Erika Ilves

Some ventures are worth starting even if you can't finish them during your lifetime. Creating friendly Artificial Intelligence, extending human healthspan, protecting Earth from asteroids, electrifying the entire world's car fleet, replacing fossil fuels, switching from livestock to lab-grown meat, ending poverty--these are all examples of hyper-visionary ventures that advance human civilization but can take decades if not lifetimes to see through. Too few of us dare start them. Even fewer dare fund them. One of my life's goals is to help shift our civilization’s attention and capital out of trivial pursuits and into civilization-advancing ventures. We need fewer RunPee’s (an app that tells you the best time to take a bathroom run at the cinema), and more Space X’s (a rocket company on a mission to create a multi-planetary civilization, starting with cheap, reusable rockets). To figure out what's worth doing, I co-wrote a book on the future of the human species. I continue writing, speaking and spontaneously digressing on this topic.My current focus is figuring out how we transition to a zero-emissions, closed material loop world. The green transition, rising living standards in the developing world and another 3 billion people on this planet by the end of this century will require hundreds of millions of tonnes of metal. Today, metal production comes with a host of serious, global scale, hard-to-solve environmental and social impacts. So how do we make sure that in our hurry to move away from fossil fuels we are not merely shifting the environmental and social impact burden from one extractive industry (oil & gas) to another (metals & mining). That's the problem we are working to crack at DeepGreen.In my previous life, I co-founded an industrial robotics company (OffWorld), a lunar mining company (Shackleton Energy), served as an executive at a kickass Norwegian technology company TANDBERG (acquired by Cisco in 2010), ran a strategy firm in Dubai and spent 6 years as a consultant with McKinsey & Company where I co-led the Firm’s South-East Asian banking practice and managed large-scale performance transformations for banks in Asia-Pacific, Africa and Europe.