A Peace Corps Volunteer and a Bond Trader Walk into a Bar…


A few weeks ago, Blue Forest Founder and CEO Zach Knight was invited back to Haas to speak at his ten-year reunion. He used the time to reflect on how Blue Forest got started.
The seed was planted just off campus, outside a bar, when his classmate Nick Wobbrock tapped him on the shoulder and said, “You’re the guy who used to work on Wall Street, right?” He’d been designing rural water systems in Honduras. Zach had been trading bonds in New York. They didn’t know each other well, but they grabbed a beer—and started talking about infrastructure, climate, and why we only invest in one kind of system and not the other.
That conversation became the foundation for Blue Forest. This talk is a look back at what we’ve built since, what we’ve learned along the way, and why we still believe that the only way to solve big problems is to slow down, build trust, and do the work together.