Judson Kauffman & Joe Wolfel | Terradepth
JUDSON KAUFFMAN & JOE WOLFEL
Co-CEO’s of Terradepth, a data-as-a-service company whose vision is to map Earth's ocean.
What Is Terradepth? Tell Us About What You Do And What Your Mission Is.
Who are we? We are a team of problem solvers and makers dedicated to advancing ocean exploration.
What do we believe? We believe that a deeper understanding of the oceans is achievable through technological advancements in robotic autonomy and data visualization—and that a deeper understanding of our oceans is critical to better decision-making and valuable to a wide range of potential customers.
What do we want?
To be the go-to entity for interaction with the ocean.
To create the largest, most diverse, and highest resolution ocean data set in the world.
To fundamentally improve humans’ capability to interact with and make decisions from ocean data.
Why do we do it? By turning Earth’s oceans into an immersive and accurate virtual world, we can connect humanity with the last frontier on our planet. Our ultimate purpose at Terradepth is in service to society and our planet.
Purpose is at the heart of any elite organization. It’s admirable to build a profitable company. It’s another thing to build a profitable company that also adds meaning to its stakeholders’ lives. We aren’t interested in just being a part of a successful business; we want to work with people who are united in their service to a shared purpose.
The fruits of our labor will give humans a holistic reasoning of Earth for the first time in history. The discoveries that we facilitate will lead to new medical treatments, inform environmental regulation, solve historical puzzles, and connect people with the ocean in a way never before possible.
How Did Your Backgrounds As Navy SEALS Play A Role In Leading You To Start The Company?
We learned how to operate on an elite level in that community, and that experience gave us the confidence to start our own company.
Our Navy experience introduced us to the fact that humanity is almost totally ignorant about our oceans. The experience planted the seed for the desire to explore the ocean and cemented our reverence for it.
We learned how to build strong teams and how to lead them.
We learned the power of analogous thinking in solving problems creatively—and the impact that calm, assured leadership can have in high risk, highly complex environments.
What Have Been Both Your Favorite And Least-liked Parts Of Your Entrepreneurial Journey? What Have Been Your Most Challenging And Most Exciting Moments For You And The Company?
Jud: I struggle greatly to maintain interest as tasks drift towards routine, administrative matters, and away from broader concepts. Starting and running a company requires much of this, so it has been hard for me to adopt new habits to overcome this weakness. And thankfully, I have Joe.
Sometimes I feel like simultaneously balancing multiple tasks will help me be more productive, but the opposite is true. The best performers must prioritize ruthlessly and focus only on the single thing in front of them. In every moment, we can choose to give in to distraction or choose to do work that matters. Furthermore, I really love spending time with my family, so balancing my obsession with them and my obsession with Terradepth requires deliberate planning and action.
Joe: My favorite part of the entrepreneurial journey personally has been the extent to which I can indulge my intellectual curiosity. When you’re starting a company, you need to accumulate so much learning—often in an entirely new space. Entrepreneurship rewards that kind of curiosity, so that’s been a really energizing aspect of the journey.
The most exciting part of Terradepth has been watching the team coalesce around our mission and bring their different perspectives to the table to attack a very hard problem. My least-liked part of being an entrepreneur, perhaps unsurprisingly, is interacting with potential investors who seem to have an identity crisis. I see a real struggle with some venture capitalists to do what they say they do—and that wastes everyone’s time, potentially the most valuable asset we have as individuals. Of course, there are a ton of fantastic venture capital partners out there—it’s just the time suck of interacting with ones who are falsely advertising their approach that’s the frustrating part.
What Are Some Of The Frequent Use-Cases Or Challenges Which Terradepth Helps Solve?
Terradepth is solving challenges of autonomy in very austere maritime environments and interaction with large, unstructured maritime datasets. We’re still finishing our prototype, but the top use cases are:
General ocean exploration: this is useful for curious adventurers, hydrographers, fishermen, surfers, etc.
Subsea asset inspection
Subsea survey work for pre-construction planning (think offshore wind farms, for example).
What Was The Fundraising Process Like For You? Tell Us About Your Investors And What You Use The Money You’ve Raised For.
We were pretty fortunate in this regard. In our previous venture (a consulting firm that we also co-founded), we developed strong relationships with several executives at Seagate Technology.
When we shared our idea for creating a comprehensive ocean data set and building a high-resolution virtual ocean, they loved the idea and seeded the business with $8 million. We had previously done in-depth market validation and fleshed out our concept with some brilliant engineers, so we had much more than just an idea. With that seed money, we’ve been able to build a prototype cloud-based ocean data management system, a prototype deep ocean data collection robot that can recharge itself at sea, and an advanced machine-learning-enabled software suite to support all of these components.
Can You Tell Us About Some Of Your Numbers? How Has Growth Been Over The Past Couple Of Years? Anything Exciting That Will Be Launching Soon?
As a pre-revenue company, there isn’t much to report on the numbers. We will test our prototype in the ocean this February. 2021 will be a big year on both the data collection demonstration and ocean data user interaction side of the house.
What Was The Inspiration Behind The Company Name?
It was Megadepth, an intentional nod to the 80s metal band, but our Chairman is more mature than we are and suggested we find an alternative. Terra means “earth,” and depth acknowledges the ocean focus. Tera is also a large measure of data storage (think Terabyte), so it resonated as well.
Tell Us A Little Bit About Your Team.
We are a 12-person team, and everyone is critical. The two of us have little to no engineering skills, and this company is engineering-centered, so we lean on everyone equally daily. We see ourselves as enablers for them to accomplish the technical goals of the company.
How Do You Think Your Industry (Or The World In General) Will Change Post-COVID?
We think things will largely return to the way they were before. We need physical connection on a biological level, and as soon as a vaccine is widely available, we will see things begin to return. Certainly, some lasting impacts will be more frequent remote working, less air travel for business, and increased public hygiene requirements, among others. For our industry, this pandemic has led to an increased focus on expanding “digital reach.” In other words, becoming less dependent on human presence for ocean data collection and use, which is what Terradepth is contributing to.
What Do Your Typical Workday Schedules Look Like? Tell Us About Your Daily Routines and Favorite Products And Practices.
Jud: I’m usually up at 5:15 (to my wife’s annoyance), meditate for 20 minutes, in the gym (that Joe and I built) by 6 to work out and take a 10-minute ice bath, and then back home to cook breakfast for the family at 7:15. I get back to the office around 9 and work until lunch, then breathwork around 12:30 before returning to work at 1. I meditate again at 4:30 and then head home to play with kids and have dinner, do bedtime routine, and then spend the next hour either reading or watching TV with my wife before going to bed at 9:30 for a 10 pm sleep time.
I do transcendental meditation. I wear a Whoop bracelet to track sleep and recovery. I keep a journal most days. I drink mushroom coffee, tea, and water primarily. I read the Daily Stoic email, the Flow Genome Project newsletter, TechCrunch, and occasionally the WSJ. Other than that, I read books voraciously, which is not something I have always done. Right now, I am reading Factfulness.
For workouts, I like to mix things up depending on my mood and recovery level: I love yoga, hiking, Olympic lifting, breathwork (to support general performance and also my freediving/spearfishing), high-velocity training, and sprinting. Occasionally I go to a gym in Austin called Train4theGame and sometimes visit the Austin Pole Vault and Throws gym to do some pole vaulting.
Joe: I’m usually up at 5 am. I do some breathwork after I stagger to the espresso machine, usually after stubbing a couple of toes. I used Sam Harris’s “Waking Up” app for a while but do my own apnea and meditation work now. I get some business or personal reading/writing done before my children wake up.
I’ll usually read some material on Farnam Street (fs.blog) or the Daily Stoic email and see where that takes me. Then my kids are up, and it’s breakfast time, school prep, etc. I’m out the door to
the office by 7:30 am, get a workout in the Terradepth gym, jump in the ice bath after Jud, and get ready for the workday.
For workouts, we’re pretty minimalist. I’m usually doing something along the lines of Olympic lifts, weighted calisthenics, kettlebells, and metabolic conditioning. Rowing on a Concept2 as well. Running is pretty much gone since my knees are pretty much gone. Pilates and yoga have been helpful from an aging/body abuse standpoint, so I throw that in sporadically. In a similar vein, Jud and I met Jerzy Gregorek last year, and we love his Happy Body program.
At work, we have a daily stand-up to orient everyone to the day’s work to kick things off. Then the days are totally varied at that point. I could be helping make cables in the warehouse, driving a forklift, helping run a sonar data collection mission, doing strategic planning, talking with customers, etc. I try to be home by 5 or 6 pm to spend time with my kids before they’re asleep. Then it’s dinner, family time, and reading/random work.
My Navy dive supervisor qualifications don’t translate to the civilian world, so I’m getting a Divemaster rating—so that takes up some time in the evenings recently. I read pretty much constantly—right now, I’m bouncing back and forth between Mortal Questions (philosophy book by Thomas Nagel) and Antifragile (Nassim Nicholas Taleb). I try to be unconscious by 11 pm, then repeat.
What Are The Most Important Skills A Modern Day Entrepreneur Needs In Order To Be Successful? What Advice Do You Have For Entrepreneurs Who Are Just Starting Out?
Self-mastery
Risk-taking competence
Mental Model creation: rapid information analysis and synthesis
Being brilliant isn’t enough. It isn’t even required. If you can do the above three things with some semblance of emotional intelligence, you should be able to build a team to address your chosen problem. Of course, you need to pick the right problem…which is much of the battle.
We recommend spending most of your time in the early days validating the market. Just because your loved ones think your thing will sell doesn’t mean it will sell. Talk to 100 potential customers and listen well.
Ask yourself: 1) Is this industry growing? 2) Can I defend and protect my thing from replication or obsolescence? and 3) Why am I doing this? If question 3 doesn’t evoke deeply rooted emotions, consider something else that does. The more you care about what it is you do, the bigger it will be.
Tell Us A Story Of Something That Happened To You, Something You Heard, Or Something You Saw, That Taught You An Important Lesson.
Jud: We met a man named Dan Laffoley, an ocean conservationist, who made two things clear: 1) the ocean is being destroyed, and 2) Terradepth has better odds than anyone at saving it. Dan’s comments helped me fully understand how important this work is.
Joe: In a different vein: when I was debating on whether to get out of the Navy, something a Delta operator said stuck in my head: “Don’t be the guy who stays in because you were too scared to go do something else.” Good words to consider in many different environments.
What Do You Do In Your Free Time?
Jud: play with family, flyfish, spearfish, bowhunt, play music, read.
Joe: family activities, woodworking, house projects, hunt, work out, read.
What Is Your Favorite Quote And Why Does It Resonate With You?
Jud: Impossible to have just one, but I have always liked Howard Thurman’s “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” I have also always liked Thomas Carlyle’s “For suffering and enduring, there is no remedy but striving and doing.”
Joe: Tough one. I’ll have to randomly choose a couple since quotes from much smarter people than me run through my head all day. From two books mentioned above, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either‚ but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts.” Or Hemingway: “The road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.”
Who Is Your Role Model?
Jud: I have many, but probably my two grandfathers top the list. One was a wealthy philanthropist who did a lot of good in the world, and the other was a poor farmer who never let pain interfere with joy.
Joe: All of the people I count as friends serve as role models in various ways. I’m very fortunate to have friends who make me better and make me want to be better. The ones who died young always stand out, as it seems much easier to pull the different ways they modeled what’s right—which is a bit odd now that I write it, but a reality nonetheless. That said, a consistent role model for me has always been my grandfather—he’s a humble, compassionate, kind, and strong man who’s transitioned through multiple roles in his life: welder, farmer, etc. But always a strong husband and father who’s guided by faith and higher principles.
Is There A Parable That You Often Think About? What Is It And What Lesson Does It Teach?
Jud: I recently read the Bhagavad Gita, which is sort of like the Hindu version of the Sermon on the Mount, and it’s a parable that reminds us that a human’s greatest conflict is within himself, within his own consciousness, and that minimizing our own ego is a more than worthy effort to be undertaken on a daily basis, perpetually. It teaches us that every decision we make should take us closer to our true selves—to wisdom and to love.
Joe: The parable of the pious man on his roof during a flood. There are many variations, but the essence is that the man is one of faith and is convinced that God will save him from the rising waters. There are a few avenues of escape offered as the flood worsens, but the man refuses them all, stating, “no, God will save me.” Then he drowns. He meets God and asks, “I believed in you—why didn’t you save me?” God replies, “I tried three times, and you didn’t take the opportunity.”
I think about this in terms of always having a bias for action. When things get tough, it’s important to have faith. But it’s also important to rely on yourself, rely on your team, and the unique gifts you’ve been given to adapt, survive, and win. As a General I used to work for always said, “you can’t steer something that’s not moving.”
If You Can Have A One-Hour Meeting With Someone Famous Who Is Alive, Who Would It Be And Why?
Jud: Jerry Seinfeld—I’d like to tell him some jokes and make him laugh. I think making Jerry Seinfeld laugh would be about as rewarding as an hour could be.
Joe: Larry Page—so I can get the full story behind Google Earth and the Google Ocean initiative.
What Are Your Top Three Favorite Books, Or Three Books You Recommend?
Jud:
Joe:
The Sun Also Rises (and many of Hemingway’s short stories)
What Does Success Mean To You?
Jud: To maximize my unique potential in harmony with the universe and to know how to love and be loved.
Joe: Basically what Jud said. To love and be loved while protecting and creating more of what is good in life.
