Melissa Chan: We Run Towards the Problem

Welcome back to the Team. Today we’re really happy to welcome Melissa Chan to speak with us. Melissa is Senior Director of Ecosystem Development at Analog Devices, a Boston company makes semiconductors for all sorts of technology. She holds a PhD in Engineering & Public Policy and has spent her entire career in Energy and Climate. An exceptionally smart person, Melissa drops a lot of knowledge in the next hour. We’re going to try to catch as many of the references as we can and post the links in the show notes. We hope you get as much out of this conversation as we did. Lets get to work.

References

Vehicle-Grid Integration Council (VGIC) A national membership-based advocacy group focused on advancing the role of flexible electric vehicle charging and discharging.

Edge Computing doing more of your data processing close to where it's created—on your phone, home router, factory floor, or even inside devices themselves—instead of sending it all to a distant cloud.

The Institute for Regulatory Law & Economics (IRLE) a hub that brings together law, economics, and technology to improve how we regulate key industries—especially energy and digital networks .

Analog Devices Melissa’s employer, they build software and hardware for all kinds of technology solutions across aerospace, automotive, communications, consumer, energy, industrial automation, and healthcare.

Community Development Financial Institution ( CDFI ) a specialized financial institution that provides financial services to underserved communities and populations.

DOE GRIP- Department of Energy Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships. A Government Grant Program for companies and individuals that help enhance grid flexibility and improve the resilience of the power system against extreme weather.

“Mass Energy Center” refers to the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC). MassCEC is a public agency dedicated to accelerating the growth of the clean energy sector in Massachusetts.

Rainforest Action Network Activist Group Taking action against the companies and industries driving deforestation and climate change.

All In Energy  a nonprofit with a mission to advance an inclusive clean energy economy.

Transcript

The planet, we're big fans, and it needs some help. We're going to skip the part where we convince you that humans have caused a tremendous change in the climate since roughly the 1700s. We're also going to skip over a bunch of terrifying statistics and doom and gloom stories.

We know you've heard all of that. We are regular people, you might say climate curious, that want to help, and don't know where we can jump in yet. Welcome to Team Climate, a show about what it really looks like to do climate work.

This is real, and this is bigger than all of us, and it's going to take all of us to change it. My name is Jeffrey Bryan Potter. I'm a Senior Product Designer in the FinTech space.

My co-host, Kristin Shaw, is the Head of Growth for a Consulting Agency and the National Marketing Chair for a CleanTech Accelerator. Each episode we're going to be talking with someone in the field doing the real work it takes to make change. We hope this inspires you to jump in too because we're going to need you.

Welcome back to the team. Today, we're really happy to welcome Melissa Chan to speak with us. Melissa is a Senior Director of Ecosystem Development at Analog Devices, a Boston company that makes semiconductors for all sorts of technology.

She holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering and has spent her entire career in energy and climate. Melissa is an exceptionally smart person, and she is going to drop a lot of knowledge in the next hour.

We are going to try to catch as many of the references as we can and post the links in the show notes. We hope you get as much out of this conversation as we did. Let's get to work.

We are talking with Melissa today. Melissa, how are you?

I'm doing great. How are you?

Good, good. Kristen, how are you doing?

I'm doing great, thank you.

So, Melissa, we'd love to hear a little bit about your current work. Can you give us a quick overview?

Yes. My current work is with Analog Devices, which is a semiconductor company. We manufacture the chips that turn essentially the built world, like the analog world into a digital signal.

With that capability, we're also able to compute right at the edge inside the machine. This is something I've been learning about ever since joining the team about nine months ago. Whereas I had thought Edge Computing was measuring something at the edge, sending that information to a cloud, computing it there and then sending a command back to the edge.

This means that you can truly have little tiny, essentially microscopic computers at the edge in machines that talk to each other and comprise a giant edge computing network. How I got here, because your listeners are probably like semiconductors do not sound like the typical type of company that we hear about on the podcast. I came to Analog Devices about nine months ago as a continuation of my career in power infrastructure.

So I guess something that's unusual about me among the guests in Team Climate is I've spent my whole career in the climate industry, starting off in a centralized power plant planning for carbon capture and storage way back in the day, smart grid investment rollout for utilities, designing first of a kind programs for customers. And I guess the first of a kind aspect is what I'd say is a common thread among everything that I've done. So I really understand infrastructure, what it takes to build and deploy new technologies.

And after it's been about eight years of either being part of an early stage team or starting a company myself, I have really honed in that experience of figuring out very early product market fit and being able to scale it. And so I joined Analog Devices specifically because they as a chip manufacturer have expertise at making amazing technology and of course building that into built infrastructure, but their relationship with their chips ends when the chips are sent off to whoever is going to build it into the meter or the car or the battery. And what we're doing now is we're directly engaging with infrastructure owner operators in order to understand what's needed at the edge so that we can build the right thing and get it out there.

So that's my very long roundabout explanation of where I am now and how I got here.

Wow. Fantastic. And so are you able to walk us through like a day-to-day?

Well, I want to interrupt. Tell us what your education was in and kind of what led you down this path. I think that would be helpful content.

For sure. I am an engineer by training and a lot of people, especially in my current job, expect that I'm an integrated circuit engineer. And integrated circuits I have recently learned are the little tiny circuits on circuit boards.

I have come to understand giant circuits, actually as a chemical engineer. So I studied chemical engineering for my undergrad degree. I double majored in a program called Engineering and Public Policy, it's like Carnegie Mellon.

I'm a double Carnegie Mellon alumni, so I did my undergrad there. And then I went back for a PhD in engineering and public policy, which really is like an applied mathematics or advanced analytics degree. I hesitate to say like data science.

I feel like a lot of the skill set that you learn is, how do you solve problems with information and figure out the pathway to make a decision one way or another? And so my pathway through my education, I guess, was a little unusual. So I did start off as a chemical engineer.

And the reason why I did was, I suppose you could say I was a bit of a child activist. So I read Silent Spring in high school. And it's like this, this is a problem and I want to be part of the solution.

And it seems like chemical engineers have a big part in figuring out how the built world works. And so I guess I wouldn't say the problem was completely solved, but nobody had told me like we had figured out that indeed is the problem and we don't spray it on everything and everywhere. So luckily like that, she was solved.

But when I was in college, I was really focused and interested in what our solutions are to the ozone hole. And as we know, we've managed to allow that to heal by no longer using CFCs. And so the problem of my whole career has been like focusing on climate change and carbon emissions.

And so I first started off, my first job after school was with the Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy, actually. And I know that sounds strange for somebody who is really focused on carbon emissions because obviously fossil is the source of most carbon emissions. But I mean, run to the problem.

And so my initial work, the DOE was designing and looking at ways to reduce the cost of separating out carbon dioxide from power production, transporting it and injecting it underground. And definitely uses a lot of chemical engineering skills. I went back to school for my PhD because I really thought I was going to grow up and lead a national lab.

I suppose that that is still a possibility, but it seems like you need to have a PhD in engineering to lead a national lab. And so I went back to school. Sometimes people ask me if they should get a PhD, and I actually push them pretty hard to reconsider it.

It's a very long and lonely journey. I guess unless you're going to become the executive director of a national lab, you might not need it. I really enjoyed the path

It was really hard. It was also personally rewarding in some ways. I met my husband in the same degree program.

So you could say I should, everyone, if they want to find a life partner, should know, I can't indoctrinate. But I'm pretty sure there are other ways to find your life partner. I came back to the Boston area, so I'd grown up in the Boston area.

I came back here for a postdoc at the Harvard Kennedy School. So all this time, I had been older than other people, like say, in my graduate school cohort and worked through a lot of the degree. And so finally in doing my postdoc, it was an opportunity to really just focus on the research and go deep on something.

And at that time, that was in 2009 to 2011. And my research really focused on what would be the outcomes for carbon emissions if we take a hard look at how we're spending federal research money and take a look at what public-private partnerships could be. And this is all in the early days of what that meant.

And I feel like in a different path, if I had done that research, I guess, maybe a few years later, I might have gone the path of joining a venture capital firm as an investment associate and then work my way out. But that wasn't a path yet. When I finished my postdoc, I decided I didn't want to be in academia.

And you can tell I obviously did not go back to the National Lab. I joined a consultancy, which at the time was called Navigant. It's now called Guide House and worked for a few years, advising utilities on their smart grid rollout.

Learned a ton. And it's interesting that as you're learning and going through a path, you don't realize how much you're learning until maybe years later. Like I still in 2025, like 15 years after some of those projects, still draw upon the experience of working through the change management and procurement and deployment and metrics collection steps that I would go through with utilities over time in helping them deploy technologies.

And so after working for Navigant for a few years, I actually had a round of layoffs and I was like, go. And I followed one of the clients who I'd really liked working with. She had left Avangard around the same time and I had liked working with her.

So I reached out and joined her boutique consultancy about a year and a half. And we did a lot of work helping utilities figure out their smart meter rate case. So I was like the first really small early stage team that I joined.

She left that company and I left shortly after. And then that's when I went into consulting for myself for a little while while I was figuring things out and just trying to figure out what to do in order to contribute to our industry. Like it really felt like an actually like when I had gotten laid off from Navigant and I was in like the kind of wilderness as some people say, trying to figure out what to do.

Like I got asked a lot, why are you so focused on climate change? Why are you so stuck on working on energy problems? You know, utilities are not a lucrative business.

And I would say I would agree, utilities are not a lucrative business. Like people would even go so far as to say, like, you know, climate change is really not a problem. Like these things that you care about, like they're just like a nice to have.

And I think, I mean, now, 10 years later, it is all the more apparent, like, how real climate change is, because we're really experiencing crazy weather, rain for 14 Saturdays in a row, temperatures over 100 degrees. Like, I think people believe more now, but I would love to say back to anybody, like, well, you know, is having a planet to live on just a nice to have? Like, having a stable climate where you can just focus on your living and not worrying about, you know, whether you could possibly die because it's way too hot.

I did get asked a lot, like, why not change and focus on biomedical problems or, you know, cancer, which I admit that is a huge problem, too, or finance or any other thing that it may have been easier to find a role in at the time. But obviously, I'm still here working in climate because it's, I care about there are lots of problems to knock out.

I think that we all expected it was just going to be warmer winters and hotter summers, but it would all sort of follow the same kind of pattern, not winter, summer, winter, winter, summer, summer, snowstorm, rain, 100 degrees, like all in the same week, like wildly erratic like that. I'm sure someone like yourself probably did know that that's what we were going to expect. But I think the average person didn't think it was going to be this erratic.

And I say it in the present tense, like we are seeing it for sure.

Yeah, I can say I knew. Like I've gotten the same questions of like, oh, well, it's just a little bit warmer than it used to be. And depending on whether the person I'm talking to like had a calculus class explain like, well, you know, the minima and extreme maxima are more extreme and more frequent.

And so overall, when you average it, it appears to be slightly warmer than it used to be. However, it is so extreme like our little bodies, like we can't keep up.

Yeah, I had a conversation with someone recently where, you know, they were talking and kind of same thing, like questioning why I want to focus on the planet. And I was like, well, my feeling is the earth will be fine. You know, when you go back millions of years, there's been significantly more extreme climate patterns or whatever, you know, environment.

And the reality is like us as humans and a lot of like the life forms that currently inhabit the planet can only survive in this like really small window of factors, you know, and so I'm not necessarily passionate about the earth. I'm passionate about making sure we have a place that's inhabitable for us.

Yeah, we essentially live in a refrigerator, right? It's just that the range, you know, is a little bit wider than what we keep food at, but not that much compared to the range of, you know, temperatures that exist. And it's really about climate stability.

I wonder if we could, you know, there's something to that, like saying, start saying climate instability rather than climate change or warming, you know. You say warming to people and they're like, oh, I could deal with it being a little warmer. Just wear shorts every day, you know.

Getting into the weeds a little bit. What does a day look like for you?

A day? I just describe a week because a day, it can vary. But I would say over the course of the week, I give the boring answer.

Like so many of us have spent a lot of time on the phone, a lot of time on email, a lot of time writing other documents, writing my own documents, putting together presentations, and that's not very interesting. But like the bigger things that I'm working towards are, how do I deliver on the promise that I made to my team of helping us figure out our path into a new market that I know about very well? And for me, actually, the incentives for what Anilog wants and what I want are very well aligned.

I want to solve the big problem of energy transition. I suppose like we could think of a better term for that because it's kind of like the climate change term. It's like, okay, there's change or there's transition.

And it makes it feel like there's like a terminal point. But this is more like we're in it and we're going to be in it for a very, very long time. Like infrastructure just takes a long time to build.

But there are a couple of things. And I would break how I spend my time into like three categories. The big one is learning about what the power industry thinks about when it thinks about Edge Computing.

And on the flip side of that, teaching and introducing my team to the right folks in the power industry when the conversation is right. And so having these conversations where we're advising, say utilities or policy and regulatory books about what is possible at the edge. That's one thing.

Another is bringing a new way of thinking about go-to-market to this company. So semiconductors, it's the ultimate in hardware. It's like selling pellets and pellets or cases and cases of chips.

And we in the company joke, we sell a bag of chips and call it a day. But this is the world of smart computing and connected everything. And so what I've been doing is bringing my expertise from prior roles, where I've spelled out, how do we, say for example, when I was at Formata Energy, make it possible to have an EV charger that provides the grid service of discharging the battery inside the car, so that now the car is paying for itself.

Like this is the service, whereas the charger is just the widget. So thinking about the recurring services over time and how that is valued and how that's shared among all of the partners who make that solution possible. And then the third thing actually, and this is where I'm just so fortunate to be where I am, is I get to spend time really thinking about and connecting with people who are also thinking about advanced infrastructure development.

And what are the problems really that stand in the way of building power infrastructure in a smart and responsible way? So technology is available, but there are real problems that we have in how do we decide where to build, how do we make decisions about building, how do we use that technology? Something that is endlessly frustrating is regulator may approve, for example, a smart grid technology that produces a lot of data, but they don't push or ask the right questions of the utility.

Through no fault of their own, they just don't know. Like, you can't know all of the unknowns, but there's no reason to have all this data at Edge Computing if you're still requiring revenue settlement with a pre-defined load profile that's developed on an economist's or presentation of a given household. It negates the value of having the hour-by-hour measurement of how a household or a customer is using their electricity.

And so that's just one policy example of where policy needs to be updated in order to enable a technology to provide its fullest value.

What are the problems that are worth looking into?

There are so many. Oh my gosh. In my prior role for Vehicle-Grid, like, was that it was really reconsider the definitions on what is a proprietary charger technology?

Because, for example, Chattamo, that connector, which is thought to be sunsetting, it's very mature. It's Vehicle-Grid out of the box, whereas CCS Type 1 and the Tesla standard are still figuring it out. I just have to say that they won't, but if you want to have Vehicle-Grid today, let's reconsider not allowing Chattamo ports in public charging or to be subsidized by their utility programs.

Another is, let's also reconsider the seemingly inconsistent, and this is a strong word to use, I know, but it feels like when you are someone who's developing charging infrastructure, arbitrary definitions of L1, L2, L3, and DC fast charge, such that as technologies evolve, it might be possible that you have a low power, which means like a level one or a level two charger size, like under 20 kilowatts, but direct current instead of alternating current. So then instead of DC fast charge, you have DC slow charge, right? But like there's no category for that, the way that you have defined these four categories of things.

And so when the new technology shows up, whoever is working on the rebates for chargers is like, well, you don't fall into any of these categories. So sorry, new technology. Like we, you can't qualify for the make ready and the rebates that we offer for all of the other chargers that are on the market.

And, you know, I could go on, you know, in my current role, the questions that I feel are really important to answer are, you know, let's really think about data storage infrastructure, or what it means to have data at the edge. Like, who does that belong to? Is it a common good?

Especially if it's coming from a household meter, how does the household have access to their own data and make it possible to say virtual power plants or third party aggregators or a battery virtual power plant? I guess these are specific examples where a household be like, here is my data and here is how it would be useful for me as a household in order to get value from it. There's a lot, I feel like I'm very quickly about to go down a rabbit hole, so we'll just pause there.

We can go in another direction.

Which implies you haven't been down a rabbit hole yet. I'm trying to keep up to someone with a PhD. Go ahead with what you're saying.

Oh, on more things that we could work on. I'll stop on the more things that we could work on, but the solution is let's find more ways to educate regulators on technology. I think that there are a lot of organizations that are working on this and doing a really good job.

There are some nonprofits, there's one working group out of Northwestern University. I'm never good at remembering what acronyms stand for, but the IRLE, I think it's Institute for Regulatory Something-Something.

That is not what that stands for, but it's definitely IRLE. They hold a lot of workshops, actually, for curious and forward thinking policy and regulatory makers on what is technology evolving into, like what is possible with data, what is possible with computing. I think there are several other organizations that are figuring this out.

So like trade organizations. My last team belonged to the Vehicle-Grid, VGIC, Vehicle-Grid Integration Council. I think that's what that might be.

That they would hold like small conversations with regulators and policymakers to learn from industry about what's possible. And you know, you don't have to be part of working groups in order to be part of these conversations. The really great thing about all of grid infrastructure regulation is it's open and very transparent and ordinary people can get involved.

And this doesn't mean like a Parks and Recreation kind of thing, where you show up and like yell at Leslie Knope or, you know, whoever's the head of the DPU. Really, I haven't seen any regulatory commission that doesn't have a way for a person to download and read a proceeding and see what the conversation has been like over the process of the whole conversation and then send an email or upload a letter that explains what would be very important for the commission to consider, like anyone can do it. In like official roles, you know, I've reached out to people.

I had conversations on behalf of the companies I've worked for, but I've also just reached out to people in my own state, Massachusetts, for conversations. Because if you work in this industry and you are contributing to a solution, your solution needs to see the light of day. People need to know that it's there.

And the people who have the power to create the market that brings your solution into the world are usually the policy and regulatory makers. They're like, reach out. See if you can get an appointment with your, I don't know if it's like the state attorney general who has a division that's focused on energy.

Some public utility commissions are more open than others, and you can meet with them and have conversations. You can have conversations with your state rep. I've done that in a couple of different states where I thought that there might be interest in new technology or that state rep has a reputation for introducing technology forward and climate-leading bills.

There's a lot that you can do as a private citizen. So I guess I might talk about the different working groups. Might not be so much the important point of what I'm talking about as opposed to what you can do as somebody who's in this industry and knowledgeable about.

Let's take a quick break.

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That means your experience might already be more relevant to you than you think. If you're curious about diving into climate work, here are a few ideas to get started. Research and apply for roles in rapidly growing sectors like renewable energy, EV infrastructure and carbon markets.

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85% of jobs are filled through connections. Communities like My Climate Journey, Work on Climate, and Terra.do are fantastic slack communities to meet like-minded individuals and learn from others already in the field. You can find the links in the episode notes.

Solutions for climate change.

As Analog Devices, have you had a success, something that's made some impact, since you've been there, that you can share?

Not yet. We're getting there. Come back to me in a year.

We'll definitely have something out in the world. We're going to be doing first demos of technology soon, but we'll have, I think, more concrete results in a year.

Given that you're working on long, projected projects, how do you keep your feet on the ground and stay motivated?

That's a great question because sometimes it doesn't feel like a lot of time has passed, but indeed, time passes.

Yeah.

In my current role, it's the vision of being able to fulfill and solve a big problem. Right now, as we are developing the early stages of the technology. We're still having conversations with the industry in order to understand the full requirements.

I think in anything that you're doing, whether it's the fundamental compute technology as we are at Analog Devices or with my prior team at Formata, where we were integrating and building vehicle-to-grid projects, it takes time to build and integrate and deploy. So even when, you know, arguably at Formata Energy, you could look at that and say, well, all you need is a car and a parking spot and the charger and the utility's permission. But all of those things actually take a lot of time to align.

Yeah.

So a project that I've highlighted in my LinkedIn profiles, one of the things that I got done was we proved out at Formata Energy that you could fill power back to the grid from a Nissan Leaf in such a way that the driver of the car could own the car for a really nominal low price. And we did that in partnership with Enterprise Rent-A-Car and a local Boston low-income landlord so we knew the driver was income qualified. This took two years to get into place and it was really, it's like running into wall after wall after wall in places that I didn't expect when we were just looking at this as a spreadsheet model.

Because on a spreadsheet it's like, oh wow, you can make a lot of money with a car in Boston. Like you can earn about $4,000 selling power back to the electric grid every year. And that's more than right.

Like if you have a car, you have a sense of like how much it cost to own that car. And so on paper this all pencils out really well. But in the real world, all of a sudden you learn like, okay, if we are giving a car to a low-income, income qualified, low-income household, it is considered income and then we're putting their residency in a low-income apartment building at risk.

So that's off the table. Then it's okay, well, what if we rent the car? And then it turns out in Massachusetts, there are some very interesting car insurance rules, where I'm guessing in the 70s or 80s, or some point where the scud stood up, there were a lot of scams around car rentals, such that if you have fewer than 20 cars, it's like $13,000 a year per car to insure them.

And that point, it's almost like, well, why don't we just buy a new car every time you wreck it? It just doesn't make sense. And so wall after wall after wall, conversations with lenders in order to try to figure out how to finance the project.

Finally, it took two years and we arrived at the partnership we had because A, Blue Hub Capital is a local community development fiduciary institute, CDFI, that's interested in this specific type of project, bringing mobility to low-income parts of the city. Perfect partnership, very patient capital. Finding somebody who I used to know who worked at National Grid, Matt Cloud, who's just fabulous, who had moved into the e-mobility role at Enterprise Rent-A-Car.

And you can say like sometimes the relationships are luck. Maybe this was luck. Just perfect to find somebody who likes getting stuff done.

Like he'd always been that person who I knew would get things done at National Grid. And I could count on him there. And so when I reached at Enterprise, he's like, yes, I'm very interested in this.

And then a few months later, things are really falling into place. But this would have just taken so long. And I guess to your point about like White Cues and Grounded, two years went by and I didn't notice two years had went by, but I did get asked quite a bit, like, why are you still grinding on this?

Yeah, it would be easy to just set it down after all that. And I didn't even think like car insurance companies would, you'd have to wrestle with them and all these, all this other red tape that you never even thought of before.

There's so much, you know, splitting the car payment, say, on a lease. It's not possible, actually. Like, no, I learned that when you buy a car, that's, you know, that lease is coming as a financial instrument from a bank, and banks do not like splitting the payment.

So finding someone, and luckily, Matt was willing to, like, have those tough internal conversations at a huge company, you know, Enterprise is enormous, to figure out, like, what of the many rental products they have could support this. I really think that finding all the right people who are willing to push at the same time in the right direction, like, that takes time, and it happens at all stages of any kind of technology development and deployment.

Just because I'm curious, how does the money work? If you really were to go jump through all the hoops, and I drive a Nissan LEAF X amount of time, I can prove it, and I charged it, it was all electric. Do you get a check back from the power company for four grand or how does that?

Yeah, literally, actually. In Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the utilities have programs that are called Connected Solutions, and in both programs, small batteries can provide power back to the ground, be compensated for up to 60 hours during the summer. And you can imagine these 60 hours are usually in the evening on the hottest days of the year when everyone is running all of the things or standing with the refrigerator door open or just driving demand up.

And the payments are pretty high. So the way the math works is, I think it's either 325 or 350. But let's say it's $300 for simplicity.

So $300 per kilowatt year is the payment in Boston from Eversource under this program for a battery. And so if you have a electric car charger that can do vehicle to grid and it's 20 kilowatts, that's the capacity size of how much you can sell back to the grid at $300 per kilowatt year. So take 20 multiplied by 300, that's the amount that you'd get paid, so $6,000.

And so if you assume some error, for example, maybe you can't get back in time for the event. Maybe you have to do something that requires your car and you weren't expecting that emergency to come up, like even if you make only 80% of the events, so you would still make a lot of money.

And I'm just guessing a Nissan Leaf is around 20 grand, so for years, you would make back pretty much your whole what you paid for the car.

Pretty much. To scale this exact thing, I designed a proposal in partnership with our Department of Energy Resources in the state for one of the DOE, GRIP. I can't remember what that stands for.

It's like Grid Resilience Improvement Program, maybe Innovation Program, GRIP grant, where we were trying to figure out how to use one of the state's financing mechanisms for energy efficiency technology in order to offer loans to income qualified drivers through state financial institutions, so that the payments from the utilities would go directly towards paying off the cars. The way the math worked was you can buy a new lease on leaf, which is about $20,000, but if you start buying used lease on leaves, then actually you get the surplus and people would be paid to own these cars. It totally like, it becomes an asset.

Yeah. Makes money for you. Wow.

Yeah. Unfortunately, that proposal didn't get funded. But it still lives on.

The Mass Clean Energy Center took the concept and built it into part of the Vehicle-Grid demonstration that they're doing right now.

That's amazing. I would like to ask another question about this. Because Melissa, you're very, very smart and you're very, very accomplished.

But I want you to give context of how maybe some other people in the workforce support you. Within your organization, are there, you know, not engineers, but, you know, do you have a team of marketers who try to influence storytelling, messaging and policy? Do you have, of course, there's probably like accountants and financial people and I don't know if they're salespeople, but maybe like partnership teams.

I don't know. I was just wondering kind of how those support functions are structured in your organization.

I'll make a generalization, actually. It'd be hard for me to explain how Analog works. It's just such a big company.

It's 26,000 people. It's the biggest company I've ever worked for. I am honestly still learning how we're structured.

Certainly a lot of support. I don't do any of this alone for sure. But to your question, yes.

Climate technology companies are just like any other company. You need operations, you need project management, you need program managers, you need a technologist who actually build the technology. So I would say in a technology company, the product, I think traditionally in some companies, it's more based on scientific discovery and they discover something really amazing and they figure out where it can be used in the world.

But a lot of the companies that I've worked with have taken the approach of what is a fundamental problem that needs to be solved? How do we translate that problem into technical bounds that can be solved with the technology and then we build that and deliver it? You have finance people who figure out how to do the demand forecasting, sales people who figure out what the go-to-market will be and come up with like, here's how much money we will actually make if we price it in such a way and test out the pricing with customers and build the pipeline in order to sell to them.

Then there's the operations that oversees the administration as well as the delivery of the technology and in a lot of climate technology companies, there is a policy team which works very closely with marketing and sales. And marketing in climate tech I would argue is different from marketing in other fields because marketing and climate technology, you are building a new market and the new rules around it literally because these are technologies that don't traditionally exist. There's a whole art and expertise around building and advising the creation of the market for your technology to exist.

I feel like it's almost clandestine in its effort because you're just talking about cost savings, cost savings, cost savings, and skirting the reducing carbon emissions and saving the environment kind of angle a lot of times. Do you encounter that?

I guess, can you put a finer print on that? I'm not quite following.

Yeah. I feel like a lot of times, the benefit of solar panels or wind turbines or etc. are cost, cost, cost.

Look how much money you save, look how much money you get back. It's the best thing to do cost-wise, and we just downplay the actual reducing carbon footprint aspect.

It's not a lie because you are saving these costs, and you are making these improvements in efficiency and things. But we all know that it's to help fight climate change. But a lot of times, they don't get to say that, but they don't feel like they can say that.

I guess maybe we could pause it here and be optimists that the early adopters are saturated. And if we're going for the middle majority, it's the people who are going to care the most about their purses and wallets.

That's a nice way to put it. Yeah, that's optimistic, in fact.

I'm an optimist.

Can you speak to the kinds of things you mentioned, like talk to you in a year? What is it that you hope to have achieved at Analog in a year?

In a year? This is a great question. So I'm nine months in, and I have developed conversations with some international investor-owned utilities and have established a relationship, several relationships for us with leading hardware startups in the Edge computing space.

And so in a year where I'm hoping these conversations lead to our announcements of us building in with these leading hardware companies, us having major partnerships with our legacy customers who are major industrials on building a technology that we can deliver at scale, like the beautiful thing of working for a company that makes something that goes into everything, is when we figure it out, it can be deployed at a scale really fast through all the channels that our customers work through and I want for actually, I was just talking to my team about this way this week. On July 1st of 2026, where do we want to be? We all agreed that we wanted to be talking about the commitments that the utilities we've been talking to have made to first demonstrations of our technology and learning about it with us.

That's where we'll be. We will have real technology. Out in the world.

Wow. Right. In my world, I'm in Fintech.

We always encounter this customer versus user problem. The person who buys the software or the technology isn't the person who uses it and vice versa. Do you think about that?

Where's your head around that?

Yeah. I'd say that's not unique to Fintech. It's in so many areas and I guess I'm going to revert back to talking about electric cars because it's very easy to follow.

So with charging infrastructure, the person who's making the decision about where it gets built, maybe a landlord or a municipality, but the users are the drivers who shop at the supermarket or stopping at the library to pick up and drop off books. The users are quite different from who is owning and operating that technology. Of course, a lot of energy technologies actually get stymied for the same problem.

Improvements to buildings can get stymied because the landlord's incentives are different from the tenant's incentives. So the tenant would certainly benefit from upgrades or distributed generation, but the landlord has no reason to invest in those things. So yes, I have thought about it quite a bit.

I call it the airport lounge problem because somewhere right now, two people are talking about the technology and buying drinks, and one person is selling the other on technology that neither one of them is ever going to use.

Yeah, I guess, what examples have you had of this happening? Like, does it lead to a sale, but then the technology is not used?

Right. Like, I see it in my line of work a lot. Like, the person buying the software deploys it out to the employees, and the employees have to train up and use it, and they never made that decision in the first place to use it or to buy it, and then the person who bought it probably will never even see it.

I feel on both sides of that equation where we end up with churn, attrition because there wasn't proper adoption of our product internally, when I'm selling B2B specifically, and then I've been on the other side of it where we're like, I've been the buyer and I haven't been able to successfully deploy it and scale everybody up and get everybody's interests and learned a lot of lessons about that over the years. And yeah, and then you're stuck with an annual contract coming out of your budget for the year, and nobody's using the tech. Yeah, I see it on both sides of the marketer who's trying to sell it and the person who is leading the team, that's trying to find some efficiencies and some cost savings, and I can't get, for example, the sales team to adopt the new process or the new tech, and they just fight you on it for many, many reasons that most of the time have nothing to do with the technology or its functionality.

Like it can be very political, you know, it can just be an unwillingness to change. It can be poor communication that went out through the process of change that kind of just put a huge halt. It's a great question, Jeff, like just trying to wrap my head around that, around a climate issue where not only that, there's also probably like polarizing schools of thought on the value and importance of that.

It's got to be 10 times worse than what I've experienced.

Yeah, food for thought. Melissa, can you think of any of a good piece of advice along your journey that you've received that comes to mind?

That's a really broad question. I've received a lot of good advice and of course, none of it is coming to mind.

What advice would you give someone who's thinking about pivoting into this space, whether they're on the engineer side or another side? I would love for you to line this up with your question that was close to your answer of why you're still grinding on this question throughout your career. What compels you and what advice would you give someone who's looking to enter this space

What compels me is, as an optimist and as an engineer, like engineers solve problems when we build things. I really believe we can figure out a path. It may be a just-in-time solution, but I honestly think we will figure it out.

It is a problem that needs a lot more people working on it than there are right now. And I know there are a lot of people working towards a solution. I meet people on my journey who are surprised that there are industries where you can focus on a climate solution.

I also meet people who think like there is a door, and you are in the climate industry. And I would argue, and I think, actually, Kristen, you brought this up in our earlier conversation when we were talking about this conversation, is any job can be a climate job. You don't necessarily have to be in the climate industry in order to be contributing to a solution by being part of a team and helping prioritize climate-focused decisions, whether it's on, like, say, procurement within a company that doesn't necessarily solve climate problems, like making the lower carbon decision.

It's a big one. If you want to work in the climate industry, we need so many functions in order to stand up companies. Technologies don't get built and sold and delivered magically.

Like, there's a whole supply chain of hands where a idea becomes a material concept, becomes a product, and then a service. And, you know, our days of, I guess, Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse being these, like, you know, eponym companies, one person overseeing the whole thing. And those days are over.

Like, it takes teams to deliver and build things and solve problems. And so I would urge people, don't feel that there's gatekeeping around this. Reach out to people who are doing things that interest you and talk to them about where you may find a path in.

And don't feel that you need to necessarily be working at the big names that are working on solutions. You can still make a huge difference from where you are in your role and even in like the personal decisions you make or like the involvement that you get into. Say, for example, in the earlier part of our conversation of like how you as a ordinary person can have conversations with like your local politicians and regulators and people who make decisions on your behalf.

There's so much, so much that you can do as one person. Like the options are endless. And I guess the question then is for you, where is listening to this?

Like which path do you want to go down first?

It's a little bit broad of a question, but how do you feel like you've found your path? Was it a fit for you right away?

I would say it took me actually a long time to realize I was on a path. Because I kind of, yeah, like I knew what I wanted to work on. And I looked around at like what the options were.

And I was like, okay, well, I don't think I'm going to work for a nonprofit like the Rainforest Action Network. I want to work on like a concrete solution. And so I went and worked for a national lab where, through luck, through one of my professors, I was connected in and they created a role for me.

And when I have looked back at my meandering path, what I realized was every job that I've gotten is because of a conversation that I had that led to an introduction. So that's one big thing. My path in engineering, I hadn't realized this until recently only because you only know the path that you've taken.

So in my last role at Forgot Energy which is a very technical organization, we hired a lot of women which is fantastic. And I realized for the first time in my life, like I was sometimes on calls with all women and I was like, this, this has never happened to me before.

That's great.

And I just had not realized over the whole course of my career, like I've always been either or sometimes both the youngest and non-male person in the room, and often the only person of color. And you don't realize when like this is just what you see all the time until you're actually in a room where you aren't the only woman or non-white person. And I've had conversations sometimes with people where this is not them purposely being unkind.

There are multiple truths out there. Last year, I was invited to be part of a panel. We talked to early career professionals about Pals and Climate and the gentleman next to me.

And again, I'm not saying that he was wrong. This is his truth and the life that he was living. And sincere advice that he was giving to the students.

And he said, when you go on to a company's website, if you don't see people who look like you, then you should really reconsider whether that's a place for you to find a job. And he was like, you know, I work with a lot of Caucasian people from Western Europe. And again, this is just, I'm repeating, I'm not necessarily agreeing.

But I do think that this is a truth of what he's experienced. He said, you know, when my European colleagues come, like they have a real perception of people who do not look like them. And so I gave an answer after him and I said, sometimes you have to be the first.

And it's not comfortable. I hadn't realized that I was always like a different bird. The lack of, just, I don't know, it's a terrible analogy to make, but like just of a different stripe or different spots.

Like I hadn't realized it until it's like, oh, this is what it has been like the whole time. And the younger women that I worked with at Fremont, like they would often, if we weren't on a call with a more traditional engineering team, be like, oh, wow, it's just us and like eight men. And I was like, yeah, that's a traditional engineering team.

And so sometimes you have to be the first and it isn't always comfortable. And you have to give a lot of space for other people and their truths and where we, where they might be coming from.

That's beautiful. That's a great, that's probably a great place to end it. I like to ask this question.

You know, it can be silly. It can be whatever. Or if you don't vibe with it.

But if your workplace was a workplace sitcom, who would play you?

Who would play me? Oh my gosh. You mean like what character I most relate to?

Or like what actor?

Or actor, whatever you vibe with.

Oh my. There's so many. I most relate actually to Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation.

Okay.

Yeah. That scene where actually she's yelled at, like public meeting, and she says, they're just caring at me really loudly. I totally relate to that.

I love that.

I love that too. That's amazing.

That's awesome. That's our time, Melissa. This has been really great.

Kristen, did you have anything else you wanted to jump in and ask?

No. Just thank you so much for the amazing insights. I think it was, I appreciate how thoughtful all of your answers were and how really, I just think your experience comes through and you're incredibly insightful, and I'm just very glad that you are working on the problems that you're working on.

Thank you, Kristen. That is really kind and thank you both for having me on. I know we went well over.

So I hope that this has been helpful for you too. It was a lot of fun for me personally to get to know you a little bit.

Yeah, definitely. Awesome. I appreciate it.

Thank you again and have a nice night.

You too. All right. I'll see you both later.

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