Irina Filippova
speaker
226 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Irina Filippova’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Spent some time in Chicago, moved to London, worked in upstream and downstream in a conventional energy space, but always with an eye out to that broader mandate to bring energy line and mobility to people in different ways, including using alternative and renewable sources.
And my last project at VP, before I decided to move on, actually had to do with relaunching brand and doing so in a renewable fashion. So we had this phenomenal project called Helios House in Los Angeles, where we've rebranded and revamped an old, dirty gas station on the corner of Olympic and Robertson into an architectural marvel. But also, it was an education.
station that helped us showcase renewable energy technologies, solar, the use of recycled repurposed materials, and kind of a new way of looking at what was a very typical if you will, feature of everyone's life, right? A gas station. And obviously looking at alternative fuels at that time as well. So that's where my journey into sustainability began. This was 2007.
And I have been on that path ever since. When you look back, do you see any common themes or threats?
I think the common path that I'm observing here is that I was always a self-starter. So even when I was working for a major energy company, I tended to work on projects that I was originating. At no point in time did I actually take over someone else's role. So every role on every project that I worked on was essentially starting from scratch.
So if you will, it was being an entrepreneur within a very established company and within a very established culture and way of doing things. So that is definitely a common theme. The second common theme was simply curiosity. My career path is completely non-linear, and that was okay by me, I think.
For me, when I reached kind of the age of 35 or so, the idea of following an established career path was not at all appealing. I wanted to learn about different aspects of energy. I wanted to try myself in different roles.
I actually joined a early stage startup out of the UK upon leaving BP, and that involved building the US presence really from scratch, from the ground up, and really creating relevance in a new market for that particular business.
So in that sense, the transition from a big established organization to being more or less independent or being an entrepreneurial advisor was not hard for me because I already thought like an entrepreneur, even within, again, an established company. The other component, again, is curiosity.
In order to be successful in being independent or running a small business, you do have to be very curious about industry trends. You have to be open to building partnerships, relationships, collaborations with others. You have to continuously find ways to in which you can create value, not just for yourself, but for others in the ecosystem.
So those components really lead, I believe, successful entrepreneurs to more success. I've also observed, I've observed a lot being in these different environments and these different spaces. And unfortunately, we don't see a lot of great examples of leadership on either side. I believe in the US culture, there is a bit of a glorification of the entrepreneur.
We hear all these great stories about unicorns becoming successful overnight. And therefore there is this mystery and mystique of what it takes to build a successful enterprise. And I believe that unfortunately gives rise to tendencies that are not necessarily healthy and don't lead to long-term sustained success for entrepreneurs.
Because again, folks think that if they kind of somehow outsmart the market and become very popular, that somehow is going to get them from point A to point B. And of course, we've seen a lot of unfortunate consequences of that kind of thinking.
In my mind, Vance, the word leader equals the word courage. There is no leadership without courage. And even though I believe we don't necessarily have a lot of examples of courageous leadership, those who show courage are the true leaders. Did it take courage for me to make the transition from BP to an early stage startup?
Probably, probably some courage, but I would say more curiosity on my part. Like I said before, I was not wedded to a particular structure of my career. I was not wedded to going from one stage to the next in a very precise way. I always desired to have more freedom and more control over my own destiny, as it were. So that, to me, was very natural.
That transition was very natural, even though it happened in the midst of the global financial crisis in 2008. So anyone thinking rationally about this would say, well, why wouldn't you just stay with a safe, secure career where you were progressing just fine in a large company versus going kind of off on your own into the unknown. But to me, that wasn't really the dilemma.
I was attracted by the opportunity of meeting a challenge. My desire was to meet that challenge and to bring all my skills and experiences to bear on meeting that challenge. And if I could do that in the context of a small enterprise, like-minded individuals, great, fantastic. If I had to venture off on my own, then that's how it had to be. So I see courage really as a way of being rather than
kind of a quality that you have to have. It's just a way in which you get from one place to the next. And you do have to sometimes jump over large chasms. But in doing so, you have to have a vision of bridging areas that don't really bridge easily. The business that we are now, for example, we're in now, the business of
Electrifying transportation involves two very established industries, energy and transportation, going through a transformation. And as both of them are changing at the same time and fundamentally, we're here to really bridge everything that they're going through and create an opportunity for fleets to electrify successfully.
So again, this is an opportunity and this is seeing how you can actually connect the dots in the midst of the storm, for lack of a better term, in the midst of this big major transition and transformation. I would say that most courageous leaders in my mind are those who actually stick to the promises that they make to their people, to the organization that they run.
Showing 81–100 of 226 · page 5 of 12
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