S8E15 - How to Frustrate 90% of Start-Up Founders in 15 Minutes in their Best Interest

with 🎙️ Paul Gagliardo, Judge and advisor at Imagine H2O, and Principal at Gagliacqua.     

💧 Paul also runs the Water Entrepreneur, an incredibly good water podcast that is one of my personal favorites and which also turns out to be a family business as Paul will elaborate on later on in the conversation.

What we covered:

🚽 How leading the project that infamously popularized the term "toilet to tap" made Paul famous and what his job was in San Diego 

👨‍🔬 How Paul led a research center that tested equipment, gave a brutally honest feedback and assessment and how he rapidly got praised for that 

🈂️ How becoming a consultant engineer, one of his first duties was to translate what utilities said so that his colleagues could understand it 

🏰 How the water sector used to be extremely conservative and somewhat trapped in the 19th century and how things drastically changed over the last decade 

🧑 How the startup founder is almost as important as the technology and the market the company aims for, why, and what to do now that you're aware of that 

🚧 How some inventors believe in their technology despite the fundamental laws of physics and how to overcome their harassing demands 

⚖️ Defining a set of rules to check and assess technology in the most effective manner and how despite all precautions taken to make it a science, there is still some subjectivity in it 

🧑‍⚖️ How the more disruptive your technology is, the more people will want to compare it to things they know and understand to better assess the value you're delivering 

📊 How you need to think of data collection from the onset when piloting and how there are a set of best practices that support your efforts in this endeavor 

🤌 How expertise can be tricky: the more expertise someone has, the less likely that person is to look at something new because they think they already know everything 

0️⃣ Startups having zero experience in the water business, getting paid as a utility and having to figure out what to do with the money, how founders have to be prepared to be replaced when the company grows, being an open book, being smarter than everybody else, seeing the future... and much more! 

🔥 ... and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 🔥 

🔗 Send your warmest regards to Paul on LinkedIn  

🔗 Check out the Water Entrepreneur Podcast's Website

🔗 Find the full transcript of my conversation with the inventor of the Toilet to Tap on the (don't) Waste Water website!

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