Nearly a decade ago, on his first trip to Washington, D.C., Tim Latimer asked a Senate staffer why wind and solar energy had won tax credit extensions, while geothermal hadn’t. The Senate staffer said Latimer was the first person who had ever come to talk to him about geothermal. No surprise, then, that when the fight over tax extensions grew tense, geothermal was left out.
Today, the buzz is much louder — and it’s generated by a coalition of supporters on both sides of the aisle. In June, a geothermal permitting bill passed the House.
"Sometimes we joke that the one thing that can heal the country's divide is going to be geothermal, because we've gotten both parties to agree on it,” Latimer told a Columbia Business School audience during Climate Week NYC 2026.
As co-founder and CEO of Fervo Energy, Latimer sits right at the center of geothermal’s buzz. In May, Fervo raised $2.2 billion in what is believed to be the U.S.’s largest-ever clean-energy IPO.
Latimer spoke with Bruce Usher, Professor of Professional Practice; co-director of the Tamer Institute for Social Enterprise and Climate Change; and Elizabeth B. Strickler '86 and Mark T. Gallogly '86 Faculty Director at Columbia Business School. Their conversation kicked off a week of Climate Week events hosted by Columbia Business School in close partnership with the Tamer Institute.
Geothermal's (and Fervo’s) momentum has been on CBS's radar. At a workshop convened by CBS’s Climate Knowledge Initiative, geothermal industry leaders, including Fervo chief of staff Nour Ghadanfar, agreed that the sector has entered its breakout decade.
In his conversation with Usher, Latimer looked back on the risks required to build Fervo, looked ahead to what it’ll take for geothermal to reach its potential in the U.S., and offered four key points of advice for anyone weighing launching a climate venture of their own:
1. Sometimes entrepreneurship is the only way to test a big idea
Latimer called himself a "reluctant entrepreneur." He didn't set out to start a company, but he became so obsessed with an idea that he decided becoming a founder was his only path to pursue it.
The idea took shape while he was working as a drilling engineer with an oil and gas company. The industry had recently begun systematically drilling horizontal wells, going deep vertically and then turning to drill sideways for miles, which yields far more from every well. Wondering why geothermal wasn’t doing the same, Latimer called the 10 largest geothermal companies in the world to ask, and he repeatedly received the same answer: It would never work.
"I realized there was this huge disconnect between what was happening at the frontier of technology in oil and gas and in geothermal," Latimer said. "These communities, even though they were both solving technical challenges of drilling wells, were not talking to each other."
He pitched company after company on horizontal drilling for geothermal, hoping to join a team already pursuing it. But he discovered there were no such teams.
He couldn’t shake a haunting question: “What if I was right about that idea, but we just never tried it?" That question sent him to business school, where he spent two years workshopping the concept, and eventually to founding Fervo.
Latimer's advice to future founders: Don’t wait. As a second-year MBA student carrying student loans, he nearly talked himself into taking a job offer from a prestigious consulting firm for a few years before starting Fervo. Then, in a Stanford climate ventures class, investor Dave Danielson explained the math: It can take five years of research to found a company, five more to build a first prototype, and 10 to reach a mass-market product, and five to ten years to scale it. Anyone hoping to make a dent in emissions by mid-century, Danielson argued, had to start now.
"There is an urgency of now in a lot of these things," Latimer said. "Every year you wait … you are delaying the growth of your business; you're delaying the impact you're going to have on the world."
He turned down the other offer and went all in on his idea. Danielson later became one of Fervo's first investors.
2. Build something whose value doesn't depend on carbon alone
Building a climate company in the United States has real advantages, Latimer said, but one clear disadvantage: "We have a political system that can swing pretty wildly from election cycle to election cycle."
That volatility shapes his most pointed piece of advice for climate founders: "I don't think that you can mobilize capital at the multitrillion-dollar scale needed to address climate change if carbon emissions are your only value proposition."
As demand growth, national security concerns, and affordability pressures rise, the two major U.S. political parties, and many governments abroad, have dropped climate down their list of priorities. Climate still motivates plenty of founders and employees in their career ambitions, but durable businesses must stand on other types of customer value. For Fervo, that means reliable, cost-effective electricity at a moment of once-in-a-generation growth in power demand.
"What's driving our customer procurement decisions and what's driving policy is the need to have reliable, cost-effective electricity," he said. "That is why our business can survive the political swings, because that has enduring value even before you start talking about carbon emission abatement."
3. Expect the technology to be the easy part
When Fervo launched, proving its technology took up nearly all of the team's attention: new ways of drilling and completing wells, and of mapping the subsurface with fiber optics. Looking back, Latimer said, "that was the easiest thing we did!”
The hard part was everything that had to happen around that technology. "The U.S. is actually really, really bad at building infrastructure," he said.
He offered Cape Station, Fervo's flagship project in southwest Utah, as an example. He said Phases I and II of the project, totaling 500 MW, are currently under construction. But it took six years to get from the initial lease application in 2018 to the final federal environmental permit needed to break ground on the power plant in 2024. Usher noted, too, that Utah is a relatively regulation-friendly state.
Latimer pointed out that those protracted permitting timelines collide with how startups are funded. Venture capital is often the only kind of financing with a large risk appetite for unproven technology, but VC funds typically expect returns within eight to 10 years — a six-year permitting wait eating most of that window.
Seeking financing for these types of climate-tech hardware projects opens up its own culture gap, Latimer added. Year after year, he said, VCs who liked Fervo would open its financial model, see a line item for project debt, and reflexively pass. To many Silicon Valley investors, he said, infrastructure finance "feels like a New York thing,” whereas they’re more familiar in software-investment terrain.
Fervo made it through, Latimer said, thanks to dedicated customers and fortunate timing: While it waited on permits, the electricity business became a booming industry. But many companies won't be so lucky, he worried. That's why permitting timelines need to be dramatically shortened, he said, and reflected that in nearly every conversation he had during Climate Week, the topic was permitting reform.
"Whatever your energy priorities are, permitting sits at the root of it," he said. He is cautiously optimistic that a bipartisan fix could come within the next election cycle or two.
One of the freshest shifts in the investment and infrastructure culture Latimer has observed concerns local communities. For a decade, Fervo invested in community engagement because, he said, it was the right thing to do: showing up early, listening, hiring locally, and being transparent about projects. For years, he said, nobody gave the company credit for it. That has changed recently, with the nationwide backlash against AI data centers.
“It's maybe one of the first times where we have experienced engaging with investors across the whole capital stack where one of their first two or three questions is, ‘What are you doing on community engagement?’” Latimer said. In other words, for founders building physical infrastructure, community trust is now part of the business case.
4. Past a certain size, leadership becomes a team sport
Latimer started Fervo as an engineer and assumed he would keep doing engineering for a long time. Then the company passed 15 employees. Between investor, customer, and management meetings, the time for his own technical work disappeared.
"That's something a lot of founders struggle with," he said. "You have to pivot way earlier than you think to just being a people leader.” He added: “As soon as you hit that 15-employee mark, you cannot brute-force your way to success anymore. It becomes a team sport, and your job as the leader is just making sure everybody wants to be on the team and knows what the goal is.”
His parting advice was targeted to the students in the audience, and it echoed the choice he faced when he turned down the consulting-job offer. He acknowledged that there will always be a temptation to take the safe job and the slightly higher paycheck over the passion-driven work.
“But I think you owe it to yourself, and you owe it to society, to actually lean in and try to make a change in the world,” he said.
