Victoria Beasley grew up in a small North Carolina town playing in the woods every day, which led to her deep connection to nature and early passion for science rather than a traditional finance background, and she spent time working at an HIV clinic in Ethiopia doing financial reporting before transitioning to climate investing. She was taking vacation time from finance roles to secretly attend early sustainability conferences well before climate investing was fashionable, and now co-founded Gigascale Capital with former Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer after building her climate investing track record at Prelude Ventures, where she led investments like Lightship's all-electric, self-propelled travel trailer from ex-Tesla engineers.