SPEAKER_01 0:07

Welcome to Policy Catalyst. I'm Caroline Martin, and after my own transition from a long career in the public sector into a fast-growing tech company, I wanted to dig deeper into what it means to be an effective policy practitioner but outside of government. So in these conversations, we're going to be sitting down with some of industry's foremost leaders on policy to unpack how they think about the function, the unique ways it can support a company's goals, and how they measure success. So now let's dive into today's conversation. So welcome to the show, Jennifer. It is great to have you with us.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Oh, it's a pleasure. Thanks for asking me to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

So, Jennifer Ganton, policy expert, and currently the Chief Global Affairs Officer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which I think is an incredibly exciting company building our future energy supply. So I'm looking forward to hearing more about that. But first of all, Jennifer, before we kind of dig into what you are doing today, I want to take us right back to, I guess, you know, pre-professional career to think about what was your very first job. So can you tell us a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_00 1:16

Yeah, um, I can go on the way way back machine to the very first paycheck I ever received. Um, I was 14 years old and I got a permit, a waiver to work at 14, uh living with my grandparents at the beach, and I was the toast girl. I made toast at a restaurant during the previous year.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

Wow, I didn't know that that was a job, so there we go.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

I actually uh got promoted to be able to make waffles uh about halfway through that summer as well as toast. But it was my first paycheck, and it was exciting, and I was saving for college and to be earning money, and I ended up moving up and going in to do waitressing at that restaurant and saving enough money to pay for my first year of college.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

So it's exciting. So waffles, waffles and toast pay. And I love the fact that going from toast to waffles is a is a promotion as well. So that is quite excellent. Um you said you paid for your first year in college. What were you studying?

SPEAKER_00 2:18

Yeah, so um I was very fortunate that growing up, my father's job uh allowed us to move to lots of different countries. Uh he ran manufacturing plants for a large Fortune 50 company, and we had moved around a lot, mostly in Europe. And so I knew I wanted to study international business, international affairs, something of that sort. And so um I was looking at degree programs where I could do that, but I also had to pay for college. So I went to Drexel University in Philadelphia, and they had a really interesting multidisciplinary degree. I was only the second class to be in that degree program, international area studies. We did a little bit of business, sociology, language, international economics, those type of things. Um, but it was a co-op school where it's a five-year program and you work six months uh in co-ops and then you go to school six months. So I was able to fund my way through college at Drexel University uh through the co-op program and graduate with an international area of studies degree, uh, which turns out employers don't really understand what that is, but it was a really fun, you know, Drexel's program, which is still available today. I'm actually on the Dean's Advisory Board now for the um for the College of Arts and Science of Drexel. They've asked me to come back and help advise uh on programming there. But um uh the first year is like a traditional year, and then you have three years where you do the six-month, six-month split, and then your last year is three quarters, uh, so a traditional year. So it's a five-year program. Um, but you get three pretty solid uh work experiences over those six months. And I started college in 1987, and it was pretty unique back then to have a resume that had really substantial work experience in companies uh coming out of uni.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Okay. What sort of companies were they that you I mean co-ops, but what what sort of things were you doing?

SPEAKER_00 4:14

Yeah, so the first co-op, I worked for the Chamber of Commerce in Philadelphia and on programming for uh for some of the companies in the Philadelphia area, educational programming. Uh that was a lot of fun. My second co-op was actually McNeil Pharmaceutical. Uh they're headquartered just outside of Philadelphia, and I worked in the government affairs department, uh, doing it in doing my co-op for six months there for the vice president of government affairs. During a really interesting time, uh they were the makers of Tylenol and they were just kind of recovering from the uh the unfortunate things that have been happening around the tainting of Tylenol and what it meant for the industry. And so my third co-op uh at Drexel University was with a company called McGetigan. And they did meeting planning for large launches uh for pharmaceutical companies. Um, and that ended up being where I went right after university. Uh, I was able to parlay that into my first job out of college.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

Very nice. So kind of very early on, you kind of had this government affairs policy type bent, it sounds like. Is that is that true? I mean, this is your first role. How long did you stay there and and sort of what happened after that?

SPEAKER_00 5:26

Yeah, um I think a lesson I always try to talk to people about is you have to take the opportunities when they arise. I graduated college in 1992. There was a terrible recession going on in the United States. Um, so I really enjoyed that government affairs co-op I had, but there just weren't job opportunities in that space for recent grads. So going to the meeting planning company was the right thing to do. I had a job right out of college, a lot of my friends didn't. Um, but I only did that for about a year, uh, realizing that was kind of not my calling. Um, and I was, you know, opportunistic because the market still wasn't great. And so I ended up going to an executive search firm doing research for them and ended up becoming the director of research at that small executive search firm out of Philadelphia, um, which led to then moving into HR for a tech startup company uh from there. So for the first few years of my career, I actually, by happenstance, ended up in more of a human resources type of role and was doing that work for probably about six years.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

That's really, and I do think there's a lesson there about we can think all about like our ideal next role and so on and so forth, but at the end of the day, you're choosing between the options before you. And I think it's particularly relevant because I think a lot of people at the moment are worrying about well, what's the future kind of careers going to look like? Is this a great market for grads? And you may not have your dream job, but there will often be a job. There are multiple routes to Rome. And so six years in that kind of like HR space with a couple of different types of companies by the sounds of things. How did you kind of slowly make your way back into? I guess you you knew that HR wasn't going to be for you, or how did you end up then back on the sort of government affairs policy side?

SPEAKER_00 7:21

Yeah, it's a bit of a winding journey. Um, so it takes uh it takes looking at, I think, when you look at your boss's job, at your boss's boss's job, and you're and you're gaining experience in a certain discipline. Do you want those jobs? And I looked at that and I said, I don't really want those jobs. I'm I'm more interested in what the business is doing from a how they're operating in the world, how the business is growing. So I decided to take a break and go get my MBA. And I purposely chose to do my MBA to pivot my career. I wanted to move from human resources into a different discipline. I wasn't sure what it was, but I also knew I wanted to get back to the roots of doing something more international. I had been working in what I would call very domestic focused roles, and uh, and that had not the door had not opened to do anything more international. So again, I chose an international MBA program, which at the time when I went to school in 1998, there weren't a lot of those around. So I had a few to choose from, and um and another lesson learned. I got into some schools with big brand names, um, but there's a really unique program at the University of South Carolina. At the time it was called the Master's in International Business Studies, MIBS. Um, now it's an IMBA program, but um it was unique in that you did half of it in the US and half in another country. You had to be fluent in the language, they kicked you out of the program if you after the summer program you weren't fluent, and you went and did a nine-month internship overseas. So, and they also gave me a full scholarship.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

I was gonna say that would have been quite an investment, right? Like at, you know, you're six years in, and presumably no one is paying, like your your your employee employers are is is not paying for this.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

So yeah, I was on my own dime and my own time, as I call it. Yeah, and uh and so yeah, I had to choose wisely with a program that met my needs, but then also the program that gave me the full scholarship, whereas I'd gotten partial scholarships in the other programs. So it mean meant I could go get an MBA and come out without with no debt, which was super important. And I got to go work overseas for nine months as part of that program and rush up on my German uh and become fluent in German.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 9:40

All of which I achieved.

SPEAKER_01 9:42

Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. And then did that parlay, as you hoped, into a kind of a more internationally focused role?

SPEAKER_00 9:52

It did exactly what I wanted it to do. Um, and it introduced me to energy, uh, which I will have to say if you're looking for an international career, energy is where it's at. You can't look at the front of the Wall Street Journal for a week and not see stories about energy. And there's stories about the global connectedness of the energy markets and what's happening and how it impacts everybody. So um I had the fortuitous opportunity. I had some job offers um from some tech companies coming out of my MBA. It was, it was just it was, you know, we were interviewing in 1999. If you could spell MBA, you could get a job. It was this big, the tech boom was happening, everything was great. So I got some tech offers, I got management consultant offers.

SPEAKER_02 10:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:37

But I went to a um a sort of wine and cheese because I had wine and cheese. I'm like, I'll go to the information session for this energy company, Texaco. Never heard of them. I know the gas stations, but what else do they do? And um, I was just blown away by the presentation of what a career in energy could offer you. And they were offering a leadership development program. So for two years, they would rotate you through different parts of the company to learn about the company, and then you would be in a fast track leadership development uh career trajectory. So I was not on the interview roster, um, but I found out there was a dinner that night for the candidates that are on the interview roster. And so I showed up at the restaurant half an hour early, found out which table they were gonna be at, and sat myself at it. And the recruiter happened to be an alumni who was an executive at that company, and he sat next to me and I said to him, I don't really have an interview tomorrow. I just came here because I want one. And he said, I like your gumption. Why don't you meet me for breakfast tomorrow? We'll make this happen. And I got ended up getting the job offer. They only were making one offer that year to um my program, and I got it. And the two tech offers I could have accepted. The tech crash happened that spring, and they rescinded the offers for the others in the program.

SPEAKER_01 11:51

Creating that opportunity for yourself, like being like, no, I think I want this, and can I go make it happen? And then like creating the circumstances which allow kind of serendipity to step in and yeah, yeah. That's incredible. As you look back now at the MBA, I think there's often, you know, people who are thinking about doing an MBA, particularly say in this policy space, it's is it worth the investment? Like is often a question that comes up. Is it just about the network? Are you looking to learn things? How do you think about having done it now? Beyond those kind of immediate opportunities, it helps you translate to like how do you think about that now in terms of the policy function?

SPEAKER_00 12:31

Yeah, I think the skill set I learned there and the early experience at Texaco where I had more of a finance role and before I transitioned into government affairs roles served me well. I mentor a lot of um people at my current company and previous places where I used to work. And when they started talking about an MBA, I always say, why are you going? What's the purpose? Is it significant enough to make that investment? What's the return on investment you think you're gonna get from this? Um, so really think about are you gonna go significantly into debt or can you do it a different way? And then thirdly, um, the skill sets that you gain in an MBA end up being applicable across whatever discipline you're doing because I have to think about policy and the impacts it has on our business. So, for example, one of the things once I was in government affairs, I had to manage how we talk to the government about tax policies that impacted our company. The fact that I actually understand financial models, how taxes impact businesses, I was it was much easier for me to work with the tax attorneys and the tax accountants at our company and quickly get up to speed on the issues and understand them and then translate those into policy objectives and then go advocate for those. So the business background and understanding how your company works, the underlying strategies and how you make money and what's important are really great tools for someone in the policy space. So you often see people with law degrees in the policy space. I think that's important as well. But I thought I think over over the years I've brought a unique perspective with my business background and some financial acumen, having then moved into policy. Uh, and the MBA was a big part of that, and then this leadership development program at Texaco, and I ended up coming out working in the internal corporate venture capital group at Texaco at the time, which we got bought by Chevron during that period, and it became the Chevron Technology Ventures Group, and we were doing equity investing into renewable projects. Yeah. And so um I started bridging between the finance work, and I got promoted to be the advisor to the president of that division, and I started managing some of the public-private partnerships we were involved with as part of the technology ventures work, and that's when I realized I like that more. I really like that work.

SPEAKER_01 15:03

So you've spoken a little bit there about what happened to your arrival at TechCo. You're in more of a financy role, you end up in the ventures arm, and then on to policy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:14

Okay. So I get exposed to a lot of government public-private programs that we're engaged in, uh, supporting our uh our policy team and our corporate responsibility team with the work that we're doing. And I realize I want to do that. And um, and I talked to my boss at the time, the president of CTV, and I said, These are the things I really like to do, but I like working on the renewables. And he gave me some good advice. And he said, We are an we are an oil and gas company that is thinking about where renewables will fit in our portfolio. He said, To get the credibility and to have a leadership role in this company, you need experience in the core business. Go get some experience in the core business, go learn about that, and I will help you try to transition into the type of role you want in the core business and come back and have my job one day. Come back and run it. So I took the advice. Uh with sound advice from someone who'd been at the company a long time and knew how you got promoted, how to be successful in that company. And so he helped me get some internal sort of discussions or informational discussions. And the woman who was running um our policy, government, and public affairs at the time had moved into that role from a finance role in the company, and she knew me through the financial management program that I had come in through. And she said, I love this idea of you taking those skills and bringing it to this part of the business. I'm gonna make this happen. And she worked with them with the managers in that division and found me a job in our natural gas group um doing policy, government, and public affairs work.

SPEAKER_01 16:55

Wow. Okay, okay. Did you ever make it back to the ventures arm?

SPEAKER_00 17:00

Um, I did not. Um, I made it back in a way to the type of work I wanted to do because as I started working in what we call policy, government, and public affairs, PGPA at uh at Chevron, I had an amazing experience. I never said no to anything they asked me to do. I did things that I'm like, how am I gonna do that? I've never done that. I don't know how to go work with a community that we need to relocate where we're gonna build an LEG plant in Mexico. I don't, I've never done this work, but I'm gonna rely on the resources in my company, friends and allies, and people who do know this. I'm gonna rely on my abilities and I'm just gonna get on a plane and go do this work. Um, and opportunity after opportunity came up. Um, and I moved through the organization. I was asked to go to Nigeria and work on a project in Nigeria for the gas group there as well, to be the PGPA manager and oversee government engagement, but also community engagement in Nigeria. Same thing. I'd never even been to Africa. Wow, yes, and I said, what a great opportunity.

SPEAKER_01 18:07

Engagement requires like getting in there. Yep.

unknown 18:11

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 18:12

And I said, I'm in, I'll go do it. And um, and I was fortunate that I was able to go do that. And so I moved around quite a bit, always had my hand on some of the policy work. Um, but then I knew I really enjoyed dealing with the most senior level parts of government and shaping country-level policies as I was doing that work abroad. And I made another decision. I decided to go back to school full-time at 38.

SPEAKER_01 18:41

My goodness.

SPEAKER_00 18:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:43

So I like, I mean, I say that because these are relatively risky choices, right? So they're not they're not like a clear path to something by doing this.

SPEAKER_00 18:56

Yes, exactly. Well, I had a little bit of a safety net. Um Chevron allowed me to take a leave of absence and said they won't hold my job, but they would hold my role within the organization to apply for jobs there when I'm coming out and would bridge my tenure in the company. Um so they made it very easy for me to feel like it took a little bit of the risk out. I've been a high performer at Chevron. I felt like there'll be something for me if I go do this. Maybe I'll look at other things and maybe I don't want to go back to Chevron, but let me explore. Um and so I um only applied to two or three schools that I knew would be the right programs for me. And I was standing in line, I remember it distinctly, um, coming back from a ski trip. I was living in London with Chevron at the time, and standing in line at immigration coming back from my ski trip. And uh and I got the email that I had been accepted to the Harvard Kennedy School. And so to me, it felt like it took the risk out as well to be going to an institution like HKS, which was such a big name brand. The program was so well respected. Um, I'd be meeting the network that you get at HKS is just incredible. Um, people in my class have run for head of state, have run for Congress and are members of Congress, um, and so and worked in the White House and those type of things. So it felt like um the it didn't feel risky, it felt like opportunity, I'll be honest, when it came came to me.

SPEAKER_01 20:29

Okay. That's a great distinction too.

SPEAKER_00 20:31

Yeah. Yeah. Again, it was on my own dime in my own time though. Chabron was not gonna pay for this. They don't pay for these types of things.

SPEAKER_01 20:41

And that one was I wrote a check.

SPEAKER_00 20:43

Yeah. Um, but I've been working really hard for a number of years and saved money for options. I didn't know what those options would be. Um, but I knew I might want some options, and so I was able to write the check and do the program.

SPEAKER_01 20:56

Okay. Okay, wow. So Texaco becomes Chevron. You take time out to go to HKS, you're still in energy today. Was that the natural kind of path? You finish HKS and you're like, that's it, energy. We're going coming back.

SPEAKER_00 21:13

I called, uh I called my former boss at uh at Chevron, who's just been an amazing mentor, Linda Payton, and um through my whole career, she's just been amazing. And we talked through um what would be my options if I came back. And they offered me the job to run um the policy government affairs in Australia, okay, uh which was our largest uh capital project at the time, or to go to the DC office and run government affairs there, or the international government affairs opportunity there to run a region. And coming out of HKS DC was just like that's it. That is the job I want. There was nothing else I want. I I get to stay in energy, which I looked at other things while I was at HKS, and I'm like, there's just nothing like energy that is so exciting, global, and on the president of the country, every Country's mind every day. So I'm going to go do that. And I had a wonderful manager in Washington, DC, who meant and had mentors in that office who were just amazing and helped me understand how to do my job there. I got promoted to run the group that managed international government affairs for Chevron while I was there. And then ultimately I was promoted into what I will call a very senior kind of leadership role within the company and moved to the headquarters. And I was the general manager of global policy, corporate responsibility. I ran our social impact fund. So I had hundreds of millions of dollars of social investing that we did globally that um that I managed. And I also was given the opportunity to co-lead our climate strategy for the company with the head of strategic planning. Yeah, spend a lot of time up on Mahogany Row, as they call it. And we don't really have mahogany at Chevron, but it was that idea. But uh but it was the it was the full circle that my very first boss at Chevron had talked about. Go build credibility in parts of the business that everyone will know you can deliver. Deliver, do it well, and then you will have these type of opportunities open up for you. And so I thought this is an opportunity to bring my interest in energy transition, renewables, the things I had started with, but also the balance of how do we manage the things we need today. We still need oil and gas in the world, and we have to make that happen. So, how are we balancing all these things? And what is the policy, what is the company going to do over the next few decades as they think through what may or may not be the transition inflection points? It was a really fun job. It was fun. It was hard, but it was fun.

SPEAKER_01 23:46

I mean, obviously a completely different climate as well toward some of those sustainability questions than the one we're facing today, and yet you are still in energy and in a company kind of very much at the heart now of those new. So, how did you get from Chevron to CFS?

SPEAKER_00 24:08

Yeah. So um after almost 20 years at Chevron, what I also realized was um very large companies are a little bit like the government, a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of people involved in decision making. Yeah. Um, and I just thought I'm I'm hitting kind of the last third of my career. I wanted to go fast and do something exciting. I wanted to be able to take that last half and just have a really high impact.

SPEAKER_01 24:38

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 24:38

And um, and I felt like I probably need to look at other things if that's really what I want.

SPEAKER_01 24:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:45

And so I just started to explore opportunities and um and I get asked all the time, how did I make that transition? I ended up leaving Chevron and I hit the reset button really hard. I went to a biotech. I went from managing a team of 40 or 40 or 50 people to go to a biotech with no team, from a general manager, an executive level role, to being a senior director, no direct reports, building alliances on how do we change the policies and rules to make one-time curative gene therapy treatments available and paid for. Um, and I loved it, it was fun. I also was eye-opening. Um, I the learning curve was so steep on healthcare compared to energy. But again, I had an amazing boss, Mark Battellini, um is probably one of the best mentors I've ever had in my career. He's he's a friend today. Um, he just really shepherded his team in a way, and he wanted people who thought differently on the team intentionally, so hired an energy person. Like that's he's he's that's like really smart. Like, we got really creative. We accomplished some big changes and regulations while I was there, just in the two years. He promoted me to vice president of federal government affairs and international market expansion within six months. Um, and so I had an executive role back in an executive role. Um, but what I what a the uh the siren of energy was calling me all that time. All that time, I really missed it. So when a friend uh sent me, there was a job posting for Commonwealth Fusion Systems, and a friend sent it to me and said, This is you. You you cannot ignore this opportunity. I um she said it checks all the boxes you've been talking about for the last few years. Uh, and I just apply, I cold applied on their website.

SPEAKER_01 26:35

Just can you talk a little bit about when you say you missed energy, was it you have a lot of experience? You're like, am I why am I throwing away that experience? Is it that you uh kind of had a lot of passion for the subject, or you know, what was it exactly that kind of drew you back?

SPEAKER_00 26:53

Yeah, I mean, I think healthcare is also a very exciting area to be working in, right? Um, and and what we were doing, if you don't feel good going home at the end of the night, trying to make one-time curative treatments for children with rare disease, there's something wrong, but you're like, it was a great job. Um, but um I will uh I I think there's two things here if I'm being honest. One was I had 20 years of energy experience. I had 20 years of an energy network. I'm in Washington and I'm like building new relationships in this healthcare sector. I'm trying to decide is this the right consultant to hire? And they're new to me, I don't know them. I've never worked with them, I've never seen the work they've done on the committees on the hill. Like, I don't know if that's the right person. And my boss did, so he was able to help guide me through things. But um, I knew everybody in Washington who worked in energy. I knew most people who worked in energy in like 20 different countries. And and so I felt like I was leaving on the table this skill set, this network that I had, and uh and and I could be super high impact in energy and healthcare. I was being high impact, but it was really hard. It was much harder.

SPEAKER_01 28:07

How long did you take away from energy? Like how long was that stint at the biotech?

SPEAKER_00 28:12

Just two years.

SPEAKER_01 28:12

Two years. Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:14

Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:15

Which is interesting in that your network lasted. I think some people worry, they want to try something new, and then they're like, Will I ever come back? And I think what's interesting is that two years can feel like a long time, but maybe isn't. Was that your experience? When you came back to Commonwealth fusion systems back to the energy sector, were you like, oh, it's like I never left, or what was that experience?

SPEAKER_00 28:39

To a degree, yeah. I mean, some things have changed, and there were some people doing roles that I had never met in in Washington, but there were an awful lot of people that I did know. And I would walk into a room and people knew me because, and and these were people who back in the day, you know, they were staffing an assistant secretary. And now they all are the assistant secretaries, or you know, they worked at the embassy and the energy desk, and now they're the deputy country manager at the embassy in this country, and so it's people you had grown up with through um through engagement, and they they all stayed in energy and they just had bigger jobs. Uh, and so um, so yeah, it wasn't there's there's always new people to meet, especially when you do policy and I do I do lobbying as well. It's part of my the role I've always had at Chevron and uh and the role that I have here at CFS, the lobbying team reports to me. Um we do advocacy, and so you you do run into the same people, um, they just have different roles, and you have a different role.

SPEAKER_01 29:45

For those people who don't know, can you tell me a little bit about what CFS does?

SPEAKER_00 29:50

Yeah, there's a reason I came to CFS. It is super exciting. Um, I had not even heard of Fusion when my friend sent me the job posting, and I went down a rabbit hole of fusion that weekend. Like I could not stop myself. The whole weekend, it was like the next page, the next page as I was going, going, Googling all about it. Fusion is and always has been something that will be the ultimate answer to how we power the world. And for a long time, there was a lot of science happening in Fusion, but now, within the past 10 years, 15 years, there was this burgeoning commercial industry starting and some technology breakthroughs and material science breakthroughs that had happened that we were seeing we are on the cusp of actually having fusion energy on Earth and available to us in a commercially viable product. So fusion is the opposite of fission, it's a nuclear reaction, but it's the opposite of fission. Fission takes heavy elements, uranium, plutonium, and and breaks them apart. And uh and when you do that, you get tremendous amounts of energy, but you also get um a chain reaction that you have to control, and that's where some of the safety parameters around fission are what make people nervous about fission, is you can have a chain reaction or a meltdown. Um and with fission, you're using special nuclear materials as your fuel, uranium, plutonium. Um, and uh and those in them in the in and of themselves have dual use into other parts of the economy, such as defense, and so there's concerns there. Um but then uh there were just a lot of things that if you think about fission as a traditional industry, it works, we know it works, it's it's clean, there's no greenhouse gas emissions, there's many benefits to it. But when you jump to fusion, it is fusing together two light elements, hydrogen uh isotopes, one of which comes from seawater, uh, it's called deuterium, and the other is called tritium. And it is uh one that has to be kind of it, it's available in the atmosphere and in the world, but you it's really hard to extract. And so right now it's a byproduct of the fission industry, but you can make tritium from lithium when you hit uh lithium with a neutron when there's radioactivity and it's lithium, it makes tritium. So there's a way to make all the tritium you need in the world if you want to. So it's these two line elements, you fuse them together, and it makes tremendous amounts of energy. So we're talking about a difference of like grams of fuel versus tons of fuel when you talk about fusion compared to coal, for example. So you can it we always say it's grams to gigawatts, is kind of a catchphrase that the fusion industry uses, but you need very little of this hydrogen, these hydrogen isotopes to be confined in a machine that brings them to very high temperatures. It's 100 degrees Celsius, like it's hot as the sun. And um, but you make it really hot, you confine it, and we do that with magnets. That's how you make the confinement, and um, and you get that fuel dense enough in the machine, so you have enough of that fuel in there, and you put some power in there, and you can create this fusion reaction, and it creates a plasma. It's like a uh it has a glow to it, and it's a plasma that happens in the machine. And as that's happening, it just creates this tremendous amount of energy and heat, and you can capture that heat, and it looks just like any other power source after that. Heat then turns water into steam, turns turbines, and makes electrons. That's what we do with natural gas, coal. So it's just a different heat source, and it looks the same to the grid as any other power plant, but there's no there's no greenhouse gas emissions, zero. The only byproduct is a small amount of helium. We don't have special nuclear materials, and it is a nuclear reaction, so some of the materials in the machine do become radioactive when they get hit with a neutron, but it's a low-level radioactivity, kind of like particle accelerators at hospitals to do cancer treatments or MRI machines, uh, medical equipment that uses radiation. And so that decays within a few decades, as opposed to the waste from fission, takes hundreds of thousands of years to decay. So fusion really is something that could power the world with very little fuel. You build a machine and you make energy, so you're not relying on supply chains from other countries. If you have seawater and you have the machine, you have energy. Um, so you can scale this. If you figure out how to manufacture at scale, you can scale rapidly, um, and you don't have long-lived waste. So it's just really it's the ultimate answer to how do we have abundant, affordable energy that doesn't have impacts on the climate? It's fusion. It's fusion, it's the ultimate answer. So nobody had done it though in a commercially viable factory. We've had fusion machines. The actual design we're using is called a tokamak. It's like a donut-shaped machine, and the plasma runs in the center of the magnets that have a hole in them and it looks like a donut. Um, but there's lots of different designs that are happening. Um, but there's over 50 private fusion companies pursuing a commercially viable fusion power plant on the grid in the early 2030s, and we're one of them.

SPEAKER_01 35:23

Okay. Okay. So it's in growing like, I guess, competitive space by the sounds of things.

SPEAKER_00 35:28

It is, it is. Because of the advances, um, some have more science to prove. We have very little science. There's 150 tokamaks around the world. It's just how do you get the configuration so you can get more power out than it takes to run the machine? You have to have like a 10x more power out to make it a commercially viable product. We're building a demonstration in Massachusetts to show that that will turn on in in 2027 next year. And then we announced the sighting of our very first fusion power plant that'll connect to the grid. And we announced that at the end of last year, and that will be outside of Richmond, Virginia, in Chesterfield County, Virginia. And we have started the process for all of our permitting and uh and moving forward with putting that on the grid in the early 2030s here in Virginia. So six months ago, I moved from Boston down here to Virginia. I'm sitting in Richmond, Virginia as I speak to you. Yeah, and we're a tech startup, right? So when I joined, I was employed I was employee one like between 100 and 110, somewhere in there. Um, and uh, and there were two people on my team who had been here from the very beginning of the company, actually. They were employee like seven and eight. Um yeah, our CEO had the foresight to understand the importance of regulations and policy and community acceptance were all paramount to this burgeoning new industry and brought people on early. Um, so uh I came into an executive role and and they were on my team, and I've been able to grow the team since then to about 10, 10 or 11 folks now that we have on the team. Um yeah, yeah, and so a lot of other startups ask for advice. Like, how do I scale and grow a policy government affairs function? Like, what how do I do that, right? My advice always is what is the most important thing and the highest business risk for your company? Do that first. And so for us, it was regulations. It was there are no regulatory frameworks for fusion power plants because they don't exist in the world. There are regulations for fission plants, which are considered nuclear plants, and there is a propensity to want to regulate us like that. The regulations for fission are quite burdensome for good reason because every part of the design of the machine is a factor in controlling the safety of the machine when there is a chain reaction or a meltdown. Fusion can't have a chain reaction or a meltdown. It's a very fragile process to make the fusion. It's really, really hard to make that plasma. If anything happens, it just stops happening. It literally just stops happening. There is no exposure to the surrounding cities, and nothing happens with the building. Um, and so um, and and so from our perspective, you should not be regulated under the same regulations as fission. We should be regulated more like particle accelerators and medical equipment. And so the Nuclear Regulatory Commission uh in the United States regulates both all those things, anything with radiation. So we had to go make the argument of you need to create regulations for our fusion industry because we need to be able to apply for a license. We're gonna build this demonstration machine in Boston and we're gonna build our first plant in the early 2030s. We need to be able to apply for a license to operate, uh, to have the materials on site and then to operate. And um, they don't exist today, but you should not just copy fission and give it to us. It should look more like what you do for particle accelerators, and then add on the things that are specific to fusion, perhaps. Um, and that becomes our regulations. That was the number one thing because to get our license, if we were regulated that way, is a couple years and about 10, 20 million dollars. A fission license when we started this took like a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to get your license. You don't have a commercially viable product in fusion when it's a very small machine. It's not like micro-size, but um, but when you have a smaller machine and you're producing 400 megawatts of power from that machine, you can't kind of amortize the cost of a license like that the way you can a big fission plant and that makes giggle, you know, multiple gigawatts of power. Um, and so at the end of the day, for the commercial business model to work, we needed to be regulated this way. So we chose that. The majority of our work was policy work on regulations, had to get those in place. At the same time, we wanted RD programs to be more commercially focused with at the DOE. So we were working on policy at the DOE, and we were working at funding in Congress for how they fund things for fusion. We were thinking about community. We were going to build this demonstration plant in Boston, and in 2021, we were moving dirt around, getting ready to do that. So we had a whole community engagement plan in place. And the woman on my team, Kristen Cullen, who does that work, is just fantastic. And we did uh a lot of open houses for the community explaining fusion, fusion 101s. We do tours every quarter, and we invite the community to come in and we give a talk and then we let them tour and see what we're doing to demystify fusion and make sure there isn't this confusion between fission, fusion, like say nuclear.

SPEAKER_01 41:16

Say the word nuclear, and probably everyone starts panicking and yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:20

Yeah. So you're all the above was happening simultaneously. Okay, but you really have to sit down and say what will kill the business that's your biggest priority, or what will be the biggest enabler for the business and make that your priority to get that done.

SPEAKER_01 41:38

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 41:39

Working some of these other things in parallel, but then you know, things surface. So we we've got that regulatory certainty in the US. It's fantastic. They made the decision a few years ago, we're gonna do it this way, and they're now writing rulemaking and guidance and those type of things.

SPEAKER_01 41:53

Okay. So you spoke a little bit before about that kind of difference between like lobbying and the policy work. Can you talk about that a little bit also in the context of your team and how you structure it and why you organize like that and how you see those differences?

SPEAKER_00 42:09

Yeah. So from the beginning, we had regulatory expertise through consultants who just knew how to do that work, and uh and we had a law firm that we worked with, and then I went and hired the lawyer because he was the only guy who knew about fusion regulation, and I'm like, we should hire him. Um, so um we we sort of had a few, we had that through consultancy. We did have um a lobbyist in Washington on retainer who was sort of tracking fusion things. But as we started to think about how we grow the team, um we knew we needed um in-house, we really needed that advocacy for fusion and to take a leadership role in advocacy for fusion with more and more fusion companies coming in, and a fusion industry association was stood up. We needed to figure out how to have a leadership role in shaping that and making sure it went on the right path. So I I was fortunate. We raised a fair amount of capital. Um, after we demonstrated a core piece of technology in 2021, we had a $1.8 billion raise. It allowed us to build the machine we're building in Boston, but it also allowed me to add some people to my team. And so I had um a full-time person that heads up federal affairs in DC, a very well-connected DC critter that worked in and out of the White House, up on the hill. I hired a head of international government affairs because we had expanded to making sure these regulations are in place, not just in the US, but in countries all around the world, to kind of make it inevitable that all the markets would be open to us once we have our product on the flywheel of manufacturing at scale. We can build and chip these anywhere in the world. So open the door for industry at scale. So hired a head of international government affairs. And uh, and then we hired a community manager to support Kristen, and Kristen focused a little bit more on state policy work where we were building in Massachusetts and then here in Virginia, where we wanted to build. So, you know, and we now have a policy specialist on Kristen's team as well, who came in, who interestingly enough, I'd met at Bluebird, and she didn't have any energy experience. Yeah, yeah, she was biotech, no energy experience, but probably one of the smartest people I know. And so I said to Kristen, we have to hire Sarah Castagini. She will get there. And she's now one of the experts and is called by governments around the world for her expertise on uh fusion regulation and policy. Um, so we built a small team of policy experts under Kristen and community work, and then the actual advocacy lobbyist, like Trent is a registered lobbyist, um, and Greg goes out and meets with governments around the world.

SPEAKER_01 44:46

And then I now also sorry, gentlemen, you make the distinction in terms of the people who sort of work out what the ideal rule book is, and then the people who go and make the case for it. Is that broadly speaking? Okay.

SPEAKER_00 44:59

It it's a feedback loop that's critical, though. Um the policy team can't do the policy work without the feedback they're getting from the teams that are meeting with Congress and meeting with ministers and and parliaments around the world. That that has to be like a really close relationship iterative feedback loop. So it's kind of jointly developed, I would say.

SPEAKER_02 45:21

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 45:22

But the policy team has a little bit more deeper expertise, is more research-oriented. They have legal skills to write bills and do the language. And uh and the advocacy team is really the face of this, and then going and taking these ideas and trying to activate them in the hall of Congress or in the White House or at the DOE.

SPEAKER_01 45:42

Okay. Okay. Yeah. Because I think sometimes that distinction kind of maybe sort of the government affairs and the policy side can can get a get a little bit uh lost along the way. Um, how do you measure success? Because these are obvious. I mean, you're talking like you you said a moment ago, you know, this can be like a couple of years uh to kind of get go from kind of nothing to having a policy framework with kind of rule book written. What how do you actually measure whether people are being successful in their roles?

SPEAKER_00 46:16

Yeah, um, a couple of things. We have objectives on regulation changes we want, and we put time frames on them, and did we achieve them? Like we need these regulations changed by this date because we need to apply for a license. And we exceeded that date, which is fortunate. And the same thing I now have for international, I said, well, in order to make it feel like it's inevitable that it would be regulated this way around the world, I need the G7 countries to regulate it this way. And so by this date, the G7 countries need to have established the principles of regulating this way, and we're well on our way. Uh, Germany, Japan, UK has already made the decision, but Germany and Japan and Canada have all announced they're gonna follow this way, and we're in there in the trenches providing advice to them on writing their regulations. So you actually have to have concrete the government changes a rule, you set a target of when you need that done by, and you go do the work and you put boots on the ground, advocacy, you have the ideas, you bring the ideas, you make it happen. So that's like a measurement uh on the regulatory front. Um a measurement that I often imply uh you know uh impose on the federal team as they're working through this as a policy, it's policy, and and Trent and DC working together. That is is the DOE focusing on the right type of RD programs that will support our business, not just basic science? Are they pivoting their roadmap of how they're going to do research with government money that we can benefit from? So we need these three programs stood up at the Department of Energy because they would be helpful to us. It needs funding and it needs the DOE's attention to say it's a priority. Go do that. We have a clear objective and we go and do that. And so, I mean, we're really fortunate at the moment. Um, this current administration, the Department of Energy, Secretary Wright, as well as the White House, have said that fusion is a top three priority. They have prioritized fusion, they have engaged the fusion commercial companies in an open and transparent dialogue about what we need. They came out with a new fusion roadmap for leadership, and they are pivoting RD programs to things that will be helpful for the commercial sector. It's happening. Um, but that took years. It that doesn't happen on a dime. Uh, it took years, and we're seeing conversations about increasing funding into fusion. That hasn't happened yet. But uh but our CEO has testified in front of Congress twice on fusion. The first time was a couple years ago, and that he was kind of explaining what fusion is and what the commercial industry is going to be, and lots of questions around that. And this time, um, the questions from Congress were well, if you had billions of dollars to spend how uh in government money, what should we do with it? How would we do that? How would it be helpful? Totally different conversation, not the I don't believe this is gonna happen. It's how do we get US leadership infusion from us to make that happen? Amazing pivot in two to three years in the conversation in the halls of Congress. So that I measure I measure the success by those types of things. Have you moved the needle? And the bigger measure of success will be have we gotten a lot more money allocated through appropriations to fusion RD? We're still working on that one.

SPEAKER_01 49:47

Who are your main internal stakeholders?

SPEAKER_00 49:49

Yeah. Um at Chevron, I sat within a function, and that function supported the business. And we were often embedded in the business, but the stakeholders were when I worked doing policy work and government affairs work and community work, I was embedded in a business unit, and my main stakeholder was the president of Nigeria business unit, the president of the natural gas, you know, business unit, the president of the upstream business. The the people who are having to deliver business results, and they need policy and they need advocacy to support them to be able to do that in the best way possible. So, in my mind, that was my sort of customer internal alignment that I had to achieve. I had to understand their objectives, translate them, and then deliver for them. Um, in the role that I'm in at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, we now have 1,200 employees. Um, so we're much, much bigger, but we're still quite small. And we sit around a table, and I'm also in the C-suite now. And so I sit around the table with the chief operating officer, the chief commercial officer. And so for me now, it's much more of a collaboration between the chief commercial officer who's trying to sell fusion power plants and sell fusion energy to customers, who's going to buy the electrons we make. Um, the chief operating officer who needs to expand our manufacturing capability to do that. So we're going to need the permitting to do that, we're going to need the permission from the community to do those things. Um, our chief marketing officer, whose job is to ensure the world understands what fusion is. And part of that is he's helping with that messaging in Washington, he's helping with that messaging everywhere around the country. And we also are still raising money as a private company on a regular basis. So we have investors. So Ali Oast, who's our senior vice president of corporate development. There has to be this really synergy between all of those functions that we are all working towards the same objectives. They're aligned and we're doing mutually reinforcing things for each other. Um, so because we're smaller, we can sit around the table and do those things.

SPEAKER_01 52:07

Yeah. Yeah. And I do find that quite interesting then, Chevron, you were really like in there with the business, the kind of sales side. How do you think about how different companies will make that choice?

SPEAKER_00 52:20

Yeah, I think it's the size and where we're at, and it will evolve. And the chief commercial officer and I talk about this all the time.

SPEAKER_02 52:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 52:27

There's four people in our commercial team at the moment, and um, and we're building one plant. Um, that will change in the next decade pretty rapidly as we start planning the subsequent plants and we validate this technology when we turn on our demonstration machine in Boston and show the world this technology works. Um, I think our order book, we won't be able to take orders fast enough for future power plants. Um, there will be business units uh who are building in certain parts of the country and they will need direct support. And so luckily I worked for Chevron and I can take the understanding of how to grow our function to move into a model that functions under business units. Yeah. So I have a vision for the next 10, 15 years of how the function will grow, how we will provide the support we need. And I I can map that out and put that on paper for my boss to say this is what it's going to look like. Would have been really hard if you only had startup experience to do that. Um, so I think the fact that I've done startupy things, but I also have lots of experience, boots on the ground in DC, at headquarters with a large operating company to take both of those and put them together and be able to do planning.

SPEAKER_01 53:42

Yes. Yeah. Okay. And where do you spend most of your time now? Is it really kind of on the management side, or are you out there kind of doing those like thought leadership or the client facing or like working with, you know, the kind of the uh product side to understand and feedback? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 54:02

Yeah. I'd say it's probably a third, a third, a third of managing my team and supporting my team and providing guidance and counsel. They're all extremely capable, but everybody likes a boss who they can talk through ideas with and come up with creative solutions. So I try to make myself available to do that. Um, a third on company building. As a member of the executive team, the C-suite, I do things that feel well beyond my function because I sit at the table as we think about how are we going to build an industry in a company? And I have to be part of those conversations where I have to take off my government affairs hat and I have to put on a hat of a company executive thinking about the best way and the most efficient way to build a company and to become the industry leader and to create an industry that didn't exist before. Really hard stuff. Um, we have an amazing leadership team here, and it's super fun work, challenging, fun, fun work. We do executive leadership retreats every quarter where we go off site for a couple days, and we do this hard work of like get out of your day-to-day. We're building a company. How are we doing? What do we need to do next? What is our vision for the next five years, the next 10 years? How are we executing on it? What are we delivering? Um, and then a third of that is being out in the world. Thought leadership, um, being available to my team to do the meetings with the highest levels of government. Um, you know, there's still a reality of if you go to meet with foreign governments, you don't get through the door unless you are a C-suite or VP title. The minister's not going to take the meeting kind of thing. So um, so yeah, and and I'm doing more and more kind of speaking at global energy forums and events and things like that. Um, fusion's really coming onto a global platform, uh, and there's opportunities for me to be talking about policy and regulation. Our chief commercial officer talks about the market and and where the potential for the market is for energy markets for fusion to fit in. And our CEO really is able to piece all that together of a vision of the future with fusion energy in it.

SPEAKER_01 56:12

Yeah. So there is a lot of developments in your market. How do you keep up with everything? And maybe related to that, maybe not, is how do you, if at all, like use AI? And I mean particularly sort of like gen AI in your work, either like to manage inbound or to develop outbound.

SPEAKER_00 56:37

Yeah, those are good questions because it's evolving so fast, right? Um, how do I do my work? I'll be honest. Um, if you want to work in a startup, you better be prepared and have the grit. There's just long hours uh when you're in a startup. Um, there's nothing you can do about that because it's precious capital that we go raise. We have to build this big machine, you have to build a plant here. Um, those are the priorities. And so um there's never enough resources to do everything you want, and you just gotta put the hours in. And you gotta be willing to do any job, not just the job you have. And so um, and so I will get my hands in on meeting planning and things like this, and you know, that as an executive at a Fortune 5 company, you would never do. Um at a startup, if everyone, if it's all hands-on deck to go do something, you just go do it. Um so it's grit, it's uh it's long of course, uh, and it's um, you know, working with a really smart team that wants to do those things as well. Um, so that's like a big piece of it. And the second part of the question was AI, yeah. So uh we are we are a very uh AI forward company for two reasons. We're already thinking about how to use AI in our business, and the team that reports to me that does open innovation, they're leading how AI is going to integrate into everything we do. So AI going to be used in the large data sets that we have to manage to help us operate our machine efficiently. We've done a we've done partnerships on that that have been announced. Um, and so we're working with you know Google and others on thinking about how we do that work. We just recently announced digital twin work with NVIDIA. So my team is kind of steeped in how did AI impact our business, but on a personal level, we also have a corporate you know enterprise license for Gemini from Google, and um it is an amazing tool, it has created a level of productivity that I didn't expect it to create. And so because you have to be very careful, and everybody gets trained in our company, ours this is a closed system just for our company. I'm not going to chat GPT and putting in things about my company, but I can easily go in and use that tool to say, I need to write a letter that does this, this, and this, and it has to have this tone. And it's a great tool to kind of put a framework together, and then I go in and customize it. And it letter might have taken me 15 minutes to craft, takes me five. So there's small things like that. But there's also now I work on corporate strategy and using it as a more learning now how to use prompts in a very sophisticated way to have it also help generate ideas and different ways of approaching things as I think about putting together strategies for how my function should grow and develop. Um, and so that's really exciting to me. And I'm I've just been surprised by the robustness of the tool and its ability to do that. And then you tell it, put that in an Excel spreadsheet, and then, oh, by the way, make a PowerPoint slide for me.

SPEAKER_01 59:52

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Jennifer, this has been fantastic. I could ask you questions all day because it's just such an interesting path, too, as well as like the interest in what you are doing today, currently at CFS. So thank you so much for the time and being so sort of frank and open uh to share that experience, which frankly could have gone, your career could have gone somewhere else, and you you brought it to really where it was in quite, I think, a sort of deliberate but non-linear uh fashion. So um thank you for sharing that with us. Uh it's been great to have you with us on Policy Catalyst.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:31

Thank you so much. It was a lot of fun, and I hope that uh that my lessons learned are things that will encourage people to take the risk, take the job, do something different that you weren't expecting because you never know where it might lead you.