Co-Founder and Chief of Staff
Elizabeth A. Thomson Correspondent
While a freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Matt Houde discovered two key things: he wanted to study geological engineering—he’d always had an interest in rocks—and he wanted to work in the energy transition. “I saw that it was going to be one of the major challenges we had as a civilization in the years to come,” says Houde, who received his undergraduate degree in 2016.
At Stanford, where he earned a master’s in civil and environmental engineering, he quickly narrowed his focus. “After the second or third day of a class on geothermal engineering, I realized that this was the industry where I wanted to spend my career. Geothermal energy is pretty much everywhere on Earth, right under our feet, but it’s relatively untapped today. Could we grow it to have a much larger impact?”
Houde’s classmates included Tim Latimer and Jack Norbeck, who went on to become co-founders at another geothermal firm, Fervo Energy. That’s in part why Houde refers to Professor Roland Horne, who taught the class, as “a mentor to the geothermal engineers of the future.”
While at Stanford, Houde interned at Ormat Technologies, where he learned that “there were pretty strong limits in how big we could grow conventional geothermal resources.” A year later he took a 13-hour Amtrak ride to attend his first Geothermal Rising conference, where he was introduced to superhot geothermal. “The idea was that if we could find a way to tap into much hotter rock, we could produce geothermal energy that looks a lot more like oil and gas in terms of how much energy is coming out of these wells.”
Soon after, while finishing his master’s, Houde landed a job with AltaRock Energy, a geothermal company interested in exploring the potential of superhot rock. “They saw one critical barrier to going hotter: how do we get down to the depths where these temperatures are widely available?” Houde remembers.
So AltaRock surveyed the landscape on novel drilling technologies, and Houde found himself writing proposals to fund an idea out of MIT: drilling holes through superhard, superhot rock with millimeter-wave energy instead of conventional drill bits. The latter can’t withstand those formidable conditions without becoming exponentially more expensive with depth.
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Geothermal energy is pretty much everywhere on Earth, right under our feet, but it’s relatively untapped today. Could we grow it to have a much larger impact?—Matt Houde Co-founder and Chief of Staff
Enter Carlos Araque, then technical director of The Engine, at the time MIT’s venture capital firm and a nonprofit incubator for tough tech. Through The Engine, Araque had also learned about the MIT technology, and was so excited by its potential that he would soon go on to leave The Engine to co-found—and become CEO of—Quaise Energy.
Houde connected with Araque around this time. After a two-hour phone call, Houde remembers, “it struck me that this is someone I want to work with. I don’t come from a microwave background [the MIT millimeter-waves are in the same family] and Carlos doesn’t either, but he comes from oil and gas, and he has a lot of expertise in systems engineering.
“Listening to how he was thinking through the challenges we were going to have with millimeter waves, I thought, ‘this is someone who knows what he’s doing.’”
Meanwhile, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), part of the U.S. Department of Energy, was reviewing Houde’s AltaRock proposal to fund additional research on millimeter waves for geothermal drilling. In November 2018, Houde learned that the proposal had been selected for award negotiations, a key step in securing the award for a multi-year research project.
“That was one of the happiest days of my life,” says Houde. AltaRock moved the ARPA-E award to Quaise, and Houde was asked to become a co-founder of the startup with Araque.
That was seven years ago, and the company has met many important milestones since. In July, it drilled to 118 meters through granite, a record for millimeter waves. In September, it conducted the first of several public demonstrations at a quarry in Marble Falls, Texas.
But the technical milestones are not what Houde is proudest of. “I really think that if there’s something uniquely of value to Quaise that no one else has, it’s the team we have built to take this crazy idea out of the lab and into the field.”
Houde believes that geothermal energy will become the backbone of the energy transition. He is running for a seat on the board of Geothermal Rising because he sees the organization as a key facilitator to that end, supporting all modes of geothermal, from heat pumps for heating and cooling homes to the high-temperature production of energy at parity with oil and gas today.
Matt Houde is running for the Owner/Operator seat on the board of Geothermal Rising, the oldest geothermal association on Earth. Members can vote through the Online Voting portal through Saturday, November 22, 2025.