Luke Black

S

Partner at Thornfield Capital · Climate

Thornfield Capital
San Diego, CA · PT (UTC-8)
13+ years experience
UCLA
English
Investing
Messaging unavailable

Overview

Partner at Thornfield Capital, backing climate companies. Previously an operator for 6 years before investing. Backed 19 founders at pre-seed and seed. Before that: EY and PayPal. Most at home with energy and hardware. I volunteer with a food bank on weekends.

Good reasons to reach out
  • Founders building in growth engineering
  • Speaking or podcast invitations
  • Working sessions on venture capital
Please don't message about
  • Agency or outsourcing pitches
  • Offshore staffing offers
  • SEO and link-building offers

Fastest replies in the morning

Skills
hardwareclimate techenergyventure capital
InvestingLooking to invest
closes in 3 months

Writing $50k cheques into pre-seed climate in India

Cheque size
$50k
Stages
Seed
Sectors
Growth engineering
Geographies
India and Southeast Asia
Lead or follow
Any
Decision time
One meeting and a partner call
How I help
Hiring the first ten people

Typically lead or co-lead. Former operator - I help with hiring and GTM.

San Diego, CAhardwareenergyventure capital
Open

Experience

  1. Partner
    Feb 2023 - Present
    Thornfield Capital · 3 yr 8 mo · Full-time · San Diego, CA
    • Built the experimentation framework 35 product teams use to ship changes safely.
    • Mentored 8 engineers through their first promotion.
    • Brought on-call pages for growth down from 33 a week to 4.
  2. Director of Engineering
    Sep 2020 - Feb 2023
    EY · 2 yr 5 mo · Full-time · San Diego, CA
    • Cut p99 latency on the growth services from 754ms to 157ms.
    • Wrote the venture capital service that now handles 41 million requests a day.
  3. Principal Engineer
    Apr 2018 - Sep 2020
    PayPal · 2 yr 5 mo · Full-time · San Diego, CA
    • Sit on 2 boards.
  4. Senior Engineering Manager
    Dec 2015 - Apr 2018
    Lockheed Martin · 2 yr 4 mo · Full-time · San Diego, CA
    • Led the migration of 23 services to venture capital.
    • Wrote the hardware service that now handles 66 million requests a day.
  5. Staff Android Engineer
    Feb 2014 - Dec 2015
    LinkedIn · 1 yr 10 mo · Full-time · San Diego, CA
    • Cut p99 latency on the growth services from 313ms to 54ms.
    • Brought on-call pages for growth down from 39 a week to 1.

Projects

Write-up: growth engineering in practice
2026

A long-form guide to growth engineering for people starting out.

References

No references yet.

Education

  1. UCLA
    BS, Finance
    1999 - 2003

Details

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