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, ...
May 27, 2026•50 min
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 o...
May 19, 2026•37 min
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...
May 13, 2026•55 min
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 a...
May 06, 2026•52 min
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 ...
Apr 28, 2026•47 min
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 th...
Apr 15, 2026•1 hr 6 min
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 mode...
Apr 07, 2026•38 min
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, ...
Apr 01, 2026•39 min
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...
Mar 17, 2026•49 min
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...
Feb 17, 2026•39 min
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 stres...
Feb 10, 2026•38 min
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...
Feb 03, 2026•46 min
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...
Jan 27, 2026•54 min
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, ope...
Jan 20, 2026•51 min
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 d...
Jan 13, 2026•36 min
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 ...
Jan 06, 2026•43 min
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—...
Dec 16, 2025•42 min
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...
Dec 09, 2025•53 min
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 fe...
Dec 03, 2025•39 min
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 unc...
Nov 19, 2025•43 min
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...
Nov 13, 2025•50 min
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...
Oct 29, 2025•40 min
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—driv...
Oct 07, 2025•55 min
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,...
Sep 30, 2025•42 min
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 app...
Sep 23, 2025•46 min
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 sy...
Sep 16, 2025•54 min
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 t...
Sep 09, 2025•56 min
Dr. Susan Hubbard is Deputy Director for Science and Technology at Oak Ridge National Laboratory , the largest of the U.S. Department of Energy’s multi-program science and energy labs. With more than 7,000 scientists and engineers, Oak Ridge is advancing innovation across nuclear energy, grid resilience, AI, quantum computing, isotopes, and advanced manufacturing. In this episode, Susan shares how the national labs’ mission has evolved since the Manhattan Project, how companies and startups enga...
Sep 02, 2025•56 min
Mitch Lee , CEO of Arc Boat Company , is bringing the Tesla playbook to boating. Arc’s quiet, software-powered electric boats—like the sold-out Arc Sport—deliver cleaner rides, zero fumes, and customizable wave settings. Mitch shares why electric makes more sense on water than land, how dockside charging already works, and why Arc builds full boats instead of motors. With $100M raised and an expansion into commercial vessels, Arc is leading a cleaner, better future for marine travel. Episode rec...
Aug 12, 2025•54 min
Katherine Boyle and Erin Price-Wright are General Partners at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) , leading the firm's American Dynamism practice. This episode explores how their team invests in companies tackling national imperatives—ranging from defense and manufacturing to energy and critical infrastructure. Katherine shares how American Dynamism emerged from portfolio patterns at a16z, while Erin describes how her background at Palantir informs her investment lens. Together, they unpack why the U.S. ...
Jul 29, 2025•50 min
