Team

Joe leads the Laurelin program. He read physics and philosophy at Columbia and Oxford, and spent four years inside fusion-energy research before crossing into quantitative trading for a little over six years. The trading work was the discipline that built the company: a daily exposure to capital allocation, to risk under uncertainty, and to the difference between a thesis that survives contact with the market and one that does not. Coming back to fusion in 2024, he carried that discipline with him.

His intellectual method is to refuse the easy frame. The dominant story in fusion is that the physics is hard; Joe argues that the physics is the easy part and that the engineering integral — closing a complete reactor inside a transportable envelope at venture-capex scale — is what the field has been getting wrong. Within that frame, choosing deuterium–deuterium fuel over deuterium–tritium is not a contrarian flourish; it is the only choice that lets a forty-foot ISO container hold the whole machine, with no tritium plant, no breeding blanket, no civil works.

At Laurelin, Joe authored the whitepaper that the company runs on, the component blueprints, the patent claim map, and the procurement plan. He runs the bench day-to-day with Boruch and the engineering team, takes the customer conversations with hyperscalers and defense buyers, and writes the long-form essays that argue the political-economic case for an exit from the petrodollar arrangement at full length.

Recent and ongoing writing includes the company whitepaper (RDG-01-FRC, 2025–) and the inaugural Manifesto essay “Exit from the cost ledger” (2026), the first in a planned series working outward through each of the four architectural commitments.

Boruch leads engineering at Laurelin. His DPhil at Oxford was in materials science, focused on the materials and vacuum systems that survive extreme environments — high heat flux, pulsed magnetic loading, neutron exposure, ultra-high vacuum. The thesis question for a containerized fusion machine is whether the materials problem closes inside the envelope; that question is the one Boruch spent his graduate years on.

His engineering posture is bench-first. Nothing reaches integration that has not been characterised at the bench: every flange, every weld, every magnetic component, every diagnostic. The discipline reads as slow from the outside and as the only sustainable speed from the inside — it is the reason a six-engineer team can credibly carry a machine that historically required a control-room of operators and a national-lab capital stack.

At Laurelin he runs the materials, vacuum, mechanical, and fabrication programs, and co-owns the integration plan with Joe. The build cadence — bench article, characterisation, integration, shot — is one he sets and one the company runs against.

Boruch’s published work sits in the high-vacuum and pulsed-magnetics literature; full publication list available on request.

Ian advises the Laurelin program on operations and capital posture. A decade of financial-investing and deal-structuring experience across traditional and renewable energy informs the operational discipline and capital structure the bench runs against. He carries an M.B.A. from USC.

Victoria builds international collaborations for energy access and climate resilience at Laurelin. Her background includes program management at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), policy work at the United Nations on sustainable development, and founding TerraVantage Consulting on international clean-energy strategy. She holds an M.B.A. in International Business and a B.A.M. in Applied Management from Golden Gate University.