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13:20: I always have had an admiration for entrepreneurs and never had the courage to go out and strike on my own, but that is something that obviously Rice is really strong in. In fact, with one of my MBA 2012 colleagues, Phil Leach, we were in the Rice MBA business plan competition, and we even won $10,000 for best elevator pitch for our product at the University of Louisville business plan competition that year, which was Action Figure Laboratories, and our tagline was, “It is like Build-A-Bear, but for boys.”
02:41: I actually remember doing all of my Rice MBA admissions interviews at midnight, wearing a jacket on the top and pajamas on the bottom, off camera, all the Rice admissions folks. And so my wife and I, who are all from Miami, we came to Houston. I loved my experience at Rice. I was a full-time 2012 MBA. And when I came out, I went into clean energy. I sold for almost ten years utility-scale wind and solar and battery energy storage projects to utilities and increasingly to corporate buyers, such as data centers, who have really large energy procurement goals and 100% clean energy procurement goals at that.
06:03: The good thing is, when you sign a 20-year deal and you structure it in the right way, you provide a runway of 20 years of seven- to eight-figure revenue for this nonprofit fund to operate from, and so they can plan some pretty impressive, impactful local projects.
Owl Have You Know is Rice Business’ podcast created to share the experiences of alumni, faculty, students and other members of our business community – real stories of belonging, failing, rebounding and, ultimately, succeeding. During meaningful conversations, we dive deep into how each guest has built success through troubles and triumphs before, during and after they set foot in McNair Hall.
The Owl Have You Know Podcast is a production of the business school at Rice University (Rice Business) and is produced by University FM.
[00:00] Brian Jackson: Welcome to Owl Have You Know, a podcast from Rice Business. This episode is part of our Flight Path series, where guests share their career journeys and stories of the Rice connections that got them where they are.
Today I'm joined by Michael Pariser, a 2012 Rice Business MBA graduate and senior principal for renewable energy and utilities at Oracle. Mike's career has taken him from finance and traveling the world to working on both the sell side and buy side of the energy industry. After helping companies like NextEra and EDF Renewables sell power, he moved to the buyer side at Walmart, Microsoft, and now Oracle, where he's helping secure energy for the rapid growth of AI and data centers.
In this conversation, we'll talk about his unconventional career path, how the energy industry is evolving to meet unprecedented demand, the challenges of powering AI, and Houston's role in the future of energy.
Hi, Mike. Welcome to Owl Have You Know.
[01:01] Michael Pariser: Yeah, great to be here, Brian. Good to see you again.
[01:04] Brian Jackson: Hey, great to see you. Your career, you started off in finance. You were, you know, at Lehman Brothers for a bit. Going back in time, trying to think about, you know, the phase of life that you were in, what did you imagine the rest of your career was going to look like?
[01:19] Michael Pariser: Yeah, sure. So, it's been a minute since I graduated from my undergrad, but yes, if I ever knew 20 years ago when I was a banker at Lehman Brothers with a finance undergraduate degree that I'd be in the business of data centers and renewable energy, I would've thought that someone looked up the wrong Michael Pariser in the future phone book.
My former career pre-Rice MBA, I was a commercial real estate banker in Miami, Florida, where I was born and raised. Went back home after college up at Georgetown and decided to get into the commercial real estate cycle, which was on a big upswing, and Wall Street was on a big upswing.
And then September 2008 happened, and both commercial real estate and finance evaporated for the foreseeable future at that time. So, basically, I ended up buying a one-way ticket to Southeast Asia and had two years to think about what did I want to do with my life, and ended up getting really interested in supporting clean energy projects for off-grid rural villages in Southeast Asia for USAID, the Agency for International Development for the U.S. government.
And came back to the U.S. to switch into energy as a career, coming straight from Manila, Philippines, to Rice MBA. I actually remember doing all of my Rice MBA admissions interviews at midnight, like, you know, wearing a jacket on the top and, like, pajamas on the bottom, off camera with all the Rice admissions folks.
And so, my wife and I, who are all from Miami, we came to Houston. I loved my experience at Rice. I was a Full-Time 2012 MBA. And when I came out, I went into clean energy. I sold for almost 10 years utility-scale wind and solar and battery energy storage projects to utilities and to increasingly to corporate buyers, such as data centers, who have really large energy procurement goals and 100% clean energy procurement goals at that.
And so, after a few years in South Florida with NextEra Energy and a few years in Southern California with EDF Renewables, I moved back to Houston in The Woodlands and became a buyer of power, first for Walmart, where I led Walmart's clean energy procurement and strategy for a bit before I moved into the data center space about five years ago with Microsoft.
At Microsoft, I was leading the North America renewable energy procurement strategy, and I actually for a while, my last year or so at Microsoft, was leading the European theater of renewable energy procurement. So, it was really interesting work at Microsoft. I executed several of the first power purchase agreements for wind and solar and offshore wind that had environmental justice components in the PPA agreements, which was really cool. So, that's something that was very novel.
[04:17] Brian Jackson: What does that mean, an environmental justice component?
[04:20] Michael Pariser: Yeah, so all of these large infrastructure projects, you know, cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and no lender is willing to stroke a check and pay for this infrastructure to get built unless they have certainty on what the revenues are going to look like for 10 to 20 years. The fixed revenue component is what a power purchase agreement is, so PPA.
And so, all these large wind and solar projects, and now even these gas projects, you know, these nuclear deals that you're seeing driven by data center growth, they all require a buyer, a creditworthy offtaker, to sign up for 10 to 20 years, fixed price of all the power that that generator can produce. And so, I think Microsoft was very smart and showed a lot of forethought a few years ago when they started the environmental justice component of their PPAs, and what that is, is Microsoft will agree to a price with a generator, you know, a solar, wind, nuclear project, whoever.
They'll agree to a price, they'll agree to commercial terms to buy the power for 20 years, and then Microsoft will say, "Yeah, and on top of that, I want to pay an extra couple of dollars per megawatt hour, which is going to add up to several million dollars a year, and I want you, the seller, I'm going to pay that to you for the power produced, and at the end of the year, I want you to send that component, that additional money that I'm agreeing to pay, into a nonprofit fund that we're going to hire a third party to manage, and that third party is going to be governed by a board of community members for the local community of where the infrastructure project's located, and they're going to decide how to best spend those millions of dollars."
And the good thing is, when you sign a 20-year deal, and you structure it in the right way, you provide a runway of 20 years of seven- to eight-figure revenue for this nonprofit fund to operate from, and so they can plan some pretty impressive, impactful local projects.
Anyway, yeah, the Microsoft environmental justice component was pretty neat, and I've obviously taken those learnings as I've come over to Oracle. I joined Oracle because Oracle had been historically a software company, not an infrastructure company, and about a year and a half ago, Oracle pretty much overnight went from having no energy procurement function to being one of the largest procurers of power in the world when they decided they wanted to not only be a software company, but have most of its revenues come from its infrastructure build-out and basically renting of GPUs to large language model operators like Anthropic and OpenAI.
And so, that's when I joined Oracle, and I'm responsible for buying all the power. And because of my clean energy background, I've also created the clean energy power procurement program here, which we've made some recent announcements about, lots of wind PPAs in Texas that we've executed this year. We've made a lot of progress on our march toward 100% clean energy procurement to support our customers.
[07:26] Brian Jackson: Well, I mean, all of that, it's like a compounding of lessons learned, and it seems like that's what you're doing in each role. And ultimately at Oracle, you have the buy side, the developer sell side of energy, and bringing all of those parts to what you're doing today. It makes me, and I'm going to take us back again to Southeast Asia because, one, I'm partial to it because you and I have that shared experience of living there.
But, you know, beyond the travel, you were working in microfinance, you did typhoon relief, climbed in the Himalayas, explored shipwrecks. You also rode the 1,500-mile Ho Chi Minh Trail on a motorcycle, and then also somehow you're trained in Thai massage. Never knew this about you, Mike.
[08:06] Michael Pariser: I am. Royal Thai massage from Wat Pho in Bangkok. Yes, 80 hours, actually.
[08:12] Brian Jackson: It's impressive. Had no idea. You know, what were you looking for during that period? Was it just grab every experience so you had more to draw upon later? Like, what were you trying to find?
[08:22] Michael Pariser: Yeah. At that time, I was trying to aggregate experiences that I knew in the future... Because I was not working full-time out there. That was after the Lehman implosion and Wall Street implosion and the real estate implosion. And so, I decided instead of moping around applying to jobs that are probably either going to be highly unproductive or just not even exist for probably a period of two years, I'm going to try and gain some life experience that I would never be able to fit in a standard two-week corporate vacation window.
And so, all of what you just described, you know, becoming a PADI Divemaster in the Coral Triangle out in Borneo, moving from Cambodia to Laos to Vietnam, you know, by boat and motorcycle and elephant, to hiking the Himalayas in Nepal with my wife.
I mean, all of that is really just trying to gather life experiences that would help inform what I think is most important for me and what motivates me. Because honestly, you know, I think a really interesting question to ask yourself is, if you were to hit the lottery tomorrow and no longer need whatever job you're in right now, what would you do with yourself every day?
And ideally, it would have something to do with what you're actually spending your day doing already. I mean, of course, you know, it doesn't always work out like that. But for me, renewable energy, clean energy, was that answer. I saw when I was traveling around the developing countries of Southeast Asia that these folks did not have electricity, they did not have air conditioning, most of them had no vehicles, and probably in 20 or 30 years, they're all going to be having air conditioning and driving SUVs and using a lot of electricity.
And if we did it the old-fashioned way of just building coal plants, these absolutely incredibly beautiful places on Earth are just going to be destroyed ecologically. And so, the way to help these developing economies leapfrog the old way of doing things while still getting folks up to speed on having infrastructure and access to the internet and access to power is, we've got to do it in a sustainable way from an emissions standpoint. So, that's, kind of, how I came to the realization.
[10:51] Brian Jackson: So, I totally understand the experience of being in Asia, seeing developing countries, seeing a growing need for energy, and that the demand's going to get there, and we're not getting there fast enough. But then you come back, and you go to Rice for your MBA. I'm trying to understand that part. How did you know that, "Okay, I need to get an MBA, it needs to be from Rice” — why did it matter at that time?
[11:12] Michael Pariser: That's a great question. It was very specific to Rice. So, pre-MBA, post-Lehman Brothers, I, you know, had already a deep experience from a finance field standpoint, real estate lending standpoint. I was, you know, my last role at Lehman Brothers was vice president, so from a resume-building standpoint in that industry, I already had pretty solid standing.
But because I wanted to career pivot and switch industries into more of the, kind of, basically the non-lending, non-Treasury side of the energy business, a lot of the commercial skills that I gained as a banker have remained useful, and the negotiation skills as an originator back then originating commercial loans to real estate buyers, you know, have served me well as I continue to negotiate large contracts, even though this time it's for buying and selling large power contracts with generators and with utilities.
The fact is, if I wanted to get a role within a utility or power company, energy company, that wasn't starting out at the bottom with the 21-year-old undergraduate folks, I was going to need some, sort of, energy-specific resume component, and I figured that that was a Rice MBA, because Rice still obviously has a very strong energy industry flavor, just given who our faculty is, who the alumni base is, the fact that we're located in Houston, and what the internship opportunities and the post-MBA recruiter opportunities are.
And so, that was the calculus on Rice. It certainly was really interesting. My Rice MBA, I, you know, had an interest in the more commercial-flavored electives from an energy industry standpoint. So, I remember, like, classes taught by Scott Gaille about, like, international energy markets and entrepreneurship and private equity-type classes, like, taught by Dennis Murphree, were really interesting to me.
I always have had a kind of admiration for entrepreneurs and never had the courage to go out and strike on my own, but that's something that obviously Rice is really strong in. I, in fact, with one of my MBA 2012 colleagues, Phil Leach, we were in the Rice MBA business plan competition, and we even won $10,000 for best elevator pitch for our product at the University of Louisville business plan competition that year, which was Action Figure Laboratories, and our tagline was, "It's like Build-A-Bear, but for boys."
I don't even know if Build-A-Bear exists anymore. And it was when 3D printing just came out, so we take a photo in the store, we print out an action figure with your face and head on it, and then you get to accessorize it, et cetera, and walk out with a mini version of yourself. I tried to find mine before this podcast so that I could show it on camera, and unfortunately I think it got lost at the shop.
[14:19] Brian Jackson: Oh, that's awesome. And I agree, like Houston is, and I think will continue to be, the energy capital, right? But energy, like that word, has evolved over the last 20 years. And I know you do a really great job in connecting clean tech and data center folks here, but I'm curious, like, what role do you think the city of Houston's going to actually play as energy tech and AI increasingly intersect? Like we've got all these fantastic players here.
[14:43] Michael Pariser: Yeah. That's a great question, and I think that Houston can do more, frankly, and Houston can do better with the ingredients that Houston already has.
I find that here in Houston, most of the energy, clean energy, and power companies that have locations here or expand locations here are folks that already have legacy, kind of, oil and gas or legacy power trading activity and footprint and team located in Houston, and they typically will expand on that.
But honestly, you know, as a buyer at Oracle and as a buyer previously at Microsoft, I've done at this point probably 100 different power purchase agreements in the past few years with, I don't know, more than 30 counterparties.
And I think honestly, we could do better as a community here in Houston on making it known what synergies this city has to offer for folks looking to get into the mix, get into the deal flow, and, you know, have a faster takeoff when trying to get their name out to counterparties and prospective customers that, you know, they're in the business of selling power or a new energy solution to data centers or large corporate buyers, et cetera.
[16:01] Brian Jackson: Yeah. Well, I mean, your happy hour is one big step towards helping us get there, so thanks, Mike. I appreciate it.
[16:07] Michael Pariser: No worries. Yeah, I'm up in The Woodlands, work from my home office here, and the happy hour is funny. The original idea, which I started about five years ago when I was with Walmart buying power across the U.S. I love staying in touch with my network and with my Rice network and with my power and energy industry network, and making the trip down to Houston from The Woodlands, you know, multiple times a month to catch up and grab lunches, breakfasts, et cetera, was getting a little heavy on my travel schedule.
So, I said, "You know what? I'm just going to be in a place once a month, and I'm going to send out a note to everybody. Come if you can, don't come if you can't. Don't worry about it. But if, you know, if… I will be in town right at this spot, and we can catch up in person there."
I also meant it to help out my colleagues and, kind of, spread the... I think it originally started out as, like, the Energy Clean Tech Happy Hour, so more of a renewable energy bent. And it's really, kind of, broadened to data center developers and to big tech buyers because we've, you know, as Amazon and Meta and Microsoft and Google have post-COVID basically become an almost fully remote workforce, a lot of the folks here in Houston have joined those companies and still, you know, domicile here.
And so, yeah, we've got a good mix of sellers of energy and power, buyers of energy and power. We've got oil and gas folks. We've got power generation folks. We've got renewable energy folks. We've got data center folks. So, yeah, it's a good time, and I'm glad that you make it out as much as you do.
[17:48] Brian Jackson: No, it's great. And I mean, you know this, on both sides of this, it's the network that tends to make deals happen. And I think, you know, you're very intentional about building your network, and it seems like it constantly gets pulled up and used on either side that you're on. My next little pivot is jumping from NextEra, EDF, developer sell side, going to Walmart, Microsoft, now Oracle, buy side.
You're sitting on the opposite side of the table. Is there now, like, these "aha" moments that you're having of like, "Oh no, I understand their position. This is what we'll do?”
[18:14] Michael Pariser: Yeah, no, I think as you can imagine, having been on the opposite side of the table and coming to the other, you know the pain points of who you're facing on the other side of the table because you've sat in their seat. You know what makes them excited, what would make them most interested in whatever you're proposing or offering.
And you also understand from a negotiating standpoint where they actually have a firm line and cannot move from, versus they're just positing from a negotiation tactic standpoint that, you know, they don't want to have flexibility. So, it's a little unique. I haven't met too many people that have gone from buyer to seller or gone from seller to buyer. But that's something that I've done, and who knows? Maybe I'll flip back to the seller side at some point in my career.
But yes, I think even if, from an internship standpoint, you can intern on one side and then, you know, if you plan on getting a job on the other side, I think it's a really insightful experience to be able to have sat in the seat or, you know, worn the shoes of the person who you're tasked with executing a heavily negotiated agreement against.
[19:25] Brian Jackson: Well, and you being the cost center but also the crux of the development of the data center site, I feel like you and I have heard enough of, like, "speed to power." And for folks that aren't in energy and have no idea how this works or what that even looks like, could you, kind of, explain what's making getting power to site so difficult?
[19:47] Michael Pariser: Yes, so "speed to power" is the catchphrase of 2025 and 2026 and probably 2027 as well in the AI infrastructure data center community. And what that's referring to is, you've got OpenAI's ChatGPT, you have Anthropic's Claude, you have Google's Gemini, you have Facebook's Muse... Or sorry, Meta. I just aged myself, dated myself there.
And all of these large language models are effectively in a race to see who can train up to an elevated, efficient model quickest. Because the idea is, whether it's correct or incorrect, you know, there's a little bit of an idea of a winner-take-all theory with AI. I mean, that's just one theory, where whoever's model becomes the most advanced and quickest and fastest and most accurate is going to dominate the space. And in order for that to happen, you really need to have as much GPU and CPU compute power as possible running on racks inside data centers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, ideally as soon as possible so that that training can begin.
So, really the bottleneck to Anthropic or OpenAI is, you know, getting as much compute capacity as they want, is not money. They have access to almost infinite capital with every... Basically, the stock market is focused on investing into this AI infrastructure build-out. So, really what it is, it's not land, it's access to electricity.
These data centers are, from an energy intensity standpoint, the most energy-intensive buildings probably that the world has ever seen. To give you an example, one of the data center sites that Oracle has announced in New Mexico for 2.2 gigawatts of power is going to consume on a routine basis the equivalent electricity consumption of 1.8 million American households.
It's hard to think about without seeing, because the numbers are so large, it's almost like, you know, my mind can't compute it. But my point is, the energy is really the key ingredient to these data centers to be able to train up these large language models. And the grid, the transmission system in the United States for electricity, is not strong. It is old, it breaks. We have built in the United States, I think the total amount of transmission mileage, miles of lines of high-voltage transmission lines, in the past 10 years, I think we built like, I don't know, 100 miles, whereas China has built like thousands of miles in the past 12 months.
And the reason why is because we have a lot of "not in my backyard" issues, and it's really expensive, and the permitting processes take years from a federal level, from a state level. Depends if you're crossing state lines, it becomes a federal permitting issue. And then once you get permission to access the grid, the utilities typically take several years to build the actual power line that's going to connect the grid to your new data center facility.
And so, that's why you see a lot of deals being announced, including the one I just mentioned in New Mexico for Oracle, that are totally off-grid. Now, one day, eventually, years from now, they will probably connect to the grid, but they are not counting on access to the U.S. electric grid for first power. They're just saying, "We're going to find natural gas. We're going to, you know, put some renewable energy, and we're going to combine the two, and we'll have round-the-clock power. We don't need the U.S. electric grid because we don't want to wait five years. We want to build this and be up and running in 24 months."
So, that's a big, big effort that really all of the large data center companies and big tech companies are focused on.
[23:48] Brian Jackson: But you're trying to solve for reliability, speed, cost, and also carbon-free energy all at the same time. Those priorities, to me, don't always lead to the same answer.
[24:01] Michael Pariser: Yeah, several contradictions in there, and although they are all true at the same time, we want and need reliable power. These data centers need 24/7 continuity, so we can't just wait for when, you know, the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. What happens at night when there's no wind? We want clean power. We want affordable power, although affordability's probably lower on the list of priorities than it would normally be in normal times.
The speed-to-power theory is that the revenue that will be generated from the dominant AI model that can come online first is going to be so great that the cost of power is going to be a non-issue, even if you're paying a premium for power.
[24:45] Brian Jackson: Yeah. So, when you look like five or 10 years out, which I know trying to be an oracle here is difficult...
[24:53] Michael Pariser: No pun intended.
[24:54] Brian Jackson: Yeah, no pun intended. What's happening in energy today that you think we're collectively underestimating?
[25:00] Michael Pariser: Yeah. So, my crystal ball, we're sitting here in 2026, getting toward the mid-to-late 2020s, amazingly. We've had an incredible growth of installed renewable energy capacity over the past 15 years since I graduated from Rice, and a lot of that has replaced old, retiring coal capacity generation.
And at the same time, up until five years ago, the U.S. load, the amount of power America and American businesses were using, was actually either flat or slightly declining 1% to 2% a year because of energy efficiency programs. You know, we were offshoring large, heavy industry, you know, to Mexico and China and other places.
And so, power demand for two decades since 2000 was pretty much going down in America, and the aging coal generation fleet was being retired and replaced increasingly by clean energy sources and renewables, and that was a great thing to be a part of while I was at NextEra and at EDF.
And now with AI, there's been this incredible spike in demand for power, which looks like it's, you know, going to be very strong for the next several years. We also have an electrification of buildings and of things that is driving electricity demand in the United States. And also my Polestar that's sitting in my garage, and everybody's electric vehicles increasingly is going... The electrification of the transportation industry is also driving electricity demand. So, it's pretty interesting.
Now, you know, U.S. industry has gone from declining demand over two decades to, like, almost, like, pretty strong, like, you know, mid-to-high single-digit year-over-year growth for the next few years.
So, what does that mean? We need a lot of baseload power. What does that mean? Non-intermittent, dispatchable power, where you can flip the switch on and off of the power plant and it turns on. So, that's either renewable energy sources that can be stored into some, sort of, you know, energy storage system like lithium-ion batteries, or there are some other long-duration energy storage technologies being worked on, or baseload power like natural gas generation or nuclear generation, geothermal generation.
So, right now, you know, we're, kind of, having a renaissance that the renewables will continue to be built out because they are the cheapest marginal cost of energy for any new megawatt installed in the United States. Solar is cheaper than anything by a long shot. Wind is second to solar right afterwards.
So, renewables, I think, will continue to have a bright future. We're now having this renaissance in natural gas generation. So, the last time the United States had a big build-out of natural gas generation was basically when Enron collapsed. And so, we haven't really built gas that much in 25 years. So, we're pulling a lot of people out of retirement to help us build gas plants today, and same thing with nuclear. I think the, kind of, end of the 2020s to the beginning of the 2030s, we're going to see a lot of gas generation build-out in the United States to serve, you know, data center load growth, to serve vehicle electrification load growth.
I think we're going to see a lot in the 2030s, I'm hopeful, of nuclear, new technology, small modular reactor nuclear power, which can provide carbon-free baseload power. And at the same time, I'm hopeful that we will crack the code on some long-duration energy storage technologies, which can be paired with wind and solar and store the power not for just a few hours, but for several days or even several weeks or months. So, that will be pretty amazing.
And yeah, I think we're going to increasingly see the electrification of our industrial society, and I think there's also a really interesting role for each of our homes and apartments and businesses to play in the grid, because there's the distribution of power sources is now happening even at our homes, like, you know, raise your hand while you're driving listening to this podcast if you have a generator or if you know someone who has a Generac at home. You know, living in Houston, I bet half of you do. I'm up in The Woodlands where our power lines thankfully are buried in the ground, so I don't have much of an issue with trees falling and cutting my power for days at a time, right?
Who has a base power or a Tesla Powerwall? These are power sources that not only provide, you know, residents and small businesses with emergency backup power for when the larger grid fails, but also potentially a revenue source for you to sell your power back to the grid in times of stress on the grid when there is a shortage of capacity, they can draw from basically a distributed network of thousands or millions of tiny little power plants in people's homes. So, I think we're going to see more of DER, which is distributed energy system, in the next five to 10 years. That's just my crystal ball.
[30:09] Brian Jackson: No, I think you're right. So, if you were a recent Rice grad or, let's say, even a current student, and you're looking at everything happening across power, infrastructure, AI, and of course you're thinking, "I want to be a part of this," where would you tell them to start?
[30:24] Michael Pariser: So, I would look at the power industry. I would look at, in particular, independent power producers, IPPs, which are competitive companies that enter competitive power markets or different markets across the U.S. and try and sell long-term power purchase agreements to utilities or large consumers of power like data centers from large CapEx power generation projects that they built, like wind, solar, batteries, gas. There are a lot of IPPs. There's several actually that have major offices in Houston, so you know, from a locale standpoint, I think that works.
So, yeah, I would take a look at the IPPs. There's a lot of them. I'm sure ChatGPT can give you a good list. "Throw me the IPPs with an employee presence in Houston." I would start there.
[31:15] Brian Jackson: Well, perfect. Well, Mike, this has been a ton of fun. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm looking forward to seeing you at the next happy hour or maybe a Rice event.
[31:24] Michael Pariser: Yeah, thank you, Brian. I appreciate it. It's been great to join you. Go Owls.
[31:33] Brian Jackson: Thanks for listening. This has been Owl Have You Know, a production of Rice Business. You can find more information about our guests, hosts, and announcements on our website, business.rice.edu. Please subscribe and leave a rating wherever you find your favorite podcast. We'd love to hear what you think. The hosts of Owl Have You Know are myself, Brian Jackson, and Maya Pomroy.