Growing up, Ian Myers said he attended every football game from when he was five years old until he graduated from Penn State with distinction with a bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering in 2010. With a natural inclination for math, science, and physics– and an environmental engineer father–pursuing engineering was almost a given. A fateful Chevron information session inspired Myers to shift gears.
“I started at Penn State as a chemical engineer focused in biomedical,” said Myers. “Then I learned about big deepwater projects, and it piqued my interest.”
Myers thinks that learning about the big capital projects and hard-engineering problems spoke to his entrepreneurial spirit, which was always bubbling in the background. His new plan was to learn the ropes at a big company before venturing on his own.
“I love building,” Myers said. “Folks view entrepreneurship as very glamorous, but you need to roll up your sleeves and do a lot of dirty work when you’re starting from scratch. I love setting things up and simultaneously trying and evaluating many strategies during those early stages.”
Built on the rigor of oil and gas engineering, Myers pursued an executive master of business administration and expanded his understanding of marketing, behavioral science, behavior economics, and game theory to become a negotiation expert. Through it all, he believes his Penn State engineering background was a critical factor in his success.
“Ultimately, petroleum engineering is all about making asset-based decisions, with uncertainty and limited data—even today,” Myers said. “Understanding how to manage risk and make probabilistic decisions and carrying that engineering mindset to understand the mechanics of negotiation science has been important. And Penn State, because of its size and diversity, allowed me to interact with so much that I developed those essential interpersonal skills and conflict skills that helped me separate early in my career.”
Myers’ most recent endeavor was to form Mainline Ventures, a leading-edge strategic sourcing and procurement advisory firm, in 2023 with his brother, a fellow petroleum and natural gas engineering Penn State alum. There, the two continue the Penn State tradition of rolling up their sleeves and getting to work to create the first AI based strategic sourcing platform, allowing firms to measure and maximize their purchase
efficiency.