Heard Around The Grove
Blake Newcomer • March 30, 2026
Two things close to my heart: Water and community.
What is WAAS? Take a guess.
You got it: Water as a service. Juan Rivero is leading a charge in the southwest USA to solve water stress through decentralized water infrastructure.
Now for something more familiar. What is Community?
Trick question - while we can intuitively sense and seek community, defining it isn't as easy. Paige Perillat-Piratoine walks us through her long journey wrestling with the curation of it and what we can do to build community tangibly.
Let's dive in.
In this week's issue
- WAAS
- Community Building that isn't cliché
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WAAS: Water as a Service
The concept is straightforward once you have the analogy. Just as the solar industry structured Power Purchase Agreements to let customers buy electricity from panels they don't own, Water as a Service uses a Water Purchase Agreement to let industrial or commercial clients buy treated, recycled water from decentralized equipment installed on-site. Claps for good analogies.
Because the client doesn't own the infrastructure & just pays for the service, they experience a lower water bill, reduced wastewater disposal costs, and resilience against future water stress.
Juan came to this model through fifteen years of building wastewater treatment companies in Mexico. In his previous career, he watched large multinational companies (like Unilever and Repsol) spend millions on water infrastructure while missing basic fundamentals that caused costly problems. He moved to Houston in 2019 to build Hydros from that experience.
The value prop is specifically relevant for companies that (1) pay high rates for both water intake and wastewater disposal, but (2) whose wastewater is not prohibitively complex to treat.
Oil and gas, mining, aerospace manufacturing, and food and beverage are all strong candidates.
The U.S. American Society of Civil Engineers estimates there will be $99 billion needed annually for wastewater and stormwater, only 30% is currently being met, and if unaddressed, the funding shortfall could balloon to more than $690 billion by 2044. The banking sector still lacks the technical expertise to underwrite these projects confidently.
We're cheering you on, Juan. Keep building!
Community Building that isn't cliché
Paige Perillat-Piratoine has spent her career building community. Her latest project is at the Nature Tech Collective, a cross-sector community spanning the organizations measuring, restoring, and financing nature.
The difficultly in defining "community" comes from its overuse. Many organizations calling their audience a community are just describing a mailing list.
A real community, in Paige's framing, is a group where members lean on and contact each other. The distinction has real structural implications for how you build one.
For example, the Nature Tech Collective started as the MRV Collective & focused narrowly on measuring, reporting, and verification technologies. Once they found that siloing to the supply side wasn't enough, they expanded to connect supply and demand: technology providers, project developers, corporates, investors, academics, and consultants.
Now, NTC serves radically different stakeholder types within their community. A solution Paige employs is been highly intentional event design to keep the value of the interactions hyper relevant to the members.
Three more pointers of wisdom for us:
- Have a shared space where members can reliably contact each other (not just receive broadcasts)
- Have a common set of values that makes outreach feel natural rather than transactional
- Imbed reciprocity. NTC asks members for either a fee or an in-kind contribution so that everyone has something at stake.
Bonus: community death is not failure but it's a natural part of the lifecycle.
Good community builders plan for what artifact or resource will outlast the community itself.
What great stuff. Thank you Paige!
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With love, Blake
See you next week!
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