Taylor O'Neil

Taylor O'Neil did not come to water from a lab or a utility, but from finance. He spent his early career in investment banking and asset management, with stints at Bear Stearns, BB&T Capital and the hedge fund Pine River Capital Management, before a backer with a long history of giving to clean-water charities pointed him at a small, strange Texas company that bottled rain. In 2017 O'Neil and a group of investors bought Richard's Rainwater, and he became its CEO, a seat he held until 2023.

Richard's Rainwater was already an unusual business before O'Neil arrived. It started in 1994 when an Austin resident named Richard Heinichen, fed up with bad well water, built his own rain-collection setup, and by around 2002 he had become the first person in the United States licensed to bottle and sell rainwater. O'Neil's pitch was to take that quirky permit and turn it into a real brand. By 2022 the company was selling still rainwater in aluminum cans and sparkling rainwater in glass bottles, nationwide at Whole Foods and across Texas grocers like H-E-B and Central Market, with revenue O'Neil told reporters was on track to top 10 million dollars that year, up from roughly 100,000 dollars when he bought it.

Taylor O'Neil's bigger argument, the one he came on the podcast to make, is that the United States has a quiet water crisis of its own and that rainwater is the most underused answer to it. He frames the company as "the first renewable solution that looks like solar power for water," a decentralized water network of collection sites rather than one giant plant. The process leans on physics: each site skips the first 0.2 inches of every rain event, because that first flush rinses the roof, then tests and runs the rest through what he calls a zero-waste, chemical-free treatment. The math is simple enough to picture, and that is the point. As O'Neil puts it, every time it rains one inch, every 1,000 square feet of collection area yields about 550 gallons of clean water, so a big enough roof becomes a small waterworks.

Taylor O'Neil tends to ground that argument in events people lived through rather than in forecasts. He points out that in Austin, supposedly the next San Francisco, there has been at least one multi-day boil-water notice nearly every year he has been in the business, and when Jackson, Mississippi's municipal system effectively failed in 2022, Richard's Rainwater shipped 40,000 units of drinking water into the city. His flagship collection sites sit on breweries, a working one at Lazy Magnolia Brewery in Kiln, Mississippi and a second at Faubourg Brewing in New Orleans, which the company billed as the largest potable rainwater collection site in the country.

Taylor O'Neil also thinks past the bottle. On the show he sketched a future where the same harvesting kit sits on the roof of a university, an Amazon warehouse or a Tesla factory and turns runoff into drinking water on site, and where "water credits," modelled on carbon credits, let companies pay water-positive projects to get closer to water-neutral. He stepped down as CEO of Richard's Rainwater in 2023 and now works in investing, but the brand he built is still on shelves, and the case he made for treating rainwater as an asset rather than a nuisance has only gotten louder.

“Our company, Richard's Rainwater, is the first company in the United States to get approval for bottled rainwater. We're harvesting water in a completely different way, trying to make water local, to make it more sustainable, and to build what we think of as the first renewable solution that looks like solar power for water.”

He is, in the end, a finance guy who fell for an idea: that the cleanest water in the country falls out of the sky for free, and that the only thing missing was someone willing to bottle it and sell the story.