"Running Tide Technologies is an oyster farm with an eye on climate change," reports PC Magazine. "It does carbon sequestration by growing kelp and its 30 employees include software developers, instrumentation engineers, fabricators, and a data scientist who wrote her doctoral thesis on the impact of sea surface dynamics on ocean nutrients.

"'We put oysters in our system, we grow them, we learn about what the oysters like and don't like and then we adjust our gear accordingly,' said Marty Odlin ['04, Thayer '07], the Maine-based startup's 38-year-old founder. 'So it's just this big iterative cycle where we listen to what the water tells us and to what the oysters tell us.'

"Odlin relied on that iterative process just a few years out of Dartmouth, when he put his engineering degree to use and started a bamboo bike business in New York, which guided people as they built their own bamboo bicycles over the course of a weekend. After Odlin closed down Bamboo Bike Studio, he went home to Maine and worked in the family commercial fishing business. More than a dozen relatives—including his father, uncles, and cousins—have captained commercial fishing vessels over four generations."