Consider this. By the time you finish reading this column, people will publish worldwide over 1.75 million tweets of up to 140 characters. During the same time, eight people will have died due to lack of clean water. The former is a technological marvel. The latter is a stark reminder that, despite humanity’s stunning innovations, we still have not conquered some of our most basic challenges.
It’s a great mystery of our time. We can connect around the world with millions of strangers, sharing signals based on pinpoint beams of light oscillating over 1 trillion times per second. Yet we still can’t safely provide nearly a billion people with the basic stuff of life.
So why is clean water so hard? Given that the world invests billions of dollars into clean water, even fighting wars over it, why have we made so much technological progress in other realms but not so much in clean water?
I’ve been grappling with this issue for over 9 years. That’s when I happened to meet a couple scientists working on a new technology with the potential to dramatically lower the cost of purifying water. I bit the hook. Eventually, this pathway led to the founding of a startup, Liquidity Nanotech, that has created a product, Naked Filter, that is a personal water filter bottle that can instantly create bacteria-free drinking water anywhere. Building this company has been an epic journey – I’m its acting CEO -- to say the least.
Given my experiences, I thought it would be useful to provide some personal reflections on why clean water is so hard. I’ve got almost a decade of battle scars to show for these learnings. But here they are for you, neatly packaged in a pithy numbered list…
1. Price. Good intentions sometimes lead to big problems. That’s the case in water. How so? The lack of efficient pricing in water has stifled innovation. Most people understandably view clean water as a basic right, rather than a market-driven product. As a result, many of us pay far less for water than it actually costs, at rates often subsidized by the state. While this might create a short-term benefit in creating more equitable sharing of water resources, it creates a long-term problem by discouraging new technologies from coming to market. Risk is not rewarded properly in the water business. With Liquidity, it became clear very fast that we could not easily build a business by selling to governments or municipalities as a main channel. So instead, we built a business focused on selling to consumers (and the OEMs that sell to consumers), where pricing incentives actually matter. The lesson: people pay more for water the closer the product gets to their lips.
2. Regulations. The regulatory landscape in the U.S. for drinking water is a confusing landscape of acronyms and numbers: EPA, WQA, NSF, ANSI, P231, etc. In addition, each governmental body in the world can have a different set of rules, whether it’s for a nation, state, city, or region. And many such rules and standards aren’t always grounded in reality—they often focus on theoretical worst-case scenarios, instead of practical day-to-day improvements for ordinary people. You would think that, with water as important as it is, these issues would be navigable with some basic inquiry on the web. The reality is that very few people understand these regulations well. Even the experts can get confused sometimes. At Liquidity, we had to bring aboard some highly experienced talent, people who knew these regulatory issues thoroughly. For other startups that can’t find this expertise, regulations can become an insurmountable barrier.
3. Consumer confusion. Water is a complicated subject, and consumers understandably get confused. People generally hold a few basic “truths” about water: germs are bad, chemicals are bad, and water should taste good. But there is much nuance that consumers don’t realize. For instance, did you know that the vast majority of filters sold in retail stores have zero impact on germs? Many people don’t realize what the filters they buy actually do. We have learned at Liquidity that we can educate consumers, and that they appreciate it when it’s done well. Chemistry and microbiology are not the easiest subjects in the world to explain, but we’ve discovered ways to do it. For instance, our Kickstarter page contains a lot of science, but we put it in a digestible format for ordinary people to understand. In short, respect your customer.
4. Too few entrepreneurs. The slow pace of innovation in water creates a negative feedback cycle. This happens because entrepreneurs learn best from other entrepreneurs—that’s why mentoring in the digital world is commonplace. However, in the water sector, there just aren’t that many entrepreneurs and innovators to learn from. Why? The water industry evolves slowly, which means that there are not many innovators who have succeeded in driving breakthroughs and can share lessons learned with others. In addition, professionals in the water sector tend to be more risk-averse than in other sectors, often for safety-related reasons. With Liquidity, we intentionally sought out some of the most successful entrepreneurs and innovators in the last half-century as part of our core
5. Cross-sector collaboration. When I reflect on the vast diversity of talents required to launch Liquidity’s most recent product, my head wants to explode. There’s a ton of knowledge involved, and you need a ton of really smart people working together to pull it off. Our team includes a diverse spectrum of scientists, engineers, businesspeople, policymakers, and capitalists. And on any given day, the fate of the entire company can rest on any given person. The challenge with diversity is that people speak different professional languages, they bring different assumptions, they work in different methods, they have different incentives, and they possess different attitudes to risk. This means that unpredictability, miscommunication, and friction are more likely. It’s hard for any team to innovate—it’s even harder when they’re tackling clean water.
6. Invisibility. It’s hard to remove what you can’t see. The things that are dangerous in water are too small for the visible eye. That makes clean water hard. In addition, water quality varies everywhere. For instance, the water you get from your faucet today is not the same as the water you’ll get tomorrow. Given the invisible nature of water contaminants, testing cycles are slow. For example, to do a full test of the entire process in the past at Liquidity, we had to boot up and run the manufacturing production line, create specialized test water recipes, run a given volume of water through the test, and then finally hire a laboratory to count germs manually, one at a time. And then do it all over again. When dealing with clean water, you need a healthy dose of discipline, planning, attention to detail, and perhaps most importantly, patience.
Clean water poses great challenges for the world. However, I believe those challenges can be overcome. The issues are largely systemic, which means you solve them by thinking about the whole system, not just its components. I hope some of these lessons that I learned the hard way can be useful to others seeking solutions.
Victor W. Hwang is Executive Chairman and Acting CEO of Liquidity Nanotech, a company that recently launched Naked Filter, a personal portable filter that makes drinkable water free of bacteria, free of bad taste, and free of hassle.
