After hearing that a U.S. Navy submarine ran into an underwater mountain, Joe Wolfel was surprised to find out just how little both government and commercial organizations knew about the ocean floor. It stuck with him throughout his time in the Navy and years later he launched a company to try to fix it.
Wolfel is the co-founder and CEO at Terradepth, a startup that is working to both map more of the ocean floor while also building a platform to make that data more accessible and easy to use. He said on a recent episode of TechCrunch’s Found podcast that while this is a large problem to solve, it’s a worthy one to tackle.
“What this problem demands is somebody taking a big bite, right, and that big bite is going to have to look at the problem from a holistic perspective,” Wolfel said. “We’re going to have to be vertically integrated. And by vertically integrated, I mean, we’re going to have to invest heavily on the hardware and robotic side so that we can massively scale ocean data collection capability.”
Wolfel talked about how the company has been able to develop robots that can help with mapping but still require human “babysitting.” He added that while the company is working to build autonomous robots, they are using their existing robots now so that they can start working with customers and collect more data for the platform in the meantime.
“One thing you learn pretty quickly in combat is you can’t steer something that’s not moving,” Wolfel said. “There’s no substitute for on the ground learning, right? So we’re eating our own dog food every day. So because we’re out on the ocean, because we’re collecting ocean data, we’re putting it into our own data platform.”
Wolfel also talked about what it was like fundraising for this company and how it was really hard in the beginning because VCs just weren’t interested in this space and funding for hardware startups was difficult in general. He added that the rise of American Dynamism by VCs has helped bring attention to this area but the challenges remain.
Lastly, he dove into his leadership style and what he considers to be the differences between leadership and management.
“Leadership is about inspiration and management, in a lot of cases, is about control,” Wolfel said. “How are you balancing those to operate with the right amount of risk? So you’re being responsible to your shareholders, but you’re also executing. What I tell the team always is we gotta be humble enough to learn but arrogant enough to execute.”
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