Bigger Than Us

Daron Babcock - Founder & CEO, Bonton Farms Disrupter. Social Justice Advocate. Sower of Seeds.   Moved by his personal beliefs, Daron Babcock, couldn’t sit idly by as he encountered his brothers and sisters in  South Dallas ravaged by institutional inequities. He left a  successful corporate career and moved from his home in North Dallas to serve inner-city residents of Bonton...

Jeff Gold is founder and CEO of Nexus, a plastics-to-oil conversion company utilizing advanced designs and technology to achieve high energy efficiencies, oil yield, and high quality chemical feedstocks. Under Jeff’s leadership, Nexus has advanced quickly to become the global leader in sustainable, circular molecular recycling. Prior to starting Nexus, Jeff founded and is president of a 30-year-ol...

Ryan Hunt has degrees in Physics and Bioengineering from the University of Georgia. Ryan has a passion for circular technologies including algae, photosynthesis, and thermoplastic compounding. Ryan co-founded ALGIX that creates sustainable technologies for environmental restoration and biomaterials under the BLOOM brand. His team collaborates with government and corporate partners for cleaning air...

Zecca Lehn is the General Partner of Responsibly Ventures, based in California, backing U.S. PreSeed startups in both Social and Sustainable Tech—using multiple UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a guidepost per investment. Over the past 15+ years, he has worked as an Environmental Economist, Data Scientist, Non-Profit Board Member, and Co-Founder. He grew up in an off-the-grid Japanese-st...

Venkatesh Kini is co-founder of Ubuntoo, a global environmental solutions platform that helps scale impactful innovations that address the planet’s biggest challenges. Venkatesh holds 30 years of experience in marketing and general management with some of the world’s most reputable brands and corporations. Prior to founding Ubuntoo, Venkatesh served as President, India and Southwest Asia, for The...

Dr. Rob Moir is a nationally-recognized and award winning environmentalist and president & executive director of nonprofit Ocean River Institute. He continues his several decades of tireless efforts to make the planet bluer and greener. Rob and Ocean River Institute has assisted environmental groups on a local, national and global scale including Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, the...

Craig Kasberg began working on commercial fishing boats in Alaska at age 14, and by 19 was captaining his own fishing vessel in Southeast Alaska. Craig then started a sustainable seafood marketing business, where he began to envision the development of technology to upcycle seafood byproducts as the opportunity that could make the largest impact to the industry. Craig eventually began to focus ful...

TJ is a former NHL forward, playing with the Colorado Avalanche, San Jose Sharks, and Calgary Flames following his time at Dartmouth College. As Co-Founder of Outcast Foods, TJ has quickly become one of the young leaders in food and agriculture with his unique outlook on sustainability. Additionally, TJ has been a guest lecturer on food waste at Rice University, a speaker at the Tuck School of Bus...

Jon Friedman saw a need for urban agriculture to emerge as a competitive industry in the food landscape. In 2010, he and a business partner Brad focused on rooftop greenhouses, but quickly realized that to achieve their goals they needed a modular and scalable solution. In an effort to cut down on costs and logistics, Brad and Jon began to seriously consider building their new technology inside sh...

Catherine developed a passion for clean energy and technology in 2011. She worked at the United Nations developing relationships with governments on public-private partnerships and subsequently took a job as a Consultant at Acre Resources, a global recruitment firm focused on energy and sustainability. Catherine founded recruitment business McLean Ross in 2011, with a core focus on placing sales a...

Rob Day has been a sustainable resources private equity investor since 2004, and acts or has served as a Director, Observer and advisory board member to multiple companies in the energy tech and related sectors.  Rob also serves on the Board at the New England Clean Energy Council and the Investment Committee of the Clean Energy Trust.  From 2005-2016 he authored the column Cleantech Inv...

Blair Levin serves as a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Project at the Brookings Institution. He also is the Policy Advisor to New Street Research, an international equity research firm. Blair began his career practicing law in North Carolina. He then served as Chief of Staff to FCC Chairman Reed Hundt (1993-1997), was a policy analyst for the equity research teams at Legg Ma...

Chante Harris currently leads the investor network and corporate partnerships for Venture for ClimateTech , a climate tech venture studio and accelerator sourcing the best climate tech solutions across the globe. She also oversees the For ClimateTech Global Innovation Challenge and is spearheading the exploration of a thesis for a new financial mechanism funding early stage climate tech alongside...

Kathy Hannun is the Cofounder and President of Dandelion Energy, the largest residential geothermal company in the United States. Dandelion transitions homeowners from fossil-fueled to geothermal heating and cooling using their custom geothermal drilling suite and Dandelion Air heat pump. Before founding Dandelion, Hannun was a Rapid Evaluator at X, Alphabet’s innovation lab, where she focused on...

Andrew Behar is CEO of As You Sow , the nation’s leading non-profit practitioner of shareholder advocacy and engagement. Since 1992, As You Sow has used shareholder power to align investments with values and compel companies to reduce material risk on issues including climate change; toxins in the food system; ocean plastics; diversity, equity, and inclusion; racial justice; and wage equity. Previ...

Dan is CEO of SparkMeter, the leading provider of smart metering systems that enable utilities to implement pre-paid billing and real-time monitoring and control on micro-grids and central grids alike.  He has served as a consultant to the United Nations Office for Project Services in Haiti, and for the World Bank.  From 2014 to 2015, he was the Chair of the United Nations SE4All Practit...

Kelly is the CTO and co-founder at Charm Industrial, where she leads the engineering team developing their pyrolysis and gasification systems. Prior to Charm, she led the early upper stage design at Astra, a small rocket company, and the mechanical design at Planet for their constellation of Dove satellites. She studied mechanical engineering at Brown University. https://charmindustrial.com/ https...

From the newsroom to the boardroom, Lisa Ann has used her keen analytical skills to share technology stories with the world for over a decade. She is Founder and CEO of the award-winning Technica Communications , Founder and Chairwoman of the non-profit Women In Cleantech & Sustainability, an international speaker and moderator and documentary filmmaker. She was named a PR Executive of the Yea...

Ibrahim AlHusseini is an award winning serial entrepreneur turned tech investor.  He made his fortune in fiberoptics and rolled it into Cleantech in the early 2000s after witnessing the acceleration of plastic-pollution in our seas and oceans.  He is the founder of FullCycle, a growth equity fund accelerating the deployment of climate critical technology worldwide.  He is an early i...

When Azzedine Downes became President and CEO of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) in 2012, one thing was clear to him: “Talking to people who already agreed with us just isn’t enough to get real results.” As IFAW’s Executive Vice President since 1997, Azzedine had worked closely with experts from across the sciences and decision makers from around the world. But when he became Pres...

Steve Schmida is the Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Resonance, an award-winning global development and corporate sustainability consulting firm with more than 100 consultants and offices in Vermont, Washington, D.C., Seattle, and Manila. Resonance clients include Fortune 500 companies, international donor agencies, and leading nonprofits and foundations. His writings have appeared in the...

Marc Conte is an Associate Professor in the Economics Department at Fordham University and a faculty research fellow at New York University, and a recent Visiting Associate Professor at the Yale School of the Environment. As an environmental economist, his research pursuits often explore how market prices fail to accurately reflect the impacts of market actions on the environment (and the resultan...

Juan Verde is an internationally renowned strategist for both the public and private sectors, with a particular focus on sustainable economic development. His specialty is designing innovative strategies to attract investment, accelerate economic development, and support strategic alliances. In the public sector, Mr. Verde served as Deputy assistant secretary for Europe and Eurasia at the United S...

Catherine Von Burg’s career spans a diverse portfolio of strategic planning, policy development, executive management, and multidisciplinary team building in renewable energy, biomedical engineering and research, health and human services, environmental conservation, and education. A member of the California Solar and Storage Association (CALSSA) board of directors, Catherine was selected for an e...

Skye d’Almeida is a Senior Vice President in Macquarie’s Green Investment Group, where she leads investor coverage for the Americas. Skye has spent the last 13 years working in sustainable infrastructure and energy for private, government and non-profit organizations. In her role at Macquarie, Skye manages relationships with pension funds, infrastructure funds, private equity funds and strategic i...