Insane "underwater" startup.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/13/smallbusiness/subprime_sub.fsb/index.htm

by noonespecial • 18 years ago

35 34 18 years ago

money.cnn.com

Allocator2008• 18 years ago

I am not an economist, but I think this is a lesson in the area of risk/reward. Sure, as a tourist I might have qualms about taking a ride in an unlicensed sub. However as a human being who loves knowledge, I would be intrigued by the chance to see a 14-foot shark close-up. The risk involved is offset by the chance for knowledge. Evolution hard-wires self-preservation into us. But perhaps it also hard-wires a certain risk-tolerance for the sake of a greater good. Put it another way: it is better for the gene to lose a few gene-carriers along the way to aquiring a big new advantage, than to not lose those handful of gene-carriers but also not aquire the big new advantage. So businesses like this that understand the hard-wired tolerance we have for risk when others don't understand that, have a competitive advantage - they can get to work while their competitors are still worrying about paper work. In a word, the selfish gene should be proud of this guy! :-)

seano• 18 years ago

You could get the same knowledge from watching a video.

dmv• 18 years ago

Knowledge, perhaps, but by no means the same experience (which is what the commenter probably meant). There is no question that I appreciate how a shark moves through the water far more from my experiences as a diver than as a Shark Week viewer or aquarium visitor.

sireat• 18 years ago

This sounds like a lot of fun, till someone gets hurt. Even in Honduras that would spell trouble.

I would probably take the risk though.

bigthboy2• 18 years ago

I, like many of those who commented in the article, think the guy is pretty smart. I mean he did build his own submarine from scratch and furthermore made it profitable. However, I also agree that the bull headed and risky approach he has with the whole thing is a bit... unnecessary. I would like to see him approach it not thinking he's better than everyone and that he can simply get around the law. For as many dumb laws there are there are at least half as many good ones. Not allowing people to take other people to dangerous places without being certified and having insurance is one of those good ones.

noonespecial5• 18 years ago

The point he made was that the certification would have cost him more than the sub. He is barely profitable as it is.

There are a whole set of laws in the first world that create an absurdly high barrier to entry for certain activities. Instead of making the activities safer, as intended, they simply make them impossible/unprofitable/implausible.

A soup kitchen that fed the homeless near me was forced to close because they could not afford to install a centralized halon fire extinguisher system to meet commercial kitchen code. Instead of making the volunteers and the homeless marginally safer, the volunteers went home to watch TV and the homeless were SOL. Law->Fail.

Different cultures experience risk/reward in different ways. Safety above ALL else is a distinctly first-world/western notion.

bigthboy2• 18 years ago

I'm not saying they all work out I'm saying that some are good. In your example of the soup kitchen closed because it couldn't install some fancy-pancy fire extinguisher system, yeah, that's a bad law and a bit of an overkill. Telling someone that they can't legally take other people 700 feet below the water in a sub that isn't certified is a bit of a different story.

He may have barely have been making a profit but the fact of the matter is it would've cost him $100,000 to get papers/certified but he instead spent $200,000 on a new sub. It just seems like the kind of thing that would actually be considered an investment because it could make you more profitable and definitely adds more credibility.

dhimes3• 18 years ago

I understand your point, but it doesn't necessarily follow that law->fail. If those people burned alive in a horrible fire, like the patrons of a certain RI nightclub, then we would be calling for the law. Because the homeless have had to find another place to go we won't know.

The problem that I see with regulation is that it's hard to apply it intelligently to each case, so broad, sweeping regulations are made when other, more practical solutions may solve the problem. My pet peeve is the banning of smoking in Boston (I don't smoke and have never been a smoker). Make the law something like "smoke will be undetectable in non-smoking areas to with x parts-per-billion" or something, and let somebody figure out how to build a cheap negative-pressure room for smoking areas in restaurants. Instead, we get "no smoking allowed."

I actually suspect that in a lot of cases (good) regulations help businesses by establishing some trust in the customers' minds.

TrevorJ3• 18 years ago

I agree. I have a condition which technically should restrict me from doing anything interesting and/or exciting but I long ago decided that it's better to live a full life and do what makes you happy than it is to attempt to mitigate every single risk that the world may present you with.

sfphotoarts• 18 years ago

I wonder just how much of the world would have been explored had Shackleton, Columbus etc worried too much about if their boats were insured.

Antarctica...ummm, that's all very interesting sir, but tell me again how much personal accident liability you have on The Discovery... :)

hugh• 18 years ago

Interestingly, googling "Shackleton insurance" gives this New York Times article from January 16, 1914:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A07E6DC1730E...

It's not clear to me from the article who actually took out the insurance policy, though.

ryanwaggoner2• 18 years ago

I think the difference is that this guy is taking paying passengers down and some in the industry seem to think that they're not being made fully aware of the risks.

wastedbrains• 18 years ago

I saw ads for this when I was scuba diving and Honduras, kind of funny to see this story on CNN about a year later.

josefresco• 18 years ago

Would you trust/encourage a guy who shoots a horse in the head just to see something on the bottom of the sea floor eat it?

rudyfink• 18 years ago

Yes, while I don't see it as something I would do, I can't find any fault with it. I'd guess it's probably just the cheapest price point for meat available to him. If he bought a pallet of horse meat from a butcher, it would seem far more ordinary I think? That said I can't fault the logic of just going right to the source and saving money.

noonespecial5• 18 years ago

Its the same cultural problem that some people have with eating dog. Its just a different world. The meat in this case even walks to the place where its needed! If it was a cow or a pig, it would probably seem less objectionable. Horse seems to ring up as "pet" in my mind and so colors the issue for me.

If you think about it, he doesn't need to shoot the horse first. Dropping it to the bottom of the ocean with cinder blocks attached would do the trick while possibly attracting more sharks. It be cheaper and cleaner boat-side as well. He would probably find it morally objectionable to do so though.

If more people had to kill their own meat, there'd be a ton more vegetarians.

wensing• 18 years ago

The horse was described as tired and old, so its fate may have been no better wherever he bought it from.

mtw• 18 years ago

killing the horse just to get tourists see sharks and other sea predators is imo stupid and unelegant

mixmax2• 18 years ago

Either this is nothing special or I just hang around a weird crowd. I know a some guys that made three submarines, and they go to 1500 feet. The biggest one is the largest amateur submarine in the world. See pictures here: http://www.submarines.dk/

They are currently working on commercial spaceflight: The goal is to make a rocket that will get one person suborbital but weightless and back down. They expect to do it within a couple of years. They just had their first public motor test, you can see a clip here: http://ekstrabladet.dk/nationentv/klip/?clipid=17454&cli... . (links are in Danish)

And they're just a couple of guys with no money to speak off, but they are crazy and they believe they can do it.

So do I.

ryanwaggoner2• 18 years ago

I'm pretty sure you just hang around a weird crowd...

pages through Facebook to see if anyone's status is building submarine or hobby rocket

Yeah, just a weird crowd :-)

mixmax2• 18 years ago

Looking forward to a trip on top of their rocket though :-)

trapper• 18 years ago

Envy. I've always wanted to build my own as well. Have you gone in the submarine?

TrevorJ3• 18 years ago

I would love to be introduced to your crowd, maybe I would not stand out so much if I hung out with people like that.

markm• 18 years ago

Now that's a maverick.

sspencer• 18 years ago

Is there a particular reason underwater is in quotes here? It IS an (insane) underwater startup. The fact that it is underwater does not need to be quoted. I think people have completely lost touch with what quotation marks mean.

Sorry to be nitpicky, but I am getting tired of seeing completely wrong uses of quotation marks everywhere.

noonespecial5• 18 years ago

I used underwater in this case because it is often said that a startup is underwater when they are in debt.

The quotes for the double meaning.

Apologies if I got it "wrong". :)

gruseom• 18 years ago

You really need to take a trip to the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.

http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/

Update: looks like their snarky literal interpretations are running a bit weak lately, but the photos people send in are still really good.

TrevorJ3• 18 years ago

I tend to "agree" with you here. ;-) I read it as a subtle pun on the normal usage of underwater as it pertains to startups - that is to say, using the term underwater to mean the company is losing money.

Insane "underwater" startup.

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