Colin Goddard

Colin Goddard did not arrive in water through a lab or an engineering degree, and he is the first to say so. He grew up overseas, the son of two parents with careers in international development, which meant a childhood spread across Somalia, Bangladesh and Indonesia, high school in Egypt, and, by his own account, a first visit to a refugee camp before he was one year old. He studied international relations at Virginia Tech, and after that he spent the better part of a decade in Washington as a gun-violence-prevention advocate, a path that began when he survived the 2007 shooting on his own campus. So when he eventually landed in the water industry, he landed there as a mission person who had learned to move policy and people, not as a technologist.

Colin Goddard joined the company in 2018, back when it was still called Zero Mass Water, and stayed nearly seven years as it grew into SOURCE Global, a public benefit corporation, which is a company legally bound to a social mission alongside profit. The product is the SOURCE Hydropanel, one of the more unusual ideas I cover on the water-tech beat, and the science behind it came out of Arizona State University: a proprietary hygroscopic material (hygroscopic just means it grabs moisture out of the air) paired with a thermodynamic cycle that loads the material with water vapour and then wrings it back out as clean, mineralised drinking water, using nothing but sunlight. No grid, no pipes, no plumbing to the house.

Colin Goddard's whole pitch, the one he repeated from a rental car baking in an El Paso parking lot the day we recorded, was what he called "Option C." For millions of people at the edges of the grid, running a pipe to the house costs more than any utility will ever recover, so Option A (centralised water) never comes and Option B is do nothing. The hydropanel is the third option: a panel a family owns, that makes its own water on the roof. He put real numbers on it, a panel built to last 20 years, retailing around $2,000, which amortised out to roughly 7.5 cents per bottle of water, and he was candid that the upfront cost is the hard part, which is exactly why the episode is titled "expensive, heavy but desperately needed."

Colin Goddard measured the mission in households, not megawatts. The project he was proudest of was SOURCE's partnership with the Navajo Nation, where, as he put it, over 500 families were drinking clean water in their own homes for the first time, people who had been told they would never see running water in their lifetime. That is the lens he brought to everything, including his read on where the sector is going: toward distributed, decentralised, fit-for-purpose water, the idea that not every drop has to do every job. To build that mission at scale, SOURCE raised $223.76 million across four rounds from backers like Breakthrough Energy Ventures and BlackRock, the kind of conviction capital a hardware company moving water needs, every figure here cross-checked against my Leviathan database the way I explain in my methodology.

Colin Goddard left SOURCE in April 2025, closing a chapter that started with a startup most people had never heard of and ended with hydropanels in dozens of countries, and by mid-2025 he had moved on to co-found a new venture, Loop Media. The water industry collects a lot of engineers, and it needs them, but it has fewer people who got into it the way Colin did, through humanitarian work and personal loss, and who can sit in a parking lot in El Paso and talk about dignity and cost per connection in the same breath.

“And tell me if that's an egregious waste of money. I think that is a beautiful use of resources to give people a clean drinking water supply that they own and they're making themselves.”