Welcome to Founder Real Talk, a podcast for founders, by founders.
We explore the real journey of building and growing a company. Each episode, we go beyond the highlight reel to unpack the strategies, decisions, and hard lessons that shaped successful businesses, revealing the good, the bad, and the ugly behind the growth.
This week, Josh sits down with Benjamin Slotnick, founder and CEO of Lillianah Technologies — a climate tech company using biological solutions to restore waterways, reduce nutrient pollution, and pull carbon from the atmosphere, with a focus on wastewater treatment for municipalities and food processing plants. Benjamin’s path is anything but typical: a rock-collecting kid who became the first geologist in his family, earned a PhD from Rice, spent nearly a decade in oil and gas, and even got elected as a municipal water director in Texas. He breaks down why your beer, chocolate, and tomato sauce are quietly polluting the water supply, the operate-vs-license dilemma shaping the company’s future, and the hard-won lesson that you can’t do it all yourself.
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Chapters(00:00) - Intro
(02:05) - What Lillianah actually solves in wastewater treatment
(04:24) - Why food processing is a hidden source of pollution
(06:32) - From a childhood rock collection to climate tech
(08:27) - A big win: first patent awarded, first licensing deal signed
(09:02) - The operate-vs-license dilemma (and the McDonald’s analogy)
(15:35) - Wisdom is failure redeemed: don’t try to do everything yourself
(18:10) - The biggest challenge: staying focused
(19:47) - Finding the beachhead: targeting acidity and pH, not a single food group
(23:16) - Evolving as a leader and his growing edge
(25:35) - Investing in himself: building an advisory board instead of a big team
(30:06) - Benjamin turns the mic on Josh: what makes a guest, and the loneliness of founding
Links & ResourcesReferenced in the episode:
- Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell (the money/energy delegation matrix)
Keywordsfounders, entrepreneurship, climate tech, wastewater treatment, water technology, Lillianah Technologies, Benjamin Slotnick, nutrient pollution, carbon removal, food processing, pH buffering, geology, oil and gas, patents, licensing model, operate vs license, advisory board, delegation, Buy Back Your Time, market beachhead, physical-world startups, municipal water
