Damian Georgino

Damian Georgino is, in his own words, someone who has "seen the whole gamut of what's going on in the water space." He has spent more than 25 years as a transactions lawyer working on water and wastewater, energy and infrastructure deals - mergers, acquisitions, financings and capital-markets work - which is a long way of saying he is the person in the room when water assets change hands or get built. When he came on the show in early 2023 he was a partner and head of the global water practice at the law firm Womble Bond Dickinson; he has since moved that practice to Dentons, the world's largest law firm by headcount, where he is a partner today.

Damian Georgino's distinctive credential is that he has not only advised on water deals, he has run the companies. He describes himself as having been in the "founding management of three public companies that are all focused on water," and his career bears that out: he was a senior corporate-development and legal officer at USFilter in the 1990s, then at PICO Holdings and at Nuverra Environmental Solutions, three publicly listed water and environmental businesses. On the investing side he runs Sewickley Capital Partners and has put private-equity money to work in the sector. That triple vantage point, the lawyer, the operator and the investor, is what makes his read on the market worth listening to.

Damian Georgino's central argument on (don’t) Waste Water was a contrarian one about where the water problem actually lives. "When you look at water usage," he told me, "the largest single water user is agriculture by a factor of 10 to the next largest user, which is energy, and by a factor of 10 next is industrial, and then by a factor of 10 less is residential users. So we focus on residential to fix the problem." His point is that the public conversation fixates on the tap at home while the volume, and therefore the leverage, sits upstream in farming and industry. To make it concrete he reached for semiconductors: roughly 60% of the world's chips come from Taiwan, which was then living through its worst drought in 60 years, and water can be something like 15% of what it takes to run a chip plant. Water, in that framing, is an industrial risk long before it is a residential inconvenience.

Damian Georgino's other recurring theme is capital, specifically that the bill is too big for governments to pay alone. He puts the US water-infrastructure gap at around $1 trillion and Southeast Asia's at a far larger figure still, and his conclusion is that the private sector, "driven by economics, driven by market dynamics, and not driven by a political agenda," is where the change actually happens. That belief runs underneath a question he keeps returning to and thinks the industry avoids, which is simply what the value of water is - whether it should be a regulated return on capital or something more market-driven - because until you can price water, it is hard to get private capital to build the infrastructure that water needs. It is a lawyer-investor's view of the sector, and it is a useful corrective to the purely engineering one.

“I've been involved in the water space for more than 25 years as a lawyer with Womble Bond Dickinson, head of the global water practice. I've been founding management of three public companies that are all focused on water. I've been an investor with private equity. I've seen the whole gamut of what's going on in the water space.”

He is, in short, the water sector's deal lawyer who can also read the cap table and the operating plan, which is exactly why his "follow the volume, follow the capital" argument lands differently coming from him. You can hear the full conversation on the episode linked below.