I’m Kevin Brennan. Of San Francisco today, and a few countries along the way…
I’m a surfer and athlete, living between a love of city culture and people, and the inspiration of wilderness and no people. My work has been in finance, mostly focusing on raising large amounts of money for clean energy, natural resources and sustainability-driven investments.
Right now, I’m indulging in a career pause through June 2024. It’s delicious!
For fun, I’m writing occasional Life Notes, snippets from the kaleidoscope of curiosity, to stay in touch and to carry on the spirit of some pandemic writing in Letters from San Francisco.
I was born in Canada but mostly grew up in England to Irish parents, living also in Scotland, France and Australia during student years. My first decade of career was in London, a majestic city that always felt ‘home’, until in my mid-thirties I made a instinctive new ‘life rule’ one morning while surfing in Bali: always live by the ocean. Days later I stumbled into an interesting job opportunity to move to San Francisco with Terra Global Capital.
In the bone, I’m Irish and from a family culture that is very Irish. My parents left Ireland in the adventure of emigrating to Canada, in the years after their young marriage started. Mum and Dad had grown up in Donegal, nestled in the rugged coastal beauty of North West Ireland where my four grandparents – sadly Mum also now – lie at rest today in a beautiful hillside cemetery gazing out on the Donegal Bay. So, Donegal is my ‘ethnic’ home.
My work over 25 years has been mostly in environmental finance, raising capital for energy, natural resources and sustainability-driven investments. This all evolved from deliberately blending a first degree in Economics and Business (University of Edinburgh, 1998) with the Chartered Financial Analyst professional training (CFA, 2001) and then a Masters in Environmental Management focusing on natural resource and climate change economics (University of New South Wales UNSW, Sydney, 2003). I seem to love interdisciplinary knowledge and continuous learning, as my lens on curiosity in the world. My LinkedIn is here, and I scribbled out more on my backstory here.
This site started as a fun project during a sabbatical in 2021. For years, I’ve found bloggers interesting characters and spirits. So I dared myself to make my own digital scrapbook, for mucky moments of personal writing that would bubble up, mostly on a plane…
You’ll find….
Letters – travelogue emails during a 2021 sabbatical
Favorite essays include…
- capturing the visceral beauty of surfing, in Dawn Magic and The Moment You Drop Into A Wave
- impulsive writing on the spirit and skill in jazz music, in Branford Marsalis and A Fire Engine In Grace Cathedral
- an essay on family, nationality and where we’re from, in On Our Family And Roaming
- and there’s one poem Mum, Where Are You Now? that flowed out of me, in about eight minutes, thinking about Mum on the first Mother’s Day morning after her 2019 death. Mum always encouraged me to write (thank you!).
Kevin
San Francisco, 2021
P.S. I’m occasionally on Twitter, mostly quotations, LinkedIn for all things career, Instagram for occasional pics and I open Facebook on Christmas Day….
And, you can email me via this Contact Me form.