Inspired. That’s the feeling we get from working closely with a room full of ambitious, climate-tech entrepreneurs during our most recent Ocean MBA.
Here's a quick aside as an example...
One of the startups is at what we’d call the “idea stage.” The founder is an academic professor who has an idea for a climate start-up. Not yet incorporated. No patent filed. Thinking about raising some grant money for the science. We recruited them to the Ocean MBA. Sure, they’re early stage, but that’s the beauty of the program – to accelerate ocean entrepreneurs. Still, we weren’t sure if they’d convert to a company (and hopefully an investment opportunity for Propeller!)...
So fast forward to the final day, when all the founders pitch our partnership. Apparently inspired by day one of the Ocean MBA, in their pitch deck was a screenshot of the timestamp for filing their provisional patent – late at night on the first day of the Ocean MBA – and their commitment to get the business going in the next 365 days! We love that bias for action and appetite for ambition and it’s what’s so inspiring about our work.
Ok, back to the program: We know one of the main ingredients that makes our Ocean MBA so inspiring – the people. This year’s cohort was down-selected from our largest applicant pool ever (~60% larger than last year). This meant we had a broad diversity of ideas, solutions, and technologies across our themes (Carbon, Organics, Industrials), a wide range of stages from Idea-stage to Series A, a greater geographic distribution of applicants (from five continents and as far away as Singapore), and frankly, a hard time down-selecting to our final cohort.
We think that mixture is part of the magic. Challenges of scaling a business are true across software and hardware, and change from idea to Series A. It makes for a dynamic learning environment where no two cohorts have felt the same, but all founders leave having grown dramatically in a short time.
Of course, our instructors, mentors, and partners are another key ingredient in our recipe for the Ocean MBA. With each iteration of the program, we bring back some favorite lessons – like the HubSpot case study led by HubSpot cofounder and Propeller GP Brian Halligan – while rotating in fresh faces and material, too. This year we deepened our work with the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and featured new units from Bill Aulet and Ben Soltoff, alongside repeat instructors Jenny Larios Berlin and Tod Hynes. In keeping up with the times, Tod even dropped some time-saving AI tricks-of-the-trade into our cohort’s tool-belts.
We also brought back favorite and essential(!) units from our supporting partners – Goodwin Procter and J.P. Morgan. Our Goodwin team – Joe Theis and Kate Leonard – are so generous with their time, walking through specific questions from the cohort, helping them avoid critical mistakes in corporate structure and governance. The support extended beyond the classroom too, with other Goodwin partners swarmed by founders looking for IP advice at our cocktail party. Thank you again to Goodwin Procter for their incredible support of the Ocean MBA and the greater climate-tech ecosystem.
Similarly, our friend Britt Gardner returned this year and alongside Propeller’s CFO Bob Kittler, walked through how to build strong financial practices from the start. Along with Brit’s participation this year, we’re grateful for sponsorship of the Ocean MBA from J.P. Morgan as they build out their climate practice and look to support more climate-tech startups from their earliest stages.
Some of the new faces this year included Bill Carr and his "Working Backwards" framework as well as T.A. McCann, the Managing Director of Pioneer Square Labs. Other instructors included exited and current climate-tech founders, some of our investor friends from Azolla Ventures and Clean Energy Ventures, and of course some industry mentors with deep experience building in the ocean.
Adding it up, we’ve now put ~50 teams through our Ocean MBA and eight of those have gone on to become Propeller portfolio companies. It’s an exciting pipeline for Propeller, but we also see what we’re doing as ecosystem building, sharpening the entrepreneurial instincts of a whole wave of ocean founders.