Can Kidlin's Law Solve Water Infrastructure?

Kidlin's Law is quite popular in business and marketing circles (and probably quite true). Invented by Arnold Glasow, it postulates that:

If you can write the problem down clearly, then the matter is half solved.

Everybody will agree that there is a problem with water. But if it's still unsolved, it's maybe because we never wrote it down clearly?

Look, I won't pretend I can solve "Water" in a newsletter release. But as water infrastructure lately seems to either crumble or not exist, let's try to apply Glasow's wisdom to that very topic today.

What's wrong with Water Infrastructure?

The united nations project a growth in urban population, which shall reach 68% of the World’s population by 2050. Most of that growth will happen in three countries: India, China, and Nigeria, and in cities with currently less than 1 million inhabitants.

That's a monthly growth of 7 million urban inhabitants!

Meanwhile, these urban dwellers also increase their water use: they connect washing machines, showers, and dishwashers, which leads to problems One and Two:

1 - Cities don't have enough water

2 - Their water infrastructure is undersized

Now, half of this could be solved with a quick fix: getting more water into the system. But the fix rapidly turns into a problem: more water, in a traditional take-make-dispose approach, means disastrous effects on ecosystems (not to mention rising water scarcity). Let's take that one down as well...

3 - Water Supply "the conventional way" is not sustainable

... and let's recognize that water scarcity comes from somewhere, aka Climate Change, which comes with more extreme weather events that, in turn, can also disrupt water infrastructure:

4 - Water Infrastructure is at (climate) risk

Last but not least, I have to address the elephant in the room: money. Water Infrastructure is expensive (I promise I won't repeat it every week), and budgets - even when they get expanded (?? see this week's Snacks) - never meet the CAPEX needs.

5 - Water Infrastructure is structurally underfunded

So we've noted 5 ProblemS down. But, if we want to apply Kidlin's law, we need to write THE problem down clearly.

So what's the largest common denominator among those five?

It's the centralized infrastructure!

Those who read last week's release saw it coming, I know, but the 20th-century solution to the World's Water Challenges will not work in the 21st Century anymore.

And 24 years in, it's probably time we acknowledge that.

When 75% of the Water Cycle's costs are in the network, when 20% of pristine water going out of the treatment plants never reaches end-users, when replacing 1 km of a distribution line costs $1 million, and when (almost) none of the scale parameters that led to centralized designs are still valid in 2024, it's time to become rational and to admit that:

We can't afford centralized water infrastructure approaches anymore

... which leads us to the second part of Kidlin's law: now that we laid down the problem in clear terms, we've... only half solved it!

What should replace centralized water infrastructure? If I answer this one extensively, it's no longer a newsletter; it's a book.

(and I'm not sure you'd like to read my broken English in a full book)

So, for today, I'll leave it at: intuitively, my biased water instincts would take me to a different place and approach than my podcast guest this week.

This is probably why you should listen to Sabine Stuiver , to form your own opinion.

(to be clear as well, I don't disagree with her; I'd simply probably be less radical than Hydraloop is ??

Somewhat agreeing with this IWA Paper David Ewusi-Mensah shared with me ??)

?? This week on the Podcast: Hydraloop

While most water start-ups would crave to be noticed by the Water Sector, Hydraloop played in a different league from Day 1: they beat Samsung, Sony, Mercedes, and the like on their home turf by winning nearly every possible category at CES 2020!

All of this with a simple, brilliant, and well-packaged greywater recycling tool, sure, but also with some special spices:

• They leveraged existing challenges (you know, they didn't attempt to create a market ??)
• They carefully went after select early-adopter and carved their niche by going B2C and establishing an irrefutable proof of concept
• They built and leveraged strategic partnerships, sometimes even with unexpected counterparts, such as Sydney Water
• They effectively used media and awards. (Ever heard of a water company that gets its leads from Netflix before?)
• They crafted a product that marries practicality and aesthetics, hence catering to their go-to-market strategy
• They designed their path to scale by rethinking manufacturing

All of this... almost against the founders' will! They would have happily stayed in their early retirement if they had not felt the urge to turn the tide and execute a brilliant idea they had passively invested in for some time.

Best I can say is: check it out for yourself!

?? Snacking Content

?? Nicola Lei Ravello keeps covering the intricacies and evolutions of the UK Water Crisis. This time, he explores OFWAT's plans to inject ￡88 Billion to reduce the fracture in the country's infrastructure. If you haven't subscribed to him yet, you're missing out SO MUCH. My two cents.

?? Lux Research 's tracking is not limited to Water Tech for sure, but when I saw Michael Holman 's sharing of their ranking of innovation fields over the past 20 years, I couldn't help but notice that biobased chemicals consistently held a top spot over the last two decades. The implication of which I've discussed with Kemira in the past...

(... and there's more to come from me in that field in the coming weeks; hey, I haven't told you yet to subscribe this week; it's time for a reminder, right? ??)

?? AI has a significant impact on tech companies' carbon trajectory. In the example of Google, their GHG emissions have increased by 48% since 2019, despite their pledge to cut them in half by 2030. And while Google's data center electricity consumption surged by 17% in 2023, it may be time to look into the water impacts of all of this.

According to this paper at least, one-fifth of US Data Center's water footprint comes from water-stressed watersheds. Time to rethink their placement and integration?

?? Still catching up with the other (AWESOME) podcasts of the ecosystem: this week, I'd recommend The Water Entrepreneur Podcast 's episode 78 with Asaf Pras . A great dive into predictive monitoring, where the spice lies in the AI brain, not in the data (that's commonly available).

(And if you want to get to know Paul Gagliardo, MPH, P.E. first, he was my guest 18 months ago!)

?? The only thing I don't like about the Tackling Water Pollution Challenge by the World Economic Forum is... the word "Aquapreneur" - but it's me, and I'm petty.

If you're a start-up with a product-market fit and a suitable business model, you can enter the contest and get one of the ten 175'000 CHF checks, together with exposure to a great ecosystem, including Mazarine Ventures , BlueTech Research , and Imagine H2O .

(the right point in time to recommend my conversation with Scott Bryan, I guess!)

?? Natural Ventures just announced the first close of their "impact-focused venture capital fund!" With $100 Million in their pockets, I'm curious to see where they'll shoot first! (maybe you'd share us a hint, Benjamin Tam ?)

?? Hydraloop is hiring a Growth Hacker. If that's you, reach out to Sabine!

That's it for this week - if any of this is of interest to you, make sure to subscribe! I'll return next Wednesday with some thoughts on a bizarre water tech exit ??