Hope is something you do: how Kathy Izumi is helping create change through Aspiring Materials
Updated: 5 days ago
When a startup is in its infancy, it’s a case of all hands to the pump. The edges
between roles are fuzzy, there are plenty of “doing this for the first time” moments,
and life experience can be every bit as valuable as professional experience. Test,
fail, learn, try again.
Kathy Izumi, Chief Operating Officer for Aspiring Materials, knows this very well.
She has seen Aspiring Materials grow from a discussion to a concept, to a
company preparing to scale. She literally watched the idea set in early concrete
experiments back in 2012.
“What drew me to Aspiring Materials was family. When the business was first starting off, it needed someone who could multitask. What I had always thought of as moving around and taking on different roles over my career turned out to be the perfect preparation for what a growing company needs.”
Kathy may describe herself as the “wearer of many hats” at Aspiring Materials, but
in truth, she embodies much of what makes the company work. Although her
career has not been in science, she can discuss technical details with the
engineering team and understand the chemistry unfolding in the lab, just as readily
as she can shape the business plan or identify commercial opportunities.
But it wasn’t simply her ability to multitask that made Kathy a natural fit for Aspiring
Materials. Married to co-founder Chris, Kathy has long been immersed in the ideas
that would eventually give rise to the company. Family road trips often involved detours to explore geological curiosities, search out mineral deposits on rocky outcrops and learn more about the chemistry that shapes the natural world.
While those experiences have provided a unique foundation for her role, what truly distinguishes Kathy as COO is her optimism. She has a way of looking at established systems and asking whether they still make sense.
“It’s easy to overlook things that we’ve done for decades. You can quite happily never give them a second thought. Cement, steel, batteries and energy are fundamental to our lives, and they might not seem especially exciting on the face of it. But if we step back and ask, ‘Could we do this differently? Is there a better way?’ we often realise there is.”
For Kathy, Aspiring Materials is an opportunity to align her work with what matters to her: leaving the world a better place than she found it and showing her children what it means to pursue change rather than simply hope for it.
That same ethos fuelled Kathy and Chris’ move from California to Christchurch, with their young kids in tow. They went all in, not because they knew Aspiring Materials would succeed, but because they believed its potential contribution to addressing climate change was worth finding out.
“My role at Aspiring Materials allows me to pursue the things that are important to me in life in big, fundamental ways. We’ve always been clear that we want to create shared outcomes for the benefit of many and make the greatest possible difference for the planet and for local communities.”
Kathy also hopes that Aspiring Materials can make the possibility of change feel more real. It’s just one example of the remarkable work happening across New Zealand and around the world, to address climate change.
“We’ve always believed human ingenuity is capable of cracking this nut. It can be easy to lose sight of how incredible our technology is and how far we’ve come in such a short time, but Aspiring Materials is part of a much bigger collective. There are many companies out there doing amazing things that can and will make a difference. I hope people learn about Aspiring Materials and come away feeling hopeful that this [climate change] is a problem humans can solve.”
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