Roberto Coustas & Konstantinos Kyriakopoulos, DeepSea: Innovation that is Changing the Rules in Shipping

Panagiotis: Konstantinos, Roberto, welcome!

Konstantinos and Roberto: Hello! 

Panagiotis: I'm so glad we're here together and that we’ll get a chance to talk about a very interesting story which you've created, DeepSea, and all the things that have happened. We have a lot to talk about and I would like to begin with what DeepSea does. 

Konstantinos: We basically apply artificial intelligence to shipping to optimize the ship itself. For example, all decisions taken for a ship— the speed that it will take at any given time, control of the engine, how it will be chartered, where it will go etc.— for all this to be done more efficiently, using data and artificial intelligence. We mainly have software products in the cloud, software as a service, but we also have systems that we install on the ship itself and data collection for engine automation. 

Panagiotis: What I find very interesting is that you talked about artificial intelligence long before it became a hype so, in 2017 DeepSea starts. 

Roberto: That's right. It was founded in '17, we started in '16, meaning we came up with the original idea back when artificial intelligence was just in the universities. We had just finished up— myself with my postgraduate degree, and Konstantinos with a postgraduate degree from Cambridge and then, at this stage, only Facebook, Google and very large companies basically had research departments. There was not even any data to make this thing work when we started. 

Panagiotis: Starting a little from that age, our childhood, what has contributed to this story that you are creating— still creating. I love that, while I have two guests across from me, I am having one conversation. You have known each other since you were children. Tell us a little bit about that. Where, how... 

Konstantinos: First of all, our parents are best friends so we’re sort of spiritual brothers-in-law, so I've known Roberto since he was, like, two or three years old. 

Roberto: We would see each other 6 months out of the year, Christmas, Easter, summer usually and there was always a break and we would always catch up. And through one of those catch ups, it was just as soon as we had finished our studies when we hadn't seen each other for 1.5 or 2 years, we hadn't met, and we had a catch-up, looked at where we were and essentially launched DeepSea through a discussion which we will talk about in more detail in a little while how exactly it happened. 

Panagiotis: Thinking a bit from my own experience it's very nice when you have some relationships where you may have months or even years since seeing someone and the day you're with them, it's like you’ve been together every day. 

Roberto and Konstantinos: Exactly. 

Panagiotis: I guess that's kind of how you are. Tell me a little bit about your school days, your student years, all of that. Did that contribute to entrepreneurship? 

Roberto: If I start from school, let's say, as a student I was never a good student at school, especially in high school I had almost failed twice due to absences. I was going through a phase at the time where generally I did ok when I wanted to, but this type of thing when you’re not into it and you're in high school, you don't have some particular, shall we say, goal so why should you study? And what really changed things for me personally was when I saw a documentary by Al Gore called "An Inconvenient Truth,” which at the time was— this is also tied with some fires that were raging one summer in Greece, which is now a very common occurrence and I felt that the world was being destroyed around us before our eyes and nobody was doing anything about it or about climate change. And then I started reading Scientific American, I would go and pick up the magazine and I got more involved in the sciences slowly and I wanted to study Environmental Engineering. I mean, at first I didn't have— What happened afterwards,connecting the dots that ultimately it has an impact on the environment, what we do, was something I didn't know at first, in other words when I started. 

Panagiotis: So you were studying? 

Roberto: So then I go to UCL, to study. I ended up studying mechanical engineering because it was a bit more generalized and also included the environmental aspect if I wanted to go down that route. And I slowly start to get into it more and with various inventions, let's say. And in college, I had created a shoe which could charge your cell phone when you walked, which was very, very uncomfortable. It had a turbine at the bottom of the shoe and had air and when you lifted your leg, it filled up with air, you'd step down and a turbine would turn and it sounded like someone with asthma who was with you like all the time. 

Panagiotis: Did that work? 

Roberto: It worked. In other words, I got a decent grade, it worked, but the professor told me this thing is of no commercial use.

Panagiotis: Fortunately. 

Konstantinos: Yes, okay. Of course we've heard this before and they were wrong. 

Panagiotis: You never know. 

Roberto: Yeah, and then eventually I got involved also with computer science again, okay not exactly randomly. I basically wanted to take a course on programming in college and I was a mechanical engineer and I wanted to take an "easier" programming course to get a good grade and to finish school with a better GPA. And finally we have the first paper that we have to hand in, and I hand in the assignment on the first day the professor assigns it to us. And because I did very well, he sends me an email saying “You're overqualified, more qualified than what is required for this class, so you cannot take this course. You have to choose another one from the computer science department.” And he sends me an email and it says the only course that's available is artificial intelligence and neural networks. “Everyone who attended has failed,” he says— “that is not a computer science major, so good luck.” So in short... 

Panagiotis: Did you take it? 

Roberto: I took it and I didn't know where it would lead, and what it is we say about the dots, and it was when it started and I took this course, I had no idea where that would lead me. So that afterward I would be doing a master's degree on that and everything that followed. 

Panagiotis: So you're doing a master's degree in artificial intelligence? 

Roberto: Yes at Oxford, yes. 

Panagiotis: We are starting to connect the dots— how DeepSea is a story that starts talking about artificial intelligence much earlier than anyone else, and certainly in your industry. We need to have that in the picture. Konstantinos, what about you? 

Konstantinos: I was more like the kid who realizes quickly that he's going to be an engineer when he grows up. So I really liked math and physics and those things as a kid. I used to play with lego mindstorms and stuff like that. Since— I will say that I was a good student from the beginning. Around the age of 12-13 a teacher told me, “You have to start writing code,” so I started, like most people I know, experimenting on my own with java. I finished school early, I did what they call a gap year in England, that is, working for a year before university. I did freelance development. I also worked at Microsoft for a while as a programmer, and then I went to study in England at Cambridge University, general engineering. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do with my life, so everything was included, i.e. from civil engineer to electrician everything, and then I saw that I liked it better and I also had a background in things having to do with computers and code and I got into the IT side of things. And when I saw that the first courses existed then, which went into artificial intelligence, this immediately interested me.Mostly because I didn't know how it was possible for artificial intelligence to exist, how a computer can think, it didn't make sense, and out of curiosity, more so, I went into it. That's where I ended up doing my doctorate and I stayed at Cambridge until much later. 

Panagiotis: Somewhere in there you must logically have met up in England, right? 

Roberto: After England. 

Panagiotis: After England, so in Greece, back here? 

Roberto: Yes. 

Panagiotis: You finish your studies and you face a dilemma to come back or stay where you are. What makes you decide to return? 

Roberto: Basically, if we go— because the idea was not something that happened in one day, I do not know how it happens for other entrepreneurs, but it wasn't something that in one day, one night, came to someone and that was it. The idea was something that evolved and formed over several years. That was the first time I came face to face with the problem, I still didn't even know if we would ever create a company to solve it. This was when I was, afterwards, at a a second type of university. I had gone to do an internship at a shipping company and the problem was that China was making some new ships called eco ships, promising 15% better consumption under specific conditions, which was also much more expensive. And at that time no ship owner knew if it was worth investing in these ships that promised optimum consumption due to the increased price. And they were all trying, with excel, to compare the ships they already had with these new ships, which some people had bought, and they also had very limited data. And because you base the consumption of a ship on so many parameters, for example, waves, wave height, undercurrents, wind and direction. There are so many factors that it would be impossible, essentially, to compare using the same data two completely different ships. And since this problem existed, it remained in the back of the mind. That summer passed and eventually, with the research department I used to work for in this shipping company, we didn't get anywhere. And then when I went to this class, Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks, what made an impression on me— I enter the room, I sit down, and the first thing the teacher says is that with problems that are multidimensional, which are very difficult to solve, the best way to solve them is neural networks. And somehow I automatically made the connection there. Oh, that problem that existed back then, perhaps it could be solved with neural networks like technology. But again, I had no idea about what was going to happen. That this was going to be a company. I simply made a connection at the time. I did a master’s degree at Oxford, I returned to Greece and I met up one day with Konstantinos who had then finished his master's degree at Cambridge and he was going to get a PhD. And we see that we both had a lot of love for artificial intelligence and for the potential it actually has in changing how the world around us works. Because for me, it is not a technology that simply improves, to some small extent, an industry. It just completely changes the mindset, especially since, as engineers, we have learned to operate— usually when you're an engineer, you've learned that, fine, I'm laying down some parameters, some assumptions 

and with these assumptions, I solve a problem. And, always with every assumption, you narrow down the problem so you can solve it. Because if you take all its complexity, you can't— you need to simplify it enough to be able to solve it. Artificial intelligence is changing this entire mindset, how it works and that's what I discussed with Konstantinos at the time at this coffee shop we had gone to for hours and hours. And Konstantinos because he's quite, shall we say, modest, since he was very young. My brother is 2 years older than me, so he is 3 years older than Konstantinos and we were at the dinner table, 12-13 years old, and he was talking about mathematics. My brother was in high school and Konstantinos was in middle school meaning that he worked with completions from a very young age. 

Panagiotis: Okay, we've realized that... 

Roberto: He was very, very good and the great thing was that it started not as a business idea. But, at the time we said wow, it would be very cool if we could get data and actually run some experiments and see if this technology can really have some application in this industry. 

Konstantinos: So basically, we had a conversation about this problem. We didn't discuss about our lives, what country we wanted to be in, but what I said is, I believe that if you put this on a different network, you can solve the problem. At the time, the best accuracy that all these engineers had achieved who were working on this, must have been like 15%, something like that. So I said can you give it to me so that I can have a go? He sent them to me. I was on holiday in Paros at the time. I had a microsoft surface, something like a tablet and I tried it on there and I saw that we're able to very quickly reduce it to 5% error, which has now become 1%. So then we met again and we said, okay, does anybody do that? And the answer was no. I was also thinking about what I wanted to do with artificial intelligence, everybody was doing the same thing, speech, language processing. I really liked the idea of applying it to something like that in the real world. So slowly, we started with small steps. At some point, we had to make it a company. 

Roberto: We don't know how this can be a company, but oil is expensive. We imagine that knowing how much one consumes is important so someone will want to pay for this service. And that's how we started forming the idea, and it became what it did afterwards. 

Panagiotis: The first question that pops up spontaneously here is that, okay, you've studied artificial intelligence and neural networks, which I don't know exactly what neural networks are. It would be nice if you could tell us a very quick definition of what neural networks are. 

 

Konstantinos: A neural network essentially is a machine that can repeat something it has seen many times. So you have some kind of physical system or a malfunction where you have input and output comes out. Looking at it a thousand, million, billion times that something has been done, then it can do it. For example, you go to the airport, you put your passport in this machine that looks at it, and it looks at your face and says, yes you are the same person. How does it do that? Has anyone gone in to write something? Do you go in, measure the size of the nose? No. The way it works is, they took millions of pairs of photos where in half of them it, was the same person and half were different people. they trained it, and then that's what it knows from now on. When you give it a pair, it finds the same person. So this technology, which is something very specific— which is called a neural network, can be used for very different things. For example, ChatGPT, which we use now, is the exact same thing. In other words, they’ve given it a huge volume of text with questions, answers, of various things anyway, and then it says that on the basis of all the texts that I have seen when I was trained. 

Panagiotis: It foresees the best solution. 

Konstantinos: What was the question, what is the answer in the new question that came to me, what is the answer, this, this is what it does. We do the same thing for ships. As strange as it may seem, it is exactly the same thing. You've seen hundreds of ships for years— every minute, what is the weather like, what is the speed, what is the draft, what is the exact condition of the engine? So if I now take this ship, which is like this or like that, I'm going to put it in such weather at such speed. How much fuel will it consume? 

Panagiotis: Why didn't someone else do it? What do you think puts you in a leading position? 

Konstantinos: As it is always the case with innovations, some things had to be done before this could happen. One was the interface of the ship with the land via satellite link. In other words, until 2010, ships couldn't communicate on land every minute. There was no data, so this technology suddenly allowed shipping companies to have all this data, which at first we didn't know what to do with. Then the second thing is that artificial intelligence, although many will say that it was invented in 1970, which is valid, but anyway, widespread use of it also took off around then, 2012-2013, mainly due to the developments in video games that allowed GPUs which give us the computational power to be able to do— to train neural networks with lots of data. So it was the right time, it was exactly the right time. And it had to somehow be bridged, the world of artificial intelligence with the world of shipping— which are two completely different worlds. And there are not too many people, neither in the first nor the second, who deal with the other. And we were in the right 

place at the right time. 

Roberto: And because we also mentioned before, the report Outliers, 

It says this a lot, specifically that— usually to make a breakthrough in any industry, time and place play a crucial role. Meaning, we are Greeks above all. Shipping in Greece is a huge industry that controls a country. Greece has, I think, 0.01% of the world's population and it controls 20% of global shipping. In other words, per square kilometer, how many shipping companies are in Athens that don’t exist anywhere else in the world? And that is the second thing, as Konstantine says, the possibility exists to have data. And thirdly, I did my masters in '14-'15. In 2014, the professor that taught us at Oxford, he stayed for 6 months, he couldn't stay for the whole year. Google took him for Deepamind because that had just started and then all this, and so if someone had gone to university 2 years before that, they would not have this knowledge. 

Konstantinos: Now you know 17-year-olds who can build neural networks. Then the people who had studied this thing very seriously, were very few. It was available in 10 universities. I think we're the only 2 who got involved in shipping who completed their studies. 

Panagiotis: They got picked by other companies and went into other industries which were very... 

Konstantinos: They were very few. Now there are too many but now we have gained a lead that we believed in early on. 

Panagiotis: That plays a very big part in it, right. 

Konstantinos: We started then and worked hard on it. 

Panagiotis: You make the decision at some point to start the company, to found DeepSea, in 2017, if I'm not mistaken. Tell us a little bit about this process, how is it that from a simple idea and from some pitches, to some shipping companies— for it to become a tangible company? 

Konstantinos: It's slow at first and then very fast. It is an extremely educational process, it’s something we've never had before.... 

Panagiotis: You created the company in Greece, right? 

Konstantinos: In Greece. In the beginning, it was a project, we set out to find some of the top engineers to help us, get it set up, to find some funding from European projects, to somehow build the first platform and give it to some shipping companies to try it out. That's how it started. Then, we went and raised money from the first VC in Greece and then that's where we had to— you get to a point where, okay, now we have to get serious because this is used by real people who need it in their daily lives. Things break down, we need to learn how a company is created, how procedures are performed, what are the roles you need, so this all happened very quickly in '18. 

Roberto: I think the most difficult thing is in the beginning. I don't even know how we made the decision now that we look back at it because we didn't know at all how to build a company. And we started it not having in our minds that, yes we will aim for DeepSea to become a company with 100 employees. We had a goal, okay, the project is interesting, it’s heading somewhere. I think that if we make it, perhaps a couple of customers will want it— who had expressed interest for 2-4 ships. So kind of step-by-step, we were running the process and because at the beginning we didn't know at all what a business is, what it means to raise money, we thought that if a fund came in, they were going to take our company. and we didn't want that at all. And I actually snapped when we started and at that point for a year and a half the company had started operating from '17 to early '19. We started quite late, as Konstantinos said, with our first customers in Greece and because we didn't have the money to bring in good, experienced, employees— they were all too young— we recruited from the National Technical University of Athens. We were sending LinkedIn messages, if anyone wanted a summer internship, because they also were familiar with artificial intelligence. This was the generation that had started learning at that time at NTUA. They found it very interesting that a company in Greece deals with things that they enjoyed and would do also on their own in order to learn, and we were a group then of 7-8 people in '19, with an average age of 22-23, who were actually, again, trying to solve a problem and build a platform which could be used by the leading shipping companies. And so we give it to a customer in Greece who had purchased a pilot for 2 ships and now, even for the installation to get the data from the ship—which we did— we had an enormous amount of difficulty to achieve this because we had never done it before. So they were the first customers. We truly did the whole process from scratch from getting the data up to handing over the platform and, in any case, they see the platform at their offices and I have a charterer who has come to see them— to visit them and he says we have also installed DeepSea technology, here, check out their platform, and they see the monitors that we had built and he says, “Oh very nice,” and we get a call 2 days later and they tell us, “We want you to come to our headquarters in Geneva.” Where I, Konstantinos, and Simos Hadjigeorgiou went— who was the first guy who wasn't tech and was a bit more business oriented but he did everything from marketing to sales or whatever— and we went from being a company, which if you look at it, was not a serious company in the sense that the screens that we had, which we had found from other organizations that no longer wanted them. I mean it was a mess in the office, it’s not what... 

Panagiotis: It was a Startup. 

Roberto: Totally, totally startup right. And we go to their offices in Geneva.

Panagiotis: Which was a huge building… 

Roberto: a multinational corporation. Huge and we go inside the office and there were 9 people from their side just at the meeting. That was more than what our entire company was and they tell us, “Just a minute so we can get the rest of the people to have a conference call with the other countries.” And we're over here and we didn't understand what was going on. We have a meeting, they see the platform and the really cool thing about this story is that, though I imagine they knew what stage we were at, they believed very much in us which is not something common when you have a startup. In general, sales are very difficult, but he was one of the first people— he was global head of assets, had an important position, and he now saw 2 guys who just had the drive to create and passion for what they were doing. And he gave us a huge opportunity by telling us, since you can see how ships behave based on artificial intelligence, couldn’t you improve the routes of the ships in the future? And we said yes, of course, it’s the next product we are working on. 

Panagiotis: Which you were actually working on or? 

Roberto: Yes, we had started and we knew it was needed, that it’s the next step we just didn't have the capabilities to do a second product. We hadn't even started, so to speak. 

Konstantinos: Basically, what we actually had at the beginning was an idea and a proof of concept, which is in the form of a product. In other words this man, George, realized that this thing would solve his problem. Can you make it like this for me? And it’s at that point that we start and we go in having this contract as well, which we use to raise money more seriously. Say, okay now we're going to make a product, for example, a product which has product market fit, which we are looking at to see what the whole market is worldwide, how they need it so we can then sell it to someone who doesn't buy the idea, but buys the product because it will save him money, and that for us was something very important because we found that we could make something that we will sell to somebody and he will immediately save money by using it, even if he doesn't believe in us and does not want to support the young people who make it, just for his own benefit. So that's very important. 

Panagiotis: And at this point— just to mention the other side, right. When a large multinational decides to support an idea early on, they are the ones who will reap the benefits first. Very important for them themselves to be there and to truly support new ideas and new initiatives. At the time you go to make a cut, you have raised some European money, right? It's 2019, you have raised only one round which is a certain amount.. 

Konstantinos: Did we actually raise money in Greece? 

Roberto: We didn't raise any. We had received from a European 

program $150,000. 

Panagiotis: But with the benefit of a very strong partnership, with a global player, you go to raise money more seriously and I know there's a round which is angel investors, serious heavyweight angel investors. Tell us a little bit about the funding. There have been 2-3.. 

Roberto: More generally to say something that is important also for anyone listening who still hasn't raised any money, that, without exception, all VCs in Greece and abroad told us they didn’t want to invest. Nobody believed in the idea until they saw the Cargil logo during the presentations. 

Panagiotis: So your first round is with angel investors? Tell us a little bit about the first ones.

Konstantinos: Our first round was with Ireon which is a VC. Hector Kimonides who was really the first man to believe in us, and then ETFs in London, Rob Genieser, who is now an agent of the Greek ecosystem. But at that time he was not, we brought him to Greece. 

Panagiotis: You are the first, Rob's first investment. And the way in which Rob, who is also very involved in Endeavor and he's a fantastic investor— it’s because of DeepSea and the exit that you did and we'll go into that as well. Maybe that's why an investment— and we at Endeavor see it as we're trying very hard to bring foreign investors to enter Greek startups, and it's a very nice way for them to have - 

Konstantinos: So ETF, the initials stand for Environmental Technology Fund, they invest in carbonization. He was the first one who looked at what we do and he told us, you guys don’t save money, you save carbon dioxide and that's gold. Which we, at the time, because our customers were mainly Greek shipowners and some of us didn't really understand that, but he had this vision that at some point this is going to be huge. And indeed, after investing, in the following years, they started exiting because shipping was then an exception when it comes to ESG. For example, it was literally an exception. For example, from ETF and the emissions market, it was in the supply chain part, they weren't much concerned with this. In the years that followed, after ‘20 when Rob got involved there was a great deal of pressure on shipping. First of all, from the banks, they created the Poseidon Principles, which stipulated that in order to get some loans you have to have some goals. Then, the European Union said it would tax emissions in the same way as other companies. Then the International Maritime Organization, the IMO, took out targets on the so-called CII, which is essentially a metric... 

Roberto: To grade ships, essentially the same way we have ABCD for all devices and homes, this is now also true for ships. 

Konstantinos: So every ship now has to measure this indicator which is how many emissions it has in carbon dioxide per mile traveled, per tonne of capacity it has, and if it's below some threshold. the ship can practically be rendered useless, because many ports will tell you, you are not allowed to come here etc. There are some thresholds which are getting tighter every year, so all of a sudden the whole market started looking for ways to save fuel. 

Panagiotis: You raise this round of funding, we now have European funds in your cap table, among your shareholders and I think that an upward trend is starting here which will you tell us some key milestones that played a crucial role in your career? What would they be if you have to pick out some of them? Some great collaborations, some great successes? 

Konstantinos: The first thing we did when Rob came in is, we started to think more internationally. So first we hired a sales manager from the Netherlands who put us in the process of implementing a professional sales system with salespeople who make sales, not us. We put together a strategy. Meanwhile, Cargil decided it wanted to try to make on its own what we were doing and chased us away. So we were focused completely on this new

Roberto Koustas, Konos Kyriakopoulos 

DeepSea: Innovation that Changes the Rules in Shipping 

Season 5, Episode 4 

product that no one was using anymore. Actually no, it was used by one Greek. I mean, Seanergy, which was a player that supported us early on. And we're trying to sell it to Wallenius Wilhelmsen, we were running out of money and we managed to clinch the deal, full free deal, 110 ships and that was a turning point for us because we came out with this client and we put out press releases with what the client said, and we also did a study which we published. Which is a big deal because most clients don't want to talk about it. He said we did such, and such, and such and so we proved that we reduced our fuel costs by 7% using DeepSea. That's what launched us.Then we started getting inbound leads from all over the world, we started to enter other markets, Singapore, Germany. 

Panagiotis: Sounds like a very stressful period though. What did you notice about the company, yourselves, do you have any learnings, any courses you have taken? 

Roberto: In general I think that the courses required to actually learn— they are of a completely different nature during the course of the company. In other words, to raise the first funding is to learn how to make presentations, how to pitch to investors, and how to make the company attractive or even make the whole story of the company attractive so that investors can invest. This is the first thing and it's very difficult because from not having raised any money, we then raised $500,000 in September of 2019 and $3 million in March '20 which means that. from not even knowing the meaning of the word investor, we went on and did 2 rounds in 6 months. And then the second thing is, okay, I now have the money, the problem is how do I recruit people because we went from 10 people to 40 in a year and a half and that was terribly difficult in order to be able to maintain both the culture and the structures. And we also had COVID, so it was all remote and to me that's what being an entrepreneur means that no matter what problem you face, there is always one problem after another, you have to be ready and be able to basically solve it with... 

Panagiotis: To cope. 

Roberto: To be calm and cope because the problem always changes. For instance, each milestone was a challenge in itself. 

Konstantinos: We have always had a very strong conviction that what we're doing is the right way to do this thing. So we never stopped. I mean now looking back, we took quite a few big risks. We both worked for free for a very long time. yes, though we had customers who wanted one product we were building another one, we did completely crazy things but it was this big risk that then brought the great benefit and I think this happened because we both had confidence that what we are doing was right, we'd rather fail doing it like this than go and do something else. 

Panagiotis: Was that stressful, was it very difficult?

Roberto: 

Very stressful and that's the good thing about having 2 co-founders because when faced with any difficulty we would be with Konstantinos straight away on the phone or we would go out and through the conversation, we would relieve the pressure together and we would cope with it much more easily. 

Konstantinos: 

No one else has ever done what we do with Wilhelmsen, i.e. a client comes out and publishes a study, "I used this AI product, before I consumed so much, after so much, I saved so much." 

Panagiotis: A great vote of confidence and I think that the period we referred to as being a bit difficult, I imagine this took the weight off both you and the team. 

Konstantinos: I know a lot of founders in other countries who have faced similar challenges. One of the biggest problems is that once such a challenge arises, people leave, but that didn’t happen to us. We have set up a team which has supported us at every level, who stayed with us when we were facing challenges and I think they did this because they knew that we too would support them afterwards, which we did, when we clinched the deal with Wilhelmsen. The first income for the first year we handed it out as bonuses, but they deserved it. 

Roberto: What I want to add in relation to the people is that in general with Konstantinos, we made a conscious decision that we didn't necessarily look at the CV of somebody coming in, but we looked more at the abilities that this person may have and the mindset they have about learning. Because in a startup, the problem is that it grows so fast and everyone's role changes so quickly through time that if you hire someone for what you need today, in 6 months to a year he won't be able to even fill his own position. For example, Panagiota Tziova, who was a product owner, the first one we had at the company, now VP of Product. Simos Hajigeorgiou, who was the first person we had. Antonis Nikitakis, who was the first senior researcher we had, who is now VP of research. We gave them this opportunity to effectively be able to create, and that is the most important thing, I think. 

Panagiotis: If we promote the podcast to the outside world, what foreign companies need to understand is that opportunities exist here on which they don’t need to spend hundreds of millions to develop technologies, and it's something which is a message to the rest of the global ecosystem. The second thing I retain is that hires, the first hires made at a startup, play a very important role. Wrong early hires can be deadly, the same way a lot of money can also be deadly. 

Konstantinos: Layoffs are also very important. If you ask anyone who has been through the journey of a founder, what is the biggest lesson you learned, they will say, if you allow me to answer in English, fire fast. It's very important, because a man who is not fit for a specific position at a specific time can create a problem for the rest of the team and eventually also creates a problem for himself because somewhere else he may have a very great… And that's something that you need to learn, you have to learn not to be soft in such a way that in the end it harms you. 

Roberto: No, because I think if you look at it also from that perspective, that he's the wrong person in an environment that doesn't suit him, then there is no particular guilt because really you help him find something that suits him better and he himself is happier. 

Panagiotis: When does Nabtesco come on the radar? I know that before the exit took place there was also an investment. Tell us about this relationship, how it is forged, and how it is evolving. 

Konstantinos: Well, we went to Zurich, to the European Venture Fair at which time Rob was already in and we were looking for the next VC, where we found Emerald Ventures which is a Swiss company that also specializes, not exclusively, but very much in the carbonization technologies part. Anyway, we negotiate with them, we thought that they would invest, and at the very last moment they tell us, you know, we will invest in you through a fund which we manage on behalf of a company called Nabtesco and also a gentleman is coming as an observer on your boards, Hiroshi Nerima, that won't be a problem, why should it be a problem? So all of a sudden Nabtesco shows up, and there we discover the story of Nabtesco. Nabtesco is a company with over a century of history, which makes motion control systems. 

Panagiotis: I hear this Nabtesco deal, does it have any application for planes? The same need, this wouldn’t all be lost. The solution that has been created of optimization and of... 

Konstantinos: Now, in addition to continuing in shipping and with what we did and with the new things that we are doing together with Nabtesco, we also become an AI center of excellence within Nabtesco to bring this technology to other markets in which it is active. Airplanes are one of these markets, we won’t begin from there. We have seen what the first projects are, but we may get there. 

Panagiotis: We very often also see technologies in Greece, where a big platform comes along, a big company, and takes them over. At some point, some will say maybe a little too soon. Some are due to the ecosystem and the maturity of the ecosystem, but eventually, a big company buys a technology and it says you open its platform and you see all of a sudden this company becoming gigantic. There's a story here, and many times indeed the growth is so large that it occurs within the platform and at this international company that we see founders staying and continuing and also excelling within this company. A classic case who we've interviewed and who is very close to Endeavor, Aimilios Chalamandaris.Samsung, right? All Samsung now builds text-to-speech technology here, and he is named Samsung's best scientist, crazy stuff. After the exit, tell us about some metrics that show a little bit of growth, how many people, what are you working on?

Konstantinos: Year on year from the exit up to the anniversary of the exit which will be now in a month or two, we've just about doubled the revenue. 

Panagiotis: That's fantastic. 

Konstantinos: Our people have gone up from, I think, 80 to 100 persons. Sorry, 99. And we have more hires ahead of us now, so in general, we have growth at all levels. In the pro-exit era, we managed to get clients in Ankara, in the major markets, i.e. we have them in containers, in tankers, in bulk carriers, Ro-Ro. We have quite a few in Greece, quite a few in Northern Europe, and we have, shall we say, a very good position in Singapore and Japan, so in the first stage we want growth. Growth, in the beginning, we can't do volume, which now that we've moved on from the early adopter stage it’s more a product which is desirable and we don't have to prove it from scratch every time because they can Google us, it’s easier. Then together with Nabtesco, we are moving towards the great vision that is the autonomous ship. So we got approval a month ago for our first product that we sell together, which allows a ship on the high seas to be autonomous. In other words, we’re talking about a retrofit which you can install in 2 days on any ship that turns it into a ship which, on the high seas, all its speeds are transferred to the engine automatically, having a computer for these to be sensitive. And by '26, and we've already started work, we want to have full autonomy. 

Panagiotis: Most importantly, usually after such acquisitions these companies, at least this is what we see for the most part, in the majority of these investments. These companies make a decision to keep development and research and technology centers here and what do you end up with? You end up with world-class research and development in the country because of this exit, which in shipping is the first, in maritime tech. Which we call the technology sector in shipping, this is the first big exit in technology and it's, I think, very exciting. Of course, then Marine Traffic was created, so it is no longer the only one, but you are the first. 

Roberto: No okay, it's very important because that knowledge that is being built up in startups then starts to trickle down to the whole ecosystem. And it's very important because one of the problems that existed when we started it was that we were looking for people in key positions 

that have the experience to help us get where we wanted to go, but there was no one who had experience who could repeat something, shall we say, scale a company in Greece. While in America, let's say, and especially in San Francisco, one of the greatest assets it has is that there are so many companies that have duplicated unicorns, to reach the value of one billion, who know exactly how to do it and who to hire, and they go from a big company, from LinkedIn to Facebook and... 

Konstantinos: On the other hand, there is shipping here, which is very important for us. In other words, one of the reasons why the company that was created in New York decided to do the same thing, I believe, is because they don’t have that proximity to their customer to understand what the customer really needs. And in Greece, everyone has some contact with the sea. So, let’s say, we have our Lead for supporting ship captains, he’s a captain who has worked on ships for years, and he is also a computer engineer. This man is a key person, in other words, both to communicate what we do to the customer and to help us develop the product, etc. If you were to look for him in San Francisco, you wouldn’t find him; he wouldn’t exist. In Greece, I am sure that there are others like him. 

Panagiotis: I think it's the only industry, the only space where Greece should be the Silicon Valley of maritime tech. 

Konstantinos: But really, if we don’t manage here to be the hub… 

Panagiotis: And you should be very proud because you’ve made an extraordinary contribution towards that end. 

Konstantinos: I believe it will happen. 

Panagiotis: A very nice game to clear one’s mind, a nice game that we have created here with our fantastic producers, from reach. Each of you can pick a card. It’s a word, and I’d like to hear the definition you provide for it. 

Roberto: Okay, I have selected a strategy. The way I define strategy is to be able to see all the stimuli around a company and all the factors that influence each decision and, as in a game of chess, to be able to somehow see, in the near future at least, how the market will roughly progress these moving elements, shall we say, which exist, how they will progress, and to be able to make the best decision based on that. This is what strategy is. 

Panagiotis: Nice. 

Konstantinos: Scalability. Scalability is the ability to scale 

Panagiotis: Exactly. 

Konstantinos: It's what I do now on a ship, I can do it on a scale of 100, and what I do on a scale of 100, I can do on a scale of 1000, and what I do on a scale of 1000, I can do on a scale of 10,000, and likewise, what I do with 5 people, I can do it with 100, I can do it with 1000. It is the most important and difficult thing. 

Panagiotis: We have this privilege and blessing to be number one in the world in one sector of the economy, the shipping sector. At the same time, we are lucky that we live in a period, that you factor in Greece’s turnaround, you take everything all together and we are in a prosperous period despite the more general problems that exist as regards the economy and the technology industry and sector, things are going in a positive direction. I want you to tell us a little bit, what is the role of Greece? How do you see things in the ecosystem, what opportunities are developing, and in shipping in general, what are the goals we should set as a country, strategically?

Roberto: Because we as Greeks also have tremendous potential, but because we don’t have, especially in the startup community, success stories, it’s hard to imagine that yes, we can, because we’re too not in America where it’s mostly Americans who have achieved, shall we say, the greatest successes. That’s, I think, for me, one very important part. And the other, which is about shipping, because we have this very big advantage, we have 20% of the shipping industry in Greece. Every technological revolution that comes brings with it great opportunities. And now about the artificial intelligence part, for example, and the part related to energy transition that needs to be made to alternative fuels, there are very many opportunities. And I want to believe that the Greeks will be the ones who will find solutions to these problems. 

Konstantinos: Shipping in the next 30 years will change completely, that is, first of all, we’re going to have to find some other way for the ships to move because they can’t run on fuel. We should be net zero in 2050, so there will be a huge change in the fuel part, which has not yet been solved how this will be done. There will be a huge revolution in the autonomy part, that is, ships will be autonomous, they will be self-driven, optimal, they will use artificial intelligence, etc. What has not been done yet is the great revolution that needs to occur in general digitization. 

Panagiotis: So, can we become the Silicon Valley of maritime tech? 

Konstantinos: Yes, we can. 

Panagiotis: What are the key things that need to occur? Is it the owners? 

Roberto: Okay, several owners, like in us, Greek shipowners have invested in them. It's just that this needs to be done on a much larger scale and to get closer to the VCs for companies to be able to very quickly build a product together with shipping companies. 

Konstantinos I am not afraid of the financial part because, although in general, there is less money in Greece, for a shipping startup there is more here because there are shipowners who understand shipping while a VC in America does not understand shipping. And I additionally also see foreign marine tech companies which are coming to raise money in Greece, so the financing, we have got it, and it's growing too. We have the talent, now that the visa issue will be solved to be able to bring people from abroad, it will be even more important. Where I would like for there to be more progress is on the customer part, at scale, i.e., to provide incentives for Greek shipping companies to obtain experimental or new products from... 

Panagiotis: More pilots and for them, in other words, to buy more. 

Konstantinos: Oftentimes, we will see that one shipowner who will be very generous in investing in a shipping company, his company will not buy the product, a marine tech company, of this company because there’s some person there that won’t let it happen.

Panagiotis Yes, here I can imagine a lot of things that don’t work, but I will mention the one that strikes me as a nice opportunity, and we can all work on it together.Technologies from abroad that are emerging and forming and being built, for them to come to Greece and instead of just raising money, which is also fantastic because what do we want in the end? We want an industry that is close to technology and innovative and forward, we want it to continue to be competitive, that’s for sure. But shouldn’t we give incentives and work together so that these companies can stay here or build teams here to increase the talent density and in general the extroversion of this maritime tech? 

Konstantinos: We are entering a great debate of the general attractiveness of Greece as a destination for tax purposes, in terms of the graffiti on all the buildings, in terms of the judicial system, etc. 

Panagiotis: Mostly the structures are…I will tell you that my own belief is, and having worked a lot on the visa program that is coming out now for startups, my belief is that structures are in line with the needs. I mean, if people come here and start, and there is a community of foreigners and of people who are pushing the structures to grow because they need it, structures grow much faster. If you expect to build them first to be attractive afterwards or say, come to Greece, then it might be a little too late. Roberto, a book or a podcast? 

Roberto: Book. 

Panagiotis: Konstantinos? 

Konstantinos: Podcast. 

Panagiotis: Roberto, morning person or night owl? 

Roberto: Night owl. 

Panagiotis: And you, Konstantinos? 

Konstantinos: Me too. 

Panagiotis: A night owl, that goes for both of you. Coffee or tea, Roberto? Roberto: Coffee. 

Panagiotis: Coffee or tea? 

Konstantinos: Coffee. 

Panagiotis: If a single person says tea, I will end the episode. Roberto, if you could have dinner with a historical figure, any one you wanted. 

Roberto: Steve Jobs.

Panagiotis: How about you, Konstantinos? 

Konstantinos: Aristotle. 

Panagiotis: What technology can’t you live without? 

Roberto: I’ll say my mobile. 

Panagiotis: How about you, Konstantinos? 

Konstantinos: Mobile. 

Panagiotis: What is your favorite city for business travel, Roberto? 

Roberto: Singapore. 

Panagiotis: Konstantinos? 

Konstantinos: Singapore. 

Panagiotis: Konstantinos, tell me a book that has changed your life or left a great impression on you. 

Konstantinos: I could truly say Outliers. It is true. 

Panagiotis: The podcast? 

Konstantinos: You said a book. I read it when it came out a while ago. I was young then, and I read it all in one go. It was extremely interesting and put me in a state of thinking about the world and relationships. 

Panagiotis: Roberto, a book? 

Roberto: The most pivotal book I've read is Blitzscaling, in relation to these things. 

Panagiotis: Reid Hoffman. 

Roberto: Yes 

Panagiotis: He's a board member at Endeavor, and we have it here from him. He sent it to us—fantastic. Have you ever received a piece of advice that resonated with you?

Roberto: I was recently in England, fishing. I spent too much time with the rod—about 3-4 hours—trying to catch some fish. I was with my friends, and no one managed to hook anything. Then, this old man passes by. I see him, and I ask, “Did you catch anything?” He says, “Yes, I caught 2-3 fish.” So, I ask, “What advice do you have for me?” And he says, “Just enjoy it.” I liked that very much because it applies to everything. Sometimes, we long to reach a goal and miss the beauty in the process. 

Konstantinos: 

All jobs are the same. It might sound strange. Let me explain. What it means is that the skills, especially for a manager, are general skills. Once you've learned how to analyze a problem, solve a technical issue, and handle people, you can apply these skills across many sectors. 

Panagiotis: If you hadn’t created DeepSea, what would you be doing now? I have a feeling I know your answer Roberto, but Konstantinos let's hear it. 

Konstantinos: I think I would be doing another startup, applying artificial intelligence to another industry, though probably less successfully. 

Roberto: If I did something else, it would definitely be something creative because something that is also important and especially when you reach the end of a cycle, how you perceive yourself has to become more abstract. If you base your identity solely on being a founder in maritime tech, and then that ends, you might wonder, “Who am I?” I’ve learned that I’m a very creative person. I like making things people use, whether it’s a product or a piece of art that someone sees or hears. So, I’d definitely be doing something creative. 

Panagiotis: The common question in all podcasts for 5 seasons now—what do you think makes an entrepreneur an Outlier? What makes someone stand out? 

Roberto: To be a true outlier, you have to find yourself in some circumstances, which are external factors, so you can be much better than everyone else, so to speak, to find the right time and the right place. But that's not very motivating for someone who’s looking at it now and saying, I don’t know if i am or not. I’ll say this: the main feature I believe you need for success in anything you do is perseverance and patience. It’s easy now to talk about our success, but Konstantinos and I spent a long time thinking, "This is super difficult, why can’t we sell? Is the product to blame, are we to blame?” In general, it’s not as easy as you think and the difficulty is part of the process. You have to experience those struggles to eventually manage more people, bigger revenue, and not crash. 

Panagiotis: Roberto, fantastic discussion. Thank you very much. good luck, and we’re by your side.