Charge Up! Entrepreneurship Series
Fireside Chat with Steve Oldham
For first time entrepreneurs, planning for growth, alongside financing, conducting product R&D, and operations as well as decision making around hiring, can be a daunting experience fraught with potential missteps and missed opportunities. Steve Oldham, CEO at Captura – a Caltech spin-out company that removes atmospheric CO2 via the ocean – will share his considerable experience at growing deep tech startups, and detail successful strategies and pitfalls to avoid.
Meet & Greet to follow. Office hours available on request.
Before joining Captura in early 2022, Steve was CEO at another carbon removal company – Carbon Engineering. There he grew the company from 10 people through to a recent $1.6Bn sale to a strategic investor, helping to build global awareness of the need to combine emission control with CO2 removal. Under his watch Captura secured an initial round of $12m investment. Prior to carbon removal, Steve was a senior executive at Canada's largest Space company, running the businesses that built the Canadarm on the International Space Station and performed the world's first robotic brain surgery. Steve is a Maths & Computer Science graduate from the University of Birmingham in the UK.
About the Charge Up! Series
To expand the current programming and provide mentorship, formal and informal education on the startup process, in 2023 RSI launched the Charge Up! Series of seminars and workshops with the goal of providing students, post docs and faculty with information to help them understand the startup process of entrepreneurship, and decide whether this is the path for them. These monthly events are intended to demystify entrepreneurship, and cover topics of particular value to Caltech scientists and engineers thinking of moving from an academic lab into the outside world of business. Given by subject matter experts experienced in working with new ventures emerging from academia, they cover such areas as assessing technology for commercial value, fund-raising when just starting out, and filing IP whether starting a company or licensing an invention. The moderated workshops are intended to be interactive, encouraging individuals to ask questions and make connections that may prove valuable in the future. Find more information and where to sign up for this year's series here.
Please direct questions to Stephanie Yanchinscki, RSI Director of Entrepreneurial Programs