Season 8

Water Companies can face a wide array of events: creation, expansion, profit, losses, and sometimes even death. Yet one specific change is maybe the most transformative: getting sold and transferred to a new owner. If that’s well documented for large water groups, it’s a much different story for smaller water companies: let’s explore it!

with 🎙️ Karl Michael Millauer, Founder of KMM Consulting and a former C-Level executive in some emblematic water groups like BWT, Christ Water Technology, Aquatech International, and Aquarion AG.

💧 KMM Consulting helps clients around the globe leverage opportunities in the world of water through mergers & acquisitions, finance & funding, business development, and strategic support.

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The top 10 risks ranked in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report all relate to Water. If that’s not a sign that it is time to get your Water Risk Assessments right, I don’t know what is! Not convinced yet? Let’s dig further:

with 🎙️ Jennifer Möller-Gulland, Water Risk Expert and Water Economist for the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme

💧 Jennifer is the founder of the Water Risk Assessment Blueprint Training, a 12-week online course that helps water professionals to know the Water Risks, convince decision makers to consider and address them, be part of the solution, and accelerate their career.

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Zwitterions are weird beasts with two fascinating perks: being simultaneously positively and negatively charged turns them highly hydrophilic and very resistant to non-specific adhesion. Wouldn’t that make them the best special sauce to pump up a membrane filtration system? Let’s find out!

with 🎙️ Alex Rappaport, CEO and Co-Founder of ZwitterCo. 

💧 ZwitterCo leverages the benefits of Zwitterions to build Membranes that treat the world’s toughest wastewater. 

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When marketing focuses on “Promotion” only, it limits itself to 8% of its possible spectrum. And it has consequences! Product-market Fit, go-to-market strategies, or strategic directions for the company might suffer from that tropism on the last link in the tactics chain. Who is to blame? Most of the time, top management.

with 🎙️ Björn Otto, Founder, and Managing Director of Interius Solutions. 

💧 Interius Solutions supports Water Technology Companies with outsourced marketing solutions and a very special touch – it’s marketing done by water professionals that understand water technologies. 

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with 🎙️ Paul Gagliardo, Judge and advisor at Imagine H2O, and Principal at Gagliacqua.     

💧 Paul also runs the Water Entrepreneur, an incredibly good water podcast that is one of my personal favorites and which also turns out to be a family business as Paul will elaborate on later on in the conversation.

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with 🎙️ Ben Kimura Gross, CEO of Systemics Academy, Negotiation Trainer, and Mentor.     

💧 At Negotiation with Goliath, Ben trains sustainability professionals and entrepreneurs to get decision-makers on their side and make your goals their goals.

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Aclarus, a Canadian ozone-treatment manufacturer founded in 2011, wins a mature, consolidating niche by staying small and agile, serving the underserved rural and industrial sites the big ozone players overlook. That focus carried it to about US$1.3M in revenue and a 2020 acquisition by 1440 Capital.

with 🎙️ Michael Doran, President & Co-Founder of Aclarus Ozone.    

💧 Aclarus Ozone aims to solve complex water problems with advanced ozone technology.

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Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) provides a systematic framework to identify and assess environmental impacts associated with a product or service, including energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, waste generation, and as probably most interesting for us, water use.

Hence, LCA is a powerful decision-making tool that helps identify opportunities to reduce environmental impacts, improve efficiency, and promote circularity. Let’s explore it:

with 🎙️ Dubravka Skunca, LCA Representative and Expert for the European Commission, but also an SME Support leader at the European Regional Development Fund, Business Consultant, and Council Representative at various EIT groups.    

💧 Dubravka is also LCA Leader for Green Protein, a European project which aims at a major innovation in the fields of protein production and food loss reduction in the EU by producing high-added value, food-grade functional proteins, and other ingredients out of green field waste.

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Many decisions we make may look good on a small scale, yet as soon as we zoom out, we realize that they were the wrong choice in the end. That’s all fine when it’s about eating the last chocolate chunk in the box, but it’s an entirely different story when it comes to Water, its use, and its management worldwide! Why do we have so many wrong incentives? Let’s explore:

with 🎙️ Gonzalo Delacámara, Consultant on Natural Resources Economics for the United Nations and Water Policy Advisor for the OECD, the European Commission, and the World Bank   

💧 Gonzalo is also Director of the Center for Water & Climate Adaptation at IE University, aiming to reinvent education and train the people who will change the World tomorrow.

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Membrion builds ceramic ion-exchange membranes that recover up to 98% of water from harsh industrial wastewater streams which corrode conventional polymer membranes. The Seattle company has raised 22.9 million dollars across Seed, Series A, and two Series B rounds, including a 7.0 million dollar Series B led by PureTerra Ventures in January 2023.

with 🎙️ Greg Newbloom, CEO and Founder of Membrion.   

💧 Membrion strives to help industrial water users who aren’t satisfied with processes that are thousands of years old, and who’ve been searching for a better and lower-cost way to recycle or reuse their wastewater.

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When we discuss the water crisis in America, we often focus on a certain section of the Water Cycle: residential water. Yet, that’s only a fraction of the challenge and probably not the one where water is valued the most. Indeed, could you imagine industrial production without water? That’s why it’s a risk, and the reaction to have once you acknowledge it is something we covered:

with 🎙️ Damian Georgino, Partner at Womble Bond Dickinson

💧 Womble Bond Dickinson is a leading law firm that provides support to organizations operating within the fast-moving, challenging, and dynamic energy, water, and food nexus.

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There are a lot of parameters to consider when planning infrastructure for today and the decades to come. It is a compound of existing assets, communities, social issues, vulnerabilities but also water and climate data. This is why democratizing access to all those datasets is so crucial to solving the water crisis in America! And we’ll get to understand how and why:

with 🎙️ Sarah Kapnick, Chief Scientist at the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration

💧 The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) aims to enrich life through science. From the sun’s surface to the ocean’s depths, the Agency works to keep the public informed of the changing environment around them.

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