Zoë Routh interviewed Nick Dyner, Moleaer's CEO, on her Leadership Podcast. Together they discuss nanobubble technology and how it applies to various industries including agriculture, wastewater and surface water, Moleaer's mission and what its like to lead a climate tech start-up.
Listen to the full podcast, 291 Nano bubbles - Nick Dyner's leadership perspective on a better future and follow along with the transcript below.
Intro
Welcome to the Zoë Routh Leadership Podcast, where we share all things people stuff in leadership. Learn from leaders who have done the hard yards and learn from experience. Hear from expert authors about the latest insights from culture to strategy and messy people dynamics. Get tips and insights from multiple award-winning author and leadership expert herself, Zoë Routh. Now on with the show
Zoë
Well, g'day there, it's Zoë Routh, your friendly neighborhood leadership futurist from Canada and Australia. This is our last interview of the year and oh my word.
It's so good to finish on such an optimistic note. My guest today is Nick Dyner. He is the CEO of Moleaer. Spelled M-O-L-E-A-E-R. From molecules and aeration, Moleaer. And it's a company that specializes in nanobubble technology.
What is that? May you well ask. And it's something I asked Nick first up. It is cutting edge technology that delivers extraordinary improvements in sustainable food productions and recovery of natural resources.
Basically, it's about helping water be better helping people use less water. That's a big deal here in Australia. And it shouldn't be a big deal around the world. So I'm thrilled to bring this conversation about Nick and the technology to you. He has had a bit of experience in Australia as well. He worked on desalination projects some time ago. And that has led him to keep asking the big questions about how can we use less water and use it better? I love this conversation. It's got some really important insights from a leadership point of view, as well as from a water use point of view. So, let's get into it. Well all the way from Los Angeles, welcome to the show, Nick Dyner.
Nick
Thanks, Zoë. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Zoë
You're welcome. LA, it's such a long, long way away. And I'm really super excited to have you on the show and talk about this really cool technology called Nanobubble technology, which I've no idea what that is. So I'm looking forward to finding out about it. I did know that's not you. I did read a little bit about it. But I'm like, yep, need to know more. So first things first, how did you get started in this sector? And probably you need to tell us along the way, what is nanobubble technology?
Nick
Yeah, thanks. I would be surprised if you had heard of it. And I would probably also be a little concerned because it would make me wonder who else is really out there actively trying to promote this new class of science or this new category into the vast number of industries where it has applicability. It is widely studied in universities, there's a number of papers that are being published, it's growing exponentially each year.
But from a commercial or industrial scale, I think Moleaer is one of the first and I believe the leader in bringing it to market. So I'll tell you a bit about how we stumbled into this. It was late 2016. I was finishing work with a company I had been previously part of in reverse osmosis membranes for desalination, something that is widely used in Australia – it’s one of the largest markets for reverse osmosis membranes. That was a company that I was lucky to join in 2010, that brought me to Los Angeles, and I became the commercial leader for it. It was called Nano h2o. And that was eventually acquired by LG, the Korean company. And as I was finishing my work with LG in late 2016, I was looking for something else to do. I was working with some other companies as well and in various consulting support roles, and met the co-founders of a company called Moleaer, which is derived from the term molecular air because we're making basically air bubbles close to molecular scale, meaning nanoscale.
Zoë
And thank you for explaining that because the way that you pronounce it sounds very French but it's not spelt in French way at all.
Nick
Our co-founder, our CTO, decided that molere, which will be molecular wasn't interesting enough, so he put a French twist on it. That's how you get Moleaer. Nothing more than that. But you know, started to do some research on Nanobubbles, just Google searching. And what I first thought was just an interesting way to dissolve air and water because he talked about bubbles, and bubbles are widely used in a process known as aeration, you're trying to put air into water to create a little bit of an aerobic environment typically used in wastewater, some other applications.
And I started to do research on all these different areas that were being explored by universities around applications for Nanobubbles that range from water treatment to washing foods without using chemicals and more sort of sanitation standardization methods, to coding bubbles for healthcare to improve drug delivery for different types of diseases. I thought the concept around what these bubbles could do was fascinating. So myself and a few others that were at the previous company I was with, invested in our co-founders, that would be now January 2017. And shortly thereafter, I joined them to help grow the business.
Zoë
Okay, so let me just clarify a couple things. So when I read nanobubble, I'm thinking little mini robots, and maybe I'm reading too much sci-fi right now. And the current book is about having nanobots injected into your bloodstream, and they do all sorts of self-repair. Nanobubble, does it mean it’s an electronic thing or does it just mean they’re really small?
Nick
It really is the latter, but it's a little more interesting than just really small. So when you are typically dissolving gas and liquid, you form a bubble, that bubble starts to rise, once it reaches the surface, and pops, it's gone. And during the time period that it starts to rise, you're trying to dissolve as much gas as you can into liquid. That's not that interesting from a sort of future science technology perspective. It's very important. There's not much you can do in a short period of time that a bubble sits in water, think of a soda, same concept applies when you’re putting air oxygen into water bubbles rising, reaches the surface, it's gone. When you're forming a nanobubble, you're really not thinking about bubbles anymore, you're thinking about these gas nanoparticles. So think of it in terms of almost like an alternative form of chemistry. But instead of using some sort of liquid or some sort of solid base material to make a nano material, you're actually just using the gas that you apply air oxygen – can be nitrogen, carbon dioxide, which is finding more and more applications – and you're putting it into a bubble that's 100 nanometers at 100 nanometers, that's 2500 times smaller than a grain of salt.
And although not many people from our marketing side like me to use this analogy, but since we're all now experts in viruses it’s about the size of a virus. And since you can't conceptualize and think about how big a virus is, I mean, how can you think about 100 nanometers, it's very hard to think about what a gas bubble at that same size can do. But what we've done, and a number of universities along the way, and prior to us, is really understand what happens when you start to put oxygen at that level.
And you start to realize it can do a heck of a lot of things. And it starts to influence different physical, chemical and biological reactions or processes differently than what any other gases would do whether in a dissolve form, and certainly any bubbles would do. And so we focus on trying to harness that in a number of industries, to enable these truly extraordinary outcomes for our customers really around growing food, growing fish, cleaning water, treating wastewater, extracting oil, extracting metals, and mining, etc.
Zoë
That is, I think, just very exciting. Okay, so let's tease out, you know, the benefits. Thank you for explaining the tech. I mostly got it. And I want to know about what this means for things like, well, let's start with the first one you mentioned – growing food. How will this benefit growing food?
Nick
Yeah, that's our biggest market today, about 35 to 40% of all of our installations, we have a little over 2000 of these, what we call nanobubble systems installed globally. About 35 to 40% are in some form of a growing facility, could be a small vertical farm to a traditional Dutch greenhouse to even now an outdoor farm.
And we're touching the irrigation water. And so what all farmers know, or all growers know, is that when you can bring higher levels of oxygen to the roots of a plant, you develop more robust and healthier roots. And once you have more robust and healthier roots, there's a lot more that's going to come from that crop, it could be more yield, it could be that the plant has to spend less time fighting disease, it could be sweeter, higher caliber fruit or vegetable for example.
And so what we've done is we've enabled these growers to bring supersaturated levels of oxygen nanobubbles, to the roots to get a much healthier, stronger or more vibrant root zone. And then you get all those extra benefits around yield improvements and better quality, less losses.
We also improve the water quality along the way. These nanobubbles are going to actually react with pathogens in the water. The pathogens in irrigation water, known as pythium and phytophthora, those are types of diseases that plants are trying to fight and what growers are trying to prevent. So we're going to also help eliminate or reduce the presence of that because the bubbles are actually going to interact with that and oxidize, which basically means eliminate or destroy those pathogens in the water.
So, we end up starting to deliver this solution to the grower that allows them to not only get the higher yield, but they're getting higher yields with the same water input, which essentially means they're using less water to grow food. We're also now starting to see what happens as we go to these outdoor growing or farming facilities where you're using drip irrigation, which is basically you know, think of tubes along the bottom or under the soil that is delivering water in a very precise fashion to each crop that's being irrigated. We're starting to see that that water flows to the soil more effectively, because the bubbles are actually, what we call reducing surface tension. Think of how soap makes water flow more easily, makes it a little more slippery, that water gets through the soil more effectively, so you actually get the same amount of moisture you want in the soil but with less water. So we're actually starting now to reduce the amount of water that's needed to also grow the food you want and get more food out of it. And so that's one of the reasons why I've been so successful in that space – that it delivers higher yields, better water quality, and in some cases now even less water to begin with, to be able to get the outcome you want.
Zoë
Oh, that's, I mean, farmers in Australia would be very interested in that, though not all of them are drip irrigation farmers, I'm thinking about my rice grower clients, say, for example, where they do flood irrigation. Can this technology support that? Or are you not up to it in the research there? Where do you sit with that?
Nick
It's the latter. So for us, there's only so much we can do at a given time, as you can imagine, any company, especially an early stage or smaller business, so that's on our sort of application list when we think about irrigation. The company has a mission, right? We focus on how do we enable industries to use less water, right, to increase productivity, and to treat that water more responsibly. So really preserving, protecting that input, and input here being water. And so this company is very mission driven, very passionate, every employee that we have in the business over 80 people now, they truly are passionate about how do we focus on the areas where our company really helps improve the environment and helps industries overcome the challenges associated with climate change, water being a critical one, especially in Australia, you recognize that very well, just like in California, drought is real and these growers are affected by it. So right now, we focus on where we know the technology has an immediate impact, but we're also looking at how do you go to, what we call pivots or overhead sprinklers, right? It's where the water is coming from the top, not from the drip. And then after that, can we even affect fields that are flooded? And how do we get these oxygen nanobubbles introduced or even air nanobubbles, they won't have the same benefit, but they still have benefit, into that water before it gets to the roots of the plants or before it goes into the irrigation.
Zoë
So huge application for food production. And you also mentioned cleaning up water. So, tell me how it works with that and what industries are using nanobubble technology to help do that?
Nick
Yeah, we split that into two segments. One of them is on wastewater, how do we improve wastewater treatment processes? And then how do we also treat surface water. Think of surface waters as lakes, ponds, rivers, canals, etc. And the needs are different, and actually, the mode of action is a little bit different between both. And wastewater, it's actually really interesting, even though the concept of aeration – dissolving air oxygen into wastewater – is widely understood, it's estimated about 2% of the world's energy goes to aerating wastewater, which is to just get air into the wastewater treatment process, to keep enough oxygen in that water so that microbiology, the bacteria, can do its job and break down the organics that come through the wastewater treatment plant, and eventually you get to a water quality that's good enough to discharge.
Zoë
2% actually sounds like a lot. It seems like a lot of water to be used.
Nick
Topic: Wastewater Treatment
It's a lot. Obviously, it's incredibly needed, right? There’s wastewater treatment everywhere, for obvious reasons. But it's also a very inefficient process. What we do is, we actually don't replace that, we don't compete with that, what we do is we try to make that better. And we make it better by where our customers will introduce nanobubbles into the wastewater treatment process, and these bubbles, just air will react with those contaminants, similar way I talked about how they react with those pathogens in irrigation water, they will react to a number of the contaminants, could be things like industrial soaps and cleaners, which actually affect the biology downstream, and we start to bond with them, the bubbles will, and think of it as kind of rendering them harmless, right, we’ll neutralize them, we separate them, we break them down.
And so as the wastewater travels through the rest of the treatment process, there's less work for that treatment process to do because we've already started to pretreat it, and now all of a sudden, we're able to reduce some of that energy usage that would otherwise be needed by those aeration systems, or allow the customer to actually treat more wastewater without having to increase their energy, which is such a big cost driver in wastewater treatment.
So that's how we play a role in wastewater, primarily do municipal we also do industrial and that space.
Topic: Surface Water
And then on the surface water side, a lot of the big challenges in surface water are things like odor, like you walk past a stagnant body of water on a warm day and it smells like hydrogen sulfide, it's because a lot of the water has been depleted of oxygen levels and now you've got the anaerobic or sort of bad bacteria growing that causes this rotten egg smell. And then we also deal with things like algae blooms, particularly harmful algae blooms, which also can be a result of warming temperatures, depleting oxygen levels, and all of a sudden, the algae has an opportunity to flourish. You can take care of both of those issues very easily with chemicals. But there's a growing movement for good reason to start to want to reduce our dependency on these, what are called oxidizing chemicals like peroxide, chlorine, or bleach, algaecides, pesticides, herbicides, and what we're finding is that our system, which is just taking air, and putting these tiny 100 nanometer sized bubbles into that water provides similar efficacy.
So we're able to provide the same type of breakdown of those hydrogen sulfide compounds that make that odor that nobody likes, that rotten egg smell, help improve the water quality to a more aerobic state, meaning add some air into it so that those anaerobic bacteria that form that smell can't form, and then also on the algae side start to break down some of the presence of that algae and also prevent the algae from actually blooming by improving that water quality just by using these tiny air bubbles versus chemicals that are often the standard default solution.
Zoë
And this is all a completely natural, chemical free process that you do? It's just taking air and making it little, tiny, and then sort of amplifying natural processes?
Nick
A true chemist will tell me it's not chemical free, because I'm using oxygen. I guess they're right. But I think from the way we think about chemical versus non-chemical, I think we all agree that air oxygen is not harmful. And therefore, it's chemical-free the way you and I think about it, we just take air oxygen, or the gas that is of interest to the client. We do have some customers who work with certain industrial gases or certain industrial processes, none of which is in conflict with the environmental and climate goals that we have. But 90 plus percent of our clients are taking air oxygen and applying it as a solution that could have to reduce their dependency on chemicals or other perhaps more harmful solutions or more expensive solutions.
Zoë
So I'm wondering how this might apply in the Australian context. Right now, I'm not sure if you're aware, we're having massive floods particularly in the eastern seaboard of the country, we've had climate change driven massive weather events, and we've had flood after flood recently, and a lot of homes are all saturated, a lot of agricultural areas are soggy and so on. Is this something that your technology could help assist with in terms of helping re-aerate the land – and talking from an agricultural point of view – or even helping clean up homes. Is that sort of the application that it could be used for?
Nick
When it comes to floods, a lot of times the aftermath of the flood is that in many respects those surface waters – ponds, lakes, canals, rivers – when that new water is introduced, or gets mixed with other waters, and obviously, when you have a flood, you got a lot of mixing of new waters being introduced with other waters, a lot of those waters are carrying pollutants with them, because they can be coming off the street, they can be coming off of, you know, anywhere golf courses, we have a high amount of fertilizers being applied, that's going to leave these previously perhaps very good quality surface waters in a state of repair where they need that kind of repair. And that is where our technology does play a role. So we've had instances where there's been a short term need for our technology to come in to restore a body of water.
We actually did a very large project here in Los Angeles County, wasn't due to a flood, it was due to a chemical, some introduction probably some sort of chemical spill into that body of water, and rather than using harmful chemicals to deal with the hydrogen sulfide smell that occurred from the deterioration of water quality, Los Angeles County used our technology, and it was a chemical free solution to restore that body of water. Something similar can occur when you have flood as well, when you have things that are mixing and new chemicals or other potential contaminants are introduced to that body of water. That's where we would play a role in a post-flood solution.
Zoë
Well, your technology sounds like no brainer to me. Why is not everybody using this? So you're obviously a good sales person, because you're telling me the story. I'm like I'm sold, or maybe I'm just gullible? I'm not sure. But I suspect the story is good. From a leadership point of view now, in trying to present this solution, what kind of challenges have you faced in terms of helping people to see the possibilities? Have you actually experienced any challenges around this?
Nick
We do. Trust me, there are many. And it starts with the very beginning of our conversation, which was wondering what are nanobubbles and my question about whether you'd heard of them or not. So the vast majority of customers or potential customers that we engage with in any industry, are not familiar with nanobubbles. So we have this challenge of not only do I have to tell you about Moleaer and who we are, but I also have to tell you about the technology that we are trying to offer you to solve a specific problem you have. So we start at a very different position than maybe if I was introducing a new smartphone to you, where you know what a smartphone is and I gotta convince you that mine is better.
In this case, I got to tell you about a technology you've probably never heard of, and then I gotta convince you that I know how to deliver that technology to you. So that is a challenge that requires us to go above and beyond just designing a product, building it, getting a few salespeople out there and selling it, we really have to do the research around what do nanobubbles do and really understand them. We really have to do the research around how do we optimize it for your particular need or that particular industry. And then we also have to do an enormous amount of education, so that you really understand why this is a better solution and an alternative to meet your needs.
Zoë
So once you do that, once you do all that educational processes, and you work through all that, and like me, I'm like, oh, this totally makes sense, this seems like a good idea, is there, apart from overcoming the lack of knowledge and lack of awareness piece, is there any sort of mindset pushback that you get from people around this particular thing, like anything else like that?
Nick
Yeah occasionally, you know, one of the things when you deal with something that's 100 nanometers, which is why I do use that analogy I used before relative to a virus, now, obviously, I wouldn't if it wasn't made perhaps a little more timely now than before, but it is very hard to conceptualize something at that scale. You don't see it, no matter how many we produce, and we produce hundreds of millions per milliliter, enormous concentration, a milliliter is nothing, right? But if you start to think about, I can't see 100 million, hundreds of millions, not 100 million, several 100 million of these little gas particles or bubbles, because that's how small they are and it's very hard for someone to understand that. And so in that respect, a lot of people will say, you know, I don't need this today. Oh, wait, right?
But you always have, in any industry, when you are delivering something that's creating value and it's something novel, there are early adopters, and where we have been very lucky, and I think we're past early adopters, because we have over 2000 of these, we've been very lucky over the last several years or last four years, as we were building this and continue to build it, to find those early adopters, those innovators who say, this makes sense, I have a problem that this can solve, and I want to try it. And as we do that, and we get deeper and deeper into that industry where those early adopters have peers, it gets easier and easier to sell, which is why now we have several 100 different types of growing facilities that use our product, because they know from their peers that this works. But every time we enter a new industry, we go through that same challenge.
Zoë
How do you identify an early adopter? I mean, it makes sense. You're an emerging technology, you want to be with like-minded people who are ready to test things and experiment with them. They don't necessarily have a neon sign above their head saying, hey, I'm an early adopter, come and pitch me something new and innovative. What's your process for identifying them?
Nick
But we do cast a wide net to find them. But it's a combination of two things, right? I mean, one of them is marketing. We have a very strong marketing team and they are able to get the story of Moleaer out into a lot of eyeballs.
And then when you get an inbound lead off of that, especially if it's early on, in our evolution and industry, you kind of know there's somebody there who's pretty curious. Either they have a problem they cannot solve, and so they might be a little bit desperate, or they truly are early adopters of technology and love to try new things and can connect the value proposition and the science or the technologies that we're offering to the problem they have and they want to go solve.
And the second is, it's our sales team, and their capability of knowing from the questions that we're asking, and the answers they get, whether they have somebody here who's serious, who's interested, who has a problem we can solve, because we're not just interested in selling anything, and is the kind of person that fits that profile of an early adopter. But you also have to know that the beginning when you start out, most are going to say no, because they're not early adopters, and you're trying to figure out who those folks are. And then once you find one, they typically know who else are like them, and so it’s that word of mouth and building that network, and a network of what, and I would use that term again, early adopters, who bring our technology into that particular industry, and then they become promoters. And once you have those promoters, it gets a little bit easier and easier. I always say the first sale is the hardest, the second sale is the second hardest, and so on.
Zoë
From a leadership point of view, I'm curious about the work that you did, first of all, in desalination in Australia, what kind of leader mindset and approach you had then and has it changed at all now that you're CEO of a tech startup? Is there a difference in mindset? Is there a difference in approach? Is there a difference in ideology?
Nick
I wouldn't say it is different, I would say it's an evolution from those learnings that continue. So, I'll give you two parts to it. There is one overarching belief I have when you are trying to commercialize something new, which is, as an organization, particularly on the commercial side, if you're not taking risks, calculated risks, you're really not trying hard enough. And you gotta be prepared to make mistakes. And it's okay to make mistakes. Because if you're not making mistakes, you don't really know how far you can push something, all within reason, and we're never going to let it- we're never going to abandon a customer, we make a mistake we're going to do right by that customer, we do every single time.
But the other part of it too, from a leadership in the commercialization specific that one has to understand, and I did pick this up from the desalination work I did, which is, and especially in Australia, which is you really have to understand from the other side of the table, from that customer side of the table, what are the perceived risks? Because in our industries, water treatment, wastewater treatment, even agriculture, or aquaculture, if we create value for that, the person is making a purchasing decision on the other side, they probably get a pat on their back from their boss, and he or she will be told you did a good job. But if they bought something and it goes terribly wrong, and that terribly wrong leads to some sort of consequential outcome, they may get fired. So it's really important to understand those perceived risks and make sure they understand how we fit into those risks, whether they're real or not, and how we mitigate them. And what we're doing, in terms of what we offer, once we explain it, is you either are going to get a benefit, or you're going to get nothing, you're not going to get a negative. And once they understand that the risk profile changes tremendously, because now they're not worried about getting fired for doing something so consequential. They're just worried about whether or not this is going to do what we say it's going to go do and can Moleaer fulfill that promise. It's a very different starting point, and making sure that we communicate that very effectively upfront, because so many technologies, particularly in water, don't succeed, not because they're a bad technology, but they're never able to overcome that perceived risk profile that the customer assumes, and aren't able to mitigate that where the customer feels confident to take a risk and purchase that product, because they're so worried about the adverse effect, not the benefit.
Zoë
Thank you for sharing that. I'm also curious about the organization's purpose. You've mentioned the beginning, that the founders and the whole business is focused around its mission to reduce the use of water and improve the quality of water. Can you just make sure that I've captured that correctly? What is the purpose?
Nick
Yeah and at a very sort of high level, right, we're trying, the mission statement, with a little bit of sort of buzz around the mission statement, or whatever the right word is, is you know, we want to unlock the power of water to help industries do more with less.
But if you really break it down to its most basic, which is we're trying to help industries increase productivity without using more inputs, the key input here being water, and when they are using that water, that they're treating it responsibly.
So it goes that whole sort of like, you know, preserve, protect type of philosophy. And the reason for that is, and I think coincidentally, it was this weekend, that the world's surpassed 8 billion in terms of people, right, and you have a finite number of resources. And I've been telling this story recently, to new hires, and folks in the company, about a year ago, I was in British Columbia, outside of Vancouver with my family. My son loves geology, loves rocks, so I took them to an old copper mine, where they do a tour. And on the tour, the tour guide says, if you really think about it, everything we touch in this world started out as either being mined or grown.
And I left that thinking again, the commonality of those two things is water. You cannot mine, whether it's a metal or oil, and you cannot grow without water, water is the connector between that. And when you think about with a growing population, you need to extract more metals, especially as this electrified economy ongoing, we have to figure out how do we get more copper? How do we get more metals to support that move from fossil fuels to batteries. And when you think about a growing population, you have to feed it. So how are you going to grow more food? And you only have a finite amount of water, right? You can't really produce more water. Desalination is one way to produce more freshwater, it's expensive, it's effective, but it's expensive. So how do you enable industries to be able to keep up with what's inevitable demand because of population growth without exhausting the inputs necessary to produce those resources, because then you have a real problem. And you know, that problem is going to disproportionately affect those who can't afford those resources, when they start to have a supply constraint. So that's how we think about it in terms of a much more… so I'm getting a little granular, but on a sort of macro level, the granularity of why that mission is so important.
Zoë
I think it's really, really absolutely important. And it, for me, it signals a shift in approach to how we're looking at resources. So I love that you share that story, with your son about you know, everything is constructed, either we grew it, or we dug it out of the earth. And that's really an extraction mindset, isn't it? We're standing on planet Earth, and we're using its resources. And now your technology, your business is all about, hang on a minute, we can't just keep taking things out and using it willy-nilly, we're kind of reaching capacity for that we've got lots of problems that have come as a result of that. So in her book, Donut Economics, not sure if you've read or not, by Kate Rayworth, it was fantastic. She talks about the shift needed to go from extraction mindset to regenerative mindset. And your business sort of sits in the, I don't know, the bridge to that, I guess, if you like. So it's about reducing extraction, and being more sensible and useful with it. I'm wondering if you see your business as sort of on the cusp of a changing mindset about how we view our resources? Do you get a sense of that for yourself?
Nick
Yes, but that's because I live it every day. I don't know if I have an objective point of view that says that the majority of people or enough people are truly appreciating that challenge and to some extent, I am concerned they are not, and some of the examples I use because it makes it more, not only personal, but also tangible for people. You know, when you read, Heinz Ketchup, ketchup prices are going up, in part because there's a shortage of tomatoes that are not available because of the drought in California, and so I don't know if enough people recognize that, right? And that's where I say, I wonder why people aren't talking about that more and thinking about how do we enable a farmer in California to still grow the tomatoes that are needed, so I can put ketchup on my french fries? So the fact that there's not enough awareness about that, I say it bothers me because I have a bias, like I said, I'm in this every day, but I do get concerned that that's not well enough understood. But I hope that that shift is changing. And I think it's inevitable that it will, because if the solutions don't keep up with the problems, we're all going to start feeling it more and more.
And my, our goal at Moleaer is to try to address the problems that we can solve, to alleviate some of that pain that people may feel.
Zoë
I think you've hit on something that is really important, actually, is people don't actually see the system within which they exist. The ketchup being an example of that. The ketchup is part of a system, an ecosystem, that we're all part of. All we see is the ketchup and the prices going up and complain, you know, oh it's inflation. I think in Australia, we, I think, because it's been in the news so much over the last six months, the floods here have wiped out a number of different crops, which has led to crazy prices for different foods that were wiped out, like lettuce. Lettuce went up to like $12 ahead at one point, which is pretty crazy. It's not normal. And because of the floods at the moment, future crops are going to be in short demand and prices will go up as well. Are people going to the office and going, oh, why are the prices going up? And why are there no vegetables? Why are there no zucchinis here? Oh, it's because of the floods or previously because of the fires. In Australia, we, I think we are fairly anchored to the environment, because it's had such a massive impact on us. That's not always the case in a country like the US which is, is as vast as Australia. But its population is so much bigger, you may be disassociated from the systems, which provides you with your food. And I think that's a really useful observation. And I think in working in agriculture, too, it's one of the common complaints that a lot of farmers and primary producers make is that people don't get where their food comes from. It's this constant educational battle about the meat on your plate, the milk in your fridge comes from a primary producer working on that. And it's the work that we need to do as educators and as leaders is to help people see the system in which they're operating. And this is a big leadership challenge and a big mindset shift that people need to make as well. And start to care about the nanobubbles in California and water that can enable better producing tomatoes, not just so that you can have ketchup at a convenient price, but because it allows food security down the track, which is probably the bigger threat that we are not as concerned about or as aware of because it's a little bit down on the horizon. So that was just me waxing lyrical. I want to ask you a question. Thank you for allowing me the stage for a second.
Nick
But what you were just talking about is vital. And there are some countries that are highly attuned to it. Singapore, the UAE, they are, at the government level, investing heavily in ensuring that they are food secure by a certain date – 2030, one's a little earlier than that, one's a little later than that, but it's around that 2030 timeframe. And you have to adapt and change how you grow food, not only because Singapore and the UAE are not, you know, the easiest places in the world to grow a vast range of produce that you want, but also because of that concern as to whether or not they'll be able to import those foods in the future from Australia, from the United States, from wherever, due to a number of issues, climate change being one of them, and whether those locations can continue to grow at the output that's necessary to feed them, as well as their own domestic population.
Zoë
Is Singapore actually growing any food? Have they got lots of vertical farms there?
Nick
Vertical farms slash greenhouses. They've made a mandate to invest there.
Zoë
Wow. Okay, so let's fast forward 20 years, and, or could be a little bit longer, I'm not sure, with your vision of what nanobubble technology can do, let's say we've been successful in educating people, hey, you're actually part of a system here and we need to do some things like dealing with our water supply and our water security, what do you see as a blue sky horizon possibility 20 years down the track? How do you see this rolling out and leading to positive change?
Nick
Yeah, so first and foremost, we wouldn't start this podcast with you wondering what nanobubbles are, you would be, in 20 years from now, know nanobubbles as well as any other technology that is, you know, typically used in sort of water and these industries like agriculture and whatnot. So that's my first goal, to make it that relevant that we all, as consumers, understand the role this technology plays.
But then more importantly than that selfish goal I have on the branding side or on the category side, from a food perspective, starting with that industry, I want nanobubbles to have been able to reduce the amount of water necessary to produce the amount of food that's needed to meet that demand. So for example, in California today, about 80% of California's water goes to irrigation. California is obviously the largest farming state in the United States. If all of a sudden, we were able, not all of a sudden, 20 years from now we were able to bring that down by 10%, so 72% of the water is now going to irrigation, that's an enormous amount of water that now becomes available to the community, community being the western United States. That’s an enormous impact, right, it eliminates the need for things like desalination, potentially, or wastewater reuse, these effective, but very expensive, very complex processes that are needed to overcome water shortage. In aquaculture, we all want to continue to eat fish, it’s my favorite sort of food category, but to make sure that we're able to grow things like salmon and shrimp in a sustainable manner.
Today, if you grow salmon offshore, you may have issues with the seafloor, you're decimating the seafloor, because of fish waste, food waste. We already help restore that, we do that in Chile through our partners down there, we use oxygen nanobubbles to restore the seafloor below the sea cage. So rather than thinking about, well, you can't grow salmon anymore, because it's destroying the seafloor, let's make sure we have a solution to prevent that destruction of the seafloor. So we can continue to grow salmon offshore, in a more sustainable manner. And same thing in wastewater, right? Twenty years from now, I want to see that energy consumption drop. So if it's 2% of the world's energy goes to one and a half percent of the world's energy. Half a percent is enormous savings.
So that's where we really see that impact, right? And of course, you can't do that with just one customer in each segment, you really have to make this become standard kit, for lack of a better term, in the process by which you irrigate water and grow food, in the process by which you grow salmon, shrimp, and other thin fish, crustaceans and whatnot, in the manner in which you treat wastewater treatment plant, and the manner in which you treat surface water. That's how we think about that sort of long-term vision of impact. And then when you really add it up, and we sort of kind of said that water, food energy nexus, that you're using less water to grow more food with less energy. That's how this all comes together in terms of creating that big impact.
Zoë
Very exciting. Thank you. That was one of the most positive views of the future. I've heard for a while.
Nick
I have to be an optimist to do this job.
Zoë
You absolutely have to be an optimist. So let's talk about another element of the leadership challenge around this. It's not just educating people about nanobubbles, thinking about scalability, and hopefully you've been working on this whole challenge, there's only 80 of you working in a small different sector to achieve that global impact. Apart from the technical challenges of getting more people, the leadership challenge of trying to scale so that you can have global delivery, what do you think are the leadership challenges involved in that?
Nick
Yeah, I'll categorize some simple words. The first is clarity, right? Providing clarity to the organization and any other stakeholders who are sort of within our orbit to help us really understand what it is we're trying to do, and making sure the goals of the organization, not the ones at the top, I don’t mean top meaning at the CEO level, top meaning the overarching goal, and then the sub goals that come forward are clearly understood. The reason why clarity matters is through clarity, you get focus. And focus is really hard for a nanobubble company, especially Moleaer. There are so many applications. I was at an investor conference two days ago, and one of our investors introduced me and said there's 44 million applications for nanobubbles, as a joke, but I was like that might not be far off. It's just an endless number of things you can do with these tiny bubbles, just Google it, look at the research, and there's more things that are being studied by third parties that there are that are on our radar, and on our radar there are more things than we're actually doing today. So keeping the team focused on the industries and the problems that we try to, that we focus on solving is a big challenge, because there's so many cool things you can do with this tiny technology. Like, like I said, the very beginning, one of the areas of research is coding these tiny bubbles with pharmaceuticals to deliver them more effectively. And within that area, cancer is one of those areas that people are trying to use bubble technology to improve the treatment of. Who doesn't want to be part of that? The problem is that's so different from everything else we do and so far away from being something that's commercially available or viable. It's too hard for us to focus on that today. Down the road, I would love to and I hope we're part of that. So keeping that focus is the other part of it. And so that's where clarity and that focus come in. And then scalability is making sure we're not trying to solve every single person's problem with a different way. Today, we do a lot of that, it's one of our challenges, but it helps us really understand where to create the most value, and then making sure you get to that specific set of problems with a specific set of products that then allows you to continue to rinse, wash, repeat, using that cliché, over and over again, as we grow globally and enter different geographies pursuing those same applications with similar or the same products, so it becomes much more of a repeatable process. But it takes time to get there. Yeah, we'll learn a lot about whether you've got the right product for that market, that classic Product Market Fit example, and making sure you really understand what problems you’re solving, and really understand what are the needs of those customers. And then eventually you get there. But of course everyone wants to be there today. People recognize we're getting there, takes time to get there, we're learning, and that's where we're aiming to go, and we're on track to do that.
Zoë
Thank you, Nick. I think that was really, really helpful. I think that's got applications for all leaders, you know, when you're clear about your goals, and you realize that there's multiple pathways, and you've picked one and to stick to your knitting, just to mix a couple metaphors in there is really helpful. Otherwise, you can just spread your energy way too far and wide. Where can people find out more about Moleaer and nanobubble technology?
Nick
Yeah, no, I appreciate you asking that. The best place is as always gonna be the website, and that's moleaer.com. There are phone numbers on there that people can call direct, certainly can put you in touch with, whether it's sales or R&D or others that can best provide a little more insight in both the company and the technology.
Zoë
Thanks, Nick. I know that there's a lot of listeners to the show who are from the agricultural sector, and also from water management sector, here in Australia, and around the world. So I'm sure there'll be lots of interest to this technology, I certainly found it fascinating. I love your vision for the future. And when good people come together to focus on some of the world problems, a lot of good things can happen as a result. So thank you so much for the work that you're doing out in the world, and also for coming on the show and telling us all about it's been absolutely fascinating. And it's been, I'm really deeply grateful for your time today.
Nick
No, thank you, I appreciate the opportunity.
Zoë
There was so much goodness in that conversation. I loved hearing about technology, and I love the future that Nick paints about what could happen if we implement this technology and the difference that it could make to our planet and our resources. From a leadership point of view, there's some great insights here. And I think the observation that trying to help people see how much they are part of a really complex ecosystem, and how something like the prices of a product on a shelf, be it ketchup or a price of a lettuce, work backwards from that and you have people who are working on the lands, people are working in natural resource management, doing the best with what they've got, and sometimes technology can help them do that better. And if we can assist them to do that, so much the better. So I think from a leadership point of view, our roles as leaders is to, first of all, help ourselves learn to see the greater systems in which we operate, so that we can see and navigate this complexity better, and then we can also design, this is sort of the very advanced leadership skill required, then we can start to design systems that can be better systems, healthier systems. I'm talking not just ecological systems, but food distribution systems, say for example, economic systems, say for example. We may need to redesign many of our systems, in order for us to be able to continue to operate with 8 billion plus people on the planet, given that we have limited resources. And as leaders, we need to be able to see the systems, design the systems, and manage the systems. So how are we doing that for ourselves? And how are we helping our teams, then the people that we work with be able to see and navigate complexity that I think this is one of the most essential leadership skills and capabilities that we need moving into the future. One of the things that Nick said also is clarity is going to be the number one thing that's going to help them scale, useful insight for all leaders. We can do many things, and many of those things are very exciting, like he says, pharmacology and the application of nanobubble technology there is one of the most exciting things that you could apply to, it's like, nope, stick to our lane, as I say, stick to our knitting, but we'll stay in our lane instead we'll use that metaphor. Very useful insight for all leaders, I think we can all fall prey to the shiny object syndrome. So what is the problem that we want to fix? How are you going to contribute to that and stay the course? Keep in our lane. Wow, I'd love to hear what your insights are. Your questions are coming up from this episode. Please leave us a comment on the blog or on the Facebook page or send me an email zoe@zoerouth.com. I love hearing from listeners and you'd be surprised how many people I bumped into at different events and say I listened to your podcast, I really liked that episode. That would be really helpful, really helpful for me to know that people are listening and getting value from it. So leave us a rating, continue the conversation, anything to get you engaged with these concepts and keeping you nudging forward to meeting the future head on with all the resources and abilities that you are capable of. So be brave and be courageous. That's what I want for you. In the meantime, if you're coming to Canberra in February, or perhaps you might consider coming to Canberra in February, February 24, to be exact, we have our seminal event called The Future of Leadership happening. And it's a one day where we're going to look at things like what's on the horizon, what are the trends that will affect our leadership? And what are the capabilities that we need in order to meet that head on and to navigate that complexity, that ambiguity, that uncertainty with aplomb? As I said before, my new favorite word. If you want to hear about how some of those horizons might look and some of the leadership skills and capabilities we might need to consider, pick up a copy of my novel, The Olympus Project. It is out in all forms now ebook, audio book, and paperback so you can get it on Amazon, a lot of the audiobook platforms will have it out available for you and the ebook is up on Amazon as well. In the meantime, oh, this is our, oh, it's not quite the last one. It's the second last episode of the year. So in the meantime, live well, lead well.
Outro
You've been listening to the Zoë Routh Leadership Podcast with leadership expert, Zoë Routh. For more about people stuff and to contact Zoe, go to zoërouth.com.