Max Storto

Max Storto did not come into water through a pump or a pipe. He studied Environmental Science and Public Policy at Harvard, then did a dual Yale degree, an MBA at the School of Management and a master's in environmental management at the School of the Environment, and spent most of his early career inside the world of sustainable investing, at firms like Boston Common Asset Management and the water-focused investor Echo River Capital. He even spent the 2020 election as a field organizer for the Iowa Democratic Party, knocking on doors in a farm state where, as he puts it, water-quality issues are a really big deal. So by the time he landed at Xylem, he had seen the water problem from the investor's chair, the policy side, and the doorstep, which is an unusual combination for the person whose job is now to spot the next good water company.

Max Storto's job at Xylem Innovation Labs is, in his own framing, a talent scout. Xylem Innovation Labs is the partnership entity within Xylem that explores relationships with early-stage technology providers, and Storto is the person who scouts and evaluates the startups Xylem might work with. He likes the sports analogy and reaches for it himself, the way a club recruits a promising player young, and the comparison is doing real work here, because Xylem is a giant and it cannot chase every interesting idea, so somebody has to watch the whole water-technology field and pick the handful worth backing. From three or four hundred companies that get invited to apply each year, the funnel narrows to forty or fifty applications, and from there to a handpicked cohort of around ten.

What makes the model genuinely odd, and it is the thing the episode title leans on, is that Xylem takes no equity. A large corporate accelerating startups would normally want a slice of the upside, but Storto is clear that the long-term value for Xylem is commercial, not financial: the goal is to sign commercial agreements and sell more solutions to customers, and he argues that the margin on that is worth far more to Xylem than the upside of a minority stake, while the equity is worth a great deal to a young company that should not have to give it away. The accelerator runs on a mutual non-disclosure agreement and trust rather than a term sheet, which is a deliberately founder-friendly way for a multinational to work with companies a fraction of its size.

Max Storto is also refreshingly honest about where a company like Xylem actually helps. Getting a startup from client 5 to 50 is the sweet spot; getting it from zero to five is not, because at that earliest stage a startup is still proving the technology and finding its first customers, and a partner the size of Xylem would, in his words, probably just slow you down. So the commercial accelerator is built for companies that already have a proven technology and a growing revenue stream, and Xylem's role is to catalyse the speed of that growth, plugging a promising young company into the customer relationships, the regional managers, and the credibility that a large incumbent can offer. The challenges the program chases, decarbonising water, decentralised treatment, contaminants of emerging concern like PFAS and microplastics, come from a process Xylem calls its voice of business, where customer-facing teams pool what they are hearing in the field so the priorities are set by real demand rather than a hunch.

Today Max Storto has moved up from the analyst seat he held when he came on the show, where he was Lead Innovation Analyst, to Director of Innovation Strategy and Venture Capital, still at Xylem and now shaping the firm's direct investment strategy as well as its scouting. In 2026 he was named one of Global Corporate Venturing's Rising Stars, the only person from a pure-play water company on a list dominated by tech and pharma giants, which is a fair marker of how seriously the venture world has started to take water. He is, in the end, a connector, more comfortable sending you an introduction than pitching you, and he keeps a line from one of his old professors close at hand:

“Plagiarism is when you take one person's idea. Research is when you take a lot of people's ideas. So I like to just take and sprinkle in a bunch of different ideas from a lot of people that I've learned from.”

It is a fitting motto for a scout: his whole job is to see who is doing the most interesting work across the water field, and to make sure the best of it finds a way to scale.