Carol Maxwell

Carol Maxwell did not come to water through engineering, and she is the first to tell you so. She studied biology, with a lot of chemistry and physics, at St. Lawrence University, started a PhD, and then, in her words, bailed, because she realised she did not want to be in academia. Her first real job was as a sales rep at the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, where, as she puts it, anyone who is not a lawyer or a bench scientist has to "carry a bag", which is the old industry phrase for going out and meeting customers and bringing back sales. She was a little miffed about it at the time, and then she fell in love with it, and that is the thread that runs through everything since: a biologist who learned to sell, and decided that was a superpower rather than a detour.

Carol Maxwell spent three decades in marketing and advertising, at names like J. Walter Thompson and Pacific Telesis, and then became an angel investor back home in upstate New York, a founding member of the Eastern New York Angels (ENYA). That is where the company found her. One day the group's founder brought in a young engineer, Brent Solina, who had been working on microbial fuel cells while finishing up at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), and the room, mostly lawyers, was politely interested. Carol Maxwell was not politely interested. "As a biologist, I was like, I want to hear more about that," she said, and one thing led to another: more conversations, a board seat, and then, in her telling, "somehow I became CEO" of MICROrganic Technologies.

MICROrganic Technologies builds what are called microbial fuel cells, and the simplest way to picture one is a wastewater tank where the bacteria that already eat the waste are wired up so that the electrons they give off, because all of biology, as Carol Maxwell points out, is really just electrons moving around, get harvested instead of wasted. The payoff she leads with is energy. Conventional plants spend an enormous amount of power running blowers to pump air into the water, and her pitch is that microbial fuel cells let you turn those blowers down, which in her telling reduces secondary-treatment energy use by about 85 to 90 percent while the cells also generate a trickle of clean DC power. The deeper idea is that wastewater is not a cost to be processed but a battery to be tapped, since the stat the industry passes around is that there is roughly seven times more energy in wastewater than it takes to treat it.

The episode's title, about fuel cells reaching out on Twitter, is not a gimmick, it is the second half of the product. Because the cells run on the bacteria's own respiration, you can watch that electron flow continuously, which gives an operator a live readout of how the biology is doing instead of the once-a-day lab sample most plants rely on. As the company likes to say, microorganisms don't typically use Twitter, but theirs can, and the longer-term vision is a treatment system that files its own maintenance ticket and drops a calendar invite when it needs attention. Carol Maxwell is careful about maturity, though, the way good founders are: the showstopper application, doing desalination that produces electricity instead of consuming it, is, in her words, "the holy grail of a value proposition", and also "not something that we're actively pursuing right now".

Carol Maxwell is also clear-eyed about the hard parts, which is rare and worth listening for. She will tell you that sitting next to the Great Lakes, with some of the cheapest power and water on the planet, makes the energy-savings pitch a tougher sell at home, and that the company's product works but is "not really fully ready for commercialization", which is why she leans so hard on programs like Xylem's innovation incubator and the Anheuser-Busch accelerator, and recommends them to any aspiring water entrepreneur listening. She is the commercial half of a deep-science company, the one who can hold the biology and the buying decision in the same conversation, and on the show that combination is most of why MICROrganic has gotten as far as it has on a technology even some PhDs were still wrapping their heads around.

“As a biologist, I was like, I want to hear more about that. And so we started talking, and we expanded a board, and then somehow I became CEO.”