The SuperYacht industry is constantly evolving, and technology is playing an increasingly important role in shaping its future. In this episode, we sit down with Jack Robinson, the director of the Superyacht Technology Network, to discuss how the network is transforming the industry through its focus on innovation and collaboration.
One of the key ways the SYTN is making a positive change in the industry is by providing a platform for discussion and collaboration among industry experts. Through its various events and initiatives, the network brings together technology buyers and sellers, industry leaders, and global experts to share their knowledge and insights on the latest technological advancements in the SuperYacht sector. This not only helps to foster a sense of community within the industry but also creates opportunities for the exchange of ideas and solutions to common challenges.
Another way the SYTN is making a difference is by promoting access to cutting-edge technology for SuperYacht owners and their representatives. The network provides a wealth of information and resources on the latest technological trends and advancements in the sector, making it easier for buyers to find the solutions that best meet their needs. From TECHtalks to webinars and industry events, the SYTN offers a range of educational opportunities to help stakeholders stay up-to-date with the latest innovations in the field.
The SuperYacht Technology Network is a driving force behind the positive change in the SuperYacht industry. Through its commitment to collaboration and innovation, the network is helping to shape the future of the sector and ensuring that superyacht owners and their representatives have access to the best and most cutting-edge technology available.
Brought to you by SHIPSHAPE
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Farah [00:00:09] Hello and welcome to the Shipshape podcast, a series of podcasts where we meet amazing people and talk about their experiences, personal, technical and all related to the maritime world. Come and dive in. Dive in. Dive in.
Georgia [00:00:37] This week on the Shipshape podcast, we are speaking to Jack Robinson, director of the Superyacht Technology Network, which looks how we dive into such thorny questions as how to confidentiality. NDAs and innovation co-exist within the Superyacht industry. My name is Georgia Tindale and I’m a freelance editor and writer based in Lancaster in the UK. And I’m joined by Merrill Charette.
Merrill Charette [00:01:00] I’m a liveaboard on a Ta-Shing, Tashiba 36 and I’m also top 40 under 40. Maybe I’ll change it up a little bit. So, Jack, where are you coming from?
Jack Robinson [00:01:10] So I’ve been in this industry throughout about 20 years in various modes media, technology, general, kind of like disruptor and people’s last night. I’ll be honest with you. Say I come through different segments of the industry that really led me to where about to be able to bring it all together. And obviously, obviously, just for the sake of technology show 2024.
Merrill Charette [00:01:34] But prior to all the superyachts, I mean, did you grow up boating? Like what is that background look like?
Jack Robinson [00:01:40] Oh, I see. Now, actually, I grew up I got a broad based in my life and maybe that has some influence. But I grew up primarily in Europe, in Spain and and in France. I’m a water baby, but I did sailing a lot. Primary is like windsurf stuff, a skim board, even surfed a few sand dunes in my time. But I think the love of water was always there that I progressed into kind of corporates, into big DLC. And after a while I went for an interview and I had the word superyachts and I just thought, That sounds like my kind of place and the rest is history. You know, I did used to organize some pretty well known and crazy parties that like the black and white Lounge that were the first people to privatize the IOC, a billionaire ski team. So I lived in Majorca for years. So obviously a big voting place and it kind of drifted because I stopped working after a long time at this company that I was. I just kind of got bored and I had a bit of money in the bank and I thought, you know what, I want to go to Europe. And I went over there, really enjoyed it. I wouldn’t want to live there. It’s full of your people. And I thought, you know, somebody will come to me. That actually went for lunch with one of my old clients who happens to work in tech, and I had a big research and development company and he had a fundamental problem, which was that his products weren’t selling. And my background is in sales, you know, unashamedly commercial director with a raft of qualifications and courses and help and everything. So, you know, I really understand the structure of how to sell stuff. And what was funny is I came into this company, which not only I’m from the south of the UK and they’re based up north and is quite different people. I would say that everyone was lovely, very different people and I think always when you have like ten engineers in the room and this guy comes in as the new head of sales, automatically, they’re like, What are your qualifications? We don’t like you. This is the whole thing. And I remember walking in and kind of a big burly engineer looking at my myself going, What is this guy going to do? And I’ll the company at the time was I was losing money and things were not good. Yeah. Came in and I tried to make a joke. I held my ear and I went, boom, boom, what’s this? And they all looked at me like a complete idiot. And I saw that French engineer trying to break the ice. It didn’t work. Well, in all seriousness, sometimes what engineers to overthink things. Their job is to be Socratic and say they find a problem and then they find another problem. My job is to make money and find solutions and take products to market. Right? So that’s what I did. Firstly, by calling our distribution and finding out who most of them was selling off test products, probably because we were offering really terrible margins and our distribution model was pretty poor. So I kind of that’s I ended up in the technology segment by accident, but then I loved it. I mean, it’s really exciting, absolutely amazing. So that’s is how I kind of ended up where I was.
Merrill Charette [00:04:40] Gosh, you sound like the Steve Jobs of Superyachts.
Jack Robinson [00:04:43] That’s like you’re like, now I’m still a startup young whippersnapper. I mean, we have had four of the legends know, Wolf, of the tire industry a very successful build. The lady companies arguably was the first ever ability of CTO in the future industry built something that was able heavily and build some of the biggest superyachts in the world, very successful technical management. And, you know, it’s a huge thing because I was looking for someone that would invest potentially would be a mentor as well, and quite frankly was a good guy. Now I’m looking to work with someone. He’s a good, good person. He shares the same vision, is a venture capital that just wants a quick ROI. So yeah, I would say he is more like Steve Jobs. I am more like holding on to Steve Jobs, toe coats or whatever they call it these days. I space. The vision that we share is very similar, and we strongly believe that mixing brokerage together with technologies really doesn’t work. Mean every single person I speak to says I go to big brokerage shades, sell technology and really I don’t have a lot of progress. I meet people. But you know, a lot of people say, frankly, I’d better go and see them outside of the show or get to spend quality time, take them for lunch. I don’t think it really works when you prioritize to sell yachts. And yet technology is an afterthought. How important is technology? Most of the people are dealing with not Jeff Bezos. That’s in the media now, his Super Bowl, etc., etc. all made their money in tech. And yet we’re going, Oh, it’s not that important. I just want to create an environment that wants to bring something that wasn’t a very free show where there was tech. I did want to do something where it’s, you know, it’s not a marine trade show with like barbecues and life jackets for dogs. And then let’s stick some superhero stuff in because it makes us lots and lots of money. And, you know, we’ve seen a substantial decline in those Marine trade shows and they tend to buy spicy for people. I think everybody was very, very bright and ready for a show that was simply and purely dedicated to the Super Bowl, a segment of the market. So we wanted to create a dedicated show. We also wanted to be different. We wanted to be like TED Talk style, not a bunch of middle aged men on a panel where it was just like talking about a bunch of stuff that had semi relevance to the Super Bowl sector. So that’s really, really important. And again, I do apologize, but I’m working from home today and all of us know that that’s my vice president of three events behind me, which is Larry the golden retriever type. My wife just come home so I can hear barking in the background.
Merrill Charette [00:07:23] So when we start talking about technology, right. And especially in kind of this industry, that’s not very quick at adopting technology. There’s a lot of education that has to happen. And so this event that you put on is kind of the avenue to educate and bring to light all this new technology 100%.
Jack Robinson [00:07:41] Let’s be very clear between different types of technology. If you are going to monitor your show, for example, I’m not picking on them. The Dubai Boat show, The Fort Lauderdale Show, these are all brokerage shows. Let’s agree the primary task there is to sell yachts. Okay. That’s why I did that. Now, let’s not detract between lifestyle products that are technology and actual technology that is complicated tech, you know, radars, stabilizers, systems, gravity systems, cinema systems, all the way through to, you know, our these systems now, cinema systems arguably might transition between the two worlds. So it’s a little bit lifestyle and it’s a little bit very technical as well. Certainly when they put the first IMAX on the bowl ever, they know they have to pull tons of concrete into the bottom. It was this craziness into to achieve something of that caliber. So I think lifestyle product should stay approved shows if you want a Jacuzzi that has a fountain and a shower that changes color and steam and every level that fantastic. We want to be the show where you can go and you can see absolutely amazing, you know, artificial intelligence based kits. You can see everything that you need from a technical point of view where technical people go to understand the technology that is required onboard changes there affecting the market like you that has come in and completely disrupted the superyacht sector. Debatable whether it’s going to be good or bad because I don’t know if, you know, Starlink’s business model. It’s very Elon Musk’s.
Georgia [00:09:11] No, I don’t know about that. Could you tell me.
Jack Robinson [00:09:14] You don’t get any margin and you get very little support? So yes, it’s an amazing product, but basically, unless you are buying the kind of volume that it’s very unlikely that anyone in the crypto industry could buy right then is probably going to be the case that me here at home as a private individual or for our office in Bath would buy a StarLink system for exactly the same price as somebody that was ordering three hypersonic systems.
Georgia [00:09:39] So satellite access. Just just to clarify for people who don’t know what it is.
Jack Robinson [00:09:45] Yes. So basically, it’s been a bit of a major shift. Leo could be coming to the markets, low earth orbit, satellite, medium, earth orbit, satellite. So essentially tens of thousands of tiny satellites, much closer to the earth, spinning around. And if you get between Oneweb and a deal, Musk’s company and StarLink, if they don’t get all of those satellites into the sky at an alarmingly fast rate, which they achieving very well, then effectively your phone would just stop working. And many other impacts, business and things like that. You can imagine the impacts. We’re so dependent on all of this because the amount of data that we now use in a minute is what at a certain point we were using in a year. So the infrastructure. To keep up with low-Earth orbit stuff. I won’t go too far into this. You know, you have lower latency as well. So you know, the time it takes for the signal to bounces back and forth between the yacht, the earth, the products.
Merrill Charette [00:10:44] Getting back to the conference that you set up and you talked about how boat shows and yacht brokerage, maybe technology and yacht brokerage don’t really go together. And one of the major shows in the United States, I mean, one of the big ones, I had a booth there one time and they gave me the statistics and it said that 97% of the people that show up here don’t own a boat and can’t afford a boat. And then like the other aspirational. Yeah, the other 2.9999% only have dinghies and then it’s like the .01 percent that actually have a yacht. So when the people are showing up to your conference, what is the demographics usually look like?
Jack Robinson [00:11:25] 230 It’s a professional conference. Everybody is very clear. It’s not a conference. It’s a show which incorporates into a 500 seat auditorium that has a conference within it. So we are a show where the show table with you show our demographic is completely professional, so we wouldn’t allow any members of the public in whatsoever. The ticket price is very affordable in a business context, but no take affordable to Joe Bloggs, who frankly wants to go to the One K show. I think this is why they put the ticket price up so much, because they were like, Oh, wow, I want to go and look at the big yachts. And of course, you’re no longer allowed to do, you know, my or my time. That’s how our bread and butter, how we sell things, including technology. We would walk up and down adults on the dock, on the CB offering the barrels, and we’d say, Hey, can I talk to you about our amazing product? Now, if you did that, you’d have like an armed guard. You have to get through the security barrier. You need to leave your passports, have an armed guard. I did. By invitation, by a specific your own need to have to come get you. So even tourists that need to walk up or down below and ask can’t do that anymore. So yeah, we don’t have any aspirational people. We have a VIP program. What that gives you is full access to show lunch dinner. We have a VIP hub every day. You have these huge gala dinner parties because we are a show. We call ourselves a networking show because it’s private and it’s all about Yes, you can talk about business, go to the stands, see it. You know, we’re going to have cinema being built this year. It’s incredible to go in there, all these experts. But, you know, we want to break down that barrier between personal and business. At the end of the day, I want to get to know Tony. I don’t want to get to know just, you know, the person that is the managing director of this company. So he put a lot of work into creating this really collaborative, really fun environment. And that’s what a lot of people talk about. They’re like, This is amazing. I’m not only going to be to be trade where I’m meeting my suppliers. This person sells me the SIM cards that allow my systems work and I never actually met face to face or has that element. And then you have a known as rat for the new build who’s coming in. And this is great. I can see all the best speakers in the world and listen to them. I can go along and learn about cybersecurity all in one place, but you have to receive the supplies in the yard. I don’t have to go out and visit the multiple different locations. And to be honest, what we’ve seen forced collaboration. So sometimes brands that we’re like, we’re competitors. That’s the nineties comes along, goes well, I like that, but I also like that. So I want both. And it’s like, Oh, we’re going to have to work together. You look at the testimonials, some of the people were like, What we learn is that we can collaborate more with our competitors. I believe in the model win, win, win. When you make a deal, everyone wins. I don’t like the domination of the business model where it’s like a Gordon Gekko, like I have to destroy them to be successful. That’s an area that is past for me.
Merrill Charette [00:14:22] Okay, so I’m hearing where you’re at right now. But when you just started this thing, we had an interview with Superyacht Times and they were saying, Oh, yeah, you know, when we first started trying to have like an event, we ended up losing a ton of money. But how did you get people to get on board and how did you get it to the point it is right now?
Jack Robinson [00:14:41] Honestly, a lot of time on the thing. I was fortunate to work on quite a few new builds. I could literally and my thing was a whole bunch of really important people. I made a bunch of people ambassadors as well, and then I asked them to go out, find other people. And, you know, we’re we’re a really small industry and a lot of people came behind me in support. They said, Yeah, you know, you’re right. Like, there’s a lot of people, even like the president of me. But last year on our show, I didn’t I was super happy about me saying this. But he agrees that is the only person that represents all the brokers don’t white boy. And he said, Yeah, you know, I really think mixing brokerage and technology is not the way forward. It’s great that there’s a show that’s been created dedicated solely to our industry. If you are going to tell people like, get out of that house, you have to build another house for them to go to and you can’t just chuck them out. We really hope that everybody starts making an exit strategy from. Chris Shays, who’s involved in complicated technology. Because even though you were talking about an owner, right, you’re an analyst, say you go round, you go to a show and you buy your Jack Bezos or something like that, Right. Depicting the Super Bowl. Fantastic. And the trimmings and the carpets are going to look like water. And when you walk on them, like they massage you added whatever you want, right? Do you really care that much about like the engine management system? Do you have that much about the detail of how these that’s going to work and things like that? How involved is an Arab prince in that or like perhaps experts that needs to pick that? And all the assumption is and something we sometimes actually can’t achieve. And I just want the same stuff that I have or we can achieve another huge cost. So it’s a case of that doesn’t need to be there. What you do is pick your yachts in a bright red shirt, come to our show to pick all of your technology to understand what’s happening in the market, to look at the cutting edge of what’s going on. Like right now, I’ve seen a trend in disappointing business suites on yachts, right? Because if you think about it, like quite a lead in this segment is like an interior designer and is super exciting designing the lounges and cinemas. And of course in the cinemas you get a lot of conflicts because it has to actually work, not just look good. So designing and got a huge waterfall style light that tumbles down. That’s why the stairs and everything. So it’s amazing. Fantastic. But the office suite, for example, tends to be like the desk with a nice screen pops down and you know, now office Suites should be like tactic technology. You know, like in Minority Report that only exists. It’s easy like tables that are actually surfaces that you can project something with. You have to throw on another screen. You know you should be these are people running billion dollar businesses and they end up with a desk with so we’ve got a few companies are going to come in to our event and go like Businessweek is these are tech people. Now yours is super important. It should be matching up to the expectations of what you would have in a large corporate building.
Georgia [00:17:36] Yeah, makes total sense as you say it, especially with COVID and remote working, there must just be so many people using their yachts as their primary office as like a big office space for them. The idea that this would be streets behind what they used to at home just doesn’t make any sense, does it?
Jack Robinson [00:17:53] Yeah, 100%. I look at every owner now out there. What’s the unified experience? It’s funny because we look at ourselves as the superyacht industry, but I think that again, look, I’ve got two private islands and a penthouse in New York, a penthouse in London and a house in Sydney, Noosa or whatever it is. Right? And all I want is the same thing when I go in that maybe you like different speaker systems, maybe like whatever, but Right. You don’t want to go in and have like a different playlist every time you go everywhere. I don’t want that Crestron is probably like, our brand is really good at doing that kind of stuff, you know, like really unifying the whole experience so that even the theme of your lighting is the same the way that you’re shades of gray. So a very cool thing whereby you can go into like holiday mode and go replay everything that you did in the last two weeks. If you’re going away for two weeks, for example, you just set it. And every action that you did as a normal human being is replayed through the entire system, every light, every thing that a burglar might go that differently. How is that what’s going on in that? Right.
Merrill Charette [00:18:53] I deal with a lot of technology. That’s kind of what I do outside of the podcast. And one of the things, you know, is part of my whole like pitch I do is that there are so many advancements in technology, but with all this advancements in technology, it’s kind of just evolving so much quicker than the people that can support actually stalling and doing all of that. Can you talk on that a little bit?
Jack Robinson [00:19:18] Yeah, I think training and education is really, really important. We have an additional 11 rooms this year. So to be clear and I will send you a floor plans, we are quadrupling the size of the show. So we now have an exploration lab. We don’t call them holes because it’s all technology. We like the word lab. So we have an exploration lab with 50 stands in one and a cinema built in that We have a discovery lab which basically has these amazing sea lounges and that type of stuff. And upstairs we have 11 training and meeting rooms. These like with screens outside, some of them are like 50 meters long and some of them are like really small and companies are able to offer like workshops pre the event. During the event, there are obviously pros as well. There’s not a privacy meeting connected with a new build and you’re like, We don’t really want to talk to you here. You can book into that room, you can go up there, you could do that, you can take them for lunch in VIP, which is a glass cube where you can have six course lunch. They get offered lunch anyway, the VIP hospitality hub. But if you want to go that one step further, go. No, no, no. I think we should go into this glass cube and have a special lunch. Then we can do that too. Yeah, I think education is massive and what we have is more need to draw from outside the city sector. I like people on my main those new sales pitches. Last year we had the guy who is arguably the best builder in the world, engineer of headphones. He builds Dr. Dre beats really nice guy, very clever, very good public speaker. And it was beautiful. He came in, he showed us ten square foot of technology that he had to get into a headset because he wanted to bring something that was completely different. It cost $50,000 entry level. These are basically like to be customize the soundscape of your your on your car. They can be a real leather anyway, blah, blah, blah. I’m drifting a little bit away from it. So we have our main stage and we have a new stage called the Discovery Stage, and that’s also where you can go and learn about tech unashamed and people can present their products because there’s nothing wrong with presenting new products. And we definitely, especially with Will’s involvement, you may notice a bond a bond is one of the training companies for technical people in the industry. Be very clear, will find a ten or best in our company has absolutely nothing to do with any of the companies that he owns. But of course, if he wants to bring in as a page company like anybody else, a training element for Bonds, we would support that. We’d also support any other organizations like Blue Water who have trained come in and offer training. Because these people are in one location, they may as well learn. So a couple of other things which link into this is it’s disappointing. This is kind of like this where I’m probably going to go and see my slightly rant rant. But look, I find it really disappointing when we look at this that the number of advice you offers as you contact me and say, you know what, Jack? I love the idea of you to learn so much and I don’t have to meet so many different suppliers on the boat. Plus they can’t bring my kids over easily, you know, how do you bring a massive load kit onto the boat every time this makes sense, I can get a one place education. I can watch the talks. I want to talk. I can speak to all of my surprise. But the captain won’t let me go, even though the owner’s not on board. Because maybe the TV or break in the crew, some people won’t be able to watch Netflix. I mean, what other industry would you be like? Oh, there’s a professional, dedicated seminar all about whatever it is that you do, all you automation in the car building industry, but you can’t go because you’re really good with the coffee machine in the office. It might break. So you’re going to have to stay here, right? It doesn’t make sense to me. We have to engage more to be more a rational industry that that sends people to two days to the show, the two days and from it fully paid for their tickets. They pay nothing. So I suppose that’s the other one you want to talk at some point I think about privacy.
Georgia [00:23:25] Yeah. I was going to say, Jack, one of the things that makes the CPA industry a little bit special and complicated is the fact of NDAs and confidentiality. How does that work when it comes to innovation and sharing ideas? Because if you’re at the show and you want to collaborate and talk to each other, is everyone just stymied by the fact that they can’t talk about projects?
Jack Robinson [00:23:47] Well, see, the irony is two different things is one, that I completely understand and respect. The need for NDA is we don’t need to know where the owners kids go to school or things about their private lives. Absolutely not. But I would say if you receive your own ideas as to your own, it would be in my own self interest that we learn about amazing technology that has worked for other yachts. Would it not would it not be useful when new technology is deployed, like, you know, the chaos that was the transition from analog to digital mobile radio? And I heard things probably working in that segment from so many different yachts. And some of them were just complete fantasy and others were frankly really worrying where a repeater system which is a set to to what’s by the IMO, the law of the sea, the United Nations, the regulatory body for a very good reason. People went, Oh no, you don’t need to buy a cell system. You just crank up the repeater to a to X amount level to the equivalent of like 50 mobile phones going off at the same time. And then you put that next to the kids room on the yacht. I would you know, I know this unproven, but would you really be happy to have that next to your head all night while you were sleeping? But, you know, it saves a bit of money. So that was really like if I’m the owner, they wouldn’t even know about it because it was more about saving a bit of money. There’s a lot of that going on, a bit to save cash or, you know, this system, that system. But really what we need to do in a positive way and what we’ve done is we’ve worked with surrogates to help promote and create the steering council and the website goes live. It is live, but it’s just been finished. Very soon what that will be is top down the problems in the industry and then inviting lots of very clever companies from in and outside the. To come in and offer solutions and talk to us about how they can solve these. So that’s an initiative that I’ve really helped support with. I guess we’ll have the first meeting in June to kind of solve this. I would love to get to the point where everybody can go into somewhere like our show and sign a collective NDA. We don’t need to know about specific jobs on the build the specifics of it, but it would be nice to share feedback about tech, see how we can improve it. And lots of industries and even the CIA have like a kind of a collective seminar of like sharing with other intelligence organizations, and they work under this big collective NDA umbrella. I was looking into it the other day. I mean, it needs to go that far, but surely we can get something in the middle, right? Because I certainly if I was a CTO and it would be like, Yeah, yeah, tell me about tech that didn’t work elsewhere and also that works elsewhere because let’s be honest, you could use an MBA to cover up bad work, right? And then you could just keep going in the industry and no one will ever know about that work that was done. And I’m not saying that’s the case, but, you know, it’s a double edged sword, right? An MBA.
Merrill Charette [00:26:41] So when you start talking about technology and this technology show that you put on, it sounds like there’s very established companies that come in. And I do work with several venture capital groups in the marine space. And the problem that ends up happening is that these startups, they come in and they have some new innovative product and all of that. And Marine is hot right now. Everyone wants to invest in it, but when they start talking Marine to, you know, potential investor, the investor realizes the lack of knowledge that they have in the space and that kind of pushes them away. How many new startups are you seeing come into the Superyacht industry or are these already established players?
Jack Robinson [00:27:23] So we are a notoriously difficult industry closed or difficult to break into people that like way. If you give your kudos from other industry go, you know, we’re amazing in cruise liners. It’s almost like it’s a negative in our industry or our brilliant with the military, you know, and that is understandable because you know when the Russians were obviously involved, if you went, Oh yeah, we’re great, we supply everything to like COBRA operations and MI6 in the UK or whatever. They don’t want to work with you. That makes sense. We think that it is. We are trying to do as much as possible to bring people into the super industry, but also for them to work with partners like integrators because it is much more complex. I think a company like IDEO works well. Someone can easily go into residential, but can a residential company easily go into CPO? It’s not really. They need help. They need understanding. Bringing new products in also is part of that because all the integrators of that. So you have to partner with other people. I think that is absolutely essential. The other thing is the other way around, we don’t capture and share data really enough. So when you’re talking about things or big investment companies metacarpal that you wanting to look at the CPA industry and then there’s no data is terrifying. What am I investing in here? It’s just like I don’t because there are sensors all over, it’s now like predictive maintenance, you know, a big thing like working out something’s going to break before it’s going to break, and that’s the way to do it. Save money, all that data to not only be going into feeding into your bigger understanding of CPR, it can help the world’s oceans. You know, you have amazing systems. They put on a lot of yachts now that allow you to scan the bottom of the ocean so you can go to places that no other people could go to because it would be simply too prohibitively dangerous. We work with a couple of is brands like imagine my friend Justin and his company and there’s a lot of around that. Fantastic. That kind of data would be invaluable to big the oceanographic organizations. And I asked them, I said, Do you share this? And they were like, not really. I mean, no one’s really asked us, you know, that kind of stuff. And it’s like, that’s a bit of a shame. I think also we need to engage with, even on the environmental side of things, which is four or five people on a huge thing consuming hundreds of thousands. Nathan Diesel is not arguably ethical, but I think stupid industry is trying really hard to develop tech. New owners are trying really hard to push the boundaries. I went to building Green Giants, the movie, there’s a lot going on and we get a lot of stick, but some of the tech is being built by these billionaires. Is that transferable? You know what? I want a black girl to be selling your outlet as well. The energy recuperation system is almost 100%. It’s incredible. And this tech could be deployed to other industries. So we get a lot of steps. But I personally would like to reengage with someone like Greenpeace, and I think it was a real shame. Missed opportunity. When Extinction Rebellion went on the stage at the Superyacht forum, looked very interesting and very. Martin handled it very well. It was planned in advance or something. But like, absolutely incredible, you know, came on the stage and says, do the best thing you can do is the mike. Tell us, how could we work with you? What can we do? And they just shout in the light of all you rich people, give us your money. What a missed opportunity to really present some coherent arguments about ultra rich, how we work together the rest of the world. The 3%. Well, I think it it is a shed. I would like to see us in the future. We will have a Green Zone at the next show. We will offer very heavy discounts to tax to take part in that. We also have a startup accelerator so you can actually take part for a very small amount of money to help startups get in them. X David offices that I know that for example, have launched really good products and support companies for that kind of stuff. And of course we already had our Women in Sex initiative, which would be seeing some of the pictures, but not just something. But we just did the, you know, the bandwagon. It was really successful. We did a huge poster on the stage and, you know, notoriously don’t have enough women in the sphere of technology and support for even less.
Merrill Charette [00:31:41] I find it pretty funny about how, you know, some people just look at the industry from this weird, like shaded glasses type view. We did an interview with Robert Van Tol from the Watford Foundation. Yeah. So I decided to make like the copy. Can super yachts be sustainable? Post that all over Reddit it blew up. People were like down with the Superyacht industry and I was like, listen, all these innovations that are happening in the Superyacht industry go to so many other segments of marine that are way more destructive than super yachts.
Jack Robinson [00:32:15] So 100% good does exactly it come in and somebody you know, you have somebody like that go said, look, I want this you ought to be able to run 100% under its own energy and the algorithms that control the batteries, they that work out when everyone’s having a shower, learning algorithms right through to the way that the sails engage with the energy recuperation by this kind of tech. If you pursue this the right kind of you pursue this kind of tech. This is stuff where it’s very easy to see that within 7 to 10 years you are you know, I’ve got yachts that are completely self-sustaining. And then we’re only talking about the material that they use. And of course, a big trend right now. And Lomac said it’s the future, these exploration yachts that also serve as deployment, yachts for crisis, famine, earthquakes, blah, blah, blah on a superyacht. And I can say, you know what, let’s do this. Let’s take 300 tons of stuff ascending the Superyacht I think there was a there’s a record yacht many years ago. The name I would have chosen, it wasn’t already take a foul call from the never ending story. I always love that it kind of comes in and defeats the bullies and helps everyone is is really good. So yeah, but look, he’s completely right. You know, it’s pretty easy to make us into the villains. But I think the same people you see online who jump pointed out criticize every political party, everything. But if you sat down at dinner and said, Yeah, great. Look, it’s pretty easy to throw debt and everyone’s giving for things you would do to make the world better and they just for apart because they have no career and positive arguments in the selves that just negatively criticize everything without having a, you know, let’s introduce meditation into the school curriculum. I had no problem making it up, you know what I mean? I have a lot of thoughts about how to make the world better, and my vision for the Superyacht Technology show is to make our industry better, is to, you know, go beyond that. I would love to really bring something that is is able to influence technology in our segment in a really positive way and lead to better collaboration with large companies and that we can feed information back and forth. Because let’s be honest, the 3% of the world have a lot of money to put into this tax, and they have a vested interest in preserving the oceans. And this is where their super yachts are going to be flying around a bunch of oil. And you know that that’s not how it is. So they’re not stupid people. They’ve made a lot of money for a reason. And I don’t think a lot of them out there going, oh, you know, I want to see the world burn. I mean, I think maybe, you know, some of the ones did left now. Yeah.
Georgia [00:34:55] So what gets you excited then in technology? What’s getting you very excited at the moment?
Jack Robinson [00:35:03] I’m really excited about the whole energy, recuperation, green systems. I think we were going to understand is like algorithms and how important they are. You know, like people are terrified by it. But you know, with a lot of these systems, it’s about AI needs to study our behavior to be far more efficient. It’s not just enough to like capture energy and store energy. We have to have algorithms, not sufficient intelligence studying the way in which we use this energy to be most optimal. And you probably are aware that like most. To perform at their highest point. Need to kind of stay at like 85, 90% all the time. You don’t run it to zero, then recharge it to zero and recharge it because they weren’t lost any time. By the way, I’m no to be a technology expert. I know a little bit about a lot of stuff, but there’s definitely a lot of people I would bring in on this. The other thing is like you want to say immersive. Like I’m super excited by immersive. I saw Raffi trying to go give his talk at IAC. This is really exciting stuff like living on you are fully immersed in. I’m really excited about the future of how you will be able to use the zones in a multipurpose way. They’ll be able to change kind of as you walk through the your it detects your face and changes all of the artwork and even the smell of the air is, you know, is is fragranced around you, but also like health benefits, things like that. I think a lot of ultra rich are very into like the study of their own bodies in how their results continue. This one thing being optimal all of the time. There’s just a lot of exciting stuff just listening. Even said Dr. Dre beats Guy. I never it’s any headphones but like him laying down on the floor all of the tech that took him many many years to fold and fold and how he worked with other industries for military it’s aeronautical. So you draw from super cars, you go and everything. And he managed to take what was No. Ten square meters of cars and bring them gradually by working with everyone. Small smells into a headphone and creating this completely different soundscape which I listen to, by the way, is amazing for basically all other music you ever listen to for shit after that.
Georgia [00:37:17] So it’s completely ruined it for you. And now you have to raise 50 grand to get yourself a pair.
Jack Robinson [00:37:23] The other day I went to Electric States headquarters in London and you should definitely go there. They have their half million pound bags and you lie in it and the amazing kaleidoscope system comes down and you line this brown back and all the music is tailored to use. You’ll give your top 500 albums of all time and they will make it into a crystal ball filled with bubbles inside. Right. And when you put this bubble on the bed, the music plays even on another bed. Does it work? Is your bed? There was some of that and we watched the Mac Ted scene from the new Top Gun and the absolutely amazing and life changing the way it came through your body. You know, you were in there with the cockpit and then you came out of it dying. You just ruined two movies for me travel. So I make a lot of money. So all of these your technology shared by all the fans. So I get one of these beds, then I’m going to retire actually three periods. But also the different schools I’ve seen speak companies that just go, This is loud music out loud. It is loud, loud, loud. I mean, an acoustic I 704 is their background. It was the French position at MOS or Physics, if you like, who you went to a concert, the seven seats. And it’s like, why is it when I stand at the front desk can’t hear a thing or black, you know, overwhelming on a side of the back, I hardly hear anything at all. I know what consoles this is called physics. So, you know, when you go to a any concert now you have these curved speakers everywhere, right? That was hit. They invented the trademark, ran out on them, so everyone uses them. So these companies that stage and, you know, great all great other speakers in the market so non people like that’s a fallback father you work with getting all the Maseratis but an acoustic I would say in terms of the engineer because you stood in this room and they were like, you want it to sound like you’re in St Paul’s Cathedral or you know, And they said to us, and I can’t understand why they quite often will bring people in here. We’ll be like, What music do you love? Do you want to listen to? And it’s like, they can listen to this and they cry. They cry. I am stoic and British, so obviously no.
Georgia [00:39:35] Emotion for us, obviously, Jack, But inside.
Jack Robinson [00:39:39] They know and you know, it’s I know music is emotional, but this is more about the technology. This is what we’re talking about and you’ve got to speak up. But it’s no longer what it’s about. This is about a unifying system using amazing software and algorithms to work together to link itself into the human brain. And I think that’s what we’re going to see a lot more of. I was speaking to the New York Times designer of the year and she said some of you at the lunch in London, and she said to me, the future it’s in by interfacing the human body, interfacing with technology. It’s terrifying, I will say.
Merrill Charette [00:40:15] So can you give us, as we kind of come to our end here, maybe a success story or a memorable moment from one of your shows?
Jack Robinson [00:40:24] Oh, memorable moment from one of my shows, Yeah. It’s how you remember one of my shows is went by to. Key members of staff baseball coded and I had to run the entire show on my current house of cards, which should be very, very difficult because I was running around putting up posters, doing this during the job of every single person. And actually how humbling that was and how many people came up to me and went, This show is actually amazing. It was really good to see that we were making South Central. So putting in the hard work, trying to think of a kind of a technology based anecdote. And I’ve got to say, you put me on the spot. I mean, listening to the the $50,000 headphones was pretty amazing. But, you know, I think this year I’m not going to be on the stage. Good. Our professional presenter, but I want to be very much in the background. I think I really like to sit back from a future anecdote, hopefully watch everybody come together. It’s amazing. Exchange is collaboration, incredible new technology and just seeing kind of seeing it all come together in March 2020 for Boston World Trade Center and building on that building on that for the for the future. Now, I’m very, very passionate about what I do. You know, I hope that that comes across in the shirt.
Merrill Charette [00:41:41] And what type of tips and advice would you give a budding entrepreneur that might be trying to come into the technology space?
Jack Robinson [00:41:48] Yeah, I think to understand technology from a user’s point of view, I think sometimes we have a tendency to engineer and try to anticipate too much. I think we experience that all the time. Even when you’re using your Microsoft three, six, five, whatever it is, you’re fired and stuff. And you can imagine this, some very geeky engineers sat in there and, like I said, aggressively found problems and problems and problems to solve because that’s how their brain works. But really, sometimes as a as a basic human being, you know, we all sit there and just go, God sake, can it just work? But I think that’s what a lot of your owners got frustrated with is, you know, there was a time when you needed sorry, like 192 cards in each of your sky machines, you know, And then every time you moved from one country to another, someone had to put out the cards and put 167 into the next thing just so that you could watch TV. And I find that all the time with products overengineered. So I would say look at the industry from a user’s point of view. If you’re bringing new technology, if you want to get involved in the technology segment, I would say make yourself a very good salesperson because there is a large abundance of engineers. There’s not enough technical crew. But that’s because maybe as an industry we’re not doing enough to specifically train them and maybe jobs are not doing enough to allow people who don’t have the experience to come on board and do some kind of apprenticeship. So if you want to work on a yacht, the only thing I would say, especially having lived in New York, which by the way, is nicknamed, you know, the graveyard of ambitions for the super industry or the graveyard of crew, if you like. But it’s because you’ve got to remember that you need an exit plan. You might make a lot of money in Superyachts, you might evolve, but you need to be backing that up with qualifications outside the future industry, taking opportunities to go and work on newbuilds in yachts as well as on a yacht because that x amount of money that you’re getting to live in a bunk bed on a ship, it’s not going to last forever. It’s not sustainable and it’s not really growing. You like you would grow within a corporation when you have a personal development plan. You there were there were glass ceilings, even get caps and talk into account. You want to sleep in the bed if you want kids and a family. I have a lovely daughter, a dog and a wife. If you want those things, you’re going to need to have an exit strategy, which I did for a lot of ABC offices, and a lot of them seem to do quite well these days, my French consultancy and things like that. But I’ve also seen people die and just end up setting the bar on your own work. And then will their qualifications become more and more outdated? But also you’ll be a good person. Look for a win win win. Like I said, I think one of the key things people I don’t like to work with, with people who seek to dominate other businesses, but I want to be the only one and everyone else must disappear so that I can rule the entire business section of the market or something. I don’t think the world is good that way. I don’t think needs to be that way. And I think that everybody can win in this situation and we can all have a positive outcome that benefits us as human beings as well as our bank accounts.
Merrill Charette [00:44:58] Awesome. It was absolutely amazing talking to you. And kind of here in this story, you don’t hear too many perspectives of technology. In the space.
Jack Robinson [00:45:07] Rocks. You probably have quite a cheap, cheaper aspect of technology. Like I said, there are a million experts that you can bring in on individual segments, but again, it’s then only applying to a small amount of people that want to understand the RBA. So you did a really good job of bringing me back on track because otherwise we had a bubble that I remember about.
Georgia [00:45:27] So if people want to find you, where can they find? Information about you and what you’re up to.
Jack Robinson [00:45:33] So you go to Job Technology Network dot com. You could come over to the beautiful city of Boston, most historic city, celebrate, what, 15 years in a row, historic World Heritage site. Currently, our city center offices will take you out for lunch. We’ll look after you if you want to buy tickets. Go ahead. You want to get involved in sponsorship? I recruited two amazing people who came directly through our network, by the way. One is MCI served the UK, James and then Lindsay comes from Lloyd’s. So really, really top caliber. Definitely. Have a look at the plans. I am having a fantastic 3D rendering because you know, the show we did before the show we’re doing now. And that’s why, by the way, people are asking taking the year off just to bring what we’re going to bring, we need to take a year off. We need to bring it. We need to come back. And if you are a buyer, you know it is working on a new build. Whatever it is, you will learn so much, you will save so much time and we will give you a free VIP ticket and you will get given beautiful chef that lunches go to fantastic parties and have lots of professional time. You can watch lots of talks and stuff. And obviously for Meryl and George here I’m talking to, you’re welcome to attend as well. We’ve got new media partners that we’re signing up, so accommodation coverage and interview all these tech experts and stuff. Then March 20th and 21st, 2024, World Trade Center, Barcelona, which we chose for obvious reasons. It’s cool and it’s hip and it’s young. It’s dynamic like us.
Georgia [00:47:06] Next. Dirk.
Jack Robinson [00:47:07] All right. Thanks so much that you say.
Farah [00:47:15] Check back every Tuesday for our latest episode and be sure to like, share and subscribe to ship shaped up for.
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