# S01E04 · Transcript — Peter Gallant Full transcript of [The Useful Podcast](https://useful.ventures/podcast) Episode 4, a founder-to-founder conversation between host Gokul Bala and Dr. Peter Gallant, founder of Productive Patterns, former CEO of WaterTAP, and co-founder of Pathogen Detection Systems. Back to the [episode page](https://useful.ventures/podcast/peter-gallant-watertap). This transcript has been lightly edited for readability. Filler words and false starts have been removed and the meaning has been preserved. Any errors are mine, not Peter's. ## Where the productivity system began **Gokul** I was curious, before anything else — when did you know you needed a productivity system? You built what you call Total Capture, but how did that even start? **Peter** That goes way back to the early 2000s, to almost the earliest part of the entrepreneurial work I was doing. I realized pretty quickly that entrepreneurs wear a lot of hats, and as soon as you start working with customers or hiring people, the amount of detail and the number of commitments you have to track goes up exponentially. You can't keep it all in your head. I was fortunate enough to be walking through a bookstore and see a display copy of David Allen's *Getting Things Done*. Attractive title. I picked it up and started reading right there in the store. The first line is what hooked me: "It's possible to have an overwhelming number of things to do and still be productive, with a clear head and a positive sense of relaxed control." That sealed the deal. I devoured the book over the next 24 hours, and it changed the way I managed myself, my business, and my personal life. **Gokul** Was there a specific moment you were drowning in work, or was it more of a general build-up? **Peter** It built up. I was starting my first startup while still trying to finish my PhD thesis, so I'd wake up every morning aware I hadn't finished the thesis and also had a business I was trying to launch — a series of inherently conflicting priorities I was trying to act on all at once. I got more and more concerned about how much I had to do versus my ability to actually get it done. That was right when I saw the book in the bookstore, and the rest kind of fell from there. ## Managing commitments, not time **Gokul** Did the book give you something tangible right away? **Peter** My view on productivity is that it's very personal — everybody needs to design their own system. But the thing that hit me immediately, like a ton of bricks, was that I was managing the wrong thing. I was trying to manage my time, blocking out calendars, when what I actually needed to manage was my commitments. I didn't have clarity on everything I'd already committed to, or everything I'd need to commit to if I wanted to succeed in the startup and still show up for the rest of my life. **Gokul** Was there anything you had to unlearn immediately? **Peter** I had to stop making commitments willy-nilly. "Yeah, sure, I can do that." "Want to meet next week?" "Sure, happy to." I became very conscious of the commitments I was making in the moment, and when I looked hard at the ones I'd already made, it freaked me out. One of the simplest rules in the book is the two-minute rule: if something can be completed entirely within two minutes, do it the instant it shows up — reply to the email right now, get it out of your world. That had an immediate impact. The rest of the system took a long time to mature, tested by the entrepreneurial experiences I had along the way. **Gokul** If someone just adopted your system wholesale, would they succeed, or does everyone have to build their own? **Peter** *Getting Things Done* is a fully specified, self-contained system you can learn — through the book, through seminars, through YouTube. Or you can take building blocks from GTD, from Cal Newport's *Deep Work*, from Greg McEwen's *Essentialism*, and build your own. I don't think it matters whose system you adopt. What matters is that you have one — a systematic way of engaging with the work of entrepreneurship, or knowledge work generally. Otherwise you end up with a pile of open loops that never close, and that's not effective for you or anyone around you. ## Neural networks before AI was cool **Gokul** Let's go back further — your PhD was in electrical and computer engineering, researching artificial neural networks. What was that research actually about? **Peter** I did my bachelor's in electrical engineering at Queen's University, graduating in 1991, and worked as a research assistant there beforehand. I loved electronics — I'd worked at Radio Shack before that. For my master's, I had two supervisors, and I was looking at some of the very first papers on training artificial neural networks, which had just been published in the late '80s. Geoffrey Hinton had just published his seminal work on training neural networks with an algorithm called error backpropagation. The idea was: you could specify a black box that didn't need to understand anything about the problem, and train it entirely from examples — feed data in the front, the correct answer in the back, and let it learn. This wasn't large language models — it was processing sequences of numbers. The first problem I worked on was for one of my supervisors: detecting patterns in the myoelectric signals amputees generate when they tense a muscle, and translating that into control signals for an artificial limb. I was looking for real-world problems that required turning large volumes of time-series data into something useful — what kind of inputs do you feed the network, how big do you make it (too big and it memorizes the training data instead of generalizing, too small and it can't produce meaningful signals). **Gokul** And the PhD? **Peter** Halfway through my master's, I read a paper that changed my direction — published in the Journal of the Optical Society of America by a Queen's professor I'd never met, George Sanders, who'd been trying to improve the resolution of ground-based telescopes like the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea. Starlight travels undistorted for hundreds of thousands or millions of years, then gets distorted by the atmosphere right before it's imaged — the same effect that makes a hot road shimmer, or a star twinkle. He'd published a paper arguing that twinkling wasn't random — and if it's not random, you can predict it. That became my PhD: applying neural networks to predict atmospheric distortion, so an adaptive optics system could drive mirrors to correct for it in real time. Our findings suggested you could improve a ground-based telescope's resolution by roughly 600% using even fairly simple neural network architectures. ## Predicting the stars, then the markets **Gokul** And then you tried to commercialize that research. **Peter** Of course — what does everyone try to predict once they can predict things? The financial markets. My first startup took some of that on-campus research off campus, which of course pulled me further away from finishing my PhD on schedule. We built neural-network-based prediction systems on large volumes of transactional data, aimed at short-term predictions of market direction and volatility, primarily on the futures market — interest rate and currency futures on the Chicago Board of Trade and Chicago Mercantile Exchange. We combined that with a disciplined set of rules for when to trade. We raised a pool of trading capital and ran fully automated trading systems for a number of years — sometimes very successfully, sometimes with losses as market conditions changed. It turned out the markets weren't as predictable as we thought, and some of what looked like predictability was really an artifact of how the market data had been recorded. Still, it was my first real exposure to taking academic research and applying it in a business context — an AI analytics company in the '90s, when almost nobody was doing that. **Gokul** What was the hardest part of turning research into an actual product? **Peter** Starting with the simplest possible version of the product. In academic research you explore lots of avenues and can leave things less defined than a real product needs. You have to get real clarity — beyond the abstract clarity that gets you published — about what you're building, what it looks like, and most importantly, the value proposition: what are you actually generating that somebody is willing to pay for. That's the hard part. ## Detecting E. coli in two hours **Gokul** Was there a big mistake from that first run? **Peter** The list is long. My first startup, the AI analytics business, was really trading our own capital — I hadn't yet had the experience of building something someone else buys. It ended up morphing into more of a lifestyle business. We used some of that capital to start a second company, Pathogen Detection Systems, which was much more of a real product business: a system to detect bacteria in drinking water, in the wake of a water quality outbreak in Ontario in May 2000 that killed seven people and made thousands ill. A group of Queen's researchers had developed a way to automate microbiological testing for harmful bacteria like E. coli and total coliform. I'd taught a course with one of those professors while doing my PhD and working off campus — again, too many commitments — and he introduced me to the rest of the research group. I asked them how they planned to commercialize it, because in my view the outcome of research shouldn't just be papers — it should be products that change the real world. Lab testing meant shipping a sample off and waiting 48 to 72 hours or longer to learn the water had already been unsafe to drink three days ago. Not a very useful signal. What these professors had proven in the lab was a fully automated system, reducible to the size of a microwave oven, that could run right at the point of testing — take the sample immediately at the plant or in the distribution network, and monitor it continuously. As soon as it detected bacteria, it could raise an alarm in as little as two hours. I saw a clear value proposition in radically accelerating drinking water testing, brought the professors together, pitched them on how I'd go about commercializing it, and became founding CEO of Pathogen Detection Systems. **Gokul** What was it like building a product out of research where a lot was still unknown? **Peter** The proof of concept had been done in petri dishes, with reagents mixed by hand by a lab technician. The gap between that and a robust product was enormous. We needed a single-use test cartridge — partly for a workable business model, similar to the razor-blade or inkjet-printer model, where the recurring revenue comes from the cartridges, not just the box. But converting a lab test into a cartridge with at least a one-year shelf life, able to survive shipping and temperature swings, and run by a non-laboratory water operator in the field rather than a trained technician — that transition was the exciting, hard part of the business. ## Regulators, and getting acquired by Veolia **Gokul** How did you end up getting acquired by Veolia? **Peter** We'd raised an Angel round and a Series A, but to really grow we needed people to trust that the tests were sensitive and selective enough — and in every jurisdiction, drinking water is heavily regulated, with specific approved tests required. We were fortunate to get our automated system approved by the US EPA for drinking water testing, so a municipality could use it to meet its regulatory obligations — though that approval came after the acquisition. The process, timeline, and cost of getting approvals across the US, Canada, and other jurisdictions was significant, especially the time required. We needed to raise $10 to $12 million in a Series B, but we were heading into 2008. There was no raising that kind of venture capital during the subprime mortgage crisis — VCs simply stopped investing, and the IPO window closed. So instead of chasing venture capital, we went looking for a strategic partner. Several major water-testing companies had been circling the technology, and Veolia, the world's largest environmental services company, ended up simply acquiring us — for a relatively modest value, not a retirement-level event for me or the other shareholders. I stayed on with Veolia afterward, because that gave us the resources to push the technology through approvals and actually get it deployed. Veolia is enormous — hundreds of thousands of people, operating in 60 countries — and I got to work almost like an intrapreneur inside it, evaluating other new technologies that could sharpen the competitive edge of products in a very slow-moving industry. **Gokul** With that many patents and approval systems across different water companies, what did it actually take to deal with regulators day to day? **Peter** It's a very specialized area — I literally changed my title to VP of Business Development and Regulatory Affairs because so much of my time went there. A lot of regulations had never contemplated running a microbiology test outside an accredited lab, and there was no single global approval — it was jurisdiction by jurisdiction. I spent a lot of time with the US EPA, running their testing protocols and explaining why our system's results differed from lab tests — ours was actually more sensitive to bacteria, which made it look like it was generating more false positives than it really was. A lot of that work was technical, but just as much was the human work of building confidence with the people responsible for these decisions, plus straightforward business development explaining the technology's value to potential customers. Some regulators, like the US EPA, are credible enough that getting their approval opens doors elsewhere. But the market was largely closed to the technology without those approvals in the first place — something I hadn't fully appreciated when I first looked at the technology. It was one of those hidden challenges at the start of the entrepreneurial journey. ## Running Ontario's water innovation agency **Gokul** You're also a co-inventor on more than seventeen patents, and you later became CEO of WaterTAP, Ontario's largest water innovation agency, reporting to a minister. What was it like moving from founder and academia into something closer to a government agency? **Peter** I never really did the PhD for academic reasons — I did it to do something hard and lonely, as entrepreneurial training. I think entrepreneurs need to challenge themselves and drive themselves from within rather than from external accountability. Mission accomplished on that front. Running startups after that was challenging but something I really enjoyed, and by the time Pathogen Detection Systems had gone through acquisition and I'd spent five years working inside that large multinational, with a lot of travel and young kids at home, I wanted to get back to working directly with entrepreneurs. The province of Ontario, through the Water Opportunities Act, had created a five-year innovation accelerator for the drinking water and wastewater industry. I was on the board originally, and when the previous CEO left, I applied for the job. It let me combine hard-won policy and regulatory expertise with working alongside entrepreneurs building genuinely global technologies. A lot of water-industry entrepreneurs are technologists-turned-founders — strong on the science, but they run into trouble attracting customers, designing products, and raising capital. I'd typically get a sixty-slide deck where fifty-nine slides explained how the technology worked, and by the time we finished reworking it, they had a real pitch: the market opportunity, the product, the value proposition, the unmet need, how much of the product they could build, where they could sell it, and how much money they could make in five years — the things a VC actually needs to evaluate an investment. I got good at packaging technical ideas in non-technical terms, something that had already been a through-line at Veolia. **Gokul** By the time you turned fifty, what did your resume actually look like? **Peter** PhD, startups, an exit, and I was still teaching. I'd taught engineering courses early on, then for around seven or eight years before that point I'd been teaching an introductory entrepreneurship and investing course in the business school, drawing on the real-world skills I'd built around dealing with investors and explaining technical ideas simply. I was recruited into teaching about a course a year in the business school. ## Turning fifty and redesigning a life you don't retire from **Gokul** Do you think your productivity system actually helped you do all of that? **Peter** If you ask ambitious, go-getter people to rate their own productivity out of ten, most will honestly land on a six, seven, maybe eight. They've cobbled together their own practices, but if you ask them to explain their system, a lot of the standard objections come out — "I don't want to be a robot," "I don't want to be working all the time." Most people do have basics down, like using a calendar for anything time-based. But there's a real gap between how much someone has invested in building the capacity to be productive versus simply sitting down and doing work. For the last ten or twelve years as an adjunct professor, I've offered a bonus, fully optional lecture on personal productivity each year: how are you going to manage yourself, sustainably, without burning out, for the next hundred years? Students kept telling me they'd never thought about building a systematic, consistent way of managing themselves, and looking back at my own entrepreneurial career, that systematic approach was critical — figuring out what I really had to focus on, and the specific actions that moved the related projects forward. That response is part of why I'm now designing a methodology — Productive Patterns — for entrepreneurs, recent graduates, and professionals to learn how to build their own system from existing building blocks. **Gokul** When's that coming out? **Peter** I did a batch of interviews over the last year and I've been developing the curriculum and launch plan with a colleague. I'm launching an initial beta cohort of it in mid-September 2026 — small group, live sessions over ten weeks with an option to just watch the recordings. After that I'll fold in the feedback, add content I'm itching to include, and launch a fully asynchronous version around January 10, 2027. **Gokul** Why teaching specifically — beyond the fact that teaching something helps you learn it? **Peter** Partly that, yes. But when I turned fifty, I worked with a professional coach for a year, partly through the financial independence and early retirement community, looking at something called "coast financial independence" — I'd already saved enough for a conventional retirement, so I just needed to cover expenses until then. Through those conversations I realized I wasn't actually interested in retiring — I was interested in designing a life I'd never want to retire from. My coach asked me what the through-lines in my life were, and one of them was clearly teaching — I'd been a teaching assistant in grad school, taught at the university for years, and even taught my hobbies when I wasn't in a classroom. Part of the secret of a good transition into semi-retirement isn't necessarily a long list of new things to learn — it's figuring out what you're already really good at and want to keep doing for a long time. I joined the business school as a continuing adjunct, now tenured on the teaching side with some administrative responsibilities but no research obligations, so I can teach as many or as few courses as I want and mix it with everything else. One of those "everything else" things was upgrading the private pilot's license I'd held since the 1990s with a multi-engine and instrument rating, so I can fly in clouds and tougher weather. My instructor for that was a former F-18 and Starfighter pilot, seventy-five years old, still flying sharp as a tack — that's what I aspire to. **Gokul** A lot of people turning fifty go through something like a midlife crisis. What's your advice to them? **Peter** I don't know if I've had one — though my wife might answer that differently. What hit me hard heading into my fifties was a talk at a conference where the speaker put up a timeline with birth, death, and one dot in the middle marked "enough," and asked: do you have enough? More importantly, are you enough? I think a lot of fear around aging, especially in men, comes down to alternating between the fear of not having enough and the fear of not being enough — not achieving what you set out to do, or what you feel is your purpose. I still feel both of those sometimes. But reconciling that against having probably several more decades of genuinely productive work ahead of me, and deciding where to place that energy, made all the difference. I don't have to work full time. I don't have to become CEO of a major corporation. I want to free myself up to do my best work — and having invested in my own productivity system means that once I define what that best work is, I actually know I can get it done. Too many people have unfulfilled ideas sitting in notebooks. I'm guilty of that too. What I try to do now is reduce the number of ideas I chase, let them sit and mature before committing, and let myself off the hook for the ones I decide not to pursue this year. ## Flying, visualization, and entrepreneurship **Gokul** What did learning to fly actually teach you? **Peter** A few things. I'd always loved the idea of flying, flown flight simulators as a kid — I'm afraid of heights and roller coasters, but never afraid of heights inside a plane. Learning any complex skill, the individual pieces feel disconnected at first: moving the yoke, banking, the engine. Then one day, after enough practice, it all starts flowing together, the same way you eventually stop thinking about the mechanics of driving a car and start focusing on the road ahead and what's coming. Once the basic skills integrate, you start thinking at a higher level — systems, procedures, situational awareness — especially once you move into multi-engine flying and an instrument rating, flying in clouds down an instrument landing system the way the airlines do. As an entrepreneur, you're in it day to day, but every so often you have to step back to a higher altitude and ask: am I at a safe altitude, on the right course, following the right procedures, are all my systems working. We spend a lot of training time on emergency procedures, and I learned I don't panic — in both simulated and a couple of real minor in-flight emergencies, I stayed calm and worked through them, which reinforced my confidence in other parts of life too. **Gokul** Flying is also a skill you can't just practice constantly — you can't jump in a cockpit whenever you want. **Peter** You don't only learn to fly by flying, though that's the most realistic way. A lot of early training is ground school and simulation, and modern simulators are realistic enough that I can log recurring-training hours in one. Simulators can also put you in situations too dangerous to train live — an engine failure right after takeoff, or my last recurring session, flying an approach into Telluride, Colorado, surrounded by mountains we don't have here in eastern Ontario. The other big tool, in aviation and other professional training, is visualization — what we call "chair flying." You sit and mentally rehearse everything you're about to do. Even right before pulling onto the runway, my instructor trained me to run through it out loud: am I on the right runway, what's the departure procedure, what am I doing the second the plane's off the ground, have I got the right frequencies set — and most importantly, if the engine fails right after takeoff, what am I doing. If I'm not off the ground by a certain marker on the runway, I pull the throttle and abort. You can envision things fully before you do them, and I think that's absolutely critical for entrepreneurs too. ## The three things that have to be true, and advice to his younger self **Gokul** Since we're near the end — this is one of my favorite questions. Across founder, executive, CEO, and professor, what was the happiest season of your life? **Peter** I've gone through seasons ranging from euphoria to panic and everywhere in between. Personally, the best days of my life were getting married and the births of my two kids. Professionally, the first time somebody actually bought a product I'd had a real hand in designing — that was magical, because someone recognized the value of what we were doing and was willing to pay for it. In an entrepreneurial journey, it's not the day you incorporate the company, and it's not the day you raise venture capital — that just means you've been handed the tools to do the job. It's the day someone buys what you built, or the day the business turns cash-flow positive, or the first time you hire someone and give them a job. There have also been plenty of dark nights of the soul, second-guessing myself — but that's all part of the entrepreneurial game. Entrepreneurship isn't without risk, and how you react to risk shapes whether you can perform as an entrepreneur. **Gokul** Taking it all the way back — what would you tell your master's-student self, still studying neural networks? **Peter** I'd tell myself AI is going to take a while to catch on, but when it does, it's going to be huge — buy Google. Beyond the funny answers, though, what I'd really tell myself is to spend more time focusing on a small number of the most important things. It's not what your website looks like, it's not your logo. There are only really three things that have to be true for any business to maximize its chance of success. First, you need a real value proposition — you're delivering something genuinely valuable to somebody in the marketplace, and you understand why it's valuable. Second, you have to understand who your customer actually is, so you're delivering that value to a specific, qualified customer. Third — once you've nailed those two — you have to execute: build the product properly, get it in the customer's hands, engage with them, and keep iterating until they're fully satisfied. You are not a proxy for your customer. I used to think I knew what my customers wanted. Our most innovative ideas always came from people actually using the product, not from what we assumed they wanted. **Gokul** That's a perfect place to end it. Thanks so much, Peter — I learned a ton. **Peter** My pleasure. --- Back to the [episode page](https://useful.ventures/podcast/peter-gallant-watertap) · [[podcast|All episodes]]