Human-Centered Design & Water

"The problem with water wasn't technical. The problem was water was all around consumer issues, accessibility, affordability..."

It is a no-brainer that clean water is a fundamental necessity for a healthy life, however, so many people do not have access to this. In this episode of Liquid Assets, host Ravi Kurani speaks with Jonathan Levine, co-founder and CEO of Folia Materials and President of Folia Water, about providing affordable clean drinking water in developing countries.

Jonathan explains how Folia creates a 20-cent antimicrobial water filter made of silver-coated paper and by pricing it like a can of soda rather than an expensive appliance, they aim to make safe water accessible for low-income consumers. He discusses the business model of partnering with major distributors to reach customers through existing grocery supply chains and talks about the challenge of convincing investors there are profits in water technologies.

Interested in social business in emerging markets - this episode is for you!

What you'll hear in this episode:

• Who is Jonathan Levine & what is Folia Materials: Insights into Levine’s background and Folia Materials' innovative water purification solutions.
• Universal Water Access Challenges: An exploration of the global challenges in ensuring safe drinking water, with a focus on low-income areas.
• Business Strategies in Water Purification : Discussion on Folia Materials' business approach, including distribution, partnerships, and affordability.
• Investment in Water Technology: Insights into the financial landscape of the water sector and strategies for attracting investment.
• Future Trends & Personal Motivation: A look into the future of water technology and Levine's personal drive towards global safe water access.

Listen On:

• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Watch the interview:

Meet Jonathan

Jonathan has always been driven to tackle major global issues like energy, climate change, and water access. After recognizing that lack of accessibility and affordability were key barriers to safe water, Jonathan co-founded Folia Materials and is the president of Folia Water which uses an antimicrobial silver coating to create inexpensive water filters made of paper.

He holds a Ph.D in Earth and Environmental Engineering from Columbia University and is motivated by a vision of universal safe water access, approaching it from a social business perspective, he now shares hard-won lessons around focusing on end-user behavior, rapid prototyping, and finding advocates. He exemplifies an entrepreneur guided by both heart and mind to make a difference worldwide.

The Book, Movie, or Show

In our quest to discover the literary influences shaping our guests' visions, one title stands out in Jonathan's repertoire.

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

Factfulness by Hans Rosling challenges common misconceptions about global trends. The book argues that people, including experts, often have a less accurate understanding of global statistics (like poverty rates or educational attainment) than random guesses. Rosling identifies ten instincts that skew our perception, such as binary thinking and a negativity bias, leading to a distorted view of the world. The book emphasizes the importance of basing opinions on strong facts, reducing stress and enhancing focus on significant threats. "Factfulness" aims to shift perspectives based on reality.

Transcript

00:00
Jonathan Levine
Here's how we address universal safe water, because it's a major pain. The water sector is all real pains, right? These aren't optional things. These are really core staple problems. What we actually do is we're a materials company, and then the big problem in the space is investors think there's no money to be made in water. So I was like, okay, look, the 21st century problems are clean energy and clean water. And you can work one or you can work on the other. 

00:24
Ravi Kurani
And welcome to another episode of Liquid Assets, where we talk about the intersection of technology, management and business and policy as it looks at water today. 

00:34
Ravi Kurani
We have an amazing guest for you, Jonathan from Folia Materials and Folia Water. 

00:39
Jonathan Levine
Hi, I'm Jonathan Levine. I'm the CEO and founder of Folia Materials. And I'm the president of Folia Water Globe. 

00:44
Ravi Kurani
John, I won't take up any more of your time. Why don't you go ahead and just do a quick introduction, who you are, what you're working on. Yeah, kick it off. 

00:51
Jonathan Levine
Yeah. So the water connection is that we make a 20 cent, 20 liter water purifier for low income countries where the idea is to re envision how we solve the problem of universal access to safe drinking water using business, using social business, which is public health. Problems are solved by soap, menstrual pads, condoms, toothpaste. These are all multibillion dollar categories in countries sold through mass market grocery. But they all have pull people gladly go and buy them. They decide to buy these health products. And companies like Unilever have large multibillion dollar divisions doing this in water. We've got bottled water. $58 billion in bottled water is sold in low income countries. And that's really the market dominant position, which is plastic. Plastic. It's wasteful. It's stuff that middle and upper class people in low income countries buy. 

01:42
Jonathan Levine
What Folia is doing is my CTO and co founder invented, a paper that is antimicrobial. And so, hey, now we can make a grocery product water purifier, where for $0.20 we can choose to make it 20 liters. And now for the same kind of low price, we're down at a grocery price that's affordable for the mass market based pyramid, for the two to $10 income. So our beachhead market is Bangladesh, but then we would expand into India and Tunisia and Philippines. And no, we don't have a salesforce. We have an enterprise sales force. Because the goal is to have this through national distributors, through master distributors, like 100 million dollar versions of Clorox or Procter and Gamble, but they're local equivalents in other countries. That's a business model that goes and says, here's how we address universal safe water, because it's a major pain. 

02:34
Jonathan Levine
The water sector is all real pains. Right? These aren't optional things. These are really core staple problems. What we actually do is we're a materials company. We actually have a patented coating for paper, which is the real core IP core technology goes around doing industrial scale paper coating, which is why all that stuff is super cheap and super inexpensive and so on. And then the big problem in the space, which we had to start recording because were getting into it, is investors think there's no money to be made in water. And by the way, the same is true. I'm now learning for angels and for venture in paper and for packaging. And so I've had ventures say, oh, there's no exits in packaging. 

03:13
Jonathan Levine
Well, there's a billion dollars in exits every quarter through M and A for a quarter on quarter going back some number of years. In packaging. It's just private equity, it's just strategics. It's just a large corporate buying 100 million dollar firms, and a certain Ravi Karani apparently had an exit and in water, and no one in the water space is going to know about it because you're not showing up and telling other water startups and other water investors, hey, wait. Ravi had an exit and it was an early stage exit and it was a commercial success for a startup and hopefully, let's hope your so if. 

03:51
Ravi Kurani
We were to go back to why this is a problem, right. I'm just going to unpack this a little bit. Right. There is financing available. The financing doesn't see that there's exits in the water paper space. And it seems like it's like a messaging problem. Right. The fact that I'm not in this one story, that I'm not out there circling the bandwagon around these events saying, hey, look, there are wins that are being had here. How do you solve that? Outside of me going and traveling to the conferences, if we baseline this, is it like a messaging problem? Is it the fact that these conversations aren't being had? 

04:29
Jonathan Levine
I think we increase your social media profile and I go on your podcast to try to get you more social media followers, because I think the solution is you need to have a million Twitter followers who are like, you can make money in water. Yeah. A lot of it has to do with the personalities also, which is like your typical water company, paper company, packaging company. These are not personalities that are like super extroverted and want to be on social media all day, right? These are usually people who kind of want to quietly have a beer and chat, but the people I'm talking about are also directors and vice presidents at billion dollar companies. I go to paper conferences, I go to water conferences, and I'm the only startup in a room full of billion dollar companies. 

05:15
Jonathan Levine
And these are the executives running large divisions. It's like, oh, there's 100 VPs in this room at billion, $10 billion paper mill companies or packaging companies. I'm it for the startup in the room. And then you know how you do your engagement? You're like, how about I buy this round of beers and then hang out? That's it. You're not on Twitter. You're just like at a conference hanging out and you got a beer with them. And that's about it. 

05:40
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, no, I totally hear you there. And so, I mean, I think we should just take every single water startup entrepreneur and make them take like an improv class or something to get the guys a little bit more social presence. But I think you're right. And it's funny, in the last few interviews that I've had, this concept of messaging and storytelling comes up a lot in everybody that I've interviewed, from policy to people in business. They're just like, from number one, right? The end user doesn't understand that there's a problem with water, right? And that's like a big thing, that there's this big undercurrent of a wave. And some people don't. Some people do. So how do you go ahead and build that up secondarily to what you're saying is the VCs and the financiers don't know that water exits exist, right? 

06:24
Ravi Kurani
So it seems like there's this big disconnect of just storytelling and messaging. 

06:29
Jonathan Levine
The reason I don't have a social media presence aggressively in any of these things is my customers are all enterprise technical corporations that have a thousand plus employees. They don't care if I'm on Twitter or on LinkedIn or on anything else. I get tons of people like, oh, we can help you with your social media, blah, blah. My staff is like, what if we post on blah blah blah? I'm like, nobody wants to buy from a technical enterprise organization that's got, we've got a material. You've got a smart pool sensor. Nobody's buying your smart pool sensor because you're on social media. You're going and you're explaining and it's a lot of technical education and you're talking to a bunch of people in a large corporation that all have technical degree and they might have a marketing degree and they want to know what the revenue self is going to be. They might say what's the volume in terms of number of units in year five? Because that justifies us implementing this and putting dollars into it. But nothing to do. They don't care about your social media profile. They're a giant company. True. So the problem is there's no market incentive if you're business to business enterprise technical. We're not. 

07:37
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, very true. And so if you're Jonathan, Mr. Beast sitting on not maybe at that rate you're going to sell some more folia materials. 

07:46
Jonathan Levine
But yeah, you're right. But fundamentally, the way Our business model is, nobody's building an entire sales network of people, a grocery product. Nobody does it in any country. That's just not how it works. You have trade merchandising people. You've got a whole set of language around, "This is how you support grocery sales through distributors who are going to go to a retail shop." Right? And so you have the person from Pepsi Frito, a who goes and makes sure all the merchandising is done well because their presence, the shopkeeper pushes their product. And let's be honest, that's not a Pepsi staff member. That's actually an implementing trade services organization that they hire that does all of those visits to all the stores. And that's what the grocery sector looks like. Right. So you get the idea. 

08:34
Jonathan Levine
The sales tools are just different than a D to C than a direct to consumer event. 

08:39
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, that totally makes sense. 

08:41
Jonathan Levine
But that's how the trillion dollar grocery sector works. But most software is advertising. Who's the biggest advertisers? Procter and Gamble. It's just an advertising channel for actual physical products. 

08:55
Ravi Kurani
Anyway, I kind of want to unpack that a little bit. 

08:59
Jonathan Levine
Right. 

08:59
Ravi Kurani
You said there's 58 billion in water bottles that are sold in developing countries. For the audience, can you kind of simplify? What is a trade services organization? Walk us through the journey how you actually distribute this product in the developing world. 

09:14
Jonathan Levine
Sure. It basically ends up being the exact same way that you sell groceries in the United States in 1920s. And the way that people are familiar with this is probably Costco for a typical person. So a person listening to this kind of podcast is probably tertiary. They've got a university degree, maybe an MBA or some kind of sciences degree also. And so you're probably going into a fairly upscale store like Costco, by the way, Costco is a professional upper class store. And so Costco is where you get handed that sample to try and you're like, "Oh, chicken, blah, blah, I would buy this." That's activation and promotion, right? That kind of sampling. And so you have that kind of old school sampling, which by the way, used to be the door to door vacuum cleaner, right? 

10:01
Jonathan Levine
Vacuums are sold india by Eureka Forbes and they're sold door to door, just like vacuum cleaners are sold in America 1920 1940 with an emerging middle class. Same thing, by the way, water appliances India sold the same way - they're sold door to door. There's an appliance sales kind of thing, right? So grocery, we're used to being in Costco. That's how you get that. Now you like the product. Now you're going to get an advertisement on your local television, you're going to see a billboard, you're going to have somebody with some sort of booth that's going to tell you about it. And all of these are totally standard techniques. You might have a door to door salesperson that's often micro enterprise where you'd have the women going and talking to women in the conservative society. 

10:42
Jonathan Levine
And so then they're educating about the product and then generating demand that way. That's another standard activation sales tactic. But all of this is like, look, if you're a digital media company, you're going like, I've got Instagram as one sales channel. I've got this social media site is this sales channel. I also go through content marketing. Over here is another way to get content marketing is an advertising channel. It's just a way that you're creating demand and then you're having people land on your website and then somebody's going to go and usher them through and make sure they buy your product. Almost all the terms that we use in digital marketing, distribution, that's a physical grocery product term. You physically have a truck drive stuff to the store. That's called distribution. Yeah, marketing, segmentation is consumer goods. 1920s, am I selling to somebody wealthy? 

11:28
Jonathan Levine
What's the consumer persona? This is all grocery sector terms. Consumer persona is 1950, 1920. Grocery sector, old school stuff, right? So all these things that we do, Silicon Valley is doing, it's like same thing, the world's the same. How you do things, how you sell stuff, it's the same. It's just swap out channels, swap out this, swap out that all of those tools are out there. And then you have a massive audience. You've got 170,000,000 people in Bangladesh. You've got 200 something million people in the largest state India. Right? So if you can sell to all of them or you can sell to a 10th of them, you've got a giant seller. 

12:04
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, I mean, that completely makes sense. And so then if we continue that journey of using these trade services organizations, the 170,000,000 people in Bangladesh, let's double click into the technology. Right? What are people buying? You said when you first introduced yourself, you guys have a pennies to dollar decrease in the ability of how much the person would pay for the technology. Is this thing look like a Brita filter? What's the actual usability of it? And do these folks that are going door to door selling these water technologies, do they just have it in their coat? And they're kind of like, hey, let me open up this briefcase like I was going to sell you a Cutco knife or a vacuum cleaner and go ahead and buy this Folia Water technology. Can you kind of shine some light on that? 

12:49
Jonathan Levine
If I cleverly have it in my drawer right here. So what we do is we package it right here. 1 second. What we do is we package it like a coffee filter. (Shows Folia Water Filter, opening package)

12:59
Ravi Kurani
Okay? 

12:59
Jonathan Levine
Very simple. So this is antimicrobial coffee filter. And then this is going to go into the place that you are store your water. So think human centered design, cultural anthropology, which is going to be true for any kind of product. C Seven tape. Here's some instructions for use. Here's a coffee filter that's going to go into a filter housing that's going to go. This is sort of the Bangladesh context, but you basically have a good pot goes on there. You put a bottle of water on there. So this is very much small, lightweight product. It's very much a matter of solving accessibility and affordability. So right now, the way water purifiers are sold around the world is the same way you can solve a refrigerator. And the problem is in the United States, low income people in the United States don't buy refrigerators. 

13:50
Jonathan Levine
You go to a Rent-A-center or landlord. And so selling an appliance is a major investment. If you were going to buy a refrigerator tomorrow. You'd go to Consumer Reports, you'd ask a bunch of people, you'd go. So the barrier to deciding to buy a refrigerator or some kind of appliance for hundreds of dollars, that's how water and purifiers are sold right now in northern countries. It's a big challenge. What if now, instead of that, you're buying it at the price point of a can of Coke? So what we've done is we've said, hey, we're going to need the exact same pricing as a can of Coke, or a bag of chips, or SIM cards, or snacks. The big story in emerging markets is Fin-Tech Tel-Co. What's the real story there? 

14:34
Jonathan Levine
The story is that they took $100 cell phones, $1,000 cell phones, they made them $100. But then what they really did was they made it into 20 cent purchases through SIM cards. Yes. Right. That micro purchase of minutes now means, and the same thing is true for solar pay as you go. You're getting little tiny micro payments of ten or 20 cent purchases of minutes on your cell phone. And now you see that everybody in pick a country has a cell phone that can go banking online. There's analysis of everybody on banks. So all of these different things are built on making that payment ten or $0.20, rather than it being a big capital item that we have the same thing in America. We'll sell you minutes instead of selling you $1,000. 

15:17
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, man, that's so cool. I never actually thought of it from this large scale capital side of things, and then actually building the case study around what's happening with telecom, around what's happening with energy. You're right. I remember being India back in 2012, and I think M Pesa was just coming out back then, and all these little microtransactions, you could literally, I'd have to walk down to the street corner, go to a SIM card guy, show him my phone, and he would basically load up another 30 minutes or a day's worth of minutes and data on there. And that makes so much more sense versus in the US, right? 

15:52
Ravi Kurani
I mean, I get it from a capital perspective, but you're spending $1,000 on an iPhone, you're then spending $50, $80 per month on these cell phone plans, and it becomes so much more accessible if you're doing it on a pay per use model. 

16:05
Jonathan Levine
Let's go over American water. $300 billion worth of bottled water is sold. I think it's the United States. United States and Europe. I think it's US. But $300 billion of plastic bottled water is sold. And everybody listening to this, again, probably has an MBA or a technical degree. And so delayed gratification ability to do certain analytical math and analytical decision makers and so on. But you can buy a water filter for $30, or you can get an expensive one for $100 to $200. And the return on that thing is that in six months, twelve months, it's paid for. And you don't have to be moving giant packs of 30 counts of water. You don't have to move a five gallon bottle of water. Well, you know what? 

16:47
Jonathan Levine
Go over to the local immigrant neighborhood, and you're going to find out that Russian, Polish, Latin American, Indian, they're all buying five gallon bottles of water. Nestle might be getting delivered. It's in the grocery store. And they're paying $5 for five gallons of drinking water deliverage of the home. And what are we doing as the third or fifth generation Americans? We're drinking tap water or we're buying a $30 filter. And so there's a huge expense disparity there. And then same thing. You're like, well, all you would have to do is buy something in advance. But it's not what happens. That appliance purchase doesn't happen. It's the same grocery purchase and bottled water. And people are just spending $1,000 a year on grocery bottled water. It's the same thing. Yeah. 

17:29
Ravi Kurani
How long do one of these filters last? How many gallons does it go through on average? Does it last for a week? A day? Given just a general four, six, eight family water consumption?

17:39
Jonathan Levine
Choose to make it last shorter, longer. 

17:42
Ravi Kurani
Okay. 

17:43
Jonathan Levine

Because we're a material sciences company, what we're doing is we're silverizing paper. The silver comes with the paper. The germs get killed while it's going through the paper. And then we also have the silver coating So there's no off taste of silver, unlike chlorine. And we meet all health organization standards and so on. So you've got silver going and killing the bugs. We can choose to have less silver. We can choose to have more silver. We can choose the size of the product, and so on. So the key part is to bethe same retail price as Coke or snacks or chips. From there, penny per liter seems to be the market standard. So we have a 20 liter as what we choose to make it.

18:22
Jonathan Levine
When we started, we chose to make 100 liter product at a dollar. And we realized the market wanted us to be down at 20 liters for $0.20. Right now, we're already working on a 30 cent 50. Right. But we can actually dial in how long it lasts. And then we realized we thought we would make a one month product. Then we aim for one week. And then again, the commercial, the sort of consumer marketing sciences piece of it was, there's a term in everywhere else in the world, they say “fast moving consumer goods”. When they say “grocery products”, we would say consumer packaged goods. It does actually mean something which is one of those, we don't normally think about it. Fast moving means a product that consumers go and buy very quickly.

19:03
Jonathan Levine
So you're going and buying this kind of staple once a week or more than once a week. And that habit of buying more than once a week is actually the consumer self-validating and valuing the product. So the retail shops like products that last only a day or two. They don't want products that are lasting a few weeks. Sure, because then people forget to buy it and then they stop buying. And so you actually want shorter- for consumer sciences, behavioral sciences reasons -you want consumers buying more. So we chose to say, okay, it needs to be bought multiple times a week.

19:34
Ravi Kurani
Yeah. 

19:34
Jonathan Levine
To be clear, my PhD is in carbon semination. Yeah. My PhD is in earth and environmental engineering and clean energy. But we realized that the problem with water wasn't technical. The problem was water was all around consumer issues, accessibility, affordability. But then you get into a language of like, human centered design, consumer kitchen journey, consumer water journey, consumer shopping journey, purchase frequency, right pricing, willingness to pay. These are all consumer marketing, consumer behavioral kinds of things. And we realized that was really all of those things had to be built in together in making this thing successful. And we also realized no one ever tried to do that. So we said, let's go and do it. 

20:16
Ravi Kurani
I want to kind of pull one of the things you were talking about earlier, right? That funding for water is, and you guys are a social enterprise, right? So you guys took the double whammy here of investors really not wanting to invest in things that are water or social enterprise. Two questions there. One is, what initially drove you to do this? You have this background, earth Sciences and climate tech. Why does Jonathan do what he does? What drives you to wake up every morning and solve this affordability issue of drinking water in the developing world? 

20:48
Jonathan Levine
20 years ago, during undergrad, I walked over to engineering school and they were doing work on the United Millennium Villages projects. This is 2003, 2000. And so they were like, hey, we're going to put a bunch of pickup trucks into rural villages in Africa. What should we do with them? Jeff Sachs was my boss's boss. And the idea was, if you get $100 ahead, remember like the GDP .7% stuff, and it was all right. If you get $100 a person, 5000 person village, $500,000, we're going to put a pickup truck in. What do you do with it? One of my friends got asked, how do you do electricity? And so he created a micro grid of Ghana in 2005. It's like they had to build controller, they had to do everything. There were no components, right? 

21:33
Jonathan Levine
They had to build it from the ground up. How do you build a micro grid for electricity? How do you charge people? How do you have a meter? So they asked me, what happens if you do clean water? All right, well, you got an engine over here, you've got some heat. So I looked at mechanical vapor, condensation, desalination. Basically, I looked up what's standard and I said, all right, well, this is the kind of thing that already exists. Let's put one of these on the back of the pickup truck. And this is how we can do desalination in rural Africa. The reason for all of this is this notion of why wouldn't everyone in the world have safe drinking water, right? What are 21st century problems? Is basically what I asked myself in 2000 and 2001. 

22:12
Jonathan Levine
As I remembered that, I was like, look, it's going to be global warming, climate change. I did something crazy back in Undergrad. I just read the IPCC report because, I don't know, 2001, 2002, the latest edition came out and I was like, I'm in undergrad. Why don't I just read it? That's what my job is. I was just to study stuff, right? So I just read the IPCC report and I was like, they got like 100 pages of citation. They have an answer. We have a real problem. Ignore the newspaper. It's obvious. In 2001, 2002, the Earth Sciences people know this is a problem. I'm not an Earth scientist, I'm an Earth engineer because I realized that the problem wasn't “what's the problem”? Then I read what's the solution”? And at the time, wind was crazy expensive, solar was crazy expensive.

23:00
Jonathan Levine
And I said, all right, what do these come down to? This comes down to energy and this comes down to water. And now you have the energy water nexus. Back in 2002, I don't know, I still thought it was pretty obvious. If you read the IPCC report, it's like everything's about electricity and emissions or it's about water. So I was like, okay, look, the 21st century problems are clean energy and clean water. And you can work on one, you can work on the other. So first I worked on clean water. My master's was grid scale, thermal batteries how do we use giant salt caverns to do grid scale gigawatt hour energy storage? Then I was working on billion ton CO2 disposal underneath deep sea sediments. My boss invented pulling CO2 out of the air, shoving into rocks.

23:43
Jonathan Levine
I was like, all right, the deep sea, you can go to the bottom of it, but it's in the ocean. All right, what if we go underneath the ocean? That was my PhD work. My wife and co founder invented our paper for her PhD. So I was the president of Students for Socially responsible investing in 2001, and we kind of figured if you go and you invent something, that's a 10th of the price of what's out there. Like, the capitalists should go and do something”, right? Well, it turns out that's not really true. Everybody's like, “oh, there's a market for it out there." Well, no, I think Steve Jobs is kind of a famous person for being like, “No, the consumer doesn't know what an iPhone is. You have to tell them what an iPhone is.” It's not how it works.

24:18
Ravi Kurani
Yeah. 

24:19
Jonathan Levine
So how do you go and create a new market that no one sells a 20-cent water purifier? So my wife invented this paper that makes clean drinking water, and of course, no one knew what to do with it. It wasn't being sold already. So, of course, everybody sells an appliance. Paper is not useful inside of an appliance. You've already got an expensive appliance. Now we know the words. The bill of materials for the consumable paper is like a few percent of the total bill of materials on an appliance. So the fact that you made a cheaper filter, a cheaper membrane in there, who cares? Most of it was the big plastic stuff, the buttons, all the other stuff that made it an appliance go. It wasn't the functional piece in the back, right? That's the little filter cart. That was the cheap part.

25:01
Jonathan Levine
So he said, right? That's not the answer. The answer is you got to have all of the pieces fit into the grocery. And we asked a very simple question, “Who buys grocery products that have paper in them right now?” Everyone. Because if I go to the store, like, a box of soap is in paper, if I go to the dishwasher, soap is in paper. Like, all this stuff. And that's true in America, but it's also true, like, picture, like, the worst civil war in the middle of Africa. They still have grocery products, right? Like, somebody's still buying grocery products in paper. And we're like, all right, we're adding a penny of silver to the paper. Well, then people in grocery stores everywhere should be able to afford that. Well, who gets products into grocery stores everywhere? Unilever and Procter and Gamble.

25:42
Jonathan Levine
And then we're like, all right, how do we go talk to them? When I met you, we were in San Francisco or Oakland. We moved to Cincinnati in 2018 for three months to meet the Procter and Gamble people. Okay? They had took a swing at it 25 years ago, before even methodology, before a lot of other things. So they took a swing 25 years ago. They're now out of that. They basically said, all right, we did this a while ago. We're not going to try it again because we tried and we moved on. All right? But hey, we have the people from that team as advisors and they can tell us everything that happened. Sure. Which no one else in the world knows because it's starting. I can't share it because I'm under NDAs. But we moved there. We moved to Cincinnati.  

26:26
Jonathan Levine
We got half a million dollars from Unilver for our initial consumer pilots. They have some internal stuff. Now it becomes M&Akind of stuff. But now we're on sale in 2,500 grocery stores. And we created a subsidiary, parent based paper subsidiary is the Water Filter Company. On the investor side, materials people know materials manufacturing, and emerging market people know emerging market sales. They're different people. So we separated the two companies out and now it all works.

26:55
Ravi Kurani
Got it. 

26:56
Jonathan Levine
Super cool. 

26:57
Ravi Kurani
That's really inspiring, Jonathan. So you guys are in 2,500 stores in Bangladesh through. Is that through Unilever? Through this other company called Folia Water or what is the mechanics of that?

27:08
Jonathan Levine
So Folia Water Global had gotten the initial work in 2019/ 2020 funded by Unilver and the UK government. The Dutch Foreign Ministry has a an Aqua for All. They funded our 2021, And some of the work through present. Folia Water Global has just closed basically a half million dollar round for expansion out to 10,000 stores. So, Unilever had some change over at the top. UK government had a 70% cut in their foreign aid And So apparently we're Brexit victims. So were supposed to get like a million dollar follow up and then that program disappeared. Fell through. Yeah. Because of Brexit, essentially. In part. So we've just closed a half million dollar round through impact investors who are emerging market. The common theme is very serious technologists, people who were doing computers in the 1980s.

28:00
Jonathan Levine
One of our board members created URL, was one of the 20 people who created URLs. He worked on the intranets, several intranets. Before the Internet. 

28:09
Ravi Kurani
Before the Internet, yeah. 

28:11
Jonathan Levine
So our board member Mitra, AOL got online through his computer systems, and then Russia got online through his desktop at one point! So, technologists from Silicon, who moved to Silicon Valley in the 80’s and 90’s. Each of them had ten different companies, were there at that sort of deep technology level. Have seen what real technology is, not operating companies, but what technology companies that have to do forcompanies. And that's sort of who we're seeing is funding this deeper “How do you do a new technology into a use case?” So, Brewster Kale, who's the creator of the Internet Archives, is one of our major financers.

28:47
Ravi Kurani
Wow, that's awesome. You have such an impressive group of advisors, mentors and investors. Man, that's really cool. 

28:54
Jonathan Levine
And they're all people who you're like, you want to get a beer? You want to get a coffee? I'll talk to you all day. They're fascinating. They're much more fascinating people than I am. 

29:03
Ravi Kurani
What's one of the craziest stories that you've heard over beers with any of these guys on the beginnings of the Internet or whatever that might be? Can you share one of those?

29:12
Jonathan Levine
Mitra's neighbor was like Greenpeace in 1981, when he's like fresh out of college. And so he goes and creates the global green net for them so they can be emailing in the early 80’s and then all those aid concerts with Peter Gabriel and all that kind of stuff. They ended up building computer systems. All the NGOs in the global south, you get online. But this is intranas before the Internet.

29:35
Ravi Kurani
Yeah. 

29:36
Jonathan Levine
And then later, when it came time for the commercial part, those same people ended up creating these Internet things. So at one point, AOL was, Mitra was building AOL to get online. Mitra in 2000 realizes that the.com stuff, that this is already mature. And so he moves over into clean tech in like 2000 to do solar in Australia. And so it's just what a technologist, what these people saw, and you see a set of people who were there in the80’s/90’s Internet move over to clean tech in 2000, move over to emerging market stuff, because that's where these new challenges are. And then the pattern matching, because most of Silicon Valley these days are operating companies. They didn't invent AI, they didn't invent machine language. Those are just best practices, tools to implement execution software. They didn't actually build new technology. Sure.

30:27
Jonathan Levine
And you see a very different mindset of what are all the pieces? You need a system of sellers. You're going to have different kinds of components. You're going to have different people in the value chain.

30:37
Ravi Kurani
That's such a profound analogy. 

30:39
Jonathan Levine
Right? 

30:39
Ravi Kurani
Like, I was actually talking to another one of the guests earlier. Two kind of competing threads here, right? One is that water follows what is happening in energy, and that energy kind of follows what's happening in telecom. And your second thread that you just made, right, is these folks that first built the Internet were building infrastructure. They're building pipes, right, for basically series. It could be digital pipes, electronic pipes, communication pipes. But this difference of today's technology company being operating companies versus yesterday's companies being more infrastructure companies actually lends itself to this water problem because water is a physical thing. And that's the point that this guest was making. 

31:21
Jonathan Levine
Let me follow up on that. Mitra was the head of the decentralized Internet at the Internet Archive. Wow. Okay. The Internet was originally about decentralizing information and taking the centralized infrastructure. Internet was all about how do we get it so that anyone can get information? Anybody in the most fascist country can get educated. A little girl in Afghanistan should be able to get educated because the Internet gets there. She can figure it out, right? Water and public health water is normally the big financing problem with water is usually it's billion, 10 billion, 100 billion dollar infrastructure deals where you're putting in giant pipe networks across a giant city. And so one person I heard said, like, “look, most venture and PE can't play in water. You need to be a pension system writing 100 billion dollar check, because that's the kind of mega deals these are.”

32:11
Jonathan Levine
What we're doing is saying don't solve water through centralized health system. It's in parallel to it. Right. But you have the World Bank, IMF, people like this, large organizations putting in an entire pipe network in Jakarta, in Mumbai, in wherever it might be. Right. Well, you're always going to have problems at the edge of that network. It's the nature of a fast growing megacity. And one, this is the Asian century, two, this is the megacity developing country century. Right. And so you're always going to have these problems. Rural is never going to have pipes. You can't do pipes in the middle of a low-density rural area. It's not possible. So what do you do?

32:57
Jonathan Levine
You need to decentralize how you get clean water, which means you need to have point of use water filtration. How do we have a system of decentralized public health products? Let's call it consumer good product. That's called. Now you need a distribution system. How do I get to a little village of 500 people? That's kind of far from anything. And by the way, that could be in the middle of the United States, that could be in the middle of Australia, that could be in the middle of, well, nowhere in Bangladesh is not close to ,Everything in Bangladesh is close to something. But you could be in Tedia, and maybe you've got a 500 person village that's kind of far from any who's showing up with a truck there once every week or more than once every single week. Grocery.

33:37
Jonathan Levine
How do you solve the problem of condoms? So you're back to, you solve the distribution and affordability. You solve accessibility, you solve affordability- because you don't have your own truck. There's one truck that's bringing all the groceries in. You want to be on that truck, and so you got to be part of that system. And that's kind of what we realized with water. Same thing is true.

33:58
Ravi Kurani
Awesome. I know we're coming close to time here. A question I love to ask everybody. Do you have a book, a TV show, a movie that has just changed your outlook on the way that you look at water or the way that you look at?

34:11
Jonathan Levine
So it didn't change my outlook, because I kind of already knew, but it confirmed. So there's a book called ‘Factfulness’ that I really urge everyone to read. ‘Factfulness’ is Hans Rosling, and he says, look, I'm not going to argue with you about all sorts of stuff about emerging of markets. I'm just going to tell you facts. And we don't argue about facts. Right. And it's education is everywhere going up. Maternal health is everywhere going up. Girl/ boy disparity issues are everywhere going away. They're getting equalized. And we'll look at the facts. What's the global population going to be in 2050/ 2070? We're not arguing from a perspective. There's no opinion on this. It's all of these people are already born. They're going to live longer. So our population is going to go up because they're going to live longer. But we're mostly at equilibrium.

34:58
Jonathan Levine
And then same thing. All sorts of countries are moving up. And it gives you a scale that says America: Bangladesh maps to like, 1890/1910, America; India maps to 1920s levels of wealth. 1950s, you're at Mexico, maybe 1970s level of wealth. Right. But now you actually have a way to say, what does it look like to sell a product? What does it look like to live in this country? And the answer is, everywhere around the world, you have the same number of… If I take your wealth, I can tell you how many rooms you had, what kind of toothbrush, what kind of transportation did you have, what kind of groceries did you buy, what kind of electricity did you have, what kind of television did you have?

35:37
Jonathan Levine
And it's true if you live in Baltimore, it's true if you live in Poland, it's true if you live in Buenos Aires. There's some number of ‘rich’ people, some number of people making this income that are ‘middle class’. And all of those wealth things and all of those things are the material lived reality is the same everywhere in the world. And by the way, it's spreading immensely. Malaysia is a rich country. Thailand is about to become rich country. Right. A lot of countries in America thought of as poor are middle-income countries. And we do our work in Bangladesh. Bangladesh was destroyed because of geopolitics. They got flattened in 1970 because of a civil war. They've been rapidly increasing. They're doubling wealth every ten years. Well, wait a minute. That means that they're actually going to be a middle-income country inside ten years.

36:23
Jonathan Levine
Bangladesh is a top 30 economy. I think India is a top ten economy or top five economy. 

36:28
Ravi Kurani
I think they're like top, yeah, top five or top seven, something like that. 

36:32
Jonathan Levine
The typical America focuses on Silicon Valley consumer facing companies because that's what we're familiar with. That's what we're presenting. The big economic story and the big economic development story since 1980 is China. China had caloric deficiency and food rationing when I was born in 1982. Now half of China is a wealthy country. Right. That's incredible. Both from the number of dollars that were made, but also from an impact perspective. Those are all people that might have had not enough food on the table in 1981. Now they've got the problems of rich people, like great, okay, that's a great improvement in the world because why shouldn't Chinese people have the same level of wealth and everything else? India is going through the same thing right now. So if you showed up in China in 1990, that was a pretty interesting 20 years there, right? 

37:18
Jonathan Levine
Well, I think a lot of Americans are missing that. the same thing is true around the world. and America is no longer it. That's not what the 21st century is going to be a story about. Our advantage in America is that we have people from everywhere. So whoever the richest person is in pick country, sure. We got some of your people here in America, too, because we're really, we've got immigrants from your country and we probably have a pretty good number of them. They're really smart and they live down the block from us. Now, that's an advantage we have as America. But I would say ’Factfulness’, I would say that's the one book I would say is really worth reading. I got three copies of the shelf right there so I can give them out to 'Factfulness.'

37:58
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, I'll definitely, I'll throw on the blog post when we publish your episode. 

38:01
Jonathan Levine
Cool. 

38:02
Ravi Kurani
Jonathan, thanks a ton for coming on the show. For all of you those out there listening, you can listen to liquid assets on Spotify, on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, wherever you consume your podcast from. And if you want to see other episodes, you can go to liquidassets.cc Jonathan, thanks.