Op-Ed: The Popular Mechanics Of Maritime Innovation

This is a problem. It’s a serious problem not just at this event but at most maritime innovation events.

Ship captains operate in a highly complicated and chaotic and uncertain world. We must navigate our vessels through changing wind and currents, we must solve problems that nobody predicted, we must be navigators but also behavioral scientists managing things like action bias in our crew, panic in emergencies, confusion when the weather changes unexpectedly or a passing ship turns without warning, We must be kinesthetic thinkers who can feel warnings in the movement of our ships. We are fire chiefs, food safety inspectors, dieticians, system engineers, psychologists, priests, rabbis, and Imams. We navigate in an ocean of uncertainty.

Large shipping companies and regulators operate differently.  These corporations are highly linear, highly structured, resistant to change, and good managers of risk. They demand that the Captain iron out the course lines and submit noon reports as if the ship had traveled in a straight line and the engines operated at a specific RPM. They may provide solutions to injury, fatigue, evolving weather systems,  or they might put a priest on the phone when a crewmember’s loved one passes away. Most shipping companies do care but they can only offer solutions when the problems reach a certain threshold.

The December 1958 edition of popular mechanics featured a robot that could wrap Christmas presents and decorate a tree. During today’s event, one shipping company executive was asked how technology innovation can help mariners who are stuck at sea because of COVID. His answer was: “We are installing IOT Treadmills that will allow crewmembers to compete with friends aboard other ships. Who knows, they may even be able to compete in a marathon at home.”

The problem here should be obvious. Nobody asked for robots that could wrap presents in 1958 and no seafarer wants to compete in a virtual marathon at home. They want to be home. They want to wrap their presents with their kids.

gCaptain was launched in Silicon Valley around the time Facebook was first launched. I was friends with those guys, I attended countless technology conferences, I hung out at coffee shops with guys who are now billionaires. I even spent a day inside secret rooms at Apple, and another few days inside labs at Google.

Nobody I met in Silicon Valley spoke like a popular mechanics columnist.

Once a few friends were hanging out with Chris Sacca of SharkTank fame in Squaw Valley and somebody mentioned a virtual reality ski map app they were working on. This guy made the mistake of saying “Users will put on VR goggles while riding the ski lift and use our app to practice their next run”.

“How the Fuck do you know that?” asked Sacca. “How the hell do you know what they will do with your app?”

And he was right. The app died but they had already made detailed maps so they decided to print them out on microfiber cloths. Today millions of skiers around the world clean their goggle and look at these maps.

The Innovation Officer at today’s event touched on this concern. He said that his company headquarters was not run by MBA’s but was managed by Captains and Engineers with “Real-world experience”. He said it’s not up to accountants and managers to decide what to build, and that every new startup idea is “presented to our Captain’s and Chief Engineers. They decide what technology we support.”

This is a slightly better approach than building flying cars and IOT treadmills but only slightly.

Chris Sacca lives in a ski town. He is an early adopter. He is an expert on recreational skiing. He has 10,000 hours on the slopes. He’s used ski maps his entire life….  but notice that he didn’t offer the startup any ideas, he did not paint a rosy picture of the future. He did not have answers but he did as the question: “How the Fuck do you know that?”

Today the big technology companies are being investigated in senate hearings and the public assumes that people like Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook knowing it would be used to manipulate voters. He didn’t.

I met twitter’s founder Evan Williams a few times and, at least back then, he never talked much about the specific use cases for twitter. He didn’t have a business plan or ask Harvard Business School to do a case study. He freely admitted that he didn’t know how Twitter would be used in the future but he was very curious to find out.

One time, when pinned down by a reporter, he did share what HE wanted to use twitter for.  Evan Williams wanted to track fire trucks moving around the city. HE wanted to use Twitter AS a digital police scanner and then he said “But I doubt that many users will care to do that.”

Twitter was not invented as a tool to be used by Presidential candidates, it was not invented so that you could mark yourself safe during a natural disaster, it was not invented for companies to get feedback directly from users… but it’s used for all those things.

gCaptain