Welcome
Prepared for the Founders United group; 25 June 2025
The intent is to:
- introduce myself – personally and professionally,
- introduce you to my third entrepreneurial endeavor – Inductive LLC.,
- seek feedback from the group on some specific challenges and general feedback on how I presented/communicated
About Josh
An insightful leader known for transforming complex challenges into strategic opportunities. With a profound ability to bridge technology and business objectives, Josh consistently drives innovation and delivers impactful results across diverse environments such as space exploration, mining, and clean-tech.
• A technical background in Electrical Engineering:
Design and test of integrated circuits | semiconductors, power electronics, and modeling
• Strategic Product mindset:
Developed First Mode’s Clean-tech line of business and supported product diversification through market analysis, techno-economic modeling, and alignment to business goals
• Data driven:
Leveraging AI tools and programming to accelerate feasibility studies through the compilation and analysis of large amounts of data
Interests
- Camping with the family
- Skiing
- Biking
- Brewing the best cup of coffee
- Global economics
Past Work
Hydrogen fuel-cell haul truck
Goal: develop a fuel-cell–battery hybrid retrofit system to replace existing diesel-alternator gensets on Ultra-class haul trucks.
Actions:
- Led multi-disciplinary team in feasibility study for both all battery-electric haul truck and fuel cell - hybrid haul truck
- Collaborated on electrical architecture; generated single-line diagram
- Drafted fuel cell architecture
- Development of discrete event simulator - estimator for range, utilization, tonnes moved
- Develop business case for commercial FCEV haul truck (product-market fit, R&D plan and requirements, pricing strategy, infrastructure dependencies)
Rail Decarbonization
Goal: generate a concept and study the feasibility to reduce emissions for heavy haul locomotives operating in a large consist.
Actions:
- Rapid concept generation (< 5 weeks)
- Identify concept bottlenecks and assign risk assessment with mitigations
- Electrical conductor market survey - needed high voltage connections between tender and locomotive
- Simplified energy balance simulation - used to compute fuel and emission savings
- Cursory thermal analysis
Scaled SCADA (IOT for small industrial)
Goal: develop a low cost way to supervise small-scale anaerobic digesters deployed in the field. Use the data to engage customers an investors. Use trends to support field operations.
Actions:
- Generated a system architecture, illustrating IoT Sensor to cloud
- Description of intended database structure
- Detailed feature-set with capability deployment timeline
Ferry Decarbonization Presentation
Goal: assess the WSF’s proposed decarbonization strategy to go forward with battery-diesel hybrids. Shift regional conversation around thinking bigger.
Actions:
- Presented contrarian decarbonization strategy at conference
- Emissions analysis
- Familiarization with charge infrastructure and high-speed inductive charging
Inductive, LLC.
Mission
Inductive is an engineering consulting firm established to provide transformative engineering solutions for our clients in heavy industry dealing with electrification projects. Capturing opportunity and value for our clients through the appropriate development and application of hardware and predictive modeling.
Based in Seattle Washington. Inductive has a built a network of peers to cover areas of expertise beyond electrical engineering and product strategy. Areas like materials, mechanical engineering, software security, power electronics, and more.
Inductive is focused on the following key areas
- Power electronics and electrical infrastructure
- Electrification of heavy-industry mobile equipment
- Remote data collection and data analysis pipeline to support things like asset health monitoring, predictive maintenance, and maximization of asset utilization
Questions for the group
1. How to manage interest and decide on a more focused course?
I feel like I’m spread too thin, bouncing between interesting ideas. I don’t seem to make enough progress on any one area.
How do you edit interest?
2. How to market consulting when my skillset is ‘jack of all trades’ type?
I’ve been feeling more urgency to get the first contract, but outside of conversations with my network and tangents of my network I haven’t tried to sell my skills.
Any Advice on how you find clients?
3. How to overcome the fear of regulatory challenges?
I’ve finding that a lot of the areas I think are ready for new technology, all seem to be hindered by high regulatory or operational hurdles that would have to be overcome. I’m a put off after my last venture to wade back in to high regulatory environment.