MEET THE TEAM
The People Who Make it Happen
Karen Nemeth
Chief Executive Officer
Karen is a systems engineer who translates different verticals of thought across cultures and disciplines to harmoniously inspire teams. She started her career in construction management building NSF-funded structures for climate refugees in West Africa and $700M+ museums in NYC before pivoting focus to learn how to build the technology the industry is in desperate need of. The machine learning programs she went on to build trained over 1000 engineers and hired over 200 engineers to teams she designed at HuffPost, Facebook and Airtime. She also produced AR/VR apps for Corcoran and The UN, organized marketing events for Mercedes EQ and Google, and, after realizing that hardware manufacturing was a critical bottleneck to smart cities, shuttled between factories in Germany and Shenzhen optimizing industrial processes for IoT startups. Karen holds a BE in Civil Engineering from The Cooper Union and has completed studies in psychology, business and electronics through affiliations with Princeton, Yale and MIT.
Andrew Bryant
Chief Architectural Officer
Andy is an award-winning architect whose design philosophy combines the history of a region’s culture with the technology of its envisioned future to create authentically novel environments as dynamic as the people who use them. He began his career with the innovative studios of Asymptote Architecture, OMA and Studio Pei Zhu, before launching his own firm, Creative Commonspace, in Beijing during 2013 to meet the growing demand for awe-inspiring, greenfield city centers throughout China. 537k+ sqm of his work has been constructed exceeding $775M of budgets. Andrew graduated from UCLA with honors and a Master’s Degree in Architecture.
Alex Skinner
Chief Financial Officer
Alex is an economic anthropologist specializing in real estate finance, feasibility and policy, particularly for impoverished and emerging markets. He has conducted feasibility analysis and investment structuring for 32 commercial real estate projects across three nations with a total construction value of $1.17B. He has been a leading influence in Mongolia’s efforts to improve policy and practice in Ulaanbaatar’s real estate markets, having authored three books on this subject and worked alongside institutions such as The World Bank and CBRE to realize urban projects, including financial planning of a 10,000 home charter city with Utopia Cities, which featured at the World Economic Forum 2017. And true to the nomadic influence of this culture, he has also founded a 9k sqft artistic entrepreneurial co-working space in Winchester, Virginia and continues to work with policy groups to establish funding mechanisms for charter cities. Alex holds a BS in Social Anthropology from University of Manchester, a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, and is currently completing his MBA from Shenandoah University.
Fernando Gómez-Baquero
Chief Logistics Officer
Fernando is a deep-technology engineer and ecosystem entrepreneur who founded the startup BessTech, which provides lithium-ion battery manufacturers with 150x more valuable processes, and directs Cornell University’s NYC-based accelerator, which has turned over 70 portfolio research projects into patented products with prosperous revenue streams. His ability to speak to the primary challenges of production processes stems from a background in supply chain logistics at PepsiCo in Colombia where he managed the national distribution of FritoLay products accounting for 40M+ packages achieving cost savings of over $5M/year. Fernando holds a BS in Industrial Engineering - Operations Research from the University of Los Andes and a Ph.D. in Nanoscale Engineering from SUNY.
COLLABORATORS
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Architecture & Masterplanning
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Battery and Energy Technologies
Architecture & Infrastructure
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