Chris Peacock is the CEO of AQUAOSO, A Public Benefit Corporation dedicated to building a water resilient future. Chris and his team use data science and machine learning to offer meaningful insight into water data and provide advanced water risk management and mitigation tools for the agricultural economy. Farmers, brokers, appraisers, lenders and water managers use AQUAOSO tools to identify, understand, monitor and mitigate water-related risks.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at NORI, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change. Hello, and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. My name is Alexsandra Guerra, and I am here in Denver with my co-host, Christophe Jospe.
Christophe Jospe: You know the drill. No pun intended. Took us 94 episodes to start talking about water. So I couldn’t think of a better person to be broaching the subject with us other than Chris Peacock. He is the CEO of Aqua Oso. He’s also done some other amazing things in his life with water as a water entrepreneur. Is that like a category, water entrepreneur?
Chris Peacock: I think water entrepreneur is definitely a category. One of my favorites.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, cool. I mean, one of the things that he did is published a book, which is pro tip, an amazing way to become an expert really quickly by helping other people sound like experts. And all you have to do is curate their expert opinions. Am I giving some of Nori’s secret sauce away on this podcast? I can’t tell.
Alexsandra Guerra: I don’t know, but I think you should name the title of the book.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. The book is called Damned If We Don’t and go out and grab a copy if you want to get a high level view of what’s happening in the water industry. I don’t want to talk about it just yet, Chris. I want to talk about you, talk about your story and what it is that led you to becoming a water entrepreneur.
Chris Peacock: Yeah, awesome. Well, thanks for having me on the podcast. This is super exciting. After watching some of the companies come into the room and have conversations, really excited to kind of have the conversations with you guys as well. This is going to be a lot of fun. So just briefly, I’ve been working in the water. I’ve been in the water sector for about 20 years. And you both know my team. One of the running jokes is I’m looking pretty pruney these days because I’ve been in water for so long. Both Jeff and Cameron like to mention that, but I think they’re just being nice because I’m getting older.
And the gray hair is coming with being an entrepreneur, continue to show up on a daily basis.
Alexsandra Guerra: I have like triple the Ghana count. Ghana is gray hair in Spanish. I have three times in just two years. It’s just absurd.
Chris Peacock: Yeah.
Alexsandra Guerra: So I feel you, man.
Chris Peacock: So yeah, I’ve been working in water for 20 years. It was totally an accident the way I got into water to begin with. I grew up in a family business. My mom and dad, they were doing land development and housing development. I worked with them in the summer months in high school and college and I swore. That I would never do that again once I graduated college. I went totally to the opposite direction. I got an undergraduate degree in East Asian Studies. Like my plan was to go travel the Orient, teach English in Japan, come back, get a PhD, get a cool smoking jacket and a pipe, be a professor.
But reality kind of hit when I graduated college and I realized I was broke. So I went to go work for my family. Ended up taking over the family business. We sold it a few years later. But in the process, we had acquired a 70-acre piece of historical farmland in northern Arizona. The land had historical water rights associated with it. So as we were carving up the 70 acres into five-acre ranchettes, I realized there were some really interesting assets associated with the property that nobody had been dealing with, which were water rights.
Christophe Jospe: Hmm.
Chris Peacock: I spent the next three years learning all about water rights and water markets, bought, sold, built one of the largest portfolios of private water rights in Northern Arizona at the time, ultimately selling it off to some developers, got involved in a wastewater treatment plant, worked with some municipalities. And then I got married and had a baby and babies are expensive, so I got a real job. I had health insurance and I moved to Phoenix to go work with some consulting engineering firms. Spent the next about seven years selling consulting hours to water utilities.
And then I got recruited to California, spent the next seven years still selling more consulting hours to utilities, but this side on the software side of the space. So helping utilities better understand the data that they were dealing with, which launched me into really the second company of mine, which was the Water Innovation Project, which was focused around helping water utilities better understand their data. And through that, I started a group called H2. 0, where I brought together software companies and water utilities, helping them build better services for those water utilities.
And as I was going through that process, I built some really great relationships, did a really cool water energy nexus hackathon in San Francisco, published the book, Damned If We Don’t, Ideas for Accelerating Change Around Water. And ultimately went to go work for one of my sponsors, a company called Fathom. They were doing some really cool stuff in the water utility space, helping those utilities not just manage the data, but getting that data back to consumers and helping the consumers, the end users make better decisions from a behavioral analytics standpoint.
I did that for a few years, traveled all over North America. And in 2016, saw some really interesting opportunities in California to better manage water at the watershed level by leveraging data. And that’s when we started AquaOso.
Christophe Jospe: There’s so much to pull on there. That’s amazing. I want to start with the utilities, actually, because utilities plays a very important role when it comes to water. For sure. And they’re sitting on a bunch of data. And you seem to have some kind of view on how they can more efficiently use their data to achieve some kind of end. So what was your experience like at H2. 0 and the Water Innovation Lab? What did you pick up? What are the sort of hot take insights?
Chris Peacock: Yeah, the biggest things that we learned as I was doing the Water Innovation Project and H2. 0 and working with these software companies was something that’s really well known in the water utility sector, which is the sector is super fragmented. People have a really hard time making decisions because of that fragmentation. And so finding economies of scale become really challenging. Everyone has historically been trying to build their own solutions. And until recently, the smart water space took a really long time to pick up. So this is like smart meters. This is leveraging data to find leaks inside of the pipes.
This is changing the behavioral modes of the individuals at the home level. All of that is just now finally starting to take shape because the economies are actually starting to work. The business models in the space are starting to fundamentally change. Whereas before, it was really hard to figure out what the fundamental business model would be in order to build scalable software solutions in that space.
Christophe Jospe: So sometimes we wait to get spicy, but I’m just feeling spicy today. Last night in preparing for this podcast, I was talking to one of our other colleagues, Jason Horton, who, while he was a student at Arizona State University working at the Decision Theater, He was working on the Harkwahala watershed decision modeling and looking at a trading water rights platform. And his commentary as a typical software engineer, who’s like, I’m just going to write code, was like, ooh, water rights, that’s controversial. And was describing these experiences of farmers coming into ASU while he was building this model.
Looking at projections of millions of dollars worth of value that they could now extract because of the water rights. Where do water rights and the utilities management of the water come together? Let’s start there.
Chris Peacock: I actually saw some of the stuff that Jason did back then. It was really cool. But you’re right, it is a super spicy topic. There’s a lot of controversy around it. You know, most people think of water utilities as the purveyor of, I get my water to my door, it’s super cheap. I don’t think about the value of the water. I don’t think about how it got to the reservoir that ultimately fed the pipes that comes to my house. And in a lot of places, what you see are Direct connections between the water utilities and the agricultural sector or the water rights where those water utilities are actually getting their water from.
So if you look at the history of California water, things get really complicated and really dicey really fast. There have been a few pretty good movies about that as well. But I think what’s interesting is I’m going to take some of the spiciness out and some of the controversy out because typically what we found is People like to fight and argue over water. But I think there’s a better discussion to be had, which is how do you help utilities and farmers and urban centers start to make better decisions and work with one another on that front?
So historically, municipalities would go buy some farmland. They would take the farmland out of production. They would move that water into the utility. And the argument would then be that the utility is stealing our water. From the agricultural community. The opportunity that we have right now are some really interesting ways in which the utilities can work directly with the farmers and incentivize the farmers to fallow land at certain periods of time to move the water into the urban centers when it’s needed.
Alexsandra Guerra: I’m not tracking. Can you try one more time? Because where’s the water going? It’s to a utility reservoir. Like what exactly, maybe a scenario, like an example of how this might work for a certain farmer.
Chris Peacock: Yeah, so a great scenario is going to be, let’s use the Central Valley of California because it is such a complicated system. I’ll try to simplify it as much as I can. There’s snowpack up in the Sierras. That snowpack starts to drain. It comes down the Sacramento River. It ends up in a couple of reservoirs. Through those reservoirs, it goes through the Delta, right? Right. A lot of controversy around the Delta. The water then moves from the Delta through additional river systems and through canal systems to the Central Valley to feed the farmers from a water perspective and get the water to the land.
It’s a really complicated network of reservoirs and canals. Sometimes that water can also continue to make its way down south to like San Diego or to LA. Mm-hmm. And so you see a lot of upstream trading of water, which is I think where water markets start to come into play. And historically, the communities like Metropolitan Department of Water and others would buy agricultural land in the Central Valley or south of the Central Valley.
Unknown speaker: So what you’re buying is not actually the water, but is the rights to that water. Is that correct? Or is it both?
Chris Peacock: It could be both. Sometimes you’re buying the rights to the water. Sometimes you’re buying the physical commodity of the water itself. And that’s where things get really interesting and really complicated. I mean, it’s such a complicated world that as we were building AquaOso, we’ve got two water attorneys on our team to help us decipher how the various water moves through the systems because it’s a complicated topic.
Christophe Jospe: Cool. All right. Well, you’ve started talking about Aqua Oso. We might as well get into it. What is Aqua Oso? What problem do you solve? How does it work?
Chris Peacock: Yeah. So Aqua Oso was actually originally started to build water markets. We started out in the process of buying, selling, trading water rights. And we made a couple of pivots along the way because we realized the business model of water right trading was really difficult without being a consultant or a broker. And as we were thinking about what we could actually do with all of this data that we had gathered, a bank came to us and asked us, Hey, Chris Cameron, can you help us understand the financial risk associated with water in our lending portfolio?
So we moved the company to really focus around that water risk scenario. So today we help organizations understand the financial impacts of water scarcity on their operations. Today, we primarily operate in California. About 20% of agricultural lenders in California leverage our tools to help with due diligence on lands that they’re lending against to help them better understand the collateral and the water risk associated with that collateral. We’ve got some customers up in the Pacific Northwest that are pulling us up in that area.
Alexsandra Guerra: Very exciting. Which is super cool.
Chris Peacock: It’s all happened while we’ve been here at Techstars. We’ve got some cool growth opportunities in front of us. But really, at the end of the day, what we’re trying to build is a FICO-like score, which Is it more than just the FICO score?
Unknown speaker: Are you maybe more like a credit karma where you’re providing them insights and actions on how to mitigate that risk?
Chris Peacock: Yeah, absolutely. So we started with the FICO score component of how do you first understand and identify the water risk and ultimately getting to the point of how do we mitigate that risk. So providing lenders with the tools to help their borrowers make better decisions in their farms on their operations around those mitigation capabilities.
Christophe Jospe: That’s so cool. And just to state the obvious, you know, you’re building a platform to better understand resources. And if you think about fundamentally, what are economics or what are markets? I mean, economics is just about finding the most efficient way to reallocate resources. And water markets are sort of about this allocation of resources, but to take a step back, like, why are we even talking about it? We’re not, you’re not trying to set up. Oh, I don’t think you’re trying to set up some market that allows just derivatives and speculators to make a bunch of money trading water rights.
Like actually. What you want to do is drive the world to a place where we can more efficiently manage this resource, which is disappearing in some places. And one of the quotes that I pulled out of your book, which I just really love, is, when you are dying of thirst, it’s too late to think about digging a well. And it seems like this is a Japanese proverb, and it seems like that somehow informs the development of Aqua Oso. But... I’m not going to put the words in your mouth. To put it in your words, how does Aqua Oso drive sort of better efficiency in the water management space?
Chris Peacock: Yeah, there’s definitely a higher purpose to who we are as a company. So Aquaoso is actually a public benefit corporation. We very purposefully and intently embedded the social ethos of water into the DNA of the company. We’re not out to go necessarily create derivatives. We’re out to help build a water resilient future, helping people make better decisions in light of the extreme weather events that we’re starting to see, in light of water scarcity, in light of all of the changes that I think water is one of the core issues that is going to be facing not just our generation, but for a few generations ahead of us.
It’s just now gaining a bit of speed in terms The importance of things that we need to think about and worry about and manage in a more integrated way. And we think Aquoso is one step in the direction to helping people make better decisions at the end of the day around our water resources.
Christophe Jospe: And so within the industry, people refer to this broadly as watershed planning, right? And in this book that you pulled together, Damned If We Don’t, I found one very succinct definition of watershed planning, which I love and I just want to read it here. It had five elements. One. Now, put all that together, and that just sounds like every watershed is going to have its own water management plan. Can you unpack what is watershed planning in light of that framing?
Chris Peacock: Yeah, for sure. So that seems like a lot, right? Of all of these different watersheds having all of these plans. And the reality is most watersheds don’t have a comprehensive plan. Most watershed level planning is done at a municipal level, at the farming level, at a district level. And so even inside of watersheds, it’s an incredibly fragmented way in which to manage what’s going on in the watersheds. You know, integrated watershed planning is a really great way in which to bring multiple stakeholders together to start making better decisions in that watershed rather than a bunch of disparate, fragmented decisions that have negative impacts on one another.
Automatically creating kind of an inverse relationship to collaboration, right? Which is the fighting that we typically see. And we’re going to see this play out more and more across boundaries because unfortunately, watersheds don’t necessarily... Fit inside of the nice container of a county or a state or a country. Watersheds oftentimes transcend political boundaries. So the better we get at managing water at the watershed level, actually the less conflict will create over time.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, it’s more, I like the way you described this and we need to be focused on the holistic approach as opposed to these fragmented plans for the district, the county, etc. And it wants me to go down one. This is really making me want to go down one path, which is like, OK, how do we design these systems better, more holistically? But I have a question here that I need to ask you because we are the Reversing Climate Change podcast. And so there is an effect that water has on climate.
So given that, what does water efficiency really look like?
Chris Peacock: That is such a tough question because water efficiency depends on context, right? So are we thinking about water efficiency for a river or for a farm or for a municipality? And I think that’s where the planning efforts become really important across multiple stakeholders.
Christophe Jospe: Or a household or building, right?
Chris Peacock: Or a household or a building or an industry. Like efficiency is very specific to the operation. But I would argue that at the highest level, water efficiency is about moving water to the right place at the right time. Based on the broader community’s needs. And that can get really tricky to define. But I think it’s a discussion that has to be had. And typically we don’t have those discussions in communities. We fight over them rather than collaboratively trying to solve for where that water should go. So it’s a really high level answer to efficiency because I think the specific answer does become very dependent on the situation and the area that you’re talking about.
Christophe Jospe: It’s a nice answer where you sort of weaved your way out of not answering it. Is that a great not answering answer? Yeah, way to do it. No, that’s what CEOs need to do well. I just want to pick up a word that you used, which was boundaries, and go back to a quote from Aristotle, which is, boundaries don’t protect rivers, people do. And so like Aristotle got it. People were thinking about this two millennia ago. Go ahead, Alexsandra, you had a question.
Alexsandra Guerra: I just wanted to bring up one more thing and it’s me like taking the mic and being so I’m on a soapbox now, which is that there’s a direct link between water and our climate and carbon because it takes a lot to move this water around. Wonderful nature and gravity moves water down the shed from the top of the mountains and it’s wonderful. But then what happens when you move it around? You give it to people, you give it to buildings and You alluded to this earlier with, okay, when it comes to utilities, are they using smart meters?
How are they using that to track where water is leaking? And if we can have full visibility of where water is and the risks at it of losing water, we can decrease our environmental impact from a carbon standpoint as well because we’re not spending so much energy to pump and move that around.
Chris Peacock: I totally agree. I think one of the really interesting opportunities that are in front of us now that we have access to better water data and we have better access to energy data and we have better access to how water is moving around, we can actually start making the connection between water and energy and the carbon footprint associated with that. Water is heavy. It is super heavy. It’s incredibly expensive to move, whether you’re moving it through pumps and pipelines over a mountain, you know, through a canal, or you’re pumping it through groundwater through those pumps.
Water is incredibly expensive to move. One of the opportunities that we have in front of us is the ability to start tracking the cost of pumping that water, the carbon footprint associated with that water, and alternative supplies to getting water to the same locations at a lower carbon and cost footprint. That’s something we haven’t really had visibility into until pretty recently.
Alexsandra Guerra: Well, keep talking to us about that. I would love to hear more about the visibility that you have on the carbon footprint of moving water around.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I was on the edge of my seat hoping you were going to go in a different direction of the connection between carbon and water, which is wetlands, which are amazing carbon sinks and also can do amazing like wastewater storm remediation, ecosystem service functions. Care to comment?
Chris Peacock: Yeah, absolutely. I think when you look at, right, we’re doing a lot of work in California and it’s pretty sad to see how many wetlands are left in California compared to what used to be in the state. And again, I think there’s an opportunity to leverage economic incentives to help people continue to build or establish new wetlands or save the wetlands that are in existence that are actually financially viable to the individuals involved in the system. And I think that’s been one of the big missing elements in any discussion around water in particular has been the economic component.
Like we’re huge fans of water markets. We think the economics of water can help move water to the right places at the right times. We believe in the economics of land stewardship. If you do things the right way, you can get higher value over time out of your land. And there’s a lot of really great things that we can start doing for the environment by leveraging economic incentives. And that’s one of the things that we’re working with in the financial sector with the banks is having them help their customers make those better decisions by pricing things like water risk into their loans and helping the farmers in particular make better decisions on the land.
Christophe Jospe: And just to state the obvious connection to Nori, because we’re working with farmers right now in a pilot who are monetizing the incremental soil organic carbon gains. When your soil organic carbon goes up, you’re on average, like water retention capacity. And it’s just like tools like yours help us look to provide an even greater value proposition to the farmers to join this market because it’s like, hey, not only can you monetize the carbon, you might have the data that improves your water FICO score that gives you better loans that sort of creates these cascading benefits of just goodness and additional ways to value and improve the stewardship of our land.
Chris Peacock: Yeah, for sure. I think one of the most exciting things about this program in particular and working with the Nature Conservancy and the nine other companies, or I guess between the two of us, eight other companies in the cohort is the opportunity to start Seeing a much more holistic view of what’s going on in the landscape. Because a lot of us have been focused on one siloed component of solving a problem. And the reality is the only way we’re going to solve some of these big, hairy, hard problems is by working together.
Pound it. I’m a huge fan of collaboration. As you can see in the book that we put together, the hackathon that we did, at the end of the day, it’s the collaborations and the partnership that are going to help us save the world, Not necessarily one individual company.
Alexsandra Guerra: Exactly.
Christophe Jospe: And yeah, I mean, these issues at the end of the day, they’re human issues. It’s not a technology issue. Just to keep pulling things out of your book, you know, water issues are human issues and they won’t go away because we’re not paying attention to them. And it’s really like finding what are the things that are going to deliver the most equitable future. And it’s going to go back to this potentially spicy topic. Like people who can make a lot of money in markets usually already have a lot of money and know how to play that game.
Maybe you’ll convince me that people don’t actually play that game in the water markets. I think they do.
Chris Peacock: People totally play that game in the markets.
Christophe Jospe: So how do you design water markets that are based on equity?
Chris Peacock: Yeah. So I think the biggest and the fundamental... Core of our business and how we’ve been building the business is the democratization of the data and the information. So we do have large institutions that leverage our tools to help make them make better decisions. But because of the price points and because of the scale that we can give to consumers, we’re able to help small landholders make better decisions as well. Like the tools that we’ve built are not just for a really large Landholder or a super wealthy organization. It’s for everybody that works in the system.
So as a public benefit corporation, one of our mandates we’ve decided is to be able to give back to the community. So we’ve launched some free maps. We work with small disadvantaged communities, helping them make better decisions from the data that they otherwise couldn’t afford to go get. And so I think there’s a lot of opportunities like that too. Get data and information into the hands of everybody so that everyone can make better decisions versus just a select few that have historically arbitraged the system.
Christophe Jospe: I am satisfied with that answer. I’m glad you talked about maps. I mean, maps are important. I know that you’ve got something going with GIS technology. Can you explain a bit how that works for AquaOSO and then more broadly, how does GIS, which is Geographic Information Systems, how does that work in the water management space in general?
Chris Peacock: Yeah, for sure. The visualization of how water moves around is one of the most important elements to understand what’s actually going on in a system. So GIS is a huge component of that. We’ve spent a lot of time geospatially mapping all of our data sets into one location, which gives our users a really quick view of what’s going on on a very... Very particular piece of land or in a very specific geographic area. In terms of kind of the broader water landscape, from a utility standpoint, GIS is essential to understand the fundamentals of where are pumps, where are pipes, where is infrastructure located that most people never think about because it’s buried, right?
It’s buried infrastructure. So we as communities don’t think about it and we don’t see it. And it’s the same in the agricultural space. Water is moving through canals. It’s moving through wells. So being able to start identifying where the water is moving and how it gets from location to location is really important in order to start making better decisions. And then on top of that, you can start layering information like water quality, water cost, and start to see specific locations and how things deviate from one locale to another.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, you’re really well-spoken, Chris. Well, thank you. Although I was thinking that whole time, did I want to interrupt him and tell him that we should say what GIS stands for, but you kind of said it’s Geo-Interspatial?
Christophe Jospe: Geographic Information Systems. There you go. I don’t even know.
Alexsandra Guerra: I’m just like pulling things out.
Chris Peacock: I’ve got to say one thing, like on the book side, because I haven’t said it yet. I like to take all the credit for the book, but I can’t. I really wish I could. It was 29 thought leaders in the space that put together most of the content of the book. What I can take credit for, and I think one of the things that, as Aquaoso, as a company that we’re good at, is building those collaborative environments. We put that book together in nine months. So from inception to publication, it was a nine-month window of hurting all of the people to get their sections written, editing all of those sections, getting them published, getting the images right.
I learned all about self-publishing. So if you want to learn, I’ve got a lot of hard lessons around that. So... Because I’ve learned so much around it, we are going to publish another book in the next year or so around entrepreneurship and water.
Alexsandra Guerra: Definitely. Ross, if you’re listening, let’s talk to Chris.
Christophe Jospe: You’re like the fat kid who just cannonballs into the pool, right? It’s like, here I am, water community. I’m the entrepreneur here.
Chris Peacock: Yeah, I’ve never been shy about making an entrance around water.
Christophe Jospe: There you go. So what’s your experience been like as an entrepreneur in the water sector? How have you seen this space evolve?
Chris Peacock: It’s really hard. The water sector in particular, because the business models are tricky and the fragmentation of the space, it’s hard to figure out business models that make sense, that are scalable. Typically what happens in the water sector, traditionally what you’ll see happening is someone will build a solution and it’s a really interesting solution, whether it’s a water treatment solution or a data solution, and they get caught up in perpetual pilot projects in specific geographies. And then they have to go run those pilots in every new geography that they go to, making it almost cost prohibitive to scale the business.
So what we’ve started seeing are some really interesting models around helping businesses scale across multiple geographies, which I think is really important in the water sector. Those models have just been taking off in the past probably five to 10 years. So we’re starting to see more and more companies enter the space. But as an entrepreneur, It’s really tricky because on the municipal side, sales cycles can be 12 to 18 months long, meaning you have to have really patient capital behind you in order to grow the business. And as we all know in the sustainability space, even patient capital is hard to come by without a really good business model to support it.
And so I think like any industry, the water sector has struggled with building innovative solutions that have a really good business model and financial returns on it. Although that started changing as the technology changed from hardware into software because software becomes much more scalable.
Alexsandra Guerra: And I imagine that you have another barrier or challenge to overcome as an entrepreneur in this space, especially if you’re dealing with utilities, which is like, how do you get the utilities involved when they’re so risk averse and you’re new to the scene and you’re trying to do something new? Do you start with the customers? Do you start working with utilities in these type of partnerships? What do you do?
Chris Peacock: So it ultimately depends on the solution, but the reality is utilities are risk adverse for a reason. They have to be, right? Of course. There’s a public health component to what they do. So coming into utility fully armed with a message of disruption is typically not the right approach. Utilities don’t want to be disrupted. They want to solve their problems. And a lot of times what I’ve seen in the utility space in particular are people coming in with problems, solutions to problems that the utility doesn’t necessarily want or need to solve right now and coming in with the wrong messaging around it, particularly around disruption.
A better approach that I found in the water utility sector in particular is being able to come in, meet the customer where they are today and having the discussion about the solution and how that solution can help make their operations better, how it can help them Enhance the services that they’re providing to the end users, which at the end of the day are us as the community, right? That’s being served by the water utility. And so I think those have been interesting challenges for a lot of entrepreneurs in the space.
And I think the biggest lesson I learned is you just have to become comfortable with a slower sales cycle and showing up for the customers, at least on the water utility side.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, we know a lot about patience and long sales cycles in the sustainability space. It’s very much the same too, especially when it comes to buying carbon offsets, which we are analogous to but quite different in that we provide carbon removals. And we talk to a lot of people who are super interested, but if we just miss them, by a couple weeks ago we just procured for the year what we’re going to do. Get back to me in 12 months like, oh, okay, great. It’s definitely a challenge to start entrepreneurship at the B2B solution.
Christophe Jospe: I’ve got a really cheesy metaphor for you.
Unknown speaker: Sure.
Christophe Jospe: It’s the capital that you need to let flow before it can evaporate. Wow.
Alexsandra Guerra: What? What?
Christophe Jospe: Because like if you, okay, let me unpack that then.
Alexsandra Guerra: I’m an engineer. I don’t follow.
Christophe Jospe: So you’ve got a reservoir with a bunch of water, which in this metaphor is the capital. If you let it stay in the reservoir for too long, it’ll evaporate. So you need to let it flow. So if it’s the patient capital, you need to say, hey, there’s a route for this to flow and I want it to flow in the direction that my service or solution as an entrepreneur can harness. But if it sits there for too long, it might go away and you might do something else. Or if you don’t understand the timing of when it needs to flow, you’re not going to be able to capitalize on that overall flow.
It might be a stretch. I will move us along. Okay, I give it to you, dude. You talked about not wanting to disrupt the water industry, but I mean, let’s call a spade a spade. Very clearly, you’re here to disrupt the water industry without saying that.
Chris Peacock: We’re fully disrupting the water industry from a different perspective. Yep. Totally.
Christophe Jospe: And in... Preparation for this.
Alexsandra Guerra: But can we be more clear on that? Like what is it exactly? Because you were just telling us that you don’t want to give that message to the utilities. So what are you disrupting?
Chris Peacock: So we don’t sell to utilities at all. Our customers are banks. So we’re disrupting the water sector from a financial perspective as opposed to a software solution that directly serves the water sector.
Alexsandra Guerra: But what exactly are you doing? Like, we’ve been talking. I haven’t read the book. I know what you guys have done. I’ve seen a demo. So I’m at even more of an advantage than the listeners. But what exactly are you doing, Aquoso, that is disruptive?
Chris Peacock: Yeah, so we’re tying together the financial impacts of making better decisions around water. Typically, those financial impacts aren’t directly connected to the decisions that are being made. So because of the work that we’re doing in the lending industry, we’re helping organizations understand what those financial changes can mean for them and to their bottom line. And I think that’s been a missing element in the water sector for a really long time. Some companies have done it really well. Others have not. We can very clearly show the ROI of our technology, not just to the companies that are buying our technology, but to the farmers who ultimately rely on the decisions that the banks are making based on our technology.
Christophe Jospe: So to zoom out and maybe ask the same question in a slightly different way, in a podcast you did in 2014, you uttered the words, transforming the way we value water as a society. And to me, not to pigeonhole you in one spot, but that seems to be your mission. Like you’re on that.
Chris Peacock: I am on a lifelong mission to transform the way we value water. Absolutely. If you look at any of the businesses I’ve been a part of in the water sector over the last 20 years, that has been a core component.
Christophe Jospe: And so I would posit that the disruption is to move from how we value water today to some future state of how society values water. What does that look like and what does that mean?
Chris Peacock: Man, so big picture as we think about how we value water as society, it’s really truly understanding how Where does my water come from? How much does it actually cost? Because in a lot of systems, water is subsidized. Understanding the environmental impacts of the water and where it’s being used. So again, because the systems are mostly hidden from public view, we don’t see necessarily the direct connection between not just the financial impacts, but the environmental impacts of how and where we use water. When I think about the value of water, I’m not just thinking about the monetary value of water.
I’m thinking about the social value of water, the environmental value of water, the capital value of water. There’s a lot of other ways to think about value. As I’ve always thought about transforming the way we value water as a society, it’s taking all of those things into account. The only way we can do that... Is one of the ways we can do that. I won’t say we have the silver bullet. We have one piece of the silver bullet, which is understanding the underlying data and the underlying information behind the water and the water systems as they exist today so that we can start making step change improvements in policy decisions, in commodity decisions, in just overall social responsibility decisions.
Christophe Jospe: Sounds ambitious and like you’ve got a lot of work cut out for you. Yeah. So what’s next for Aqua Oso?
Chris Peacock: Yeah. So next for Aqua Oso is some expansion capabilities. So moving up into the Pacific Northwest, looking at some other Western states at the same time, we ultimately will be moving to other industries outside of agriculture. Our ultimate goal is to have a global water risk management platform that’s used across multiple industries. We want to be the go-to source for understanding water risk around the world.
Christophe Jospe: Cool. Well, this has been great. I got all my water questions answered. How did that work for you, Alexsandra?
Alexsandra Guerra: It was pretty great. It was a pleasure to be here. I’m so glad that you joined us.
Chris Peacock: Yeah, thank you both for having me.
Christophe Jospe: I do have one silly question. Aqua Oso, water bear?
Chris Peacock: The water bear, yeah.
Unknown speaker: Why that?
Chris Peacock: It’s a bit of a nod to California, to the history of California with the bear and the Spanish. I’ve had some personal run-ins with bears, so there’s a bit of history there as well that’s probably better shared over a couple of beers about bears. So, yeah, I think at the end of the day, the name came to me after a couple of beers as well, and it just kind of stuck and everyone likes it. Mm-hmm.
Christophe Jospe: Pro tip, if you’re hiking in the woods and you come across a bear, make a lot of noise. Absolutely. Sing the ABCs if you can’t think of a better thing to yell out. What?
Chris Peacock: I don’t know. And if you’re in areas with a lot of bears, maybe bring a bear canister as well.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, that’s me. So if our listeners are all jazzed up about water and the way we value it as a society and want to get more in touch with Aqua Osa, what can they do?
Chris Peacock: They can reach out to me directly. We’re pretty open and transparent in terms of how we operate our business. So I’m at chris at aquaoso.com is my email address. You can find us on the web, www. aquaoso.com. And happy to take any questions. And if you want to write a chapter in a book, let me know.
Alexsandra Guerra: Awesome. Awesome. Thanks so much, Chris, for joining us today.
Chris Peacock: Yep. Thank you. Yep. Thank you.
