We had the good fortune of connecting with Joseph Oorebeek and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Joseph, how has your background shaped the person you are today?
I’m lucky to hail from Vancouver, Canada, on the West Coast. It’s known for the rain which many decry for the greyness, but it also meant that I grew up embraced by greenery and a freshness in the air. In Vancouver, the outdoors is constantly on your doorstep (sometimes quite literally, like when we found a black bear eating apples from our tree), but the scenery is also dramatic, with mountains meeting the ocean. You can’t help but feel connected to the natural world there, and I found a strong desire to preserve that natural beauty for future generations to enjoy.

Aside from the ocean, we were lucky to also spend a lot of time on lakes in the mountains, and I grew up surrounded by water. Speedboats, canoes and paddleboards made the rocking of a boat on the water second-nature to me. As a kid, I could just sit and watch water flow past the boat, or in a stream, for hours on end, and so much of my education since then has involved looking closer at how fluids move in different situations. There is a direct line from looking over the bow of a ski boat to watch the water run under the hull, to sitting in Cambridge lecture halls learning about the flow of thin sheets of water over a weir.

I’m also lucky that my parents have been supportive and important figures in my life. My dad works in construction, and from him I was exposed to practical problem solving from a young age. Thanks to him, I can usually figure out a way to build whatever I can visualize. He also gave me a great example of how any project can be tackled, whether it’s a small piece of carpentry for a kitchen, or a hundred-unit condo complex. My first examples of project management and team leadership came from him, well before I ever started an engineering job.

My parents are also very hands on, and from them I inherit the need to create. I have found a certain joy in using my creative energies to make products that people need, and make their lives better. Fulfillment for me is combining all of these parts of my life: creating an engineering product firmly rooted in the fluid-dynamics that fascinate me, something both that people need, and helps to better preserve the natural world for future generations.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
OutSail’s goal is to decarbonize the maritime industry using wind power. Wind was the past, but with a modern understanding of materials and aerodynamics it is also the future. Pithy elevator pitch out of the way, I’m really excited about what we’re accomplishing! As a group of industry outsiders, we are able to bring our unique perspectives to the problems facing the maritime industry, and take the time to approach our solutions from a first-principles mindset. Without this sort of industry cross-pollination, you end up with a bunch of sailors seeing sailor problems and creating sailor solutions for them. For us, any challenge of “but this is how it’s always been done” is answered with “until now”.

Our team has really had experience in a broad range of engineering disciplines, from developing Indy 500 winning cars to the giant fairings that protect satellites during launch. We know how to set up a problem to be solved, isolate the variables, and really look at the solution space. What we see in the maritime industry is that wind is great, but masts are annoying and always in the way when you don’t need them. So someone else may think “well, let’s just fold the mast up”, but we saw something different. If you use the wing as a mast, then you remove a part and can end up with something just as strong. At the same time, we still need to get the wing out of the way when not needed, yet in our previous jobs rolling up a curved surface like a wing was a solved problem. This is not a solution that an industry veteran may think of, because we have a unique set of skills and experiences that opened up our design space in a different direction.

I don’t want to say that it’s been easy to get to this stage, but most engineering challenges we face are often solved by taking a step back and looking at the data. Look at the knowns, the unknowns, and make an honest assessment of what you think you can find out. In this way, every design iteration, every tweak to our business plan, is traceable as being the right decision based on what we know, and with sufficient background research that what we don’t know is very small. Given that, to me our greatest lesson has been the non-engineering side of starting a business. It’s too easy for engineers in a tech startup to get hyper-focused on the technology; if we just build this widget, then people will love it and throw money at us… yeah, that doesn’t happen in real life. There has to be a real person on the other end who will buy what you build, and enough of them to turn your startup into a real company. Having a CEO with a strong product/market mindset is our secret super-power, and I have learned a lot from him on how to turn a cool idea into a real business.

What makes me excited is that all of this is coming together at OutSail, and quickly! We are making something tangible, that will encourage people to use the wind to power their vessels and yet seamlessly integrate into their lives. I will be able to walk past any marina or port and see our sails out there, making a difference. It’s a magical feeling to be able to look at something like that and say “I made that happen”.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
If you haven’t been able to tell from the article so far, I’m a pretty low-key guy who likes the freedom and freshness of the outdoors. While I now live in Palo Alto, there are still some wonderful “must-see” unexpected surprises in the heart of Silicon Valley. Here’s a plan for my perfect Sunday, and I’ve definitely done all of these on the same day to recharge myself for the week ahead!

It starts exploring a gem that exists all around us here. We are lucky enough to have the “Peninsula Open Space Trust”, which maintains various parks around the region, complementing the state parks nearby. These “POST” parks, however, are free to use, and as their name suggests are celebrations of open space and blue skies. My favorite is Monte Bello Open Space Preserve. If you survive the twisting mountain drive up Page Mill Road, the nondescript gravel parking lot near the top of the ridge still lets you hear the hustle and bustle of the bay. But 5 steps out of the parking lot, the trail turns around the hill and you are transported to a different California. The hill blocks the sound of the cars and airplanes, and you can just sit on a bench right there, closing your eyes to listen to the wind. It usually takes me 10 minutes to get past that first bench, as I reset myself for some calm hiking. The trails are relatively easy but rewarding – I will usually walk up the hill, watching as hawks soar in the valley below me, until at the summit I am treated to unique view. There, you can stand and look to the East and see San Francisco bay, and from the same spot looking West you can see the Pacific Ocean, sometimes even with a glimmer of a ship sailing up the coast.

Having worked up an appetite, we return to California Avenue in Palo Alto, where the farmer’s market is in full swing. I’ll take this chance to stock up on groceries for dinners for the week, or if it’s stone fruit season some peaches for pies. I’d then happily introduce you to one of the vendors, Zaida, who runs her own food truck serving the Oaxacan food she grew up with. A chicken burrito on a fresh made masa tortilla from her is my lunch of choice, but she also has a selection of veggie and vegan options, and is always tweaking the menu with seasonal Oaxacan treats. I’m grateful to have found her stall the first week I moved to the bay, and have even had the chance to take cooking classes from her!

As a final treat for the day, I will stop at my favorite local bakery, “Douce France”. It’s a low key shop, run by a pair of French immigrants who successfully bring an old-world cafe to the Bay Area. You won’t find their cookbook touted in bookshops, or lines around the block, but instead a gentle authenticity in the flavor of the croissants and the pace of life in the shop. They have the typical small round tables you would find in Paris, and a selection of crepes and coffees to satisfy a hungry hiker. It’s a great place to catch a quick snack, or stay longer and people-watch while writing.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I’ve been lucky enough to benefit from many wonderful mentors in my life, and most recently had the joy of working with Rob Schwarz, CTO at my previous job. As a professional role model, he is what I aspire to become; he is always the calm person in the room, never having to shout to make his point, and willing to be proven wrong when exploring new ideas. Rob balances extensive professional duties with a seemingly limitless number of hobbies including mountain biking and sailboat remodeling, all approached with an infectious optimistic energy. When I approached him with my thoughts of changing jobs, instead of giving me an ultimatum or pushing me to make one decision or another, he was brave enough to hand me a helpful career advice book and give me time to think things over. And it worked! It was enough for me to take a step back, and realize that working on satellites just wasn’t scratching the itch for me. Breaking the news to him that I would be moving on to work with OutSail, he was nothing but supportive and happy for me to follow a well thought through goal.

Rob was also very supportive because he knows what a rockstar we have in OutSail’s CEO, Arpan Rau. Having worked with Arpan before, I was impressed with his pairing of a solid science and engineering background with an artistic flair; a rare but winning combination essential to starting a new business! I saw time and again how he would happily deep-dive into customer and engineering data with the goal of ensuring we were making the right product. He is also unwilling to put up with bullshit, and will happily tell the emperor where his clothes are while everyone else is deluding themselves that everything is fine. This focus on the product is one of the key reasons why I joined him at OutSail. We’ve benefited from his leadership and product-first mentality to keep checking ourselves. Are we making something that actually helps people? Are we building something that real customers will actually buy? He asks these questions before I even think to be worried about them, and that is turning OutSail into a successful business.

Arpan has also been important by introducing me to Bailey Da Costa. She is the powerhouse of our team, full of the optimism and competence to keep us going. Nothing is an obstacle to her, only a problem that hasn’t been solved yet, and there is no right or wrong way to solve that problem as long as it gets fixed. Where someone else may get caught up thinking “well that’s a bit unconventional, so it probably won’t work”, her fearlessness to rip up the instruction manual has allowed us to iterate faster than I could have thought possible! Beyond the engineering foundation of our company, she brings balance and clarity to our small team that has let us navigate the emotional ups and downs of starting our own business with a new team with ease. By rights this should be the most stressful time of my life, but with teammates like Bailey and Arpan at my side, it’s turning out to be the most fun I’ve had in a long time!

Website: outsail.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/outsailtech

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/outsail-tech/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/outsailtech

Facebook: facebook.com/outsailtechnologies

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