84 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 11.19
crew races over to pick it up. A
second drop with a bigger chute
seems about perfect, the Spot-
ter touching down with a gentle
plop. On the last run the plane
sends a box out the window,
and just as Stackpole predicted,
the top flaps open and it starts
to spin, slowing just a bit be-
fore thumping into the waves. If
it had been dropped from higher
up, Lang suggests, it would have
worked even better.
Sofar would later decide
against using the boxes, but for
the moment the team is elated.
On the bumpy ride back to
shore, Stackpole gives Janssen a
high five and says, “We got this!”
ON A SCORCHING summer day
in Los Angeles, I meet Wendy
Schmidt for lunch at a Medi-
terranean restaurant on Mel-
rose Place. She’s the force
behind Schmidt Marine Tech-
nology Partners (SMTP), which
in large part was inspired by the
experiences of Saildrone and
OpenROV. Formed in 2016, the
nonprofit’s mission is to sup-
port the development of tech-
nologies that address ocean-
conservation challenges and are
also likely to become profitable.
The idea being that you can have
the biggest impact by support-
ing projects that eventually take
care of themselves.
“We had this realization
that there were lots of people
out there with ideas that could
change the way we think about
solving problems,” she says. Be-
tween bites of roasted cauli-
flower and sea bass, Schmidt
tells me about a key moment in
the evolution of their thinking.
In 2014, she was at the head-
quarters of the Monterey Bay
Aquarium Research Institute
to oversee testing for an XPrize
competition that would award
$2 million to scientific teams
that developed sensors to mea-
sure ocean chemistry. While
there, she met a scientist who
showed her a device he’d created
to remove oil from the water
after the 2010 Deepwater Hori-
zon disaster. (The Schmidts had
funded an earlier XPrize com-
petition for exactly such a tool,
but this scientist hadn’t regis-
tered.) He’d brought it down to
the Gulf after the spill, he told
her, but never got it in the water.
Ever since he returned, it had
been in storage.
“He’s a scientist, not a busi-
nessperson,” she says. “He
doesn’t understand the mar-
keting. He doesn’t know who
might make use of what he has.”
Such a device might be sold to
oil companies that are on the
hook to mop up spills. This, she
explains, is where philanthropy
can make the biggest difference:
giving innovative ideas a boost
so they have a chance.
SMTP’s model is to fund
projects for several years, at
amounts ranging from $50,000
to $500,000 annually, getting
them through the so-called val-
ley of death period between a
company’s initial funding and
the steady flow of commercial
revenue. Recent grantees in-
clude a startup
that developed a
sensor that en-
ables coastal com-
munities to predict
dangerous high
tides missed by
existing govern-
ment monitors;
a handheld DNA
scanner that can
identify species
of fish and other
wildlife, thus re-
ducing seafood fraud; and an
ROV developed by the inven-
tor of the Roomba that electro-
cutes and then vacuums up in-
vasive lionfish.
Others are following the
Schmidts’ lead. Last January,
at the World Economic Forum
in Davos, Switzerland, Sales-
force founder Marc Benioff an-
nounced a $1.5 million dona-
tion to the Sustainable Oceans
Alliance, which has formed an
accelerator to nurture start-
ups developing technologies
that improve ocean health. The
founders of those startups get
$25,000, attend an eight-week
leadership program in San Fran-
cisco, and are invited on a small-
ship cruise in Southeast Alaska.
(In return, SOA takes an equitystake in their companies.) A new
philanthropic endeavor, Ocean-
kind, run by a former project
lead at X Development, Google’s
so-called moon-shot factory,
says it will be funding “radical
solutions” to ocean problems.
Like Lang and Stackpole,
many of the innovators in the
ocean-tech sector don’t have
a marine background, which
can cause them to get ahead of
themselves. Pelagic Data Sys-
tems, founded in San Francisco
in 2014 and funded in part by
SMTP, started out producing
a solar- powered tracking de-
vice for the small fishing boats
that are used all over the devel-
oping world. About the size of
a large smartphone, the track-
ers use cellular towers to auto-
matically log and share location
data. The system allows author-
ities to better manage fisher-
ies and combat illegal activities,
while fishing boats can certifythat their catch was taken out-
side protected zones. During a
presentation at a networking
event in San Francisco, founder
Dave Solomon described how,
when the company sent its first
run of prototypes to Indone-
sia, the fishermen wanted to
see what was inside the units,
so they popped them open, de-
stroying their waterproofing.
“We were just a bunch of tech
nerds in the Bay Area,” he said.
“We had no idea.”
Move fast and break things
has, of course, been a defin-
ing ethos in Silicon Valley, but
it’s an approach that can make
traditional researchers uncom-
fortable. A marine biologist who
works with a major conservation
organization told me that the bil-lionaires backing the new tech-
nologies are too easily captivated
by “the next cool thing they hear
about at a dinner party.”
Still, for veteran marine scien-
tists, it’s an era of extraordinary
opportunity. Woods Hole’s Jim
Bellingham recalls launching
his own startup, Bluefin Robot-
ics, to manufacture underwater
autonomous vehicles in the late
1990s, a time, he says, “when no
VCs or angel investors wanted
to be in the marine space.” He
put his own savings into the
company and hit up family and
friends. “It was really tough.”
A month after my lunch with
Schmidt, I visit Bellingham at
his office on Cape Cod. An ad-
viser to both the Schmidts and
OceanX, he sees extraordinary
possibilities in the merger of
tech entrepreneurs and the sci-
entists who really understand
the ocean. At Woods Hole, he
oversees a project designed to do
just that: DunkWorks, a rapid-
prototyping facility opened in- Bellingham leads me into
the multiroom space, which
has a geeky Star Trek vibe and is
loaded with laser cutters, high-
resolution 3-D printers, and a
virtual-reality system.
The vision is to enable re-
searchers and the many marine-
technology companies clustered
around Woods Hole to collabo-
rate on new designs for every-
thing from tiny sensors to au-
tonomous robots. “Things that
used to take months, now you
can do in a day,” Bellingham says
Walking around, we pass by a
whiteboard scribbled with en-
gineering diagrams and equa-
tions. In the top left corner,
someone has written a new and
improved motto for innovation:
TEST FAST + LEARN CHEAPLY.
A WEEK after the Spotter test,
Lang flew to Washington, D.C.,
to appear before the House Sub-
committee on Environment,
which was holding a hearing
called Ocean Ex ploration: Div-
ing to New Depths and Dis-
coveries. Once again he told
the story of building a robot to
search for gold and how that led
to a company launch. The realThe plane makes its
first bombing run,
sending a buoy with a
small black and red
parachute hurtling
toward the Pacific.