Wonder Woman Wednesday #6: Astrid Atkinson
How can we use Google's technology to fight climate change?
Did you know that tapping into clean energy sources can save utilities millions of dollars per year?
This week I sat down with Astrid Atkinson,
Co-Founder and CEO of Camus Energy, a software startup leveraging the technology used to scale Google to decarbonize America’s power grid.
Before founding Camus Energy in 2019, Astrid worked at Google for 15 years where she was a Senior Director of Software Engineering leading framework infrastructure engineering for all Google products.
Astrid is now tapping into her expertise in distributed systems architecture and reliability engineering to combat one of the most pressing issues facing our planet: climate change.
How has working at Google helped in your journey as a female entrepreneur?
I was the most senior woman in my organization — which consisted of many thousands of people — for the majority of my time at Google.
Therefore, I’ve had a lot of practice navigating people and difficult work environments.
This was a very valuable experience to have as I’ve transitioned into the entrepreneurial space.
What are your best tips for being an effective leader and people manager?
I love opportunities to help people figure out what they are good at and fulfill their potential.
There are a lot of different ways to do people leadership. My personal style is figuring out the right configuration of skills + people to get the job done.
This is really powerful because I don’t need to be good at everything on an individual level.
What mantra do you live by?
There are a couple different mantras. One is to trust my judgement and trust my heart about what’s the right thing to do in any particular situation.
And then, there are two pieces of advice from a leadership coach at Google that really stuck to me:
#1: Make sure that you’re checking your assumptions and how these assumptions are impacting the choices you’re making.
#2: Look for ways to make the system work for you. This is really important for the work we are doing in particular.
There are so many small problems in decarbonization and climate and then so many huge ones. If you want to make any reasonable impact in this space, you have to figure out how to make the system work in your favor.
For a deeper dive into Camus’ technology and cloud-computing platform, visit here.