The Start of Revolutionary Technology with Bruce Crawford, CEO of Nona Desalination

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Bruce, CEO of Nona Desalination, and they discuss how Bruce is finding product-market fit for a revolutionary new technology, the challenges of turning saltwater into drinking water at scale, and leadership lessons from MIT's MBA program. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Bruce at 00:00:31) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) This is the Modern CTO podcast. I'm really excited to talk about the water desalination because I've been researching it a few years ago. So when I saw you come up as a potential guest, I was super pumped. But I wanted to first speak to some leadership topics because I saw that you've had a fantastic upbringing from where you started to where you've gotten today. So I was hoping you could tell me a little bit about where you started and then where you're at today.

(Bruce at 00:01:07) Yeah. So I'll just preface any leadership discussion by saying I'm in the camp who is seeking advice and learning and growing, but I've had great examples. So I started at Ryerson Steel, which is a Chicago steel company, and started there right out of school. I was an intern actually, and then was able to grow into entry-level analyst and senior analyst and was able to work on a lot of cool stuff. I had a few really excellent leaders there who were able to mentor me and who really knew their stuff. I was one of few entry-level people. I was their first-ever intern, and everybody else at this company in finance—I was in the finance department—they were at the part of their careers where they had started at a big accounting firm and then done the grind for ten years and then come to this steel company to have good work-life balance. And then there was me who was starting my career there. So I just had awesome mentorship. Kyle Shinnick was my first boss. He's a CFA, just really knew his stuff and had a really good hands-off leadership style, which was greatly appreciated for me. Just kind of let me do stuff on my own and try it. And then he was more than qualified to come in and fix whatever I messed up.

(Bruce at 00:02:13) From there, I moved over to Rivian. I always loved being in hardware. I loved cars growing up. I liked being at the steel company a lot too because our customers were these really cool companies building trucks and tractors and stuff. But I wanted to get back to the West Coast and I wanted to work with cars again. So I went to Rivian, and there it was such an interesting place because everybody was awesome. Everybody was great. It was almost a utopian experience.

(Bruce at 00:02:51) In most organizations, I think you've got kind of a range of people with commitment level and expertise. Rivian was just—when I was getting there, they had only raised $2 billion, which is a lot. And by the time I left, they'd raised like $11 billion and were just about to go public. It was just getting popular, and everybody who was in green tech or automotive was flocking to the place. So people were taking demotions, pay cuts, coming from McKinsey and Bain. And the CFO of Waymo, while I was there, took a position demotion to be the VP of business finance at Rivian. So it just gives you an idea of—people were making sacrifices to come into this company and they were all awesome. So everybody was an example there. Everybody was—it really kind of made me need to step up my game and be sharp because everybody was so good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:44) Did you ever get to drive one of the cars?

(Bruce at 00:03:46) You know, that's one of my biggest regrets. I was going to at one point. We had a group that was going to take out a Rivian and they had a fleet of prototypes that engineers could take out to test. So we had this car reserved. And then last minute, the CEO, RJ Scaringe, brought some investors in unexpectedly and had to take the car.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:09) You've got to get that $11 billion, man.

(Bruce at 00:04:11) Got to get the $11 billion. Yeah. So I missed out. I feel silly having never driven one, but I left because I got into school at MIT. I had to come.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:19) Yeah. And so what did you study at MIT?

(Bruce at 00:04:21) So I'm doing an MBA, master's in business, and I'm half done. I'm still doing it. So that's why we're here in Cambridge. So this is all pretty fresh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:30) What type of content are they teaching in their leadership classes?

(Bruce at 00:04:34) Oh, I've got to say, I'm going to sound like marketing materials from MIT, but the thing they boast is max flexibility. So the first semester, it's core. They register you in your classes. It's basic accounting, econ, getting the basic skills covered, and then you can do whatever you want. So for me, I knew coming in that I wanted to be an entrepreneur and I wanted to be doing hard tech.

(Bruce at 00:05:01) Even before I started working on this current business, I knew I wanted those things. And so my curriculum has been tailored towards that. So I'm taking entrepreneurship courses that go through, you know, just starting a business 101, and the whole course is working on a business. And then I've taken some specific product development classes too, which they do a great job of mixing the MIT pot together. So you've got, you know, a third of the class is MBAs, a third of the class is engineers from MIT undergrad and master's programs, and then a third are industrial designers from Rhode Island School of Design that come up from Providence, Rhode Island to take this class. So you've got these cross-functional teams, you're building a product. So very focused on developing a product and building a successful business. That's what my education is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:51) Where did your interest in entrepreneurship come from?

(Bruce at 00:05:54) It's kind of—oh, that's a deep-seated thing for me. I think I grew up always feeling that my dad wanted to be an entrepreneur. My hero of capitalism in my conservative household was the successful entrepreneur. And so that was part of it. I also—my background was a little on the rougher side. I was in western Washington. I shouldn't say rough, but I'm a first-generation college graduate. My parents have blue-collar jobs. So to pay for things in high school and then into college, I would flip cars and jet skis and motorcycles. So I think it started when I was 12.

(Bruce at 00:06:37) My dad would bring home some free thing from the Craigslist free section—a jet ski, a mini bike, a go-kart. And then I would get it working and rebuild the engine and then sell it and kind of move up the chain. I was able to have a car that way and was able to pay for a good chunk of my degree that way with the cars that I amassed by the time I had to go to college. So that was kind of an entrepreneurial journey, my first one, and I always received a lot of praise for that from my parents, you know, for the entrepreneurial aspects of that. And then I entered the workforce.

(Bruce at 00:07:19) I worked in a bank to help pay for school too and cleaned carpets and worked at Costco. I did all these crappy jobs, even got into finance, and I was like, this is not that great. So then it just reaffirmed I should be an entrepreneur because that's way more fun than sitting at this desk.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:35) Oh, absolutely. My dad was an engineer, software engineer, and then my mom was a stay-at-home mom. She was a cheerleader-type person in high school. And then they got divorced when I was about 12, and my mom remarried an entrepreneur. So I had this sort of, you know, excited part from the cheerleader from my mom, engineering from my dad, and entrepreneur from my stepdad. It's always interesting to see the mix. It sounds like in your house, though, your parents both had normal blue-collar jobs and it was glorified, the entrepreneur role. Or were they an entrepreneur at some point?

(Bruce at 00:08:08) Yeah. So it was glorified. My dad did have bouts of entrepreneurship. I shouldn't say bouts, but it was kind of always in his life too. So my dad was adopted. He was taken in by a guy through his formative years, 16 to 20, who owned a piano business in western Washington. It's called Piedmont Piano. It's the piano store. If you're north of Olympia, basically, and you want a piano, this is your guy. So my dad grew up—him and this guy's other sons—running the business.

(Bruce at 00:08:44) So they're in a truck moving pianos or selling pianos or tuning pianos. So that's my dad's father figure, was an entrepreneur. And there's always kind of a feeling that my dad and the other sons would inherit the business, and that kind of has happened now. My dad is a database administrator, but he's always kind of done piano stuff on the side.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:07) So you've always been near it. It's always been around your family.

(Bruce at 00:09:11) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:11) Nice. And then right now, I want to talk about what you're doing with water desalination. Is it Nona? Is that how you pronounce it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:20) What is that?

(Bruce at 00:09:22) So it's like "no sodium."

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:25) Oh, no Na. You guys are nerds. I love it.

(Bruce at 00:09:29) And there's a little positive to indicate that it's a positive ion because those little—

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:34) Yeah. That's great, man.

(Bruce at 00:09:36) We're okay if people don't realize that until the fourth, fifth time they encounter the brand. We like that it's kind of subtle, but yeah, cat's out of the bag now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:43) Yeah. So what's the main goal of this project?

(Bruce at 00:09:46) So that's a big question. We have goals at so many different levels. In the short term, we think that this project can solve water scarcity for individuals and small communities. And that can mean a bunch of different things. It was actually developed for the military to solve water scarcity for deployed soldiers who have to be off-grid, groups of ten. That's who funded the development of this technology initially. We think that people who live in hurricane zones, maybe in Florida, maybe in Texas, who are thrust into water scarcity when there's a boil notice or the water stops flowing and there's floodwaters, we think we can solve those people's problems. And sailors also, who have lots of saltwater and lots of sun, but not a lot of freshwater. So in the short term, we want to make a product that is really good for those groups. Because right now, they're using portable reverse osmosis, which we can go into it, but it has a lot of flaws. And that's what we think we can do in the relative short term.

(Bruce at 00:10:47) Beyond that, you know, we think we have some select advantages over reverse osmosis that can treat a greater number of problems at a larger scale. So we're looking at things like building water recycling in a commercial building. We're looking at water softening. And we're looking at developing-world villages and communities, you know, who need a slightly bigger solution than just the portable one we're doing right now. And that's where we're setting our sights right now. We'll see where the development goes. You know, at this point, we don't think that we will be able to displace reverse osmosis for large-scale desalination and give water to the whole Middle East, but we'll see. We just need to keep developing towards the short-term goals, and we'll see where it goes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:31) Yeah. When I was doing the research for this episode, I didn't know that you had done the military—the military was using this. That's a great use case. And when they were telling me portable, my first thought was I just did this special episode with a guy named Alexander, and the episode was titled Wartime Leadership, because he was running an engineering company. They find engineers, then you hire the engineers through them. They're called lemon.io. But he has that company, and it was based in Ukraine. And then the war happened, and then he came to New York, but a large part of their company is still in Ukraine, and they were working out of a bomb shelter. And I was like, this is fascinating. Every day these people go to work at a bomb shelter, and they're software engineers. And it was a really interesting episode, but the reason why I thought about that is because a lot of the lakes in Ukraine are saltwater. And so if you had this portable device, you know, if they're fleeing their country or whatnot, that could be super useful to them to survive.

(Bruce at 00:12:27) Absolutely. That's a use case we would love to serve as well. And we have gotten so many calls from people in Ukraine or organizations giving aid to Ukraine, wanting prototypes, wanting whatever we have now. And it just hurts, but we don't have—you know, it hurts that we don't have prototypes that we can be sending right now. We don't have any prototypes at that level beyond just our tests. But yeah, that's—we think that's a great application. And there's so many places like that where a lot of the water's salty. You know, a lot of the groundwater in the American Southwest is like that, in Mexico, Brazil—salty groundwater, a lot of salty surface water.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:04) Yeah. And then you mentioned that the sailors have this reverse osmosis system. What's your system? Why is it different? How is it better?

(Bruce at 00:13:13) Yeah. So reverse osmosis, the way I explain it is that it's basically filtration. So with regular osmosis, you've got water flowing through a semipermeable membrane. We're all in science class, but it flows from the fresh side to the salty side. So you'll make the freshwater salty if you just let it happen. So you reverse the process by shoving a ton of pressure on the salty side and you push out clean water through this porous membrane. It's like a filter. To do that, you need high pressure, you need like 800 PSI. And so you need some high-pressure pumps and plumbing, and that all takes a lot of power. So to run that, you need a generator, you need a lot of batteries, or just a ton of solar.

(Bruce at 00:13:57) If you've heard that desalination is expensive and energy-intensive, that's kind of why. You have to push water through this membrane at really high pressure. And also, they go bad. They clog, you know, just like any filter will, they have to be replaced. So what we're doing fits in the category of an electro-membrane process. So in desalination, you've kind of got three broad categories. There's reverse osmosis. There's distillation, which is boiling, distilling, and then there's electro-membrane. Reverse osmosis and distillation, that's 95% of desalination. There are some niche electro-membrane processes that work by basically passing water through a channel and sucking out salt and bacteria with electricity.

(Bruce at 00:14:42) So it's great. You don't have a filter problem. You can be more efficient in some settings. And there's a bunch of these different technologies. Electrodialysis is a popular one. CDI is another one you'll hear of. They all have kind of their trade-offs in their niche that they're really good for. One thing that's unaddressed is a technology that's electro-membrane, you know, uses electricity to suck salt and bacteria out of the water, that can remove the salts and the bacteria, the total dissolved solids and the total suspended solids, in other words. So our technology can do that, and that's what's novel about it. So you've kind of got an electro-membrane process, no filters that can compete with reverse osmosis in a different set of ways than any of the other existing processes.

(Bruce at 00:15:30) So it can have some real advantages, depending on the setting. For urban-scale, municipal-scale desalination, the most efficient is still reverse osmosis. And we've not, us or any of the other electro-membrane processes, we haven't cracked efficiency, cracked the reverse osmosis efficiency yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:50) Is it just you haven't cracked it at that scale, or—

(Bruce at 00:15:53) At that scale, exactly. So at that scale, the metric is watt-hours per liter. Reverse osmosis is doing like four watt-hours per liter at that mega scale. At the small scale, you know, they're struggling to get close to ten, and we're undercutting that at the really small scale.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:13) Where are you at on the small scale?

(Bruce at 00:16:15) Yeah. We're around ten. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:17) You guys are similar?

(Bruce at 00:16:18) We're really similar.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:19) What's the benefit then? Why would I choose this system over the other system?

(Bruce at 00:16:24) Yeah. So if we can get to parity with the efficiency, then, you know, you have the opportunity to ditch all the other woes of reverse osmosis. You're not changing membranes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:35) Uh-huh.

(Bruce at 00:16:35) Every time, if you've got the most portable reverse osmosis device on the market, it's like 50 to 75 pounds, and it's quite large. It's like bigger than a carry-on suitcase. And every time you replace the one membrane, it's $300. And it's all high pressure plumbing, so it's quite difficult to do that.

(Bruce at 00:16:56) You've got to have some savvy to be able to service that machine. So if you think about our device, it's going to be 20 pounds. So it's less than half the size, and that matters if you're carrying it long distances. No filters to change. And then the ease of use is so huge.

(Bruce at 00:17:15) So first of all, there's the ease of use of changing the filters, massively better because there's no filter to change. But then just operating it, you've got this device with reverse osmosis, you have to run this thing at 800 PSI. You've got a generator, you're starting, you're adjusting pressure, you're watching a gauge, you have to keep it in this range, and it's extremely noisy. You're talking like 76 plus decibels.

(Bruce at 00:17:40) It's freeway level noise. So it's kind of just like this bulky, difficult to use device, and they can't get smaller, and they can't get quieter, and they can't get easier to use. So we're coming in at, you know, half the size, hopefully half the cost, so much easier to use, and get rid of the membrane replacement problem. We think it'll be a lot more accessible for users who want to have one in their home or take one in their RV or on their boat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:08) It sounds like the bullet points that'll be on the front of the box, right? It's easier to service. It's half the weight, you can carry and transport it. Low maintenance, no filters. What type of maintenance would it have? Like, what type of maintenance does it have?

(Bruce at 00:18:21) So what you have with this electromembrane process is that, you know, you're sucking all the salt and bacteria to one side of the channel, and then you're pulling all the clean water out of the other side of the channel. You get some buildup on one side of the channel of all the stuff, all the particulates and stuff. So what we can do is it can actually self-clean. So it's an electrode, a positive side and a negative side. So if we reverse the polarity and reverse the flow, it can clean itself out.

(Bruce at 00:18:50) We've been using the same membranes for like five years just in our lab tests and no issues, no signs of fading. So we don't anticipate any maintenance is the short answer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:01) That's awesome, man. And so where are you at as far as making this a business? Do you have orders? Are you still coming up with the first high production version?

(Bruce at 00:19:11) Yeah. So on the technical side, we're working on getting the scale up. We're doing one liter per hour right now, and the military spec is 10 liters. They want 10 liters per hour. We think we have customers at five liters per hour. So that's probably where we'll enter. You know, it's like one and a third gallons per hour. That's enough for most survival circumstances for like a family. So that's on the technical side. For the business, we are, yeah, we're looking for customers right now.

(Bruce at 00:19:43) So we've got a few hundred people who are subscribing to our newsletter and saying we want to preorder when we can preorder. We've not started taking money yet because we just want to be really sure we have our product specs defined and our pricing defined before we say, here's the price, put it down, give us a deposit. But we're hopefully, by the end of the year, we are taking money, and we're optimistic those preorders will go well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:09) Well, put me on that list. Unless if it's like an incredible industrial, like $100,000, that's a little bit much for me to play around with as a toy. But if it's something that, you know, the camping enthusiast community, wilderness type people, or something that like a family would buy, if it was in that price point, that's an easy yes. Is it just on the homepage? How do people sign up if they want to know?

(Bruce at 00:20:34) So yeah, if you go to the homepage at the bottom, in the footer, there's like, you know, putting your email, subscribe to the newsletter, and it'll ask you when you do that, do you want to preorder when that's available? There's also a contact form on the contact page where you can reach out if you're an investor or media person or somebody who wants more info.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:51) What's the website?

(Bruce at 00:20:52) Oh, it's nonatechnologies.com, Nona Technologies. But yeah, it's not, we're not talking industrial machine pricing. We want to be priced at parity with other emergency preparedness devices, like a portable generator.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:10) Yeah.

(Bruce at 00:21:11) $1,000 to $2,000, that's where we're going to put the first unit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:15) Dude, I'd totally buy one of those for that price range. Like I said, I live out in the middle of nowhere, and I've got a freshwater stream that runs through my property year-round. And I always ask my wife, I'm like, should we like dig a well, like have a well dug or something? Because we have city water even though we're out in the middle of nowhere. I was like, but if the city water goes off for whatever reason, we have this freshwater stream, but like, how are we going to filter the water?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:38) So we've actually, we have all sorts of different short-term uses, right? There's like tablets you can put in. There's these survival systems that you can hang on a tree and like run water. But they're all, they all have this like finite lifespan, and they all have their ups and downs. But it would be totally cool to have that, like, as part of your preparedness package.

(Bruce at 00:22:00) Yeah. Hey, we'll send you one. You could be a beta tester.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:03) There you go.

(Bruce at 00:22:04) For your use case, I mean, I think that you talked about some of those other solutions. If you've got plentiful freshwater on the surface, you know, there's much cheaper ways to do it, like you mentioned. Now they're all going to, yeah, they're all going to be more finite than our system would be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:18) Oh yeah. Will it filter freshwater? Like, will it still purify it, or does it only deal with salt water? Because you said it removes bacteria.

(Bruce at 00:22:25) Yeah, it'll treat freshwater too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:28) Oh, cool.

(Bruce at 00:22:28) This is why the military is interested. It's like a catch-all device. You don't really know what's in the water. Could be salty, could have bacteria, but this is just like the one-stop shop to take out everything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:40) Yeah.

(Bruce at 00:22:41) So for your use, if you have one of our devices, you're uber-prepared. We think it makes more sense value-wise if you're like, for someone who is on the Gulf of Mexico and like the water is definitely going to be salty. But hey, we'd love to give you a device too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:55) No, that'd be super cool. I like how you guys made it like the OD green, like the military style color too. It looks pretty sweet. It's, by the way, this is me seeing it for the first time.

(Bruce at 00:23:05) Yeah, that's what we're going for. We are working with industrial designers. We've got some industrial designers on our team. We've got some mentors who we haven't officially signed yet, so I won't disclose, but from some really top-notch consumer electronic companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:22) Jony Ive just left Apple, so maybe? Am I letting the cat out of the bag?

(Bruce at 00:23:27) It's not Jony Ive, but it's kind of in that genre, we think. So yeah, we're trying to really make this a consumer product because, you know, there are desalination devices that are out there right now. You can get them, but they've got technical issues that keep consumers like you and me from buying them. First of all, you're going to pay at least $5,000. You've got the filtration problem. They're super noisy. They're huge. They're intimidating to use. And they need a generator, probably. So we think if we can solve those technical issues and make it cheaper, remove the filtration, make it as easy to use as just a microwave, then we can bring it into people's homes.

(Bruce at 00:24:06) Whereas now, nobody has desalination in their homes. That's kind of our hope. We want to set a really high bar for ourselves in terms of design. That rendering, the renderings you're seeing on the website right now are just about to be displaced by some more cool stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:19) Oh, really?

(Bruce at 00:24:20) Keep an eye on the website. The design is ongoing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:24) I had a section of the conversation I didn't go there because when I was doing my research, it was on large-scale stuff. Like I was watching how people were choosing to build different types of plants on like a global map based off of like future needs and like water crises and like the, you know, twenties and late thirties and stuff like that of like, you know, 2030 and such. And then I was learning about how, I didn't even think about this, when you're in a desert country, all your water is imported or at least most of it. And so looking at like the cost of the processing of the water and the transporting of the water and all of this stuff, it was a fascinating rabbit hole to go down to learn about this entire industry. So understanding where your product sits and how it's going to help, I think it's brilliant. It's a super excellent market, and I'm going to be on your newsletter, man.

(Bruce at 00:25:14) Cool. Thanks. To be clear, it's kind of part of our ethos to not overpromise. So there's maybe one strain of entrepreneur who would say, okay, we've got this desalination thing, watch out world, we're going to like change it all. We're going to be in all those places. And we tend to take a little more let our game do the talking approach. So those bigger plants, we don't see them in the future right now, but our plan is to get into production with this first market that we know we can do well in and then self-fund development and see where it goes from there. Because obviously, like, the big problems are the ones you're talking about. Those are the ones we really want to address if we can. But I'm not going out and saying, you know, we're going to solve that problem in 10 years, give me $10 million. We don't want to set ourselves up for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:10) No, I like that. Elon Musk, I'll give you an example of one of his. He's got so many businesses and has made so many claims, specifically the brain-computer interface things that he's working on, Neuralink. So he says, like, this is where we want to go, but here's the current commercial thing that allows us to make money, grow the company, and continue to explore new ideas. But you entering this very clear market so that you have a sustainable business, then you've got a million, you got infinite at-bats to solve other problems, and that's the sweet spot.

(Bruce at 00:26:41) Yeah. Yeah. That's, you understand. You stated it much better than I did. That's exactly what we're going to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:46) Tell MIT I'll come lecture, but there's a fee.

(Bruce at 00:26:50) You should charge a fee. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:51) But yeah, it's always fun to get to hang out and talk with people like you, Bruce. As you progress and hit milestones within the company, like you have your device out, things like that, let us know. We'll have you back on the show because I think what you're doing is awesome. It's super interesting to me personally, and I'm more than happy to help you any way we can.

(Bruce at 00:27:11) Absolutely. Thank you so much for having us on this time. We'd love to come on again as we hit some of those milestones. And yeah, just thanks for the opportunity. Great talking to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:20) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.