Ep 124: Nicolas Pinkowski, Co-Founder of Nitricity

Today's guest is Nicolas Pinkowski, Co-Founder of Nitricity.

We cover a lot in this episode, including how Nitricity came to be, the impetus for its founding, progress made to date, and some of the twists and turns along the way. We also discuss the company’s longterm vision and what's coming next. We also touch upon the experience of starting a company within an academic environment and the pros and cons of doing so. Finally, we delve into what society can do to foster more of this type of innovation, that holds promise of delivering both impact and profit.

In today’s episode, we cover:

• What is Nitricity?
• The background of the team and how they came to work together.
• How traditional fertilizers contributes to GHG emissions.
• How Nitricity arrived at the problem and discovered a solution.
• Experience with taking an entrepreneurial class and how it inspired Nitricity.
• The skills needed in developing their prototype.
• Pros and cons of prototyping on the farm versus in the lab.
• Nitricity’s pitch and value proposition for the farmer.
• Nitricity’s business model, expenditures and dependencies.
• The company’s financing efforts.
• Nitricity’s product vision moving forward.

Links to topics discussed in this episode:

• Nitricity: https://www.nitricity.co/
• Stanford Energy Ventures: https://energy.stanford.edu/energy-transformation-collaborative
• CalTech’s FLOW Competition: https://rocketfund.caltech.edu/
• Check out another interview with Nico on the MIT Energy Initiative podcast: http://energy.mit.edu/podcast/2020-mit-clean-energy-prize-winners/

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*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant