Changemakers: Tim Kopra

Few of us will ever see planet Earth from the International Space Station (ISS). Just 230 people have been up there so far during its two decades in orbit. One of those people is Tim Kopra EMBAG2013. The former NASA astronaut is now a venture capitalist – the only VC to have been to space.

Kopra, 55, flew to the ISS twice, in 2009 and 2015–2016, spending a total of eight months on board, 250 miles above Earth. “It’s definitely left me with an imprint of how interconnected we are,” he reflects calmly. “At night you see these brilliant spots of light in our cities. Roads look like gold tentacles that connect city to city. Off the coast of South East Asia, thousands of dots of light turn out to be fishing boats, each with a captain and a crew. So you really get a sense that the planet is alive – not just from the standpoint of nature, but from the standpoint of all the people who are active on the planet, too.”

It follows that Blue Bear Capital, the fund he co-founded in January 2017 with fellow LBS alumnus Ernst Sack, is focused on the global energy supply chain: humanity’s rapacious energy consumption is strikingly manifest from space – and Kopra has seen the big picture.

Blue Bear invests in companies that use cutting-edge technology, such as AI and data analytics, to help suppliers of both conventional energy (such as oil and natural gas) and renewable energy (wind, solar, hydro) to get smarter and more efficient. This is hugely significant work; although Blue Bear doesn’t have an overtly green agenda, the effects of improving energy efficiency are eco-friendly. “There is a natural connection between improving those efficiencies and having a positive environmental impact,” says Kopra. “It all ties into the perspective of a living planet.”