Venture Capital, SpaceX, & Climate Solutions with Sam Levac-Levey | Ep. 19

25-05-2021 • 1 hr 39 mins

"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