December 28, 2022

Episode 149: Alex Rappaport, CEO & Co-Founder of ZwitterCo, Inc.

Alex Rappaport is an award-winning leader with a passion for innovation and sustainability. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of ZwitterCo, Inc., a company that develops membranes that are immune to irreversible fouling and enable treatment and reuse of the world’s toughest wastewaters. At ZwitterCo, Alex drives strategic planning, organizational design, and the long-term vision for company growth.

Under his leadership, ZwitterCo has been recognized by the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center as a leader in clean water technologies. Alex has also led the company through multiple highly successful rounds of financing with both institutional and strategic partners.

Alex is a fierce supporter of his team. His strength is setting a culture of empowerment with a philosophy of “come as you are – love what you build.” He encourages the same entrepreneurial spirit, creativity, and resourcefulness in his team and has fostered a community that is dedicated to ZwitterCo’s mission to preserve and manage industrial and agricultural water and wastewater.  

Alex holds an M.S. in Innovation and Management and a B.S. in Environmental Engineering from Tufts University.

Julian: Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have Alex Rappaport CEO and co-founder of ZwitterCo, a company that develops membranes that are immune to irreversible fouling, and enable treatment and reuse of the world's toughest waste waters. Alex, I'm so excited to chat with you.

As we were discussing before this show, fascinated about sustainability technology and, you know, we all wanna be more sustainable and wanna help and. Reuse resources or repurpose things, but it's hard and the mechanics of doing it are more difficult than I think a lot of us maybe understand.

And so over overly just excited to, to learn more about your experience in building it and really you know, getting it into a place that, you know, people are adopting it and having real positive effects. So before we get into all that, what were you doing before you started the company?

Alex: Absolutely. And Julian, great to meet you. Great to be on the show here. Thank you so much for. . So if we really rewind the clock, even before there was a wico, even before I knew what membranes were and what the promise this technology was I was a river raft guide. So I used to teach standup whitewater, paddle boarding, kayaking, rafting on the Potomac River just outside of dc, Virginia area.

So a lot of my early experiences were outdoors, right? Working with campers, working with counselors on all sorts of fun adventure. So that was really one of the sort of touching moments that said, when I end up pursuing some professional path, it's gotta be in sustainable technology. I have to find a way to combine exciting breakthroughs in engineering with the fervor and fun and challenges that come from entrepreneurship.

And what I ended up stumbling on was this class of. New filtration materials that can really change the economics, the opportunity, the reliability of doing wastewater treatment and enabling reuse in applications where there's a really painful acute need for both water access, lower cost of treatment and resiliency against the impending changes that are coming from water scarcity and changes in regional regulations.

And to be able to provide the tools that can help people make those decisions practical, and affordable. It's a really exciting place for the company to. So happy to dive in on any part of how we sort of make this happen.  

Julian: Yeah. Well, do you have any, you know, anecdotal stories about seeing wastewater in, in areas that maybe you weren't expecting it or being encountered it?

You know, obviously you're somebody who loves nature and, you know, loves to kind of, you know, have the experience of activities in nature, which I love. And I grew up on the kind of the countryside of where my town was from. And so obviously I love the outdoors and I think it.

It's one of the easiest ways to have fun as a kid, especially and the least expensive is just to go play in some mud and some water on a riverbank. But yeah. Any anecdotal stories of where you were impacted by a  

Alex: person? I'm sure this will end up being a footnote in the, you know, in the book that gets written at some point.

I actually got Giardia from Contaminated Water in the River Way. Yeah. I spent so much time there. It was sort of a known potential concern. But I would say that's probably the first direct exposure I had to realizing the water that we interact with, right? If you're going to the ocean, if you're going to rivers, if you are just sort of in nature, that water still has you know, a relationship with the rest of the industrial world that we.

And, you know, the experience just sort of compounded from there. One of the other moments that I actually remember before the company was founded and. Pretty interesting, pretty sort of developmental moment was while I was at Tufts studying environmental engineering, there was an opportunity to go tour deer Island, which is one of the massive wastewater treatment centers that covers a lot of the municipal sewage and wastewater that comes out of the Massachusetts area.

And we don't think about what happens when the water goes down the drain, right? You turn on your shower, you turn on your sink you think of it. Food that you interact with, manufactured products you interact with, but we don't think about how much water goes into those processes and where it all goes when it's done.

But get to see the scale of how much water we process and how much contamination or industrial byproducts end up in those in the feet of civil environmental engineering that. Helps us get to this continuous process of making it safe enough to put back into the environment or doing the best job we can.

Again it's just sort of outta sight outta mind until it's not, until there isn't enough water, until it costs really change. So having a chance to see infrastructure that exists it was really impactful for me. I didn't appreciate the scale until you saw it in real life  

Julian: I, I had a similar trip when I was younger and it was fascinating to me that some water was unable to be reused because of the contaminants that people were putting into it with everyday products.

And so it ma it made me personally conscious, unlike, you know, don't put certain things in the toilet or down the sink, especially like oil right. Don't put any hot oil or anything like that in, in your pipes because it's so difficult to then repurpose that water outside of like human impact or actually take it in a step back here.

How much if you, I don't know if you statistically know a percentage, but how much is human impact directly related to the inability to reuse water or I guess maybe the inefficiency to reuse some water and how, what can we do about it or the things that.  

Alex: So, there's definitely a world in which there's a direct relationship between what we call human waste or sanitary waste and how that affects the treatment infrastructure we have in this country around the world.

One of those anecdotes you mentioned, you know, what, shouldn't we flush down the drain? Or you hear about wipes, you hear about you know, a lot of the fat. You don't want big and grease going down your down your kitchen sink. Well, not to nauseate any potential listeners here, but if you ever have a chance to Google.

Fatberg, the Boeing 7 47 size icebergs of fat and congealed crap that ends up in lots of sewers all around major metropolitan centers. The, you know, the small incremental impacts that we each have in our day-to-day decisions. Things that go down the drain, they will aggregate and will accumulate. Yeah, it can be a huge thing.

It can be a real civil burden on treatment infrastructure. And unfortunately that is just sort of a direct how people, the behavior we take towards our waste and we think about our water and, you know, again, it's just as easy to make it disappears sometimes but there is more ramification to it than that.

And the spirit that Zwitter Cooper. There's sort of a different way that we think about the human interaction. So a lot of the facilities, a lot of the customers that our tools are deployed in are in big manufacturing centers. So whether you're making you know, bioprocess or bio manufacture materials the meat and poultry industry, dairy whether you're treating the leachate from landfills or whether you're in few ethanol plants, these large facilities that make the food fuel manufactured goods and services we interact.

A lot of them need way more water on a total poundage basis than the actual product that's produced. It's something like five and a half gallons of water per bird in the meat and poultry industry. It's like two to one, up to 10 to one. Sometimes the amount of water that comes out for petroleum extraction.

So all these industries that we think of, you know, our consumer are sort of purchasing. , there's in the whole spectrum of sustainable decision making, there's the energy inputs, there's the waste inputs, but all these processes need a lot of water too. Wow. When you think about folks trying to get more conservative or conscientious with their water usage, that's gonna be a really big lever.

When we think about the growth of sustainable industries. Is water's one of those really pivotal inputs and outputs to any of those manufactured processes?

Julian: Ah, describe the technology a little bit. What enables your piece of technology to be able. Hyper filtrate, you know, a lot of the water and I love the idea of reusing water, especially for agriculture and aggregation, cuz you know, maybe the water's not good enough to consume directly, but through a different medium it can still be useful and valuable.

What about the technology allows it to be reused for these different purposes? .  

Alex: Yeah, absolutely. So the easiest way to think about a filter, right, the closest homegrown analogy is your coffee filter, right? Semi-permeable barrier that extracts things based on the size of the pores. If it's too big, it's cotton retained.

If it's too small, it passes through your coffee filter, takes out coffee grounds, it passes the water, the caffeine, the color compounds. If you took a coffee filter and you rubbed canola oil or bite grease or some other, you know, organic you know, thick mixture, you would not get much permeation through that coffee filter.

You get a lot of coffee sputtering off the top of your machine. You're not gonna actually have fluid passes through it. And that's what happens to filters they clog. And in the world of industrial filtration, you have some industries that there are well adopted practices for using membrane based technologies for separation.

Lot of surface water, municipal water, seawater treatment. A lot of that's done with. , but membranes where you try to put them in places that clog really fast are basically inoperable really heavy cleaning penalties, lot of downtime. You're throwing 'em away all the time, and it just becomes uneconomical.

So technology, our filters are made from this new class of materials, these new polymers that are basically non-stick. Not only do they provide a. Where organic contaminants won't end up aggregating or a hearing, but the poor network themselves is actually incredibly non-stick. So if you were trying to filter out some industrial waste stream, even if something was small enough to make it inside our pores, it would be as though it was in a water slide or a flume where it wouldn't reach the poor walls.

It would just sort of pass its way all the way through the membrane because the membrane has. Ability to sort of always stay hydrated and never let itself get stuck or clogged to the things that it's filtering. So because the membrane doesn't clog all these applications that have orders of magnitude, higher organic loading or organic contamination than you would ever expect to want to use a membrane for, we can open the door to the precision and reliability of membrane based treatment.

And often that is one step closer to now you've purified that water to the point where it. A purpose on site other than just going down the drain. Sometimes you clean it enough just to wash down floors or tanks or trucks. Sometimes you go all the way to potable and you really want to reuse it as a input to the process, so the plant doesn't need as much fresh there.

but you can't start that exercise of how far do I want to treat it until you have the tools that can start getting some of those tough to treat contaminants out.  

Julian: Yeah. And so it, it functions similar to say a coffee filter where the pores allow some things to pass in the medium, but maybe not everything.

Do you have to continue to iterate on the technology if you start working with different industries or does the technology essentially. Travel with most, most different, say, I guess compound fluids or whatever that it's going through. What's that process like?  

Alex: Yeah very good question. So the flagship product that Zwitter has now had commercial for.

A couple years is working for us in a handful of pretty tough industries. So we have installations in dairy, wastewater treatment, in manure treatment, in food waste management in landfills. We have it in bioprocessing. So there's definitely a breadth of organic based separations that the current product is really effective with.

But when we think about the vast array, water and wastewater challenges across all sorts of industries. You're gonna have to separate different kinds of things and you wanna do so with different efficiency. Sometimes you wanna focus on the bigger compounds and leave the salt and the sugar in. Sometimes you wanna get all the way down to ultra pure water and you have to take out very fine molecular separations.

, Soli Coast flagship product has membranes that are about one nanometer wide in their for structure. So one nanometers. , you know, thousand to 10,000 times thinner than the width of a human parent, right? It's very small. So we're taking out dissolved species, we're taking out emulsions. But if you want to take out things like salt or sugar, typically you'd rely on something like a reverse osmosis membrane or something that's so based separation.

So when we think about our future as a company, the class of materials that we use has a lot of opportunity to not just. One product or you know, the current iteration, but many different tools that can do separations with different characteristics. So we think of that as our, some of our growth stories, taking this really high performing class of materials and creating all the tools that the world needs to best manage their water.

Julian: Yeah. And just kind of discussing around sustainability technology and especially water technology One how long does it take to get the product up and running? Because I'm assuming that there's just a lot of barriers and a lot of red tape that you have to go through to get something, you know, the ability where it affects humans.

And also, you know, I've asked the products that humans consume or interact with. And then second, . Why do some of these products not pass, you know, a certain threshold of adoptability? Is it the difficulty that it has to, you know, do to get clients or customers? Or is it really that, that red tape, where is, why do some of them fail in their storyline?

Alex: So, on the topic of how long does it take, it sounds like there's gonna be two questions in there. One around. Scaling any technology, bringing it to market and the path it might have to go through from a manufacturability, regulatory exercises. And then there's, once you have a technology, how long does it take for someone to start using it?

What's the process of selling it and actually getting all of that go to market momentum building? So maybe address both questions here. On the first, when we first interacted with this technology, it was in prototype stage, right? There had been laboratory data, there had been prototypes. , but it was designed still with the resources and with the industry knowledge that you have in an academic setting, right?

In a research lab and the inventor of our technology Dr. Ayesha has taken a brilliant researcher in the field of high performance polymers and anti polling membranes. And so what she had been able to produce was some of the first data that I saw and that I used in my story building, right?

This as a membrane that is already showing itself to do things that are completely unique and otherwise, IM. That was the genesis of what the, you know, story that we envisioned, but the process. Of getting the funding, going through the r and d and prototyping exercises to start building this at a larger scale, doing a lot of that.

Go to market research, sourcing all sorts of colorful fragrant fluids from every industry you can imagine, and running benchtop simulations of what the treatment scheme would look like, and then eventually full scale manufacturing, building quality programs, having the team get built around this that we could deliver.

Not just, you know, on a one time basis, but with the service and support required to really make sure customers were successful. That took some time, right? It was, we founded the company about four and a half years ago, and we had our first commercial plant running in October of 2021 with a lot of our early products getting piloted uh, earlier in 21.

So that scale up exercise is maybe my, Place I'd point to where a lot of good technology and a lot of inspired ideas can really struggle to find the funding to get that early product market validation and to have the right collection of skill sets and focus to get you to those milestones that show this is no longer just an idea of value creation.

You're actually getting to see it, you know, live. And that builds a lot of confidence in the investment community and with your stakeholders. for a lot of hardware companies, a lot of companies in the clean tech space, getting those first commercial points of validation so critical to crossing some of the thresholds that, that often can point to companies making it from an adoption standpoint.

It can really vary. It really depends on the needs of your customers, right? So, a lot of our applications can take, you know, time to pilot, time to get the equipment built, time to have all of that commissioned in operating. So it's not a flip, a light switch and suddenly you can get these membranes running.

But one of the things that I've seen that been really proud of and really impressed by with our, the customers and partners we work with is they never need to be convinced. water reuse is a good idea. There's no questioning in folks' minds. This is not just an ESG or an environmental nice to have.

This is a license to operate. I need water into my plant because my groundwater wells are drying up, or I'm trucking away my water in tanks. They're tanker trucks, and it's horribly inefficient and really expensive. And there's challenges with city ordinances about those trucking fleets, or there's new regulation coming down and I need to get out in front of it to continue running.

So what we are seeing is. Impressive momentum building from our end users around the desire to try and look for new technologies. And our mission, our mandate is to give them a way to understand as possible in a simple business model and as simple a validation exercise as possible because they're motivated.

People really wanna see technology put to work and they're willing to take those risks. It's been really, it's been really great to work with our.  

Julian: It's incredible. And I was gonna ask about the incentives from the customer standpoint, but it sounds like that they're fully focused on, you know, repurposing and reusing water and it seems like there's so many more elements that actually, you know, keep that top of mind for them, not only for the personal business, you know, expansion and growth in operation, but also externally in the external factors that they.

Tell us a little bit about the traction with Zwitter coat. So you had the first commercial plant up and running in October, 2021, which is so exciting to see. Where are you at now? How many more up and running operations do you have? And what's the with the excitement about next year?

What are your goals and your ambitions to, to continue that scale growth?  

Alex: Good. Yeah, absolutely. So, between projects that are either up and running or that we have won and we'll be running soon the company already has over 3 million gallons a day of treatment capacity across more than a dozen, you know, installations.

So, you know, 3 million gallons a a day pretty quickly turns into something like a billion gallons a year of treated recovering water, which it just, it's. Such a cool moment to get to be able to actually appreciate the volumes that we're talking about. That said, it's still a drop in the bucket.

There's so much more out there both from the folks that know today that they need advanced tools for treatment and reuse, as well as the growing population of folks who are. Coming to realize it as water scarcity and the cost of water become more present and rapidly more concerning threats to their business.

So the water market as a whole is growing really fast because we are seeing such a rapid onset of both public attention and starting to see some of the painful effects of climate change presenting themselves. Not in, oh, you know, five, 10 years, we're gonna be in trouble. Troubles here, around the world.

So, from that standpoint, we're really excited to capitalize on these first installations. We have a lot of marquee projects that are like some of the largest in the world for what they are. And being able to share those stories and build the momentum behind those installations, hopefully will help us with, you know, the rapid growth and adoption that, that we're looking for.

You know, the other thing that we're seeing a lot of really positive momentum building is with our partner. So Zwitter co as a go-to market model we make the membranes, we make the thing that does the filtering, but the equipment that is required to run these projects and to, you know, get installed in these facilities, to capture the water and send it through likely many different stages of processing.

Often that is a job in our value chain that is filled with the technology integrator or the solutions integrator that. Sometimes with some of their own technologies, sometimes with other technologies, they piece together from other vendors, put together a complete solution for the end user.

And we've built now a couple really successful partnerships with folks that are familiar with what our technology does, sees how we can enable them to provide their customers with more efficient tools, to put a lot of commercial resources behind, building that into their scheme of offerings that, that they bring to the marketplace.

So it's a really helpful distribu. Process for us. It helps us learn and get to know the needs in the marketplace and have other companies that, you know, can expose us to the needs that, that we on our own wouldn't be able to fully visualize. And it's just a, it's a great meeting of minds when you've got another stakeholder where you've got these complimentary business models and that stakeholders just as motivated and just as mission driven about bringing solutions to the market and trying to make an impact in water. So it's a great cohort to get to.  

Julian: That's amazing. It sounds like there's so much just cooperation in just making this process successful. It's not one product. It's not one piece of technology. It's not one partner. It's everyone kind of, kind of working on a goal, which I feel like as a business is probably very much exciting because, you know, it's not reliant on one or two feature or factors, but it's also probably a little bit heavy, you know, incorporating so many partners into, you know, completing a certain.

Alex: Objective, rising tide floats all ships is the cliche analogy for anyone in the water space. But really we are hoping to all see both startups that want to pave a path for future investment into this space and to prove that the deployment development of innovations in hardware, in digital infrastructure, in new financial models can all be the stepping stones that future entrepreneurs can get to.

Follow more efficiently so we can continue this growing innovation in this space. We see a lot of, again, our partners that are very excited and growing rapidly, important resources themselves. We see other folks that are maybe outside of the water industry starting to really pull resources into this for the first time.

Infrastructure funds that might have been familiar building, you know, solar arrays or other major capital projects are now looking at water infrastructure. Critical set of assets that will never stop being necessary, have, you know, collateral value. And, you know, the momentum at the government level, at the public level is all there to support investments like this.

So yeah the wheels are turning. It is a, it can be a challenging web to, to really navigate to appreciate how many different players, how many permutations. . Well, an integrator in this country is focused on these things because of that country's regulations, but in this place it's different. Or this partner has something that they do as part of their scope and another partner doesn't.

And so trying to piece together how to make the most efficient route for all the people who have different scope that they have expertise in to work most collaboratively, I would admit that is not a trivial exercise. But rarely have I ever met someone who, you know, wants to close the door in your face about having a convers.

about how you could work together? Yeah. I mean, it's a very spirited Oh, and going back to the very first thing we talked about on this podcast, when you're out in the outdoors, when you're doing environmental stuff, when you're hiking, when you're out on a river, people want, have a great experience together.

Yeah. I think there's a translation into the clean tech industries as a professional setting. People want to see everyone succeed. Yeah. There's always competitive limitations to, you know, being in a capitalist world, but you know, the spirit behind what everyone's trying to do I find very positive.

Julian: That's, What are some of the biggest risks that sort co fixes today?  

Alex: Well, growth has all sorts of challenges to it. The company just reached 50 people so 50 employees in the team. Just from a you know, from a human psychology standpoint, we're all learning and growing together as to how we can be most efficient with our team and our tools, our resources.

So anytime you're going through rapid growth like that, you be very conscientious about the way you think about roles and responsibilities, the way that you grow leaders, the way that you build cultural habits and practices. don't just require, you know, the leadership or the folks who founded the company to be the ones trying to build expectations, but the company itself grows and sustains those expectations of one another.

And that's what really leads to a scalable organization. So we're trying to, you know, as we think about rapid deployment of technology and providing services to customers, it's also make sure that we're gonna be, you know, successful partners, not just tomorrow and the day after, but in years to come as we.

and of course we are you know, we're a venture backed company. There's very high expectations on growth for our organization. So from a risk standpoint there has been a a historical risk aversion or slowness to the water industry that, you know, new inspired entrepreneurs are gonna work on growing their businesses as, as quickly as possible.

But it's always risky to try and take a top industry with a lot of entrenched ways of thinking and to. make changes on technology and business models and all sorts of stuff. So, it, it's an industry that is excited to change but it'll take a lot of collective effort.  

Julian: Yeah. If everything goes well, what's the long-term vision for ZwitterCo?

Alex: Treat all the water that there is Capture Andrew use. So, quote, seriously. You know, our moonshot is big, right? Industrial agricultural water is coming out of a pipe, right? If it's in the centralized collected facility and it's coming out of a pipe, we want to treat it and provide the tools and path for someone to reuse it, right?

Food tool manufacturing, doesn't matter what the industries are. Because the volume of water that we need to continue growing as a society and to not let all these other sustainable industries. You think about plant-based protein, you think about renewable natural gas, you think about green chemical.

there are a lot of other spaces that are also trying to innovate and be more sustainable, and so, but crow's sort of job in life is to make sure that none of those industries are constrained. Because of water. We wanna help create this future of water abundance where everyone who's inspired to solve these problems, you know, can think about.

We, we have a way to make sure that water is also managed as effectively as can, as we can in their.  

Julian: As a founder, you know, gets day to day or week by week, what do you find yourself focusing on the most and what would you like to put more time into?  

Alex: Day by day, week by week? What am I focused on? Well, what's on fire?

. The the thing that I'd say is a newfound opportunity for me in my position that I'm really enjoying, part of it's having conversations with folks like you. . We have intentionally tried to make sure we had products running with reliability in these industries before there was too much fanfare and too much expression to the world about what this technology was because it's different.

It's, it has been met with a, and brains aren't supposed to do that. They're not supposed to work in those spaces. And we really wanted to make sure we had the substance to, to back up the claims we were making. Now that we. Raise some of the financing that we have. We have these commercial deployments. A lot more of my time in my mandate has been to be the spokesperson, sharing this with the world and engaging with a lot of the q and a from, from the industry that helps others understand where we can fit in, how our brand is growing and where they can think about working with us and where those collaboration points can come from.

So it's a great new challenge for me to be able to. This story and this team that I have been so proud to work with and all of the internal development that's happened and now, you know, shift the direction externally and be a spokesperson for my team's amazing work. And grow the narrative of what sort code can be.

Julian: That's a, that's amazing. And is there anything that you you would like to put more time into? Is there anything you'd like to put more time into?  

Alex: Yeah. Figuring out how to have more time in the day because. There's just always more water to treat. Yeah I think one of the places where I'd like to be able to engage most is again, in sort of the.

the public discussion. Yeah. We are now reaching the point where some of our customers want to work with us on engaging with the regulatory agencies that help govern the way they run their facilities. Or we see all of this new legislature coming out about the way that funds are being allocated to improve infrastructure or the way that we're trying to deal with cutbacks or shortages or managing these challenge.

And obviously Zurich's still, you know, a very small entity in this space, but we'd like to be able to at least provide the information about how new technology can solve some of these problems and be able to have a voice in those conversations. Yeah. So there's a great time for it. And it's, again, you gotta focus on what's in front of you and you gotta focus on what's.

Five years out and everything in between. But I think being more engaged in that, that global sort of conversation about water is definitely something that, that we'll be angling for as we get bigger.  

Julian: Yeah. I always like to ask this next question to, to really get us so some gems of knowledge for the audience, but selfishly for my research purposes.

But whether it was early in your career or now, is there any, or what books or people have influenced you the.  

Alex: Books or people have influenced me the most. So I have never just personally been the kind of person who sort of watches my idols from afar and tries to learn from them, from the contents and media that is shared publicly.

I am, I'm a young CEO and I've learned a lot of what I've learned through the mentors and advisors that I work. all the time. So I have a wonderful collection of alumni from the Tufts University ecosystem, folks from the Greentown Labs ecosystem up here in Boston. Other serial entrepreneurs or founders in water, in, in Cleantech and hardware.

And the folks who have inspired me the most are the ones who. Continue to grow and run up the learning curve for their respective company's needs or industry sort of adapting themself to new challenges as quickly as the needs of their organization adapt. When I think about the opportunity I get and the real privilege it is to have some of the advisors I work with be so generous with their time and their feedback, and sometimes it means that you.

Getting forged on the and build, it's not always a fun process to have, you know, the feedback that you need to hear be delivered but man, is it valuable? So I, it's sort of my message to any young entrepreneur and certainly the way that I've grown the fastest, has been surround yourself with brilliant people who have done what you're trying to do and have seen the next chapters that come.

And don't be afraid to share what you're working on with them in as transparent, vulnerable ways you can, because those ideas and the critique that you'll receive. just so valuable to, to venture building. It's that continual revision of your thinking based on outside content is a, it's a really valuable skill to hone.

Julian: Yeah. That little piece that you said at the end really resonated with me, which is like, share your idea and be very much as transparent as possible with what you can, because I think that's where a. Early founders or people who are thinking about founding companies, they're so tightlipped about what they're gonna be working on and what their idea the problems that they're looking to solve.

Out of, maybe it's a fear of being the idea of being stolen, but it's hard to steal somebody else's idea versus just work off something you're passionate about. You'd have to have so much resources and shift your focus you know, to honing in on that because it's hard to build.

And so I love that, you know, you're very much in practice of sharing and exploring new conversations. Cuz I. That's right. I think that's what founders should do and that's swear a lot of the unsolicited, but really good advice comes from  

Alex: my my the professor who ran the program in grad school that wears, was founded, had a great line that I've always loved, which is that you can't look smart and be learning at the same time.

A tough one. Sometimes you just have to be learning. That makes you gonna ask questions. And sometimes you're gonna look kinda stupid, but it's always worth it. I

Julian: like that you can't look smart and learn at the same time. I'm definitely gonna use that. And I'm stealing it now on, on record of. I love it.

I love it. Well, Alex, I know we're close to the edit the show here, and I always like to give my guests a chance to give us your plugs. Let us know where we can support, where we can learn more about sustainability technology, about Zwitter code, what your website, your LinkedIn, your Zwitters. Where can we get involved and learn more and we're excited about as a potential partner reach out and start using the technology.

Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Certainly. Website is a great place to start Zwitter code.com. Please do follow us on LinkedIn. We've got a really terrific team running our social accounts and we've got a lot of good content coming out, both news press, interesting articles. We're seeing way the technology is being used.

And if there are any folks out there who have some pretty tough water and wastewater challenges, please do reach out. We are always growing the base of applications that we work on, and we absolutely love working with our partners and customers, so, please drop us a line and happy to get in touch.

Julian: Amazing. Well, I hope you enjoyed yourself, Alex, and thank you so much for being on the  

podcast.  

Alex: Absolutely. Julian, this was blast. Thank you so much for having me.  

Julian: Of course.

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