How Modular Systems are Solving America’s Water Infrastructure Crisis
Every two minutes, a sewer main breaks in the United States, creating an unprecedented challenge for businesses and municipalities alike. As our aging water infrastructure continues to crumble, companies are taking matters into their own hands, leading to a revolutionary shift in how we approach water treatment and management.
In this episode of Liquid Assets, we sit down with Riggs Eckelberry, CEO of OriginClear, who brings a unique perspective from his journey through tech disruption to water innovation. From his early days as a ship captain to leading software companies and eventually pioneering "Water as a Service," Eckelberry shares how his diverse background helped shape a new approach to solving America's water crisis. Through OriginClear, he's transforming the traditional hardware-focused water treatment industry into a service-based model, making clean water accessible and affordable for businesses of all sizes.
The conversation delves into how decentralized water treatment is becoming the new normal, with businesses bypassing failing municipal infrastructure to ensure their survival. Eckelberry explains the parallels between the solar industry's power purchase agreements and OriginClear's innovative water purchase agreements, showing how financialization of water treatment could be the key to solving our infrastructure challenges. As the company prepares for its NASDAQ debut, we get an inside look at how this small company's disruptive approach could reshape the future of water treatment.
What you'll hear in this episode:
- How every two minutes, a sewer main breaks in the United States, creating an urgent need for innovative solutions
- The transformation of water treatment from a hardware-based industry to a service-based model
- Why businesses are increasingly taking control of their own water treatment
- The parallels between solar power purchase agreements and water treatment financing
- How decentralization and modular systems are revolutionizing water treatment
- The journey of taking a water technology company from penny stocks to NASDAQ
Listen On:
Watch the interview:
Meet Riggs
From ship captain to tech executive to water industry innovator, Riggs Eckelberry brings an unconventional perspective to solving America's water crisis. As CEO of OriginClear, he's leveraging his background in technology disruption to transform how businesses access clean water.
After successful ventures in the tech sector and NASDAQ listings in the 1990s, Eckelberry entered the water industry in 2007. Under his leadership, OriginClear evolved from a penny stock company focused on algae technology into a pioneer of "Water as a Service" - making advanced water treatment accessible through innovative financial models similar to solar power purchase agreements.
Today, as OriginClear prepares for its NASDAQ debut, Eckelberry is revolutionizing water treatment by helping businesses take control of their water needs through decentralized, modular systems and subscription-based payment models. His mission is clear: democratize access to clean water by transforming not just the technology, but the entire business model of water treatment.
The Book, Movie, or Show
"Inside the Tornado" by Geoffrey Moore was highly recommended by Riggs Eckelberry, stating that he has "lived by" its principles throughout his business career.
The book explores how companies must adapt their strategies and character at different stages of the technology adoption lifecycle. It provides insights on navigating from early adopters to mainstream markets, and how to successfully "cross the chasm" between these stages. Eckelberry emphasizes that the book's core message about continual reinvention has been crucial to his approach in business, particularly in the water technology sector.
Contains affiliate Amazon links.
Transcript
00:00
Ravi Kurani
Every two minutes, a sewer main breaks in the United States. Now imagine this. Businesses are taking water treatment into their own hands, bypassing failing infrastructure to ensure clean water and survival. It's not the future. It's happening right now. Today we're joined by Riggs Eckelberry, a true disruptor in the water industry.
00:24
Riggs Eckelberry
Hi, I'm Riggs Eckelberry, and I am in the water industry. And I'm transforming it the way I was taught to as a technologist. Total disruption. And it's actually going to make the water industry really service people so we can again have a healthier America.
00:44
Ravi Kurani
From transforming algae biofuels to pioneering water as a service. He shares how decentralized water treatment is reshaping business and solving one of America's biggest infrastructure crises. We'll dive into why treating water on site is becoming the new normal, how modular systems are revolutionizing industries, and why the financialization of water could be the game changer we need. This episode will challenge everything you think you know about water and its future. Let's jump in.
01:16
Ravi Kurani
Riggs, I won't hold your intro anymore because I think you have such an awesome story that were chatting about before I hit the record button. Can you just kind of rewind the tape there and start back from the beginning of how you were in tech, how you kind of hopped into water, and your kind of views on the industry?
01:34
Riggs Eckelberry
Yes, well, I'm a cautionary tale as to watch what you wish for, because I was a happy tech guy, you know, doing disruptive. This is in the 90s and into the early 2000s. You know, lots of disruption, lots of exits, and really, you know, sort of a feeling of creating the future. And. And I was at a company that were getting out to the nasdaq. I was the president, coo, and I made the huge mistake of telling a fund that I was working with that I think I could be a good CEO. Unfortunately, they took me up on that. They said, well, rig's really, well, we're not doing tech anymore. I guess they decided tech was done. Little did they know. But anyway, tech is done. We're doing. We're in green, and we think that algae could be a great biofuel.
02:29
Riggs Eckelberry
And I went, okay. And their secret sauce is to have a CEO, a patented technology, and a really high level big concept, and then to get the company out, making a public company right away, raise money in the public markets. Okay, so I had. You had the high concept which was out to biofuels. It had me. And then my. I've got an inventor brother who had a technology for doing things with algae. Okay, fast forward through all kinds of fun stuff where, you know, people like, you know, like Fox Business, they're calling. Stuart Varney is calling me. I'll call you Algy, man. You know, and it was great because people are like, who knew? This is crazy. Very disruptive. And then the price of crude crashed from out of $20 down to below 50 because of fracking.
03:28
Riggs Eckelberry
And we concluded that we could not make a business out of algae for biofuels at a time. And so we pivoted and our technology was for extracting microalgae out of water. Well, in a way, you can think of microalgae as a form of sewage. So we had a technology for extracting sewage from water, electronic processes. And that became the technology that we entered the water industry with and then became my education because water is huge, but water is very slow. And we had great expectations. And then we found out that new technologies in water take 12 to 15 years to be accepted. And we just didn't have total of 15 years. And so eventually we found out that the water industry does love new business models.
04:27
Riggs Eckelberry
And it's interested because the water, she's caught in a terrible place, which is it sells a lot of hardware when it should really be selling a lot more services. And especially since, as you may know, all the utilities are suffering from what's called the silver tsunami. Over 7 million utility workers are retiring. Now you don't have people, you may have hardware, but you know, that's low margin. Well, now there's a perfect opportunity to create something called water as a service, which I'll get to. So that was really how we got into water and eventually how we found our traction.
05:07
Ravi Kurani
Really interesting. I want to actually rewind back to the beginning of your story really quick. You had talked about how you were taking a company public on the nasdaq. Can you kind of talk about what was. Was that the algae company or that was like a separate company?
05:20
Riggs Eckelberry
No, that was a software company. So I was up until this mad idea of mine, I was in software and was from 1995 when I joined a company long gone called Quarter Deck all the way till 2005, 2006, I was in software, making my up the ladder as a VP, marketing COO, that kind of stuff. And prior to 95, I was primarily an entrepreneur and also turns out I was a ship captain and I worked in a Nonprofit space, all kinds of interesting, esoteric things. Eclectic, you might say. That really added up to an ability to deal with stuff you can't predict, which is exactly what I had to go through every single day. So into.
06:08
Ravi Kurani
I want to do a quick fire round on those three things because I feel like we have touch on that. If you were to say one interesting fact about being a ship captain, what would that be?
06:19
Riggs Eckelberry
Well, it's the most interesting thing about it is that you cannot train for that position. You can become a first mate and this and that and the other thing, but then the day you step into being a captain, you're. It ain't nobody else and you can't train for that. And it was a very interesting experience. And the other thing that I experienced was that at sea, dangerous things can happen, but they're in slow motion. We're sinking and think like four days, right? So, you know, you have to act rapidly to deal with things that are in slow motion. It's a fascinating thing. And when you think about it, that's true about most things. Most, most difficult or dangerous situations don't happen overnight. They develop over time. And you have to fight that sort of inertia. Oh, my God. Right?
07:16
Riggs Eckelberry
And break it, break that trend. And so I learned really to. To be decisive and to be willing to break things to make things happen. And if there was, as I say, breakage along the way, so be it. But the main mission was preserved. And that really takes a meaning.
07:35
Ravi Kurani
Really good standard, really awesome kind of bullet points there. Because I feel like there's going to be some threads that come back to water into the startups. If you're, if we fast forward to this NASDAQ standpoint, what was one or two bullet points on taking a company public? You're actually the first person that we've had on the podcast that's taken a company public. What does that look like?
08:00
Riggs Eckelberry
Okay, so at the time, this was a company called Cyber Defender, which had built its early business on. So these drive by back in the day used to see these banners warning your computer is infected, and then you had to immediately do something, right? And some people might have said that these people were actually creating the problem that they were then saying. But whatever. The point is that was that there's a business on that. But it was a very. It was mostly a marketing business that needed more technology. I was brought into to make the company. They had, they had invested in system technology. I was brought in to turn into a real Software product based company. And that's what I was doing at the time that now. So what was the process of going public?
08:49
Riggs Eckelberry
Well, first of all, the CEO of the company had some good relationships and there was a, an investment bank called Wedbush that was willing to do help us with the road showing it was willing to take us out on. Back then you had, you went, you went out on what's called special. You were special situations. You, you physically go visit all these funds in New York and Chicago and a bit in la and you introduce yourself as a special sit, meaning an opportunity to make a ridiculous amount of money in a short amount of time. But very unusual. And so we teed up this NASDAQ up list and it was all set to go. But I started being concerned that the, you know, how a company starts is very. The culture of a company shines through all the way.
09:48
Riggs Eckelberry
It's very hard for a company to break its culture, kind of have a revolution culture revolution. And this company was not. They just kept being a hey, your computer is in danger kind of company. And I just felt that they were going to eventually hit the wall because that's that stuff, the, you know, yelling fire in a crowded theater. It only works so many times. And after a while people say shut up already. Right? So they were one trick pony. And it worked so well for so long. And they weren't really, you know, they were kind of addicted to that model. So that's when I was like, okay, you guys are about to go public. Great, I'm going to go now. And they were shattered. It was very tough on them.
10:39
Riggs Eckelberry
But, and I felt they had about four or five years on the NASDAQ before they went away. And sure enough, they lasted about four or five years. And, but they did get into the nasdaq. So there's really two things. Number one is this pathway of getting on the Nasdaq. And the second thing is what do you do once you're on the nasdaq? And that's a whole different world. We're experiencing this right now with this water on demand company. I can talk about that. We are literally in the middle of a MA merger, a NASDAQ uplist.
11:10
Riggs Eckelberry
And what we're really focused on, like, okay, we're going to get past all the technicalities that get enlisted as hard and as horribly difficult as they are and focus on the immediate post because it's like you get to go to the very pinnacle of the Burj Al Khalifa in, you know, that and you're like Tom Cruise on the very top of that. And you better not tip over because it's a long way down. So that's really. Now, if you do achieve stability and momentum and so forth, then you can really go places. And this is a good time to go places because as you may have noticed, small cap companies are doing really well in this new energized environment that we got going. People are looking for opportunities where companies like Tesla and Nvidia have already gone to the movie.
12:09
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, yeah.
12:10
Riggs Eckelberry
And so what are some of the new companies out there that could be really interesting? And so this is a perfect time, but we have to execute. So anyway, back then I felt that the execution was flawed. I helped them get in the nasdaq. But then I was like, I can't keep doing this or else I will be like the concentration camp guards. I was only following orders, you know, yeah, I can't be that guy. And so then unfortunately it was tough because I spent six months unemployed with a young child. My son was at the time five, six, seven years old. And so what we had is a situation where I kind of went off into the blue. But I was given this wonderful opportunity to create a company that today we call the 16 year old knife success.
12:59
Riggs Eckelberry
Because we launched 2007 and that's of 2024. We were finally starting to find both a technological spot, but also from a corporate development. We were starting to finally get out of this penny stock world, which is, you know, I mean penny stock is good because you're public, but it's bad because you can never raise real money. And so you tend to just raise small amounts of money and cheap. It's like a pilot light mode. So you don't know if you see something.
13:35
Ravi Kurani
And this penny stock that you're talking about, was that the, this is the.
13:39
Riggs Eckelberry
One currently that OriginClear. Okay, so what we have is the one that was Algae is the same company. It was called Origin Oil back then. Then we pivoted, kept the same company, same investors and everything. I've got investors to this day. They go, I remember when win. And they. Then were called OriginClear. There were three phases. The first phase was the algae phase. The second phase was water technology phase. The third phase there was a water business model or transformative business model phase which is the one we're today. So let's kind of.
14:18
Ravi Kurani
You touched on the penny stock, so you kind of touched on the algae side of the business and how you guys had to Kind of pivot when the price of crude basically tanked down. Walk me through what the water, what the kind of second phase looked like. And then we can go ahead and kind of complete out with your water business model phase.
14:34
Riggs Eckelberry
The second phase being a technology. So like, okay, we got a great technology here. Let's go ahead and get this technology accepted and licensed and implemented in systems. And were getting headway. I remember we made a first big sale to a energy utility in Australia, Melbourne, Australia. And were starting to get momentum and starting to show stuff and in algae. But then we took the same idea of licensing technology and we started doing it in water. And we demonstrated working in fracking, we demonstrated working in aquaculture. We demonstrated various environments to clean up the water. But it was extremely hard to find commercial attachment. The word attachment is one that Microsoft uses to say how many people have adopted what we have. So they'll say, well, we have 30% attachment to the new Outlook, for example.
15:39
Riggs Eckelberry
Well, so it's very hard to get attachment towards people that go, well, that's very interesting. And then they move on. And that was when I found out that the water industry is kind of okay with the technology they've got. There is a huge reservoir of fascinating new technologies out there that is just not seeing the light of day because of the issues of acceptance, which in turn drive lack of funding. And so when we realize that around to, you know, the mid 2000 teens, we then started. First we acquired a company, then we created a company, then we created this new business model. And that was when we really started getting, becoming this mouse that roared that a small penny stock company that actually figures something out.
16:32
Riggs Eckelberry
And we became, you know, if you take, you know, one of those magic quadrants, those Gartner quadrants and you say okay, at the top left of it, you will have the big water companies and they have. So here's the XY AIs. Higher up there is more and more investor accessible. Further out is more and more focused on modern water as a service. And what we found was that the desirable thing, which is you want subscription models for everything the water, the big water companies were all clustered at the high investor availability but no acceptance of new models. And then at the bottom right there were some new players doing this waters of service, but totally unaccessible to outside investors.
17:32
Riggs Eckelberry
And then were at the top right of that graph where we are a pure play in this waters of service and highly accessible to investors. Both we're the only ones doing it. So what I'm saying is that the conventional players that are available for people to invest in are just not very interested in water as a service. They're very happy selling machines and having contracts to operate city utilities and so forth. But there's something very powerful happening in water today, which is decentralization of water. It's a massive trend. And we have a unicorn in the space already called gradient, which handles some of the big players. Basically industry, agriculture, are taking over their own water treatment. They have to, because decentralized. The water infrastructure in this country is falling apart. We have one sewer main break every other minute in this country.
18:30
Riggs Eckelberry
It's becoming just ridiculous. And you don't notice it until one day your street is full of sewage. And so people are very complacent. But there's a big problem, and the best way to solve it is for business to do itself. That's decentralized water. But they don't implement so much. These big water companies is the idea of pay by the gallon, also called throughput contracts. Very similar to the solar power purchase agreement where you put out the equipment, you know, 30 year contract, and you finance the equipment with the contract. And it's all beneficial to the end user because now they are not being hyperinflated. They only have the inflation of the actual parts that service the machine. They have the ability to recycle, which nobody was doing.
19:21
Riggs Eckelberry
And thirdly, they're out of the hair of the politics of the local utilities, which is actually a major motivation for these big and small businesses.
19:33
Ravi Kurani
I want to pause there really quick, Riggs, and kind of go back and maybe for the audience you can kind of explain what exactly the product does. Like, what are you, what is as a service versus what's the delta? What the big companies that are investorable, investor accessible are not doing. Right. What exactly is that like physically? Is it like a machine that's able to take out, you know, wastewater, like you just said with the algae? What, what does that look like?
20:00
Riggs Eckelberry
Okay, well, first of all, think of how big water is in a breakup like AT&T. In other words, it's breaking up from a monolithic infrastructure being served by big water companies like Veolia, American Waterworks and so forth. And they're doing a fine job, but the problem is it's underfunded.
20:20
Ravi Kurani
And when you just, when you do say water companies, you mean just to make it super simple. It's for consumers, for farmers, it's the people that provide the water. That provide clean water when you open up your tap and it's also the wastewater when you send it back in. Or what part of that are you saying? Or it's the entire thing.
20:38
Riggs Eckelberry
Well, municipalities do both. They have, they bring you the fresh water and they clean the water that's made dirty. And they are the, you know, 85% of the water that's treated in this country is treated by something like 10% of the water treatment utilities, like big ones like in LA, NY, Chicago, et cetera. But there's 150,000 utilities. So many of them are small. So there's this galaxy of water utilities and they have this job of taking, of finding fresh water, which they generally do a pretty good job of. But then they have to treat whatever comes their way. And unfortunately they're completely overwhelmed and they've started to say no, we can't take your water. So you have breweries, for example, that are being told no and they're being forced to truck their water to the next county, that kind of stuff.
21:32
Riggs Eckelberry
Same thing is happening in a bunch of other spaces. And so what it led to organically was decentralization where more and more businesses just started taking care of treating their own water. Now they typically still get their fresh water from the city. That's just a water pack, no big deal. Worst case they get a well. But the big problem is not the fresh water. The big problem is treating the toxic water. Especially now that there's this big focus on forever chemicals and we have these amydose chasing lawyers creating class action lawsuits suing the creators of these toxic wastes that were treated by the city but not treated well enough and it's the original company being blamed. So if you're that original company saying you know what, I'll take care of it myself or else I'll be out of business.
22:28
Riggs Eckelberry
And so a lot of this is protective like because it's heightened awareness. And they tell you with the advent of RFK Jr. And that whole make America Healthy again, there's going to be incredible focus on toxins in the water forever chemicals and fluoride and everything else. And that is going to drive even more self treatment by business because they are going to have to or they will be pinned to the wall like a butterfly gets pinned to a notebook. I mean it's really as bad as that.
23:03
Ravi Kurani
So I want to reiterate where we are so far. So there are industrial companies, we'll just say a brewery, for example, they're getting in the water for the Municipality, which quote unquote is not a problem. I think it's a problem to discuss for a different day. But the water is arriving at the brewery. The, the problem is when there's the effluent, right, they're sending back the waste and the municipality is like, hey, we can't filter this. We're not going to service it for you. There's these lawyers that are coming around saying, hey, look, now that the water is mistreated, they're going back to the brewery and saying, hey, you guys are the ones that are actually responsible. And so this creates this sort of tailwind or this, this trajectory that's allowing for the decentralization of treatment, which is kind of where OriginClear comes in.
23:50
Ravi Kurani
And at, kind of at that precipice point, you guys are changing the model away from just selling hardware, which was done previously, into kind of building out a services model. Am I explaining that correctly or is there any.
24:03
Riggs Eckelberry
Just a great recap. The next step before water as a service is if you're going to do decentralized water, you're no longer building giant water treatment ponds and so forth. You're building modular ponds that are big enough, small enough to fit into a brewery. And so before we even got to the service part, we built a company called Modular Water Systems that is in the business of these fully assembled systems being brought in on a semi truck, dropped onto a pad, water and power plugged in up and you're up and running. And even more potent than litigation is the fact that a lot of businesses are expanding beyond the reach of utilities.
24:47
Riggs Eckelberry
There's right now between Dallas and the Oklahoma border, there's a land boom going on and you have the problem of real estate developers having to send a sewage pipe for miles and takes forever, et cetera. They can just set up. We have right now a, if you go to Ontario, YouTube OriginClears YouTube. You'll see there's a high end housing development on the shores of Lake Denison, which is on the Oklahoma border. And right there's a container that's quietly treating all the black water coming out of those homes. And then once a year, you know, a truck comes by and, and pumps out the sludge tank. And that works really well.
25:30
Riggs Eckelberry
So it was, you had to first miniaturize so that these complete turnkey water treatment systems could be dropped into sites from breweries to housing developments, to car dealerships, to RV campgrounds to all kinds of people like that. Then you Say okay, oh, you can't pay for it. Don't worry, just start paying by the gallon. Sign here. That's the second part. And we know this is needed and wanted because there was a famous case of a woman who owned a trailer park called Neville Home Park, Neville Penns. You can look up the news story. And she was, she got in trouble. She couldn't meet permit requirements and she was gonna be shut down. And so she literally gave away half of the equity in that trailer park to fund a water treatment system from us.
26:29
Riggs Eckelberry
We didn't yet have that service thing going on and we sold them the system and she survived. Better to have half of something than 100% nothing. So but today we'd say, ma'am, don't give away half your company. Just, just sign here. And so that is the revolution. Why? Because the minute you move from a low profit product, which is hardware sales, typically water companies do about 16% net profits. It's not good. It's only about five or six points better than inflation. So you have to make much more money. And you know, and it's well illustrated. There's a scale that I saw where Tesla, if one Tesla is sold, they, I think Tesla makes three, four hundred dollars on that sale. If they add on fully self driving that goes from one to two, it doubles their profit.
27:35
Riggs Eckelberry
And if we fast forward all the way to robotaxi, it's 28 times not so go from 1 to 28. And that is why we're going to see Robotaxi happen so fast. Well, this is the Robotaxi of water, right? Is, is, we'll just take care of your water. You don't have to have an expert on site. Because the minute I start trying to treat my own water take away from the city, well, where's my expert who don't worry about it. We'll install our system, we will maintain it. We'll have remote control. You have a guy or gal on site who's a facilities manager who can take a filter and slide it in, but that's it. The rest of it we'll take care of. And the customer says fine, problem solved.
28:25
Riggs Eckelberry
And they didn't have to spend a million dollars they don't have because nobody plans to invest a million dollars in wastewater treatment. Nobody does. It's not on your business plan. That is the future. So the first thing is where water treatment becomes privatized and the second part is where it becomes Financialized, there's two different steps and that is what water.
28:50
Ravi Kurani
On demand is to really cool. And I'm totally seeing the threads of your background in SaaS software as a service coming to kind of fruition with how you inject what was a pure capex play by just selling the hardware into something that is now recurring in subscription revenue all the way to actually turning water into a publicly investable good. Right. I think when people think about water, when you think about the stock market, you think about faang companies, you think about Google and Facebook and Amazon. And this is something I want to uncover on the POD is like we, there is not enough of a spotlight on water on something that we need as an infrastructure plan. There is a supply problem, there is a problem of testing and monitoring and also waste mitigation.
29:42
Ravi Kurani
And this is just such an interesting and beautiful business model. One of the questions that came to mind were the unit economics of one of these. Right. I think it totally makes sense for that, for that lady who is at the RV park, at the trailer park where she didn't factor in for this.
29:59
Riggs Eckelberry
Right.
29:59
Ravi Kurani
And your model on the paper gallon or kind of that paper kilowatt from a solar analogy makes sense. What does it look like from an OriginClear standpoint? Like what is the ROI break even? And I know it depends on how much you're probably filtering or the size of the project, but is there kind of like unit, rough unit economics of whatever you can share with us that kind of makes sense.
30:21
Riggs Eckelberry
So if we compare the original sale, you sell it one time, you make 15% of your money. So you know, on $750,000 you made something like $105,000 net profit and that was it, you're done. Goodbye. You might get some filter service sales, whatever, but that's it. Okay. Now instead we do a contract where they don't pay anything, they just get the machine and they pay by the gallon over a 20 year period. We're going to repeat that profit 15 times over again and again for the same thing that's just sitting there. Look at your Microsoft Office license. You're paying 20, you know, 1995amonth. Used to be you could get the whole thing for 131time. Now it's. And you know what? You don't mind because they're responsive and they're adding more resource, more ser. It's easier, it's just easier all around.
31:16
Riggs Eckelberry
It's all going to the service model, because you know, the capitalize the consumer should not have to make a capital investment is the point. Right. The capital investment should be made by the provider. That's where it's at. And this, that seems simple. And, but when we finally figured that out, like, whoa, wait a minute, this is something that nobody industry is looking at. And because we didn't come from the water industry, we didn't take it for granted. One of my big jobs as we become a NASDAQ company is hiring a COO for the NASDAQ company. But my internal debate is should this person have a lot of water experience? But then are they going to be willing enough to break the model? But they need to understand water, otherwise they'll be just strangers in a strange land.
32:06
Riggs Eckelberry
So you need to find somebody who knows and understands water and yet is willing to play a more disruptive game. You know, there's the, that wonderful book by Clayton Christensen called the Innovator's Dilemma where he talks about the innovations come from within market leading companies but are shunned by those leaders and they end up exiting those companies and destroying the market leader. You have this creative cannibalism going on, but it's not very creative for the market leader being destroyed. I guarantee you it's not a lot of fun, but that's the process. And so I want to get some of these really smart people, extract them and put them to work for this new company.
32:52
Riggs Eckelberry
Now I keep talking about a NASDAQ company and so maybe I should just cover that at a time range because what we decided to do OriginClear is a penny stock company and it allows us to experiment with things and try new things, but it does not give us a lot of capital. One of the problems with being on the over the counter market is your capital access is not very good, primarily because it's been such a abused market. But it's good for creating new things. It's a very good piloting environment. So we decided, okay, let's get on the nasdaq. And so we engineered becoming acquired by a SPAC Special Purpose Acquisition Corporation, the blank check company that in fact we may have a secretary of the treasurer who built SPACs for a living Chamath.
33:44
Riggs Eckelberry
So the SPAC, went ahead and did a deal with the SPAC to have it acquire the unit that we had created which did this decentralized equipment plus the waters of service at Capital Model and we achieved a valuation for it. And for the entirety of this year we've been Going back and forth with the sec and we are looking at the end of the process where we're finally going to be approved for this merger and able to go on the Nasdaq. And that's super important because once I'm on the Nasdaq, I can do those power purchase agreement type deals. And I think that's essential. We have to scale up. Now. One final thing that I'm going to say is we are not wedded to having to build machines.
34:26
Riggs Eckelberry
We're perfectly happy to step back to the financialization step and just do the water purchase agreement deal with other water companies, building and maintaining the machines perfectly fine. Because water equipment companies are like real estate companies. It takes them forever to build and develop things. So let them do it. I can have a dozen, 20, 30, 40 deals at the same time, as long as I can find the capital partners and they'll all do it at the same time and I won't have to do the actual building or managing. And that I think is what's exciting about the model we're moving to, which is a pure financialization. And then that's how we go international too. Because as bad as things are in America, just take a look at India and you know that something needs to happen over there.
35:18
Ravi Kurani
Yeah. That is such an inspirational model. I kind of love how you can transverse up and down from the financial model to, you know, almost being agnostic to who builds the technology and being able to deploy those all the way to kind of the evolution of the company itself and actually selling the hardware in your kind of version one. That's like really cool. Kind of how you went through those three phases and explained it over the last few minutes. That's awesome. If we talk about kind of where you guys are deployed today, are there, is the financial model, do you have the water purchase agreements kind of already executed and enabled in geographies or with people or are you kind of kicking that off? Where exactly do you stand in the implementation?
36:03
Riggs Eckelberry
Okay, so where we're very mature is with these modular systems. We sold, you know, hundreds and maybe even thousands of systems small and large that were for private business users of water treatment, such as power plants. Right. People like that. So we've got lots of that. What's new is this water service. And now we are in negotiations with a party to do the very first showcase of that. If I'm going to sell with a water purchase agreement, I have to show a place where it's actually happening. It can't be a PowerPoint. Right. This is what Elon Musk told us. He said you can do a PowerPoint but you need to build a car. Eventually you have to build a car and that's what we got to do.
36:46
Riggs Eckelberry
So right now we're in, in late stage negotiations with a very interesting user in Texas that has the scale we're looking for. It's not too big. It's a million dollar deal and we can control all a piece of it and then we'll have all dynamics and then we'll have it run and it will start to generate the real world numbers that we can use to go to Wall street and go, okay, let's do a water purchase agreement just like those PPAs you do all day long. Oh, where's the numbers? Here they are. Boom.
37:22
Ravi Kurani
Really, really cool. We should, I would love to actually do like a follow up episode after that's closed and almost do a deep dive on what that water purchase screaming even looks like. I think it'd be great to do like the anatomy of when that's kind of all done.
37:36
Riggs Eckelberry
I think it's a glimpse of the future frankly. Ravi. And we're so excited and we know we're going to get ripped off and it's perfectly okay because I believe that if you just keep your momentum, you'll always be the head of the pack and people can copy you. They're copying you ancient history. And I can't wait to be disruptive technology guy once again in water.
37:57
Ravi Kurani
That's amazing. And I hear that again, kind of full circle from here, from your ship days. Right. That's kind of as a sailor coming back is you just have to show up every single day and things do happen in slow motion, but if you just show up, you'll eventually get there. I asked this question to everybody at the end and it's do you have a book, a movie or a TV show that has kind of had a profound impact on either your view on business or your view on water?
38:27
Riggs Eckelberry
Yes. Well, there's one that I really have lived by and it's Inside the Tornado by Geoffrey Moore. And I read that years ago and what Jeffrey Moore did was re identified how a company has to change its character depending where they are in the technology life cycle. From early adopter to strategic buyer to sort of going into vertical industries to then tornado adoption and then to the late stage skeptics and conservatives. And he outlines that. But what I realized was you have to Reinvent yourself as a company at every stage. And if you fail to do that, you know, Larry Ellison did it beautifully with Oracle, because I remember I had an IT shop in New York in the 80s, and we knew Oracle as being something that didn't work. It didn't work. Ingress worked great, but Oracle did not. Well, guess what?
39:30
Riggs Eckelberry
Ingress is gone, but Oracle is here. Why? Because Larry Ellison got everybody to agree that Oracle was it. And once everybody agrees, they don't care if it doesn't work, because it's going to. Everybody's doing it. It's going to be. It's going to be fixed. Right? It's like, no problem. Let's not worry about it. And so he really understood that. And today he's maintained Oracle's leadership all the way through an amazing example. But you have to do every single stage as a different company. Almost be, you know, multipolar, shall we say?
39:59
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
40:01
Ravi Kurani
Really Cool. We'll definitely put that on the show. Notes Riggs. Thank you so much for joining us today. This has been absolutely thrilling. I kind of loved also having somebody that's fraud a company onto the nasdaq and we can find you at OriginClear. Thank you for joining us, Ravi.
40:19
Riggs Eckelberry
It's been such a pleasure. I'd love to come back anytime, report on how it's ongoing. We'll get a little. We'll get our own movie going.
40:25
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, definitely.
40:27
Riggs Eckelberry
Awesome.
40:27
Ravi Kurani
Thank you.
40:28
Ravi Kurani
If you want to listen to Liquid Assets, you can find us at LiquidAssets, CC or anywhere else you get your.
40:33
Ravi Kurani
Podcasts or on YouTube today.