80 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 11.19
COURTESYOF^ DOMINIKFRETZ/SOFARhe says, “building a submarine
in his garage.” When he discov-
ered that Stackpole was con-
structing a small remotely op-
erated vehicle, or ROV, Lang
says, “I thought that was even
cooler.” The two men bonded
over their passions for explora-
tion and technology, imagining
the many ways the sub might be
used. “They don’t have a term
for love at first sight in busi-
ness,” says Lang, “but that’s
what it was.”
Stackpole and Lang have told
this story many times, but it still
gets them animated. On a sunny
spring day in San Francisco,
they’re seated on a couch in the
glass-enclosed meeting space
of Sofar Ocean Technologies, a
newly minted startup created by
merging their brand, OpenROV,
and Spoondrift, a three-year-old company that makes solar-
powered buoys that can trans-
mit data from anywhere in the
ocean. With $7 million in new
venture funding, Sofar is one of
a growing number of companies
developing technologies that
make it vastly cheaper and eas-
ier to track ocean conditions and
observe marine life, spurring an
incipient revolution in ocean
science and exploration.
Lang, 34, has intense brown
eyes that light up when he talks
about big ideas. The hunt for
gold, he explains, was a MacGuf-
fin—the filmmaking term for a
goal that gets the narrative going
but ultimately doesn’t matter.
“You hear of lost treasure and
that’s the beginning of your epic
adventure,” he says. “By the end,
you forget it existed.”
Soon after the guys met,THE ROBOT was born out
of a treasure hunt.
It all started in 2010, when
Eric Stackpole was a promising
young engineer designing sat-
ellite technology as an intern at
NASA’s Ames Research Center
in Mountain View, California.
He was simultaneously work-
ing toward a master’s degree at
nearby Santa Clara University
and was prone to procrastinat-
ing. Lately, he’d become taken
with the idea of building his own
underwater robot.
Some of the engineers at
Santa Clara were already devel-
oping autonomous submers-
ibles, and Stackpole had noticed
that they “seemed to be having
all the fun.” Instead of spend-
ing years planning for a mission,
they’d design, build, and deploy
a sub within months. “I was
like, man, I want one of those,”
he says. “You don’t have to have
a rocket, just some curiosity and
a shoreline.”
He needed a purpose to guide
his design, so he asked friends
for suggestions. A childhood
buddy responded with a link to
a web page describing a Gold
Rush–era heist that ended with
a pile of gold stashed in an un-
derwater cave in Northern Cal-
ifornia’s Coastal Range. “Down
the rabbit hole I went,” says
Stackpole. “I started reading
more and more about it and ba-
sically became obsessed.”
Soon after, he met David
Lang, an idealist in his mid-
twenties who was working for
a startup that did crowdfund-
ing for new companies. Lang
had sought out Stackpole after
hearing about a guy who was,howthehBYPagehow.w.DFNBYofPE.
BYPE.BYPEaquariushow.wTEBYw.BY
Backed by billionaire philanthropistsen;zldjnand
silicon valley venture capitalists.hoTERAJSD-
FNa wave of upstart entrepreneurs.how.BPETERare
developing.d,jfblkdhigh-tech, low-cost technologies.hgs-
dflksjdfTO EXPLORE THE WATERY REALMShow.BYPETEWE STILL
BARELY UNDERSTAND.d,jfblkARE THE OCEANS FINALLY GETTING
THEIR MOON-SHOT MOMENT?dd,jfblby mIchAEl roberts
- the next frontier