One year ago, I became CEO of DexMat and raised our Seed Round of funding. Today, at the end of the year, seems an appropriate day to reflect on DexMat’s progress – and what a rocket ride of exponential progress it has been!
The past year has been one of exponential growth–production capacity increase, sales growth, and cost reduction–for DexMat. Our Seed Round investors challenged us to hit five key milestones to de-risk our venture and demonstrate our capacity to reach financial and climate impact at massive scale. We have exceeded all milestones, which are reviewed below, so are now gearing up to raise our Series A early next year.
As a reminder, DexMat is a climate tech moonshot startup driving the next industrial revolution by displacing steel, aluminum, and copper with advanced, carbon-negative materials.
Earlier this year we set out to accomplish big goals. Here’s what happened…
Build an awesome team and set that team up for success Team members: 6 → 15
We now have in place a talented, balanced team with diverse backgrounds, skillsets, and networks. Our culture and suite of tools/systems/processes for hybrid-enabled work have this team performing at an elite level, with 100% retention and 100% engagement score.
Scale up production capacity and reduce cost Production capacity: Increased 20x Production cost: Decreased by 90%
We scaled annualized production capacity this year by 20x, while reducing cost by 90%.
Secure CNT supply Feedstock cost: Reduced by 70%
Through supplier negotiations, we secured agreements for 10x the volume of CNTs we purchased in 2023, and at 70% lower prices. This brings our total cost of producing Galvorn down an order of magnitude from the beginning of the year, and keeps us on track to achieving cost parity with steel in four years.
Expand IP moat → 2 existing patents licensed from Rice → Executed new license for faster, less expensive, more sustainable production
We secured two additional patent licenses and one license for proprietary know-how from Rice, and took steps to address potential infringement.
Pivot from opportunistic sales to proactive market development → NEW GTM Strategy → NEW Website → NEW CRM → NEW Marketing/Sales Processes → NEW Pricing Strategy → NEW $1.3M Grant Funding
We developed a cogent Go-To-Market strategy, laid our marketing foundation with a new website, CRM, pricing strategy, and sales process, and we are already seeing the impact with increasing sales that we can attribute to specific sales and marketing investments. Additionally, we won $1.3M of grant funding to develop new Galvorn products, and completed applications for more than $25M of new grant funding in 2024.
DexMat’s really cool demo for NYC Climate Week
On behalf of the entire DexMat team, thank you all for your continued support; DexMat’s exponential progress would not be possible without it! I hope you enjoy a bit of a break this holiday season, because 2024 is going to be really big!
I’m on the flight back from Austin, and I’m still buzzing. Three days, three very different stages, one spool of Galvorn fiber, and more BBQ than any responsible CEO should probably admit to eating.
Before anything else: the weather was perfect. I ran along Lady Bird Lake every morning, which is my preferred way to both clear my head and earn whatever I’m about to eat. On Friday morning, I was joined by one of our investors, Anthony Del Porto of Betterway, for a run-and-talk that I’d take over talking business during golf any day of the week.
What made it especially meaningful is that Anthony and I first crossed paths two years ago at DexMat’s Run For Carbon during Houston Energy & Climate Week. There is something beautifully full-circle about building an investor relationship that started on foot and continues on foot. Running is honest. You can’t hide behind a PowerPoint deck or a carefully arranged pitch room when you’re both gasping for air. I’d argue it’s one of the more authentic ways to get to know someone.
I also managed to reconnect with Austin friends and colleagues I hadn’t seen since my last visit three years ago. There’s a particular joy in picking up a conversation exactly where you left it — a testament to the relationships that outlast any single conference.
Thursday: Science Fair of the Texas Futures Summit
My first official event was the Science Fair component of the Texas Futures Summit, where DexMat was among the companies showcasing at the intersection of deep technology and the future of Texas’s economy. As always, the spool of Galvorn fiber is a better conversation starter than any slide deck. People want to touch it. They’re surprised by how soft it is. They’re amazed by how light it is. And then you tell them it’s stronger than steel and as conductive as copper, and you watch the mental math happen in real time.
Texas is a natural home for this conversation. The energy, defense, and industrial ecosystems here are exactly the industries where Galvorn can have the most transformative impact. Every handshake and business card exchanged Thursday was a reminder that the commercialization journey is fundamentally a people journey.
I also had the honor of meeting the legendary Bob Metcalfe — inventor of Ethernet and recipient of the 2022 Turing Award. He was suitably impressed by Galvorn as the material poised to enable the next generation of Ethernet cable — stronger, lighter, and more conductive than copper. When the inventor of Ethernet leans in to look more closely at your fiber, that’s a moment you remember.
Saturday: Capital Factory’s Top Secret Salon
Saturday brought me to Capital Factory‘s Top Secret Salon, a curated gathering of defense and dual-use startups, investors, and customers. It’s exactly the kind of room where Galvorn’s properties — extreme strength, light weight, electrical conductivity, flexibility — generate real, substantive conversation rather than polite interest.
Defense and dual-use applications are an important part of DexMat’s near-term market strategy, and rooms like this are where relationships that lead to serious offtake conversations begin. I can’t share details, but I left with more business cards than I had talking points, which is always a good sign. Kudos to Capital Factory, which has developed a truly vibrant venture ecosystem in Austin.
And speaking of futuristic technologies, I took Waymo autonomous vehicles for most of my rides around Austin. The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed — and in Austin, it distributed me around town quite well.
Friday: Lights, Camera, Galvorn — Meet The Drapers
The centerpiece of the trip — and the reason this post is longer than usual — was Friday’s taping of an episode of Meet The Drapers, the venture-focused reality TV series featuring Tim Draper and family. Think Shark Tank, but with a deep focus on startups that are genuinely trying to change the world.
I’ll be honest: I have never done anything like this before. I’ve pitched in boardrooms, on stages, in Zoom squares, and in stairwells (see: my London trip), but a reality TV taping was a new frontier entirely.
DexMat was selected as one of four finalists from hundreds of applicants — a process that involved two virtual pitches over the preceding weeks. I can’t reveal anything about the outcome until the episode releases this fall, but I can tell you that the experience was everything I hoped it would be: energizing, unexpected, and a little surreal.
Beyond the episode taping itself, the producers collected extensive background video on each contestant. They asked me to choose an Austin location that was special to me — and the answer was obvious.
Franklin BBQ
Franklin Barbecue — the James Beard Award-winning, perpetually-lined, objectively transcendent BBQ institution on East 11th Street — is the one Austin destination I have written about with genuine reverence on this blog. When the production team asked where I wanted to film, I didn’t hesitate. Franklin was extraordinarily accommodating, and they set us up with a loaded tray of brisket, ribs, and all the trimmings. I ate a little, but shared most of it with the crew. They say the camera adds 10 lbs, so I didn’t need any extra help from Franklin!
Sitting at Franklin — with a camera pointed at me, a tray of some of the world’s best BBQ in front of me, and the smell of post oak smoke in the air — I told the stories that have shaped me as an entrepreneur. Here is a version of what I shared:
I think imagination is one of the most underappreciated drivers of human achievement. When we fail to solve the world’s hardest problems, these are often failures of imagination — artificially constraining our solution space by thinking inside the box. As astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison has said: “If you can dream it, believe it, and work hard for it, anything is possible.”
My parents were the first inspiration. Both grew up in families of extremely modest means in Hot Springs, Arkansas — a great town, full of great people — but they saw the trajectories around them and aspired for lives of greater adventure and impact. They saw education as their ticket to a bigger stage, and, with each degree, they stepped into wider and wider circles of impact. My mother’s journey from a small town in rural America to one of the most significant, popular museums in the world is, to me, one of the great entrepreneurial stories of all time — even if she’d never use that word for it.
My father’s story is one of resilience. He was diagnosed with cancer when I was just born and given six months to live. He fought like hell, participating in experimental treatments across the country, and bought himself ten more years — enough for me to get to know him. His treatments contributed to scientific progress that has since saved millions of lives; what was a death sentence for him is now a treatable cancer with a survival rate exceeding 90%. He showed me what it looks like to devote yourself to others even when times are hardest for yourself.
Rice, Football, and a Nobel Laureate
Having grown up inspired by literal moonshots, when I had the opportunity to play college football, I chose Rice University. At Rice I got to play the sport I loved every day on the very field and in the very stadium where John F. Kennedy gave his famous moon speech in 1962. “But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? . . . Why does Rice play Texas?”
09/12/1962 – President John F. Kennedy tells a crowd of 35,000 at Rice Stadium, Houston, Texas, ” We choose to go to the Moon, we choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one in which we intend to win, and the others too.”
Playing football at Rice (and, before that, at TJHSST) was a moonshot! Every time we took the field, we were the underdog. Nobody expected us to win. But through creative strategy, hard work, and disciplined execution, we found ways to win more often than not. That maps almost perfectly to entrepreneurship: the odds are always against you, but with the right team, the right motivation, and relentless execution, you can change the world.
At Rice, I had the fortune to attend a talk that changed everything. Nobel Laureate Rick Smalley gave his famous “Be a scientist; save the world” talk, arguing that if you could solve the energy and climate challenge, the solutions to almost every other major human problem — food, water, disease, equality — would follow. It was an epiphanic moment. I dedicated my career to making a significant, positive impact on energy and climate from that day forward.
In a full-circle moment that still gives me chills: I am now CEO of DexMat, where our material, Galvorn, was co-invented by Rick Smalley himself. Like my father, he was taken from us too soon by cancer. Carrying forward his scientific legacy — translating his breakthrough into exponentially scaling real-world impact — is among the great honors of my life.
Failing Forward
I should tell the complete story, though — because it isn’t a straight line from Rice football field to reality TV taping.
As I moved from software into hard tech, I had a very first-hand lesson in why they call it “hard.” Entrepreneurs sign up for a high risk of failure, but, when one of my ventures in particular failed, it really hurt. I was all-in — and many of my investors were friends, colleagues, even family. The timing made it worse: we had just had our first baby, my partner was in grad school, and suddenly I was facing significant financial pressure having just lost a large portion of our net worth. I fell into a depression. I questioned whether I had what it took to make the impact I had spent my career pursuing. I wasn’t eating. I was losing weight for probably the first time in my life. The pandemic hit around the same time, and it would have been easy to stay secluded and wallow.
But my family needed me. And — not to be melodramatic — the climate needed me. I thought about my parents, who had faced far more significant adversity than a startup failure and had not become quitters. It reminded me of getting knocked flat on the football field in front of your teammates and the entire crowd. The greatest moments of growth over my football career weren’t the touchdowns; they were the moments of figuring out whether you had what it took to get back up and keep fighting.
So, call by call, meeting by meeting, I put myself back out there. And the response humbled me beyond measure. My family and friends didn’t disown me — their love was unconditional. My teammates were eager to collaborate again. My mentors challenged me to apply my learnings and have even greater impact on my next shot on goal. My investors made introductions and committed to reinvest in whatever I did next. I felt, as corny as it sounds, like Superman healing in the warm glow of Earth’s yellow sun.
I returned to the climate fight with greater determination than before. I co-founded Third Derivative to address exactly the commercialization challenges I had faced — and rapidly built it into the largest climatetech innovation ecosystem in the world, having now helped mobilize more than $4 billion into nearly 300 deep-tech climate ventures.
And then came DexMat. And Galvorn. And a tray of Franklin brisket. And a camera crew.
I can’t tell you how the Meet The Drapers episode ends. You’ll have to watch this fall. But I can tell you that sharing these stories — both the triumphant and the painful — was a lot of fun. And the other entrepreneurs competing were top-notch, with very compelling ventures – it was an honor to stand beside them.
The demand for high-performance, sustainable materials is real and growing. Our customers are proving it. The investors are leaning in. And now, apparently, so is primetime television.
More soon. 🚀
Have you visited Franklin BBQ? Seen an episode of Meet The Drapers? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.
Texas has the feedstock, infrastructure, and expertise to own the domestic advanced carbon supply chain. The question is whether we recognize the opportunity before someone else does.
Texas has spent a century perfecting one transformation. We learned how to convert hydrocarbons into energy at a scale no one else could match. We built the infrastructure, trained the workforce, and established the expertise to dominate that process globally.
The next century will be defined by a different transformation. The same hydrocarbons will become materials instead of fuel.
The feedstock is already here. The chemical processing expertise is already here. The manufacturing talent is already here. What’s missing is the strategic recognition that this represents a generational economic opportunity. And the clock is ticking.
The scaling problem
When people think about advanced materials innovation, they think about university labs and breakthrough discoveries. Discovery happens constantly in labs around the world. The constraint is somewhere else entirely.
What stops most advanced materials from reaching commercial scale is the industrial scaleup required to produce something novel in large quantities while keeping costs competitive with commodity materials. That requires petrochemical engineering expertise. You need people who understand continuous production processes, high-temperature chemical synthesis, and supply chain logistics for physical goods.
Advanced carbon materials can be produced from hydrocarbon feedstocks. The same natural gas that Texas has in inexpensive abundance becomes the raw material for conductive fibers, structural composites, and next-generation materials that are replacing metals in aerospace, automotive, data centers, and energy infrastructure.
DexMat currently manufactures Galvorn from carbon feedstock at the Shell Technology Center in Houston. Galvorn delivers essential conductivity while also providing exceptional strength, light weight, and flexibility. The material can bend 1,000,000,000 times without breaking. The strategic advantage is straightforward. Instead of relying on global copper markets concentrated in geopolitically unstable regions, you build a pathway to produce conductive materials from resources that come out of the ground in Texas, processed by expertise that lives in Texas, and manufactured in facilities that operate in Texas.
China understands this. They’re investing aggressively in advanced carbon materials manufacturing because they recognize that controlling the materials supply chain means controlling the industries that depend on it.
The question for Texas is simple: are we going to build that capacity here, or let this value chain be built elsewhere? We can do both. We can keep producing energy and start producing the materials the world needs.
Why this matters right now
The timing on this is critical. Three things are converging that make this moment different from five years ago.
First, demand is exploding. The AI revolution is driving exponential growth in data center construction. Electrification is putting unprecedented strain on copper supply chains. The International Energy Agency projects we’ll need 400-600% more critical minerals by 2040 to meet decarbonization targets. Second, the technology is ready. Advanced carbon materials have crossed the threshold from laboratory curiosity to production reality. Companies are shipping product. Multi-year offtake agreements are getting signed.
Third, the policy environment is aligned. The federal government has made energy abundance and supply chain sovereignty national priorities. All three of those conditions have to be true simultaneously for this opportunity to be real. They are true right now. They might not stay true forever.
The choice in front of us
Companies are making site selection decisions right now. Investors are allocating capital. Researchers are choosing where to commercialize their discoveries. Those decisions compound over decades into regional competitive advantage or regional irrelevance.
Texas can own the domestic advanced carbon materials supply chain. Or we can watch this value chain get built in China, or Europe, or somewhere else that recognize the opportunity sooner.
DexMat manufactures Galvorn at the Shell Technology Center in Houston using pilot-scale equipment and chemical engineering expertise that already exists. We recently signed our first multi-year offtake agreement. We have active customer development programs with companies in aerospace, defense, automotive, and energy infrastructure. This is happening now in Houston.
The hard parts have been solved. The feedstock advantage is real. The technical capability is proven. The market demand is accelerating. What’s needed is strategic vision.
The future will be built from feedstocks that come out of the ground here, processed by expertise that lives here, and shipped from factories that operate here. That’s what it means when we say the future is forged from Texas.
348 medals were given at the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics – 21 more than were given four years ago (327 in 2022) and 41 more than eight years ago (307 in 2018). The Games continue their strong growth trend (291 in 2014 and 217 in 2010), representing more than 60% growth over a decade and a half. If you’re holding gold, you’re in good company: there are more of you every four years!
Norway has now repeated as the clear victor for the fourth consecutive Winter Olympics, taking home 18 golds and 41 total medals – both new all-time records for a single Winter Games. Their total weighted score of 137 left second-place USA far behind at 105, which itself was a significant step up from prior years thanks to an historic men’s ice hockey gold (the first since 1980!) and a dominant overall performance. The host nation Italy made its own strong showing, finishing third in weighted score – a welcome storyline for the home crowd. The top performers by weighted medal score were:
137 – Norway
105 – USA
82 – Italy
78 – Germany
74 – Netherlands
73 – France
Because Norway is so small, it crushed the competition even (especially!) when normalized by population. The top performers by weighted medal score per million citizens were:
24.82 – Norway
7.25 – Switzerland
6.60 – Slovenia
5.92 – Austria
5.85 – Sweden
These countries are mostly pretty affluent, though, so how do things change if we normalize instead by GDP? Not much! The top performers by weighted medal score per $B GDP (PPP) were:
0.228 – Norway
0.114 – Slovenia
0.079 – Sweden
0.079 – Austria
0.074 – Switzerland
We can mix up the leaderboard a little bit if we normalize by GDP per capita. The top performers by weighted medal score per $1,000 GDP per capita were:
1.48 – China
1.30 – Italy
1.26 – Norway
1.17 – USA
1.10 – France
A few storylines worth calling out: Italy’s home-field advantage appears to have been real – the Azzurri claimed 10 golds and 30 total medals, landing #2 on the GDP-per-capita efficiency list and delivering their best Winter Games performance in decades. Meanwhile, Brazil made history by winning the first Winter Olympics medal and gold medal ever by a tropical, Latin American, or South American nation. And Georgia won its first-ever Winter Olympics medal as well – a reminder that the Winter Olympics continue to expand their global footprint.
Russia continues to be absent from these rankings, and for good reason – the IOC’s ongoing restrictions on Russian athletes remain appropriate given their well-documented history of systematic doping.
Many congratulations to Norway, a small country of just 5.5 million people that continues to absolutely crush much larger and richer countries at these Games. Four consecutive titles is an astonishing dynasty. We’ll hope to give them more competition in four years in the French Alps at the 2030 Winter Olympics!
I am beyond elated to share that DexMat has closed an oversubscribed Seed funding round, bringing our total equity funding to $10 million! This milestone represents far more than capital—it validates our exponential trajectory, recognizes our incredible team, and accelerates our mission to drive a materials revolution that the energy transition desperately needs.
Taking the Exponential View
When I became DexMat’s CEO three years ago, we faced a fundamental choice: take the linear view that everyone expected, or dare to see Galvorn’s exponential potential. Thanks to investors, advisors, customers, and bold teammates—we chose exponential.
And boy, has that choice paid off.
Since I joined as CEO, our progress has been nothing short of exponential:
Built an incredible team of mission-aligned, values-driven, brilliant, hard-working, and kind DexMates
Scaled up production capacity 20x (with 200x coming soon!)
Reduced production cost 96% to parity with aerospace-grade copper (with orders of magnitude more cost reduction on our near-term roadmap)
Grew sales 2.5x year-over-year in 2025 (on track for even more rapid growth this year)
Secured our first multi-year offtake agreement (with several more to be announced soon!)
As Kent Lucas, Founding Partner at non sibi ventures, put it: “With early stage investing, you’re betting on the team as much as the technology. With DexMat we saw a high-performing team that consistently exceeds targets and a category-defining platform technology addressing a significant market opportunity.”
Why This Round Matters
The global copper market is facing a perfect storm. Demand is outpacing supply, climate impacts are constraining production, and the energy transition requires exponentially more conductive materials than we currently produce. Traditional solutions—mining more copper, recycling harder, or hoping for substitutes—simply won’t cut it at the scale and speed we need.
That’s where Galvorn enters the picture.
Manufacturers across wire, cable, aerospace, defense, automotive, energy, and e-textiles are increasingly encountering applications where traditional materials—especially copper—introduce unacceptable tradeoffs. They need materials that are lightweight, flexible, durable, and conductive. They need materials that enable designs previously impossible. They need Galvorn.
This funding round—over $5 million in equity plus $3 million in non-dilutive funding—allows us to meet that growing customer pull. We’ll support existing customers as they advance Galvorn in commercial applications, onboard the new customers entering our pipeline each month, expand our technical and commercial teams, and advance pilot-scale production to meet near-term demand.
It Takes a Village
My co-founder Matteo Pasquali likes to say: “It’s been incredible to be part of Galvorn’s evolution from a conversation on a couch with Nobel laureate Richard Smalley to a product now gaining market traction. This inflection point is the result of over 25 years of concerted R&D. Achieving our mission to reduce reliance on energy-intensive metal production will take a village.”
He’s absolutely right. And I am so incredibly grateful for our fellow villagers:
Our brilliant team of DexMates, including my co-founder Dmitri Tsentalovich, who keeps reminding us: “We consistently hear the same message from customers: the material performs really well, and they need more of it at a lower cost. This round supports the production scale-up and cost reductions required to move Galvorn into broader commercial use.”
Our amazing investors and advisors—both prior and new—including our lead investor, non sibi ventures, along with Governance Partners, Tailwind Futures, BetterWay, and Capital Factory.
Our growing customer base, who are developing applications across 90% of our $300+ billion target market and teaching us every day what the world needs from next-generation materials.
There are literally too many people to thank here, but I am so incredibly full of gratitude to you all.
No Energy Transition Without a Materials Transition
When I was building Third Derivative—which has now helped mobilize over $2 billion into more than 200 climatetech startups—I learned firsthand that there can be no energy transition (or dominance!) without a materials transition.
Everyone’s climate roadmap includes maintaining a reliance on old, inferior materials like steel, aluminum, and copper that are really hard and expensive to decarbonize. The International Energy Agency projects that demand for critical minerals could increase by 400-600% by 2040 to meet climate goals. We simply cannot mine, refine, and recycle our way out of this challenge using millennia-old materials and processes.
But here’s the thing: DexMat isn’t trying to make those materials green—there’s only so green you can ever make them. We’re making them obsolete.
Galvorn is many times stronger than steel, lighter than aluminum and carbon fiber, as conductive as copper, and produced not by combusting carbon but by capturing it. It’s a carbon-negative material that enables the energy transition while simultaneously embodying it.
What Gets Us Out of Bed Every Morning
Two months ago, we were named Trellis 2025 Startup of the Year—an honor that reflects not just our technological innovation, but our commitment to driving industrial-scale change. Recognition like this is gratifying, but what really gets us out of bed is knowing that:
Textile mills are developing antistatic fabrics where just 4 pounds of Galvorn displaces 1,000 pounds of incumbent materials
Aerospace companies are exploring continuous structural health monitoring sensors for airplane wings
Automotive suppliers are creating flexible thermoelectric devices for waste heat recovery
These aren’t science experiments anymore. These are commercial applications in development, with letters of intent, offtake agreements, and real demand.
This Is Just the Beginning
I learned from my time at Third Derivative that daring to do things differently—to innovate new models rather than execute familiar, known patterns—is essential for climate solutions. Familiar patterns are what got us into this crisis in the first place.
At DexMat, we’re not just innovating a new material; we’re catalyzing a materials revolution. We’re building the carbon materials value chain from the ground up. We’re proving that better properties and lower costs—the traditional mix of conditions that lead to materials revolutions—are achievable with Galvorn.
Our exponential learning rate is steeper than solar and batteries. We’ve already scaled production 3,000x and reduced cost 99.6%, moving from cost parity with exotic materials, like platinum, to parity with specialty materials like carbon fiber. When we scale another 3,000x, we’ll have lower cost than even commodity materials like steel, aluminum, and copper.
The sky is literally the limit—as long as we maintain the exponential view.
Ad Astra
This DexMat seed funding marks an inflection point, but it’s just the beginning. Our rocket ship is lifting off the launch pad, and we’re accelerating toward a future where Galvorn enables designs previously impossible, where the materials we use to build our world also heal our planet, where the energy transition succeeds because we’ve solved the materials bottleneck.
If you’re excited about this journey, there are several ways to join us:
Get your hands on Galvorn: Order samples to explore what Galvorn can do for your applications
Partner with us: Contact our team to discuss how Galvorn can solve your materials challenges
Join the team: Check out our careers page to see how you can become a DexMate
To everyone who has supported us on this journey so far—thank you. To those joining us now—welcome aboard. To those watching from the sidelines—we’re just getting started.
It is such a privilege to be working at the forefront of the materials transition our world desperately needs.
Ad astra! 🚀
Bryan Guido Hassin is the CEO of DexMat and the founder of Third Derivative. He writes about climatetech, exponential technologies, and the materials revolution at greenknig.ht.
When Xcel Energy shut off power to over 100,000 customers across Colorado’s Front Range on December 19, 2025, they claimed it was necessary to prevent wildfires. What they didn’t mention was that this multi-day Xcel Energy Colorado blackout—which left our house without power for five days—was the predictable result of years of underinvestment in grid infrastructure while paying out billions in shareholder dividends.
This wasn’t an unavoidable natural disaster response. This was a utility company pushing the massive economic cost of their poor planning onto customers.
Five Days in the Dark
Our house was among roughly 52,000 customers initially affected by the Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS), though a second PSPS event on December 21, 2025 impacted an additional 69,000 customers. Most people had their power restored within a day or two; we weren’t so lucky.
The winds that prompted the shutoff died down by Friday afternoon, December 21, 2025. Yet it took until Sunday night—more than two full days later—for our power to come back on. This despite the fact that our neighborhood has underground power lines and homes just a couple blocks away had power restored quickly.
There was clearly no damage to lines around us; it just took Xcel days to flip the switch back on.
The Staggering Economic Cost
Let’s do some math. How much did this PSPS actually cost Colorado?
According to Berkeley Lab research, the cost of a 1-hour outage for an average residential customer is approximately $3. For our five-day outage (120 hours), that’s $360 per household. But that’s just the beginning.
For small-to-medium commercial customers, a 1-hour outage costs approximately $1,200, and for large commercial and industrial customers, it’s approximately $82,000 per hour.
Let’s be conservative and assume this December PSPS affected:
100,000 residential customers for an average of 2 days (48 hours): 100,000 × 48 × $3 = $14.4 million
5,000 small businesses for an average of 2 days: 5,000 × 48 × $1,200 = $288 million
100 large commercial/industrial customers for an average of 2 days: 100 × 48 × $82,000 = $393.6 million
Total estimated economic impact: ~$689 million
And that’s probably conservative. It doesn’t fully capture:
Spoiled food in tens of thousands of refrigerators and freezers
Lost productivity from workers unable to get to closed offices
Critical infrastructure like wastewater treatment plants running on backup power
School closures disrupting families
Medical equipment failures and injuries
The compounding effects throughout the economy
For context, power outages cost U.S. businesses $150 billion annually, and the 2021 Texas blackouts caused economic losses estimated between $80 billion and $130 billion.
Criticism #1: Chronic Underinvestment While Enriching Shareholders
You’d think that, after being held responsible for Colorado’s most destructive wildfire in history, Xcel would have immediately invested heavily in preventing future catastrophes. But, instead, they’ve been systematically enriching shareholders while under-investing in the infrastructure needed to prevent exactly the kind of crisis that forced this PSPS.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
From their own financial reports, Xcel has been paying out massive dividends:
2023: $2.08 per share annual dividend
2024: $2.19 per share annual dividend
2025: Approximately $2.28 per share annual dividend
With approximately 574 million shares outstanding in 2025, that’s roughly $1.3 billion paid out in dividends in 2025 alone.
Xcel has increased dividends for 22 consecutive years, maintaining a payout ratio around 65%. Meanwhile, they’re asking for rate increases and claiming they need to shut off power because the grid isn’t resilient enough.
What They Could Have Done Instead
Xcel’s Wildfire Mitigation Plan includes $2 billion in Colorado investments, and they’re planning $5 billion for wildfire mitigation nationally over five years. But here’s the problem: much of this is being pushed onto ratepayers through rate increases, not taken from the billions in profits that went to shareholders.
The technologies to prevent wildfires exist:
Undergrounding Power Lines: Undergrounding can reduce the risk of wildfire ignition from electrical equipment by approximately 98%. Yes, it’s expensive—PG&E estimates about $3.3 million per mile—but it’s far cheaper than the combined costs of lawsuits and power shutoffs.
Covered Conductors: Covered conductors prevent sparks when lines fall to the ground and eliminate ignition risk from tree contact or conductor clashing. These cost roughly 1/7th the price of undergrounding while still providing substantial fire risk reduction.
Advanced Sensors and Monitoring: Optical sensors can detect anomalies in conductor position, temperature, and sag, allowing operators to prevent equipment failures before they cause ignitions.
Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings (EPSS): Automated systems that shut off powerlines more easily if disturbed by wind or debris, preventing energized lines from sparking fires.
Xcel presented customers with a false choice: either suffer through multi-day blackouts OR risk devastating wildfires. The real choice should have been: invest the billions paid to shareholders in grid hardening, or lose your monopoly.
Criticism #2: Woefully Underprepared for Restoration
Even if we accept for the sake of argument that the power had to be shut off, the restoration was unacceptably slow.
Xcel stated that restoration “could take several hours to several days” because crews needed to inspect lines. But here’s what actually happened in our neighborhood:
Friday afternoon: Winds died down, conditions safe for crews
Friday night through Sunday morning: No Xcel workers, trucks, drones, or helicopters visible anywhere in our area
Sunday evening: Power finally restored
We didn’t see a single Xcel employee until moments before our power came back on. For a neighborhood with underground lines and no visible damage anywhere nearby, it shouldn’t have taken 48+ hours just to flip the switch.
Where Were the Crews?
Xcel claimed they were “working day and night to restore power”, but social media was filled with people reporting they never saw crews working at night. All of Xcel’s own video updates only showed daytime work.
When we lived on the Gulf Coast, utility companies would bring in crews from neighboring states after hurricanes to speed restoration. It’s a standard mutual aid practice in the utility industry. Xcel apparently made no such arrangements, relying solely on their regular crews to handle an outage affecting over 100,000 customers.
This isn’t preparation. This is negligence.
The Communication Disaster
Last year’s April 2024 PSPS was criticized for communication failures, and the Colorado Public Utilities Commission investigated and required improvements. Yet Xcel somehow managed to perform even worse this time.
We received a cascade of contradictory messages:
Power will be restored by Friday 4 PM
Actually, Friday 8 PM
Now Saturday 11 AM
Oops, Saturday 4 PM
Try Saturday 8 PM
Maybe Sunday 11 AM
Perhaps Sunday 4 PM
Each revised estimate was presented with the same confident tone, making it impossible to plan around the outage. If they didn’t know when power would be restored, they should have said so. Instead, they repeatedly lied to their customers with false precision.
Criticism #3: A Master Class in How NOT to Communicate During a Crisis
Xcel used this PSPS to demonstrate textbook failures in crisis communication. I recall studying crisis management in business school, where we learned that leaders in a crisis should:
Take ownership – Acknowledge your role and responsibility
Show empathy – Demonstrate understanding of the harm being caused
Provide accurate information – Even if incomplete, be honest about what you know and don’t know
Be visible – Leaders should be on the front lines
Xcel failed on every single count.
No Ownership
Xcel’s messaging consistently framed the PSPS as something that simply “had to be done” due to weather conditions. They refused to acknowledge that this was a choice—one driven by their underinvestment in grid resilience. They “do not admit any fault, wrongdoing or negligence” for the Marshall Fire despite the settlement, and they took the same stance here: this isn’t our fault, it’s the weather.
No Empathy
Rather than expressing genuine concern for the hundreds of thousands of people suffering without power, Xcel’s communications pleaded with customers to “be patient” and “be nice to our staff.” While it’s appropriate to ask people to treat workers respectfully, leading with that message rather than expressing empathy for the disruption they caused was tone-deaf.
Inaccurate Information
The repeated, false restoration estimates destroyed any credibility Xcel might have had. Each message essentially told customers: “We have no idea when your power will be back, but here’s a random time we made up.”
Invisible Leadership
Where was Xcel’s Colorado President Robert Kenney during all of this? Where were the executives holding press conferences, touring affected neighborhoods, or showing up at community centers? Crisis leadership requires visibility and accountability. We got neither.
The Bigger Picture: A Broken Social Contract
When you are a utility—whether government-owned or private—and you are granted a monopoly over essential services, you enter into a social contract with your community. You promise to provide safe, reliable service to all customers. In exchange, you get guaranteed revenue and protection from competition.
Xcel has broken that contract.
They paid a $640 million settlement for causing the Marshall Fire, with $350 million coming from insurance and the rest recorded as a “charge to earnings”—which means either future ratepayers or shareholders ultimately pay, though Xcel claims “ratepayers will not be forced to cover any of the remaining cost.” They’ve continued paying massive shareholder dividends. They’ve underinvested in grid hardening. And, when the consequences of that underinvestment came due, they pushed the entire cost onto customers through a multi-day blackout affecting over 100,000 customers.
The estimated ~$689 million economic impact of this PSPS is roughly equivalent to the entire Marshall Fire settlement. By choosing to underprepare, Xcel has essentially created another Marshall Fire-scale disaster—except this time, the damage is economic rather than physical, and it’s spread across tens of thousands of victims instead of concentrated in two towns.
What Needs to Happen Now
Legal Action: Class action lawsuits should be filed on behalf of affected customers and businesses for the economic damages caused by Xcel’s negligent under-preparation.
Regulatory Investigation: The Colorado Public Utilities Commission should investigate not just the communication failures (again), but the fundamental question of whether Xcel has been meeting its obligation to maintain adequate grid resilience.
Rate Case Opposition: Xcel is currently seeking rate increases. Every one should be denied until they can demonstrate they’ve invested adequately in grid hardening rather than shareholder enrichment.
Monopoly Review: When a utility repeatedly fails to meet its obligations under a monopoly franchise, that franchise should be up for review. Colorado should seriously consider whether Xcel deserves to continue as the monopoly provider, or whether the service should be taken over by a public utility that will prioritize reliability over profits.
Required Investments: Mandate specific grid hardening targets: X miles of undergrounding in high-risk areas, Y miles of covered conductors, Z installations of advanced monitoring systems—all funded from earnings before dividends are paid.
The Path Forward
We don’t have to choose between wildfires and blackouts. Southern California Edison has reduced catastrophic wildfire risk by 85-88% below pre-2018 levels through grid hardening, including undergrounding and covered conductors. It can be done.
But it requires utilities to prioritize infrastructure investment over shareholder returns. It requires regulators to hold utilities accountable. And it requires customers to demand better.
Xcel Energy failed Colorado this December. They failed us in the Marshall Fire. They’ll keep failing us until the consequences of that failure outweigh the benefits of underinvestment.
It’s time to make sure those consequences are real.
Have you been affected by Xcel’s power shutoffs? I want to hear your story. Share your experiences in the comments below or reach out directly. The more we document the real costs of these failures, the harder it becomes for Xcel to claim this is acceptable.
Last week in San Jose, DexMat was crowned Trellis Climatetech Startup Of The Year—a true honor selected by my peers and fellow travelers in the climatetech community. It’s been quite a journey from nomination to this moment, and I’m thrilled to share the story.
From Nomination to Recognition
Earlier this year, one of our partners, Enduring Planet, nominated DexMat to be a startup of interest for Trellis (formerly known as GreenBiz, a leader in climatetech reporting). Trellis reviewed more than 100 climatetech startups from more than 10 countries and selected DexMat as one of their 25 Startups To Watch back in August.
Already this was a major honor. Trellis has been a trusted voice in our community for years—Heather Clancy wrote an article about us last year, and I even contributed to a GreenBiz article back in my Third Derivative (D3) days. But this was the first time Trellis said, “Hey, pay attention to DexMat; these guys are really up to something promising!”
Included with this recognition was attendance at Trellis Impact (formerly known as VERGE) and an opportunity to compete with the other Startups To Watch for the title of Startup Of The Year.
Why Conferences Matter More Now
I’ll be candid: I’m a bit skeptical of the utility of attending conferences. They cater to the big sponsors, not to startups, and I feel like we should have better ways of fostering connectivity by now. However, I think our climate communities matter more than ever right now with climate science under attack, and I was eager to represent DexMat well.
The last time I was in San Jose was when I was pitching Smart OES at the CleanTech Open. It turned out that the CleanTech Open was happening at the same time this year, co-located with VERGE as part of Trellis Impact, so it was great to see so many early-stage impact ventures there. Full circle moments abound!
Day One: Bryan Corner
The first day (Tuesday) of the conference was great. My colleague, Sofia (whom people may recognize from DexMat’s hype video), was with me, and we made a great team. The day started with a run through and around the San Jose State campus—a great way to get the blood pumping before a long day, and the cool air left my head literally steaming, as it used to when taking off my football helmet late in the season.
We set up in the startup pavilion, where we were right next to Third Derivative. I called that spot “Bryan Corner” since it was populated by organizations I had founded/led. There were several other startups I knew at the startup pavilion too, mostly because they were part of D3. It felt like coming home.
That afternoon, I pitched DexMat in the “semifinals”—a pitch competition of the five startups in Trellis’s Industry category. Each of us was given 2 minutes and 30 seconds to pitch, with a few minutes of Q&A from VC investors after. Then the audience in the room voted on the venture they thought could have the most scale of impact.
The other startups were really awesome, including Hamilton Perkins Collection, which I know through my board role at LabStart. The competition was fierce, but I was ready.
The Pitch That Won Hearts and Minds
Here’s what I told the audience:
I’m Bryan Guido Hassin, CEO of DexMat. We make Galvorn — the highest performance, most sustainable, most cost effective conductive material on the planet.
Why does that matter? Because copper, the metal powering renewable energy, electrification, and AI, is problematic. It’s heavy, weak, incredibly dirty to produce, and dominated by unstable supply chains.
Here’s a small sample of our conductive material; this is 157,000 meters – nearly 100 miles – of Galvorn wire. It’s as conductive as copper, 15x stronger than steel, ½ the weight of aluminum, and made entirely from carbon.
We start with greenhouse gasses like methane or carbon dioxide. Our patented process strips off the carbon atoms and processes them into solid materials like this wire, but we also produce films, fabrics, and composites with equally impressive properties.
This manufacturing technology is known as wet fiber spinning and is how other materials like Rayon and viscose are already produced cheaply and at massive scale. And Galvorn can be recycled back into this same process over and over again with no loss of properties, offering a truly circular, clean alternative to dirty metals.
Galvorn is a dual-use technology, originally funded by NASA and the Air Force. It was invented by Nobel-winning scientists at Rice University whom we have now surrounded with experienced operators who have a track record of scaling manufacturing and sales. The results have been exponential: DexMat now has hundreds of customers using this space-age material to replace copper in aerospace, automotive, defense, data centers, grid infrastructure, and the rest of the $300B conductive wire and cable industry.
This exponential growth has driven Galvorn’s exponentially declining costs. Two years ago, this spool would have taken six months to produce and would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Today, it takes less than an hour and costs a few thousand dollars – already at cost parity with aerospace-grade copper. In a few years, we’ll be producing this much every second for less than a dollar – less expensive than commodity copper, steel, even aluminum.
With that cost structure, we’ll expand beyond conductive wire and cable and build vehicles, bridges, and even buildings out of Galvorn.
In my prior role as cofounder and CEO of Third Derivative, I learned the hard truth that there can be no energy transition without a materials transition, so DexMat isn’t making dirty metals less problematic; we’re making them obsolete.
When the votes were tallied, I was elated to learn that DexMat had won, so we would go on to the finals.
That evening, I attended some after parties, including an excellent soirée hosted by Orrick, where I met many other entrepreneurs, investors, and developers.
Day Two: The Finals
The second day was great—catching up in person with many people I usually only see by Zoom, including some of my fellow EFI fellows.
In the afternoon, I took the stage for the startup competition finals. This was a larger crowd, and one of the moderators was none other than my former D3 colleague, Elaine Hsieh.
Here again, the other startups were awesome, and I was inspired by their pitches. I had the fortune of going last, so I tried to bring it home with a bang.
When all the votes were in, DexMat was announced as the Trellis Climatetech Startup Of The Year—a real honor!
Competition vs. Collaboration
I think competitions are actually the wrong model for startups—we should be incentivizing startups to collaborate with each other, not compete against each other. That said, I’m a competitive SOB, so, if it’s a competition, I want to win!
This competition awakened some of the former high school/college football player in me. Prepping for it felt like August two-a-days, the moment before the pitches felt like pre-game jitters, the pitches themselves felt like locker room pep talks, and the victory felt like hoisting the championship trophy high after a hard-fought game.
It was great to have some familiar faces in the audience, too, including some of our investors like Aramco Ventures and Better Way. I felt really supported and confident up on stage!
Everyone’s A Winner
I’m glad for the recognition this brings DexMat—it’s a true honor to have been selected by so many of my peers and fellow travelers in climatetech—but everyone who participated in this competition is a winner. They are offering truly inspiring climate solutions, and we need all of them × 1,000!
Wednesday night, Sofia and I attended several after parties, including a great one hosted by SVB. I was glowing all evening as people kept congratulating me on the win. When I got back to the hotel, I crashed hard after an intense two days. It felt like the late-night crash after dueling it out under the Friday night lights many, many years ago.
This recognition is more than just an award—it’s validation that the work we’re doing at DexMat really matters. As we continue to scale Galvorn and work toward our vision of a materials revolution, I’m grateful for the community that surrounds us, challenges us, and cheers us on.
Together—and only together—will we build the sustainable, prosperous, equitable future.
Bryan Guido Hassin is CEO of DexMat, where they produce Galvorn, an advanced nanomaterial made of pure carbon that is stronger than steel, lighter than aluminum, and as conductive as copper. Previously, Bryan was co-founder and CEO of Third Derivative, the world’s largest climatetech accelerator.
You can watch the full TJ alumni interview on YouTube, but I want to share some conversation highlightst about entrepreneurship lessons and leadership insights that shaped my path from TJHSST to revolutionizing materials science.
Building the Courage to Reimagine: Lessons from TJ’s STEM Environment
One thread woven through our entire conversation: developing the courage to reimagine solutions unconstrained by the status quo. This wasn’t something I consciously developed—it was a mindset I built at TJ, where academic curiosity was celebrated rather than stigmatized.
The TJ environment created something special. When 400 academically motivated students from across Northern Virginia came together, it created a resonance where innovation thrived. I remember spending hours on the phone with a classmatee discussing quantum physics and virtual particles—not as a classroom assignment, but because we genuinely found it fascinating.
When we encountered something that wasn’t the way it should be – whether a computer program, a math problem, or even a team sport – we were encouraged to go back to first principles and rebuild it, better than before.
That culture taught me that the world doesn’t have to work the way it currently does. We don’t have to accept the constraints of the status quo. We should always have the courage to question those constraints, and the willingness to rebuild from first principles.
TJ Football: Where Entrepreneurial Leadership Skills Are Forged
Playing football at Thomas Jefferson taught me more about startup leadership and entrepreneurship than any business school could. We always underdogs, never never expected to win. We deliberately moved up a district, facing stiffer competition, including the eventual state champions every year, yet we frequently found ways to win.
Startups face the same, challenging circumstances, so I learned many entrepreneurial lessons on that football field:
Resilience in the face of long odds – Our 160-pound offensive linemen faced 250-300 pound defensive opponents; we had to out-technique them and wear them down.
Strategic thinking over brute force – We won through discipline, innovation, and and matching our strengths against opposing weaknesses.
The value of diverse teams – it would be hard to win with a team of just quarterbacks or just receivers. Through diverse skillsets – and the orchestration of those skillsets collaborating seamlessly – our whole was greater than the sum of our parts.
Doing more with less – We had less practice time every day than our opponents (because we had eight academic periods to their seven), so we had to make the most of every moment. As our coach will drill into us: “Practice doesn’t make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect.”
Embracing pressure as privilege – We achieved peak performance when the stakes were highest: e.g., I scored the game-winning touchdown at Homecoming on a broken ankle while the band was playing the Rocky Theme Song.
The skills that make successful entrepreneurs—drive, resilience to failure, rapid adaptation, building/leading/inspiring high-performing teams—these aren’t developed in the classroom. They’re forged in the crucible of constantly facing challenges where conventional wisdom says you can’t succeed.
From Computer Science to Climatetech: An Entrepreneur’s Non-Linear Path
My career path from TJ alumnus to climatetech CEO wasn’t linear. Starting with computer science and electrical engineering at Rice University, I moved through software startups into increasingly complex hard tech ventures.
Eventually, I built Third Derivative, which became the world’s largest climatetech accelerator, mobilizing over $2 billion into more than 200 climate technology startups.
But we faced a critical gap in investment dealflow: sustainable materials innovation. The best solutions for, e.g., steel production emissions were incremental improvements to materials humanity had used for millennia. That approach seemed to accept constraints that shouldn’t exist.
When DexMat achieved a manufacturing breakthrough making it possible to displace legacy materials like copper, aluminum, and steel at commercial scale, I knew this was the materials revolution climate solutions needed.
DexMat’s Nanomaterials Innovation: From TJ Alumni Vision to Market Reality
Today at DexMat, we’re proving that sustainable advanced materials can compete with—and surpass—traditional options:
3000x production scale increase while reducing costs 99.6%
Negotiating multi-year, multi-million dollar supply agreements with major automotive and industrial partners
Market traction across 90% of our $580B+ target segments—from power transmission infrastructure to Formula 1 racing to aerospace applications
Galvorn performance specs: Many times stronger than steel, lighter than aluminum, as conductive as copper, and produced by capturing carbon rather than combusting it
Our recent Science magazine cover feature validated what we’re building—advanced nanomaterials that can truly displace dirty legacy materials at scale.
Essential Soft Skills for STEM Entrepreneurs and Alumni
When discussing advice for current TJ students and recent alumni, I focused not on technical skills but on the soft skills that determine entrepreneurial success:
Recognizing you don’t have all the solutions keeps you open to innovation and to partnering with brilliant minds. This humility has been essential throughout my career in climatetech entrepreneurship and is what opened to the door to my commercializing at technology that was invented by Nobel-winning scientists. TJ prepared me very well this; getting comfortable being surrounded by people smarter than you may be the most relatable TJ experience ever!
Building Cross-Functional Relationships
My comparative advantage has never been being the smartest engineer in the room. It’s been serving as the interface between technical experts and those who need to understand their work—translating vision, technology, and requirements bidirectionally. This skill, developed at TJ across different groups, has proven invaluable in startup leadership.
TJ Alumni Leadership: Mike Mukai’s Return as Principal
Learning that Mike Mukai—my former TJ football coach and a 1989 TJ alumnus—was returning as principal gave me chills. Coach Mukai understood what it meant to be a TJ student-athlete because he’d lived it. He mentored players far beyond football, working with teammates on career aspirations and personal challenges.
Having a TJ alumnus who “gets it” leading the school into its next chapter feels significant. I’m energized about TJ’s future and looking forward to the 40th anniversary celebration this October.
TJ Alumni to Climatetech CEO: Entrepreneurship Journey
Attending the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology was an enormous privilege that marked a clear inflection point in my life. TJ continues bringing together academically motivated, ambitious students and creating conditions for innovation and breakthrough thinking – inside the classroom and beyond.
Bryan Guido Hassin is the CEO of DexMat and a 1997 graduate of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Previously, he founded Third Derivative, the world’s largest climatetech accelerator. Connect with him at greenknig.ht.
Sunday I raced my final track meet of the season, and it was a blast.
Back in July, I raced my first masters track meet at CU Boulder since my failed comeback attempt last year. I beat my target times in the 100m, 200m, and 400m, and, most importantly, didn’t get injured! I returned after two weeks of sprint training and improved on those times while winning a gold and two silvers at the Colorado Masters Track & Field Championships. Then, Sunday, there was a final meet of the season. There I raced only the 100m and 200m, and improved my times further.
Results
My records this outdoor track season are:
100m – 14.29s
200m – 30.43s
400m – 1:13.9
Looking Back
Those aren’t particularly impressive, but they have me feeling good after not much training. I can compare them to PR times of my past:
100m – 13.2s (2014)
200m – 27.7s (2014)
400m – 1:03 (2015)
However, that doesn’t seem like a fair comparison, looking back 10+ years – before kids, before spinal surgery, and 20 kg (50 lbs) lighter. There is a way to normalize results by age, though, called age grading (AG), and so that is a more useful way to measure whether I have been improving, falling, or holding steady:
Event
2014
AG
2015
AG
2018
AG
2019
AG
2025
AG
100m
13.2s
72.58
13.7s
70.39
13.7s
71.81
13.9s
71.28
14.29
72.19
200m
27.7s
70.73
28.5s
69.20
29.4s
68.39
28.6s
70.76
30.43
69.13
400m
64s
68.43
63s
69.97
65.5s
68.57
65.2s
69.43
73.9s
63.64
It’s neat to see that my 100m sprint has remained relatively steady. My 200m has slipped a bit, and my 400m has slipped a lot. That feels right to me, as I can feel my form breaking down toward the end of the longer sprints. The good news is that sprint endurance is trainable – I just haven’t been training it for the past five years!
Looking Across
Another lens through which to analyze my performances is how they compare to my age group peers. In 2014, I was ranked #375 (out of 532) in the world and #61 (out of 120) in the US for the 400m, so in the middle of the pack. I didn’t have rankings for the 100m and 200m, because they weren’t electronically timed. By 2019, my time was a little slower, but I was in a similar position – #39 (out of 63) in my new 40-44 age group.
Outside of sprints, I did race some top masters track national times in other events about 10 years ago.
This season I finished #39 (out of 42) in the US in my new 45-49 age group in the 400m, #48 (out of 52) in the 200m, and #54 (out of 61) in the 100m, so near the bottom of the field. That’s to be expected, coming out of five years of not training/competing for track. I’m back now, though, and I look forward to getting back in better competition form before next season.
Final Thoughts
A few more interesting take-aways from these few 2025 track meets:
In the Colorado Masters Track & Field Championships, the same guy beat me in the 100m and 200m. He likely would have beaten me in the 400m, too, but he scratched out of it, so I won the gold. As I get older, half the game is just showing up. As the saying goes, “You can’t win it if you ain’t in it.”
In one of my 100m races, I recorded peak power output of 850W! If I can drop some weight while maintaining that same power output, that will substantially increase my speed.
ChatGPT analyzed my Garmin data and estimated that I ran my first 40 yards of my 100m race in 5.6s. That’s a lot slower than the 4.9s I ran in high school and the 4.7s I ran in college, but it’s a lot faster than the 6.0s I ran a few weeks ago before shifting into track gear. I’m encouraged by the improvement!
Today I had a delightful surprise. I was working from home when my canine alarm system let me know that someone was approaching the front door. Assuming it was a delivery, I stepped away from a Zoom meeting to see if they needed a signature.
It was a delivery, but it was also so much more. The person dropping off the package was none other than Dave of Game Sack! Game Sack is one of the most preeminent Youtube channels for retrogaming content, and I have been watching them for years. Dave actually left the show a few years ago, but he is remembered and loved by all the fans. I had forgotten that Game Sack is produced here in Colorado, and I guess Dave’s day job is nearby. FedEx, if you’re watching, give this man a raise!
I jokingly invited him in to play TurboGrafx. He was a good sport about it and took a selfie with me. I thought about running back inside to change into a TurboGrafx shirt for the picture, but I figured I was already fanboying a bit too much.
About that time, my colleague – who was working at my house too – came outside to remind me that I was missing the Zoom call. Oops! Ah well, it was a great diversion and a very, very small world. The world is even smaller when you consider what was inside the package he delivered . . . TurboGrafx games, of course!
Five years. That’s how long it had been since Katie and I moved to Colorado, and shamefully, how long it had taken us to make the mere 2½-hour drive north to visit one of my favorite IMD professors, Corey Billington, in Laramie, Wyoming. I blame COVID, then having a second baby, but really there’s no excuse for letting geography keep us from one of those deeply valued relationships that transcends the classroom.
From Swiss Alps to Wyoming Plains
Corey was one of my favorite professors during my 2008 IMD MBA, and, like John Bennett from my previous post, he’s evolved from beloved professor to dear friend and DexMat investor-advisor who also happens to enjoy excellent wine. For family reasons, Corey moved from Switzerland to Wyoming several years ago, where he now teaches Entrepreneurship and Supply Chain at the University of Wyoming’s College of Business in Laramie—bringing his wealth of experience from IBM, HP, and startups to the Mountain West.
Even across the distance, we’ve maintained our professional collaboration. I’ve been fortunate to engage Corey as a supply chain advisor for DexMat, where his expertise has been invaluable as we scale our advanced materials production. Additionally, I’ve had the privilege of guest lecturing in his entrepreneurship course, sharing lessons from my experience raising over $100M across nine ventures with the next generation of Wyoming entrepreneurs. These remote touchpoints have kept our relationship alive, but nothing replaces the magic of face-to-face connection.
It was actually Corey’s dog, Acacia, who first caused Katie and me to fall in love with the Bernese Mountain Dog breed, which ultimately led to us adopting our beloved Genève many years later. Though Acacia is no longer with us, Corey and his partner, Katherine, now have Ollie, a sweet Welsh Springer Spaniel who was incredibly patient with our kids—and seemed to particularly appreciate how much food two small children can drop during meals!
Wyoming Really Is Small
As we drove north from Boulder after our 4th of July race, I was struck by just how sparsely populated Wyoming truly is. With a total state population of just 590,169 people, Wyoming is indeed the least populous state in the nation. Laramie itself has only about 32,638 residents, making it the 4th largest city in a state where over half the cities have fewer than 500 people.
The drive was refreshingly easy—plenty of EV chargers along the way, though unnecessary for such a short trip. The change of scenery from Colorado’s Front Range to Wyoming’s high plains was exactly what we needed.
A Weekend of Home Cooking and Friendship
Friday afternoon brought us straight into Laramie’s 4th of July celebration, with the downtown park bustling with vendors and activities. His kids all grown up now, Corey and Katherine have become empty nesters—though I suspect they’d forgotten just how much entropy two small children can bring to a peaceful household!
Corey, who is an excellent chef, took charge of Friday dinner, treating us to one of many incredible home-cooked meals of the weekend. Saturday saw Katherine handling breakfast and lunch duties with equal skill, while Corey once again worked his culinary magic for dinner. Between meals, we explored a nearby school playground and enjoyed a tour of downtown Laramie, including the University of Wyoming campus where Corey teaches. I succeeded in throwing a pine cone into Rexy’s mouth, which means I’m assured an “A” on my next exam . . . whenever that will be! Corey treated us to another sumptuous dinner, and great wine was enjoyed by all—except the kids, of course!
It has probably been since before we had children that we’d enjoyed so many consecutive home-cooked meals, which was an incredible treat in itself. Sunday morning brought another fantastic Katherine breakfast before we made our way back to Colorado.
Lessons in Long-Term Relationships
This quick trip reinforced something I’ve learned throughout my entrepreneurial journey: the relationships you build along the way are what you carry from one adventure to the next. Whether it’s former professors turned advisors, or longtime friends who become investors (or vice versa!), these connections form the foundation of everything we do.
Corey embodies the kind of long-game thinking I’ve written about before—someone who brings both academic rigor and real-world experience to every conversation. His transition from the corporate world to academia to now supporting the next generation of entrepreneurs in Wyoming’s emerging ecosystem reflects the kind of purposeful deployment of time – the one thing we can never raise more of – that inspires me.
Passing away the late evening hours sharing learnings about AI-augmented leadership (one of his areas of research) transported me back to the very beginning of our relationship. It was glorious. Restorative. And the food, wine, and company didn’t hurt either!
Looking to reconnect with long-distance relationships in your network? Consider a weekend road trip—sometimes the most meaningful experiences are closer than you think.
