Aaron Mandell has co-founded numerous companies at the nexus of energy and water, including: Altarock, WaterFX, Oasys Water, Coskata and GreatPoint Energy and Greatpoint Ventures. He is on the board of Quaise (millimeter wave drilling for geothermal) and Quidnet (energy storage). 

Aaron has taken numerous companies out of university research labs and formed them into successful operating companies. He's successfully applied for and been awarded large DOE / ARPA-E grants, has raised money from large venture firms like Khosla Ventures and even joined a Y-Combinator batch. 

In this episode we talk:

0:00 Bio / Intro 

01:50 Quaise technology overview and extracting it from MIT 

08:00 Traits of successful inventors 

10:30 Finding commercialization pathways and de-risking 

14:00 Value of Non-dilutive funding 

17:00 Difference between R&D and R&D towards commercialization 

20:00 Mistakes made and importance of timing 

22:00 Running out of water 

29:00 Advice to young entrepreneurs  

31:00 Advice to go after funding from federal agencies / VCs 

34:00 Sell and then build 

35:30 -Product-Market Fit in Hard Sciences / Why Aaron went to Y-Combinator /How to MVP 

42:00 Working with the professor/inventor of the technology 

43:00 Working with TTOs and Universities

47:30 Patents 

More about Aaron: 

Through his leadership, this portfolio is advancing new products in fields such as solar-powered water treatment, desalination, enhanced geothermal energy, coal gasification and alternative chemicals. Aaron was recently the CEO of Altarock, a leader in the development of next generation geothermal energy and is the cofounder and Chairman of WaterFX, a leading provider of solar desalination technology.

Prior to Altarock, Aaron served as CEO of Oasys Water where he led the company from laboratory prototype to implementation of the company’s produced water treatment system and as the founding CTO of GreatPoint Energy where he led the development of the company’s coal gasification process. Aaron has deep roots in the energy and water industries with a technical background in environmental engineering (B.S./M.S.) from the University of Vermont, where he focused on numerical modeling and groundwater hydrology.

Find Aaron on Twitter at @AaronMandell

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