She catches the details before they become fires - literal and otherwise - at Pano AI, the company teaching the sky to smell smoke.
There is a job at every fast-growing company that never shows up on the product roadmap and rarely gets a launch announcement. It is the job of making the machine run - deciding what the founder sees first, which fires get water and which get left to burn, whose meeting matters and whose can wait a week. At Pano AI, that job belongs to Hannah Schlesinger, Head of the Office of the CEO, reporting directly to founder and chief executive Sonia Kastner.
Pano AI is not a quiet place to hold that seat. The San Francisco company builds a wildfire early-detection platform - ultra-high-definition cameras perched on mountaintops, artificial intelligence trained to spot the first wisp of smoke, satellite feeds and field sensors stitched into a single pane of glass for fire crews, utilities, insurers and landowners. In 2025 TIME named it one of the 100 Most Influential Companies in the world. When the product's entire promise is "we see it before you do," the operation behind it cannot afford to blink.
Schlesinger's title has shifted more than once inside the same company. She arrived as VP of Strategy & Operations. For a stretch she doubled as interim VP of Product - the person holding a critical function together until the permanent hire lands. Then she moved into the Office of the CEO. Three hats, one operator. That pattern - being the one they reach for when a seat needs filling fast - is the clearest thing her resume says about her.
Start with the detail that refuses to make sense: her degree is in Hotel Administration, from Cornell, class of 2008. It reads like a wrong turn on the way to a climate-tech operating role. Look closer and it stops being funny. Hospitality is the study of anticipating what a person needs before they think to ask - reading a room, sequencing a hundred small moving parts so the guest never sees the effort. Strip the hotel out of it and you have described the Office of the CEO almost word for word.
The first real chapter was Google. She moved through the ranks the way operators do - analyst work in AdWords and AdSense, a turn as a global product expert on Google Shopping, then Global Product Lead and Senior Manager of Strategy & Operations. It is the classic apprenticeship: learn how a giant machine actually works by being handed the parts that are jammed.
Then came the swerve most people only talk about. She left Big Tech for climate - twice. First at Pachama, the carbon-markets startup using satellites and machine learning to measure forests, where she led strategy and operations for carbon origination before stepping up to VP of Strategy & Operations. Carbon was the first bet. Fire was the second.
VP of Strategy, interim VP of Product, Head of the Office of the CEO - three jobs, one person. Range is the rarest hire in a startup, and it does not fit neatly on an org chart.
Carbon markets at Pachama, then wildfire at Pano. Anyone can say they care about the planet. She has now built the boring, load-bearing operations under two companies trying to fix it.
She works from Bend, Oregon - high desert, ponderosa forest, squarely inside the wildfire risk her company exists to fight. The mission is not abstract from her front porch.
Wildfires do their worst damage in the first minutes, before anyone official knows they exist. Pano's whole thesis is to shrink that gap. Mountaintop cameras sweep 360 degrees in ultra-high definition. AI models watch the feed for the signature of smoke and triangulate a location. Human detection specialists confirm. Satellite data and field sensors fill in what the cameras miss. Fire crews, utilities and agencies get an alert and a map while the fire is still small enough to matter.
Founded by Sonia Kastner and Arvind Satyam, the company raised a Series B and has pulled in roughly $97 million in total funding, with a $44 million round closing in mid-2025. It sells into a genuinely hard market - firefighters, electric utilities, insurers and private landowners all at once, each with different budgets, procurement cycles and definitions of success. Managing that kind of complexity is exactly the sort of problem an operator lives for.
It also runs on a serious stack - computer vision and machine-learning models for detection, geospatial analysis, cloud infrastructure, satellite and sensor data fusion, all delivered through a single cloud platform that a fire captain can read in the middle of the night. Behind a product like that sits a small army of engineers, sales staff, government-affairs specialists and operators, and none of it coordinates itself. The bigger the company gets, the more the connective tissue matters - and the connective tissue is precisely the thing Schlesinger has spent her whole career building.
Every founder eventually hits the same wall: there are more decisions than hours, more inbound than attention, more people who need five minutes than there are five-minute slots in a life. The Office of the CEO exists to absorb that overflow. It is part chief of staff, part translator, part air-traffic control. The best ones do not build their own empire; they multiply the person they serve. Done well, the CEO looks faster and clearer than any one human should be. Done badly, everything jams.
Pano itself has described the shape of the role in its own hiring - a Chief of Staff and Head of the Office of the CEO, based in San Francisco, sitting at the founder's right hand. It is the kind of seat companies only create when they are scaling fast enough that the founder can no longer be everywhere at once. That Schlesinger holds it says as much about the company's velocity as it does about her.
There is no glory in it. No feature ships with your name on it. The metric is negative space - the crises that never happened, the meetings that stayed short, the decision that got made on Tuesday instead of drifting into next quarter. It is a job for people who would rather be useful than famous, and it tends to attract a specific temperament: high integrity, allergic to chaos, quietly competitive about getting things right.
For a decade, the most ambitious operators in tech pointed themselves at advertising, search and consumer apps - the places where the scale, and the money, was. Something shifted. A generation of people who learned how to run large machines inside Google, Meta and their peers started carrying that knowledge into climate. Not as evangelists, but as operators. The pitch decks about saving the world are easy. The unglamorous work of making a climate company actually function - procurement, forecasting, cross-functional sequencing, the thousand-part choreography of a startup that has to sell to firefighters and utilities and insurers in the same week - is not.
Schlesinger's path traces that current almost exactly. Google taught her how a giant system works. Pachama pointed those skills at carbon and forests. Pano points them at fire. The common denominator is not a cause - it is a competence, deployed on purpose against problems that matter. That is the quiet story underneath the resume: an operator who decided the best use of hard-won range was the fight to keep the planet livable, and who has now made that decision twice in a row.
A hospitality diploma turned out to be a stealth operations degree. Reading a room scales.
Her company is headquartered in San Francisco's Mission District. She files from Bend - about 500 miles and one mountain range away.
Two climate startups back to back. Not the pitch, the plumbing - the operating layer both companies run on.
The Office of the CEO is the least glamorous, most consequential chair in the building. She chose it.
Profile compiled from public sources - LinkedIn, The Org, Pano AI and TIME. Facts only; where the record is thin, we left it thin.