Above Water with FreightFish

Wild Hearts

FreightFish is a New Zealand-based autonomous hydrofoil shipping company that aims to create a third option beyond the long wait of traditional ocean freight and the expensive extravagance of shipping by air.

“We should have a hundred boats on the water. We should have a swarm of ships. Way more service focused and way less engineering focused than we are now,” says Max Olsen, co-founder and CEO of FreightFish.

The FreightFish vision is to deliver goods anywhere in the world in 5-6 days and for half the cost of air. Advances in hydrofoil ships and cheaper carbon fibre manufacturing are making this vision imminently possible.

“Eight week lead times kill hardware companies.”

Title: Above Water with FreightFish

Episode interviews: FreightFish co-founder and CEO Max Olsen and Blackbird Partner Samantha Wong.

Key topics covered:

• FreightFish’s vision to build a swarm of ships.
• What exceptional engineering talent looks like
• Team Building in New Zealand
• Robots as a Service

The best of Max:

“We promised to build a prototype at 1/10th of the scale and then, everything we thought that was going to be hard about building turned out to be easy - and everything that we thought was easy turned out to be hard.”

“When you've backed yourself into the worst engineering corner, you’ve just got to bust your way out of it.”

“The ocean is super unforgiving.”

“How ready is our team at any given moment to completely rebuild a system? The structure of testing is the most important engineering principle.”

“Eight week lead times kill hardware companies.”

“Determination and resilience are the one and two most important traits.”

“In the face of almost certain defeat, can you turn yourself around?”

“The moral of the story is don't commit fraud.”

“Success is such a fleeting feeling and you only get it for a moment.Pause for a moment. Let's go take two hours to walk up a hill, spend some time learning a new skill, doing like a search and rescue mission out in one of the chase boats

Samantha Wong on FreightFish:

“ I love the sheer originality of the idea. Why not create a third way for freight to move, between slow, cheap, sea freight and fast, but super expensive and environmentally unfriendly, air freight.”

“One benefit of FreightFish is that you can actually get started with one boat. With one vehicle, you can start a freight service because it just plugs into existing supply chains. Therefore the capital requirements for a company doing that, much less than say an autonomous vehicle company.”

“America's Cup history in Auckland is really important to note when it comes to why you would build a company like FreightFish in Auckland. Team New Zealand snuck a win through innovative hydrofoils, so there are actually a very deep pockets of hydro-foiling talent here in New Zealand.”

“In my experience, attracting the best talent involves inspiring them and getting the image in their minds in such a way that they just can't forget it. They just can't shake it from their imagination.”

“I think attitude is such a big part of a good hire. That and humility around trying things and bringing a lot of energy to do their job.”