geothermal-energy
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Sriram Vasantharajan
Sriram Vasantharajan is the President and CEO of Mazama Energy, a Khosla Ventures and Gates Frontier-backed startup drilling into Oregon's Newberry Volcano to prove that superhot rock geothermal can deliver round-the-clock, carbon-free power at fossil-fuel prices. A former ExxonMobil engineer and CEO of oilfield services firm Blade Energy Partners, he is now applying decades of drilling and well-stimulation know-how from the oil patch to the geothermal industry, chasing rock hot enough to make a volcano's flank into a power plant.
Carl Hoiland
Carl Hoiland is the co-founder and CEO of Zanskar, the Salt Lake City company using AI foundation models to find hidden geothermal reservoirs across the American West. A Stanford-trained exploration geologist whose grandfather prospected for uranium and gold, Hoiland built Zanskar on a contrarian bet: that the United States has overlooked geothermal potential by an order of magnitude, possibly a full terawatt of clean baseload power waiting underground with no hot springs or geysers to mark it. In 2025 his team confirmed 'Big Blind,' the first commercially viable blind geothermal system discovered by industry in over 30 years, and in January 2026 Zanskar raised a $115 million Series C to start building power plants.
Eli Dourado
Eli Dourado is an economist and head of strategic investments at the Astera Institute, where he deploys capital to push frontier technologies in energy, aerospace, and other capital-intensive, heavily regulated sectors. He describes his work as a 'sacred quest to increase the pace of American economic growth,' which he argues has stagnated since around 1973. A former regulatory hacker at Boom Supersonic and director of the technology policy program at the Mercatus Center, he is known for influential essays on geothermal energy, supersonic flight, cargo airships, and ending the Great Stagnation.