About

Full background at: www.nick-rizzo.com

I’m Nick Rizzo. I grew up in Kingston, Massachusetts, studied anthropology at Harvard, and have spent most of my career solving problems under pressure.

After college I walked across India on a Rockefeller Fellowship. I then served as an Air Force Pararescueman (PJ), where the job was improvising rescues in harsh conditions with whatever gear we carried. After that I ran teams at Palantir across energy, telecom, automotive, defense, and public health, then co-founded Momento, a memory-keeping app that was later acquired. Today I’m VP of Special Projects at Mariana Minerals, working on critical minerals processing and attending Sloan.

Most of my building so far has been organizations, software, and homesteading adjacent. I’m taking How to Make Almost Anything because I want my hands on the physical side. At home in Duxbury, my wife Kiley and I are slowly turning our property into a homestead with our two kids, Gloria and Barrett, and I’m currently building a post-and-beam sauna and office from locally milled pine. For my final project I’m leaning toward a volumetric display vortex.

My family prayer starts with “We are builders. We are creators.” This class is my chance to deepen that commitment.