Purpose-Led Growth: How this Startup Built Revenue & Social Impact
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Welcome to Startup Success, the podcast for startup founders and investors. Here, you'll find stories of success from others in the trenches as they work to scale some of the fastest growing startups in the world. Stories that will help you in your own journey. Startup Success starts now. Welcome to Startup Success. Today, we have a real treat in store for you, a startup that's definitely caught my eye. The company is Hope Hydration, and they deliver free water through their digitally connected water refill hydro stations across the country, and they've recently raised a $20 million Series A, which is no easy feat, especially in this market. I'd like to welcome Jorge Richardson and Cristina Henico.
Jorge is the founder and CEO of Hope Hydration, and Cristina is the co-founder and head of Global Partnerships. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Thank you, Kate. Yeah, thanks for having us. I'm excited to talk to you both. So it's an area that I'm obviously very interested in. So I want to start with just, you know, kind of a brief overview of both your backgrounds and how you found each other. Everyone loves to hear how co-founders found each other. So Jorge, tell us about this and what your background and what inspired this idea. I love this. Yes. So I'm Jorge Richardson. I am Hope's founder CEO. I thought I wanted to be an investment banker. I lasted 91 days in New York and it was the world for me.
And like through life happenstance, there's the whole story about meditating with monks in Nepal. Oh, wow. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Discovered the world of water. And I was in Europe for about two years and we were building on a project. And towards the end of it, I found myself in New York. And I was like right off the subway on 47th and 7th. So like peak Times Square. And I had an app in front of me that showed me every free drinking water fountain that New York had. And if you traveled, it showed you where you could like refill basically anywhere. And I remember opening up the app and it was about a 35 minute walk to the nearest water fountain. And I was thinking to myself, well, it's, you know, at the time it was 2018, 2019.
So we're like, we're in a digital first user experience driven world. There's no way that 99.99999% of the world is going to walk more than five minutes to refill when there's a Duane Reade here and a CVS over here. And you could just go in and you can buy a single use model. And it seems like a very unsexy space. But you think about the scale and the magnitude, the order of questions that came... were floating in my head and eventually that Christine and I debated about and our third co-founder Dave came in and kind of like wrapped it up was question number one, what would it take to fund, install free drinking water access on every street corner of Manhattan, starting on 47th and 7th and working our way across the entire state?
Okay, well, our thesis is you need to build a beautiful product that people trust, needs to be data driven because there is no real data in the space, and we need a brand new funding model, which Cortina can talk more about. The second question was then, does that model scale to cities around the US, cities around the world? What does that look like? And then what really got me excited was, okay, let's just wave our magic wand and everything has gone perfectly. Over the next 10 years, we deploy this vision in every major city across the world, right? So you go to Tokyo, you got free water on every street corner of Tokyo. You go to New York and we've done the same there. Can that be the capital vehicle or the vehicle in general to be able to help
kind of make the link and solve the clean drinking water crisis that we have in the world. So it's no longer a primarily nonprofit funded solution, but there's an actual for-profit vehicle that is like 360. We're using the revenues, the infrastructure and the awareness that we're getting in New York to be able to like actually help the people who need it the most. And that was like way too big of a question to just leave a question.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–4:42
2
How did Jorge and Cristina come up with the idea for HOPE Hydration?
4:42–14:11
3
What innovative strategies are used to drive consumer adoption of HOPE Hydration?
14:11–25:20
4
What does it mean to operate as a certified B Corp?
25:20–27:11
5
How does HOPE Hydration utilize technology to improve water access?
27:11–31:32
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