Steven Kohn

Steven Kohn did not arrive in water as an engineer. He studied community psychology at Georgia State, did a stint with AmeriCorps, and earned a Master of Public Administration at NYU (which is the policy-and-management degree, not an engineering one), building a career across solar, energy efficiency and composting before water. His own label for all of it is a sustainable entrepreneur, and the idea that became Wisewater started not in a lab but on two trips, once in Europe and once in the Florida Keys, where he stepped into a shower he had to consciously trigger to keep the water running.

Steven Kohn sat on that observation for years before a 2013 entrepreneurial contest at NYU pushed him to actually build it. The product, Wisewater's smart shower, is a retrofittable device you screw on between the pipe and your existing shower head, roughly the size of a soda can, and the clever part is that it is self-powered by the water flow itself, so it needs no batteries or wiring. Paired with a foot pedal modelled on a sewing machine, it inverts the normal logic of a shower: the default becomes off, and water only flows while you press the pedal, which turns the minutes you spend lathered up and not actually rinsing into water you simply do not use.

Steven Kohn framed Wisewater against two pain points he kept coming back to: the growing scarcity of freshwater, and the rising cost of water for ordinary households. His pitch was less about a gadget and more about a blind spot, the same way your phone quietly tells you how many hours you burned on it. A shower is so embedded in daily life that nobody pictures the waste, and his bet was that a device which both stops the flow and shows you the number could nudge behaviour the way a screen-time report does. It put him in a corner of water tech that most founders skip, the consumer side, and he planned to sell it business-to-business first, into gyms and hotels and multi-facility operators, where one contract puts thousands of devices in service at once.

Steven Kohn described himself on the show as a public servant, not a hero, and when asked what he cared about most, he answered with impact rather than money: millions of gallons saved, lower bills for families who are hard up, easier days for people who still walk uphill for water. Wisewater was at the pre-seed, prototype stage when we spoke in 2021, and it did not go on to scale, so Kohn has since moved into clean-energy and sustainability business development. The episode is still a clean snapshot of a consumer-water builder attacking the demand side of the problem, in the one place almost every water-saving conversation forgets to look, the bathroom at home.

“In five years I would like to see Wisewater possibly no longer even selling directly. We will have gotten an airlock-type patent and we'd be licensing the technology into a variety of company showerheads. Moen, Kohler, American Standard, please give me a call.”

Steven Kohn is, in the end, the kind of founder the water sector needs more of and produces less often: someone who started not from a membrane or a molecule but from a household habit, and asked why the wasteful version is always the default.