Colorado, USA

Entrepreneur building at the intersection of energy, AI, and the physical world.

I'm Josh Lake: builder, technologist, and lifelong optimist. These days I'm thinking about AI and the convergence of energy and intelligence — what becomes possible when both get cheap and abundant. I've spent nearly two decades starting companies at the frontier of climate technology.

Get in touch → Read my worldview

Interested in AI, energy, electrification, or the built environment? Let's talk.

Thinking AI × Energy Co-Founder, Elephant Energy Founder, Electrify Everything Now MIT '07
At a Glance

Selected highlights from two decades building.

Experience
15+ years building energy & technology companies
Now
Thinking about AI and the convergence of energy and intelligence
Now
Founder, Electrify Everything Now
2021–2026
Co-founder & CTO, Elephant Energy
Built across
Solar, home electrification, AI
Based in
Colorado, USA
Why You Might Be Here

Pick the door that fits.

Founder / Operator

Building in energy or AI?

I'm always interested in ambitious people working on real-world technology.

Get in touch →
Homeowner

Electrifying your home?

Practical tools for sequencing upgrades, avoiding panel upgrades, and making better home energy decisions.

Visit Electrify Everything Now →
AI × Energy

Curious about the convergence of energy and intelligence?

I'm thinking and writing about what becomes possible when both AI and energy get cheap and abundant.

Read my worldview →
Reader

Want the writing?

Essays on AI, electrification, startups, and the built environment.

Read essays →
The Journey

Two decades building at the frontier of energy and AI.

Josh Lake at Moraine Lake wearing MIT hoodie, surrounded by pine trees and mountains

I believe we're living through the most exciting period in human history. Energy is getting cheaper. AI is getting smarter. The tools to build an abundant, electrified, sustainable world already exist. My entire career has been about bringing those tools to market.

It started with solar. I co-founded 532 Solar right out of strategy consulting (named for the wavelength of green light), then joined Amonix to deploy world-record CPV solar modules across the American Southwest. Then electric vehicles at Evercar/Vision Fleet, putting shared EV fleets into rideshare drivers' hands in LA, SF, and Indianapolis. Then autonomous vehicles at Nuro and Embark Trucks, building operations for some of the earliest autonomous delivery and trucking programs on public roads.

Then home electrification. I co-founded Elephant Energy and spent five years making it the easiest way for homeowners to ditch fossil fuels for heat pumps, induction stoves, and EV chargers. Three states. Series A. Thousands of homes electrified.

Every company I've built sits at the same intersection: energy, climate, and technology. The thread is always the same. Find a massive market held back by outdated tools and workflows. Build the technology that unlocks it. Lately I've been focused on AI and the convergence of energy and intelligence — when both get cheap and abundant, what new things become possible? I'm more optimistic about what's ahead than I've ever been.

Josh and Rachael Lake
Josh Lake skiing in Zermatt with the Matterhorn
Amonix CPV solar tracker in the Nevada desert
Josh Lake with Nuro autonomous delivery robot
Josh Lake at General Sherman tree, Sequoia National Park
Josh with a Mitsubishi heat pump
Companies I've Built
🌡️
Home Electrification2021-2026

Elephant Energy

Co-founded and served as CTO. Built the platform making it easy for homeowners to ditch fossil fuel appliances for heat pumps, induction stoves, and EV chargers. Three states. Series A from Building Ventures and Arborview Capital.

Heat pumps installed
2,500
Capital raised
$14M
🤖
Autonomous Delivery2017-2018

Nuro

Head of Operations. Early operations leader, building the foundation from founding team through early growth. Nuro went on to raise over $2B and partner with Uber and Kroger.

🚗
Electric Vehicles2013-2017

Evercar / Vision Fleet

COO & Board Member. Built operations for one of the first shared EV fleets for rideshare drivers. Pioneered EV-as-a-service in LA, SF, and Indianapolis.

☀️
Concentrated Solar2010-2013

Amonix

Sr. Program Manager. Managed utility-scale CPV deployments across the American Southwest. World records for solar module efficiency (34.9%) verified by NREL.

🔆
Solar Development2009-2010

532 Solar

Co-founded a solar project development company. My first step into clean energy, right out of strategy consulting. Named for the wavelength of green light (532nm).

Earlier Career
Consulting
Embark Trucks, NJ Resources
Independent consultant. Advised autonomous trucking and utility-scale energy companies on operations, strategy, and scaling. 2018-2021.
Strategy
Altman Vilandrie & Co
Business analyst. Telecom and technology strategy consulting in Boston. 2007-2009.
Education
Stanford University
Mechanical Engineering certificate. Design for Customer Value & Market Success. 2011-2012.
Education
MIT '07
B.S. Materials Science & Engineering. J&J Biomedical Engineering Award. $1K Warmup Competition winner. Co-founded Hemetrics and Sensornet.
⚡
Now Building

Electrify Everything Now

Free calculators that show you the real costs and savings of going electric. No sales pitch. Just math.

LivePlug-In Solar Calculator LiveRate Plan Optimizer LiveAppliance Death Clock
Coming SoonRebate & Incentive Stacker
Coming SoonElectrification Sequencer
Coming SoonHeat Pump vs. Gas Costs

Get notified as Rebate Stacker, Sequencer, and Heat Pump vs. Gas go live. No spam. Occasional updates.

Closing the information gap for home electrification
Press & Media
The Colorado Sun
Heat pumps are having a moment in Colorado
Featured on cold-climate heat pump viability. "The technology has gotten dramatically better." Jan 2023.
ACHR News
Contributing Author
Regular contributor to the leading HVAC trade publication on electrification strategy and cold-climate heat pumps.
Building Ventures
Our Investment in Elephant Energy
Lead investor thesis on the seed round. "Joshua Lake has spent his career building climate-tech companies." Nov 2022.
The Cool Down
Why 2023 will be the best year to electrify your home
Featured as one of the "climate-tech pros" behind Elephant Energy's electrification mission. Dec 2022.
Speaking
Electrify Longmont Seminar
Keynote on why electrification matters and what homeowners can do. Front Range Community College, Mar 2023.
GlobeNewsWire
Elephant Energy Raises $3.5M Seed Round
Seed funding announcement. Led by Building Ventures and Arborview Capital. Nov 2022.
What I Believe

The future is electric, intelligent, and abundant.

⚡

Electrify Everything

Every fossil fuel appliance in every building will be replaced by an electric one. Heat pumps, induction stoves, EV chargers, smart panels. This is the largest market transformation since the internet. I built Elephant Energy on this conviction.

🔧

AI-First, Not AI-Added

Design the workflow around what AI is best at. Every new venture starts with the question: if I had infinite intelligence and zero marginal cost, how would I design this? Then work backward.

📉

Zero Marginal Cost Is Real

Solar, wind, batteries, and now AI are all riding exponential cost curves toward zero. The question is how fast we can rewire our institutions to match the physics.

🏠

The Built Environment Is the Battleground

Buildings account for 40% of US emissions. The energy transition isn't just about the grid. It's about every furnace, water heater, and gas stove in every home. A building-by-building revolution that needs both technology and trust.

🧠

Agents Over Chatbots

Chatbots answer questions. Agents do work. Give an agent a goal, tools, and context, and let it execute. I build multi-agent systems where specialized agents collaborate with their own skills and tools.

🚀

Technology Should Create Leverage for People

The goal isn't replacing people. It's making every person 10x more effective. The best technology makes humans better at being human.

What I Read & Follow

My top picks, not a comprehensive list.

Podcasts

Newsletters

The Shelf
Josh Lake bookshelf, energy policy and startup books
See the full reading list →
Current Thesis

When electricity and intelligence both approach zero marginal cost, everything changes.

I've spent my career on one half of this equation: making clean energy cheap and easy. Now AI is riding the same exponential. The compounding is the story of the next thirty years, and the place I want to be standing.

📉

Two Exponentials, One Curve

Solar, wind, and batteries dropped 80–90% in cost over the last decade. AI training and inference are now on the same trajectory. For the first time in human history, the raw input (electricity) and the cognitive output (intelligence) both approach zero marginal cost. Most plans, regulations, and investments still price the future as if today's costs are permanent. They aren't.

🏭

Data Centers Are the New Refineries

A datacenter converts kilowatt-hours into tokens. The companies that own the electrons, the silicon, and the orchestration between them will define the next century. The U.S. grid wasn't designed for this load, and rebuilding it is a generational opportunity. The cheapest, fastest path is electric: solar, storage, nuclear, and a lot of copper.

🌍

Abundance Is a Choice

Cheap energy plus cheap intelligence don't automatically make a better world. They make a better world possible. We still have to build the institutions, regulations, and businesses that translate raw inputs into desalination, indoor agriculture, synthetic biology, personalized medicine, and education for everyone. The constraint is no longer physics. It's permitting, capital, and will.

🧠

The Bottleneck Moves to Taste

When intelligence is free, the constraint becomes judgment, agency, and asking the right questions. The people who matter in this era won't be the ones with the most credentials. They'll be the ones who can frame the right problems and decide what's worth building. Agency over IQ.

⚡

Energy → Tokens → Everything

The pipeline is simple: electrons in, kilowatt-hours into GPUs, tokens out, value created. Every chokepoint in that pipeline is a business. Every speedup compounds. This is the same playbook as oil refining a century ago, but on a steeper curve, with a more elastic output, and with consequences that touch every other sector at once.

Writing

Thoughts on energy, AI, and building companies.

June 2026
A Neo-Electrification Company?
What would a homeowner-centric, AI-enabled, national neo-electrification company look like — part heat pump installer, part solar and storage platform, part home energy operator — and who is building it?
May 2026
Not All Tokens Are Equal
How cheap energy and cheap intelligence will reshape the physical economy. A five-part map of the token economy: capability creation, commodity batch, premium interactive, agentic outcome, and local/autonomous.
April 2026
You Probably Don't Need a Panel Upgrade
The most expensive lie in home electrification. You can electrify nearly any home on 200 amps, and 90% of the time on 100 amps with the right tools.
April 2026
The Electrification Sequencing Problem
Every homeowner asks "what should I electrify first?" The answer depends on what's about to die, what incentives exist, and whether your contractor is giving you advice or selling you something.
April 2026
What I Learned Leading AI at Elephant
I led the AI rollout at a 40-person climate tech startup. Here's what I learned, and how I'd approach it if I started over at a different company today.
My OS

The tools and tech I use every day.

I'm always refining the stack. These are the tools that survived.

AI & Building

Claude Code
Primary development environment. Multi-agent builds, MCP servers, full-stack shipping.
Hermes Agent
Open-source agent from Nous Research. Useful for running agents outside the major labs' stacks.
Perplexity
AI search. Fast answers with sources when I need facts, not conversation.
NotebookLM
Google's research tool. Upload docs, get AI analysis. Great for deep dives.
Wispr Flow
Voice-to-text everywhere. Dictate emails, notes, messages at the speed of thought.

Work

Cloudflare
Pages, Workers, DNS, Turnstile. Everything runs on the edge.
GitHub
Code, CI/CD, collaboration. Every project starts here.

See the full stack including gear, home, and fitness at /uses.

Top Books

The books that shaped how I think about building, energy, and the future.

I read constantly about energy systems, technology, and leadership. Click any title to look it up on Goodreads.

01
Endurance
Alfred Lansing
When everything goes wrong, the only thing that matters is the quality of the leader.
02
Electrify
Saul Griffith
The thesis behind Elephant Energy. Reframes the energy transition as a machine replacement problem and shows it's entirely doable.
03
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Jules Verne
The original technology-optimist fiction. Nemo built something the world wasn't ready for. Relatable.
04
Not Fade Away
Laurence Shames & Peter Barton
A dying entrepreneur's reflections on what actually matters.
05
More from Less
Andrew McAfee
Economic growth and resource consumption have decoupled. Technology lets us do more with less, and the data proves it.
06
Creating Climate Wealth
Jigar Shah
The business case for clean energy by the guy who invented the solar PPA. Shah saw the deployment revolution before anyone else.
07
The Toyota Way
Jeffrey Liker
The bible of lean manufacturing. Changed how I think about operations and building systems that improve over time.
08
Scaling Up Excellence
Robert Sutton & Huggy Rao
The hardest startup problem isn't 0 to 1, it's 1 to 100. This book tackles the messy reality of scaling.
09
The Nvidia Way
Tae Kim
How Jensen Huang built the most important semiconductor company of the AI era. Culture of speed, technical depth, and relentless iteration.
10
Thinking in Systems
Donella Meadows
Once you see feedback loops, leverage points, and emergent behavior, you can't unsee them. In businesses, in energy grids, in everything.
Beyond Work

Powder days, big ideas, and the people I love.

I'm a builder first. I think about energy systems and the future of the built environment even when I'm not working. I'm extremely bullish on what's ahead.

I live in Colorado with Rachael and Scout. I ski, lift, run, and read constantly. Bookshelf heavy on energy policy, AI, and startup war stories. Grew up in the woods of Pennsylvania, still love being outdoors.

Favorite Places

Glacier National Park, the wildest place in the lower 48
Lassen National Park, volcanic, empty, perfect
Zermatt, Switzerland, skiing with the Matterhorn
Colorado, USA, home base
Rural Pennsylvania, where it all started
Josh and Scout on a Colorado summit Josh and Scout hiking in the aspens Josh and Scout at sunset in Colorado Rachael and Scout on a fall trail Josh and Rachael as Dumb and Dumber for Halloween Josh and Scout cross-country skiing
Get In Touch
Josh Lake, serial entrepreneur and founder based in Colorado, USA

Let's build something.

Reach out about AI, electrification, climate tech, or the convergence of energy and intelligence. Good conversations to have with me right now:

1. You are a founder building AI-first tools for energy or the built environment and want a sounding board.

2. You are an investor or operator working on home electrification deployment at scale and want to trade notes.

3. You run a 10 to 50 person team and want to talk honestly about what AI adoption actually looks like in practice.

Email me → LinkedIn
Emailjosh@joshlake.ai
LinkedInlinkedin.com/in/lakejosh
X / Twitter@jlake1
LocationColorado, USA
Now

Thinking about AI and the convergence of energy and intelligence. Running Electrify Everything Now. Open to advisory roles in climate tech and AI.

Reading: The Nvidia Way (Tae Kim)

Last updated: April 2026

Josh and Rachael Lake, circa 2007
Circa 2007