The Fundamental Molecule

The 250-billion-dollar bottled water industry is a monstrous waste of energy, emissions, plastic, money, and yes, water. Ideally, it would not exist at all. Luckily, my guest today, Reuben Vollmer, agrees and has built Spout, an atmospheric water generation machine that provides ultra-high-quality water at the counter top, and all you need to do is plug it in. Reuben’s route here is one of my favo...

My guest today is Nick Dyner, CEO of Moleaer. I've known Nick since the early days of the company when he became a judge at Imagine H2O, and he is one of the founders I admire most in the industry - and for good reason. He has built a fascinating company around the humble and very small nanobubble. No spoilers yet, but they are a revolution in everything from wastewater treatment to biotechnology....

My guest today is Corey Williams, who is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in water. He has built and sold no less than seven companies, with his latest, SmartCover, selling to Badger Meter for $185 million at the start of 2025. Corey is one of the most thoughtful people I know on the art of sales, not only to utilities, but recognizing that great selling is primarily a function of listenin...

I am a big fan of Cala Systems. They've set a completely new standard for the heat pump water heater and water heaters in general. What was initially an afterthought from large manufacturers - essentially a marketing ploy that really didn't make much of a difference to overall water heater performance - Cala is a step-change in its $14 billion annually non-discretionary market. When you need a wat...

The world’s biggest supply chains - cocoa, coffee, palm, soy, timber, beef, rubber - all begin in the same place: a farm, often a smallholder, almost always invisible to the companies that depend on it. That first mile is where deforestation happens, where emissions accrue, and where water stress bites hardest. Until recently, nobody could give large companies the ability to understand what was an...

Water systems don't exist in a vacuum. Systems are human endeavors run by operators, and the great majority of America's roughly 90,000 water systems with under 1,000 connections are really small ones run by crews of one, maybe two or three people. Blake Anderson knows that world better than almost anyone. A certified operator who has spent 14 years running water systems, Blake is the founder of M...

Everybody remembers their first. When I was with Imagine H2O, I had the great fortune to meet Greg Floyd, who needed a small check for an early prototype of their shower head, which was crucially different from the litany of shower heads that were coming out at the time. They were all neon and internal drives and control panels and all this crap that totally overlooked that when people are having...

Building any organization is hard. Building a nonprofit, community place-based organization in an industry you are new to, and then doing it so well that the government gives you well into nine figures to lead a regional economic engine over the next 10 years, is really hard. But Alaina Harkness is genuinely that impressive. And it's super clear she's only just getting started. After stints at the...

As you may have noticed, I really like unusual routes into entrepreneurship, where someone with an unfair advantage in and around some area of the world decides to solve something dumb within it. Ravi Kurani is ground zero for that paradigm - the scion of the pool monarchy of Southern California. He will explain. He went from shop assistant to pool boy to impact investor to founder to exited found...

One of the things that is most easily overlooked in water is just how big it is. And we mean Lake Michigan and the Nile and the Amazon basin and all the big things, but cash flow is just as big, if not bigger than actual flows. And all that cash needs to be managed. As you will hear, $500 billion a year flows through US utilities of all stripes alone, coming from customers, governments, NGOs and o...

Water is one of those sectors that hides in plain sight — essential, enormous, and quietly full of complexity — and very few people have done more over the last decade to help the world take it seriously than Tom Ferguson. From shaping the earliest conversations around water risk, to building global platforms for entrepreneurs through Imagine H2O, to founding Burnt Island Ventures as the first ven...

Accurate, informed, contextualized, sophisticated research is at the heart of the development of any industry because it allows the players, from CEOs to investors to entrepreneurs, to make better decisions. Since inception in 2011 as O2 Environmental, Paul O'Callaghan and BlueTech Research have been at the forefront of getting pretty much all the key figures in our industry the information they n...

Taking the reins at a company is no small thing, especially when your predecessor in the CEO role was someone as exceptional as Julie Mullen. Julie had built the basis for Aclarity, and following her was not for the faint of heart. Mike Shaw is not faint of heart. He is an exceptional technical and product leader with fascinating experiences at Evoqua and Nanostone, and he has been leading the dev...

My guest today is the exceptional Christopher Gasson. As the owner of Global Water Intelligence, he has built a business that he bought for £17,000 and less than 150 subscribers to the indispensable knowledge source for people in this $1.6T business of water. Those of you who read his opinion columns in GWI know that this is a man not short of opinion, and I think that is an enormous service in a...

You may know by now that I get pretty excited when people walk through the figurative BIV door with an understanding of reality that is virtually impossible to diagnose from the outside. From the moment I met Dylan Wolff and he explained what he was up to, I couldn't believe what he was solving. We will go into some depth as to what he's building at CNSRV, but it's the vehicle for the deletion of...

In 2015, all of the startup founders who were part of Imagine H2O's Accelerator had to bear with me as I had no idea what I was doing. One of those founders was Sivan Zamir. Four years later she was and remains the only person to go through the program twice, and mercifully, her feedback then was rather better. Now she's VP of Enterprise, Innovation and Venture at Xylem, Burnt Island Ventures’ anc...

Out of 910 graduating students in the Class of 2014 from HBS, three went into water. Of those three, only Peter Brooks and I remain. And, meaning no offense to all our wonderful classmates, I'm glad it's him. Peter is just a really great guy. A former Marine, he worked across a variety of fascinating opportunities before setting up Sylmar Group. He and his partner Michael have been hard at work cr...

It's always worth listening to someone's ‘why’ for doing something. What is their core motivation? Are they a tourist, or are they here for the long haul? When you combine a compelling ‘why’ with the right mix of technical brilliance, charisma, kindness, and energy, you get someone who looks and sounds a lot like Allan Adams. He is the founder and CEO of Aquatic Labs, who have made amazing strides...

The saying, "Those who tell the stories rule the world," is such a core truth that it is both a quote from Plato and a Native American proverb - two entirely distinct societies coming to the same conclusion. We in water know that our inability to tell our story is one of the most frustrating aspects of the sector and one of, if not the most, negatively impactful. So what happens when you put water...

Some people are born to drive their own bus. They have an idiosyncrasy of outlook that makes building their own thing inevitable. When these people run into a problem that they find both annoying and ridiculous and decide to solve it, good things happen. Mick O'Dwyer is one of those people. Even before BIV started, the second check I ever wrote, and first real one, was into his company, SwiftCompl...

Pierre Côté is arguably the most successful inventor and technologist in the industrial wastewater space. He has two ubiquitous technologies under his belt - the hollow fiber membrane and the membrane bioreactor, or MBR - and a third technology well on the way to becoming ubiquitous: the membrane aerated biofilm reactor, or MABR. Pierre is not only brilliant and a wonderful person, he is totally f...

At BIV, we have huge admiration for people who call their shot and are right. For all you hockey fans out there, it's people who ‘Gretzky’ to where the market is going to be and so are there when it arrives. Oliver Lawal is a fascinating entrepreneur. He saw something obvious - his words - and just went and built the thing and has made so many smart moves along the way. He's a truly thoughtful per...

There is so much that is dumb in water, but easily one of the dumbest is that in the US - let alone the rest of the world - 60 percent of meters are offline and need to be read by hand in 2025. It is an insane state of affairs, and we have had our eyes out for teams to solve it for literally years. Anne Mushow is the driving force behind the solution to this problem at Subeca. Taking over from the...

Flooding is becoming an increasingly obvious mega issue in the world today. It costs anywhere between $200 billion and $500 billion in the US alone each year. They're 31% of natural catastrophes and 1.8 billion people, about a quarter of the planet, live under flood risk. This is a nightmare for insurers who are raising their premiums in response, 17% last year in the US alone. But what if you cou...

One of the reasons why working in water is fun is the people who work in it - dedicated, driven, modest, self-effacing, hard working, but with a lightness that comes from doing something that really matters. Craig Beckman personifies these qualities and then some, and he also happens to be working on a generational - and I really do mean that it's once in a generation if the past is anything to go...