JC Btaiche

How I Got Here: Accelerating Energy Abundance

Palo Alto, California. JC Btaiche is the CEO and Founder of Fuse, a start up on a mission to accelerate the world’s transition to fusion energy - a clean, limitless, safe, and on-demand source of energy. Prior to building Fuse in the United States, JC worked on his previous venture Hestia Academy, an online education platform for teenagers in Montreal while simultaneously attending high school.

A tinkerer from Lebanon

Growing up in Lebanon, JC always knew he wanted to build things. Throughout his childhood he was often described as a “tinkerer” by friends and family alike – spending his free time deconstructing toys, electronics, and whatever else he could get his hands on. “I was never someone who wanted to sit in classrooms”, JC stated as he went on to describe his boundless curiosity.

‍

JC owes his interests, in large part, to his father who was a Nuclear Physicist by training. His father had studied nuclear physics in Lebanon but due to a civil war was forced to immigrate to Canada where he did not continue his career in academia. Despite this, JC picked up a physicist's curiosity about the universe. He began to question “how does one know all these things about the universe if they’ve never been there”? As soon as the questions arose, JC set out on a path to answer them. By grade 9, he was already working in a Plasma Physics lab in Lebanon.

Always on the move

While working in the aforementioned physics lab JC couldn’t help but to dream bigger. He wanted to explore the universe, so he asked his professor “I want to build fusion powered rockets, how do I start?". The professor put it bluntly "you need to immigrate". It was in this short exchange that JC learned in order to build something big it was going to require a move out west.

Within 2 weeks of this conversation he moved to Canada through the Canadian citizenship his dad’s prior immigration journey had afforded him. After spending some time researching at McGill University and running his start up Hestia Academy, JC ran into the same problem he ran into back in Lebanon, you can’t build big enough in Canada.

‍

JC set his sights on Silicon Valley — the world’s most fertile ground for building things. He considered his goal of working on fusion technology and recognized it would require significant investment and have huge defense considerations. While other Great Powers like China and Russia are pursuing big technologies like Fusion,  it became clear the only place where JC could “pursue ambitious goals while advancing values like freedom and democracy” was the U.S. Once decided on his desire to move across borders one more time, JC set out to acquire an O-1 visa, and then shortly after, get the green card through the EB1

The sky's the limit

Since moving to the U.S., JC has been able to grow Fuse, a nuclear fusion company at the forefront of clean energy innovations. Thanks to his proximity to investors in the Bay Area, Fuse has raised over $16M in venture capital. Despite his hard work in Canada, JC states the U.S. is the only place in the world he could build out his vision for Fuse.

"America is the best country because you can dream of something crazy and then go out and actually make it happen if you work hard enough"

JC has taken this same philosophy and applied it to his personal life since moving. He’s noticed that the people he gets along with most are those he’s met here in the U.S. citing “likeminded ambitions and values” that bind them together. It’s because of those very people that he has begun to explore one of his lifelong goals of flying a plane. JC now finds himself flying planes with other hobbyists out of Palo Alto and hopes to soon start going on solo flights.

Advice to immigrant hopefuls

Despite the O-1 visa being touted as the “extraordinary person’s visa”, according to JC getting an O-1 visa is no harder than many of your other goals. JC states “some people put a metric for their success — such as getting into their dream school or landing their dream job [...] if you think about engineering your path to work in the US as an objective it’s something you can work towards like all other things”. JC suggests finding the right people to help you make an action plan. Breaking down the O-1 visa into its individual parts and building on the criteria that were most achievable for him helped make the immigration journey less daunting.