CEO and Chairman of Dandelion Energy, the largest residential geothermal company in America. His pitch is almost rude in its simplicity: the earth a few feet down sits at a steady 60 degrees all year, so why are we still burning things to stay comfortable?
Walk into a Dandelion installation and you will not see a power plant. You will see a drilling rig the size of a small truck, a six-inch hole going 500 feet straight down, and a loop of pipe filled with antifreeze. That loop is the whole company. In winter it carries warmth up from the ground; in summer it carries heat back down. The furnace in the basement becomes a relic.
Yates runs all of it. He joined Dandelion's board in 2017, the year the company spun out of Google X. He became Executive Chairman in 2018, behaving so much like an operator that cofounder Kathy Hannun called him a "third cofounder." In July 2023 he took the CEO seat outright. His thesis is that the hard part of geothermal was never the physics - it was the economics of getting a rig into a backyard at a price a homeowner, or better yet a homebuilder, would accept.
So he moved the target. Instead of chasing one retrofit at a time, Dandelion now aims at the roughly one million homes built in the US each year, where the rig shows up before the driveway is poured and the math suddenly favors the ground. Some builder deals, Yates says, already cost less than natural gas or air-source systems would have.
A ground loop lasts about a century. A homeowner does not. Yates argues utilities should own the loops as shared infrastructure, the way they own poles and transformers - lowering upfront cost for families and giving utilities a regulated return.
"No homeowner values the years 22 to 100."
In his mid-twenties, between companies, Yates and his wife got in a car in Alaska and drove. Not for a week. For most of a year - all the way down the Pan-American Highway to Tierra del Fuego, the southern tip of South America.
Somewhere along that road he watched rainforest being cleared at scale, the kind of thing you can read about for years and not feel until it is happening through the windshield. He came home with a problem he couldn't put down. Opower, the energy-efficiency software company he co-founded, traces its roots to that highway.
Before any of it, there was a Harvard computer science degree, summa cum laude, earned right as the dot-com boom was peaking. His first venture was educational software in the Bay Area, eventually bought by the publisher Houghton Mifflin. Useful, lucrative, fine. It was the drive south that pointed him at the thing he actually cared about.
Two decades later the throughline is obvious: every company he has built has been about getting people to use cleaner energy without asking them to suffer for it.
An air-source heat pump has to wring warmth out of a five-degree January night. Dandelion's loop reaches into ground that doesn't care what the weather is doing. That single fact is why ground-source systems run roughly twice as efficiently overall, and up to four times as efficiently on the coldest peak days, when the grid is straining hardest.
The numbers on the wall plug matter, but the numbers on the invoice matter more. A retrofit runs around $45,000 before incentives, landing near $20,000-$25,000 after federal and state support. For new construction, where the rig arrives before the landscaping, it's closer to $19,000 - and in some builder deals, cheaper than the gas furnace it replaces.
"I really think geothermal really deserves to be a big part of the solution, and I'm just doggedly going to go after making sure that that happens."
On his plan"I'm a terrible loser."
Asked about his superpower"Sixty degrees is a heck of a lot warmer than five degrees outside in the winter, and a heck of a lot cooler than 90 in the summer."
On why the ground wins"Our mission to transition homes from fossil fuels to sustainable energy is more than just a business goal - it's a crucial undertaking for our planet's future."
On taking the CEO jobHe is a co-owner of The Spice House, the specialty spice retailer and e-commerce shop. The climate guy also helps sell saffron and smoked paprika.
He sits as a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the most influential environmental advocacy groups in the country.
Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year. Fortune 40 Under 40. Washingtonian Tech Titan. He collects these the way other people collect frequent-flyer miles.