Episode 124: Nicolas Pinkowski, Nitricity

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

Nicholas is a PhD student at Stanford in mechanical engineering, where he's focused on studying energy systems. He's also the co-founder of Nitricity, which produces ready-to-use nitrogen that uses only air, water and renewable electricity. Nicolas and his team recently won the MIT Clean Energy prize, at which I was a judge. One of the things the competition grants to the winner, in addition to money (which I'm sure he and the team care a lot more about), is to join me on an episode of the MCJ podcast.

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.

Enjoy the show!

You can find me on Twitter @jjacobs22 (me), @mcjpod (podcast) or @mcjcollective (company). You can reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.


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:


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Episode 125: Michael Skelly, Horizon Wind Energy

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Episode 123: Jason Bordoff, Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University