Episode 400 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Rylan Hamilton, CEO & Co-Founder of Blue Water Autonomy.
Episode 400! It’s another milestone episode.
On November 2, 2017, I published the first episode of The VentureFizz Podcast. My first 11 episodes were an experiment where I interviewed talent acquisition leaders. Christina Luconi was my first guest. Thank you Christina! After seeing the potential, I pivoted to interviewing mainly founders & investors in Boston and NYC.
I want to send out shout-out to all the people who have taken the time to share their stories with me and the VentureFizz audience. It has been a pleasure to interview all of you.
For Episode 400, I wanted to interview someone who not only has had extraordinary background but someone who is also still building. Interviewing Rylan for this milestone episode was a no-brainer.
Rylan’s professional career has been one of exploration and not just one linear path. From graduating from Harvard to enlisting in the Navy as an Engineering Officer for surface warfair, to Harvard Business School, to being the first employee at RunMyErrand which later became TaskRabbit, to learning warehouse robotics at Kiva Systems which ended up being the 2nd largest acquisition by Amazon at the time, to starting his own warehouse robotics company called 6 River Systems which was acquired by Shopify for $450M… to now… working on his latest startup, which no doubt is his biggest swing which is Blue Water Automony… a startup building autonomous ships for the open ocean. The company recently announced a $50M Series A round of funding led GV. This is shortly after announcing a $14M seed round of funding earlier this year back in April.
In this interview, we cover how Rylan’s service in the armed forces helped shape his career, his full background story, plus all the chapters along the way, to all the details about Blue Water Authonomy and how this company is disrupting and re-energizing the ship industry in the United States, and so much more.
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Transcript
Keith Cline (00:02.104)
Rylan, thanks so much for joining us.
Rylan Hamilton (00:04.206)
Keith, thanks for having me.
Keith Cline (00:05.976)
I’m so excited to talk to you. So there’s a lot going on right now. One, I’ve been doing this podcast for a long time. It’s like seven, eight years now. So I am on episode 400. And when I was like, who am I going to have as this milestone guest? I was like, I want an entrepreneur that has success. They’ve done a lot in their career, but they’re building again. And I couldn’t think of a more perfect guest than you and what you’re building with Blue Water Autonomy.
I had like a post on LinkedIn about your company and it was like, autonomous vehicles, you they’re cool, but you know what’s really effing cool is like autonomous ships built for the open ocean. And what you’re building is so awesome and I’m so excited to talk about that. But before we get into all that, let’s talk about your, know, like your little bit about your, we’re not going to go into the full background story yet, but a little bit about your background, you’re in the Navy and how that experience helped shape you as an entrepreneur.
Rylan Hamilton (01:05.048)
So definitely, so I guess I joined the Navy right out of school. It’s not something that I grew up thinking I’d wanted to go join the Navy, but I had some experiences doing like consulting and banking and other types of internships where I figured out by young age that I wasn’t gonna be the type of person who is gonna be behind my computer screen at a desk nine to five. And I took a little bit of a bet at the time, looking back, it was like super obvious that it was a great decision and I joined the Navy.
right out of school and I was surface warfare, which basically meant I was on ships all the time and I had amazing experience. But I think that’s kind of one of the bets that I made early on in my career, which convinced me that I could make other bets. And here I am at my kind of third startup and building and designing autonomous ships.
Keith Cline (01:52.948)
How did that experience help you as an entrepreneur in terms of that military type of background?
Rylan Hamilton (01:58.351)
Yeah, so for this company, it definitely helped me understand the customer and the missions that the Navy does every day with their existing ships. And then it helped me sort of take my background over the last 15 years being sort of automation and robotics and kind of rethink like, how could we do these same missions, but do them better and do them with the kind of existing technology. And so I think my current role is kind of the fusion of all of my previous experiences.
In addition to being in the Navy, it takes a lot of grit and resolve to kind of like do that job every single day. And so being an entrepreneur, whether you’re the entrepreneur or you’re at an early stage startup, takes a lot of grit and resolve. Things aren’t easy. It always feels like you’re under resourced. You’re always trying to move faster. But you just know that if you put your head down, you can kind of accomplish a lot. And I think the experience that I had in the Navy kind of built that into my DNA. And that’s something that I carry on today.
Keith Cline (02:57.037)
and your experience when we’re gonna talk about your full background story, because I just think it’s like one of those backgrounds that I don’t know if every step was intentional, but you created this portfolio of experiences that I thought was like just so different than a linear path of somebody that going from A to B to C to D to E. It was like you took these different detours that all comes together now of what you’re doing with Blue Water, but let’s take that step back. So where’d you grow up? What were you like as a child?
Rylan Hamilton (03:26.848)
so grew up in Boston, and I’m proud to be a Red Sox and a Patriots fan. I love the city. I love this, area, but, grew up in Boston and then, you know, I was the city boy kind of when I was growing up. actually was raised by my mom, who’s a single mom. and it was only until I was later in life that I got some experiences where I got to go away to summer camp in Maine. And I got to go to camps and, you know, Buzzards Bay where I found that I actually had a love of the water.
and actually took up sailing at a young age. know, between being in Boston and going to school here and then spending summers kind of on the water, that’s kind of was like my early childhood.
Keith Cline (04:09.421)
Okay, so what led you to Harvard to applied math with economics?
Rylan Hamilton (04:15.802)
so I never thought I would stay in Boston this long, but I was very fortunate. I studied hard. I think I was kind of well-rounded, kind of growing up and, I got into Harvard. I’d always loved math. I think I’m kind of a systems thinker and I’d actually, I actually studied applied math, not math, because in applied math, you have a problem and you come up with solution. And so, I kind of loved that. and I started economics as I thought it’d go into business.
But I learned later on that I, you as I said before, I’m not like that nine to five, Monday through Friday type guy.
Keith Cline (04:50.349)
Okay, so when you talked about you enlisted into the Navy, what did prompt that decision? mean, time and why is kind of interesting. was post 9-11. From what I researched, you have some family history in the Navy too, right?
Rylan Hamilton (05:05.73)
Yeah, so I graduated from college in 2002. so 9-11 happened while I was in school. And I think a lot of myself and my peers were all affected by that. And we said, what else can we do in life? And so we definitely sort of, and you talked about kind of linear career paths that people had, but I think a lot of us were definitely motivated to go serve our country. And at that moment, I had a love for the water, but also, my father went to the Naval Academy.
He was actually part of the Rickover Navy, the Navy that actually sort of really moved the ball forward in terms of advancing nuclear submarines. So he served on nuclear submarines in the sixties. I had two uncles who also served and I had a grandfather served in the Pacific in World War II. And so I really kind of reached back to that part of my family history. And I started talking to other people who had also served the Navy and they all said like, it’s the best thing that you could ever do. But my mom had remarried and my adoptive father at the time said, and he’d been in business his whole career. And he’s like, I don’t know about this whole Navy thing and all that.
But I just did a bunch of research and again, as you know, I took a bet and it was a great bet. And, you know, went to officer Canada school in Pensacola, Florida, did pushups, sit ups, all the things you have to do to kind of get commissioned in the Navy. And after three months of bootcamp, I joined the fleet.
Keith Cline (06:21.901)
All so this was, so you were on large, large ships, right? And this is where I want to geek out a little bit, because this is like, this is experience that, you you were helping transport. When I thought about the military, the amphibious vehicles need to get somewhere. And there needs to be ships that take them to another country to have their tanks, you know, Land Rovers,
you know, everything. So that was the first ship you were on, if my research is correct.
Rylan Hamilton (06:55.949)
Yeah, so my first ship was I was in the amphib Navy. I was an amphibious transport ship. It’s a USS Ponce LPD-15 and that ship was basically a utility ship for the Marines. And so we could carry all of their equipment, including tanks and helicopters and the Marines themselves. So up to 800 Marines and transport them all around the world. And when I met the ship, we were in the Persian Gulf and the Marines were basically disembarking into Kuwait just before we invaded Iraq back in 2003.
And I was an engineering officer. it’s an electrical officer and there are about 50 engineers on that ship. They’re constantly standing watch, maintaining and repairing that ship. And so rather than doing the cool kind of sexy stuff in the Navy, I was down in the engine rooms, just keeping the ship running all the time. That was my first half of my career in the Navy.
Keith Cline (07:43.671)
So that ship must be its own city to have that many people and all that equipment on it. I just think of them like that is a massive ship.
Rylan Hamilton (07:51.234)
Yeah. I mean, when you think about ships, just, you can basically disaggregate into three components. You’ve got the platform or the whole, the thing that carries things. And then basically on that, you carry basically a hotel and that hotel burrs and feeds everyone who’s on that ship. And then you’ve got the payloads and the things that matter that you’re carrying all around. And so, yeah, it is really a floating city and we had over a thousand people on that ship that just, know, every day just were either sleeping or eating.
or standing watch. And so was definitely, it was a busy time.
Keith Cline (08:24.621)
All right, so then you went to a small, like it was a small, well small, 200 feet frigate, am I pronouncing it right?
Rylan Hamilton (08:30.411)
It’s a f-
Yeah, so it’s called a frigate. It’s a little bit bigger, but basically it’s like a small destroyer. It’s basically a more cost effective, low cost destroyer. So instead of two shafts, it has one shaft. And instead of carrying a lot of missiles, it might carry one missile or some other kind of weapons that are on it. But basically it can do a lot of missions that you don’t want the expensive kind of destroyer to do. And so whether it’s escorting other ships or doing patrols, we actually did counter-narco terrorism operations in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific on the Frigate.
Keith Cline (08:35.831)
Forget.
Rylan Hamilton (09:02.103)
frigate and it was a pretty wild time. on that ship, actually got to be sort of get out of the engine room and I was a navigator. And so we got to sail all around the world on the frigate.
Keith Cline (09:12.429)
Alright, so what was the midnight Bridgewatch experience like?
Rylan Hamilton (09:16.775)
so if you ever are thinking about joining the Navy, just imagine being on the bridge in the middle of the night, looking into kind of nothing. Now, sometimes it can be a clear night and you can see stars all around you, but generally there’s not a lot going on. And some people like myself are just like enamored. It’s just amazing being out in the middle of the ocean and you just have a lot of respect because there’s only so much you can control. You can’t just escape and go back home. Like you just, you’re on something and has to be working all the time, but you.
you wouldn’t be alone either. So you’d be standing watch on a bridge with about 10 other people. There’d be people back in the combat room also standing watch and people in the engine room. And so it was kind of like a small team that was together standing watch in the middle of the night. And there’s just a sense of camaraderie and kind of all of the ocean. And so I always thought that if that was my job, just standing watch on a bridge on a naval warship, I would do that for the rest of my life. I didn’t always enjoy like the bureaucracy and the paperwork.
And Sure Duty didn’t sound as exciting, like, I don’t know, there’s just some, there’s a love of just being, you know, on a ship and operating it.
Keith Cline (10:21.166)
Well, here’s a fun fact about me. My grandfather was a merchant Marine. I know that’s not an actual part of the armed forces, but still on the water, of course, and transporting cargo and other ships. So we got a little commonality there.
Rylan Hamilton (10:34.103)
And I know there’s not a script for what we’re talking about, but there’s an amazing museum in New Orleans all about World War II and just the amount of heroics for the merchant Marines and how important it was for us to be able to transport all of the supplies across the Atlantic during World War II. And so for anyone who’s watching this, if you’re ever in New Orleans, it’s one of the best museums I’ve ever been to.
Keith Cline (10:56.366)
I didn’t know that. So my grandfather, who I never met because he was hit by a torpedo, his ship went down when my dad was a baby. he was, know, and he’s, there’s like a sector in a book that was written about that ship that he was on. So it could be in that museum for all I know. I need to check that out. So thanks for the heads up. So, all right. So after the Navy, what’d you do next?
Rylan Hamilton (11:25.037)
So after the Navy I got out I actually didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn’t want to go back to that desk job And actually spent a summer working for Suffolk construction in construction management. I actually worked on the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Which right on Boylston Street serve in downtown Boston But then I went to graduate school and in graduate school. I started to explore again to try to figure out what I wanted to do next
But the great thing about graduate school is that I started to figure out the difference between product and marketing and then realized this role called product marketing. But I was at school and actually graduated in 2009. It was kind of similar when I got out of college in 2002. Like the economy is like so-so. And so like there weren’t a lot of like, you know, job, job fairs where people like, come work for us, work for us. You kind of had like, be a little bit scrappy. It was a little bit bad. So it was kind of easy to say like, oh, maybe I want to go work for a startup. Why not?
Keith Cline (12:11.5)
Right? It was bad. It was bad. Yeah.
Rylan Hamilton (12:19.808)
and I actually was the first full-time employee at this little startup called at the time run my errand that became TaskRabbit that was started in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Keith Cline (12:31.768)
So when I figured that out, I’m like, wait a second. I totally remember Leah before she moved to the West Coast. She’s an amazing entrepreneur and she’s done so well. But I was like, wait, Rylan was one of the first or now you just told me the first employee of this company. what was that like? Cause you know, now we look at that business model as, it’s just, know, DoorDash and all these delivery companies.
That was so revolutionary. It was just the early days of the iPhone. So, and this is your first startup, right? Tech startup at least.
Rylan Hamilton (13:02.252)
Yeah. So Leah had this amazing idea and she’s like, there’s this thing called the iPhone and it allows us to connect people in ways that we never could before. So rather than people having to go to computer and figure out what they want to do, you could create an app. They could go into a browser and so she wanted to create and she created service economies. So it was actually before Uber. So we were hosting ride sharing before Uber was doing ride sharing in San Francisco. But I also learned how hard startups are. And this was a business to consumer.
app. we actually, you’ve probably run into Scott Kersner, who has been a long time kind of writer about tech in the Boston community. And I remember he wrote an article about TaskRabbit and it was like the July 4th weekend and we were on the front page of the Boston Globe business section. prior to that, we’d been in like downtown crossing handing out flyers, trying to convince people to go to this website called Run My errand and basically try out the of like the task.
Keith Cline (13:37.304)
course.
Rylan Hamilton (14:01.581)
you know, basically find people to do errands for them. And we had some success and Leah had started off going to local moms groups in Charlestown, Massachusetts if I remember correctly. But we’re like, well, if we’re in the Boston Globe, everyone’s gonna know about us and we’re gonna have this chart that’s up and to the right for investors in terms of usage and adoption and things will be amazing. And we got some attention, but then it kind of fizzled out and I was like, wow, this is gonna be really hard.
so at that moment, Leo actually ended up moving the company to the West coast. moved on to another company called fister print, but I just learned how hard it is to start a company. and so that kind of set the bar for like the next company I want to start. Cause I said, this, these are really hard. It’s just, it’s not like you come up with a business plan, you raise a little bit money and everything just happens.
Keith Cline (14:51.821)
How’d meet Leah?
Rylan Hamilton (14:53.772)
Um, I have met Leah through an investor and I was my background. just finished graduate school. I’d been in the Navy and I kind of was an ops person. And I said, I’m willing to take a bet. Uh, and so we met over coffee actually in Beacon Hill. And then I started working for a part-time, uh, while I was at school. And then, uh, right after, oh, basically as I was graduating, I was working for a full time. Uh, and then Leah actually got accepted into the Facebook fund, uh, and spent the summer.
in San Francisco. And so I went out there a couple of times and we went into like the Facebook office when there were like 200 people or something like that. And some of the founders, I think it was Logan, can’t remember the others, but the founders of Zipcar, no, not Zipcar, the founders of Lyft were also part of that Facebook fund back in the day. And they had also a ride sharing app. And so was definitely the early days of kind of like the app economy.
Keith Cline (15:30.029)
No way.
Keith Cline (15:40.023)
Really?
Keith Cline (15:46.495)
Okay, so the next chapter, which was another fun fact, I learned about you with Vistaprint. what were you working on and who’d you work with at Vistaprint?
Rylan Hamilton (15:55.165)
so I just kind of, realized that startups are hard, and I had a family at that time and I wanted to join like an established company and Vistaprint like, and so to say, it’s like a very impressive company that was one of the early companies to figure out how to make a really profitable business online. And so they’re selling, you know, marketing material to small businesses. and they were doing things like AB testing before anyone was doing AB testing and they were doing online ads and a bunch of different things. And so,
I joined and I was in a small group of people, but I would actually surrounded myself with future founders. And so Dina Grey hired me into VistaPrint, but I people like Jason Robbins and Mary Biggins, like they were on a team of like 10 people and we’d all huddle up once a week, working on different like marketing campaigns. And as you know, like Jason went off to start DraftKings, Mary’s this year entrepreneur, she’s now the founder CEO of MealPass, she was early employee at Betterment.
But like I didn’t realize at the time just the quality of people that were there at Fist of Print.
Keith Cline (16:55.63)
and you were hired by Deana Gray too, I didn’t know that part, but yeah, Vistaprint, amazing anchor company, great people, very data-driven organization ahead of its time, and yeah, the entrepreneurs that have come out of there have done extraordinary things. Speaking of extraordinary, Kiva Systems, your next stop. So this was probably, I don’t know if the acquisition had already happened, I think, well, it might have, but I saw McMount’s speak.
Eric Paley from Founder Collective would have these founder dialogue events that he would host and he’d have guest speakers. And I saw him speak and he showed a video with the warehouse automation robots doing its thing. And I was just like, mind blown that people figure this stuff out. Like there’s so many smart people out there that just can figure stuff out. And that was one of them where I just saw the whole warehouse just doing its thing. So how did you get involved with Kiva?
Rylan Hamilton (17:50.38)
Yeah. So, love Vistaprint. business cards are actually really cool. especially what Vistaprint was doing, but what’s even cooler to business cards are robots in warehouses. And so when I saw Kiva, I was just, I fell in love and it kind of reminded me of like being in the Navy where I love like physical, tangible things that when you put, and you have to put them together in a system that works all the time. And that was Kiva. I, at the time I did a little bit of research. but I didn’t know like,
Keith Cline (18:00.962)
Right.
Rylan Hamilton (18:20.235)
the alternatives that were out there. just said, of course everyone wants orange robots that are in a warehouse. And so I joined Kiva systems in 2011. I was employee 200 and I started off as a program manager. Now I got lucky because Dave Minicalo, who’s now an investor in blue water and at Google ventures, he recruited me into Kiva systems says that, Dave, I don’t really know much about supply chain. I don’t know anything about robotics. You’re hiring me to be a program manager. I’m not even sure the difference between being a program manager and a project manager.
but like, you know, are you okay with this? And Dave’s like, you’ll figure this stuff out. It’s not rocket science, but like everything you’ve done today, like will really apply. And I, you know, I have confidence that you can figure this, figure, you know, your job out at Kiva. And so I joined in 2011. It was a couple of years before Amazon acquired Kiva. And it was definitely during like the hard scaling years and like all years are hard at a startup. But this was a time when the technology was really working and a lot of retailers and merchants were moving from
kind of traditional like cart picking operations to saying like, wow, our e-commerce business is taking off and like our last holiday season and Black Friday and Cyber Monday was a disaster and we need something better. And that was Kiva. And so Kiva’s business was going up into the right. Something I didn’t see a TaskRabbit, but we’re now seeing a Kiva. And it was like, we needed to go from like scaling with heroics where people work a hundred plus hour weeks to something that was a little bit more scalable. And so I jumped into that company
and I did whatever it took to kind of make those customers successful. And the great part about being a program manager was that I got to work with all parts of the business for everything from sales and marketing to software to hardware engineering to customer success to support. And so I quickly learned that business and the technology.
Keith Cline (20:08.11)
So I remember, if my memory is correct, Staples was a customer, So when Amazon acquired Kiva, they kind of halted working with other retailers because they bought it for their own purposes, right? So did that role transition into supporting Amazon internally then, or did you have to wind down the existing contracts?
Rylan Hamilton (20:13.451)
They were.
Rylan Hamilton (20:30.325)
Yeah. So, Amazon didn’t halt the work at first. I think they wanted to understand the business a little bit. And so we kept supporting kind of the customers like Staples and Office Depot and Toys R Us and, and Dillard’s, but then at a moment Amazon said, you know what, our roadmap’s really going to be focused on all of the Amazon warehouses. And so they decided basically the end of life, the Kiva technology for all of the sort of external customers.
And so there was definitely a transition that we went through. It actually allowed me to spend a lot of times with those other customers outside of Amazon and learn more about their businesses. But yeah, it got a little bit bumpy in terms of that transition. But when I was there and during that transition, were probably like a couple of thousands or there are thousands of robots in the field. And now there are over a million robots in all the Amazon warehouses. so while it was, but you know,
Keith Cline (21:21.016)
Are there real? I was gonna ask you, yeah.
Rylan Hamilton (21:25.279)
What’s not obvious about that acquisition was in the first couple of years after Amazon bought us, like we had to prove ourselves. Amazon’s like, well, you guys are really good at robots. You know how to build the robots, but Amazon’s like, we’re good at software. And so all the teams that were in North Reading and now are spread between North Reading and West Reading, basically I’d say like, we need to earn a right to be within Amazon and to keep expanding and to do more within Amazon. And so, you know, it was an intense couple of years, but we started to, you know,
When I first joined Kiva, one of my first projects was in Arkansas and it was a 20 robot deployment. And during my last year, I was basically managing multiple deployments into warehouses where there are a couple thousand robots in one Amazon building at the same time. And so to see that scale was just awesome. And we were just floored when we got past 10,000 robots. To ever think that 15 years later, they’d be at a million robots just blows my mind.
Keith Cline (22:24.109)
It’s so cool. All right, so Amazon did acquire Kiva for $775 million in a cash transaction, which was the second largest Amazon acquisition at that point in time, 2012.
Rylan Hamilton (22:37.439)
But I have to was the best acquisition that Amazon ever made. just wanna, yeah.
Keith Cline (22:41.813)
Absolutely, a thousand percent. And it’s still like that North Reading is still a massive facility, right? Like they’re still doing a ton of work out of there.
Rylan Hamilton (22:47.101)
It’s North Reading, it’s Westboro. I don’t know the official number, but there have to be, I don’t know, between five to 10,000 employees in Massachusetts. And it’s probably the most impressive robotics company in the world. You know, and it’s just, it’s amazing. when I was at Amazon Robotics, the focus was on mobile robotics and robots that followed kind of fiducials or stickers on the floor. And now they’ve expanded their portfolio into robotic arms and…
collaborative robots and all different types of automation. So it’s really cool to see what they’ve done over the last 15 years.
Keith Cline (23:22.359)
Alright, so how did you get started with 6 River Systems, your own company?
Rylan Hamilton (23:26.581)
Yeah, so when I was at Amazon Robotics, I actually had an opportunity to go work in Seattle and keep kind of challenging myself. I was actually pretty close to moving to Seattle, but I wanted a promotion and that wasn’t gonna happen. They said, why don’t you move to Seattle and then we can work on that promotion. And so I decided to kind of explore other opportunities. And I started to talk to all these different robotic companies, some on the West Coast and a lot sort of in the Boston area.
Cause I knew from those early days at TaskRabbit how hard it is to start a company. And so I was like, why don’t I start early, you know, start at an early company or join an early company, someone that has a little bit of capital, they built a product and I can take my experience from Kiva systems or Amazon robotics and help them scale and understand the customer, understand deployment and all the different kinds of functions that you need to build into a company over time. But what I learned during that exploration is that the technology, especially around mobile robotics had advanced a lot from
when Kiva was started back in 2003. And so basically there were companies that creating almost like they’re called a collaborative autonomous mobile robots or self-driving robots or self-driving vehicles in warehouses. So you’re using some of the same sensors that you’d see on the way most of the world, the same software and the same GPUs and just putting them onto mobile robots. And it really allowed you to rethink how you could automate a warehouse. so I just, know, during that exploration said the tech is really interesting.
but no one really had a compelling kind of solution that had a great return on investment and something that kind of passed the sniff test in front of customers. And so I took some time off and I talked to other people in my network and I convinced a couple other people and I said, look, I think we have this once in a lifetime moment to start a company. If we wait five years, we’re going to kick ourselves because the moment will pass. But I said, I think if we get together and I convinced Jerome, who’s my other co-founder and my co-CEO,
and then Chris Cassioppo, who was our CTO. And I said, look, let’s start a company because I think if we bring our kind of brains together, we could actually start something with a lot of upside, but we can’t wait. We have to do it now.
Keith Cline (25:37.487)
All right, so you’re just getting started. You’ve got this great background with Kiva. You’ve got co-founders. How did you get started with the early adopter customers?
Rylan Hamilton (25:46.495)
Yeah. So, when you start a company, I mean, there are many different ways to start a company, but especially as first time founders, you have to create magic. And so back in 2015, we were convinced that we had something that was interesting. We quit our jobs and we focused on a full time, but we didn’t have any money. We didn’t have employees. We didn’t have product. We didn’t have customers. And so we talked and we actually got pulled in by some investors to some like partner meetings. And we thought, wow. Like.
instead of raising like a little angel around, maybe we’d raise from a VC and we pitched the partners and they all said, we love what you guys are doing, but you haven’t built a robot yet. We’re like, well, we know that we told you that, but they just want to learn more about the industry. So it’s a little bit frustrating, but we kept at it. And so we raised some money from sort of some friends, families and angels raised enough money to get a small team together and to build our first robot. And based off that first robot, we then were able to raise more money. We were able to get some real customers.
And it felt like we’re always kind of bootstrapping over the first couple of years. But by a year and a half into it, we actually had robots that could solve a real business problem in customers warehouses. And we had something. But what we didn’t have is we didn’t have something that was scalable. But that was kind of the first journey is where we had to convince, get early capital to go get the early team, to build the early robot, and then to go show customers that we had something. Because everyone said, I think this is interesting, especially in warehousing. And I think the same applies to what I’m doing right now with the Navy is like,
Seeing is believing. They want to touch something. They want to see it like you only can get so far with PowerPoints.
Keith Cline (27:22.925)
And what made your warehouse robotics unique? Because there are other companies out there doing things in that same space.
Rylan Hamilton (27:30.686)
Yeah. So at the time our competition was kind of the traditional ways to automate a warehouse. Cause Kiva wasn’t really on the market, but there are other companies that were kind of copying the Kiva technology. But a lot of the technology at that point was either kind of conveyor, which would whip around boxes and inventory around a warehouse. Or it was what you call like a automated storage and retrieval system, or basically like a big box in the middle of a warehouse.
where you’d stand around the outside and the kind of the inventory would be brought to you. Those systems were expensive. They took years to kind of like design and install, but they did improve your pick rate improved. They’d improve your pick rates by like three to four X. But what we saw is that if you could take a collaborative autonomous mobile robot and drop it into an existing warehouse, you could basically get 80 % of the pick improvement at 20 % of the cost. So it was a lightweight
way to automate your warehouse. And at the time, our competition was companies like Fetch Robotics and Locus Robotics. And I think to this day, Locus and Six River are the kind of top two vendors in that space. But Locus and Six River, we’re always kind of this head-to-head competition in the early days competing against each other. But I will say, I’m super grateful that Locus existed. And I think the founders of Locus would say the same thing about Six River, because now our customers are like, they’re two companies that are building technology.
And they could kind of compete each other against each other, against you. They could compete six river and Locus against each other, but that kind of created a market. Cause if it just been one company in the market, people would be like, why is there only one company in the market? And is there, am I basically chasing a technology that looks cool, but maybe there’s not something that’s actually there.
Keith Cline (29:16.783)
Yeah, validated the market for it. So you went on to raise capital. If crunch base is accurate, it was 46 million over three rounds. that? Okay, so you’re building hardware, software, scaling. That’s, when I look at today’s numbers of venture capital, that’s not a lot. So it’s pretty impressive what you’re able to accomplish building the company that you did with a relatively lean amount of capital, especially when you’re dealing with hardware, which this statement always says hardware is hard, right?
Rylan Hamilton (29:24.97)
That sounds about right.
Rylan Hamilton (29:45.61)
Yeah. So we definitely took some of the early Kiva systems culture of being scrappy and being very mindful of your capital and resources and applied to Sixth River. And so at Kiva systems, if you got an award, you actually got a paper plate because they had a bunch of extra paper plates every time they ordered pizza for dinner to keep the engineers like happy when they’re working late into the night. And so we took that mentality and said, you know what, when you build a company, it’s hard. When you build a hardware company with some software on top, it’s even harder.
And so we’re definitely mindful about the capital that we raised, but we had a great team. And I think the other thing is that when you’re building a company and you’re building a physical product, you basically get one swing at it, maybe one and a half. But if you get the initial product wrong, you’re like, you don’t get another chance to the investors. You don’t get to go after a year and a half. Be like, you know what, we tried and we learned, but if we just want to go back to the drawing board and we just need to pay twice the amount of money to go build something new and give us another year and a half and trust us this time.
And so the good thing at Six River is we got the product right out of the gate and we got early customer adoption. So then we had paying customers and we use those paying customers to fund the business. And so we were able to get to think over 20 plus warehouses in the first four years, building a product from scratch with a relatively low amount of capital. And so even if we raised that $46 million when we got acquired, we still had a bunch of that in the bank.
Keith Cline (31:09.71)
All right, we have so much to talk, I could talk to you for hours here, but I gotta be mindful of we got a lot to talk about with Blue Water too, but so how did the acquisition come together with Shopify? Like I’m skipping over pretty much a whole journey of building a company, so how did that come together?
Rylan Hamilton (31:21.447)
That’s Yeah. Yeah. So we built the company and we were definitely like, when I joined Kiva, we were scaling it. In 2019, we were scaling six-river systems. Like we had the early adopters and they were super successful. We had companies like XBO that were expanding our technology into many different warehouses. We’re expanding it into international. But then we had this company called Shopify come around.
And at the time Shopify had announced that they were launching the Shopify fulfillment network and basically a network of warehouses all around the world that could basically create the same type of economies and deliveries or the speed of delivery that Amazon had, but for everyone else who wasn’t kind of selling things on Amazon. And Jerome and I at the moment were like, we had this kind of flash and we said, this reminds us like this exactly what where Kiva was when Amazon talked to them. And we always knew that we had to have some type of exit.
We always thought that we’d have to take the company public because we didn’t want to sell to kind of a traditional warehouse automation company because we didn’t want to get boxed into like you’re the mobile robot guys. Like we really like our vision was to create a fulfillment network where everyone could benefit from our technology and Shopify had that same vision. But when we started talking to Shopify in 2019, we said, look, even if you want to buy our solution for multiple warehouses, like you’re just one of many customers that we have to focus on.
but you have a really big vision and you’re gonna need to build out all the technology within the four walls of the warehouse. And we said the only way that you really can get our full attention is if you buy us. And at the same time, we actually had a term sheet for a Series C. And so we had to make a decision in a relatively short amount of time, but Toby was the founder and he is still the CEO of Shopify, is a really visionary person, someone that’s just like, I don’t know, you just wanna work for. And so in a short amount of time,
We sold the company for $450 million in 2019 to Shopify. And then we started to integrate into our technology in the Shopify fulfillment network.
Keith Cline (33:23.449)
Such a great story. what you accomplish is so hard to build scale and then, you know, it’s helpful to have that term sheet because then you’re in a positioning of negotiation power to hopefully get the outcome that you did. So kudos to the team at Six River Systems on that outcome. All right. Blue water autonomy. So when did you announce your seed? Because that’s when I first heard that you were building again. I was just like, wait a second.
is awesome.
Rylan Hamilton (33:54.996)
Yeah. So we announced our seed in the spring of this year. We actually started the company last year, but we were kind of in stealth for a while. And what’s different about Bluewater is we’re designing and building autonomous ships. call it like the largest mobile robot in the world. But unlike the mobile robots of Sixer Systems or at Amazon Robotics, instead of building a robot that’s in the tens of thousands of dollars, we’re building something that’s in the tens of millions of dollars. And so at Sixer, we actually created our first robot in 90 days.
It was built of 80-20 and dev boards. actually 3D printed the shell to make it look really nice, but that’s not something you can do just to build a ship in 90 days. so myself and two of the other co-founders, and I can tell you more about them later, we started the company in 2024 and we spent the first six months just doing a bunch of research. We researched the supply base, we researched the technology, and then we also researched the customer. And we really wanted to make sure that when we started to
build out the technology and kind of our first test vessel that we hit the mark. Cause again, go back to my early comment, like when you’re doing a company that’s hardware and software, you only get one swing at the plate. And so we really wanted to make sure we got it right. And so we actually spent a lot of 2024 kind of like in a conference room, hold up doing a bunch of research and getting really smart. And it wasn’t until sort of the end of 24 and the being of 25 that we really started to accelerate. And that’s when we announced our seed round.
Keith Cline (35:22.96)
Okay, so yeah, let’s take a step back. So how did you meet your co-founders? Because when you hear about VCs and they, what do you look for in an investment? And they’re like team, right? And when I look at your founding team, I was like, whoa, these people are uniquely qualified to build what they’re building.
Rylan Hamilton (35:39.059)
Yeah, so the first co-founder I met was Austin Gray. Like myself, he’d served the Navy, had been on ships, and he got out and he was in graduate school. And Austin, he’d actually, he came up with the name Blue Water Autonomy, and he was thinking about how autonomous ships could help our fleet and done a bunch of research. And I had left Six River Systems. I was actually spending a little bit time with some the VCs in the Boston area trying to figure out what I wanted to do next.
met Austin actually, so he’s a little bit younger than I am. And so I’m used to kind of the email intros and I got connected to another vet and the vet connected me to Austin over text. And two hours later we were meeting in downtown Boston and he was telling me about his idea. And so that’s the pace of kind of like Austin and myself. And I was like, I like this guy. And so we didn’t start the company right away and Austin was still at school. So we spent the next basically six months doing a bunch of research and for myself kind of.
having been in a couple other startups, I was just building up the conviction and trying to refine the idea to make sure this is something that really made sense and that we wanted to go full steam ahead with. And so Austin and got to the point where we said, Austin’s like, I’m gonna pass on this job offer after graduate school, let’s do Blue Water full time. We’d been talking to one of my early investors from Six River System, who was ready to write a check, but I said, I’ve got two Navy guys, two Navy vets.
but we don’t have the CTO, we don’t have the guys actually to help design and build all the technology for these autonomous ships. And so I basically pulled out my Rolodex, which in today’s terms is LinkedIn. And I started going back and having as many coffees and lunches with all the people that I have a ton of respect for in the sort of robotics world. And that’s when I met Scott Miller. Scott Miller is someone I’ve known for the last 10 years, but Scott was a early employee at iRobot when there were like five people working around a conference room on the Roomba.
and then has been kind of this hardware software ninja working with a bunch of different companies in the Boston area. But what I didn’t know about Scott, actually thought Scott would potentially introduce me to five more people I should have coffee with was that Scott not only has a background in robotics and early stage companies, but also has a love of the ocean. And I was actually talking to Scott earlier today. I was like, Scott, I think you have a tattoo of an anchor on your wrist. He’s like, and so he pulled back and see if he’s like, I do.
Rylan Hamilton (38:00.693)
and he has a tattoo of a sailboat on his arm. And he has a degree in ocean engineering from MIT. He sailed all around the world. And like me, Austin just has a passion for the ocean and boats and ships and all that stuff. so it’s a little bit messy pulling together the team, but we got an awesome team together.
Keith Cline (38:00.834)
No way!
Keith Cline (38:26.832)
He founded Dragon Innovation that I remember, that was just a great hardware, helping other companies. I don’t know if they were consulting firm, but there was something in that world of helping him.
Rylan Hamilton (38:36.544)
I tried to hire Scott from Dragon Innovation to Six-Furor Systems when I met him, I think it was 2016, but Scott’s like, I have my own company. He’s like, I can’t leave. like, Scott, like you. I love your background. So yeah, I guess it maybe it took me eight years to recruit Scott finally into a company that we could work together on.
Keith Cline (38:45.378)
Right.
Keith Cline (38:56.912)
Okay, so how did you get started with this company? Because the Navy, you have some inroads, you obviously are a vet, but it’s a complex organization.
Rylan Hamilton (39:07.336)
So, yeah. So part of this was when I was at, know, Kiva Systems, Amazon Robotics, think about what’s next. And that’s when I started Six River Systems. The whole idea of starting a company and selling technology into the Department of Defense or war, whatever you call it, was kind of novel. Like no one was really doing it. Andro was just getting started. But if you fast forward to 2024, and even 2023 when I met Austin,
There are a handful of companies, including Androl and SpaceX and Palantir that had started business, got backing from private investors, and then created products and been very successful selling to DeVance. And so that was kind of inspiring to kind of look into kind of autonomous systems within, know, DoD. But, know, Austin and I had been in the Navy and we kind of had this first principle thinking and saying, you know, our Navy today is a blue water Navy.
the ships that we served on operated across open oceans. And so he said, what if you took like the payloads that were on these like really impressive manned warships, disaggregate them and put one or two on kind of an autonomous ship. And we did our math and we said, you could do these missions for a much lower cost and not put sailors lives at risk, especially if you’re carrying weapons or doing risky missions. And so that’s where we started for first principles. But at the time we got a little bit of pushback because
The Navy had built some of these kind of this class of ship, the Navy called it a medium unmanned service vessel, but they really had no budget to go build anymore. It wasn’t on the shipbuilding plan. It was kind of an orphan within the Navy. But Austin and I said, we said, we think there’s something here. And if you just talk to kind of like at the mid-level people in the Navy who are very impressive, but like they’re just kind of doing what their boss tells them to do and they have a lot of work on their plate. They’re just like, yeah, this is really interesting. We want to do some research on it.
but there wasn’t really a roadmap to go build like many and many of these. But it was not until we started talking to more of like the people were involved in like force redesign for the Navy that said there’s something here with this medium, you know, class autonomous ship and just give it a little bit of time. But like, and so we said, look, we’re going to start this company. We’ll raise a little bit of money. We want to be a tech company. We want to sell in the Navy. And that was this, you know, 2024.
Rylan Hamilton (41:26.482)
But if you fast forward a year, things have been on turbo charts, like the entire, things have come around 180, the Navy’s spending a lot of money on what we’re doing. And so we definitely, we didn’t expect the company to accelerate this quick.
Keith Cline (41:39.833)
and that’s why you raised your Series A so quickly, your $50 million Series A.
Rylan Hamilton (41:43.592)
We did, so we started the company, we got there with the seed money, we got the team together. We basically have just outside of Boston, we have this 150 ton test vessel where we get to test all the hardware and the software and be really agile and iterative in all our testing. But at the beginning of this year, Congress actually agreed with companies like us where basically, when I say lobbying,
It’s basically founder led sales. It’s me and Austin walking the halls of Congress, trying to get into any Congressman or Senator’s office and explain what we’re doing and saying, could you please put a little bit budget for this type of ship? It could do these different missions in different ways. And then we talk to people in the Navy. We’d be like, hey, like our background’s this and like, we think we could solve the tech. So we convinced people to actually make a bet again on this class of ship. And at the beginning of this year,
there’s a reconciliation bill where actually the most money for autonomous systems for the Navy was actually for the type of ship that we’re designing and building. And so that was the beginning of the year. And we use that as proof to investors to say, we’re not crazy. In fact, we’ve picked, this is a really good time and we’re one of a few companies that’s focused on this area. But what we’re building is like, it’s expensive. Like it’s not like we’re building a mobile robot and we need some capital to really accelerate this. And so we raised the $50 million Series A led by Google Ventures.
this year.
Keith Cline (43:09.617)
Amazing. And that goes back to your original statement of grit, of like, just walking in the halls of Congress and lobbying for ultimately this type of budget and having that passion and conviction that there’s something here and you guys are uniquely qualified to build this. So along those lines, what you’re building, you’re not replacing like warships, like manned warships. These are optimized for delivery and payload, right?
Rylan Hamilton (43:39.826)
We’re making today’s fleet even better. So we’re not trying to say get rid of all the manned warships. In fact, our Navy builds the best warships by far in the entire world. We build aircraft carriers, we build destroyers, nuclear submarines, you name it, they’re world-class. And we’ve had a world-class Navy for the last 100 years, but we need to adopt to the times. And we’re seeing all these different types of autonomous systems come out.
And our focus is to how can we kind of compliment today’s blue water Navy. So think about like a guided missile destroyer. We know it’s better than one guided missile destroyer, a guided missile destroyer with four kind of like 200 foot, 150 foot autonomous ships, basically kind of sailing alongside it. And they can carry extra missiles, they can carry radars, they can carry extra sensors. And the way I described to kind of like my friends and family is like, you know, think about a chessboard.
On a chessboard, our Navy today has the really expensive pieces on the back, whether it’s the castle or the knight, the queen, the king, you name it, the bishop. These are like the pieces that can do a lot of damage on a chessboard, but what our Navy needs is it needs the pawns. And so pawns don’t replace all the pieces on the back of the chessboard, they complement it. And they’re the first pieces that go and kind of, you know, signal where the enemy is and what it’s doing. And so we’re basically creating the pawns for today’s fleet. There are lower costs.
They’re easier to build because we don’t have people on them. They’re smaller side. We can upgrade them over time and they’re multi-mission. And so, I’d like to say we came up with this idea. didn’t, but basically we’ve been partnering with the Navy and kind of hearing their feedback. And this is where the Navy wants to go. The challenge the Navy has had is actually moving the tech forward. And so what we’re doing is we’re taking private capital from companies like Google venture and saying, we’re going to make it better on ourselves. And if it doesn’t work, don’t pay us.
but we’re gonna take the best talent from places like Boston, people that have built companies like Amazon Robotics and iRobot and take that talent and then go apply it to this class of Bessel.
Keith Cline (45:44.466)
That’s amazing. I mean, I think of the analogy of SpaceX, right? How they commercialize space again, where it was just caught in this limbo of working with these defense contractors that just would just work and work and budget and budget and never get anywhere. And all of a sudden SpaceX comes and they have gotten a lot done.
Rylan Hamilton (45:57.063)
Yeah.
Rylan Hamilton (46:02.536)
And if SpaceX never worked, the government wouldn’t have to pay anything. It was Elon and others who said, well, you have a vision, we’re going to create rockets that are going to be lower cost and by the way, reusable. And we’re doing the same thing. we actually like, you know, we don’t compare ourselves to like SpaceX or Elon Musk, but I think it’s a good analogy for what we’re doing. It’s like, what SpaceX does is it lowers the cost of taking payloads from the ground into orbit.
Keith Cline (46:20.559)
Right. Yeah.
Rylan Hamilton (46:28.741)
And what we’re doing at Blue Water is we’re lowering the cost of taking payloads across the open ocean on a reusable platform. So you can send it out, can do a mission and it comes back and you can put whatever payload you want onto it. And we’re going to get better and better at doing this. And the cost is going to come way down over time because we’re rethinking the problem. We’re not putting people on a ship. We’re not making these things with all military grade technology. We’re going to be cost conscious. They’re going to be attributable. They’re going to be easy to produce.
But at the end of the day, it’s all about the payload and lowering the cost. And that’s what we’re doing for the open ocean and the same way as what SpaceX has done for space.
Keith Cline (47:06.927)
Yeah, now it’s perfect analogy. It’s like we’re going to reuse rockets and before SpaceX was like, can’t do that. That’s insane. what? Impossible.
Rylan Hamilton (47:13.553)
Yeah. And what’s even cooler is like what SpaceX did is I’m so I’m guessing a lot of SpaceX’s initial kind of payloads were military or for the intelligence community. But then eventually there are also commercial payloads. And so we think the same way at Bluewater where today we’re focused on the Navy. There are a customer with a need, there are customer with a budget and we understand the customer really well. But as this technology matures and we can lower the cost of moving things around the ocean,
we can move into commercial markets. Now, I don’t think we’re gonna make massive container ships in the next five years that are gonna have zero people on it. No, no, no, not yet. mean, summer attack could be used on it, but you know, in the same way, and I kind of use analogies from like Amazon, Amazon has this whole concept of middle mile logistics. So how can you move something from like the warehouse to the sort center and then from the sort center goes into there? Well, I like the concept of middle mile logistics in terms of like maybe there’s stuff in like Portland that needs to move to Los Angeles.
Keith Cline (47:47.715)
I was like, are you gonna replace those things? Like, wow, that kind of makes sense.
Rylan Hamilton (48:12.296)
and maybe don’t need massive large container ships and moving stuff on the water is cheaper than moving on the roads. And so I think that’s one example of many where we can take the technology that we’re developing and be a dual use company and we can bring back the maritime industry back to the United States. And that’s something that is really resonated because like today, like our competition in the maritime industry is China and China has 200 X the shipbuilding capacity of the United States. And that’s also why our Navy needs to adopt new technology.
because we’re not going to outcompete China in the next couple of years just in terms of getting tonnage into the, know, worship tonnage into the ocean. We need to outcompete them on tech.
Keith Cline (48:52.018)
Do you have a hard stop at four? Because I can go in two different directions. I can wrap this up or just, not like, I’m not gonna chew up much more time, but I just wanna steer this in the right direction. Okay, cool. Because what you’re building is really hard, you got a new ship design. So designing ships, not easy. Systems, navigation, autonomous systems, not easy. And then building the ship. So.
Rylan Hamilton (48:54.489)
I can keep going.
Rylan Hamilton (49:01.935)
I don’t have art stuff.
Keith Cline (49:19.142)
How are you going about that? Like what’s the team look like? What’s the plans ahead?
Rylan Hamilton (49:23.537)
Yeah, so what we are building is hard, but we’ve basically decomposed the problem into different components. And then we found the best people in industry to go solve those different problems. So when it comes to robotics and automation and software, we’re pulling from kind of the Boston community. So again, as I mentioned, Amazon Robotics and iRobot and Boston Dynamics and then my previous company, Six River Systems, we’re taking all that talent to basically
solve the robotics problem. On the shipbuilding side, we just hired our chief operating officer, Tim Clenatsis, who spent 20 years building the largest Navy ships that are out there, whether it’s guided missile destroyers or supply ships. And then on the ship design, we actually took a team of people who worked on the most advanced autonomous ship. It’s built by DARPA. It’s called the Defiant. It’s doing sea trials right now in the Pacific. And so we’ve basically accumulated some of the best people that’s out there
and we have capital to basically go solve this problem. And so all the people on our team have kind of done this before in a way, but when we pull them all together, I think we have the most compelling team to actually go design and build autonomous ships. But that’s not going to make it like easy, but it definitely helps us kind of like cheat, know, cheat a little bit because we’re not doing it for the first time.
Keith Cline (50:44.966)
What’s the culture that you’re looking to build?
Rylan Hamilton (50:48.102)
Um, so I think, uh, I’m taking the best from previous companies that I’ve been at, whether it’s like Vista print or it’s Amazon robotics or it’s six river systems. Uh, and today, you know, we’re relatively early. Uh, we’ve definitely moved beyond that seed stage company and we have a team that’s like highly capable and, and in the process of, uh, actually launching our first full scale ship, uh, next year. Um, but there’s something really magical.
about kind of like a team full of ninjas. And so, you if I were to have a company of 500 or a thousand people, the challenge with some of those large organizations is just inherently you build like layers of like bureaucracy and decision-making takes longer. And then you just hire sometimes political people who are more concerned about how many people report to them and what their title is and less about the mission and the outcome. And in today’s kind of culture, it’s like, you know,
It doesn’t matter where the idea came from. Information travels really quickly and people don’t feel encumbered by spending a lot of time filling out reports. Their focus is on building and the best engineers that are out there or some of the best love building. And at Blue Water Autonomy, we are all about building really cool stuff that’s really pushing sort of the boundary. And that allows us to track the best engineers because they want to build. And it kind of goes back to like the early part of my career where like
I am not the type of person who wants to be behind a computer doing emails and spreadsheets all day long. I like to build. And so that is what is special about companies that have private capital and that are kind of startups is that we spend 80 or 90 % of our time building. And so going back to Blue Water, our culture is about building, it’s about team, it’s about the mission. And then by the way, I think a lot of us have salt running through our veins.
Keith Cline (52:44.37)
What do you in terms of hiring plans like what are the key positions that you’re hiring for across the different functional areas?
Rylan Hamilton (52:50.65)
Yeah, so most of the hiring today is just engineering. So whether it’s on the software side, whether it’s infrastructure, whole stack, autonomy, perception, we’re hiring mechanical engineers, firmware engineers, electrical engineers. And then there are a couple of kind of non-engineering roles, but like we definitely want to kind of be in this like mostly engineering kind of mindset for the near term. We’ve also made some really key partnerships. So rather than trying to do everything in house, we, for example, just announced a partnership
with a shipyard called Conrad that’s in the Gulf. They have five locations, mostly in Louisiana, and they have a thousand employees. So rather than hiring people to go build the ships and weld steel together, we found one of the best shipyards in the United States to go partner with us. And so that’s just a way that we can move faster and we don’t necessarily need to go hire people and open up our own shipyard.
Keith Cline (53:45.044)
All right, so what advice would you have for entrepreneurs trying to build a hardware company? Like, I mean, there’s some really exciting companies that are venture funded in Boston that are this next generation of hardware and robotics, Blue Water being one of them. I bought 10 Beauty. So what advice would you have for entrepreneurs on building hardware?
Rylan Hamilton (54:02.695)
So if this is your first work experience or first time being at a hardware company, generally, if you can go work for one of the companies that you just mentioned that has funding, that has a great team, that has some momentum, go learn from that company. Go learn about their culture. Go learn what it takes to get through the early days. Go learn what it takes to scale. And then if you really want to, take that experience and some of that network and then go start a company.
But if you’re just doing this right out of school, it can be really hard. That said, I think there’s some examples of companies where the founders are coming right out of school or it’s the first kind of hardware company they’re doing. Like think Whoop might be an example. I don’t know their kind of founder will as much other than reading some articles. I think he started right out of school. So there are definitely opportunities that are out there. But my experience has been learn from the best that are out there, join the companies. And there are a lot of really great companies in Boston that you can join.
and spend like three or four years there. If you’re only there one or two years, it’s usually not enough time to learn a lot, but three or four years, it’s a good chunk of time. It’s like going back to high school or going to college again. Like just learn a lot, get really deep into an area, be successful, and then take that experience and then use that if you want to be a launching pad for a startup.
Keith Cline (55:16.483)
Yeah, I mean I think if I bought they were at form labs, you know cutting their teeth there and they had done this I think before but the market wasn’t ready and they came full circle after form lab so
Rylan Hamilton (55:26.726)
That’s great. The other thing, I’ll say, you mentioned at the beginning of interview that you’ve done 400 interviews like this. And I hope that if you do 500, that maybe you’ll, and if we’re doing well, you’ll say, hey, Rylan, want to come back for 500 or maybe a thousand, you tell me. But there’s a lot of great content online. And so one way to learn is actually go join a company. And another way is actually listen to podcasts, watch videos online.
Keith Cline (55:41.97)
Yeah.
Rylan Hamilton (55:52.71)
Go to Y Combinator, there’s so much information so you can self teach yourself. And now you have all these kind of AI tools that are out there too, but learn. Like I remember in the early days of Six River, I would be running along the Charles River and I’d be listening to podcasts about startups and listening to other founders and just absorbing as much information as I could. And that was all free and stuff that I could do in my free time. So like just be a constant learner if you ever want to start a company or be a constant learner just, you know, if like.
Like myself, I just, I enjoy it. It’s something that makes life really special.
Keith Cline (56:24.795)
Absolutely. I think that’s why I love doing this podcast because I used to consume so much of this content where I’m like, maybe I should just do this myself.
Rylan Hamilton (56:32.805)
You’re like a Boston startup historian. I know we can’t pull up the emails that we had back and forth setting up this interview, but you brought up all these names and these companies and you know how it’s all connected and intertwined. And it’s pretty special in terms of your perspective on the Boston community.
Keith Cline (56:36.529)
I
Keith Cline (56:51.091)
It’s just I love figuring stuff out where I’m like no way like task rabbit early days. So anyways, it’s just cool to pull everything together. And I think sometimes Boston just doesn’t give it enough credit of things that they have accomplished. Robotics and consumer and all these different things that people are like, mean Boston has led the way in so many of these categories. I mean iRobot is such an amazing company of what they built and I mean it’s just and
know, it’s it’s I mean, Colin Angle was on my podcast and he’s building again. So there’s so many great entrepreneurs that are building again. there’s there’s so much good stuff going on in Boston.
Rylan Hamilton (57:25.305)
Yeah. And if you think about the connection, so I’m looking over your left shoulder, you have a sticker of DraftKings. So go back to Jason Robbins and that early Vistaprint team that started DraftKings. And then you just mentioned Colin. And so Colin actually worked with Scott Miller, who’s my CTO and early employee at iRobot. And so they’re all kind of connected. And if I had to pick up the phone today and ask Jason question, he would answer it and help me kind of work through a problem, the same way that Colin would help Scott work through a problem.
Keith Cline (57:34.429)
Yep.
Rylan Hamilton (57:53.167)
And so it kind of goes back to like, if you’re gonna start a company, sometimes having that support network around you is really helpful. And then hire people who have that support network too. Like when you’re hiring people, if you hire someone who’d been at a DraftKings or an iRobot or an iBot or any of these companies, they also bring their network and their learnings. And if they were a high performer at those companies, then they can also pick up the phone and call people and be like, we’re trying to solve this problem, can you help me out? And that’s where I think it’s actually really special about the Boston community.
over other tech communities, because it’s really not that big. And if you go to like the West coast and like, I think San Francisco has a really like impressive, like startup community, but it’s also like, it’s big. It’s like the open ocean. It can be kind of overwhelming and you can feel like you’re drowning at times. Whereas like the Boston kind of ecosystem, it’s more like, I don’t know, I’ll call it like Buzzards Bay, which is like the armpit of Cape Cod, but it’s a smaller body of water. Everyone knows each other. You kind of can navigate your way around.
And that’s what I just love. And that’s why we’re building this company in Boston.
Keith Cline (58:54.845)
Well, I started this comment earlier when we were starting off and I just feel like your career…
has been something that I try to preach. So I have two daughters in college. And what I take away from your background is you went out and explored, right? Graduating from Harvard undergrad, I’m sure you could have gone consulting, iBanking, but you chose to go into the Navy. And then from there, you decided to do the startups and then HBS and then startups, mean, and then joining robotics. you’ve always just like, seemed like you’re always an open ocean yourself of exploration.
Rylan Hamilton (59:12.261)
Yeah.
Rylan Hamilton (59:29.669)
think that’s right. And I think it’s even more important now. So sounds like you’re a couple of years ahead of me in terms of being a parent, but have two sons who are in high school, a daughter who’s in middle school, but I want them to be explorers because I don’t think the traditional jobs of being a consultant for your entire career or being a lawyer, I don’t know if that’s what people should necessarily aspire to do because technology is changing so quickly. And if you look at all these different AI tools,
And so if you’re an explorer today and you figure out the different tools that are out there, I think you can have a lot more impact on the world because the world is changing even faster than kind of what it has over last 20 years. And so I think that explorer mentality for some people is really important. So if you can find an explorer and constant learner, I think it can be a really kind of fun career.
Keith Cline (01:00:16.724)
All right, three rapid fire questions. Three apps you can’t live without can’t be Slack, email, or calendar.
Rylan Hamilton (01:00:23.358)
Slack email encounter. Actually, no, I’m joking. I actually have found at this point in my career that I don’t like my day to be run by apps or email or Slack. And I think it’s really easy to basically have those apps control your life. And so I actually think some of the most productive days are when you can pull yourself away from your laptop, pull yourself away from your phone, and then work on the things that really matter.
Keith Cline (01:00:25.0)
Hahaha!
Rylan Hamilton (01:00:50.149)
versus having apps kind of like direct your life. And so I actually would counter and say the three apps that I like the most are the three apps, like, like the non-apps, like just like they’re meeting with people, having conversations like this, going to conference room, having coffees, like pull yourself away from this app economy.
Keith Cline (01:01:08.146)
I love that answer actually, that’s amazing. Because yeah, enough of the apps, get in front of people and network. All right, but how about a podcast? You talk about podcasts that you like to listen to while you’re running or something. what podcasts or even book recommendation would you have for entrepreneurs?
Rylan Hamilton (01:01:23.077)
Okay, so the book one is easy. I love the box by Mark Levinson. It’s all about the invention of the intermodal container and how it changed shipping and trade and just basically the world, but it didn’t over happen overnight. It happened over like 30 plus years. And it’s a really cool story. today, you know, it’s actually something that a book that I loved even before I started Blue Water, cause it had to deal with like logistics and supply chain and automation.
And now it actually informs a lot of how I think about blue water autonomy. So that’s like my favorite book. And I’ve actually been kind of on a podcast with Mark a couple of years ago. Sorry, and what was your other question?
Keith Cline (01:02:04.18)
It was just a book or a podcast, so you covered the basis. What do you do for fun outside of work?
Rylan Hamilton (01:02:06.905)
but yeah. Okay, great.
Rylan Hamilton (01:02:11.525)
Um, so I definitely like to play golf, but being back in kind of startup mode, I played golf once. I played golf once this year. I’m just, it’s kind of sad. So, uh, I like to spend a lot of time with family. I like to spend a lot of time with work and then, uh, I like to run, uh, our office is in Lexington, Massachusetts. So you can find me either before work or after work actually running on kind of the minute man trail. Cause that’s how I got to kind of get to, uh, yeah, basically, uh,
Keith Cline (01:02:17.148)
You don’t have time.
Right.
Rylan Hamilton (01:02:42.019)
Yeah, I love running. That’s one thing I like doing outside of work.
Keith Cline (01:02:45.758)
That’s probably what you spend time thinking. It’s just great to be running and process your thoughts.
Rylan Hamilton (01:02:52.077)
no apps, no emails, although these AirPods sometimes when you’re running will then remind you that there’s a text by someone and then read it to you while you’re running, which is a really bad feature, so.
Keith Cline (01:03:01.044)
Well, Ryland, thanks so much for taking the time to us through your professional journey, all the great companies that you’ve built and you’re building. thanks again for being guest 400.
Rylan Hamilton (01:03:11.173)
Okay, Keith, thank you. It great.
