Nick is joined by Tom Ferguson, Founder and Managing Partner at Burnt Island Ventures, one of the first venture capital firms focused on investing in startups driving innovation in water-focused applications and industries.

Despite touching nearly everything on Earth, water is an under-discussed, under-invested in, and under-resourced category. As a result, innovation in the space often lags other areas that get more attention, whether fintech, crypto, or AI. At the same time, water is one of several categories that could see the most disruption due to climate change. Hence, Tom & team are on a mission to not just invest well in water but to grow the category as a whole. As part of their conversation, Nick & Tom also discussed:

• Scope & Definition: Nick & Tom spend time breaking down and decomposing what is even meant by ‘water’ when we try to understand it as an industry. 
• Portfolio Companies: Tom runs through seminal examples of several portfolio companies that underscore the types of companies Burnt Island Ventures invests in and the impact they’re targeting
• Storytelling and Intangibles: Nick & Tom stress the need for better storytelling in the water sector to attract more investment and public interest.

Timestamps:

00:01:23 - Tom's Journey into Water Investment

00:03:23 - Breaking Down the Water Investment Landscape

00:06:09 - Challenges in Water Sector Investment & Reframing the Industry

00:13:07 - Burnt Island Ventures' Mission

00:15:51 - Highlighting Portfolio Companies

00:22:03 - FundOne Portfolio Overview

00:27:00 - The Overlooked Importance of Water in Various Sectors

00:34:17 - The Importance of Storytelling + The Role of Investors in Water Sector

00:37:00 - Cross-Cutting Issues in Climate and Energy

00:39:53 - The Role of Water in Climate Adaptation

Don't miss out on this podcast if you're interested in learning more about the state of climate tech, the energy transition, and  investing in water and what the ‘water’ category as a whole even entails and represents. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple, Google, or your favorite podcast platform.

Learn more about Burnt Island Ventures on their website and LinkedIn: https://www.burntislandventures.com/

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Thank you so much.

Plus, stay up-to-date on all things Keep Cool here: https://keepcool.co/ and follow Nick on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nickvanosdol and LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholasvanosdol/

Nick:

Welcome to the Keep Cool Show, the podcast in which we cover how cutting edge climate technologies connect to the world in which we live. I'm your host, Nick Van Osdaal. And sometimes even just if whether it's actual difficulty or perceived difficulty, like that is great ground, as you said, for differentiations. Yeah, exactly. Other people don't want to do.

Tom:

Yeah, and you know, one day, one day in the sunlit uplands of Elysium, you know, it's going to be an interesting, because what it's going to get, what it's going to get, it has to. It's broken and it's foundational and climate change is water change. Like it's coming, it's just a question of when. And so we are going to at some stage be faced with the interesting reality where we have upwards pressure on our entry pricing. And we're probably going to have to sit on our hands for a while until people, you know, because when the thing becomes the flavor of the month and it's getting more and more interesting to people, it's not probably in water is always incremental. Is always incremental and the popularity of it within the kind of private market is going to be probably incremental as well But Cambrian just raised 200 million, you know gradient just raised 275, you know We're just that we're just at the beginning of the s-curve of the maturation

Nick:

All right, Tom, welcome to the Keep Cool podcast. Wonderful to have you. It's really nice of you to have me. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. So let's dive right in. Let me think about what the most interesting question to ask first is. How did you start investing in water? When did you first get turned on to that as something that one could do with one's life?

Tom:

Nick:

Beautiful. Yeah. I think a lot of folks probably, like myself, maybe not a lot, but some folks probably remember that there's that famous slide at the end of the movie, the big short where it's like, what does this guy invest in now? And it's like, oh, he's just spending his time investing in water. And I'm not sure most folks even necessarily know what that means, right? Like investing in water. In the context of that movie, it probably meant investing in water rights or something like that. But How do you break down the landscape of the different types of solutions that you all look for now? probably like the largest possible category that one could imagine on its own.

Tom:

Nick:

Yeah. So let's do some reframing of that. Maybe it can start with examples of portfolio companies. Maybe that comes later, but yeah. For what reasons is water not a dog when it comes to even just the investment side?

Tom:

Nick:

Sometimes even just whether it's actual difficulty or perceived difficulty, that is great ground, as you said, for differentiations. Do hard things that other people don't want to do, that are still important.

Tom:

Nick:

Yeah, it's been cool over the past couple of years to see folks like yourself, folks like Convective. I've, in the same vein as you mentioned, I've been lucky to make a good friend here in New York, Lauren Singer, and she's running Overview Capital, which is squarely focused on greenhouse gases, not named CO2. And it's funny how all of these things are massive categories, and there are single venture firms that we can point to as saying like, Someone's doing it, but they're still the first. You gotta go speed to them.

Tom:

Yeah, we are not alone. We are not alone. We're not the first, but we do think that our timing was good. And the verticalization, you know, it's all denominator effects. The more focus you have, as long as what you're focusing on is big enough. Right. And that's why we like water very much because of all the stuff that I won't like retread. But yeah. Yeah. I mean, the verticalization is really interesting, especially in stuff that can't help but get bigger. And Bill and Lauren and various others. Yeah. There were there were real compounding advantages to it. We certainly like it. And I am very grateful almost every day that I just have to focus on the crazy width of water, because if we had to do anything else, I just I don't I like. It's so easy to make mistakes because the amount of stuff that you have to get exposed to that you don't understand well enough is just, yeah, it scares me. I'm very grateful for our focus.

Nick:

It is always, I mean, I come to the same conclusion often where something I'm most grateful for in my day-to-day work is that I do, pretty much every day, I get to just sit in conversations where I'm like, man, I really don't understand this, but I get to learn from someone that does.

Tom:

Nick:

So let's do a little more stepping into some of the portfolio companies that you're particularly excited about, because I imagine for listeners, that'll be some of the more exciting stuff that they'll be able to wrap their heads around.

Tom:

Yeah, for real. I mean, how, like, which, you know, I never want to sort of victimize people by leaving them out. It's a good range of things. I suppose we should probably start with the last one we did. Just, you know, by virtue of temporal things, I referred to it earlier. There are plenty of things that are really dumb about the water sector. The fact that we don't have a lot of automated digital transmitting meters, that we only have 45% Penetration of advanced metering infrastructure in water is one of the more particularly insane things that is going on in the US. Subeka, that core technology is an enabling tech for a whole bunch of different IoT. They just happen to be starting in water meters. The Blink module is going to be, I'm not quite sure, I don't think I can announce this yet because it's not quite public, but it's got a very, very interesting advance in terms of the connectivity. It's about all I can say. But it essentially solves the sort of the large and central problem of actually like what network are you going to get onto? How much power it is? What's the bandwidth? you know, et cetera, it solves all of that, like key interior IoT problems. And it's going to bring a huge amount of those meters online, but also a bunch of other stuff within water online as well. And it's just really basic. You know, you manage what you measure, right? And if you have to climb into your F-150 and drive 45 minutes out to a, you know, a really important, you know, set of meters out in, you know, X, Y, Z community or X, Y, Z piece of infrastructure, this is just a crazy imposition on the time of people that work for you. So that's the latest one.

Nick:

Yeah, really quickly on that, I just want to draw a parallel because I was quite literally just on a podcast, very different space, but methane monitoring, you see something similar where historically like oil and gas infrastructure, someone has gotten behind the wheel and gone out to pipelines and measured or looked for methane leaks maybe once a month or even just twice a year. Yeah. In and of itself, the absence of a real-time monitoring system is obviously insufficient. But even just the fact of someone needing to get behind a wheel, that is the most dangerous place for a human being to be in many cases, is behind a wheel on a road. So there's a safety component too. If you can mitigate some of that in and of itself, that's a huge benefit.

Tom:

Yeah. And this is the stuff of the pain point is the pain points that we really like. I mean, a lot of people are kind of like, okay, I want to do like water risk in like supply chains. Great, cool. Those are really interesting companies that are doing that. That's fine. We really like reasons why people's lives suck. just on a day-to-day basis. And like, you know, maybe people like driving. I'm sure they do. But like, if you've ever been into, yeah, if you've ever been into and really spoken and spent time with people who run water utilities, do they have kind of an hour and a half round trip, add on an extra kind of 15 minutes for the inspection? Do they have that kind of time when things are really breaking around their ears and they're just moving from one emergency to the other? Absolutely not. And I'm a huge believer that we are inertia monsters. We never want to do anything different ever. But you need to have that degree of practical pain to maximize the likelihood that people are going to buy something to be able to allow them to behave differently. Right? You need to have very practical, I think, reasons why people are going to onboard your solution. But to give you an idea of the breadth, the second investment that we did in fund two is a really top quality company called Hope Hydration. They actually broke even in Q1 in the future. They actually broke even in Q1. Speaking into existence. Yes, exactly. Exactly. An extraordinary bunch. We've known them for a couple of years and it's a really good example of a business model innovation. I always wonder whether when I speak about it out loud, whether people are like, wait, it's really that simple? But it is. So in Times Square, at the bottom of the bleachers, there is a large black box with a writing on, lit up writing on the front that says Hope Hydration, and it is a public water fountain with a screen on top of it, which adds for all sorts of beneficial things. So it's all, they're a B Corp, and so they have like really a strong ethics and control over the messages that they transmit. But it solves the problem of free water access, because really, since kind of, I mean, not time immemorial, but for a really long time, kind of the original sin of the kind of water development was We're going to go and build a well and then we're going to leave. And when it breaks, you're not going to have any spare parts or understand exactly how to fix it. So what's going to happen in about six months is this well is going to break and then it's going to sit there. You need to have an operations and maintenance model for water access. And water.org, for example, Gary's a friend, amazing guy, they really have done an extremely good job. And water equity is an amazing next stage of what they're doing. And they really are getting to the heart of this through really interesting financing solutions. But hope is along the same lines, you know, if you just say that this is going to be operating in both New York and New Delhi, like through the provision of ads, you can provide reliable safe, clean drinking water to very, very large numbers of population. It massively impacts the problem of plastic waste, but it means that you can pay someone to change the filters. And when you ever go past the, you know, the airport, actually hope of going to be, it's really exciting. Within about six months, when you go to X and Minneapolis and Paul, you're going to see these all over the place. And actually once they're done, there are going to be some really interesting sustainability things that this enables. And the economics of it are phenomenal, like really phenomenal, because there isn't just a huge amount of new, really differentiated advertising real estate. And then if you draw this out of what can be true as a result of this fundamental provision of this business model is a huge impact on overall water access. And it's a really fascinating, very high potential, potential company. And then the last one I'll mention, because I'm just doing the fun to like, please do check out our portfolio. They're an amazing bunch of companies, is a company that is going to be a new entrant into the heat pump water heater market, which is, you know, so far, so energy, actually, the water energy network is incredibly important, because water is really heavy. And when you move it around, or you try and heat it up, It takes a huge amount of energy. Actually, in terms of their control software, they've already proved that they can reduce household water use by about 20%, which is a big deal. But every water heater should be a battery. You should be able to heat it up at two o'clock in the morning or one o'clock in the afternoon when the load on the grid is as low as it possibly can be. And it should be able to stay hot for at least a couple of days. And then you have your on-demand hot water, but you also should be able to qualify for load management credits from the grid, which transforms the economics of the individual unit. And that's exactly what this crew in Boston have done. They're only announcing in July, but this was the best thought out argument that we have ever seen. It was actually really weird. We would ask what we thought were really kind of funky questions and like, yeah, basically we're like thinking around corners over here as like funky VC people, etc. And Michael would say, yeah, that's a great question. And then he would pull up a slide that he had already created. every single time. It was uncanny, honestly, but it's really good. Andres Navarro has this great idea of go down the rabbit hole before anybody else asks you to, and to do it live. Like you really need to have thought all the way around a problem. And what Michael and his team have done is fascinating. Is it going to be a tough road? For sure. This is a market that is owned by two very, very large incumbents that share 90% market share relatively equally. But the heat pump, water heater market is just lifting off the X-axis for the S-curve. We think it doubled last year to about $2 billion. And I think the logic of it means that it's essentially going to replace the water heater market wholesale. You won't be able to buy natural gas or even just standard, I mean, maybe you'll still be able to buy the electric ones, but the legacy boiling market is going and it's going to be replaced wholesale. And that is $70 billion in spend. It's a huge market. Anyway, so those are the last three, but we do everything from industrial treatment to utility software. We had a much larger exposure to consumer than we expected in FundOne, just turned out a whole bunch of smart people were building stuff for consumers. So it's about Eurogreen. We're investing in a plumbing company. Beagle Services are amazing. They did $4.2 million in revenue last year, and we'll double that without breaking a sweat this year. Extraordinary company led by a guy called Paul Vacquier, who's got outrageous founder market fit. Yeah, that's really interesting businesses.

Nick:

Beautiful. I'm excited to put the hot water heater on my pops radar. We were talking about that a couple of months ago.

Tom:

You know, yeah, it's yeah, it's it's a really interesting part of it. The other thing is, it's just so fun getting to like understand these markets, especially when you you can see that your timing, the timing is probably pretty good. So just on yesterday, on Wednesday, the EPA announced the new regulations for PFAS, which we've been expecting for a long time. But they're down at four parts per trillion. for PFOA and PFOS. For those of you listening that don't know what PFAS is, they're essentially the forever chemicals. They were kind of the active ingredient in Teflon. And it's a, they don't degrade in nature. And so we've essentially poisoned the world. These things are not good for you. And Clarity was one of our kind of like market timing. I think that it was very, really funny. Julie, who is their fantastic CEO, the PFAS regulations came out on Wednesday and she had her third child on Wednesday. So for a PFAS founder, it was kind of a really interesting birthday. It was two things that were very important in Julie's life, the PFAS regulations and her church.

Nick:

Tom:

I think it's, you know, on the balance of probability, in terms of we know about the science about what it does to us, you know, the incidence, if you look at the, especially of early onset cancer rates, is coming from somewhere. You know, like the causality has obviously not been changed, so I don't want to, you know, make any assumptions in an unscientific manner. But all I will say is that, I mean, it wouldn't be surprising. It's the one thing that we all need and really is the kind of the common denominator between all of us. It is amazing how far that rabbit hole goes when you One of the things I think about a lot, my son is seven, he's going through first grade and mercifully he's been, you know, he doesn't sort of suffer from any kind of attention issues, but one of the symptoms of lead poisoning look an awful lot like ADD, or ADHD as we say here. It looks an awful lot like it, certainly in terms of behavioural problems, attention problems, and when you overlap lead poisoning with all of the other leading indicators of equity, of opportunity, from incomes to racial gaps to, you know, all the way down, it does make you wonder. It does make you wonder in terms of the environmental deficits that people who don't have access to the same kind of opportunities, you know, like to a degree, you know, people acting out because they've got lead in their water. I mean, it's something that we really need to pay much, much more attention to. And it just goes to this fundamental thing. I mean, people will ask us a lot whether or not we're an impact fund. For sure. Do we know what our impact is going to be? No, we don't, at the onset of any given fund, because we don't know what we're going to invest in. We're interested in all sorts of highly impactful verticals. But we also think that water is what you start with. Water really is what you start with. You have to fix it first. This is the thing that we get to solve it by turning on the tap and jumping into the shower and putting the kettle on for coffee or whatever. A lot of other people pick up a bucket and walk for an hour and a half, but both of us are solving water first, and this is what you do. So if you're interested in education, if you're interested in women's rights, if you're interested in children's issues, if you're interested in broad-based healthcare, Like, it's amazing to me the degree to which people miss that this, you gotta do the water first. And it's as spectacularly overlooked in, in philanthropy and impact investing as it is in for profit investing. It's, it's getting better, but it's, it amazes me all the time.

Nick:

And in some of the vein of what we have already discussed, I'd be curious if there are areas that you've identified where you would like to see more innovation, where you're like, oh, I really wish there were a team building X, but we just haven't found. one or the right one. Yeah. There's probably a million. Yeah.

Tom:

No, it's, it's funny because where my mind goes is unbelievably boring for everybody. Like, like we're really encouraged. We saw a really great, a really interesting company that is building billing software for utilities. They've been a couple of tilts to this particular windmill. But it just sucks. And it happens, all of the stuff has to be run monthly for every single customer in the US. And everything that's out there is just like, there's a really interesting, very, very large opportunity. There is so much and it's so wide. Of the major wish list, I mean, sanitation's the big one, right? You know, there are people who always say there, you know, there's the, you know, 2.1 billion people don't have access to, you know, clean water and sanitation. Only 750 million of those is the problem is clean water. By far, 1.4 odd billion people don't have access to adequate sanitation. That's almost one in five people on the planet. And this is tough. Bill Gates and his team are really smart. The Reinvent the Toilet Challenge was a really awesome review of this, or Tilted the Windmill. But when you look at what's kind of come out of it. It just goes to show that this is a really difficult nut to crack. Right. So we're keeping an eye on that side of things. One of the things that I was constantly on the lookout for is that, you know, when you, when people are running utilities, what they really wish that they had is just tell me what's in my water in real time with something that doesn't break all the time. Yeah. And yeah, so multivariate non-contact sensing. 2S Water are doing a really, really great job on the metal side of things. And we've seen some really interesting emerging companies that are getting closer and closer over time. And it's, yeah, that's definitely on the wishlist. We're very curious as to how AI and machine learning are going to be impacting it. I mean, so far, so snoozy, you and everyone else, Tom. Actually, what's really interesting in Water is that the availability of data, there's a huge amount that we're just about getting to the threshold at which we have enough data to make AI and ML useful. And what we're really encouraged about is the verticalization of the use cases. So two examples from the first one, sewer AI. What they do is the really cool and sexy job of automatically labeling sewer inspection videos. so that you know what you're looking at. Previously, that was done by somebody in a windowless trailer, actually in much slower than real time. Like Suwa.ai, they've just been published. NYDEP just actually put up on their website yesterday that they get their results 75% faster. with sewer, which makes a huge difference because this is stuff that you're inspecting every other year. And there are a million miles of sewer underneath the US alone. Like it's an amazing naturally recurring revenue market. And then the other one I love, which is our largest position in FundOne, is a company called Doppler, who solved the problem of water. They started in water and wastewater utilities, but they're actually now in six verticals, including railways and airports, two major rail networks and a major Midwestern airport. and reached out to basically solve exactly the same problem. But John, who was a wastewater engineer, both on the consultancy and inside the utility side of things, he just couldn't believe the way in which they did customer service was the way in which they did customer service. That they had somebody sitting there, actually keeping an eye on the 311, and also the calls that were coming in, and then the terrible website form. the people would get halfway through and then kind of abandon. And then when actually things were going wrong, when there's like a major precipitation event or there's a big freeze or whatever it is, like the volume of calls spikes so much that that individual person is essentially kind of useless, right, in terms of triaging. It was like, how are we not applying like digital solutions to this? And then his CTO just, you know, happened to be a frighteningly smart maths PhD who was self-taught in AI very, very early. And they built a vertical solution to it. So it just brings in the all of the communications to a utility automatically, triages them so it understands everything. So it's like some really gross stuff, like overflowing toilets and all the rest of it. But they've trained the model to be unbelievably accurate about it. And then they automate the dispatch against that problem in order of priority. So they're now working in the power sector, for example. So the Midwest was hit by a huge freeze in January. And when that happens, all sorts of really, really tough things happen. But if you're on a ventilator, or if you have at-home dialysis, and the power goes out, you're in a lot of trouble. And your utility needs to understand that really fast, right? Really, really, really fast. And now with Doppler, the utility knows exactly who is complaining about these specific issues automatically, and they can go and provide generators. They can make sure that that individual utility person, that they can find a hotel for them to stay in or whatever it is. And the really amazing improvement in their life, nobody who's worked for a water or wastewater utility has ever been thanked by anybody for anything ever. ever. Like they do this insanely important job crazy quietly, and everybody takes it for granted. It's just rubbish. Now with Doppler, they, every month for their customers, they send them a slide of people saying, this is awesome. Like, I love the city of Louisville or whatever. Like, dude, I couldn't believe how quickly somebody came around to do it. They were so polite and helpful. Thank you so much for all you do. Beautiful. It's just this enormous change in the feel-good factor of the people who are running these things. Doppler, this vertical of AIML and the practicality of it is what I find really exciting. We're just about to make our fourth investment in a company in Singapore that reminds us of the intellectual architecture of it. It's operating in a very different space, but the actual underlying practical architecture of it is really, really exciting.

Nick:

I always come home to that, whether it's in water or even in electricity, but so much of legacy systems that were built 100 years ago, there's lots to be improved on. But so much of the folks that work on it and maintain it, it is such a thankless job and no one gives any second thought to how it is that the light in their home turns on. I shouldn't say no one. most people, including myself, most days don't give too much thought to the systems that enable all this, or if it's tap water, what have you. And yeah, that gets back into the narrative reframe of what would it take for all of us, even if we sit outside of it, to be 1% more fluent in how all this stuff actually works and To what extent would that help?

Tom:

Yeah, I blame us. I do a lot of blaming of my own crowds. It's a little bit unfair. Especially through the late teens into the 20s, there was always this narrative on stages of water conferences that the investment isn't there. There needs to be more investors. You need to have better entrepreneurial ideas. You need to communicate them better and you need to be better entrepreneurs. Investors don't understand water, but they're also not idiots, right? If you can put a good enough example, good enough argument in front of an investor, it doesn't matter whether you're an enterprise, you're selling another CRM. or whether you're selling something into the water sector. If everything about this is right, you're going to be able to make the argument. The money is going to follow the quality, right? So it's actually our responsibility as people who are working in the kind of entrepreneurial side of things in water to make sure that we increase that quality. In the same way, people don't care because we're crap at communicating. It always used to drive me nuts when I was in San Francisco. I'd see the buses driving around with PG&E ads. Now, obviously, PG&E went bankrupt. So put that aside. Forget that old chestnut. But it's kind of the guy up the pole with the PG&E high-vis and the helmet and then family underneath hugging each other and looking up at the guy up the pole and it's like, yeah. that guy's great, or that lady's great, and it makes you appreciate the service. It makes you that much less pissed off when you have to pay your energy bill at the end of the month, right? And this is basic, but it's not like it's just the energy sector. The Got Milk campaign, like seatbelts. Nike sells shoes for $170 that takes them $17 to put together. And what is the gap? The gap is storytelling. The appreciation of public services is in direct proportion to the quality of the storytelling that is done about them. We're bad at telling the story, no one cares. If we got better at telling our story, a lot more people would care. I don't blame people for not caring. I blame us. I blame me. I blame our world for not doing a better job of transmitting the fundamental importance of the work that all of these phenomenal people within the sect do. We're improving, but we're garbage.

Nick:

It's interesting because it's very cross-cutting because there's lots of other slices of climate or energy or whatever word you'd like to use that I could say a similar thing about. It's like I've found methane beat a lot this year and it's like, okay, it's driven 30% of observable global warming, gets less than 2% of climate funding. needs more funding even just from within climate finance, right? And then you start to think about, okay, so why hasn't that happened historically? And I think you're right. It is a lot of just like, okay, well, storytelling, narrative reframe, and a whole host of other reasons. But just saying it needs more money That doesn't work. That much has been proven.

Tom:

Yeah. No, no. You need to be a better target for the money. Like, got to do it. Yeah. And it's coming, right? You know, we think about this as where water is kind of at the bottom of its S-curve. It's just lifting off the X-axis. How fast it goes up the S-curve? Don't know. Hopefully very quickly, but it's a, yeah, it really is a fascinating one. Just on the emission side of things, we've been doing a lot of work on this recently because a lot of our new LPs in Fund2 have been interested in the emissions and they're linked to climate change. Firstly, like water vapor is an extremely powerful greenhouse gas. Nitrous oxide. Methane's carbon factor is 24. Nitrous oxide is 300. And it's coming out of pretty much all wastewater treatment facilities. We think water and wastewater combined accounts for anywhere between 10-12% of global emissions. This is two and a half times the size of the airline industry. That's the airline contribution.

Nick:

That's the point I always come out to. People love to talk about the private jets and stuff like that. And sure.

Tom:

Let's talk about the airlines. Two and a half times the size of the problem. Like, yeah. And it's like, oh yeah, no, water's like an adaptation and resilience thing. We're not on that yet. Rubbish.

Nick:

No one likes to talk about wastewater treatment, you know, as you said, both nitrous oxide and methane emissions and, you know, big potential energy source if we got smarter about our systems.

Tom:

Nick:

Yeah. Well, we've already ripped and roared for 45 minutes somehow. It's gone very quickly. Anything else that we haven't hit on that you would want to make sure listeners either know about you, Burnt Island, or anything else under the sun?

Tom:

Just that we're very easy to find. It would be idiotic and my colleague Marissa would want to throw me out of a window if I didn't point people to our own podcast, which is called The Fundamental Molecule. Oh look, another VC with a podcast. That's exactly what everyone needs. What we're trying to set up is a repository of wisdom. knowledge from within the water sector, so that whenever anybody has like an idea about starting a company in water, that they can go to the fundamental molecule, listen to all of the episodes and be like, ultimately much, much better prepared to start a company in water than they would do before. So really what we're trying to do is build that. But do go and give it a listen. The latest episode with David Stanton is excellent. John from DAWPers up there, Alex from Zwittico, who's just about to raise a rather significant series B. is on there as well. There are tons of really, really good people. And then I just want to be encouraging to people who are interested in water. There is so much work to do. And there's so much green space or blue space or whatever you want to call it to run into. If you don't like crowded markets, which nobody should really, you know, come and check it out because there is tons of work to do. And I think that if you're interested in the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, like intrinsic, I get to get out of bed every day and go to work on behalf of people who are seriously brave, starting companies in water and the outcome of what they're doing is universally impactful. Like there is a one-to-one relationship between returns and impact and it's great. And then in terms of extrinsic motivation, like, I don't know, it feels pretty good when I'm talking to people who met for the first time and like, what do you do? Oh yeah, I work in the water sector. It actually feels great. You know, this is something that is, this is a place where you can, you get to be proud of what you do. And I think that's why water doesn't let people go. Once you're in, people very rarely leave. It's also a function of actually everyone who works in water, you know, present company excluded, incredibly nice. a really, really nice kind of like relatively low ego group. And so just like if we can help, if you're interested in positions, our companies are all, most of them are doing like really quite well financially. They're all hiring. So just give us a shout if you'd like to learn more.

Nick:

Yeah, love it. That's a great call to action. My last oddball question is outside of water within climate tech and energy, what's something perhaps random or obscure that you're getting excited about? That's a really good one.

Tom:

Nick:

Right. Yeah. And talk about, kind of to end on, back to that point about storytelling and positioning, I think carbon removal is a uniquely good example of a sector that's done it extremely well and has gotten a lot more money as a result. It's funny how that works.

Tom:

But yeah, yeah, it's amazing. I mean, David Gellis at the New York Times had a front page piece on the emerging CDR just over the last weekend or the weekend before. It's done a really phenomenal job. And in fact, David's team has just done an amazing job on their reporting and they cover water so much better than anybody who has really done before. At the FTA, she also had a really interesting special report on water just the other day. But yeah, CDR's done a It's done a good job. And has it pissed off a lot of people who would prefer the attention to be going elsewhere? Yes. Also, it has done that. But as far as I'm concerned, like all of this, there is no one single solution. There's no tier of solutions. We need all of the solutions. So more power to them.

Nick:

Precisely. All right, Tom, thanks so much. It's been a pleasure. See you around New York soon.

Tom:

Nick, it's always a pleasure. I will speak to you soon. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. Cheers.

Nick:

Thanks for tuning in. So you don't miss the next episode on another cutting edge climate tech, make sure to subscribe on Spotify, Apple, Google, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. We'll see you soon.