Help us Win a Webby by voting for us here: bit.ly/vote4found Today on Found we talk to Anthony DiMare, the co-founder and CEO of Bedrock, a company which has developed autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to survey and map the seafloor in a much more efficient and affordable way than the traditional “big ship with a big sonar” method .Darrell, Jordan, and Anthony get into why seafloor exploration could be the answer to many problems on land like finding space to build offshore wind farms and how there is an untapped blue-centered economy. Plus Anthony talks about his on-the-ground leadership style and how he's learned to love the salesmanship part of his job.
Help us Win a Webby by voting for us here: bit.ly/vote4found
Today on Found we talk to Anthony DiMare, the co-founder and CEO of Bedrock, a company which has developed autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to survey and map the seafloor in a much more efficient and affordable way than the traditional “big ship with a big sonar” method.Darrell, Jordan, and Anthony get into why seafloor exploration could be the answer to many problems on land like finding space to build offshore wind farms and how there is an untapped blue-centered economy. Plus Anthony talks about his on-the-ground leadership style and how he's learned to love the salesmanship part of his job.
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Darrell Etherington 0:01
Hello and welcome to found I'm your host, Darrell Etherington. And I'm here with the Moby Dick to my Captain Ahab. Jordan crook. Love it. That's right. Our I am pirate thing. It's not really pirates. No, it's not pirates. I'm unattainable. Really mythical legendary. And you're angry about it. I am. And I'm trying to take you down a peg.
Jordan Crook 0:26
Perpetually, as you know, but maybe you don't know, because this could be your first time listening to found which is TechCrunch is premier podcast about founders. We cover the stories behind the startups.
Today, we're talking to Anthony DiMarco, from bedrock, which has developed underwater autonomous vehicles, which survey and map the seafloor in a way that beats traditional methods. It's not like people aren't doing this now. But this way, it's way better and cheaper and can reach places maybe other methods can't reach the main focus right now their main client are people building offshore wind farms, and there's a lot of demand for that. But who knows what the future could hold. There's a whole range of different applications for this technology. And we talked to Anthony about quite a few of them, including my favorite underwater city.
Reserve your spot now?
Yes, but let's let Anthony explain what it is that bedrock does and what kind of potential it has for the future.
Darrell Etherington 1:33
Anthony, how's it going?
Anthony DiMare 1:34
Stalin? Fantastic. It's a great Tuesday here in New York.
Darrell Etherington 1:38
That's right. That's right. You've revealed
Jordan Crook 1:40
your location. Now you're gonna force their
time when we're recording it. That's usually a fiction. They don't know.
The problem is that you're gonna inspired Darrell to say that he's in Canada, because he has to hit it at least one
Darrell Etherington 1:53
yet on this podcast, or
Anthony DiMare 1:57
I was gonna say, I have listened to a podcast and I did hear that you are in Canada. So
Jordan Crook 2:02
every single one?
Darrell Etherington 2:03
Oh, I usually try to get it out early. But he's
Jordan Crook 2:07
got another surprise reveal later. I'm sure we'll get to somehow
that one comes up in our conversation, because it's unrelated. But
Unknown Speaker 2:17
you find a way anyway.
Anthony DiMare 2:19
There's another like teasers. Yeah.
Darrell Etherington 2:22
Stay tuned. Yeah. At the you are the founder of a company that this is one of those things where I'm gonna get myself in trouble. I'm very excited to talk to you. I'm excited to talk to everyone. Let's be clear. I'm always excited to talk to people. But Anthony, your company is so interesting.
Jordan Crook 2:41
So shit on all the other founders. Thanks. No, listen, listen.
They're all interesting in their own way. I just find this particular one personally very interested in appeals
to your interests. Yes, yes. Oh, Anthony, can
you tell us what bedrock ocean exploiter Anthony's? Like,
what the hell are your interests?
Anthony DiMare 3:02
I was like, these are interview questions of like what Jazz's you up about the ocean, right? But yeah, sure, happy to give you an overview. bedrock is primarily trying to build needed technology to scale bli map image and classify the seafloor at scale, we looked at basically back in 2019, my co founder, and I took a look at the world. And at that point, I think we have like 18% mapped of the ocean, right. And now then you gotta define what the word map means. And that means one data set that imagery, which you can think of, like topography, at 100 meter resolution. So like, you're not seeing much like if there's a large amount like cars, or you're going to think of it like a, an a city, if it was 100 meter resolution, like you would miss if you missed on like buildings, like houses, like cars, like you wouldn't see any of that. So that was what the state of the world was like in 2019, at least outside of the military sector. So you got to think about like science, all the commercial activity, anything that was done in the government outside of sort of the silos of different military groups. And what that meant at the time was like, there's this fundamental lack of understanding of, I would argue, one of the most critical resources that influences everything we do, and all living things and like how the world is like operating, and it's usually like a leading indicator to a ton of things and is where weather originates and all this stuff. And so at that time, like, we looked at the state of the world, and we're like, why the fuck Hasn't anyone built the SpaceX version of the ocean, right? You think about large, prolific tech companies that have built fundamental infrastructure for space, and you could fill that void with a couple of companies now, and you say that exact same thing for the ocean and like, you get crickets people don't have that company. And that seems like a huge narrative violation. So we basically said, We got to figure this out. We didn't know at the time that we wanted to start a company and very much thought like the world probably needs this This is like hypercritical when you're dumping cash into all these other places, and no one has figured out the right mechanism to create a structure or something that people would broadly consider putting money towards to ultimately go solve the largest exploration problem left on the planet. And this required totally new solutions to be able to acquire data. And it required totally new software solutions to allow scalable processing, X access. And just general management have like one of the largest, if not, will be the largest geospatial data set that the planet has because the planet is two thirds ocean, and everything we do, you know, all of the comparable technologies that have erupted out of the autonomous vehicle industry don't immediately translate over to sonars, and magnetometers and like things you would use to understand geology of the seafloor. So we thought, let's see if we can design the full ocean system. And that's how we actually got started back in 2019. It was more of an experiment around like, can we design a system that theoretically could scale across 95% of the oceans with the exception of some of the polar ice caps being quite challenging to do for long periods of time under the
Jordan Crook 6:12
quitter, Anthony,
Darrell Etherington 6:13
I know you better get those events. Yeah,
Jordan Crook 6:15
like I they seem like some of the most important ones. And my
Anthony DiMare 6:20
the a lot of scientists would argue that they are in fact, one of the most important parts, but I would argue quite in terms of like difficulty of places to go. Number one hardest is probably under the caps. But hey, not saying it's impossible.
Jordan Crook 6:36
Just get the investors to fund it, man.
Yeah, but I mean, it's a stretch goal, right? You're like, okay, like, get there. Yeah. Or it's like, it's like Elden ring for contemporary rule. My
god. Wait, wait, wait, hold on. I'm gonna jump in real quick, because So one important thing, if you sense my tone with Anthony, it's because we've known each other for many years now. colloquial, I would say, Jordan. Yeah, we've known each other for a long time. I knew him as a friend before I knew he even was a founder. In fact, he saved on my phone as Anthony karaoke, just to give you an idea of our relationship. Yeah. Secondly, Anthony, you got to explain, like, give an example of why this is important. Right? It's like, okay, cool. That would be great to have that data. Like, yeah, we haven't explored it yet. Cool. Cool. But like, How does someone make money off of it? Why does it matter? Right, who's gonna pay you for this?
Anthony DiMare 7:27
Yeah. So it was funny. When we started, you know, I said, we started with this idea that broadly, we needed this at scale. When you think about the data needs, the opportunities are quite endless. You know, it's a critical data set for you can imagine monitoring systems, you can imagine certain things like being able to make sure that we are doing the right things with the ocean, there are a lot of people that try and do and exploit the ocean right now. And how do we monitor that? Right? So at scale, that's one thing, but going way back down to where we are today, which is really just a data collection and data platform, right, which again, all we do is sell data that people that buy this data right now, especially in the commercial industries, or offshore wind companies. So one of the big problems right now is we have these like ultra ambitious goals to install offshore wind, particularly near metropolitan areas, because they need so much energy to be decarbonized off of coal or natural gas or whatever power plants we have. And it's really hard to build really large gigawatt scale power plants anywhere near these metropolitan areas. Except when you look at the ocean, there's like this huge resource where you can build literally gigawatts of power that take 3040 50% of the sort of energy needs and turn them into renewable energy within a 10 year timeframe. The interesting challenge that we've started to realize now is that the process at the current moment of getting critical geological data, which you can think of is very similar to like real estate, like you buy a plot of land, you do a bunch of surveys to check out what the land looks like you make sure there's no radon there, you make sure there's no weird stuff for pipelines or strange things moving through your property, you got to do the exact same thing when you go do anything in the ocean. And so that requires what the world calls a geophysical survey. The current process takes 12 to 18 months from the moment someone an offshore wind company says I need this type of data in this area to the moment when you have a process usable data set in hand at the current moment. That's because we use large fleets of ships with 30 to 50 people on board. All of the software runs on desktops because they're meant to run on the ship not connected to the internet. There's no idea or no concept of distributed cloud computing the processes cannot be paralyzed because they ship hard drives between the surveyor to environmental review firm to a third party processor to geophysical interpreter to a archaeological reading firm to the ultimately bureau of Office energy management or bond Within the United States government to check and make sure that they abided by the survey assessment plan that they had submitted and gotten permits for. And so like that whole process takes an immense amount of time. So you have to survey four to six times, if things are going well, before you can put up one of these farms.
Jordan Crook 10:18
God forbid, you're like, Oh, well, we didn't love this data. So we gotta go do it again, or whatever, like,
Anthony DiMare 10:24
so one of the big challenges is like, when you're on the surface, you're subject to weather. And when there's weather, you can imagine like, imagine your phone is like a survey ship, and your cameras are the sonars. And like, when you're doing this all the time, sometimes
Jordan Crook 10:40
the audience can't see. But imagine a boat with a camera pointed down,
Anthony DiMare 10:45
I'm holding my phone, and I'm like, gambling. I'm like, shaking Oh,
Jordan Crook 10:49
no. Are you like fancy nautical terms?
Anthony DiMare 10:54
As drone that's like Drone World. Come on, let's like, let's get to appeal to somebody. It's there. But like, in so like, Yeah, you get that data. And sometimes you don't know it until far after the fact, you gotta process at all. So you got to imagine you got to basically take out the effect of that movement of the sensor to try an ultra probably
Jordan Crook 11:14
highly irregular and unpredictable, right? Like, it's not something you can develop a general Oh, yeah,
like an AI for, in effect,
Darrell Etherington 11:21
right? You could
Anthony DiMare 11:22
theoretically try to, but like, this is how the world does it today. So there is ways to do this. And you do get good quality data, I don't want to denounce that this is not going to actually render good data. One of the benefits of that is you have GPS. Now, all that being said, when you have an entire system, not just the technology, and the companies and this like arduous process that you got to go through to get this very critical piece of data. And I hate to use the word bedrock, but like it is a bedrock of many industrial industries like geophysical data. If you want to do anything on an involved seafloor, like you literally need to know what the seafloor it looks like, what the sediment is, you need to know if there's like large rocks, are there bombs there, there's all sorts of junk on the bottom of the sea floor. And so like, if you don't know that you can't make quick progress. When you look at the United States and their renewable energy goals. It's highly reliant on 2000 offshore wind turbines being installed in us easy waters. And like when you look at the amount of serving that needs to happen to make that possible, there are real concerns about is serving going to be a large, if not inhibiting bottleneck to being able to even do that, even if we solve all the supply chain issues, which like, that's all another issue. So yeah, the primary sort of consumers right now of the data we're collecting are renewable energy companies that can go a long way for us for quite some time.
Darrell Etherington 12:47
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned other types of use cases on the website. Right. But it seems like your basic thesis is this is all we need to address right now. And all these other things are kind of like not blue sky opportunities, but like things that could develop into more meaningful businesses later on.
Anthony DiMare 13:03
Yeah, I mean, this is a market that is exploding at this exact moment in time right now. But the idea of sequester carbon storage at scale, right, we have to put, you know, like Giga tons of liquid co2 or solid co2 Somewhere, at like a scale that you got to think about, like how much carbon we pulled out of the ground, for better or worse, we got to put it back somewhere. Yeah, putting it into the ground is one carbon lakes and the bottom of the seafloor is another solution. All of this is going to require the concept of monitoring. Yeah, what I find interesting is we allow these like multi trillion dollar industries sort of exist on the seafloor, and they're the ones collecting data to monitor their own activities, and then they ultimately submit that data, right. So it's like, okay, there needs to be a concept, an organization or something that is third party that is like their sole directive is just monitoring what's going on where there's no sort of external incentive structure for certain, you know, interest. Yeah, exactly. Right. And like, it's not saying we will want to help these companies. But it's also saying, like, we want to be able to make sure that like governments have the ability to step in, if something is truly screwed up, or groups that care about things have access, readily access and cheap access to data.
Darrell Etherington 14:17
Yeah, that's tremendous resource. And you want the resource to be able to be utilized fully. If you let a few people raise the head and kind of like do their own thing and do their own regulation, then it's not going to be it's going to ruin it later when we're like, oh, but we can do so much more, right? Like build data centers on the ocean floor. That's something Microsoft wants to do.
Anthony DiMare 14:34
I actually like very proud of that for like a lot of reasons like that. To me, that solves a lot of the energy problems the ocean naturally like there's tons of hydrothermal vents all over the seafloor, like it's so the environment is literally meant to dissipate enormous quantities of heat and does it really, really well. You got to be very conscious about where you're putting those heat sources in relation to where they may be already but all being said like that actually makes a lot of sense,
Jordan Crook 14:59
but like how do you Who not regulate? Because you wouldn't be the regulatory body but like, you'd be the monitoring body that passes the data along to the regulatory body? And like, how do you do that when your clients are, I don't want to say they're exploiting, but there's the potential for your clients to also be exploiting the sea and the sea floor, right? Like if a wind turbine company comes to you and says, like, we want to do this, give us the data, and then all of their turbines are like incredibly damaging to the ecosystem in some way, you would have that data, and then you'd have to flag your own client, like, how do you do both at once?
Anthony DiMare 15:31
Yeah, like most problems, there's never like a tried and fast this is like the exact easy way to do it. What we do believe in what we've seen in most other geospatial plays is that access readily access to the same data actually aligns parties, in a lot of ways, the government's are incentivized to make sure that we get to renewable power, they want that the energy companies want this renewable source of power, oil is a finite resource, we've clearly reached the limits of where you know, they can't write, for better or worse, once again, like the idea of a reoccurring revenue source, where actually they're not a chemical company, they are an energy company, where they are providing energy back to the grid is much more attractive business model. And companies like Worstead did this like really, really well, to go a little deeper into your question, or Jordan, part of that, and part of the challenge that the world has is surveys, particularly geophysical surveys are done usually in this like one off manner. So like an energy company will go and commission a $5 million dollar $10 million survey, they will own the data outright. And they'll use the data once to go through one process. And then it'll like sit on my hard drive, and I can put in a shelf, that's where it lives, it does. And that is fundamentally screwed up. Because that means the cost of any square kilometer over any particular point in time is exceptionally high. It's not just like the cost of that data is not distributed across lots of people. And so that's part of the reason of why one, it cost the government tons of money to do this. And it costs energy companies tons of money to do this. And you can't just like port this into other industries or other governments easily because like, once again, the cost is prohibitive, and the structure around ownership is sort of broken. So what we're trying to do is shift that a little bit and say, Listen, we're going to highly incentivize this energy company to take data in in a new way. In other words, bedrock is going to take on a lot of the upfront risk, we're going to do our own surveys, in partnership, hopefully, with many of the energy companies out there, and we're going to de risk a lot of this activity for you, we're going to help you get to ROI faster, meaning you're gonna be able to get data 12 to 18 months sooner than you would have before. So you can actually do a lot of the critical work that you would have done ahead of time, where that would have taken you much longer, you can now do it faster, which means your equity investors get a quicker return on their capital, you get to construction quicker, which means you get to revenue faster, because without construction, you're not generating energy, and you're not sending it back to the grid. At the same time, you're providing a third party data set that can be reprocessed in different ways for other clients. Other ways. This is a new way the world, this is not how it works right now, like it just just to be clear, like, this is not the way that data is used. It's reminiscent of actually a business model that was pioneered in the deep seismic exploration world called the multiclient survey model. So interestingly enough, back in the 80s, and the 90s, when you would seismic surveys, which are like huge ships, they're like, literally, they have these large air guns or explosions that will send sonic booms into the crust, they will model the crust. And this is how they find or how they found oil wells back in the day. But what they realized was the cost to do these huge exploration areas was prohibitive for most companies. So why don't we split the cost, we'll have a survey company do a huge area, and then a bunch of the other oil companies will get access to that data. And they'll license it from that one company. And we want to do the exact same model here in the offshore wind industry and many other industries that rely on seafloor data broadly. And what that means is bedrock does assume a ton of upfront risk, which is, I think, critical to changing the model here. But the benefit is that we get the opportunity to license it to many more people distributing the cost of that data dropping the cost down on a per client level. And further, it allows companies and governments and other people to be a little bit more on the same page about what's really going
Jordan Crook 19:29
on because you're all working from the same Yeah, numbers, right.
Anthony DiMare 19:32
That's exactly right. So Jordan, there's like not an easy answer. You know, there's like a lot of complexity to how these things go. And like, at the end of the day, what I found pretty amazing is like when I'm interacting with these renewable energy companies, like the amount they care about doing the right thing for the environment is astonishing. It's like built into the DNA of these even if it's a different division of an oil and gas company or like a renewable division. of
Darrell Etherington 20:00
this division within the company people like give a shit.
Anthony DiMare 20:03
It's amazing. Okay, it's like it's this cool is vibrant, I mean, props to everything that's happening there. And I'm not saying that that necessarily the other parts of those companies aren't but like, it's really cool. They are really trying to do the right thing here, particularly when it comes to like marine mammals, environments and like, it's astonishing, like I really, I gotta give them yeah, I gotta get credit,
Jordan Crook 20:25
it would make sense, I guess not like the earliest, right? Because like the renewable movement has been around for a while now. But it would make sense that the people that are in those organizations are people who actually are passionate about it and care about it. Right. But like, yeah, there's always the I don't mean to like harp on this, but I just feel like it's something about long term, right? Because like, capitalism, taints everything. And if this is like the way it's going, particularly the regulatory environment is like, hey, for real, no more gas and oil. No more oil, coal. All those folks still
Darrell Etherington 20:54
use coil power, though. Coil power is good.
Jordan Crook 20:58
A lot. Yeah. Jump on it. Yeah. It's kinetic. We know. Yeah.
Anthony DiMare 21:05
Those are the batteries of the future.
Jordan Crook 21:06
You know what I mean, though, right. The bad guys, the green guys will come in, who don't give a shit about like marine life, or coral or anything like that. But like, I get it, it's complex. You have to think about,
Anthony DiMare 21:16
like, it's something that we've thought that thing? Yeah, you're totally right. It's like, it's not not a thing. So I want to be the first one to say like, it's wire, but the way that you empower others is by making data more accessible. Like it's, it's, there's a step one in most cases, right? We don't have a baseline yet. That's concerning. On a lot of levels, so like, there's a lot of activities that are going on right now in the ocean
Jordan Crook 21:40
where like we can't model change, because we don't know where we're at.
Anthony DiMare 21:43
Right, right. Right, right. We don't even know what Yeah, we don't know what day zero is. Day Zero was in 2020. Unlike
Jordan Crook 21:48
what was already been, you know, immense impact, obviously. Yeah, we've just missed it. All right.
Anthony DiMare 21:53
I mean, it's untold, right?
Jordan Crook 21:55
There's like more uplifting, fun stuff to talk about, though. So one of the things that I want
Darrell Etherington 21:59
to wait, I wanted to bring up because when we were talking about that Jordan, I realized is another podcast where we just explained SAS in a different way as the thing that is good and works for people. And also like the constant discussion, we have a build versus buy. Right, right. When you defray the costs. It's just like, everything you're talking about to brings up space to me, because it just feels a lot like space and a lot of geospatial stuff that happened there. And they're just ahead of the curve, but the same changes that seems like are in store for totally for the ocean ecosystem as well, right? Yeah, even NASA, NASA was like, Look, we want to be a client, because it doesn't make sense to single fund all of these things, and then have it go nowhere. So like, we're gonna outsource a lot of this stuff, become a client, they're gonna have other clients, there'll be more sustainable for everyone. And it's, it seems like that's the approach. Yeah,
Anthony DiMare 22:46
it's a more efficient way to use capital, it's better for the taxpayer. It's in so many ways. It's strange to me that the focal point has been in space, when you sort of look at what the markets are there when you have like, really large really impactful industries that rely on sea floor data and like,
Jordan Crook 23:02
well, it's arguably more difficult the like math involved maybe not in like, a rocket right good for SpaceX, but like are
launching why because we don't have to fight the gravitational pull. Right? That's, theoretically be easier. But yeah,
yeah, that's what I'm saying. There's like an archetype for what we do in space. It's been around for like, 70 years. And then right now, seafloor exploration, like, yeah, we have some robots, and we have some submarines, but like, we don't know what the fuck we're doing, right?
Darrell Etherington 23:27
I believe secrecy as well. No, I blame people not to blame DSV as much as they should have, right, because let's say an alt in an alternate history. A sequence CSV somehow precedes Star Trek. I think we're there I think then we'd be talking to Anthony, he'd be Elon. Yeah. Or I mean, a better person, obviously. But
Jordan Crook 23:49
hopefully, essentially, like, you know.
Like, 600 times over, but like, don't you think so? I mean, I always bring up seaQuest DSV. I'm
Anthony DiMare 24:03
gonna say this the other
Jordan Crook 24:06
day. We're also brainstorming podcast ideas somehow, like it's just a lot in the last three minutes. I'm gonna go Daryl. So
Anthony DiMare 24:15
I think it's interesting when you look back at how NASA was formed, and we're like, No, it was formed, and how people and where capital was deployed. Noah was developed under Department of Commerce, and NASA was a standalone r&d organization that had this massive marketing budget, right? No, did marketing budget No, you couldn't get that wasn't what it was about. And so I think a lot of it goes back to like the 60s and a lot of it at the time had to do with people didn't see space as a military arena. They saw it as an exploration arena. You know, when you look at particularly like the Cold War, that was a military arena, things happened under the ocean a lot if you've ever read like blind man's bluff. It's a incredible book with a bunch of declassified things that happened in the US Navy and money was spent looking mean for things and trying to do stuff. But like, none of this
Darrell Etherington 25:03
was the advent of submarines was like, Okay, we did not understand that there was this additional dimension to this. We need to understand this in full and like, yeah, space didn't have that moment. Till now. Now space has that moment Correct. That's happened recently. But yeah,
Anthony DiMare 25:16
yeah, correct. I can't help but think Especially now, when you look at like, when Charlie and I were starting a lot of it was this needs to be a public benefit corporation, right. This should not be a C Corp, this needs to be a public benefit corporation. And we need to be able to provide at least a medium resolution free version of this map to everyone outside of the capitalistic side of things. This would advance the general understanding of the ocean dramatically. And that is a core fundamental thesis that we think not only is needed for the world, but we also think helps us in general, if you have a medium resolution, and you get some sense of like, oh, wait, what's there, you're gonna maybe want to then purchase a higher resolution version, which helps us further explore other areas in higher resolution. That is a core concept that we thought was really, really important. We have a total misallocation of capital right now from space to ocean in my opinion. Yeah, it really
Darrell Etherington 26:07
isn't up space investors. We know Yeah, yes. Test.
Jordan Crook 26:17
Well, it's just I mean, to be fair, that's what Tess has been able to do. Because when you say space investors, one name comes to mind so good. Or that? She's like, Yeah, the boss. But wait, hold on, can we get to my fun things? Or no, Daryl Do you want to talk about?
Darrell Etherington 26:31
I would love to. I mean, we're so deep in this podcast, but like, I was just curious. I hope this is a quick question. But were you like at Nautilus and you were like, I see this problem at Nautilus. And then you jumped into this? Or like, I didn't transition? But what
Jordan Crook 26:43
happened with all that?
Anthony DiMare 26:44
This is not Yes, go. No, this is not my first go. So we it was funny. That's how I met my co founders, I was trying to recruit them into Nautilus, Nautilus was building essentially ship optimization software, think of like ways, but for ships, but instead of ativy, as quickly as possible, you're gonna get there as efficiently as possible, hopefully save a bunch of fuel, hopefully save ship owners a bunch of money. That was the whole thesis, we were collecting a bunch of, we had a bunch of sonar data that we were collecting from the ships. And we were like, like, wonder if there's something we can do with this. And it turns out, a lot of ships don't have the depth rating on their sonars to do things in the deep ocean. But you could theoretically start to get in a lot of that was driven by the desire to start to try to figure out the ocean weather prediction problem, because it sucks. It's just people have no idea where and when weather shows up on the ocean, hurricanes just appear. And then we can try to predict right like before they appear, we don't know where they're going to show up, or when they're going to show up or whatever. And like that has a massive implication on the p&l of any voyage. It also has a massive implication on the amount of fuel that's burned on any of these ships. And so we were like really looking for a better ocean weather prediction system. And we sort of tinkered with the idea of like, listen, we've got all this sonar data, like maybe there's a way we can employ a meteorologist. And we can use some of it to help predict weather better if you know the seafloor. We talked to MIT meteorologists, and we're like, where's the big gap? Why can't we do this. And they're like, We don't know the bounding box of the seafloor. So the error bar and most of the ocean is plus or minus a kilometer. And even the biggest supercomputers in the world can't model out the energy movement in the ocean enough to be able to predict weather accurately over the ocean. So like, you're kind of shit out of luck until you get to do that. And now we're getting better at it. Because there are companies like sail drone, and so far ocean out there that are doing really interesting things to try and move that space forward. But it's still not great. Like, we still don't know anything. So I didn't see that there. And then ultimately, I've been thinking about this since I was a kid. Like, since it was like 20,000 leagues under the sea. I'm like, This is great. This is fascinating. This was far more interesting to me than when I was a kid. I didn't have aspirations to go to Mars. Frankly, I didn't. But I did totally think about would it be cool to like, figure out how what was in the ocean? Like, almost like a child like level? This is a fascinating, crazy problem. I don't know why we haven't done it. What you have now are a bunch of people that have these submarines, where you can see 30 feet ahead of you. That's not ocean, like it is ocean. I don't want to denounce that that is ocean exploration. But like, can you in little bits of the ocean? Yeah.
Jordan Crook 29:15
I mean, like, a lighter and a dark cave. It's really like not much of
Anthony DiMare 29:19
a huge cave. Yeah, what we need is actually an immensely large scalable system that can basically interpret data at enormous scales very quickly, that is ultimately going to be what ocean exploration is because you can't use traditional cameras or radar or lasers to do broad huge area coverage very quickly. You have to use sonars. And you have to use things like magnetometers, which makes it very challenging terrain and let's get to like farm.
Jordan Crook 29:48
Yeah, let's get some my start. It's good to join. We should I think we should. So what I wanted to talk to you about is like because I get the unique viewpoint of being able to watch Your Instagram stories and your Don't worry Darryl and your, your journey as a founder like your day to day, I'm sure that there's like a lot of administrative stuff that you do and a lot of typing on your computer and all of that. But there's also like a lot of fun stuff, right? Not that that's not fun, but I see you like at a dock putting a fucking thing in the ocean, right? You're hanging out and doing cool stuff very boots on the ground, like playing with hardware, robots, etc. To like, figure this out. And so I'm just like, curious one, do you feel superior to other founders? And that you get to do that? And to? Not really, to like, wow, what's your favorite part? Is it that like stuff where you're fucking around in the ocean? Or is there like some other piece of being a founder? That's more so like
Anthony DiMare 30:45
you are? But I want to just clear up that the answer to your first question is no, I think anyone trying to do anything, in general, particularly start companies, it's like, this is a super hard thing. I have a particular respect for hardware founders, hardware is hard in general. So like, I have a particularly soft spot for people that try and solve some of the harder problems, particularly the ones that do involve deep hardware solutions.
Jordan Crook 31:08
What about if you're making like a voice changing app? Those people please suck? Right? You don't feel better than that?
Or like a mobile game? An ad supported? Like, do you really like those guys?
Darrell Etherington 31:20
We're just beta you, you don't have to.
Anthony DiMare 31:23
I was gonna say like, I'm gonna just go, no comment on this one. Like, wow, you guys are just trying to pull it out of me, God, no, but my favorite part. In general, I'm a build, like, I like building things. And I particularly love problems where there's a highly, highly technical, really tough, challenging problem that is hard to communicate to the average person where usually involves some sort of like sleepy, unknown market, that's huge, and usually is akin to like an infrastructure like play. And what I like is being at the intersection of the financial challenges around that the actual technology itself and the way you ultimately get people to adopt that I like sitting in the middle of that triangle. So do I love working with robots? Yeah, it's like fucking awesome. When I get to be out in California at a robotics facility, it brings me drag. I'm a mechanical engineer. It's my schooling. And I've worked with boats and I love being on boats, I'm happier on the ocean. So like, anytime I get to do that, yeah, it's a great day, when we're testing. It's usually like pretty high strung, there's like a lot of things that's like high stakes, hope we don't lose the vehicle. Those are all things that are like going through my head, my co founder is really the champion of a lot of the robotics and like, frankly, I'm not the best person to be running the robotics organ. So I like I put a lot of trust in, you know, I get to live almost vicariously through a lot of the advancements that he's making. Because of my past and where I sit, I lived in sort of the big data, maritime cloud systems world and that's a lot of where I've spent my time is making sure that when we do collect data, that that data can then be very quickly and easily and like beautifully accepted within organizations. I also really enjoy selling it just really enjoy it i really like and not selling and like a sleazy salesman, like thing, like I really enjoy feeling. Okay, this is like a fundamentally better way to do it. And I know that this is gonna, like be a different way for you. And I know that's, like, really challenging for a lot of people. But I really love trying to help them understand that the world doesn't have to be that way. It could be this way. So I really, really, really, really like that. I like building and I like selling a lot, I guess is the short Oh, it's totally
Jordan Crook 33:41
trust you and you say you don't like selling in a sleazy way, because I know from all the experience I have with Anthony, he's like probably the most optimistic, positive human being I've ever come into contact with Jordan. The opposite? Literal opposite. They're always like doom and gloom. It's all over no sense in trying and Anthony's. Like, no matter what if we sing, we'll feel better. You know, like, Anthony is real good vibe.
Anthony DiMare 34:10
All the time. does help a lot. It
Jordan Crook 34:13
helps everything. I agree. Yeah, so I imagine you selling and like inspiring rather than bull. Yeah, I can totally see that. And it's
Anthony DiMare 34:22
not I mean, bullying isn't even the right word. I'm really thankful that on the team, we've got a lot of like systems level thinkers, so like people that are able to dissect the complexities of like, lots of moving parts, not just the technology side of it, not just the operational complexity of it, not just the financial challenges around it, but like the gray areas of how the world actually changes is in finding the people that in the right way to tell a story to those people and get them to understand that we're not just talking about exactly the same data a little cheaper. What we're actually talking about here in a renewable energy sense, is you're gonna get to be able to deploy renewable energy much faster. than you would ever be able to do before, and it's such as offshore wind, like, we're super excited about the future of like tidal power, like huge amount of moving physical stuff that we're not taking advantage of yet at scale, which, again, we shouldn't be doing. Yeah, I think we will be doing but it's easy to sell when you know, it's better. Yes,
Jordan Crook 35:16
it's like a no brainer, right? That's the idea of building a startup selling your product should be a no brainer. Or otherwise, you should look at your business, rethinking what your product is, or rethinking the price that it sold out or whatever. Because if you're coming in and disrupting an entire industry, it shouldn't be hard to go in and be like, Hey, you spend this much and it takes this much time and this much work. And like, here's this other option that's down on all those metrics, like it should be easy.
Anthony DiMare 35:43
But to be the realist in the room, actually, now take the though I am do I am an optimist, right, curveball. I know these energy companies, they don't change very quickly. Yeah. Right. Like, it actually is quite challenging. I don't want to sit here and say, It's the easiest thing in the world, and it's gonna just change. That's not actually how a lot of things happen, right. So I do think it's a unique combination of being able to do and balance all those different things. Yeah, but I am a huge enak. Because
Darrell Etherington 36:09
you're, you're very passionate and like, it's easy to think about the possibilities. When you're describing this stuff, I get very excited when I hear you talk about it. Because I'm like, Oh, my God, there's so much potential for so many things. And like, it's gonna be wonderful what we can do at this. But if you're thinking about that, in the context of like an institution, maybe you convince the people you're in the room with, but those things are built purposefully with layers against erosion, right? Like they, in many ways benefit from inertia and benefit from like, burden hand mentality of like, look, you're right, that this thing that we do is massively expensive. But we've also done it seven times, and we know that it reliably will happen that way. And there's seven layers of middle management designed to wear down your message of hope so that it becomes nothing by the time it hits the well. Here's
Anthony DiMare 36:53
one of the big things that we've learned along the way, all these companies are about risk reduction. Yeah. So like, that's a huge part. And a huge benefit, actually, of how we're going to market, this is a massive risk reduction, you're not only going to save money, right? Right now, when you commissioned a survey, like you hope it's going to happen within eight to 12 months, that's best case, you really hope that that's going to happen. But along with that you've got personnel risk, you get people on the ocean, things go wrong, you've got marine mammal risk, you better like hope that ship is not heading toward a migrating fleet of Wales and protecting species observer that you're required by law to have up in the up in the top. And that's
Jordan Crook 37:31
not even your installation, environmental assessment. That's you're just sort of observational, free. Yeah.
Anthony DiMare 37:37
Just so like you've got time risk, capital risk, human risk, marine mammal risk, you've got all these other, you've got timeline risks, you've got weather risk. And what we're trying to do is say all that goes away, if you just do it this way. And by the way, it's tender. That's the sort of thing where, yes, there's layers of middle management that are sort of built around this thing. But like, actually, what we're trying to do is take something where there's a ton of risk in the activity. And sometimes you even spend all that money and all that time, and you get a bad data set back and shit like that. And so what we're proposing is basically far ahead of time, showing them that exact same data set that they would have wanted, or would have gotten 12 months later saying like, you could just license it right now. Yeah, you get rid of all that risk, then you get this data set.
Jordan Crook 38:24
And there's nothing to even prove it. It's not a trust me, and I'll prove it. No, it's here. All
Anthony DiMare 38:28
right, it's already done. Done it, the data is here. Like, here's the specs. And that's the world that we think is ultimately that's a revolution change in the way that we are able to do something like that was by building this huge proprietary stack of technology. And normal survey company can just go do this because they have to do permits, which we have a beautiful sort of because our sonars are all above 200 kilohertz, they're not impacting marine mammals, the vehicle is said to be long and 100 pounds moves at two knots. If we were to like hit a whale, it's the whale is going to do more damage to will just be like, Yeah, it's like a like check. It's like shattered, like swimming through the water. Right? You know, it's not going to do much to an animal, we get around a lot of the pruning processes. And this gives us this unique position where we get to really look at a market and fundamentally rethink the way we get to change the business model rather than because of that, which hopefully, hopefully does quite a bit for the way that all critical infrastructure, offshore wind is just to start right you talked about all these other
Jordan Crook 39:24
things. Well, if Elon gets his offshore launch pads, he's going to need your help. I mean, that's for sure these are starship and point to point
Anthony DiMare 39:30
interesting because I don't think he bought fixed he didn't buy fixed platforms he bought floating float or the floating anchored or flat it I gotta
Jordan Crook 39:40
actually, I don't know if they're free floating or floating.
Anthony DiMare 39:42
Yeah, I think I think he's got you where you gotta be able to, well, you gotta be able to move them. Of course,
Darrell Etherington 39:48
I also want to ask if this is also fun, can we have some underwater statements because you're talking about being a kid and like seeing these things. And that was what I remember from being a kid and I was honestly like, more into that kind of stuff than I was MySpace stuff as well. Looking back on it, it always struck me as like, I mean, maybe because I was a pessimist but I was always like, well, space is fundamentally empty. Like, I don't think there's I know what it's up there and it's not much of stuff gonna
Anthony DiMare 40:11
suck to live in space for like, a very long time. It's gonna like be really, really bad. Like, yeah, you thought High School was bad. Imagine high school, but like, in a bubble where you can't go outside? Yeah, and I'm like, I don't exactly yeah, all about trying to get there, it's just gonna take a while. And there's gonna be a very unique type of person that's going to be ready for that for like, a long period of time is my opinion.
Jordan Crook 40:32
If I could buy a condo underwater, and my window is like, yeah, ocean scape. I'm all about I'm all about it. So just tell me that. Yeah, I
Anthony DiMare 40:39
mean, I, you know, I think a lot of it's going to rely on like understanding the geophysical, think of it literally like property. Yes, a lot of it's going to rely on the geophysical risk of any given area. And then if we can build an International Space Station, we have already had sea labs, this has happened already. We are just beginning, what I believe is a complete transformation in many, many major fundamental industries that, you know, in a way that we're sort of calling like a blue centric economy. And so like real estate, and living might be a part of that energy should be a part of that data centers. And internet's already in its
Jordan Crook 41:16
potentially manufacturing, who knows, there's all kinds of stuff that could work that I
Anthony DiMare 41:21
believe, yeah, that's correct. And that extracts dependence, when you look at like the growth of the blockchain space, and how much energy you need to do that, like, we got to find more efficient ways to do this, like this thing doesn't scale super nicely, you know, when you look at that, and then you think about the hardware that's needed and the infrastructure, it actually makes a lot more sense to do this on the bottom of the seafloor, when you have a natural cooling environment, some things it turns out are probably gonna be better at pressure and depth. For example, keeping carbon dioxide, a liquid and not a gas, you have to keep it cold temperatures, and high pressures. There is a place on earth where that happens naturally, where you don't have to spend energy to keep it in a liquid form. So how we do that environmentally, I think we'll all rely on good maps, good monitoring, all of that has to exist. But are there going to be cities like Yeah, I think so. Are you like, I don't see why not funny, like, what I found quite interesting is when you go to build a wind farm, there's actually an archeological review process, you have to prove that humans didn't live on the shelf at a previous time in history. And I did not until we started looking at it, it's and like, so for example, there is evidence of ancient riverbeds in a time on earth when there was less water, and there is more ice on the caps. So you have to imagine now the ocean is you know, you look at the continental shelf, right, so you got land and then it goes down a little bit. And then it's like, continental shelf for like quite a bit. If there was significantly if there was 50 meters, the ocean was 50 meters lower, that would have been land. And so there is this is a budding new area of exploration science right now. But like people are maybe couldn't live there. This idea of like Atlantis, you know, it's actually not that far fetched. In fact, it's actually like, right, maybe no one can tell you that it really doesn't exist. No one can tell you that it also does exist largely because we don't have any datasets. Maybe one day you don't have the datasets, right. Like so. Yeah, we know. Right. Like these are all things that sound bad
Jordan Crook 43:15
press push for you guys are like we found a city under the plan is
and then you can just put that as like a press release. Let us call us for more info.
Anthony DiMare 43:29
Listen, like the weird world. Right. So? I don't know. So we we think it's great. Yeah. What's more fun stuff that you've got. I mean,
Jordan Crook 43:41
I think we're, yeah, we have Darryl cap subsidized me. No, yeah,
I subsidized. No, but I love talking to you. I unfortunately have to go have a much less fun. I have to be there to real reasons.
Anthony DiMare 43:55
For fun. I didn't even realize we were at time. So now this was a really fun combo, guys. It was great.
Jordan Crook 44:07
All right, Jordan. That was our chat with Anthony, who it was revealed is a friend of yours.
Big reveal? Juicy. Yeah, it was good to catch up with Anthony on the friend side. And then on like the professional podcast side. I do think it's really interesting how big of a thing this is to tackle when he was describing like the cost and time to do what he's doing or even like, not as good as what bedrock does even is like insane. And then understanding the need these offshore wind farms are one thing but you could see how there would be needs elsewhere. It's a huge problem to tackle and then on top of it, like think about how tough it is to build an autonomous vehicle and then be like, Oh, by the way, it's going to the bottom of the ocean, like I mean, it's just kind of enormous in terms of the problem, but I also we got hung up on this a little bit in the middle of the pack. had gas. But like, I just feel like this could be used for evil too.
Yeah, I mean, it definitely could. And we did talk a little bit about it. I think the argument that Anthony makes in the other direction is the one that a lot of technologists make generally, which is, look, eventually someone is going to make this technology available affordably. At scale. It's better if it's someone who has in mind, the possible pitfalls and misuses of it. And if it's like someone who is exclusively intent on using it for those purposes, right, it's kind of like, it comes up around nuclear technology comes up around essentially every major like, right and breaking technology, AI or like deep fakes, right? Deep fakes is a big one, because it's like, should we even do this? And those people are like, look, we have to do it, because we have to figure out ways to capture it, because nefarious actors are going to do it regardless. Right? And they're going to do what they want to do with it.
Yeah. But I mean, I feel like sure people will build this technology. And people will always be trying to exploit things. But he was like, talking about how his clients, he's talking about both being like a third party monitor, and also having clients that would need monitoring. And like that's the piece where he's like, it is pretty nuanced. And it's like, well, but like,
I think he's more talking about being a data set provider to a third party, who would be the monitor, which is maybe a difference in degree only or whatever. But it could be it could be a key difference, right? Especially if other people come to the market and try to do it bedrock is doing and then provide comparable datasets. And then you have a third party who like oversees all of them. That would be like the ideal situation.
That would be Yeah, that that helps, I think suits me.
Darrell Etherington 46:39
Now you can sleep
Jordan Crook 46:41
underwater city.
Yeah, I mean, he's such a, he's a very like dynamic person, the energy around what he's doing comes across, we talked a bit about that, too, like how good he is at effectively being a salesperson, because he like just believes so wholeheartedly and what he's doing. But the thing that I thought was interesting about the autonomous technology, the approach, like you talked about is like it is very, very, very hard. And I think we only kind of touched on that like a little bit because I think he kept trying to bring it up. And we would kind of like go like, yeah, we know it's hard and then move on. But like he talked about it compared to autonomous ground vehicle technology, right? That's a totally different thing. And you can't just take everything from cars and self driving cars ported over to self driving sub self swimming, so I don't know. Sure. Yeah. Cuz lasers don't work underwater in the same way because of like light refraction. Right. And like, totally. Does that work? Hello? Yeah. Radar. Yeah, it works. But it doesn't work in the same way. So you have to like, modify all these. And then you sonar and yeah, yeah, totally. Science,
Science. I get it. I'm with you. So the funny thing is, I do get what you're saying. But like, also, when you say it, I'm just like, why are you talking about Captain a? Yeah, I mean, I could totally see Anthony. And we talked about this a little bit being like a great salesperson. And he's just got so much charisma and like, also optimism, I think that's pretty common characteristic among founders, like you can't just like a president has to be an egotist. Or a narcissist, like a founder pretty much has to be an optimist. And it's like the ones who have the right amount of pragmatism layered into their right sickening optimism that tend to be successful. And I could see Anthony having that right. Next,
right. Yeah, we've not yet spoken to a sort of defeatist founder, which I think it'd be a super fun experience. If
we could follow company, and then we could talk to ourselves, we're pretty defeated.
Darrell Etherington 48:48
wouldn't last very long, I think so the window for like,
Unknown Speaker 48:54
it's over before it started. We're never gonna
Darrell Etherington 48:57
shut down. Why don't we just go ahead and shut?
Jordan Crook 49:01
Sorry, users?
No, but he is Yeah, he did. I do think he has that pragmatist aspect of it. It's cool that he wants to get out there and like, look at the stuff even though that's another side of the business he's on, but he's out there involved in that, right. So he's on the boats, like, that would be a very good way to just kind of like bring home how real the challenges are, because there's just a bunch of actual physical natural challenges that you encounter. Right, right. Yeah. It
could be stormy that day, right? Yeah. Or like something weird happening, where you could lose a vehicle like you talked about that. And that was something I never even thought about, but like you work forever on this prototype, and then it's just like in the ocean for good. You can't get it back. So I think I mean, money. That's the combination, though, right? You're an optimist enough to try to get into this market to begin with and be like, I can map the ocean floor. It's just 70% of our planet, right? No big deal. Right? And then also the peace for your life because you're tackling such a hard thing. You constantly got to face pragmatism. You can't have Wait it right? Because the reality is that it's been hard,
big. Yeah. Especially. And he brought this up to when your clients are primarily very risk averse, very like stodgy, risk averse, large institutions, right. Like you can't help but address the pragmatic side, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's very cool. I can't wait to see what more they do. It was cool that we recorded this during a week when they actually discovered like, oh, big ship, underwater, like the sea ice or something crazy. Yeah, from an Antarctic Expedition. It wasn't to be clear bedrock, but like, someone that could happen knows what they could find down there. They could find a whole civilization. I think we talked about Atlantis, but I want them to find the Atlantis of like, it's Aquaman or whatever, or name or if you're a Marvel fan.
I always think about if like the alien invasion has already happened. And they all had their underwater. Yeah, they're like deep in our ocean. And they're like, plot. I heard
that one time. This is definitely a tangent. But I read a book with a time where the aliens were like, had to be kept under very high pressure. So they did leave live in like ocean riffs or whatever, because if not, they would just kind of splat it everywhere. Yes, they needed their atmosphere. And that's probably true. That's probably a true real factual thing. And you've heard it here first. Yeah. And bedrock will confirm later. Yeah, so thanks for joining us. Aliens are real. Boundaries hosted by myself, TechCrunch news editor Darrell Etherington and TechCrunch Managing Editor Jordan crook sharp. McCarney is our executive producer. We are produced by Maggie Stamets and edited by Cal Keller TechCrunch. His audio products are managed by Henry pick of it. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast and on twitter@twitter.com slash man. You can also email us at found@techcrunch.com and you can call us and leave a voicemail at 510-936-1618. Also, we'd love if you could spare a few minutes to fill out our listener survey at bit.li/pound listener survey. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai