Energy Startup Advisory

In Energy, I back technical teams making long-horizon bets on hard problems — fusion research, next-generation combustion, wireless power transmission, distributed wind — where the underlying science is real but the commercial timeline is measured in years, not quarters. I look for teams with credible technical validation — institutional partnerships, government contracts, peer-reviewed research — tackling generation and distribution in ways that don’t depend on the traditional utility-scale playbook. Because so much of this sector rewards patience most investors don’t have, my job as much as anything is picking the teams disciplined enough to survive the distance between a technical breakthrough and a commercial one.

Energy founders live with a specific kind of pressure most sectors don’t: sustaining conviction — their own, their team’s, their investors’ — through R&D and regulatory timelines that can run a decade before the market delivers a verdict. My approach applies performance psychology to that exact problem — how founders and technical teams stay sharp and aligned through years of incremental progress with no guaranteed payoff — combined with the business discipline of building an investor narrative around genuinely long-horizon science, and the foresight to back technologies pointed at where energy generation and distribution are actually heading, not where they’ve always been.

Reliable, sustainable energy is as fundamental a human need as anything on this list — it’s the infrastructure everything else depends on. My mission in Energy is to help technically brilliant founders survive long enough, and stay convicted enough, to get genuinely better ways of generating and delivering power out of the lab and into the world, because the gap between a working prototype and dependable energy for real people is where most of these companies actually die.