Paul Gagliardo

Paul Gagliardo got famous for a phrase he did not choose. Back in the early 1990s the City of San Diego was trying to turn treated sewage into a safe drinking-water supply, what the engineers call indirect potable reuse, and a local newspaper christened it "toilet to tap." Gagliardo ran the research center that tested all the equipment to document that you could actually do it safely. And because he was spending public money, he decided the data should be open: for five or six years he showed up at conferences every other month with results he had collected weeks before, a faster cadence than almost anyone in the business. That is how he built a reputation as, in his words, an "honest broker", telling inventors when their kit worked and, just as often, when it didn't.

Paul Gagliardo turned that reputation into a second career as the water sector's technology referee. From 2009 to 2017 he was the innovation director at American Water, the largest publicly traded US water utility, where his job was to find new technologies worth bringing into a company spread across more than a dozen state franchises. He screened over 250 companies and generated more than $30 million in operational savings, and the win he keeps coming back to is a quietly clever one: American Water was buying $50 million a year of water meters from a single vendor, so he championed a piece of middleware that let any meter talk to any software, opened the contract to competition, and cut the meter bill by about 17%.

Paul Gagliardo has a strong opinion about why water startups succeed or fail, and it is not really about the technology. As a judge for Imagine H2O, the San Francisco non-profit accelerator he has helped run since 2009 and which Antoine has profiled in its own episode, he sees something like 100 to 120 companies a year, and his line is that the founder is almost as important as the technology and the market. The other thing he teaches founders is perspective: a utility manager, an engineering firm selling billable hours, a regulator and a startup all look at the same arsenic-in-the-groundwater problem and see completely different things, and most of his advisory work, through his boutique firm Gagliacqua, is helping a startup understand that "voice of the customer" before it pitches.

Paul Gagliardo thinks the water business has finally started to leave the 19th century. For most of his career it was, in his telling, conservative and barely digitized, but the last decade has cracked it open, and he is blunt about where the next money goes: it follows the regulators. Lead service lines after Flint, PFAS "forever chemicals" today, and, his prediction, microplastics next, because once a contaminant gets a legal limit, utilities have to act and a market appears overnight. He is more skeptical about hype, though, and he has not yet seen the one breakthrough, a reverse-osmosis membrane at a tenth of the energy, say, that would make a water company a unicorn.

Paul Gagliardo started The Water Entrepreneur podcast almost by accident, and the story is a good one. During the pandemic he built a backyard studio so his two grown daughters could work from home, one a vet student taking classes online and the other teaching, and when they both moved back out he was left with a studio and a thought: "How hard can it be to do a podcast?" Harder than he expected, it turns out, but it became a family business, with one daughter producing and his veterinarian daughter composing the theme music. He says that roughly every five years he feels the need to reinvent himself, and after public works, landfills, utilities, consulting and a startup, the podcast is simply the latest version of the thing he has always done best: getting founders to tell their story.

“The more expertise someone has in an area, the less likely they are to look at something new, because they think they know everything.”

Paul Gagliardo is, in the end, the rare insider who is genuinely useful to outsiders: someone who has sat on every side of the table, utility, corporate, consultant, judge, and now hands that map to the founders trying to find their way in.