Tyler Ellis
Black Hills Partners, Managing Partner; Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Advisor
Career Highlights
Founder of Black Hills Partners, an investment and advisory firm focused on companies making an immense global impact in the way we create and consume energy
Investor in and Senior Advisor to Commonwealth Fusion Systems (>$2B raised >500 FTEs). Have been working with the founders since prior to incorporation of the company and currently focus on a wide variety of strategic issues, including business development, government affairs, and regulation
Recently spearheaded how to regulate and permit fusion power plants for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Fusion Industry Association by defining a framework that protects public health and safety while simultaneously being ~100x cheaper and ~15x faster than the regulations designed for fission energy
Co-founded TerraPower, a Bill Gates-backed nuclear energy company where I joined pre-launch as employee #9, raised ~$500M, and managed a team of 120 engineers and physicists to deliver a first-of-its-kind Traveling Wave Reactor design
Earned a Ph.D., M.S., and B.S. from MIT in Nuclear Science and Engineering and an MBA from Harvard Business School
FailuresDifferent start-up companies I co-founded in graduate school in areas including medical radioisotope manufacturing, setting up an international nuclear waste repository in Siberia, and designing mokume-gane style jewelry
Personal Interests
Literature, Culinary enthusiast, Oenology, Horology, Ice hockey, Rodeo
Talk to me about
Energy
Climate
Sustainability technologies
I want to talk to you about
How can we accelerate the adoption of clean energy and other emerging technologies worldwide (from multiple perspectives (financial, policy, regulation, and technology)?
How the investment community is currently thinking about supporting these emerging technologies and if there are attributes that make some areas more interesting than others?
