I met Drew Thompson at the Edison Electric Institute meeting in Phoenix earlier this year, and within minutes I knew he had to be on this show. There's an energy about Drew — no pun intended — that's infectious. He's the kind of person who walks into a room and immediately makes you feel like you've known him for years. But beneath that warmth is a story of discipline, resilience, and hard-won wisdom that I think every listener and reader needs to hear.
Drew is currently the manager of distribution reliability for the New Orleans metro region with Entergy. He holds a BS in electrical engineering from Southern University A&M College and an MBA from the University of Phoenix. He's spent 17 years at Entergy and three at Georgia Power. But the numbers don't begin to capture who Drew Thompson is — a man shaped by a family of nine in New Orleans, humbled by financial struggles he's candid enough to share publicly, and driven by a mission to open doors for the next generation of utility professionals, especially those who don't always see themselves reflected in this industry.
Drew's story starts in a small town in Mississippi called Carthage, off Highway 98. His mother, Johnny, was born there in 1949. When Drew's grandmother passed away, his grandfather moved the family to Los Angeles, where Drew's father, Damaris, had been born and raised. Drew's parents met in high school as freshmen and became high school sweethearts. By the customs of the time, when they were expecting, Drew's grandfather asked his father what his intentions were. The answer: "To marry your daughter."
From that union came seven children — Damaris Jr., Darryl, Rochelle, Derek, DeWine, Drew, and Deshawn. If you noticed a pattern, you're right: every boy's name starts with D. Drew's mom named all the boys; his dad got to name one child, their sister Rochelle.
The family eventually moved to New Orleans in the mid-1970s, and that stable, large family environment became the bedrock of everything Drew would build. His parents recently celebrated birthdays just two days apart — his father turning 78 and his mother 77 — and they've been married for 55 years. Drew shares August with both of them, a detail he clearly treasures.
That family stability mattered, because Drew's father didn't finish high school. He worked incredibly hard, but with seven kids, money went out the door as fast as it came in. Drew watched his parents navigate those struggles, and the lesson they drilled into every one of their children was simple: save your money. A rainy day is coming.
It was a lesson Drew would have to learn the hard way himself.
Drew interned at Entergy for three years while in college, and even then he was paying attention to something that most young engineers miss: the leaders who made it to the top almost never stayed in purely technical roles. "I used to always ask, why did you go to school for four or five years, but you're not the VP of engineering?" he told me. "You're over customer service, or you're over some other business unit."
That observation shaped his entire career strategy. Instead of staying in one lane, Drew deliberately bounced around — six or seven different roles during his internship alone. When he joined Entergy full-time, he started in field metering (PTs and CTs for different customer types), moved to distribution, then relocated to Atlanta for Georgia Power, where he did transmission line design.
Atlanta was a growth accelerator. "My peer has a PhD in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech and I just have a bachelor's degree, and that was just the norm," Drew recalled. The competitive workforce put a spark in him. But he missed home, so in 2010 he returned to New Orleans and moved into transmission maintenance — flying helicopters, riding airboats through the marsh, inspecting infrastructure across a territory that served hundreds of thousands of customers.
The jump from a small local office to transmission-level responsibility was transformative. When transmission goes out, cities go dark, politicians call, and executives start asking tough questions. "It made my critical thinking skills grow because now it's not just a small event. It's magnified."
From there, Drew made the transition that many engineers struggle with — from technical to business. He moved into customer service, trading his FR clothing for suits, dealing with politicians and managed accounts like hospitals and school systems. That's where his community engagement passion ignited. Then came power generation, where he helped commission Entergy's one and only RICE (Reciprocating Internal Combustion Engine) technology plant — a 15-month project that tested him in every way imaginable.
I have to share how Drew explained this technology, because it's brilliant. Traditional power plants, he said, are like making grits on the stove — boiling water, waiting for pressure, 18 hours before you get output. The RICE plant is like instant grits in the microwave. Five minutes to full load — 129 megawatts, enough to power roughly 8,000 homes. When Hurricane Ida hit in 2021, that plant got first lights on in two days. The plant Drew helped commission.
"When I look at that plaque," he said, referring to the signed farewell photo from the plant team, "that was 15 months of hard work." It's his proudest career achievement, and rightfully so.
I couldn't have Drew on the show without asking about the 2013 Super Bowl blackout. The Ravens versus the 49ers, the Harbowl, in New Orleans — and the lights went out. As someone in Entergy's transmission group at the time, Drew had a front-row seat.
"When I saw what happened, I was shocked," he said. "I checked my phone because I had a notification process, and when nothing went off, I knew it wasn't a transmission event. It had to be localized — distribution." The root cause turned out to be a relay in a switchgear that was supposed to have been bypassed but wasn't. And because the Superdome still had older lighting technology rather than modern LEDs, the bulbs had to cool off and restart — a process that took about 27 minutes.
The aftermath drove a comprehensive mitigation strategy. Entergy brought in specialists for forensic analysis, studied how the Superdome was fed electrically, and added redundancy. When New Orleans hosted the Super Bowl again in 2025 — Eagles versus Chiefs — Entergy had spent a full year with a tiger team spanning IT, operations, legal, and more. The event went flawlessly, and Drew believes it may position New Orleans for another Super Bowl soon.
I found this particularly interesting because right after that 2013 blackout is when I started Think Power Solutions. One of our first projects was for CenterPoint, helping prepare for the 2017 Super Bowl by mapping out the system and identifying potential failure points. Every utility learned lessons from that night in New Orleans.
Drew broke down the relationship between reliability, resiliency, and affordability in a way that I think is the clearest explanation I've heard.
Reliability is keeping the lights on each and every day. It's looking at your current infrastructure, finding low-hanging fruit, and executing both quick wins and strategic multi-year plans. Entergy New Orleans averages a SAIFI (frequency) of about one to two outages per customer per year, and a SAIDI (duration) of about 1.2 to 1.3 hours — roughly two hours when rounded.
Resiliency is how fast you recover from a major event. It's the difference between 10 poles going down versus 200 after a 150-mph storm. It's making sure that when the storm passes, you might have a wire on the ground but not widespread structural failure.
Affordability is finding efficiencies internally and redistributing those gains to the areas that move the needle most. It's also pursuing Department of Energy grants and other partnerships so that a $100 million investment might only cost customers $80 million.
These three are deeply interconnected and often in tension. As I pointed out to Drew, moving SAIDI from 1.2 hours to 1.1 hours might cost a billion dollars. Is that the best use of capital, or would that money be better spent on resiliency improvements that also improve affordability? It's the fundamental balancing act every utility faces.
The conversation turned to one of the hottest topics in the industry: data center growth and its impact on the grid. Drew shared that he'd visited Dominion Energy's "Data Center Alley" near Washington, D.C., through an EEI emerging leader program and was stunned by the concentration — what seemed like every building was a data center, surrounded by substations and transmission lines.
For Entergy, the data center opportunity is real. Meta has secured a plant in Louisiana's Richland Parish, expected to be operational by 2029. The investment is massive — two new power plants, eight substations, upgrades to 500 kV and 230 kV infrastructure — all for a single customer. The risk is significant, and the question of who pays is the central tension playing out across the industry.
Drew shared that Entergy's approach is structured so that data center customers bear a meaningful share of the cost burden to keep rates flat for existing customers. Beyond financial contributions, these customers are also matching Entergy's community engagement investments — a model that not only protects ratepayers but makes the data center company an active member of the community. It's a thoughtful approach that other utilities could learn from.
On AI's role within the utility itself, Drew noted that Entergy recently stood up a dedicated AI department under a chief AI officer, Andrew Quick. The applications Drew is most excited about are practical: automating payroll processing from 20 minutes down to three, using AI-driven data analytics to make smarter reliability investments, and partnering with vendors to use AI and LiDAR for predictive vegetation management and storm crew pre-positioning.
I shared with Drew the work CenterPoint is doing with my friend Eric Easton, where AI and LiDAR data can predict with 85% accuracy which fuses are likely to fail during a storm — enabling pre-positioned restoration crews and reducing outages by 45%. Drew confirmed that Entergy is pursuing similar capabilities with vendor partners. The potential is enormous: shorter outage times, higher customer satisfaction, better SAIDI and SAIFI numbers, and lower storm recovery costs.
This is where Drew's story gets deeply personal, and I'm grateful for his willingness to share it.
When Drew moved to Atlanta for Georgia Power, he fell into a pattern that many young professionals know too well — trying to live a lifestyle his paycheck couldn't support. He got into financial trouble. He had a car repossessed. He was living beyond his means, and it caught up with him.
He moved back to New Orleans in 2010 and did something that took real humility: he moved back in with his parents. "I humbled myself to say, I didn't do what I thought was right. Can I stay with you until I get back on my feet?"
From 2010 to 2014, Drew paid off $117,000 of debt in 34 months. Let me repeat that: $117,000 in 34 months. Through discipline, savings, and the same lesson his parents had tried to teach him all along — save your money, because a rainy day is coming.
"That fall was similar to my father's," Drew reflected. "I figured out what was important and what wasn't. And now to this day, there's no person or thing that would get me back off track."
His advice to anyone listening: be financially literate. Read books. Use YouTube. Learn from family. Teach yourself. However you need to do it, understand money — because financial literacy isn't optional.
Drew shared a story that was difficult to hear but important to tell. During his three-year internship at Entergy, he had built a warm relationship with a colleague. They'd laugh together, go to lunch, joke around. The man had known Drew from age 18 through graduation.
When Drew graduated and bought a nice two-seater car — proud of himself and his accomplishment — this same colleague looked at the car and said: "We're paying you too much money."
Three years of camaraderie, praise, and shared lunches. And then that.
"It hurt, and it still hurts today," Drew said. "But it's reality."
He didn't dwell on it. His response was characteristically Drew: put forth the best product, be a team player, be dependable and reliable, and move forward. "I try to make sure that when you see Drew, you know he won't fumble the ball." It's a philosophy that has carried him from intern to manager of distribution reliability for the New Orleans metro region.
Drew is deeply involved in efforts to attract diverse talent into the utility industry. Through EEI, he serves as second vice chair of the distribution committee's dynamic workforce group. Through Entergy, he's active in the employee experience program and the trade, craft, and shift employee resource group. He's also a vice president of the American Association of Blacks in Energy.
But what struck me most was his honesty about the pipeline problem. At Southern University's career fairs, maybe 40 companies would show up. At nearby LSU? Perhaps 200. "Sometimes you don't have the visibility that other institutions would have," Drew said. That gap in access — not in talent — is something the industry needs to address.
Drew's approach to mentoring is refreshingly practical. He tells kids to look beyond the star on the screen and notice the five minutes of credits that roll after every movie. "There's a whole army in the background. There's data scientists, there's finance, there's legal, there's production. It's so many opportunities in the background, and I try to get them to see the possibility."
And his pitch for the industry itself? "We work for an industry where it is essential. And when you say essential, that's job security." In a world where everything runs on electricity — from the digital classrooms replacing chalkboards to the AI data centers reshaping the economy — the utility industry isn't just stable. It's foundational.
I didn't get to ask Drew this one directly in our rapid-fire round, but his values came through clearly throughout our conversation. This is a man who believes in showing up — for his family, his community, his colleagues, and for young people who don't always have someone advocating for them. His leadership isn't about title or position. It's about being present, being authentic, and pulling someone up every chance you get.
When I gave Drew the ultimate New Orleans rapid-fire question — Camellia Grill versus Café Du Monde — he didn't hesitate. "I'm a sweet tooth guy, so Café Du Monde. I need my beignets, I need my chocolate, and I need my sights. People dancing, people singing, the horses, just the art."
And then he extended the invitation that every New Orleanian does: "If you haven't been to New Orleans, I recommend anybody watching this. Come over, have a great time, enjoy yourself. It's a lot of history, a lot of culture, and I promise you, you will want to come back many more times."
Having lived there myself during the magical 2009 Saints season — Bourbon Street after the Super Bowl in 2010, breakfast at Camellia Grill (sorry, Drew), and that unforgettable onside kick to start the second half of the Super Bowl — I can confirm: he's absolutely right.
Drew Thompson's journey is a testament to something I believe deeply: the utility industry is full of extraordinary people whose stories rarely get told. From a family of seven kids in New Orleans to the control rooms of power plants and the conference tables of EEI, Drew has built a career through curiosity, adaptability, financial discipline, and an unwavering commitment to being the best version of himself every single day.
He's honest about his failures — the debt, the car repossession, the handshake deal that should have been a contract. And he's generous with his successes — sharing them not as trophies but as lessons for whoever comes next.
When Hurricane Ida knocked out power to New Orleans in 2021, the RICE plant that Drew helped commission was the reason first lights came on in two days. That's not a line on a résumé. That's a man's life work, measured in the homes that got their power back.
Thank you, Drew, for your authenticity, your energy, and your commitment to powering not just the grid, but the next generation. Who Dat.
From Boots to Boardroom shares the journey of those who power America — from the job site to the boardroom, leading with grit, tenacity, empathy, and vision. Not every leader sits in a corner office.
Listen to the full episode with Drew Thompson and subscribe to the podcast here.
This episode sponsored by KYRO AI: Digitize work and maximize profits. Learn more at kyro.ai
I met Drew Thompson at the Edison Electric Institute meeting in Phoenix earlier this year, and within minutes I knew he had to be on this show. There's an energy about Drew — no pun intended — that's infectious. He's the kind of person who walks into a room and immediately makes you feel like you've known him for years. But beneath that warmth is a story of discipline, resilience, and hard-won wisdom that I think every listener and reader needs to hear.
Drew is currently the manager of distribution reliability for the New Orleans metro region with Entergy. He holds a BS in electrical engineering from Southern University A&M College and an MBA from the University of Phoenix. He's spent 17 years at Entergy and three at Georgia Power. But the numbers don't begin to capture who Drew Thompson is — a man shaped by a family of nine in New Orleans, humbled by financial struggles he's candid enough to share publicly, and driven by a mission to open doors for the next generation of utility professionals, especially those who don't always see themselves reflected in this industry.
Drew's story starts in a small town in Mississippi called Carthage, off Highway 98. His mother, Johnny, was born there in 1949. When Drew's grandmother passed away, his grandfather moved the family to Los Angeles, where Drew's father, Damaris, had been born and raised. Drew's parents met in high school as freshmen and became high school sweethearts. By the customs of the time, when they were expecting, Drew's grandfather asked his father what his intentions were. The answer: "To marry your daughter."
From that union came seven children — Damaris Jr., Darryl, Rochelle, Derek, DeWine, Drew, and Deshawn. If you noticed a pattern, you're right: every boy's name starts with D. Drew's mom named all the boys; his dad got to name one child, their sister Rochelle.
The family eventually moved to New Orleans in the mid-1970s, and that stable, large family environment became the bedrock of everything Drew would build. His parents recently celebrated birthdays just two days apart — his father turning 78 and his mother 77 — and they've been married for 55 years. Drew shares August with both of them, a detail he clearly treasures.
That family stability mattered, because Drew's father didn't finish high school. He worked incredibly hard, but with seven kids, money went out the door as fast as it came in. Drew watched his parents navigate those struggles, and the lesson they drilled into every one of their children was simple: save your money. A rainy day is coming.
It was a lesson Drew would have to learn the hard way himself.
Drew interned at Entergy for three years while in college, and even then he was paying attention to something that most young engineers miss: the leaders who made it to the top almost never stayed in purely technical roles. "I used to always ask, why did you go to school for four or five years, but you're not the VP of engineering?" he told me. "You're over customer service, or you're over some other business unit."
That observation shaped his entire career strategy. Instead of staying in one lane, Drew deliberately bounced around — six or seven different roles during his internship alone. When he joined Entergy full-time, he started in field metering (PTs and CTs for different customer types), moved to distribution, then relocated to Atlanta for Georgia Power, where he did transmission line design.
Atlanta was a growth accelerator. "My peer has a PhD in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech and I just have a bachelor's degree, and that was just the norm," Drew recalled. The competitive workforce put a spark in him. But he missed home, so in 2010 he returned to New Orleans and moved into transmission maintenance — flying helicopters, riding airboats through the marsh, inspecting infrastructure across a territory that served hundreds of thousands of customers.
The jump from a small local office to transmission-level responsibility was transformative. When transmission goes out, cities go dark, politicians call, and executives start asking tough questions. "It made my critical thinking skills grow because now it's not just a small event. It's magnified."
From there, Drew made the transition that many engineers struggle with — from technical to business. He moved into customer service, trading his FR clothing for suits, dealing with politicians and managed accounts like hospitals and school systems. That's where his community engagement passion ignited. Then came power generation, where he helped commission Entergy's one and only RICE (Reciprocating Internal Combustion Engine) technology plant — a 15-month project that tested him in every way imaginable.
I have to share how Drew explained this technology, because it's brilliant. Traditional power plants, he said, are like making grits on the stove — boiling water, waiting for pressure, 18 hours before you get output. The RICE plant is like instant grits in the microwave. Five minutes to full load — 129 megawatts, enough to power roughly 8,000 homes. When Hurricane Ida hit in 2021, that plant got first lights on in two days. The plant Drew helped commission.
"When I look at that plaque," he said, referring to the signed farewell photo from the plant team, "that was 15 months of hard work." It's his proudest career achievement, and rightfully so.
I couldn't have Drew on the show without asking about the 2013 Super Bowl blackout. The Ravens versus the 49ers, the Harbowl, in New Orleans — and the lights went out. As someone in Entergy's transmission group at the time, Drew had a front-row seat.
"When I saw what happened, I was shocked," he said. "I checked my phone because I had a notification process, and when nothing went off, I knew it wasn't a transmission event. It had to be localized — distribution." The root cause turned out to be a relay in a switchgear that was supposed to have been bypassed but wasn't. And because the Superdome still had older lighting technology rather than modern LEDs, the bulbs had to cool off and restart — a process that took about 27 minutes.
The aftermath drove a comprehensive mitigation strategy. Entergy brought in specialists for forensic analysis, studied how the Superdome was fed electrically, and added redundancy. When New Orleans hosted the Super Bowl again in 2025 — Eagles versus Chiefs — Entergy had spent a full year with a tiger team spanning IT, operations, legal, and more. The event went flawlessly, and Drew believes it may position New Orleans for another Super Bowl soon.
I found this particularly interesting because right after that 2013 blackout is when I started Think Power Solutions. One of our first projects was for CenterPoint, helping prepare for the 2017 Super Bowl by mapping out the system and identifying potential failure points. Every utility learned lessons from that night in New Orleans.
Drew broke down the relationship between reliability, resiliency, and affordability in a way that I think is the clearest explanation I've heard.
Reliability is keeping the lights on each and every day. It's looking at your current infrastructure, finding low-hanging fruit, and executing both quick wins and strategic multi-year plans. Entergy New Orleans averages a SAIFI (frequency) of about one to two outages per customer per year, and a SAIDI (duration) of about 1.2 to 1.3 hours — roughly two hours when rounded.
Resiliency is how fast you recover from a major event. It's the difference between 10 poles going down versus 200 after a 150-mph storm. It's making sure that when the storm passes, you might have a wire on the ground but not widespread structural failure.
Affordability is finding efficiencies internally and redistributing those gains to the areas that move the needle most. It's also pursuing Department of Energy grants and other partnerships so that a $100 million investment might only cost customers $80 million.
These three are deeply interconnected and often in tension. As I pointed out to Drew, moving SAIDI from 1.2 hours to 1.1 hours might cost a billion dollars. Is that the best use of capital, or would that money be better spent on resiliency improvements that also improve affordability? It's the fundamental balancing act every utility faces.
The conversation turned to one of the hottest topics in the industry: data center growth and its impact on the grid. Drew shared that he'd visited Dominion Energy's "Data Center Alley" near Washington, D.C., through an EEI emerging leader program and was stunned by the concentration — what seemed like every building was a data center, surrounded by substations and transmission lines.
For Entergy, the data center opportunity is real. Meta has secured a plant in Louisiana's Richland Parish, expected to be operational by 2029. The investment is massive — two new power plants, eight substations, upgrades to 500 kV and 230 kV infrastructure — all for a single customer. The risk is significant, and the question of who pays is the central tension playing out across the industry.
Drew shared that Entergy's approach is structured so that data center customers bear a meaningful share of the cost burden to keep rates flat for existing customers. Beyond financial contributions, these customers are also matching Entergy's community engagement investments — a model that not only protects ratepayers but makes the data center company an active member of the community. It's a thoughtful approach that other utilities could learn from.
On AI's role within the utility itself, Drew noted that Entergy recently stood up a dedicated AI department under a chief AI officer, Andrew Quick. The applications Drew is most excited about are practical: automating payroll processing from 20 minutes down to three, using AI-driven data analytics to make smarter reliability investments, and partnering with vendors to use AI and LiDAR for predictive vegetation management and storm crew pre-positioning.
I shared with Drew the work CenterPoint is doing with my friend Eric Easton, where AI and LiDAR data can predict with 85% accuracy which fuses are likely to fail during a storm — enabling pre-positioned restoration crews and reducing outages by 45%. Drew confirmed that Entergy is pursuing similar capabilities with vendor partners. The potential is enormous: shorter outage times, higher customer satisfaction, better SAIDI and SAIFI numbers, and lower storm recovery costs.
This is where Drew's story gets deeply personal, and I'm grateful for his willingness to share it.
When Drew moved to Atlanta for Georgia Power, he fell into a pattern that many young professionals know too well — trying to live a lifestyle his paycheck couldn't support. He got into financial trouble. He had a car repossessed. He was living beyond his means, and it caught up with him.
He moved back to New Orleans in 2010 and did something that took real humility: he moved back in with his parents. "I humbled myself to say, I didn't do what I thought was right. Can I stay with you until I get back on my feet?"
From 2010 to 2014, Drew paid off $117,000 of debt in 34 months. Let me repeat that: $117,000 in 34 months. Through discipline, savings, and the same lesson his parents had tried to teach him all along — save your money, because a rainy day is coming.
"That fall was similar to my father's," Drew reflected. "I figured out what was important and what wasn't. And now to this day, there's no person or thing that would get me back off track."
His advice to anyone listening: be financially literate. Read books. Use YouTube. Learn from family. Teach yourself. However you need to do it, understand money — because financial literacy isn't optional.
Drew shared a story that was difficult to hear but important to tell. During his three-year internship at Entergy, he had built a warm relationship with a colleague. They'd laugh together, go to lunch, joke around. The man had known Drew from age 18 through graduation.
When Drew graduated and bought a nice two-seater car — proud of himself and his accomplishment — this same colleague looked at the car and said: "We're paying you too much money."
Three years of camaraderie, praise, and shared lunches. And then that.
"It hurt, and it still hurts today," Drew said. "But it's reality."
He didn't dwell on it. His response was characteristically Drew: put forth the best product, be a team player, be dependable and reliable, and move forward. "I try to make sure that when you see Drew, you know he won't fumble the ball." It's a philosophy that has carried him from intern to manager of distribution reliability for the New Orleans metro region.
Drew is deeply involved in efforts to attract diverse talent into the utility industry. Through EEI, he serves as second vice chair of the distribution committee's dynamic workforce group. Through Entergy, he's active in the employee experience program and the trade, craft, and shift employee resource group. He's also a vice president of the American Association of Blacks in Energy.
But what struck me most was his honesty about the pipeline problem. At Southern University's career fairs, maybe 40 companies would show up. At nearby LSU? Perhaps 200. "Sometimes you don't have the visibility that other institutions would have," Drew said. That gap in access — not in talent — is something the industry needs to address.
Drew's approach to mentoring is refreshingly practical. He tells kids to look beyond the star on the screen and notice the five minutes of credits that roll after every movie. "There's a whole army in the background. There's data scientists, there's finance, there's legal, there's production. It's so many opportunities in the background, and I try to get them to see the possibility."
And his pitch for the industry itself? "We work for an industry where it is essential. And when you say essential, that's job security." In a world where everything runs on electricity — from the digital classrooms replacing chalkboards to the AI data centers reshaping the economy — the utility industry isn't just stable. It's foundational.
I didn't get to ask Drew this one directly in our rapid-fire round, but his values came through clearly throughout our conversation. This is a man who believes in showing up — for his family, his community, his colleagues, and for young people who don't always have someone advocating for them. His leadership isn't about title or position. It's about being present, being authentic, and pulling someone up every chance you get.
When I gave Drew the ultimate New Orleans rapid-fire question — Camellia Grill versus Café Du Monde — he didn't hesitate. "I'm a sweet tooth guy, so Café Du Monde. I need my beignets, I need my chocolate, and I need my sights. People dancing, people singing, the horses, just the art."
And then he extended the invitation that every New Orleanian does: "If you haven't been to New Orleans, I recommend anybody watching this. Come over, have a great time, enjoy yourself. It's a lot of history, a lot of culture, and I promise you, you will want to come back many more times."
Having lived there myself during the magical 2009 Saints season — Bourbon Street after the Super Bowl in 2010, breakfast at Camellia Grill (sorry, Drew), and that unforgettable onside kick to start the second half of the Super Bowl — I can confirm: he's absolutely right.
Drew Thompson's journey is a testament to something I believe deeply: the utility industry is full of extraordinary people whose stories rarely get told. From a family of seven kids in New Orleans to the control rooms of power plants and the conference tables of EEI, Drew has built a career through curiosity, adaptability, financial discipline, and an unwavering commitment to being the best version of himself every single day.
He's honest about his failures — the debt, the car repossession, the handshake deal that should have been a contract. And he's generous with his successes — sharing them not as trophies but as lessons for whoever comes next.
When Hurricane Ida knocked out power to New Orleans in 2021, the RICE plant that Drew helped commission was the reason first lights came on in two days. That's not a line on a résumé. That's a man's life work, measured in the homes that got their power back.
Thank you, Drew, for your authenticity, your energy, and your commitment to powering not just the grid, but the next generation. Who Dat.
From Boots to Boardroom shares the journey of those who power America — from the job site to the boardroom, leading with grit, tenacity, empathy, and vision. Not every leader sits in a corner office.
Listen to the full episode with Drew Thompson and subscribe to the podcast here.
This episode sponsored by KYRO AI: Digitize work and maximize profits. Learn more at kyro.ai
Hari Vasudevan, PE, is a serial entrepreneur and engineer focused on AI-driven solutions for utilities, construction, and storm response. As Founder and CEO of KYRO AI, he leads the development of AI-powered software that helps utility, vegetation, and field service teams digitize operations, improve storm response and restoration, and reduce operational risk. He also serves as Vice Chair and Strategic Advisor for the Edison Electric Institute’s Transmission Subject Area Committee and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering with professional engineering licensure in multiple states.
