"You can always perfect anything infinitely, but at a certain point, it's time to let it go."
Sam is a mechanical engineer from Montreal, Canada. He has pursued a wide range of engineering experiences in over five different industries, including rockets at SpaceX, energy storage at Tesla, and electric flying cars at Lilium Aviation.
His current focus is helping to solve the climate crisis. He’s a leader and organizer of a highly active and entrepreneurial climate community called Work on Climate. He has also developed a board game about climate solutions, called Solutions.
The game exposes players to almost 100 unique and surprising solutions to climate change, inspired by research from Project Drawdown. It is designed to give you hope that climate change is still a solvable problem and a sense of urgency that it’s almost (but not quite) too late. It might even encourage you to pick a solution and take real-world action!
The Solutions board game will be on Kickstarter in Summer 2021. You can learn more at https://solutionsthegame.com/
In this episode:
0:53 How Sam developed Solutions
19:55 How he got into venture capital by giving a presentation on why investors shouldn't invest in his company
27:34 Growing up in Montreal
29:10 How a concussion led Sam to focus more on inventing
38:02 How he built a hovercraft in 11th grade
41:12 How Sam made himself become a more social person in high school
55:12 How he figured out he wanted to be a mechanical engineer
59:37 His experience at at Dalhousie University
1:07:36 Designing drones at Skysquirrel Technologies
1:11:43 His experience at SpaceX & Tesla
1:27:28 How a wind turbine class project led to his first company out of school
1:34:47 Sam's advice to aspiring entrepreneurs
SHOW NOTES
You can check out Solutions on IG and FB @solutionsthegame
Thanks to Podcast Pair for connecting Sam and me!
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Producer & Host: Zach McHale
Editor & Host: Connor Heine
Intro music created by Muscle Tough. IG: @muscletoughband