Splash hears from the founders and three past winners of The Captain’s Table ahead of today’s finals which are being broadcast live on this site.
The Captain’s Table, shipping’s pre-eminent pitch competition, is set for its biggest showcase to date with the finals set to be broadcast live today on Splash direct from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, one of the showcase events of this year’s Hong Kong Maritime Week.
The maritime start-up contest, now in its fifth year, serves as a launchpad for aspiring entrepreneurs, inventors, and dreamers who aspire to transform their groundbreaking concepts into reality in the maritime industry.
Su Yin Anand, co-founder of The Captain’s Table, commented: “The Captain’s Table is truly unique. Not only is it a collaborative platform between the shipping industry and start-ups but, we also have the government’s support in showcasing Hong Kong as an international maritime centre and start-up hub. This offers ample opportunities for our startups to provide solutions for both the public and private sector.”
The finalists this year are 123Carbon, a Dutch digital decarbonisation start-up, Crewdential, a seafarer well-being/SaaS solutions provider from Guernsey, ESG NRG, a decarbonisation/sustainability specialist from Norway, Indian education and training start-up Marine Insight, onboard IoT connectivity solutions firm Sealution from Belgium, and Singapore-based smart port company Magicport.
Giving these finalists a few pointers, three previous winners talked recently about what is it like to win the competition and what has it done for their respective businesses.
The winners for 2019, 2020, and 2021 had quite different experiences when it came to the participation in the competition. Founder and CEO of ocean freight visibility firm Portcast, Nidhi Gupta, was the only one of the three to win in a live event and receive her award on stage.
Due to covid restrictions, the event’s hybrid format, and the finalists presenting remotely, co-founder and CEO of crew travel software specialist Greywing, Nick Clarke, and founder, CEO, and chief scientist of drag reduction solutions specialist 13 Mari, Krassimir Fotev, won the 2020 and 2021 competition, respectively, without being on stage – although neither found it problematic, perhaps even the opposite.
“To be honest, doing The Captain’s Table during covid was a bit of a boon because I didn’t have to get up on the stage. It was a bit easier; I didn’t have to go to Hong Kong, and I was able to do it all remotely, so I think I was a little bit lucky,” Clarke remarked.
Participating in The Captain’s Table competition was not a shoo-in for either of these eventual winners. But the most attractive thing about it for all three of these start-up companies at the time was the opportunity to talk to people from the maritime industry and more importantly, discuss ideas with investors from the industry which, as Clarke put it, “speak their language.”
No one was short on superlatives regarding the competition with Clarke pointing out that The Captain’s Table was “definitely the highest ROI on time invested” that Greywing got in terms of networking and connections with new customers and participants.
“Everything that the company did and the talent that it was able to attract and the funding that it was able to attract all traces back to The Captain’s Table,” Fotev said.
Since the experience of the competition was quite different for Gupta, she looked back at the live event in Hong Kong and the on-stage presentation she gave as one of the finalists of the first edition of the competition.
“I think The Captain’s Table is unique because the time given to the Q&A is significant. It was 15 minutes for Q&A and 15 minutes on stage which is a pretty long time with a lot of deep questions about the business in front of an audience of 100 people,” Gupta recalled.
The three Captain’s Table winners also tried to give a little bit of guidance to people who are thinking of creating start-ups. Fotev noted that the most difficult thing, apart from creating the product itself, was finding people who think the same way and he stated that winning The Captain’s Table was what accelerated the process of finding like-minded people.
Clarke was a little bit more practical with his advice. He said that it was important to always work the long game as sales cycles in maritime are often long and clients may take a long time to come onboard but “by the time they do they’re unlikely to leave.”
“Playing for the long term I think is important because it affects all kinds of dynamics around hiring, around funding, and also around managing your expectations,” Clarke stated.
Even though almost all advice was constructive, Gupta gave a small warning for those looking to launch a start-up.
“There are so many unexpected things that happen all the time, you are constantly fighting fires, and every day there is something new to think about, something new to tackle and you need to be resilient and realise that it’s normal to deal with constant and unprecedented changes,” she concluded.
Keen to watch the finals? The YouTube channel below will commence live at 16.00 hours Hong Kong time today.
