Our Team
The People Behind the Land.
NGLC is built on deep land knowledge, infrastructure experience, and a conviction that this work should be done with communities — not to them.
Brian Patten
Founder, CEO
Brian Patten is the Founder and CEO of Next Generation Land Company. A 4th-generation land expert with 26 years of experience, Brian built NGLC around a single conviction: that the defining asset of the AI era is land with access to power. He operates nationally, identifying and securing transmission-adjacent acreage before demand makes it impossible to find.
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Kevin Thuot
Managing Partner
Kevin Thuot is the Managing Partner for Texas data center projects at Next Generation Land Company. Based in Austin, Texas, he has deep energy-sector experience across oil & gas and renewables. He co-founded and led JetRock Analytics for more than a decade, building an energy analytics consultancy that was acquired in 2025. Kevin is known for a rigorous, systems-level approach to decision-making, pairing data analytics expertise with a practical focus on project execution. He holds an M.S. from MIT and a B.S. from The University of Texas at Austin, both in Mechanical Engineering.
Scott Morcom
Vice President | Managing Partner, Georgia
Scott Morcom brings more than 15 years of commercial real estate experience to NGLC, with a career built on complex, multi-stakeholder transactions that required equal parts patience, precision, and trust. He gravitates toward deals with long-term weight — developments that fundamentally change how a piece of land and the community around it function for decades. At NGLC, Scott operates at the intersection of landowner expectations, developer requirements, and the regulatory environment surrounding each site. His focus is structuring transactions that are honest, durable, and built without shortcuts that create problems downstream. He believes the quality of the land acquisition determines the stability of everything that follows — and acts accordingly.
Daniel Cunningham
Chief Operating Officer
Dan Cunningham's background is in operations and business leadership — building and scaling teams that deliver consistent results for clients and stakeholders across complex environments. What drew him to NGLC was the chance to apply that discipline in a market where operational rigor actually determines outcomes, not just efficiency. His measure of a successful project isn't just completion. It's whether the community where it was built would call NGLC a good partner. That's the standard he holds his work to, and the standard he expects the people around him to hold theirs to.
Nate Lasee
Vice President Analytics
Nate Lasee's background is in mathematics, operations, and logistics — disciplines that, in land development, translate directly to rigor. His path into the industry started as a land analyst, and the work ethic that shaped that role still drives how he approaches every project evaluation at NGLC. Before NGLC commits to a site, Nate is already running the numbers — and looking beyond them. Parks and community gathering spaces. Traffic patterns. Water and power distribution. Ecological impacts. His position: land development is inevitable, but that doesn't mean it gets to be careless. The communities that host these projects deserve to have someone doing the math on their behalf.
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Mike Ward
Director of Land
Mike Ward's career in oil and gas took him through every corner of landwork — title, abstracting, leasing, mineral acquisitions — but the constant throughout was the relationships. Earning a landowner's trust has always been the work, not a precondition to it. At NGLC, that orientation shapes how Mike approaches site selection and community engagement. He looks for places that genuinely need development, or that can benefit from it — not places that happen to be available. His standard is simple: if he'd be proud to show his kids what got built there in ten years, the work was done right.
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Justin Kimball
Director of Entitlements
Justin Kimball's career spans over 20 years across construction, sales, and property management — from building materials in the Pacific Northwest to overseeing commercial and residential property portfolios across Florida and Georgia. That range gave him a ground-level understanding of how land actually gets developed and what happens when early shortcuts catch up with a project years later. At NGLC, Justin leads entitlements — the point where a project first meets the community it's entering. He treats that process as a conversation, not a checklist. His standard is the same one he developed managing long-term assets: do it right the first time. A project that earns genuine local support from the start is one that gets built and lasts. One that doesn't is a liability, regardless of how the numbers look on paper.
Ron Wamer
Interconnection Engineer
Ron Wamer came to NGLC from the renewable energy side of the industry, where he spent years developing projects and navigating grid interconnection on the transmission system. He understands, from the inside, why the interconnection queue stretches 5-7 years — and why that reality demands a different approach to power strategy than most operators are willing to take. At NGLC, Ron's work shapes how each project connects to the surrounding infrastructure. He knows that good sites are constrained, not abundant — that the number of parcels that actually work, once you factor in power access, permitting, and community fit, drops off quickly from what looks viable on paper. Finding the ones that hold up is the job.
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Heather Stephens
Director of Executive Operations
Heather Stephens holds a BS in Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management and a Master's in Healthcare Administration — a combination that makes more sense the longer you work alongside her. Her career has crossed healthcare, economic development, real estate, and professional sports, and what runs through all of it is the same instinct: create a net benefit for the people around you. At NGLC, Heather works behind the scenes — reading, researching, and staying honest about what is and isn't yet known about the long-term impacts of data center development. She stayed with NGLC because of how the team treats each other and the communities they work in. That, to her, is the tell.
Cassie Lyons
Acquisitions
Cassie Lyons spent 15 years as an oil and gas landman before joining NGLC — work that demanded precision in title, sharp negotiating instincts, and the ability to build real trust with real people in high-stakes situations. She knew the team was right within the first conversation. At NGLC, Cassie works directly with landowners. Her job is to make sure they are fully informed, fairly represented, and positioned to make decisions that create meaningful outcomes for their families. She approaches every conversation the same way: no rush, no pressure, and no filling silence with noise when a straight answer is what someone needs.
Work With Us.
We're building the team for what's next. If you have deep land, infrastructure, or energy experience and want to work on the defining infrastructure challenge of this decade — reach out.