Alice Havill, right, and Jennifer Wagner
Until this year, Daniels College of Business alumna Alice Havill (MBA 2018) made a career supporting others as they built startups to accomplish their dreams. This year, she flipped the script and did something she never planned on: She became an entrepreneur.
It started over drinks with friend and colleague Jennifer Wagner. Wagner posed a question that set off a storm of ideas: “If I wrote you a check for $5 million, what would you do with it?”
“We had this conversation of what would we do if that was an option, and how would we play with it,” Havill recalled. “I think there was just such an alignment in the conversation that we realized we had similar ambitions for our next stage of our professional and personal journeys. This bonding moment was what made us realize we wanted to work together.”
In September 2024, the pair launched Fractal Climate, a company dedicated to accelerating environmental and climate technology startups through workshops, trainings, mentorship and work as fractional executives.
Dedication to sustainability
Havill’s journey to entrepreneurship started in her native New Zealand, a country known for its natural wonders and a culture that’s dedicated to protecting it. Her collegiate chemical engineering program featured an influential curriculum grounded in sustainability and ethics. After she graduated, Havill traveled around the world, making stops in India, Thailand and Nepal.
“I realized there were a lot of environmental challenges that existed that—because I lived in a very scarcely populated country at the bottom of the world—we didn’t see,” she said. “I think it opened my eyes to the global challenges that we’re facing in terms of material recycling, carbon emissions and water quality.”
With a new outlook on the dire importance of environment-focused work, Havill began her journey in the startup world, which eventually brought her to the United States. But after years of the intensity of working for a startup, it was time to take a break and reevaluate. In doing so, Havill realized that to really make a difference, she’d need to beef up her business acumen.
Becoming a business leader
In 2016, Havill began her MBA program at the Daniels College of Business, where she would also pick up a certificate in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and global business. Though she says the program shaped her in myriad ways, above all, it prepared her to become an effective leader—one fully capable of creating and running a business.
“What I didn’t realize until then is being a good leader is about introspection and learning how to work on yourself. That was quite a painful lesson, but also a fairly important one,” she said. “Leadership was woven into the whole program, and it brought different frames of how to be a leader and how to be present, how to have tough conversations or how to manage interpersonal relationships across cultures.”
Directly after her time at the University of Denver, Havill joined a new startup, but this time she felt much more prepared. She attributes this to the focus Daniels places on experiential learning and application of education.
“We did learn a lot of theory and had the concepts behind us, but we were using real-world examples and taking it as if we were the ones making the decision,” she explained. “I went straight into another startup afterwards and, as a COO, I got to go straight into using all these applied skills and could see how they stood up when you tried them in the real world.”
At Fractal Climate, Havill (right) accelerates environmental and climate technology startups through trainings, mentorship, work as fractional executives and workshops, like the one she led for the LabStart program .
Growing ‘like seeds in a forest’
After a handful of years contributing to a growing field of climate-focused minds, Havill joined Breakthrough Energy as a business fellow, providing business support and guidance for budding companies with high potential to impact climate preservation.
That’s where she met Wagner, and drew up the plans for Fractal Climate.
Though the company is in its infancy, Havill said Fractal’s growth has been unexpectedly quick, driven by the overwhelming need for climate solutions. The pair are considering expanding their team to support even more companies and to spread their knowledge like seeds in a forest.
“You can’t make more of us, but these companies will scale, and so we are looking for ways to create fractals of ourselves to amplify our impact,” she said, giving a nod to her company’s name. “We are helping these entrepreneurs get over the learning curve faster and with fewer potholes. And we might actually achieve our climate goals a little sooner, because I have all the trust in the world that these founders are developing the most innovative technologies we have ever seen.”
So much of this work is possible because Havill was able to combine her deep expertise in climate technology and environmental preservation with startup experience and business acumen that she gained both in the classroom and in the field.
“Certainly, as a chemical engineer, this would never have been something I could have done,” she said. “But having that experience at Daniels meant that I had the direction and the tools I needed.”