Reuben Paul Vollmer II
I'm Reuben Vollmer, founder of Spout. I build physical products that bring water, energy, and food closer to home.
Closer
Resilient
Brighter
Together
At Spout, we are building atmospheric water technology for everyday life. It is where my interest in human resilience becomes a physical product: something to design, manufacture, test, and support.
Most of us depend on one pipe or one store for the water we drink. Spout makes its own, from the humidity already in the air, filtered and tested so you can drink it. It is the hardest thing I have built, and the one I am proudest of.
Meet Spout
Estimated, and counting, from 1,100+ Spout homes each replacing 8,760 bottles a year. See the impact
Selected work
Beyond Spout, two more physical products taken from idea to object. Energy you make by walking, and food you grow at home.
Energy · Linear generator
Gaian
A sneaker with a built-in generator. Walk, and it converts your movement into electricity.
My part I developed the linear generator at its core, the mechanism that turns each footstep into usable power.
Appliance · Designed and built
The Moom Lander
A home appliance that grows fresh mushrooms from spore to harvest, with the whole climate managed for you.
My part I designed and built the product.
Five lighting modes with millions of colors and a 12-hour on and off timer. An airtight habitat holds humidity and saves water.
Status: pre-launch.
Visit Mushine
I am interested in technologies that help people meet fundamental needs. Useful tools. Thoughtful design. Things that give us more agency over everyday life.
My work sits between an ambitious idea and a useful object: what to test, what to simplify, how to make it, and how it should fit into someone's life.
Notes on invention, physical products, and building a more resilient world.
A prototype has to work once, for you, on a good day, on a bench you understand. A product has to work for a stranger, in a home you will never see, through a winter you did not plan for, for years after you stopped thinking about it.
The distance between those two things is where most of the real engineering lives. It is tolerances and failure modes and the part that is fine in the lab and cracks in a hot garage. It is the instruction nobody reads and the misuse nobody warned you about. Celebrating the first working unit is fair. Mistaking it for the finish line is how good ideas quietly die.
Every part you add is a part that can fail, a part someone has to source, a part that adds cost and weight and one more thing to explain. Addition feels like progress because it is visible. Subtraction is harder and usually better.
The products I admire are not the ones that do the most. They are the ones that do one important thing so well that you stop noticing the machine and just keep the result. Getting there means saying no to features that would demo well, and yes to the unglamorous work of making the core thing honest.
It is tempting to start with the clever mechanism. The better place to start is a plain question: what does this person actually need, how often, and what happens on the day the usual source is not there?
Resilience is not a feeling or a slogan. It is a short list of fundamental needs and an honest account of how fragile our supply of each one really is. Answer that first, and the technology has something real to serve. Skip it, and you have built a solution in search of a problem, however elegant.
Building a physical product? I work with a small number of founders on the decisions between idea and production. Start with one focused conversation and leave with clearer next steps.