Harry Critchfield-Jain

About

Harry Critchfield-Jain builds new businesses and makes them run. These days he works with AI, making tools for his own work and prototypes for others.

He co-founded a carbon trading desk at Kataman, a metals trading company, where he ran a proprietary trading book in California carbon allowances. He later took the business to London as managing director, leading a team that sold voluntary carbon credits to corporate buyers and developed new carbon offset projects.

He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA with honors in History of Science from the University of Chicago, where he wrote his thesis comparing today's space founders to the historical industrialists who came before them.

Projects

  1. 2026

    Vox: one screen for broker quotes

    Commodity traders work their broker quotes out of dozens of WhatsApp and Telegram chats. I explored Vox as a venture to pull those quotes into one live view: I ran discovery with a veteran trader as design partner and put together a working demo that parsed real quotes into a dashboard.

  2. 2026

    Pricing a carbon credit, piece by piece

    A carbon credit trades at a single price, even though its value comes from many things at once: where the project sits, the standard that certified it, its vintage, who verified it, and the social benefits attached. For a Strategy for Entrepreneurs project at Harvard, I built a web app that used AI to break credit prices into those factors, so each one could be valued on its own.

  3. 2026

    Space-based solar, modeled end to end

    At Harvard, two classmates and I developed an interactive model of the economics of space-based solar power, following the energy from a satellite in geostationary orbit down to the grid. We wrote it with AI coding tools.

  4. 2025

    A hardware launch, before the first unit

    For a pre-revenue consumer hardware company, I developed the financial and operating model: bill of materials, production runs against overseas lead times, cash timing, and the financing it would need.

  5. 2025

    Turning sales calls into a roadmap

    In the Office of the CEO at Omatic, I prototyped an early AI tool that pulled customer use cases out of recorded sales calls to inform the product roadmap, then handed it to engineering to grow into a full system.

Story

  1. 2016 to 2020

    University of Chicago

    BA with honors in the history of science.

  2. 2021 to 2022

    Co-founder, carbon trading desk, Kataman

    Started a carbon desk inside a metals trading company, beginning with a proprietary trading book in California carbon allowances. I also ran marketing for the whole company, including its rebrand.

  3. 2022 to 2024

    Managing Director, London

    Opened the London office and grew a team of seven to trade voluntary carbon credits: sourcing them from project developers, selling them to corporate buyers, and developing new projects of our own.

  4. 2024 to 2026

    Harvard Business School, MBA

    Focused on entrepreneurship and startup operations, with a lean toward tough tech, through courses like Tough Tech Ventures, Scaling Technology Ventures, and Entrepreneurial Finance.

  5. 2025

    Office of the CEO, Omatic

    Worked across marketing, operations, product, and sales for the CEO, and prototyped an AI tool over the company's sales calls.

  6. Now

    Exploring AI

    Tools for my own work and prototypes for others.