Videos
Josiah Seale, Alumni
- Year
- 2010-2011
- From
- United States
- Sector
- Energy
- Location
- El Salvador
- Degree
-
2011 MBA, Sloan School of Management
"My mission is to provide sustainable energy in a socially conscious manner. To do so, I pursue five goals: sustainability: each project must promote a responsible use of natural resources that can be sustained over time; social consciousness: each project must directly improve the lives of not only those people employed on the project but also of those people surrounding it; modularity: each implementation must be locally self-sufficient and require a minimum of outside direction, capital, equipment or maintenance; scalability: we must be flexible enough to address the demands of markets both big and small; and integrability: our projects must provide energy that can be incorporated into existing infrastructures with minimal capital expenditure."
Prior to MIT Sloan I started a company focused on sustainable biofuel production in Latin America. For our initial pilot project we worked with ex-guerrilla fighters and paramilitaries in El Salvador to carry out reforestation with organic feed stocks for sustainable biofuel production from plants like jatropha curcas.
I hail from Maracaibo, Venezuela, but have spent significant time living in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. My focus is on socially conscious sustainable entrepreneurship for the developing world, with a particular focus on Latin America. This focus is long-held for me; its roots can be traced to my upbringing and my physician father, with whom I served as a medical translator among indigenous groups in western Venezuela. After coming to the United States for college, I worked with the MIT Media Lab and with the Harvard Center for European Studies, where I investigated the formation of the African Union.
My African research continued in my work with a German disarmament think tank operating in Kenya, where I carried out a research project examining social gender constructs and small arms/light weapons proliferation among three tribes in the North Rift region. I received my master's and undergraduate degrees in comparative politics from MIT, where my thesis was an econometric modeling of ethnic fractionalization and sub-Saharan violence patterns from 1970 to 1996.
Upon graduating, I spent a stint as an economist, working with a Boston-based private economic consulting firm to provide econometric analysis of health outcomes to top-tier pharmaceutical firms and to support expert testimony in litigation scenarios for Fortune 100 companies.
Ultimately, it is from this broad background that I embarked on an entrepreneurial venture as a co-founder and CFO of World Energy Management LLC, a firm dedicated to providing sustainable energy for the developing world. I continue working in this vein to date and in 2010 served as a Packard Environmental Fellow in Washington DC, where I crafted a value proposition and business plan to operationalize the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels.
