Alisha McFetridge, founder of Rainstick, on short-term thinking, the courage to build differently, and why the most important conversations are the ones we're not quite having yet.

When Alisha drew the Truth card, it felt apt. As the founder of Rainstick, a water innovation company she has built from an idea many said was impossible through to commercial reality, she has spent years navigating the gap between what the industry knows it should do and what it actually does. This conversation, with Annyse, got into that gap directly.

"We need to be a bit more drastic than we have been. There are incredible opportunities right now - so let's do something, collectively, and let's be truthful about where we actually are."

The holiday credit card problem

Alisha opened with an analogy that lands hard. You know the feeling - you're on holiday, you order the extra drink, book the extra excursion, and when you get home you simply don't open your banking app for a few days. The short-term joy is real. The bill is also real. You just choose not to look at it yet.

That, she argues, is how much of the construction and development industry approaches water. Build to the lowest cost. Win the job. Keep shareholders happy this quarter. Leave the long-term problem for the next person to figure out. The knowledge that there is a better way is rarely absent -the willingness to act on it, in the face of near-term financial pressure, frequently is.

Annyse connected this to the idea of cathedral thinking - the kind of hundred-year vision that shaped the infrastructure we still rely on today. The people who built our water systems a century ago were thinking in generations. Right now, the industry needs to find that mode of thinking again, even as quarterly reporting cycles pull in the opposite direction.

Building Rainstick — and showing what's possible

Alisha's own journey with Rainstick illustrates both the challenge and the opportunity in sharp relief. From the beginning, she knew that doing things differently would mean accepting a longer timeline. R&D is slow and costly. Early on, there were no shortage of voices telling her what she wanted to build simply wasn't possible.

She built it anyway. Getting from concept to prototype to commercialisation required enormous amounts of learning, co-creation, and persistence. And once the product was in the market, an entirely new set of challenges emerged - principally, how to shift the behaviour of an industry that still thinks water innovation means fitting a low-flow faucet.

"We'd be at conferences and ask people about their water innovation and the answer would be low-flow faucets or maybe leak detection. We're there to show what else is possible."

The three-legged stool — and the policy puzzle

Rainstick's approach to market education is built around what Alisha describes as a three-legged stool: the homeowner, the developer, and the plumber. All three legs need to be in place for the system to hold. That means investing in education and genuine excitement across each group - not just selling a product, but shifting a mindset.

• Homeowners: Understanding the value and demanding better from the buildings they live in
• Developers: Choosing to build for long-term water performance, not just minimum compliance
• Plumbers & trades: Equipped and confident to install and recommend point-of-use water systems

Some municipalities are starting to move. San Francisco's purple pipe code, for instance, mandates greywater systems in buildings over 100,000 square feet and requires smaller commercial and residential buildings to be greywater ready. The city is now working with Rainstick to bring water-circulating showers into that framework. It is the kind of policy progress that makes a genuine difference - but it moves slowly, and slowly and start-ups are not a natural fit.

The political environment adds another layer of complexity. Shifts in the US regulatory and policy landscape over the past couple of years have forced companies like Rainstick to ask harder questions about long-term market certainty. Some players in the sector have already chosen to park their technology and wait for policy to catch up. It is a rational response and a troubling one.

Looking to where the need is sharpest

Rainstick started with a deliberate focus on Canada and the US, wanting to stay close to early customers and ensure quality control. But the off-grid market has grown significantly, driven not by aspiration but by necessity, and has become an important part of how they operate. There is a meaningful distinction Alisha draws between the luxury market ("I want to save water") and the off-grid market ("I need water"). Both matter, but the latter has an urgency that sharpens everything.

She points to her home region on Canada's West Coast, where wildfire season brings between six and twenty fires in a single summer. Prevention now includes proactive assessment of high-risk areas in the off-season - clearing, managing, reducing the conditions that allow fire to spread. Her question for water: why aren't we doing the same? Why wait for drought to arrive before treating water-stressed regions as the urgent problem they already are?

One project that sits with her as a favourite: an indigenous community with land and a river, determined not to take from the river. Their conversations have centred on stewardship - a holistic, long-term relationship with the land and water around them. It is a different kind of brief than most commercial projects, and a reminder that some of the most coherent long-term thinking about water is happening outside the mainstream of the industry.

Having a daughter has shifted how Alisha sees the work. There is a lot happening in the world right now - fear, uncertainty, but also new technology and genuine possibility. The question she returns to is how we set things up so the next generation can see the hope and act on it.

Part of that, she believes, means creating spaces where the people making big decisions don't have to pretend they have all the answers. CEOs are expected to know everything and so they perform certainty, even when the most useful thing would be to sit in a room together and say, "I don't know, what do you think?" The decisions that need to be made around water, climate, and infrastructure are too interconnected for any single leader to hold alone. Collective, honest conversation is not a soft aspiration - it is a practical requirement.

"How do we set up spaces where people feel safe enough to have real conversations and make brave, bold, good decisions together? That's what's needed. And it has to be intentional."

The Truth card, for Alisha, is a call to stop deferring. The water sector has the technology, the talent, and increasingly the regulatory momentum to do far more than it has. What it needs is the honesty to stop optimising for the short term, the courage to build for the long term, and the intentional spaces to have the conversations that make bold, collective action possible. Rainstick is one expression of that. The invitation is for the whole industry to follow.