Alla Jezmir

“Being part of the collective effort to reduce and mitigate the adverse consequences of climate change motivates me to keep working harder every day.”

When Alla Jezmir (MBA/MPA 2009) arrived at HBS, her long-term plans didn’t include clean tech and sustainability. But she knew she wanted a career with social impact at its core. Jezmir emigrated with her family from Russia to Kansas City when she was 10 years old as part of a wave of Soviet Jewish families that took advantage of liberalized emigration policies to escape growing anti-Semitism. She had firsthand experience of what it was like to live with limited resources—and had seen what a difference it made when complete strangers reached out to help. “We were such fortunate beneficiaries of people’s kindness,” she recalls. “Generosity is a value my parents instilled in me, and I personally experienced the profound impact it can have on the lives of others.”

The year before starting graduate school, Jezmir worked for the nonprofit Technoserve in Kenya and Swaziland. It was there that she was first exposed to the challenge of energy access in sub-Saharan Africa, where approximately 600 million people live without a regular source of electricity. Another turning point came a year later, when she watched a TED talk by venture capitalist John Doerr (MBA 1976) on investing in green technology to confront the adverse effects of climate change.

“There was a lot of excitement at the time about the power of clean technologies and business model innovation to create a more reliable supply of renewable power,” Jezmir recalls. “I was inspired by that energy.”

At HBS, Jezmir prioritized courses in entrepreneurship, venture capital, and private equity. But she also took full advantage of experiential learning opportunities. In her Building Green Businesses course, Jezmir worked with a team of fellow students to help Masdar City in Abu Dhabi develop an aggressive strategy for rolling out solar power—a process that involved structuring a realistic plan and identifying potential financial structures and vendors. Then, as part of the founding team of EGG-energy, Jezmir took home top honors in the social enterprise track of the 2009 HBS Business Plan Contest. “All of those experiences solidified my belief in the power of technology, financial structuring innovation, and entrepreneurship to help reduce carbon emissions and slow global warming,” she says.

Those forces are a continuing factor in Jezmir’s current role as managing director at CCM Energy, a venture capital and project finance investment arm of CCM Group she helped launch that is based in Washington, DC, and supports innovations that improve the environmental and economic performance of buildings. Recent projects include microgrid pilots at a self-storage facility and at a shopping mall in Puerto Rico. Solar energy, battery storage, microgrids—all of these improvements make sense in hurricane-prone areas where power outages are inevitable, she says. The economic case is easy to make, too: “We’re at a time when equipment costs have dropped precipitously, so often these installations are on par with or cheaper than, conventional power sources.”

CCM’s successful investments prompted the launch of Traverse Venture Partners, a more broadly-focused investment platform that also supports real estate tech companies. The CCM and Traverse portfolios include companies such as Posigen, a residential solar developer offering systems to low- and moderate-income home owners; Proterra, a manufacturer of electric transit buses led by Ryan Popple (MBA 2006); and Generate Capital, a specialty finance company cofounded by Scott Jacobs (MBA 2007) and Matan Friedman (MBA 2008) that deploys capital into renewable infrastructure assets. “Being in a position to work with companies like these—supporting their strategic initiatives, introducing them to new partners and customers, helping them think through the best way to articulate their value proposition—is really rewarding,” says Jezmir. “Every day I have exposure to a broad set of innovations and really smart, hardworking people trying to resolve what I consider to be one of the biggest challenges we face as humanity.”

Which isn’t to say there isn’t a fair amount of nitty-gritty work involved, not all of it so glamourous. But Jezmir knows she has found her career sweet spot, working in a sector where social impact and positive financial results intersect: “Being part of the collective effort to reduce and mitigate the adverse consequences of climate change motivates me to keep working harder every day.”