About Chris

My name is Chris Zach. (This shouldn’t be surprising if you found my website.) This is me:

I live in Washington, DC. I work as an energy analyst at Energetics Incorporated. I play as a curious, adventure-seeking, knowledge-thirsting, life-loving human.

I have diverse interests, which means the subjects of my writings (ramblings?) on this blog will be fairly unpredictable, even to me.

Here are a few subjects you might find on the business and intellectual side, in no particular order:

• Clean technologies, aka cleantech, in areas such as renewable energy, energy efficiency, and clean water: This is the subject of my career, where I apply my professional experience and mechanical engineering education to research, analyze, and solve challenging energy issues.
• Science: I love science. It just makes sense. Understanding science helps me understand the world. I’m a rational person. (And yes, I’ve heard about the scientific studies that show us humans aren’t as rational as we think we are.) Topics that have been catching my attention include climate change, neuroscience, and evolution.
• Startups: If it doesn’t exist, build it yourself! How do we make something from nothing? I aspire to be an entrepreneur and found a cleantech company.
• Strategy: How should we compete? Where do we invest our resources? What framework should be used to make decisions?
• Innovation and product development: How do we sharpen the fuzzy front end of innovation? Which ideas are worth pursuing and which should be shelved?
• Collaboration technologies: With today’s tools lowering obstacles to collaboration and sharing, how will group-forming change? How will productivity be increased and what new outputs will be created?
• Mobile, social networking, and other rapidly evolving consumer and enterprise technologies.
• Marketing: How do we translate customer desires into new products and businesses?
• Automobiles: Despite the inability of American automakers to produce a profit, cars are still cool. Motorcycles, too. (I sold mine, sadly, but hope to get another some day.)

And on the play side, some of my hobbies and interests:

• Outside activities: snow skiing, hiking, camping, sunsets
• Photography: Breaking in my new Canon (but hopefully no breaking involved)
• Food and drink: cooking, discovering hidden local restaurant treasures, homebrewing, microbreweries, pubs, wineries
• Travel: whether on the other side of the world or on the other side of town, travel is a mindset and a way of seeing things with open eyes; I enjoy new experiences wherever they occur.
• Conversation: intriguing conversations with smart people, talking about stuff I’ve read, reading things people told me about

If you’d like to connect, my address is chris {at} chriszach {dot} com. I Twitter (occasionally) @chriszach.

If we’ve already met, let’s connect on Facebook and/or LinkedIn.