Social Entrepreneurship at Princeton: Lessons Learned from Building AquaCerta
Hello readers,
Welcome to another edition of PIE, where we interview the brightest entrepreneurs and VCs from Princeton and beyond. This issue features student founder Dimitris Ntaras, a Princeton undergraduate ’21 who is a current sophomore at Princeton planning to major in Anthropology, aspiring to work in public health in the effort to raise the living standards worldwide. As the founder of the company AquaCerta, he hopes to tackle the issue of the ongoing global water crisis. AquaCerta plans to leverage research to produce a novel filtration product that is inexpensive, simple, and highly efficient — and which could be used by individuals to obtain clean water in compromised communities.
What got you interested in social entrepreneurship, specifically pursuing the problem of the ongoing global water crisis?
To be honest, I was always more of a science person, and I never really considered myself big into any kind of entrepreneurship before. I used to believe the high school science rhetoric, for sure: it’s the way to solve the world’s biggest problems. Yet, not a year after graduation, in college, I found myself questioning that narrative while writing grants for bioscience research. In these, you normally justify the requested funding by finding the connections between the study’s proposed topic and something critical like cancer — but is the research really about it? In a majority of times, the answer is no, which made me quite angry… but also interested in finding ways to connect knowledge across disciplines on a more applied level, towards actually solving the critical issues out there. At the time, I didn’t know how.
Fast forward to the latter part of freshman year, I am speaking with Martin Johnson, social entrepreneurship faculty with the Keller Center at Princeton, and we are digging through past research for a class project. We stumbled upon a project of mine in which I studied the mechanism of absorption of toxic compounds from aquatic organisms — essentially what happens to dead fish in a polluted lake. But it was not just that, was it? I slowly started realizing that the mechanism was also an interesting possibility for some sort of filtering product. So, I delved more into this potential, residing within the Emory School of Public Health, and learnt more about the global water crisis while turning this biological mechanism into an engineered, powder-like filtering substance made of cattle bone. And so, AquaCerta’s core product was born over the summer, entangled with a deep understanding of the purpose it should serve within the wider problem of clean water. I have tried to maintain an informed perspective about that since then, taking both entrepreneurship and social sciences courses.
How have your experiences at Princeton and/or outside of Princeton helped you or prepare you in creating your own company?
Princeton has been a huge connector to resources and knowledge for AquaCerta. The Keller Center and Princeton’s eLab Summer Accelerator Program, in which we will be participating this summer, has offered much needed free mentorship: the consultations with patent attorneys, mediation with biolabs for working space, these are super important to us as a capital-stressed hardware startup. Other than that, I would say that there are numerous people outside the entrepreneurship department that have indirectly helped AquaCerta to be the type of agent of change it aspires to be — and me in my place within it. I am so grateful for these meetings with anthropology professors, talking about my process of navigating communities with them, the intense sessions of mapping out the stakeholders we need to be bringing to the table as a company in policy analysis classes, and the more relaxed Service Focus meetings talking about what the wider issues with serving and creating social structures are. Particularly in social entrepreneurship, I feel that having these resources at Princeton has allowed me to really see the bigger picture of what I am doing with this company, and to feel confident about it. Because even if this iteration of AquaCerta fails, the next one will have a much higher chance of success with me knowing the industry inside-and-out than if I tried again by re-applying a generic pitch + business plan skillset, which would be the case if Princeton was a business school or if I was stuck in the “startup” bubble.
What makes AquaCerta unique from other companies that have designs and products for water filtration?
This was a question that we pondered early on in the project. The water filtration industry is indeed quite saturated with tons of different solutions, from large-scale drilling initiatives around the world, to your average Brita filter in the shelves of Walmart. In the very beginning, and from a research perspective, our device showed potential simply as a small-scale natural alternative to these large engineering projects, since it is a handheld product built on the principles of biomimicry; we were simply re-engineering the very natural way bones in animals absorb toxins and packaging it.
It just happened that this is also super effective and long-lasting. We were very surprised to see that, for example, in absorption of cesium (among the heaviest metals), our product surpasses the market standard by over 25%. And then came the real cherry on top of everything else, which had us committed to making AquaCerta a reality. Bones, the base ingredient for our product, is considered toxic waste in the US and requires particular waste management, so we discovered we can actually get paid (an estimated 20–40 cents per device produced) to get rid of the waste and manufacture these filters. This is what is going to help us keep our products significantly cheaper than competition, and allow us to be able to serve detached communities which do not have access to clean water, including many locations in sub-Saharan Africa.
As the founder of AquaCerta, what qualities do you look for when finding team members for your startup?
I want potential team members, and have found these qualities in mine, to — especially in the very early stages of the company — have their eye on the prize and be passionate about the mission of the company. It’s important to me that they see the vision and not just the next seed round. That being said, they also need to care about making the company sustainable, which requires understanding when your dreaming is going too far — from my own experience, a bit hard to actually do. In terms of skills, I look for people who have the ability to make that critical decision on the spot, and are as capable of putting a hundred ideas in post-its as they are getting rid of ninety-nine of them in order to keep the company’s process and product simple and efficient. Finally, I have a soft spot for team members who aren’t afraid to voice their opinion and keep each other in check to turn the big leaps into small tangible steps.
What is the greatest piece of advice you could give fellow students interested in getting into entrepreneurship, working at a startup or starting their own companies given your current experiences?
At the risk of sounding cliché, I will say that aspiring student founders need to start looking more at the world around them than the latest issue of Fortune or Entrepreneur. The world needs more startups that tinker with real systemic problems in a down-to-the-root fashion, instead of applying ideas from the top down based on the latest “super profitable business model you need”. The world does not need another smart assistant/organizer app that was born fully developed from the moment you heard that consumers increasingly turn to software as a service. If you think there is something wrong with the way people organize their daily lives, or any situation really, look at the bigger picture of their lives, how they interact, etc., get different perspectives, and then identify the system’s problem and tinker with it. If it works, congratulations, you are an innovator; if not, go back and try again. Innovation is the final acknowledgment that what you did works, not a buzzword or a goal in itself. So, indeed, if you want to succeed, look around and go out there with an open mind and humility.
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That is it for this edition of PIE! If you have any further questions for me or Dimitris about entrepreneurship, feel free to reach out to me at ajnguyen@princeton.edu.
