Tell me your name, your role, and when you joined Endurance.

My name is Augustin Wambersie. I’m the Founding Thermofluids Engineer, and I joined Endurance in March 2025.

I was born in Oman and lived in Malaysia and Brazil before college. My parents worked in offshore oil and gas, so this is a funny, similar but different source of energy. We are drilling offshore for power, basically.

What did you study, and how did that lead you to Endurance?

I did my undergraduate degree at Princeton and my PhD in thermofluids at Oxford. After that, I worked for a renewable energy startup in Oxford for a couple of years, focusing on solar thermal. I spent a lot of time looking at the levelized cost of energy and renewable power generation more broadly.

I’m originally from Belgium, but after studying in the U.S., I wanted to come back. My wife is American, and toward the end of my time in Oxford, I was essentially waiting to get my green card. I had the option to stay in my previous role, which was fully remote, but I wanted to work in person, with hardware. I enjoy being hands-on.

Andrew and I were on the same rowing team at Princeton, although we got back in touch through a mutual friend. That friend knew Andrew was building a team and introduced us. Andrew had just hired Eli, employee number one, so I joined right at the beginning as employee number two.

What got you interested in thermodynamics?

I always wanted to go into engineering. Thermodynamics, and more specifically turbomachinery, seemed like the coolest of all the fields. It started with a childhood interest in jet engines and carried over. I really began specializing in thermofluids during my PhD.

Why did you choose to work at Endurance?

I was already interested in renewable energy and power generation, and this was an exciting new way to approach it. It was a greenfield opportunity in terms of the work to be done.

Having worked in solar thermal, I was coming from a field people had been trying to advance for 50 years. There were a thousand papers on what not to do, what had already been tried and how it had failed. Every idea you had, someone had tried before.

“Here, the work is almost completely new, which is a much more exciting prospect [than solar].”

Did you know much about subsea geothermal before you joined Endurance?

No. I don’t think many people knew much about subsea geothermal, apart from perhaps one or two geologists studying hydrothermal vents. It was a genuinely new field.

What are you working on right now that occupies most of your time and attention?

Right now, the turbomachinery build occupies 100 percent of my thoughts. We are deploying very soon and trying to get as many testing reps as possible before then.

That means getting the hardware here, making sure we have spares and enough parts, and setting up the right tests so we can properly validate the main part of the generator. It is also the highest-risk item, so it has taken over 100 percent of my mental capacity.

Tell me about a day at Endurance that you’ll always remember.

Probably the first Krill deployment. Krill was our first piece of hardware, and we deployed it within four months of my joining. There were only four of us at the time.

I was living in Boston and traveling back and forth a lot, so I watched the deployment remotely. Seeing the live feed from the ROV as it placed Krill on top of a hydrothermal vent was incredibly exciting. Then we saw the plume coming out of the top. That was definitely one of the most memorable moments.

What is something about the people here that you would not understand until you worked alongside them?

I think there are two sides to it.

“When you first meet everyone, they seem laid-back, relaxed and fun. Then you realize they are also extremely smart and extremely good at what they do.”

That is something you might notice in an interview, but if you met people casually, you might not see it right away. I think that is a good thing.

What would you tell someone who is thinking about working here?

It is a really hard challenge, but we are building a team capable of doing it.

“What we are trying to do is a little crazy, but I believe it is absolutely possible.”

It requires the right group of extremely motivated, talented people who believe in it and are willing to make it happen. A challenge like this needs not only capital, but also a significant amount of human effort and energy. It takes a kind of activation energy because so much of what we are doing is new.

“The closest parallel in my mind is a space program. You are building everything from scratch.”

You are building everything from scratch, and it takes a long time, a lot of money and a lot of effort before the first thing gets close to working. In that sense, what we are doing has more in common with a space program than with other forms of power generation.