Bigger Than Us

Josh Dorfman is a sustainability entrepreneur and brand builder dedicated to scaling mission-driven ventures. He is co-founder & CEO of Plantd, a carbon-negative building materials company pioneering a new path to reach gigaton-scale carbon capture. Previously, Josh led Vine.com, an Amazon business unit specializing in natural, organic, and sustainable products. He has founded two award-winning modern design sustainable furniture companies: Vivavi, named to Inc. Magazine's "Green 50" as a pioneer accelerating the green economy, and Simbly, recognized by the National Wildlife Federation for its sustainable practices to preserve forest ecosystems. Earlier in his career, Josh was the author and host of The Lazy Environmentalist reality TV series on Sundance Channel, radio show on SiriusXM, and book series designed to make sustainable living easy, convenient, and delightful. Josh served for four years as the national spokesperson for Brita’s FilterForGood campaign to reduce bottled water waste. He currently serves on Governor Roy Cooper’s North Carolina Entrepreneurship Council.  Josh holds an MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania.

https://www.plantdmaterials.com/

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Sanjay Shrestha joined Plug Power as Chief Strategy Officer in 2019. Prior to joining Plug Power, Mr. Shrestha served as the CIO of a global solar IPP and President Sky Capital Americas since 2015.  Under his leadership, Sky Capital America built and acquired over 100MW of operating solar assets and secured pipeline over 100MW.  He also sourced various types of financing solutions to support this growth including project debt, construction equity and long-term equity. He brings almost two decades of experience in the broader clean tech sector to our team. Before global solar IPP, he led the renewables investment banking effort at FBR Capital markets. During 2014, and under his leadership, the firm was ranked among the top renewable energy underwriters in the U.S.

Prior to joining FBR, Mr. Shrestha spent seven years as the global head of renewables research coverage at Lazard Capital Markets. During his tenure at Lazard Capital Markets, he was a member of the Institutional Investor All America Research team and was also ranked as one of the top five stock pickers on a global basis. Prior to Lazard Capital Markets, Mr. Shrestha spent seven years at First Albany Capital, where he built the firm’s renewables and industrial research practice. Starmine/Forbes Magazine ranked him the number 1 stock picker and the number 1 earnings estimator during his tenure at First Albany Capital. Mr. Shrestha serves as an independent director on the board of directors of Fusemachines, an AI company.

https://www.plugpower.com/

https://nexuspmg.com/

Peter Kelly-Detwiler has 30 years of experience in the electric energy arena. He writes for Forbes.com and other publications on topics related to disruptive innovation and its impact on the electricity infrastructure. He provides strategic advice to clients and investors, helping them to navigate this transitional period. Peter is also the author of The Energy Switch - a book about how companies and customers are transforming the electrical grid and the future of power.

Mr. Kelly-Detwiler has spent much of his career in various areas of competitive power markets. As Senior Vice President at Constellation Energy, he oversaw creation of VirtuWatt – a market leading platform to facilitate real-time awareness of electricity pricing and consumption and bidding of assets into competitive markets. He is currently writing a book on the transformation of electric power markets, to be published by Prometheus Books in the Spring of 2021.

https://www.peterkellydetwiler.com/

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Get motivated to step into 2023 with advice from our 2022 guests. 

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John has over 30 years of experience taking novel solutions from conception to reality across the energy, semiconductor and supercomputer industries. Prior to founding Rondo, John served as co-founder and vice president of development for GlassPoint Solar, the leading provider of solar thermal energy for industry worldwide. He is also the former founder and president of Ausra, Inc., a pioneer in solar thermal and solar electric systems. John launched his career as the lead engineer for Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy national lab, where he designed award-winning technology to support real-time fusion experiments. He is a published author of numerous technical papers and holds more than 20 patents in the U.S. and internationally. John earned a B.Sc. with Special Distinction in Computer Science from Yale University.

https://www.rondo.energy/

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Dr. Gruber, CEO and Board Member of Gevo, has spent over 30 years developing and commercializing renewable biobased technologies to replace petrochemicals. His teams have developed and commercialized several renewable resource-based products, including organic acids, plastics, fibers, advanced alcohols, hydrocarbon fuels, and the like.  Gruber led the development and commercialization of PLA at Cargill and co-founded Natureworks.  As CEO of Gevo, Dr. Gruber leads the business to commercialize Isobutanol for gasoline blendstock, renewable, low carbon jet fuel, and low carbon renewable gasoline.

Dr. Gruber received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and biology from the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota, and a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Minnesota. He also earned a master’s degree in business administration from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Gruber has received numerous awards including: The George Washington Carver Award from BIO, The Presidential Green Chemistry Award, The Discover Award for Environmental Innovation from Discover Magazine, The Lee W. Rivers Innovation Award from CDMA, an Outstanding Achievement Award from the University of MN in 2011,  The Julius Stieglitz Award from the University of Chicago, The Kirkpatrick Award from Chemical Engineering, Design and Engineering Award from Popular Mechanics, Technology of the Year Award from Industry Week, Technology of the Year Award from United States DOE,  and numerous others.  Dr. Gruber was the editor of the two-volume book “Biorefineries—Industrial Processes and Products,” and holds more than 60 US patents, with several others pending.

https://gevo.com/

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Dr. Laura Lammers is the founder and CEO of Travertine Technologies, Inc., a start-up working to scale a new technology for carbon dioxide removal and inorganic chemical upcycling. Dr. Lammers obtained a PhD in environmental geochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 2012. Her expertise focuses on carbon mineralization and carbon cycling, as well as selective critical element extraction. She has spent the majority of her postgraduate career as an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Science, Policy, and Management department at the University of California, Berkeley as well as a Faculty Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Since its founding in 2022, Travertine has raised $3M in seed funding led by the Grantham Environmental Trust and Clean Energy Ventures, along with $2M in grant funding from the US Department of Energy ARPA-e program. Travertine was recently recognized as Chemical & Engineering News' Top 10 Start-Ups to Watch for 2022. 

https://www.travertinetech.com/

https://nexuspmg.com/

Jason Salfi is co-founder and CEO of Dimensional Energy, a clean energy company that transforms carbon dioxide into the fuels and products that people use every day.

Dimensional Energy’s mission is to replace the use of newly extracted fossil carbon from the supply chains for hydrocarbon-based fuels and products and do so in alignment with globally agreed upon climate justice practices outlined in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Salfi has served as an Innovation Advisor for New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) from 2016 - 2019

In 1997 Salfi founded Comet Skateboards, a founding B Corporation, licensed in 2014, with the mission of building and sharing skateboards for space travel in ways that care for the earth and its community. His experience as a manufacturer led him to consult on product design standards and acquisition strategy, building profitable and regenerative business models for a market-leading fortune 500 company from 2015-2017. 

He has a BS in Natural Resources Management from Cornell University.

https://dimensionalenergy.com/

https://nexuspmg.com/ 

As an efficiency expert, Dan has spent the past 20 years eliminating waste for Fortune 100 Companies in a variety of industries. In 2013, Dan turned his focus to organic waste for his new venture, seizing on an opportunity to repurpose the billions of tons of waste biomass generated annually. In collaboration with Villanova University, he developed and commercialized Hydrothermal Carbonization technology that became the cornerstone of SoMax’s larger Resource Recovery Platform which transforms organic waste into advanced biofuels, carbon negative products, and fertilizers in a closed loop system. In 2021, SoMax’s Resource Recovery Platform was recognized as a grand prize winner of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Water Resource Recovery Challenge.

https://somaxhtc.com/

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After serving in the United States Marine Corps, Jake dove headfirst into the oil and gas tech scene in 2013 co-founding some of the first cloud-based tech startups and later co-hosting the first podcast in oil and gas. Now, Jake is the co-founder at Digital Wildcatters and spends most of his time at the intersection of O&G and tech.

https://digitalwildcatters.com/

https://nexuspmg.com/