CEO, Foro Energy
As a chemical engineering graduate student, says Joel Moxley, “I was a maverick.” A maverick who started a baseball hedge fund that turned $500 into almost 200 times that in 4 months and who, after chatting with a friend about a business idea over burritos at Ana’s Tacqueria in the student center, went on to enter the MIT $100K and won. “This is just what happens at MIT,” he says. “When you step on the MIT campus, there is an energy that doesn’t exist anywhere else. It’s electric.”

Since then, he has been named one of Technology Review magazine’s top 35 innovators under 35 and has worked for North Bridge Venture Partners. Today, Moxley is CEO of Foro Energy, which has raised over $30 million in venture capital. “I got into chemical engineering because I loved energy and I loved scale,” he says. At Foro Energy, he is bringing laser technology into the oil, gas, geothermal and mining industries. “I’m relatively new to lasers,” he admits. “But once they get into an industry, they dominate.”

Looking back on his short but explosive career, Moxley credits MIT chemical engineering because it touches every industry and builds a quantitative toolbox that is immediately applicable to business strategy, operations and finance. “For an entrepreneur, chemical engineering is the ultimate major,” he says. “It makes you dangerous on so many different fronts.”