-peak renewable energy. 

Oldham, former CEO of Carbon Engineering, contrasts DOC with DAC, discusses MRV and crediting, deployment pathways (onshore, barges, vessels), his company’s pilot progress in Hawaii, and why pragmatic scale-up and licensing partnerships matter for gigat...

Ben Lamm is CEO and Co-founder of Colossal Biosciences, the world’s first de-extinction company. Colossal has raised more than $400 million at a valuation north of $10 billion to bring back extinct species using synthetic biology and genetic engineering. Just this year, the company unveiled the first dire wolves born in 12,000 years, created woolly mice with mammoth-like fur, and remains on track to see woolly mammoth calves by 2028.

This conversation explores Colossal’s end-to-end platform approach, from ancient DNA recovery to multiplex genome editing, and why Ben sees de-extinction not just as science fiction come true but as a ve...

Dr. Stephen Beaton is Co-founder and CEO of Circularity Fuels, which develops compact reactors that turn waste carbon streams into high-value fuels and chemicals. Rather than compete with fossil fuels from the start, Stephen identified high-purity methane for lab-grown diamonds as a beachhead market—where Circularity’s product is 80–90% cheaper than incumbents while proving the core technology needed for clean liquid fuels.

Stephen earned a chemistry PhD at Oxford and built deep expertise in synthetic fuels during his U.S. Air Force career, including overseeing jet fuel quality control in the Middle East and launching the Air Force’...

Marc Tarpenning is Co-founder of Tesla and a venture partner at Spero Ventures. In 2003, Marc and Martin Eberhard saw two signals: GM killed its beloved EV1, and Californians snapped up Toyota’s Prius despite its compromises. They realized the market was ready for an electric car that was better than gas, not worse. Their breakthrough: 7,000 off-the-shelf laptop batteries powering a sports car that outran a Porsche and drove over 200 miles. The Tesla Roadster was born, before Elon Musk joined the company.

Marc shares how his time in Saudi Arabia exposed him to oil dependence, how NuvoMedia taught hi...