How one founder realized the potential of sustainable energy stored deep below our feet

On this week’s Found podcast, we sat down with Dandelion co-founder and President Kathy Hannun. Kathy came up with the idea for Dandelion while working at Google X, tackling some of the world’s most intractable problems, and making them tractable through the application of technology. Kathy realized that harnessing geothermal energy was a way to make an entirely new category of sustainable energy accessible at scale to markets where it makes the most sense over other green energy options.

Kathy told us all about how she ended up with her dream job at X, and then decided to make the leap from that to building her own company from the ground up to address a solution she saw an obvious need for. She also explains how despite dealing with some natural imposter syndrome finding herself at Google’s moonshot division solving problems with some of the smartest people in the world, but also how her natural inclination is to believe that she can solve any challenge she’s faced through, through a combination of dedication and learning.

We also heard from Kathy about making the difficult decision to change a fundamental element of how Dandelion’s business works, fairly late in the game, after realizing that the existing strategy wasn’t working. Her tough call literally came while she was scaling a mountain — it’s hard to get more allegorical than that.