Decentralized Desalination: How Nona Technologies is Reinventing Sustainable Water Treatment

[00:00] - Ravi Kurani
This episode of Liquid Assets is sponsored by hacc. The leader in water treatment solutions. HASA delivers eco friendly, reliable and cost effective water care and has been keeping communities safe one drop at a time. They've been at it for more than 60 years and you can learn more about hacc by visiting hasa.com that'hasa' hasa.com.

[00:25] - Bruce Crawford
Hi, my name is Bruce Crawford. I'm CEO and co founder of Nona Technologies, an MIT spinout that's decentralizingdesalination.

[00:33] - Ravi Kurani
Welcome to Liquid Assets. I'm your host Ravi Khurani and Liquid Assets is a podcast that talks about the world of water through the lens of management, technology and business. Today we have an awesome guest for you. Today we have Bruce Crawford. Bruce, my old venture capital fund, Bolt. This guy David Mallard actually introduced us,right?

[00:54] - Bruce Crawford
That's right. Yeah. We got connected with David early on. The startup we're working on began to get some traction at mit. David I guess subscribes to MIT News or something. He reached out and he's been an advisor to us. Really helpful. Obviously he knows what he's doing with regards to hardware development. So you've been an awesome mentor tous.

[01:17] - Ravi Kurani
That's really cool. So actually you touched on a few things there. MIT technology. David, let's just go back through that story. What were you doing at mit? Why did like what was this article? Why did David find you? Just walk us through what happenedthere.

[01:33] - Bruce Crawford
Yeah, so I'll go back to the start of mit. I was there for business school and living in on campus student housing. I'd come from a startup previously I was at Rivian Automotive and really was looking for, you know, the next cool thing. I came to mit, thought there should be new technology. I spent time talking to professors and going to these pitch to match things they do, trying to find a cool startup to join. One day though, my next door neighbor on campus, a postdoc named Junghyo Yoon, came to me and said, hey, I invented this new water technology and I need to commercialize it. But I don't know how could you like connect me with someone at the business school? And I said, hey, I'm at the business school, you know, let's work onthis.

[02:20] - Bruce Crawford
So it started as like a, we both treated it as a project. You know, we said let's make a business plan and apply to the Water Innovation Prize. And there's always another competition, another accelerator at mit. And so we started going the water Innovation Prize was our first thing actually, and we did not make the finals, which MEANT There were 10 water startups at MIT more interesting than us. And so that was a little discouraging. But we kept going. And in May, like six months after we started working on this, we won the MIT 100k prize, which was like their big entrepreneurship thing. And so that got a lot of press in the MIT news and it was picked up by a bunch of other outlets. So I think that's when David foundus.

[03:12] - Ravi Kurani
Got it and just backtracking. What were the, what were the other 10 startups like? What was the, what was the first two that you thought were the coolest in that first water InnovationPrize?

[03:25] - Bruce Crawford
Yeah, to be honest, I, I don't know how much exposure I had to the others. Like I said, we didn't make it to the finals where you hear everyone else pitch. I know that one, the startup that won, it was a really cool one actually. It was like it was a surface treatment for a heat exchanger that like didn't let water condense on it or something so they could like reduce the amount of energy that was spent humidifying water to make cooling more efficient, I think was the thing. And I, I apologize to this team. I can't remember the name ofit.

[04:01] - Ravi Kurani
Yeah, no problem at all. Really, really cool. And let's actually take a few steps back and zoom in to that conversation that you and your co founder had. What was just jump in the technology. Like what did your co founder come to you with? What was that idea and why did you have conviction in seeing that to build up this business? What did that first business plan looklike?

[04:24] - Bruce Crawford
Yeah, yeah, good question. So the going back to the specific conversation, it's winter, it's December in Boston, and I'm out at the communal barbecue grilling ahamburger.

[04:38] - Ravi Kurani
Because December in Boston, you're cooking a burger on a barbecueoutside.

[04:42] - Bruce Crawford
Yeah. And it's dark because it's 4pm and I'm just like bundled up and he's coming back from the laundry room. He's like, hey, I. And we'd been friends. Like our daughters had played with each other on the playground for like six months to that point. And so we kind of knew each other. And he at that point just said, hey, I'm working on this technology. And he didn't really give me any detail aside from the fact that it was doing desalination. So it was really a process for me to learn. So at that Moment, I didn't have any conviction. He said, can you help me find, you know, an mba? So I didn't just volunteer myself. I said, I'm interested. But I also helped him, like, post on the, you know, the Sloan job board. Sloan's the businessschool.

[05:25] - Bruce Crawford
And he ended up interviewing four or five of my peers, and I interviewed as well. And at a certain point, you know, through this, we're meeting, like, while we both do our laundry, for example, in the. In the basement laundry room. And I'm learning more about the technology, and I start to realize this looks like it really could be promising. And my wife at one point helped kind of push me along. She's like, this. You should just do this. Like, this is really cool. This is kind of what you've been looking for. I don't know why you're helping him find other people so nicely. So I took the job post down, but not before, you know, he talked to a lot ofpeople.

[06:04] - Bruce Crawford
The thing that I thought was interesting about the technology at that point was that it was just different, like innovation in the desalination space. Since the 60s, when reverse osmosis became commercialized, everything's been an incremental innovation. It's been like a little bit better membrane, a little bit better efficiency, a little bit better resistance to fouling. And it's really, at this point, it's really approaching thermodynamic limit of energy it takes to separate salt from water. So it's been just incremental innovations. And he had something that was an electromembrane approach, which electromembrane technologies are not new, but they've never used on the salinity of water like seawater or anything with a lot of suspended solids in it. I thought, this is just different. And, and so itunlocks.

[07:00] - Bruce Crawford
It's got this whole different trade off of advantages and drawbacks or this whole different set of advantages and drawbacks. So for the first product like it can be super light. We had this thing that's like a third the weight of the smallest, lightest seawater desalination unit and really easy to use. And like, it's just push button. It's like operating a microwave. There's no high pressure pumps. There's no heat going on, which you'd have for distillation or reverse osmosis. So I just thought, you know, I like that this has so many differences. We're not going to necessarily compete on efficiency, which has been all they've been competing on for the last 60 years. But we've got this whole different set of trade offs. It just made it really interesting tome.

[07:44] - Bruce Crawford
And were able to pretty quickly see some areas where our advantages would bevalued.

[07:51] - Ravi Kurani
Really cool. For the audience out there, I want to deconstruct some of the terms that you mentioned, and so I'll kind of rewind the tape really quick. Right. You talked about ro, which by the way, is reverse osmosis for the audience out there. And then you talk about desalination, which is basically separating salt from water. You had mentioned the 1960s. Can you just rewind the tape? And I'm going to chatgpt prompt you really quick. Talk to me if I was five. Walk me through the history of desalination. How does reverse osmosis fit into this story? And then you mentioned a few times that the whole game had been around, like, focusing on efficiency, but you guys focused on cost through this, like, electromembrane side and this, like, microwave that you can easily kind of push a button on. Let's just rewind thetape.

[08:46] - Ravi Kurani
Let's go back to, like, the beginnings of desalination. Can you just, like, walk the audience through the story of how you guys got to where youare?

[08:53] - Bruce Crawford
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for wanting me back. I found when I just got introduced to the technology, I was great at explaining it, great at pitching it. And then the more you learn, you get that the problem of too much knowledge and you use too much jargon. So thank you. So going all the way back, the way you desalinate water, the way you get fresh water from the sea or from any saltwater source, is distillation. So boiling water catching the steam like it's whiskey, except it's just water. You're distilling it. There's literally Egyptian hieroglyphs of this being done. So it's old, old distillation. The drawback there is it takes a lot of energy to heat up water. And. And then you usually end up with scaling issues in your boiler because you're condensing all thoseminerals.

[09:48] - Bruce Crawford
Fast forward from Egyptian times to middle of the 20th century, reverse osmosis is invented. So osmosis is, you know, transfer of fluid through a semipermeable membrane. And it's reversed because nature says that you flow. You flow from the fresh side to the salty side when you're dealing with salt and water. So that would be osmosis. You reverse that process, you make it flow from the salty side, and the water moves to the fresh side with a ton of pressure. So basically it looks like a filter. You're pushing water through a filter and it only has pores small enough for the H2O to go through. But to make that happen, the reverse of how nature would have it happen, it takes really high pressure. So for seawater, you're looking at 800 psi ofpressure.

[10:44] - Bruce Crawford
To put that in context, your car tire probably has like 40 psi. Your bicycle tire too. Yeah. So huge pressure to push water through membrane in this way because naturally it wants to get salty or not go the other way. Even with tap water, it's a, you know, a curve. If, if you're doing lower salinity water, it takes less pressure, but even tap water is going to need close to 200 psi. So, so it takes a lot of pressure to do this. And that's where you're spending the energy you need now an energy source for your high pressure pump to push water through thismembrane.

[11:19] - Ravi Kurani
And just to pause really quick on the difference between the Egyptian boiling water, heating it and capturing the salt to pressurizing water to 800 psi. The energy is different. Like it's because I remember what pv. PV equals nrt. Right. For all the mechan nerds out there, isn't it the same? Or is it like how much different is it from boiling versuspressurizing?

[11:44] - Bruce Crawford
It's, it all depends on how salty the water is to start. So, so I, I've got a graph. I could, I could show it up or else, or I'll send itto.

[11:53] - Ravi Kurani
You, but we can actually throw it up in like the post show notes for the audience to look at.Definitely.

[11:58] - Bruce Crawford
Great. Yeah, we'll throw it up. So basically, if your water is above a certain salinity, you know, above a couple maybe 5 to 10 times saltier than the sea, then it is most efficient to desalinate it. Basically there's not so much water left in the solution and so just a little bit of evaporation, you got all the water out that's, it's the most efficient at some point. And then as you come down in salinity, it becomes most efficient to use reverse osmosis. And that's kind of anywhere within maybe 10 grams per liter, you know, within 30% of seawater. You want to use reverse osmosis. Gotit.

[12:38] - Ravi Kurani
Okay, so I'll, I'll bring you back to where you were with the explanation of reverse osmosis. It's the opposite of what nature wants. Where you're going from fresh water to saltwater. You mentioned that you have to have 800 psi of pressure to push it through this filter like membrane to basically separate that the Salt. Only the H2O goes through what happensnow.

[13:00] - Bruce Crawford
Exactly. So, so the, this when this was brought out, it was vastly more efficient than distillation for like seawater and anything less salty than seawater. This was the most efficient choice. The, you know, it's not a perfect solution in that you now have to replace filters just like any filter. Like these membranes don't last forever, they'll clog. They can even burst if you get the pressure wrong in the system. And the membranes themselves are quite sensitive. So you gotta make sure you get the feed water super clean. So you want to kill all biologics coming in so your membrane stays fresh and nothing grows in it. And some of the chemicals that you use to clean the water, like chlorine, is the most common one to kill biologic stuff in the water that will like melt themembrane.

[13:54] - Bruce Crawford
So typically an RO plant will have like pre filtration, chlorination, dechlorination and then reverse osmosis. So you gain a lot of efficiency. But there's still some drawbacks in terms of like labor and OPEX to keep the things going. So those are like the most common ways to do it. Today, reverse osmosis is like 7,75% of wastewater treatment in general. Not just desalination. It's like really popular. So there was another technology, an electromembrane approach, invented around the same time, 50s, 60s, called electrodialysis. And so this is the concept that we're working on. Basically it's as opposed to heat like distillation or opposed to pressure through a filter, like reverse osmosis. It's using an electric field. So basically you have an electric field, two electrodes, positive and negative, and you flow water through it and particles are separated out based on theircharge.

[15:00] - Bruce Crawford
So no need for heat, no need for pressure. You're spending electricity now on creating this electric field. And so it's. Yeah, it came out around the same time as reverse osmosis, but it was just dominated by reverse osmosis. Like today it's less than 5% of water treatment is this system. And that's because it had some drawbacks too. It had an internal membrane called anion exchange membrane. Details aren't important, but it's really prone to fouling. And so it could be more efficient for low salinity. Water. So keep coming down the spectrum. We have like super brine where you wanted distill seawater level, you want reverse osmosis below that. It could be, you could be even more efficient with this electromembrane technology. But it had so many fouling issues that it really never took off outside of a few really nichecases.

[15:59] - Bruce Crawford
So what, so how having all this context, Joan Hyo comes to me, he says hey, this new technology I have, it's an electromembrane technology but I found a way to remove this problematic membrane which lets us treat, you know, dirtier waters without fouling. And we still have the efficiency advantage over reverse osmosis. So the big advantages for this long term and it's called ICP by the way. Ion concentration polarization. This was developed by my co founder's professor Jae Han at MIT and then Jungho joined as a postdoc and took it from you know, concept on a microfluidic chip to something that produces enough water to sustain a human life. So he's done all the scale up and filed a couple new patents related to that as the process haschanged.

[16:59] - Bruce Crawford
So long term we think okay, there's all this real estate in the spectrum of water salinity where reverse osmosis is not the most efficient. But people have been using it just because it's hardier than electrodialysis. Now we can open all that up and enable the more efficient technology to be used. And in the short term there's some other cool benefits too. So our, I know we're probably going to talk about markets later, but the first group to take interest in this technology at MIT was the US Army. And they came at it not from an efficiency approach, but they just thought okay, interesting. You don't need any metallic components because there's no heat and there's no pressure. This thing could probably be pretty light. So they gave Jungho grants to buildthis.

[17:59] - Bruce Crawford
You know, it's like a carry on suitcase, like half the size of a carry on suitcase. It turns seawater into drinking water and it weighs less than half of what the best thing they have weighs the lightest reverse osmosis device. So that's kind of what informed our first product. We like had a lot of co development support and funding from the army to get to this product which we're going to launch to the public middle of thisyear.

[18:27] - Ravi Kurani
That's really cool. That's awesome. And when you mentioned that it was lighter than the reverse, can you just like put it into perspective. If you had, I don't know, you can define this, but like, I guess I'm just assuming like the same volume of half of a carry on bag of an RO device, if you can even make it that small for the same output. Like is it that you need like five carry on bags and it's, you know, you're filling them with a bunch of stones versus a bunch of feathers. Like how does that, what is it? What does it looklike?

[18:57] - Bruce Crawford
Yeah, basic. Okay, so ro, let's say is like the smallest thing out there that can support five to ten soldiers. One carry on bag full of rocks, pretty much it's like 50 pounds or I think it's 49.5 pounds is the lightest thing that's out there right now. Our unit is for the same volume of water, which is like 5 liters per hour. It's half a carry on bag and it's exactly half theweight.

[19:30] - Ravi Kurani
Oh wow. So it's smaller volume but alsohalf.

[19:33] - Bruce Crawford
The weight, 25 pounds. So I guess that would mean it's full of the same rocks. There's just, there's justhalf.

[19:38] - Ravi Kurani
Yep.

[19:38] - Bruce Crawford
Number of them, which is half the number of rocks. Yeah, yeah,exactly.

[19:41] - Ravi Kurani
Really cool. And it also generates 5 liters perhour.

[19:46] - Bruce Crawford
Also generates 5 liters per hour.Yeah.

[19:48] - Ravi Kurani
And from a power perspective, because that's the main input here, does it use more energy? Less energy? Like how does that compare against this carry on rocks analogy we're using rightnow?

[20:00] - Bruce Crawford
Yeah, so for at this scale, the thing with reverse osmosis is it gets way less efficient as you scale it down. So huge, you know, 50 million gallon per day plant, they're like right close to thermodynamic limit of like, you know, they're close to 2 kilowatt hours per cubic meter. And for the small unit, you know, it's more like 10. And so for our small unit, we're going to be about 15 kilowatt hours per cubic meter. So. So we're less efficient for at the small scale. But this is the difference between needing, you know, a 50 watt solar panel, which is like you don't maybe this big, and a 75 watt solar panel. So you add a little more solar panel, a pound or two in weight and you can save 25pounds.

[21:00] - Ravi Kurani
And then you kind of mentioned a point I want touch on is that RO gets less efficient in terms of energy consumption. Right. You mentioned 2 kilowatt hours when it's at larger scale. And then 10 kilowatt hours when it's this 50 pound carry on bag or check in bag rather when it gets larger, like at that 2 kilowatt hour level, how much water is generally being generated? And then when you make that comparison with the electromembrane technology, is it at par? Does it get better? Does it work the same way? What happens when you get like larger in scale or is not, is that not the way to think about the technology? Like the market is in this smaller usecase?

[21:40] - Bruce Crawford
No, that's absolutely the way we think about it is in, you know, we're always thinking larger scale because we love the human impact we're having with these small devices. It's a great adaptation, we think. It's, it's letting people go where they couldn't before. It's letting people have water where they couldn't before. But we, and we measure impact that, but we also measure it in, you know, gallons of water saved. And so we're naturally thinking, how can we go bigger? So yeah, for seawater, and the answer differs based on seawater versus lower salinity. Right. So for seawater, yeah, the optimal scale, which you can probably reach optimal scale with reverse osmosis at like a million gallons per day. You know, a decent sized plant. Yeah, you're, you're aroundtwo.

[22:31] - Bruce Crawford
It tends to be like they say, you know, when they get the plan up and going, they say, yeah, we can get 2 or just below 2 kilowatt hours per liter. But then when you actually check the data, six months on, they're close to four. But in theory they can get to two icp. At scale, we think we can be at likesix.

[22:55] - Ravi Kurani
Oh, wow.Okay.

[22:56] - Bruce Crawford
So it's a pretty significant. And at that scale, you know, energy is your biggest, the biggest opex is from electricity. So that kind of leads us to think, all right, we see large scale seawater desalination is not where we're going to go. In some cases where you really have limited skilled labor to run the plant, or cases where it's really tough to get those replacement membranes, there's a case to be made. But when we think about scaling up, we think about this lower end of the salinity range where, for example, for reverse osmosis is using 1 kilowatt hour per liter or per cubic meter, we'll be using0.2.

[23:39] - Ravi Kurani
Got it.Okay.

[23:40] - Bruce Crawford
So in these low salinity ranges. When we look at not seawater, but you know, groundwater discharge, water from cooling towers. Cooling towers on a data center, on a power plant, any tap water filtration application, you know, this is where we can say, all right, we can win an efficiency and we anywhere we think we can win on OPEX maintenance and all that. So we want to try and scale up in places where we feel we can win on every front to make it easier forus.

[24:13] - Ravi Kurani
I feel like we're kind of touching on markets and applications here. Let's just jump into that. You mentioned tap water cooling, water towers, groundwater, what does nona look like that they're going to launch into today? And what does that roadmap look like? And based off of the products and markets that you are looking at, what's the selling point? Right. You've mentioned efficiency and cost and maybe that's like the primary drivers most of the time. But is there anything else that we're missingon?

[24:42] - Bruce Crawford
Yeah, yeah, good question. So when we think about how we're going to scale up, it looks to us like first industrial wastewater treatment and then municipal after that. And the reason for that is twofold. You know, in talking to customers, we've learned that like the value of water for an industrial customer, like treating their wastewater so they can stay open, increase capacity or just saving them money, it's higher to them than to municipality. I mean, we all know we're paying very little for our water. Even in California, where it's the most expensive in the US it's still not that expensive. So industrial has higher value for water, so they're more interested in savings there. And also the scales are more achievable for us. The smallest municipal plant you can imagine is hundreds of thousands of gallons perday.

[25:41] - Bruce Crawford
But for industrial uses you can go much smaller than that and be useful. So it makes sense for us on multiple fronts to start there. When we think about applications there, the one that we're most interested in is cooling tower water savings, water recycling. So I mean, it's everywhere. We're all aware of the growth of AI and the growth of computing generally, whether it's Web3 or crypto or AI data center usage is growing and it uses a lot of water. There's that popular, I don't know, it's one of those facts that gets out on LinkedIn and then everybody shares it. It's like the 100 word email is a bottle, like a 16 ounce bottle of water being consumed. So we feel like that's a really fast growing need that we could address. So that's kind of where we're lookingfirst.

[26:37] - Ravi Kurani
And then walk us through what the application on cooling water towers in AI or data plants like look like. How does, how does this now getdeployed?

[26:49] - Bruce Crawford
Yeah, so it looks like our product will basically look like, you know, maybe a pallet sized skid and it'll connect. That would connect to like a 1000 ton cooling tower which if you look on top of an apartment building or an office building, there's one big cooling tower with like maybe one or two fans on top. You know that's probably in the neighborhood of a thousand tons. So next to your big cooling tower that's the size of a school bus, you've got a little pallet sized nona unit and what it's doing is it's recycling water. So I'll give a brief background on because this was news to me not being in the industry. Maybe some of your listeners will be bored by this, but mo. But I'll just wanna go through evaporative cooling so it makes sense where we fitin.

[27:41] - Bruce Crawford
So evaporative cooling is the most popular way to cool like a building. Whether it's an apartment building or a facility with a bunch of servers in it, or it's a power plant and you need to coolit.

[27:54] - Ravi Kurani
And this is just like our, like when I'm walking into the, I don't know, Empire State Building in New York and I'm like going to work in the office at like a wework, the cool air that's coming from there is evaporative cooling. That's. Is that kind of the connection that you'remaking?

[28:10] - Bruce Crawford
Yeah, it is. And, and literally, I mean the one more level of detail is like that air is being cooled by a chiller which has some fluid like glycol that's in a closed loop system. And as the glycol cools the air, the glycol warms up and then you circulate the glycol through a cooling tower and the cooling tower evaporates water to produce cooling and cool down the glycol which cools the air. So it's like two heat exchange loops is what's generally cooling any building you go into. So on the water side, basically cooling towers will pump in city water and they'll evaporate some of it. They'll spray it down through this chamber and it collects in a pool at thebottom.

[28:57] - Bruce Crawford
A lot of the water evaporates and what doesn't evaporate is cooler, it's like 10 degrees cooler than it was when it entered the system. And so just like anair.

[29:06] - Ravi Kurani
Mr. If you're sitting at arestaurant.

[29:08] - Bruce Crawford
Cause it's hot outside. Exactly, exactly. And it's just like sweat too. Like our body uses evaporative cooling. So what happens is the water came in from the city at maybe like a half a gram per liter or less like tap water. There are some minerals in there enough that's pleasant to drink and but as you evaporate all this H2O off it's like simmering a soup all day. And pretty soon the stuff that was in the soup is like a lot more concentrated. And as the minerals get more concentrated in water, it, you know, it's non harmful stuff coming in. It's calcium, magnesium, sodium. As it gets more concentrated, it's going to tend to scale up. You equipment's going to start to grow. Stuff like think like stalactites and stalagmites, it's going to gum up your equipment. It's not going to last verylong.

[29:56] - Bruce Crawford
So what cooling towers do to counteract this is they continuously drain this concentrated water to send it down the sewer and refill with more city water. And that process is called blowdown water. So when you think about and so what a NONA unit would do is it would grab that water that's coming out of the tower, send 99% of it back into circulation and then only be discharging, you know, 1%. So it can save a lot of water for the cooling tower. So we're really excited about that application because we're talking about the salinity range. Right. Seawater is 35 grams per liter. What you and I drink is below a half a gram per liter. ICP is most efficient, up to like 25 grams per liter. So a lot of this lower range we're reallyefficient.

[30:51] - Bruce Crawford
The water that's being discharged from a cooling tower is generally like 1.2 grams per liter. So it's just like the least efficient application for reverse osmosis. And on top of that stuff grows on the cooling tower like Legionella. You might have heard that can be a problem. So you kill it with in a lot of cases, chlorine and other oxidizing and non oxidizing chemicals, Many of which will hurt that reverse osmosis membrane. Yep. So it's kind of like the ideal, like we have this really robust treatment system, happens to be really efficient on this range of water. So we've. I don't have anything to announce yet, but we're. We're working with a couple exciting partners to pilot a system doing thatapplication.

[31:37] - Ravi Kurani
Awesome. And you had mentioned kind of chlorine and oxidizing chemicals hurting the reverse osmosis membrane. Is it. Can you use chlorine for the ICPtechnology?

[31:50] - Bruce Crawford
Yeah, it's much more resistant. You still can't go crazy. I think they say, like, you can drink anything up to 3 ppm. 3 parts per million in your water. And our system, you know, we've. We've been running it with over 10 and it's. It's fine. Reverse osmosis. The. The rule, though, is zero detectablechlorine.

[32:16] - Ravi Kurani
Okay.

[32:17] - Bruce Crawford
Like, you can havenone.

[32:18] - Ravi Kurani
You can havenone.

[32:19] - Bruce Crawford
Even tap water is a concern in somecases.

[32:25] - Ravi Kurani
I want to change gears a little bit and go to the story of Bruce. You mentioned earlier when we first started that you were at Rivian before you were working on electric cars. And then you're cooking this burger outside in the freezing cold Boston weather, and your co founder came up to you after you put that job description up, and then you took it back down. What compelled you? Why did you switch from the Rivian job to focus on this? Why water? What was going through your head and why did you make this decision? And if you want him back up, I mean, we can also go back to kind of any sort of pivotal moments in you growing up or through your life that may dictate why you made thatdecision.

[33:13] - Bruce Crawford
Yeah, yeah, happy to. Basically. I'll try to give you the short version, of course. I love to talk about myself, so I'll limit it, but. So I had always kind of felt like, you know, I all I knew that I care about the environment. I grew up in Western Washington where it's beautiful. And water conservation is, like, always a concern. Like, you learn about it in school. I imagine it's the same if you grew up in California. Like, the west coast is just kind of on it with regards to, you know, preserving the environment or at least educating people to do so. And I never felt like I was super different in that way. So. Okay, yeah, we all care about theenvironment.

[33:59] - Bruce Crawford
And then I moved to the Midwest, and not the people there don't care about the environment, but it's definitely less a point of emphasis. And I was working at a steel company doing mergers and acquisitions, and I kind of looked around, you know, and I'd push little things like, hey, what if we put solar panels on all our facilities or, you know, what are we doing with our wastewater? And I just kind of realized, like, no one cares about this. Like, I think I didn't realize I cared so much about these things till I transplanted myself to a different part of the world. And so I got really interested in kind of climate change. But I always felt like, it always felt a little bit nebulous tome.

[34:40] - Bruce Crawford
Like, I, I would hear the activism and I would hear, you know, this is a problem. But it always bothered me that there wasn't always like a strong correlation between, like, okay, here's what's going on with the CO2, and can we directly tie this to the natural disaster? Like, there's a tie. But I wanted it to be stronger. And I, and then I also wanted a tie between something I can do right now and to impact those things. And so I always, you know, that kind of drove me when I would think about climate change. I would always think, you know, what's a solution here? What's an, what's an engineered solution? Because I, I don't want to just sit around and talk about it, although that's important. And so, and people have to doit.

[35:22] - Bruce Crawford
Like, that's, I'm not discounting the role that advocacy has, but I always wanted to do, to act, and I wanted to do with hardware because I grew up, I have a finance degree, but I grew up, like, working on cars and motorcycles and was definitely more mechanically inclined. So that's what drew me to Rivian. And at Rivian, I thought, this is great. Like, I get to work with engineers, I'm on the product development team, and it's a hardware product. It's making a climate impact. And ultimately decided to leave there because I felt like I had a grid gig there. But nobody was getting promoted past where I was without an mba. Like, I found myself at a place where everybody at my level had an mba. I was the only one with thatone.

[36:07] - Bruce Crawford
And I was like, I don't know how I'm going to get promoted. Plus, if there's layoffs, I'm gone. And after I, like, three months after I left, there were like a few rounds of layoffs. So I made the right call to come to business school. When I started talking to Jungho about water, it just kind of clicked. Like, I had been aware of water shortages. I'd lived in Southern California, I had lived in Florida and, like, had hurricanes kind of threatened water supply, but it was never super on top of my brain. And then when I was talking with Jungho about it, I was like, all right, this is direct impact. Like it's very clear to see. Like we have droughts and we're going to run out of water if we can create a new source ofwater.

[36:57] - Bruce Crawford
Like it's a very direct positive impact related to climate. So I think that's what drew me and I, I guess I'd say it's a result of me being simple minded. I think, I think I'm a simple guy and I'm like, I like mechanical stuff. It's not very abstract. It's like, here's a hardware good that can help and here's a simple way we can help the climate change issue by supplying water. So it's just, it's simple. That was probably way more than you were looking for, but that's. No, not atall.

[37:27] - Ravi Kurani
How does that, how does that actually build into the DNA of Nona? I mean, I think it's veryliteral.

[37:35] - Bruce Crawford
Right.

[37:35] - Ravi Kurani
We can understand that you guys are working on a desalination technology, you're going to provide clean water. But let me reframe the question. If you fast forward 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. Right. You can pick your time scale in kind of Nona. Geologic time. What does it look like? What kind of impact do you wish you can have? What does the North Star of the company look like when you guys are able to execute everything youwant?

[38:04] - Bruce Crawford
Yeah, that's a great question. Let me tell you a little more about Junghyo too, before I go full into thatquestion.

[38:15] - Ravi Kurani
Sure.

[38:15] - Bruce Crawford
Because Junghyo comes at it from a different perspective. His perspective was that of an academic and he did a Master's and a PhD and then was a postdoctoral research scientist at MIT for six years when we met. And he told me like he had written lots of grants, lots of publications and he's got, he said at the end of every publication that I write and then most of us write, there's one line at the bottom, you know, the abstract that says this could be impactful in the field of whatever he said, but it's never true. Like even if it's true, it's not going tohappen.

[38:58] - Ravi Kurani
Sure.

[38:59] - Bruce Crawford
So he was driven by, to like take something that he invented and actually realize the impact that it could make. So that kind of informs our DNA too. Now, answering your question, 10, 20 years in the future, we want to combine these things. We want to say like we brought a new innovation that might have just sat on the shelf of a university patent library forever, but we deployed it and it has a positive impact. And specifically, what that looks like is our society is able to use less water. That's. That's kind of. That's how we measure ourselves, because it direct. It connects very directly to a. A social benefit. Right. Like, using less water means there's more water for more people. So we're kind of. We're kindof.

[39:54] - Bruce Crawford
We describe it somewhat vaguely because we really want to see this technology at all scales. We want to see, okay, you've got this compact unit for your home or for your boat or for your disaster response relief team that you're like, you're going out and about and it's providing water where it wouldn't have been otherwise. And at the larger scale, we're just like, saving a bunch of water that now industry is not using and it can be used elsewhere. So that's. Hopefully that answers your question, but we define our impact pretty broadly, and that's where we'd like to see itgo.

[40:30] - Ravi Kurani
Inspiring. That's awesome. Bruce, we're coming towards the end of our time here. There's a question I ask everybody on the pod, and that's. Is there a book, a movie, or a TV show that has had a profound impact on the way that you see theworld?

[40:49] - Bruce Crawford
Yeah. So I was ready for this question and something came to mind immediately when I heard you, like, asking this to other guests. And for the days and weeks since, I thought, I'll think of something better than that, because that's kind of lame. But I haven't. So here you go. The movie. Have you seen the movieParasite?

[41:08] - Ravi Kurani
Yes, I have.Yep.

[41:10] - Bruce Crawford
Parasite is. Has, like, surprisingly had a big impact on me. It's one of those movies. I watched it because it won Best Picture and it's. It keeps you in suspense. The whole movie. It really kind of paints Class divide in South. South Korea. That's theme of it. And then there's a wild twist at the end that kind of leaves you thinking like. Like what? Just what just happened? And why did that happen? Yeah, I thought. I couldn't stop thinking about it for weeks after, I guess, the five years in. The five years since it came out, it still kept me thinking about it because I. I think it's really important to realize, like, the. The perceptions between the upper and the lower class and how we treat each other may be perceived different than how we think we're treating eachother.

[42:00] - Bruce Crawford
And so I I just, you know, I, I come from a low income background and I always am thinking about, you know, how, what's the best way to help the, those less fortunate, including myself, like, thrive and how should people be acting who are at the top and have the ability to do something about it. So I think, you know, I'd love to think about the craziness of that movie and think about, you know, how for those of us who are fortunate, who have resources, who have platform, who have technology, like, or just live and act in society like, how should we treat others? And that move is just like a crazy way to get at thatmoral.

[42:44] - Ravi Kurani
It's awesome. I love that. Bruce, if we wanted to find you, where can we find youat?

[42:51] - Bruce Crawford
Yeah, you can find me at, well, on LinkedIn at Bruce Crawford LinkedIn and at. Our website is nona-technologies.com n o n a-technologies.com if you subscribe there, we send updates on our product development. We'll be launching this portable product that's meant for seawater desalination. So it's big with boaters and people who live coastally. We'll be launching that middle of this year, so subscribe and you'll get updates for allthat.

[43:22] - Ravi Kurani
Amazing. Thanks a ton for coming on the show, Bruce. It was awesome to haveyou.

[43:26] - Bruce Crawford
Yeah. Ravi, I've enjoyed the conversation and all your previous conversations or many of them, so thank you so much for havingme.