Episode 99: Mapping the Ocean Economy with Tim Janssen

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood. 

This week we’re still on the whole everybody in the ocean thing and as it happens the ocean is a thing we know shamefully little about. So today’s guest is tackling a problem that is both straightforward and also extremely difficult which is to find out a whole lot more about what’s happening in the ocean and then convert that knowledge into products services research and dollars. The company does this first through the world’s largest network of privately deployed, inexpensive, solar powered buoys underwater monitoring tools and a data platform for commercial products and also for sharing with researchers and nonprofits. 

Let’s find out more 

Tim Janssen

My name is Tim Janssen. I am an oceanographer and I'm currently co-founder and CEO of Sofar Ocean. Sofar is an ocean intelligence company. Our mission is to connect the world's oceans to power a more sustainable future. And we take this quite literally. We built global sensor networks across the ocean. We take that information to improve predictability of weather and climate.

And last step is that we use that to translate that for industries into like making their operations more efficient. So effectively with data, you can improve predictability of the future state of the environment. And that's not just sort of like a nice to have, this is operationally incredibly important for industries that operate in the environment and in the ocean space.

There's a number of those industries obviously that we work with today and that we expect to work with in the future.

Molly Wood

Great. So what is the, let's start with basically the ocean data gap, a term that I got from you. What was the problem that you were setting out to solve here and how big a problem is it?

Tim Janssen

Yeah, the problem is pretty spectacular. And just to put it in context, reason why this sort of like spectacular problem is little known to most people is that we don't generally think a lot about the ocean. When we think about weather and climate, we think about what happens in the bottom of the atmosphere, because that's where we are primarily exposed to. Of course, the weather and climate is the interaction between land, water and an atmosphere together.

And so because we've not sort of like, think, focus naturally on what happens in the ocean, we've kind of neglected it. It is also a very hard place to get information. But if you just put the numbers together, and this is not maybe an entirely fair comparison, but I think it is sort of like illustrative of like the gap. As humanity, we're really good at gathering data. We've gotten really good at that. We're sort of like the revolution in IoT. If we take the total amount of information we gather in a single year,

and equate that to the distance from here to the sun, which is about 150 million kilometers, then the equivalent amount of data that we gather from the ocean in that same year is about the length of a football field. And so that illustrates the compounding problem. That's a big gap, obviously, but it compounds because every year we have a similar gap or bigger to deal with. Now, why does that matter? Because if we

don't really understand or have information from a large part of our climate system, then predictability becomes very difficult at all scales. And in many ways, climate is an extension in time of weather. So basically, know, weather is climate on short time scales. And so the immediate problem is weather forecasting. The uncertainty in weather forecasts is ultimately driven by the amount of data that we have. We have pretty good models.

of reality. Today they're mostly physics based. Obviously there's an interest in like seeing how much of that we can accelerate with artificial intelligence to make those computations faster and cheaper. But ultimately the models are pretty good and they just rely on how much information we have about the now state to predict what happens tomorrow, the day after and on much longer time scales from a climate perspective. So understanding what is over 70 % of the surface of the planet

Tim Janssen

and about 50 % of our climate system is a pretty big no-brainer, even just from a climate perspective. the second part of it is, and this is, again, why this is such a no-brainer from whatever perspective you look at it, is it also impacts our economy to an incredible extent. Every...

Every industry touching the ocean environment, which is quite a few. mean, the direct sort of like blue economy includes things like aquaculture, marine renewable, energy, transportation, all of those industries and, you know, coastal resilience for that matter, our ability to adapt to changes in climate ultimately rely on our ability to predict and understand the ocean. downstream of that, of course, the impact is significantly more than that, as we all know, since the

pandemic, as soon as global transportation stops, everything kind of stops and we have no supply chains to speak of anymore. So the impact of understanding the ocean from just from an economic perspective is tremendous. And lastly, and this is global, but certainly also the case for the United States, future growth in the economy is mostly data driven. Most economies are transitioning to what we would call information economies.

that is currently not possible in the ocean. So we're thinking about all the traditional blue economies. They are basically not ready or able to transition and build sort of like the growth and the value add that an information economy can drive. And so the necessity and I think the, well, the immediate necessity of accelerating our ability to collect information in the ocean is pretty clear and both from an economic perspective.

strategic perspective and certainly from an oceans and climate perspective.

Molly Wood

Right. There's a lot to take apart in there. One thing I will ask you to put a fine point on is the economic piece. know, I mean, think it's like always worth it. It's one thing to say, hey, we cannot in a time of dramatically changing climate, we cannot, we are missing the third leg of the stool when it comes to predicting what is going to happen. That's a big deal. But put a finer point on the economic point that you're making, like how

You know, you're probably the guy with the numbers in terms of how much money relies on an ocean-based economy.

Tim Janssen 

Yeah, well today, direct blue economy is about three and half percent of world GDP. That's direct. So basically these are the industries that we all know. Aquaculture that provides basically protein, marine renewable energy, transportation, fisheries broadly. That's a significant amount of money, but that is a complete understatement of the actual impact of these industries. Like we just talked about, the impact on the global economies is

multiples of that. And so to give you a very specific example of like what better information translates into, like for instance, we have a product called Wayfinder, which you can think of loosely as Google Maps for large commercial ships. And basically what it does, it takes all the information that we gather every day about the world's oceans and its weather, translates our weather forecast into like optimization strategies for ships. And we can save 5 % in their fuel bill.

And that is an incredible improvement for the efficiencies of these companies. Imagine that basically your company running 40 % of your expenses is fuel and you can save 5 % of that immediately simply by using better information. And that is the sort of opportunities that I think is directly relatable to anyone in terms of like, look, we can save fuel, which means lower emissions. We can make these companies more efficient.

We can help them invest in new technologies. For instance, they are experimenting with sail propulsion on large commercial ships and to further reduce the impact on climate change and further reduce their fuel bill. Those things are only possible if we make those ships as efficient as possible, maximize their strategic advantage in how to use the weather to maneuver through the ocean from one place to the other.

And that is an opportunity that ultimately, again, as an example of how do we transition into an information economy, those are things that are very well possible if we collect enough information and basically think of this as a data science problem rather than a big hardware problem.

Molly Wood

Right? So before we dig more into the solution, what is the problem to date? Like, why do we not have this data?

Tim Janssen

Yeah, well, that's a good question. think there's multiple, yeah.

Molly Wood

Cause it seems very, you know, when you lay it out like that, it's sort of like, this is a pretty big miss humans.

Tim Janssen 

Why do we not do this? Yeah, it's a good question.

Molly Wood 

We have a lot of technology and we're not.

Tim Janssen 

It is right and it's not it's not that dissimilar from like 30 years ago when we had a similar state in space sensing I think I think the initial state where we end up with as a society is that like look This is pretty important. We need to do this. So the government will invest and so, you know 30 years ago or so We were in a state where basically most assets in space were government owned. They were expensive very large was difficult to scale and really only

The only organization that could afford to do that would be international governments or national governments. Through technology and the drive and the opportunity through partnerships between government organizations and private companies, we figured out ways to scale that and move away from large, very expensive assets to more distributed sensing that was more accessible to private companies with that unlocking private capital.

and accelerating to space sensing to something that it is today, which is a completely different animal. And the benefits are incredible. Like the amount of data that we collect today is multitudes of what we had before and the impact on the economy, the industry, understanding of our planet is amazing. We're sort of like 30 years behind, I think, in the ocean. And there's jokes being cracked about that, like

among oceanographers the standing joke is if you can solve your problem with aluminum foil it's probably not that hard and this obviously refers to satellites. In the ocean things are objectively hard.

Molly Wood 

Satellites. Nice. I like knowing that oceanographers are like kind of a snarky bunch. That's a good discovery.

Tim Janssen 

It is objectively very difficult to have instrumentation survive in the ocean. You have basically massive temperature changes, have salt water, you have waves breaking. It's not a launch problem, which is primarily the problem, of course, in space. It's about maintaining assets there, making them reliable, robust, and low cost and scalable enough so that you can have large distributed sensing networks.

Ultimately, what drives this is a bet or a notion or a sort of like sense of value associated with the information. So ultimately, when you ask like, you what is this company about? This company has a single bet. Our bet is that ocean information is ultimately incredibly valuable. And for all the reasons I've just outlined. But that is something that I think we have to convince first ourselves, which we have done.

at least within the small group that's running this company now, we are convinced that that is true. Our job is now to convince the rest of the world that that is true by showing successes, building out commercial opportunities where others hopefully can follow. So we do that in multiple ways. We build technologies that help scale sensing in the ocean, not just for us, but for others. instance, Bristle Mouth is an open standard that we've launched to help others join in.

and get more information from the ocean space. We built business models like Wayfinder to show basically the value for large industries of having additional information and better weather forecast to translate that into like a business advantage. So I think what's ultimately necessary is one, the technologies need to be developed. on the one hand, that's things like bristlemouth removing scaling hurdles from the technology side. And on the other side, showing the economic opportunity because ultimately that is what drives

companies that is what will unlock private capital. I think the third part, is a little bit under fire right now and I think is really important, I want to highlight it. It is strong partnerships between government organizations and pioneering companies, which is also part of the success story in space between NASA and private companies to accelerate there. We need the same in the ocean. We cannot stop investing in organizations like NOAA and other...

Tim Janssen 

government organizations that are at the forefront of ocean discovery and exploration. Because if we do, we lose a critical advantage that we've always held, particularly in this country, where through strong partnerships between government and private organizations, we've been able to move mountains. And I think that's what we need here as well.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break. When we come back, we’ll dig more specifically into the products Sofar itself is making but also the value and potential value of the most important product of all the data. 

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Tim Janssen the co-founder and CEO of Sofar Ocean. 

Molly Wood

I do want to go back to your product line because we've sort of cruised past a couple big features, but at the core is a network of actual sensors. So talk about what you're making, and then we'll talk about how you're expanding that into other product lines.

Tim Janssen 

No need for that.

Tim Janssen 

Yes.

Tim Janssen 

Yeah, so we just kind of talked at the end state of like, how do we use the information to like help industries? Yeah, no, no, that's the part that was sort of like, think immediately obvious, like, cool, if you can do that, then yeah, can, yeah, right, now it's interesting. But.

Molly Wood

It's my fault. I did this all backwards.

Molly Wood

Yep.

Tim Janssen 

To get to data, we need hardware. again, the whole value is the information, but to get information, you need the equivalent of satellites in space, which in our case is small handheld sensors that are little floats that we can deploy out of an airplane from a fast moving boat. Anything that is sort of like traversing over the ocean can deploy one of these things. You don't need a manual for it. As soon as it hits the water,

it starts transmitting information from all the sensors that are attached to that. So the basic package is it measures everything weather related. So imagine basically this is a basketball sized solar powered satellite connected thing, right? So it's a yellow basketball size spotter buoy as we call it. In the basic sort of like configuration, it will measure everything weather related. the wave spectrum, so basically the ocean wave spectrum is a really important ingredient of ocean weather.

barometric pressure, wind speed, etc. Water temperature, air temperature, obviously. And then you can add other things to it, like you can add an underwater microphone to listen to mammal activity or vessel activity. You can add thermistor strings to look at what is the heat content in the ocean. This is really important, for instance, for driving storms. Like how much energy is available in the ocean right now.

How does that match our model prediction? So for model validations, for improving the models, understanding of the ocean dynamics, all of these sort of like different sensing modalities are critical, but you need a lot of them. We are ultimately not interested in a single unique, exquisite data point somewhere in the ocean that can do 12 decimal accuracy measurement of something. The ocean is a very big place and we need lots of distributed information around like

Molly Wood

Mm-hmm.

Tim Janssen

What is the difference between here and there in terms of its temperature, the current speed, the wind speed, because that's what informs basically models in terms of like, okay, cool. Now I have a good synoptic overview of what happens across the world. I can use that to improve my estimate of what happens right now and call that the now state of the model and then predict it go forward, which is basically just propagating information forward in space and time.

Molly Wood

Right. So you have the Spotter Boy, the Spotter platform. How many of those are there? Because you've deployed a lot, is my understanding.

Tim Janssen 

Yeah, we have about 2,500 live sensors today and we seek to double that roughly every year. So we will continue to put more sensors out there. We're also adding, like I said, the base platform is sort of like the weather station. And now we're adding other sensors to, for every data point we get out there to add other sensing modalities as well to get more information and more data in the same global network of sensors. So yeah, it's a.

The really painful part, this is the largest privately owned sensor network in the ocean. I mean, that shouldn't be. That bar should not be that low. But it is. And as a result, it already massively improves our ability to predict the weather over the ocean with just a small network like this. And again, in the grand scheme of things, this is not a small network, but it should be. Our forecast, and again, we run the same models as everybody else. We don't have...

not very unique models, let's put it that way, but by just inserting the additional information and really get good at what's called data assimilation, which is the act of putting data into a model, we can significantly outperform government forecast centers when it comes to marine weather. And this is obviously important to all of our customers and anybody that uses our platform.

Molly Wood 

Right. Who can you say, who are some of those customers who's using the platform currently?

Tim Janssen 

Yeah, can, I can share a few names who have gone public with us. Like Francis from the shipping world, Mitsui Osk lines is a, is a partner of ours. They have Wayfinder on their ships. Burger bulk Singaporean dry bulk carrier is another major user of the platform. And then there are several other ones, obviously in terms of like users for hardware and data. It's literally every single.

industry in the ocean space. We sell hardware and data to individual researchers all the way to national governments to basically help them understand their coast and the coastal environment better. So it's an incredibly broad distribution of users, including all the industries that we've talked about, aquaculture, marine renewable, research, academia, which is...

I think exactly what it should be. should be, you the whole point of when we started out, we used the word which we don't use anymore because it's been overused a little bit is democratizing access to ocean data. But ultimately, that's exactly what it's doing. Like, I'll give you an example, like for instance, in the Caribbean, we are now building networks with partners to unlock access to ocean information that previously wasn't possible simply because the hardware is too expensive, too difficult to operate.

And this was one of the dreams when we started the company around like, ultimately, yes, we want these data networks to inform basically global understanding of the ocean, but ultimately also on a local scale where, you know, the impacts of climate change are felt significantly. We want to help inform local communities on what's happening and what's going to happen. If you think about like information, although we need global information to inform, you know, the global dynamics, which

obviously impacts the localities as well. Most pain points are local. We as humans have a very limited radius of interaction with the world. so most anything that creates value and is really, really important for a community or for an individual or for an organization is going to be somewhat local. And so the ability to get sensors in localities that are important for communities and people.

Tim Janssen

is incredibly inspiring for our team and ultimately a big part of our mission to help power a more sustainable future.

Molly Wood

So to break down the parts of the business, you build and sell the buoys and the data. You develop your own in-house products like the Wayfinder Google Maps for ocean navigation. Are there other products that you, like are you kind of letting this large ocean economy guide what future products you might continue to build on top of this data set?

Tim Janssen

I think yes and no. We want to find pathways as quickly as possible to prove out and demonstrate the value of the information, almost by whatever means necessary. So I think one of the exciting things, for instance, is the rapid development of artificial intelligence. Obviously, artificial intelligence relies on information. And in a world where artificial intelligence drives the value,

Molly Wood

Or do you plan to, I guess, yeah.

Tim Janssen 

The data is the currency. mean, and so for us, the link to AI is like one to unlock AI in the ocean. Right now that's not possible. It's a data problem. Like there's not enough data to like really effectively do artificial intelligence in the ocean. And so that's what we're working on today. Like we are ultimately have always been thinking about like, how do we create intelligence and, you know, intelligence or artificial, it requires information. So

The next step for us would probably be like, how can we unlock this information more seamlessly without sort of like going necessarily into like great depth building applications like Wayfinder. And you could imagine when, if we're thinking about an ocean language model, like basically like, Hey, give me information about this side. And I want to know this information. Then ultimately it relies on like, how well have you basically trained a system to deliver that information? What information is available? So the quality of the information ultimately depends.

dictates the value of the answer. so to our mind, basically, AI opens up new pathways to more quickly and more efficiently translate the information that we have into solving pain points for humans. And so what that exactly is going to look like, the near future will tell. But I think there's a lot of exciting opportunities. 

Molly Wood

Yep. And then talk to me about the sustainability and climate mission. you you mentioned that at the top. You could be doing all of this without a sustainability lens, but it sounds like that is not the case. Yep.

Tim Janssen 

No, it isn't. Yeah, like I think to me, primarily, principally, climate is information. again, climate is the extension of weather over longer time scales. It's a complex system. If we don't understand the now state, the past state and the future state and how they are related, it's very difficult to say anything about climate change in the first place. So as a scientist, you know, data

from like just purely from an understanding perspective, to step away from buzzwords around like, know, that are politically divisive and really just show up like, hey, here is the information, here's the data, you you can validate what we think we see and this is like objectively the truth so that we don't have to have like political debates about like what's happening. This is really, really important to me and I think ultimately the only way to make real progress. On the other side of things, if we now for the moment step away and say like,

We've been messing up the atmosphere quite a bit for a while. So it's probably true that things are changing. And if we go from that assumption, then basically there's going to be a number of communities that are going to be the forefront of the impacts of climate change. And these are typically not communities that can afford the best protective measures, data infrastructures, et cetera. And in our case, for instance, a very good example is Pacific Island communities that are impacted by sea level rise and...

intensity increases in weather. And so the ability for us to get sensors in those places and with our network actually feed into like predictive capabilities there and to have like understanding when certain regions are flooding to make sure that people can evacuate. That's a direct sort of like, you know, how do we adapt to climate change perspective? And this is something that as a company, I mean, excited is the wrong word because we really don't want to be doing this, obviously, but it is a very important part of what we do.

Molly Wood 

Yeah.

Tim Janssen 

And it's something that I think internally drives a lot of excitement about the ability to get sensors into water in places where that was previously not possible. And then lastly, and this is where the applications come into play, Wayfinder is a direct reduction of emissions. We can track how much fuel we stop from going into the atmosphere, which is again, better information, reduction of uncertainty, which is always the result of better information, leads to better decisions because

we can all make reasonably good decisions if we know what the situation is. If the situation is covered in a cloud of uncertainty, then we make suboptimal decisions. So just removing that uncertainty by having more information will lead to better operational decisions, which will lead to better safety. So no loss of cargo is necessary anymore because we don't drive our ships through a major storm. And every day we can slightly reduce the fuel emission or the fuel usage and thus the emissions, which is a direct benefit to, you know,

not having that going into the atmosphere. So across the board from like data acquisition directly in terms of like unlocking the ability to gather data in places where it is absolutely needed and with traditional equipment was not possible. The second part, just the global understanding of the system that we live in, like the planet, the planetary systems, ocean and atmosphere interaction, which I think is long-term, near term, hopefully essential to

move away from this being a political discussion to one that's more scientifically driven and ultimately supported by data. And then the last part, how can we make an impact today with the information we have to reduce emissions and other negative impacts on our climate?

Molly Wood 

And then, I mean, there are those who will say that having to privatize this data, having this be a part of private industry, mean, certainly we have heard that about space, right? That there isn't like a shared set of rules and now we have a bunch of space junk and they might start running into each other. And then there's the potential for reducing access to what you have clearly laid out as potentially life-saving data.

economically really valuable data, how do you address that concern?

Tim Janssen

I think it's a valid concern. I think regulatory thinking about these things is essential. We should be starting to think about how do we regulate it? This is something that we absolutely have to do. Let's do it the right way. I don't think we can wait for that though. Here's the thing. If we haven't created space junk then nobody's thinking about regulating it because there isn't any space junk to regulate. If there isn't an action

to regulate and regulations itself is not going to drive anything, right? That has to be either foresight, which is very rare, or reactive, which is more common and also just fine. Like basically like, look, if we need to do something, there is a driver to do it. Somebody says, okay, I'm going to execute, I'm going to do it. Then yes, until there is regulations and basically it is not clear like what is, you know, okay and not okay. And then you have to use your best judgment. And I think your ethics and moral.

compass to make good decisions. But ultimately, you do want it to be regulated. We want more regulations in the ocean space, and we'd be happy to work with any organization who wants to pick that up. That's not an easy task, but it is absolutely something that ultimately we want to see as well, and we would love to be partners in that discussion.

Molly Wood 

Yeah. But, and speaking of the ethics and morals, like here's your chance to be a good guy. when I, I also speaking of access to that data, it's not like you are charging every low lying, you know, nation for this data, right? You have an open source aspect to this. It's not just about extracting value from the data at every single turn.

Tim Janssen

Yes, absolutely. And this goes back to like the scientific roots of the company. So we have an open access program for academic and nonprofit use of the data, where scientists around the world can have access to this data to improve models and make better predictions of what the future state of the ocean is going to be. And that's an important part of what we do. it is the cool thing is, and this is maybe the most exciting thing for me as an oceanographer, but also for most of the team here, is that it completely

does not interfere with our business objectives. Most of the value in data is the now state, like real time information. Older information is super valuable for training models, for improving models and better understanding the processes in the ocean, which is not the primary objective of the commercial side of our company. it is, I think, a wonderful symbiotic.

way of being able to share data with the world, while at the same time using that information to drive the company to growth. Because ultimately, and this is, I think, a general thing that has to be clear, this is a big difference between a government organization and private company. A government organization can exist if society says, we want this, we're going to buy this. Like, we want health care, good, you technically could buy that and say, like, look, we just want nationalized health care, we want good education, we will buy it, buy that, right? Those are options.

In a private company, cannot exist that way because ultimately you'll have to find a way to create value for somebody that will basically pay for the things that you're doing to create that value. And that is fundamental. But within that context and within that of like opportunity space, you can still run a company in many different ways. And I think what we've tried to do is like, look, we need to create

this value proposition, we need to show that ocean information inherently is valuable. But at the same time, we can choose a path that is the best we can make it in terms of like the best impact broadly beyond still like just that one thing that we want to absolutely do, which is showing the value of ocean data, because that will drive massive impact over time. But while we're doing that, we can also share information, we can work with nonprofits, we can work with academia, which we are really have like a massive network of

Molly Wood 

Mm-hmm.

Tim Janssen 

researchers and folks in academics who are also former colleagues of mine who work on the same problems from a different perspective and in many ways the complementary nature of working together could actually be a superpower and I think we should use it.

Molly Wood 

The company is Sofar Ocean. Tim, thanks so much for the time today. I really appreciate it.

Tim Janssen

My pleasure entirely. Nice to meet you.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: 

That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening.

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