Revealing Richard Hardiman’s interview w/ Origin Story

BRIGHTER FUTURE

APR 4, 2024

#BrighterFuture #entrepreneurship #Sustainability #ClimateChangeSolution #originstoryseries #OceanCleanup #CleanWater #MarineConservation #HydrocarbonCleanup #RanMarine #WasteManagement#seekthechange

We spoke with Richard Hardiman, founder of RanMarine, a company using aquatic robots to clean up water pollution in the ocean and in fresh water.

Thank you so much for joining us, Richard. Do you think you could tell us a little about your business?

Of course. RanMarine is an Autonomous Surface Vessel (ASV) company: essentially we make drones on water. However, we have a very specific target of cleaning up pollutants out of water. While we’ve created our own autonomy to navigate water systems and high-traffic areas, our focus is on cleaning up pollution in those areas. We’re a company of about 30 people, made up of mechatronics engineers, robotics and software engineers, management, and production, and we innovate those vessels from start to finish. So, we manufacture, produce, and sell. But I think our secret sauce is the capability to match a product to software to make it perform this very specific job. It’s a fun company to be with.

Our specific target is not far out in the ocean: we try to act before the trash or the biomass gets all mixed around out in open water. We concentrate on where there is a marina or a port or a river delta system that sends trash into the ocean.

Many great companies are trying to clean up the ocean. It’s an unforgiving job, unfortunately. Where there is a practical use case or a customer, we’re trying to introduce our technology on top of that to deliberately reduce the flow of waste.

You’re trying to stop the waste at the source. Am I understanding this correctly?

Yes. We always say we’re an at-source company, which might not be entirely true, but we certainly act at the source of the problem. We need to catch it when it does become an issue.

What are you trying to achieve with your company, and why do you think it matters?

We started out very clearly to stop marine floating waste and plastic from getting into the open ocean. As we’ve built these products, we’ve begun to concentrate on three main streams. There’s the obvious problem with plastics infiltrating and polluting the oceans to a greater extent. We’ve observed a surge in biomass, including algae and aquatic plants, at an unprecedented rate. Factors such as agricultural runoff, containing nitrates and phosphates from fertilisers, are affecting natural ecosystems. Coupled with increased sunlight due to climate change, these conditions are super-charging and accelerating the spread of biomass.

Why is that a problem? Ultimately, this results in the deterioration of these ecosystems, leading to oxygen depletion, elevated nitrogen levels in the water, and the formation of dead zones in our vital natural drinking water reservoirs. We’re finding a lot of our customers are trying to approach that from a different angle now as well. So we know our platforms can clean up the plastic, they can also clean up the proliferating algae. And now we’re moving into hydrocarbons as well, like oils in water, all of them at-source.

We started out with a very clear idea: how do we stop plastic getting into water? As you get into that industry, though, you realise there are other things in the water causing equal problems to drinking water or the ecosystems. That’s why we’re developing our WasteShark platforms to clean that pollution out in totality. So, we started up with the very noble goal of removing plastic, but we’ve entered the space of natural biomass removal and hydrocarbons to a point as well.

How are you removing hydrocarbons from water?

We have a larger version of our agile WasteShark, which is like a big floating Roomba for collecting waste. The OilShark platform is about 10 times larger. What we’ve found is that it can be deployed quite seamlessly by companies already cleaning up oil spills, and also in harbours and ports.

We look for a very quick reaction vessel to get in there for what they call the “golden hour”, the first hour after a spill, to start cleaning up immediately. Then they’ll bring in the bigger ships. We’re treating the polluted water by removing the oil and capturing it, then filtering the clean water back into the water space. We’re deploying a drone that sucks up the very thin top layer of the water, filters out the oil, and releases the clean water back into the environment.

That’s extremely interesting. Is this essentially a first response measure following an oil spill incident?

Yes, exactly. It’s when someone is transferring fuel between ships or onto a ship, or when a ship or yacht sinks in the harbour and starts leaking oil. They normally boom it off quickly. However, recovering that oil requires larger vessels than ours. But if we can deploy two or three of our smaller ones very quickly, we can halt the spread of the oil quite rapidly as well.

I think the advantage of our hydrocarbon vessel is that it can also be used from a maintenance perspective. Consider small ports and marinas; all of those vessels running on diesel engines sometimes leak amounts of oil and fuel that float on the surface, presenting a maintenance issue as well. So, it’s not just a response vessel; it’s also for day-to-day maintenance.

Where does the company name come from?

It was, ironically, written about five minutes before I had to file the registration. I didn’t know at the time; I didn’t have a name. So, I kind of looked it up. I knew I wanted “Marine” in the title because I wanted it to say what we did on the box. But all the Titans and all those well-known water gods were taken, so I found a very obscure Scandinavian female goddess of the sea. To give you background, we were in a startup, and there were ten of us all filing at the same time. And we had one guy, rather like a teacher, going “Come on guys, I need your paperwork.” And I’m just like, “I don’t know what to put down.” So, I found Rán is the goddess of Scandinavian and Nordic waters, and her job effectively was to go and rescue drowned sailors after a shipwreck. She had a net, and she would scoop them up, and the sailors would pay her in gold to collect their souls, basically, so they didn’t live in the afterlife uncollected.

I liked the idea that she had a net, and we were kind of doing the same thing; we were collecting not sailors, but debris that shouldn’t be around. A lot of Navy guys carry a kind of gold in their pocket while they’re at sea because of that. It’s kind of like a mythical traditional thing they do. A superstition.

That’s extremely interesting. The Royal Navy has a tradition of this as well. What are your roots or the path that you come from?

I come from a very distant place compared to where this business is. I was in radio for a long time as a journalist and then as a presenter. My start was when I was a crime journalist for a long time back in South Africa as a young 22-year-old. It got quite dark and negative very quickly. From there, I realised that the presenters made more money and had more fun, so I quickly exited the journalist space and moved into news broadcasting. But my dad’s an engineer, so I grew up around engineering, factories, and engineering drawings. He’s a precision engineer, and I inherited a lot of it I think just by being around him and being within his office and that kind of thing. I’ve always had a tendency to want to design and create.

I’ve had various businesses, from manufacturing haircare products to owning online radio stations. You know, that always-entrepreneurial experience. This idea came when I was about 35-36 years old. I was quite worried that I hadn’t gone back and studied anything in the business field, but here I was running businesses. I still think I was the oldest person in my business class at 36 or 38. I went back to study and, while I was there, it was quite nice because I had just sold a business, I had a break, went to study, and I had a lot of free time during the day, during breaks.

And one day I literally just saw these two guys clearing out some water space with a boat and a net. While I had been on this studying journey, I had given myself a mental task of working out how I would solve that problem in a modern way, because I didn’t think it was very clever to have people driving around in boats, trying to collect waste. It seemed like a very useless task, not very pleasant for them and not very effective in the way they were doing it. Admittedly, I thought at the time that it was an African problem. I just assumed that we had an abundance of labour in Africa, and these guys were doing it because of that. But then I discovered that it didn’t matter where you were in the world; generally, trash in water was being collected by two guys in a boat in various formats.

I literally drew it on a napkin at a coffee shop I was at, overlooking the water. It sounds very prophetic now, but it’s how it happened. I think my mother still has that napkin of the first drawing somewhere. I liked the idea so much that I kept playing with it in my head, and I iterated it. It was one of those ideas that, as an entrepreneur, you have lots of ideas all day long. But it was one that I couldn’t let go of, and one of my skills is looking at a problem very quickly. I look at an issue and wonder how I would engage with it. Can I even engage? If I can’t, move on. But if I can, I’ll follow the thread. And I’ve just kept on following the thread.

And then I did research into why they were cleaning the water, because I didn’t know that at the time. This was 2014; marine plastic wasn’t a big topic. Then I discovered that there were these massive gyres out in the Pacific Ocean and in all oceans. That was an issue, and where it was coming from: whether it was ports or harbours, the important thing was that it wasn’t just people throwing rubbish overboard on vessels. It was coming from land and leaking into the ocean.

Then I thought, well, my robot idea might stand up. Unfortunately, at the time, the technology just wasn’t there. So, I built a prototype in my garage and tested it in a swimming pool. And I had to watch hours and hours of video to understand how to do the programming side of it. And it was very basic. But I figured that if I was able to get from point A to point B in a very basic format, there must be more clever people out there that could really take the robotics level and autonomy up further.

And that’s where it started. So it was a little challenge to myself to work on how I would do it in between class breaks. That ended us up here from 2014, nearly 10 years later, as a business that’s actually doing it. It’s great. No formal training or anything. There were no robotics or engineering background.

That’s excellent. I’ve always liked the idea of homemade science. It’s brilliant that you built something at home and tested it in a swimming pool.

I think there’s a certain elegance in the naivety to it. If you knew how difficult it was because you had the understanding and education, you probably wouldn’t do it. But not knowing anything just makes you kind of hungry to find out what the next step could look like. And it carries you through.

What exactly would you say led you to create your business?

I think it was the drive because no one else was doing it, you know? I couldn’t believe I was the only one with this concept. But, as entrepreneurs know, while many have ideas, few take the next step. This was the driving force. We have Roombas cleaning our floors every morning, or when we go to bed. Why are we not doing the same thing with a very, very critical challenge out there? Why are we not cleaning water 24 hours a day with a cost-effective, easily executable option?

I now understand the complexity of the challenge, which likely deterred others. But it was the driving force. I couldn’t understand why we had a plastic issue at the time, why we were treating it with very outdated methods because plastic pollution is a very new problem, I mean from relatively modern history. But we were treating it with the same solution we would have used to clean up anything in the water 100 to 200 years ago. We needed to be more definitive and more technology-focused around this problem. And that was my driving force behind it.

Who are you doing your work for?

Initially, it was probably in two parts: ego-driven, as in “Can I do this and make it work?” and secondly, I liked the idea of creating a business that did good. You know, I thought it was fascinating that you could create a business and create a robot that hadn’t existed before. But everything it does is good for the planet. I found that rather exciting that we could create a business around this, and it could be quite effective. The more people that bought into it or used it, the better we did for the planet. And I found it rather intriguing. I hadn’t looked at it from that point of view before. My past businesses had always been motivated by what we need to make money to pay staff and grow the business, whereas this is: the bigger this business gets, the more impact we have. And that I find rather exciting.

What part of your work is most fulfilling to you?

It’s a part I don’t get to play in much anymore: innovation on the R&D side. I love coming up with ideas and working with a team on new products or on finding exciting ways to either use existing products or enhance our products to be better. I love that part. I love playing in that space.

I’m probably quite annoying, because now we have very clever people doing that, and I’m jumping around asking, “Why don’t we do this? Why don’t we do that?” Most of my ideas have a ton of impracticality.

But as the business has grown, I’ve had to stray into more of the fundraising and the business end of it, and I don’t get to play as much as I used to, which I miss. I still irritate people with my ideas, and that’s cool, but I miss the creation part, you know? What can we create to do something impactful?

I do get satisfaction from the fact that we’re producing these things. To me that is the most exciting part. Not always the selling or the building of the business, but the development of R&D.

When was it that you decided to do something differently or take a new direction in your life or career?

Just before I came up with this idea, I’d been working in radio for a very long time. I was in my mid-30s. In that industry, you’re kind of on your way out by the time you hit 35-40, or you end up on some classical programme that no one listens to. Also, although I probably would listen to that now as I age, funnily enough, at the time, I was working in a very sort of funky, cool space.

But I saw the writing on the wall that there were a lot of younger people coming up underneath me, and I had one of the top jobs, and I knew my contract probably wouldn’t go on for much longer. So I decided to call it and just say that I needed to go and do something else. I’ve always had smaller businesses.

So I cut the cord, much to my parents’ shame, because they kind of liked the fact that they had a son doing what I was doing. I went back to study and I sold a small business so that I had enough money to go and study.

That’s kind of my biggest pivot in life, I think, because my worry was that I was gonna hang on to the thing that I’ve always done and slowly die out and kind of run out of steam. Whereas I needed a fresh start.

So that was my point where I drew a very thick line under things that said, okay, what’s next? And I didn’t know what was, to be honest.

What life experience gave you the perspective and confidence to know you can come up with something different or better than what was currently out there?

Every single thing I’ve ever done has led me to this point. And I know it’s so cliché, but it’s so true. Because as a journalist in my previous life, I knew what the headline needed to be, and what the content needed to convey. The ability to present my ideas, I got through radio and had to do a ton of presentations and public-facing duties. That helped me sell my idea to people. The fact that I’d had a couple of businesses that did well, and a couple that failed horribly gave me the perspective of both sides: that you can fail and you can still make it work. Businesses do work, and you can make them good.

My parents bought me lots of Lego when I was a kid, and I was able to build things. I look at my children now— one is really good at building from the designs that Lego provides, and the other one, like me, just wants the blocks to play with and build with. That kind of value, and all those points in life, led me to where I was able to come up with the concept design and build it. Also, to have the humility to know that others can do it better than me, and to hand that over to someone to get to the next level.

What were the biggest challenges you faced or mistakes you made when you started out on your journey, and what did they teach you?

I think the biggest challenge has been financial. It’s just costly to research and develop a product from scratch. Finding the right investors in alignment with your goals and vision and convincing them to invest in your vision, and then, when you run out of their money, go back to them or continually be in the process of raising money to get to the point where you can be self-sustaining was one of the greatest challenges. Another significant challenge was making this thing work in the way that we wanted it to. Now other people are entering the market, which I appreciate because it shows there is a market and we’re sort of building it together. But it’s not easy. You think you can create this little device that effortlessly collects trash on the premises, it’s fantastic. But executing that is harder than anticipated.

We came up with great design concepts, but one of our biggest challenges— and I always get back to this— was navigating a vessel through debris. Normally, vessels would avoid debris, but we were intentionally going into the centre of it, and our thrusters would get caught in balloons and string, causing breakdowns. Navigating through rubbish and collecting it, then figuring out how to do that effectively before even considering autonomy and collision avoidance, and how long it can operate in the water was massively challenging, and it still is to a point today. So, dealing with navigating through the debris was one of our biggest challenges.

This is such an interesting question in terms of engineering. Anyone who’s driven a boat in water with surface obstructions like algae and vegetation has probably dealt with it getting sucked into the propeller. How did you get over things like string getting pulled into the rotors?

I’ll give you the answer once we discover it in the future. We’ve explored various approaches— attempting everything imaginable. For instance, we constructed enclosures around the thrusters for protection, but this diminished thrust and impedes proper water movement. The challenge is in navigating tight spaces, and you want to be getting close to the walls or edges.

Eventually, one of our designers, Tessa, came up with a system that we’re now patenting. But it was simple, you know, everything over everything. The product has to be simple because we can get as complex as we like as engineers and roboticists, we can make it fantastically complex, but the end-user needs it to be incredibly simple. We need it simple because you’re sending these things out all over the world. And you don’t want to be repair specialists, you want to be drone specialists.

So we found a very, very simple sort of almost valve release on the thruster where when it goes forward, the valve opens, and when it goes backwards, the valve shuts and stops trash coming in. You do lose thrust, and you do lose some agility on that. But it was a happy medium that we could live with, and meant our breakdowns in the water dropped dramatically. It was fascinating to see.

As the engineering moves on, we’ve reached run-through thrusters. So now the trash actually passes through the thruster, which is incredible. And it’s still early days for our size. But we’ve managed to find a company that can supply us with the solution, and we’re working with them to make our product better. So we’ve not only gained more speed back, we’ve gained agility back and we’ve still reduced our problem of getting stuck in the debris. It’s a fascinating space to be involved in at the moment.

It certainly sounds like it. When have you experienced your greatest “Aha!” moments?

I think the first one was when you’re running a company and you feel like you need to know everything. From an entrepreneur’s side, you feel like you need to understand finance, business strategy, products, and more. What I found is that you need to understand a bit of all of it and find people who understand all of it, and put them in place. That’s not always easy when you’re starting up because those people are not affordable. But as you start building out, you’ve got to come back to that humility, that kind of humility where you have to let go of the things you don’t know. You should understand them and just going into business school and understanding strategy and finance is great, but I don’t want to be looking at spreadsheets every day of my life and working out whether we’re on the right track. I’ve got really good people to handle that who would beat me hands down every time.

It’s about having to trust that you can employ people like that and think, “That’s okay.” Also, removing ego to accept, “I would do it differently, or I want to do it this way.” So, for me, that was an early realisation. You don’t need to know it all. You should have a good understanding of all of it so you can find better people. If you truly want to grow the business, you can’t do it alone. There are the Bill Gates, the Steve Jobs, the Elon Musks of the world, very exceptional, who can probably handle it all. Though I dare say that Steve Jobs probably never looked at a balance sheet in his life: but he had control of the company. But, you know, aspiring to be like those people might not be the correct approach. They’re quite exceptional. I do believe in that sort of partnership and raising the village rather than trying to be the chief.

Leadership is very important for these kinds of things.

I think another insight is that you don’t know what you don’t know, which is why moving forward is key. So, I often think that for an accountant, lawyer, or engineer, knowing all the boundaries of what you can or can’t do is a bit of an Achilles heel. When you’re outside of that, you have no idea what you can or can’t do. So you explore more, and that probably moves things forward. You need all those people to build, but as an entrepreneur, not knowing everything can be quite useful. Sometimes we find out that you can’t do something, but that’s okay. You at least explore a lot more angles, and I think that’s where innovation comes from sometimes. It’s not knowing things up-front that helps drive advances.

What were the biggest compromises or sacrifices that you had to make to get where you are now?

Probably financial. We’ve probably been out-earned by my peers for about 15 years, which is fine. You have to make sacrifices. In the first few years of this business, we lived off an absolute pittance. We forwent salaries, bonuses, holidays, and even houses to achieve that vision on the horizon. Sacrificing ego is also significant. Experiencing massive failure, when something you believed in doesn’t work out, is a huge setback. These experiences build you. But, at the heart of every entrepreneur is the belief that if you get it right, the results will be fantastic for everyone involved.

What future are you hoping or envisioning to help create?

I’d like a future where the ubiquity of this kind of product reaches a point where people completely overlook its presence. It might sound counterintuitive, but it’s actually a positive thing. Right now, people see it and go, “Oh, that’s so cool. That’s interesting.” I want to reach a level of normalcy, similar to our current view of Uber, or future perspectives on self-driving cars and robotic waiters. It should be entirely natural, recognising that a robot, rather than a human, should be doing certain tasks. This is because humans can then focus on more productive activities and enjoy a cleaner environment. My aim is for ubiquity, where our products are needed yet unnoticed. As they become more widespread, the impact of our efforts will significantly contribute to a healthier environment. This vision is my ideal: the general population is completely unaware of the product’s existence but benefiting from a cleaner environment because of it.

How do you want close friends and family to look back upon you and your journey? Or what would you like other people to take from your journey?

I think I want people to remember that the risk was worth it. Your parents, family, husband, or wife will always worry that you should go and get a normal job, pay the bills, and be secure. There are two things I’d like the impact of what we’re doing to be felt, and they can be proud of that. But also, they have a sense of confidence that it was the right way to go just from a life point of view. It’s okay, and it turned out alright in the end. A lot of this is driven by looking at my dad, who is an engineer, has had a steady job all his life, didn’t want to risk things, and understandably didn’t want to step out because he had children, a house to pay for, and school fees. I looked at that and thought it was fine. I tried to make it work, but I was terrible at it. I was a terrible employee. I just couldn’t. I always wanted to do more and make changes, and in corporations, that’s a massive, difficult thing to do in the long run. So, I couldn’t work that way. I stepped out. He didn’t like that necessarily, but you forge your own path. Taking the risk, the leap of faith is also an option. I like to instil that in my kids as well, hoping they pick up on the halo effect of that.

What advice would you give a young entrepreneur just starting out?

Just do it. I’ve had the same conversation with two people over the last couple of days: “I’ve got this great idea. I like it.” No, I don’t mean “just do it” and sort of sacrifice everything. If you’re in a corporate job and you have a great idea, and you have a little bit of finance, work on that idea in the evenings. If you think it’s fantastic, there will come a point where you have to make a choice. Being an entrepreneur is not a safe space. So, if you’re incredibly uncomfortable with it, then maybe it’s not for you. But you won’t know until you do it. And I think we all have fabulous ideas all day long.

As a species, we’re incredibly imaginative and creative. But we very rarely take the next step because it’s a risk. And it’s not just a financial risk; it’s a personal risk. People might think, “I’m crazy, people might laugh at me, what if I’ve got it wrong?” All these things go through our heads, and we kind of undermine ourselves. But that Nike slogan, “Just do it,” I think is awesome. Because if you do it and it fails, that’s okay; you can go back to the corporate job you were doing anyway. You’re not going to fail at life. We’re always looking at what’s happening right now. But, you know, I’m 48 now, and I look back at how many times I’ve failed, and I’m still here, I’m still talking to you. I still exist. And that’s okay. So, I think you’ve got to take the chance. I used to think you had to do it young. I now think that you can do it at any stage of your life. You might be better at it later on because you can see several pitfalls coming your way before they arrive. So, I think experience gives you a bit more ability to push on through.

What books, movies, speeches, people, and so on inspired you most in your journey?

I tend to read a lot, especially biographies. That’s my preference, ranging from musicians to various influential figures. The last biography I read was about Elon Musk. I’ve got a broad spread, but I like the idea of people that we look up to in the world, be it a celebrity or be it in business, that when they can, they’ll tell you how lucky they were, or how difficult it was. That’s kind of generic amongst all of us, we’re all lucky in some sense— we can be lucky, or we can be unlucky. And we can all work hard to get to a point. We all know that working hard doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll get there. But, you know, your journey is never linear.

I like that aspect of things where I read a biography and find out somebody was an orphan, or they came from nothing, and they built a business or their parents forced them into being a Disney star. And suddenly, they became very famous, because of one meeting with an agent or whatever that is, luck has a lot to do with us getting us to that point. It’s how we act on that luck, and how we sort of make use of that moment, but luck is everything. I think you look at some people and, I know incredibly intelligent people, and I look at them and think, how have you not gone further? Intelligent people who are unhappy with where they are, and sometimes intelligent people are very happy with where they are, but intelligent people who see the space in life as a failure. It’s because a lot of it has to do with luck.

I shouldn’t be involved in robotics as I knew nothing about it. I do now, and have a better understanding than when I knew nothing. But I just happened to have a cup of coffee one day and saw two guys. If those guys weren’t doing anything on the boat, and it was just a day at the marina with people standing around. I wouldn’t be talking to you right now. So I see that as a point of luck, but I acted on it.

What was the big biography for you? What’s one that really got you?

Richard Branson was one I read in my twenties. But then, I read Elton John’s biography a couple of months ago and that was inspiring because as someone who’s got to the top of where he was, despite his background, despite his upbringing, I find that quite fueling. You can be successful regardless. And so that’s what I tend to take out.

I don’t even know that I like Elon Musk anymore, but I think what he’s done is amazing. I think it’s incredible he brought electrification of vehicles to the planet. We’ve always tinkered around with it and thought it would be a good idea, this guy went, “I’m gonna make a business out of it. And it’s gonna be hard, but I’m doing it.” Whether you like the guy or not, the fact is that he’s created an industry that a lot of massive automotive companies are now chasing, so I respect that.

I am impressed with that kind of thinking. I look at Bill Gates and I like what he does from a humanitarian point of view. Windows still irritates the crap out of me, but I don’t think he knew what he was doing when he first started anyway. It grew into a business, but I’m not too sure that he set out to create one of the biggest kinds of operating systems that we now know and use every day. In contrast, though, I do know with Musk his intention was that he was going to go to Mars, or he was going to create this. He had a very clear intention of what he wanted to do with his SpaceX business.

If there was one lasting message you could share with the world, what would it be?

I think life doesn’t have to be what you think it needs to be. Very often we think it’s supposed to be one way, and we think we’re supposed to own the house, have the kids, have happy families, and have a stable job. And I don’t think it needs to be that, especially in the age we live in. I think it could be anything you want it to be. Covid taught us that. We can work from anywhere; we can do whatever; suddenly, a job stops, and what do I do now? There are so many people who have pivoted off to something entirely different. I think that was a good mirror for us. But I think that’s probably it: life doesn’t need to be what you think it needs to be.

Cheers to that, Richard. Thank you very much for spending a little time with us and telling us about your company. The subject is incredibly interesting, and I’m sure our readers feel this as well. From all of us at Brighter Future, we wish you nothing but the wildest success in cleaning up Earth’s oceans and becoming the go-to company for water cleanup robotics.

<Original story appeared on Brighter future.studio >