The ocean is Earth's battery. 11 million terawatt-hours of excess heat are stored beneath the waves — and an El Niño is coming to release them. Rainmaker is one of the few teams on Earth standing in the gap with hard-tech that can answer the call.
I am David T. Phung — and I'd like to be Augustus's right hand in the years that decide whether we feed the next generation.
David Friedberg laid out the math on All-In. The numbers aren't speculation — they're thermodynamics. What follows is the case for why Rainmaker is one of the most important companies of this decade.
"There are approximately 11 million terawatt-hours of excess thermal energy currently stored in the ocean. That is roughly 500 years of total human energy consumption — already absorbed, just sitting there, waiting for the right El Niño cycle to dump it back into the atmosphere."
"When that energy comes out — and the next strong El Niño is going to release a meaningful portion of it — you get record atmospheric heat, you get crop failures across Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, and the highest-probability tail risk is a monsoon failure in India. That's 1.5 billion people whose calorie supply depends on one rainy season. A meaningful monsoon failure is, candidly, one of the most under-priced catastrophic risks on the planet right now."
Record-breaking soybean, corn, and wheat failures during strong El Niño cycles. 2023–24 lost ~30M tons of regional output.
1.5B people. ~50% of India's calories tied to a single rainy season. A 20% deficit triggers a global food market dislocation within 60 days.
Colorado River basin in 23-year megadrought. 40M Americans, $1.4T regional GDP at structural risk.
No single technology saves us. The wedge that wins is the stack: atmospheric water augmentation, ocean-to-freshwater conversion, and ocean-thermal power — operating as one civil infrastructure layer.
Autonomous UAS, X-band radar, AI-targeted silver iodide & hygroscopic flares. +10–30% precipitation augmentation in target watersheds, with full FAA and state permitting workflows.
Next-gen RO membranes + energy recovery devices now hit ~2.5 kWh/m³. 21,000+ desalination plants serve ~300M people today — the curve is bending, fast.
A 20°C delta between surface and deep water drives a Rankine cycle. Baseload renewable power + cold-water byproduct that itself powers cheaper desal & cools data centers.
The stack creates a closed water-energy loop: the same ocean that threatens monsoon failure becomes the engine of food and freshwater abundance. Rainmaker is the precipitation layer — the part nobody else is building.
A great EBP to a hard-tech CEO is not a calendar manager. They are a force multiplier across operations, capital, permits, hardware deployment, and people. That's the work I've been training for since my first jobsite.
Operations-driven executive partner with 15+ years building, scaling, and shipping hard-tech projects, facilities, and teams. Architect-trained. Policy-fluent. Mission-aligned with Rainmaker.
I bridge the worlds Rainmaker lives in: hardware, field operations, regulatory navigation, capital-stack discipline, and faith-rooted purpose. I've delivered $125M+ in distributed-site projects, coordinated 40+ executives, and stood up multi-agency permitting from federal to county level. I want to do that work for Augustus, every day.
Notion · Linear · Asana · Salesforce · Procore · Bluebeam · AutoCAD · Revit · ArcGIS · Figma · Google Workspace · Slack · Zapier · Vercel · Claude / GPT.
B.Arch · Architecture — Cal Poly School of Architecture & Environmental Design.
Continuing exec ed: Stanford GSB online (Strategy, Operations), and ongoing reading in climate-tech, OTEC, and water systems.
Genesis 1:28 isn't a slogan to me. Responsible dominion — through science, hard work, and reverence — is the only mandate worth giving a career to. Rainmaker is the company doing it for water.
Augustus —
I've watched what you're building at Rainmaker with the kind of attention I reserve for the very few companies I believe will define the decade. The combination is rare: hard atmospheric engineering, regulatory courage, a genuine Genesis-rooted ethic, and a willingness to actually fly drones into clouds while everyone else publishes papers. That's the company I want to give my next decade to.
I am writing for the Executive Business Partner role, reporting directly to you. Not because the title fits my résumé — but because the work fits how I'm wired. I am at my best when a serious operator who is moving the world forward needs a second brain, a second pair of hands, and a defender of their calendar. That is the job.
Here is what I will do, specifically, in the first ninety days:
I am architect-trained, construction-hardened, startup-scaled, and faith-rooted. I have moved $125M of capital projects across distributed sites without losing a milestone. I have sat in the rooms with city councils, FAA officials, and Series B boards in the same week and known how to talk to each. I have read enough of Friedberg and enough of the OTEC + desal literature to know exactly why Rainmaker has to win — and why the next 36 months are the ones that count.
If there is a chance to talk for thirty minutes, I will arrive prepared: with a 30-60-90 plan tailored to your top three priorities, a list of five things I would take off your plate in week one, and the names of three people I would bring in as we scale.
Steward the waters. Have dominion over the land. Let's get to work.
With respect and conviction,
David T. Phung
contactdavidtphung@gmail.com
"Subdue" has been mistranslated for two thousand years as extract and exploit. The original Hebrew is closer to responsible stewardship — to cultivate, to tend, to be a good gardener.
Rainmaker is one of the few companies on Earth that has decided to take that mandate literally: to actually steward the waters that fall from the sky and rise from the sea, with the best science we have, and to do so reverently.
This is the work I want to be part of for the rest of my career. Not as ideology — as vocation.
Studying the rain is studying the Creator's handiwork.
Water and food for every nation. Period.
Hard tech, here, made by hand. Rain Made in America.
Discipline, humility, prayer, and excellence.