Bill Dobie - Founder and CEO at Sedna

0:00Bill Dobie:Hello Bill, can you hear me? I can, can you hear me? Absolutely, you're coming through loud and clear, it is great to have you, thank you for joining me. Yeah, I know, my pleasure. How are you doing today? I'm doing well, I've been on the road for a couple of weeks and I just got back on the weekend, so a little bit of jet lag, but coffee is helping. Yeah, I bet, where have you been? I was in Vancouver for a bit of family. I'm originally from there and a bit of work. And then I was in Santiago, Chile for a customer visit. Amazing. All over the place. Yeah, yeah, very much. To kick things off, why don't you just give a quick intro into who you are and what Sedna is?

0:39Sure. My name is Bill Dobie. I'm the CEO and founder of Sedna. Sedna is a communications platform which recognizes that the majority of the maritime industry is conversation-driven, usually dealing with solving problems, reducing risks, capturing opportunity. And a lot of that is happening over this very old-fashioned protocol of email. And instead of trying to force people off of that, we have built a platform that improves that experience, converts it to data, and then makes it connectable to your back-end systems. And no one is more surprised than me at the resilience of email, But I understand more it's now much more about the importance of maintaining an open conversation with your counterparties.

1:25And we've been working on the problem. Sedna has been around since about 2017. We probably were working on it a couple of years before that, really a customer empathy response. and we have about 1 ,200 customers around the world and probably the lead in the segment across Maritime.

1:47Bill Dobie:Amazing. It sounds like things are going really well. It's a huge number of customers. Can we go back in time a bit? How did you get into this space? It's an unusual problem to be solving for quite a niche industry. Can you give me a bit of flavour into how you got into this? Yeah, it's definitely, I would say it's a niche industry, but it is a very large industry. You know, one of the things I sometimes talking to outsiders a bit about this, I can see the studio you're in, you know, and everything there is shipped, right? It's not from there and not manufactured there. And so there's this kind of enormous magic thing around us that this push button supply chain that we all benefit from.

2:26And it's on a kind of super scale. And, you know, how I fell into it is I'm from Vancouver originally. I got a summer job after university and it was at a shipping company. And I sort of bit like train spotting the big ships, the industrial nature. It was quite far removed from computing, which where I had spent a lot of time before that, always kind of hacking away. And I spent about six years working in shipping. And then I started a software company, a similar segment. It became a leader in the oil quality space, not to get too boring. I sold that business in 2010 and then kind of pivoted back into working with a lot of shipping companies.

3:11I was, I guess, a hacker for hire, a guy who kind of understood maritime and also understood software. and everywhere I went, new software was being built, new ideas, kind of magic, whatever it was, Slack, AI, blockchain of the day was going to magically make all the problems go away in the digital journey. And all I saw was email, email, email, and more email. And there's a bunch of reasons why the volume is high in shipping, which we don't necessarily have to get into, but it's about visibility and some historical behaviors. But really what I began to feel was if you want to improve the efficiency of the industry, you are not going to be able to do that unless you can improve how people interact with their email volumes.

3:59And so that's where the idea, but the idea came from customers. I would try to sell them something else and they'd say, hey, can you fix my email?

4:06Bill Dobie:No, that's really interesting. And what's it like trying to improve the efficiency in this space? As you mentioned, it's a huge industry. It's also an incredibly old industry. Shipping has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. What's it like trying to push change, drive things forward and make things more efficient? Yeah, it's and what's it like trying to convince people to use a different email system? Let's pick off every hard problem all at once. Um, hindsight's 20-20, so I think I have a better, a slightly better perspective on it. I no longer say the industry is old-fashioned. It is an industry where they do some incredibly sophisticated things, you know, to, you know, an LNG and offshore and containerization, autonomous shipping, you know, these new fuels, these types of things.

5:00But what happens is that the majority of people in the industry are self-taught. And that self-taught journey involves a lot of habits. Habits how you handle data, habits how you handle communication. And when you try to break those habits, you are, from their point of view, introducing risk. and risk in shipping can threaten life. It can threaten the environment. It can threaten your financial health. So what you have is a bunch of quite sophisticated people, engineers, traders, you know, who have iPhones and drive Teslas and understand technology, but they don't want to shift from their habit because the habit is how they act in a safe way.

5:42So that's kind of one piece of it. So what we try to do is explain to them that we can reinforce their habits and make them work faster doing that. The other flip side, what it's like changing this industry, I think that my experience has now taught me, and we've dabbled in other markets too, which I'm happy to talk about, inside maritime companies, especially and distinct from logistics companies, the organizations are enormously flat. So the frontline person who might be dealing with a loading in South Africa, they are two steps from the president of a company, even a big shipping company. And so leadership feel the pain of that frontline user.

6:30We've got clients who get emailed 10, you know, Exxon might get 10 ,000 emails a day into a single email address. And so we've got clients dealing with this enormous volume that they've got to confront. So the organization's leadership has an empathy for the people doing the work. In a lot of other segments, that's not always the case. It's not that they don't say they care, but they can't care. The organization is too big, too complex, too diffuse. In maritime, everything is very in the now, very quick. That frontline person is nearly as important as the leader in that moment. And so they look for ways to make these people more efficient.

7:09Those two things, the fact that you do have people who are quite technically sophisticated,

7:16Bill Dobie:and then you've got a willingness to support the frontline user, that creates an opening to ship people off Outlook, which is a very tall task, right, to compete with Outlook. Yeah, absolutely. And as you say, you know, Sydney was formed, you know, a number of years before the sort of like AI bubble that we're seeing now and all these AI tools that are coming out. And as you talk about, you know, some of the, you know, people wanting to stay in their habits, they want to stick to their ways. How are you introducing AI at all? And how are you trying to drive adoption or use that to improve some of the efficiencies that you see in these industries?

7:47Yeah, I mean, you can't you can't credibly run an email company and not at least be accused of being a bit old fashioned. And so and I have ridden through multiple waves of this technology is going to get rid of the way that you've worked before. I remember trying to raise my Series A when Slack was about, and it turned out that I love Slack, by the way, but a loud bar is not a way to organize a complex transaction, and teams after that, and those types of things. But since the earliest days, Sedna has used a very rudimentary form of machine learning. It's evolved a lot since then, where we were connected to a customer's trading system.

8:35We understood what trades or voyages they were involved with. And then we could pre-organize the email and route them to the correct teams and people. So right from the start, we were doing something which the user considered a little bit magical. And so I think AI or machine learning, whatever variant you want to talk about and variations in the same field, we see the opportunity there. Now, when I talk about being conservative, I'm on the flip side of that. I think AI in its current form, which is primarily large language models, they're going to have a huge impact on the maritime industry because the industry is conversation driven.

9:15And they're extremely good at driving conversations. conversations. They're extremely good at prediction, dealing with patterns. And you can eliminate a lot of the risks in LLMs and maritime hallucination and the such, because you're dealing with a constrained physical network, a set number of ports, set number of ships, set number of cargoes. So we are, I think, as you know, we ourselves have bought three different AI companies just in the last two years, and in general see a lot of room to extract entities from these huge volumes that we're handling, somewhere around 5-6 million emails a day, organize them even faster for the clients, and then create hooks for them to take that data inside the system.

9:58So I'm pretty bullish on it. Cautious, of course. Our customers are extremely risk-averse by nature. But I do think it's going to make things fundamentally more efficient.

10:09Bill Dobie:And can we touch on some of those acquisitions? So you said three in the last two years. What kind of companies have you been targeting? And is this the end of your kind of shopping spree? Are you looking for more companies to kind of complement your stack at the moment? Yes, we've done, I think, in our journey so far, we've done six acquisitions. But there's been an accelerated period the last couple of years. So we look for, maybe if I can step up a layer, if you think about how we think about how this industry can be improved, it's a bit like you have to build a place where you can bring more innovation and workflow, but not disrupt the communication flow.

10:56And so for many years now, we've been building a platform. But one of the problems is that there are an insufficient number of companies to build on that platform in such a niche space. So one strategy we pursued for a long time, there's a sort of programming language inside of Sedna, was to encourage partners, pay them, collaborate with them, resell, etc. But sometimes that's just not fast enough to drive the innovation for our customers. So we have been stepping in and buying companies where we think this is a good proof point of what would happen when you program your email. And so in doing that, it has led us to buy three specific AI companies which deal with understanding emails from a maritime point of view.

11:46There's all small businesses, aqua hires, but with some revenue. We have bought two legacy competitors as well. So people who were probably to generate Maritimists often had bespoke communication systems. And those were primarily customer acquisition. So it was cheaper than marketing, to put it bluntly. And then recently, we have bought a leading ERP for the market. But the reason we were so interested in buying it is that it's API first. So all the aspects, estimation, price quoting, settlement, all these important flows, which are all integrated with email by buying this company. It's called Dataloy.

12:26We can prove to the market what it's like to build. And I think a little bit to relate ourselves to Apple, but Apple has some, you know, you've got numbers, but you also have Excel. So we think we can show the market what a well-programmed platform looks like that makes trade more efficient by owning some of the levers in doing that. We'll probably do some more acquisitions as we think about it, primarily focused on market share, the customer relationships, which take a long time to build in maritime.

12:59Bill Dobie:Got it. Makes sense. And so everything that you're building, everything that you're buying is very, very maritime focused. have you looked at doing you know even even like adjacent industries have you looked at trying to do communications there or is that something that you've got kind of on the horizon or you kind of stay laser focused on maritime shipping yeah it's a um right it's i can answer with the benefit of hindsight and and because god knows we didn't spend money trying and um uh the i think in the early days when we did our Series A, our Series A was with Chalfin Ventures and Stride, and Harry actually, when he was at Stride, I know you chatted with him recently.

13:42And when we did our Series B with Insight, this was pre-pandemic. And one of the proof points that we talked about was there are other sectors of the economy that have email as the primary system of record and could set a benefit from that. You also had companies like Front and Missive. There were people kind of very active in this space. And this was before they really pivoted heavy into customer service. So the shared email problem, the high volume email problem, the programmable email problem, that existed. As part of going into our B round, we actually set ourselves a goal of getting five non-maritime customers.

14:26The reason maritime was good was I because I mentioned the economic buyer was close to the user, so they could push through sort of IT resistance. But we were successful in that, and we have a few customers. One I'm quite proud of, we have Starling Bank, hundreds of users there, and we have a large Swiss book publisher. But we don't actively pursue those customers. We service them and we support them. And we pair them now, in a lot of ways, those customers are using us to perform a logistics function, a back office function, a settlement function. Even if you go inside our large customers like BP or Chevron, I would say pure play maritime users only represent maybe 20, 30%.

15:14The rest will be legal, accounting, HR, finance, groups like that. So maybe in the future, but my personal view is that Maritime is a massive market. A thousand companies paying you 100 grand a year is a great business. It's one that demands expertise and focus. It's one that I have knowledge in and I love. So I don't personally see us pushing out there. But if someone has a high volume problem, we're happy to talk to them under certain conditions. Yeah, good.

15:49Bill Dobie:I didn't realize you had other customers like Starling Bank. That's really interesting. No, no. And I mean, I hope to say they're happy too. But it is, you know, I enjoy your coverage of the market, which is one of the reasons it's nice to chat. I think a lot of entrepreneurs lose sight of how big the market they're in can be. And we got pushed really hard to not be a maritime communications company or a trade OS, as we would put ourselves now. And I actually would say that it was a mistake. It was a mistake listening to that advice, and it was actually a mistake of execution on my part. Because not only was our market very big, but the pain was profound enough that the people would buy quickly.

16:43And since we focused a sort of mid-pandemic, really at the encouragement of insight and, you know, Stride, Fred in the early days always believed in how big Maritime could be, the business has executed at a much faster rate. So as much as we use that in ourselves day to day for email, and I would love other people to benefit from it, I have learned that expensive entrepreneur lesson of staying focused in your lane.

17:12Bill Dobie:That's a really interesting insight. So, yeah, you kind of looked outside and I guess you tested some things and you've got some other customers. But the learning was to stay ruthlessly focused on your market. And actually, the market, as you say, is a huge market. And I think, yeah. Yeah, not just to stay, if I may, to stay roots or see focused, not just because someone couldn't benefit from our product, but more that to win its scale and dislodge the incumbent player, which very often is Outlook, you have to be so good at, you have to be actually 10 times better, right? Exxon doesn't willingly choose to not use Outlook.

17:50So you have to be so much better at that. And it requires a level of customer love, of user love, and focus that I think is in the end a startup or growth company strength.

18:03Bill Dobie:Yeah. Yeah. OK, got it. I'm curious, you know, you've obviously got a background in maritime and that's kind of where Sedna is now. If you, you know, are you the type of person that you would have built a business like this in any industry, in any vertical that you kind of found yourself in? Or did you just happen upon the opportunity, the chance of finding this problem in maritime? Well, that's a good question. I mean, I have been hacking away since I was a kid. Very generous parents, I suppose, as I disassembled, compared to Bobby. But I'm not a good programmer now. That's a lot this long behind me.

18:42um i think i always you know the beautiful thing about software is that you can really create something out of nothing in a very in in a way that is unique and um i think i think i always wanted to be in software i think i always wanted to build a business i i grew up in an entrepreneurial household.

19:06Bill Dobie:I think my dad was devastated when I chose not to be a lawyer or something more safe. And, but I, so I think the short answer to that is I probably would have maybe built a business in anything. If I'd stumbled into that, I didn't expect my summer job to turn into a career. What I will say though, there was a book, I can't remember the author's name, But there was a book I read in Dotcom One, that's how old I am, called Small Bits Loosely Joined. And it talked a lot about the nature of the internet, the idea of the internet operating at the very edges. And that the more you operate at the very edges, the more valuable the connections the network gets.

19:50And what I'll say is after kind of 30 years in this industry, it surprises me how much Global Maritime is like the internet. It is a network that people think Marisk is the norm in shipping. It's not. It's the outlier. The majority of the network that kind of feeds and fuels us is small bits loosely joined. So I think it's a very good industry to use Internet technologies, Internet protocols to build efficiencies on top of. So I'm sure I would have tried it in another industry. But I think Maritime had the hooks for willingness to innovate, pain, global nature, scale that makes it lending itself to build a big company.

20:38Got it.

20:39Bill Dobie:Running out of time, I want two quick questions. Number one, what advice would you give to sort of any young aspiring entrepreneurs about to take the plunge or thinking about taking the plunge into their first attempt into entrepreneurship? Advice is tricky. I think I actually, so maybe the first piece of advice I would give is not to get over advised, which was one of my habits in my early years. And I do think it's incredibly important to understand if you take venture capital, especially what you are signing up for. You are signing up to build a very large company and the sacrifices, the effort, the relationships, the way you have to think about building scale.

21:34you just have no idea. And I actually think you can build a lot of great companies, bootstrapped, or by the way, I think we're a company well-suited for capital. We had to build something that competed against Outlook, and we have a large customer base, large market, etc. But I would say that the key advice is, do you need money? And who are you taking it from? And do you understand that the return that you need to give your investors? But actually, the more important question is, do you understand the level of service and outcome you need to help your customer achieve in order to do that? And I think that's probably, if you don't love the customer, I wouldn't start a business.

22:24Bill Dobie:Got it. And final question. What does the future look like for Sedna? you know short-term medium-term long-term is there anything that's changing anything that you're excited about that you want to talk about yeah i i think um you know i i'm i'm i'm a transplant to the uk an immigrant here i i think given london's history in maritime i think we have an opportunity to build the operating system for maritime here and and we talk a lot about you know connecting. The world is a very messy, complex place, getting worse in trade, especially given global macro conditions. And we have had a meaningful impact on the efficiency of the customers who've chosen us.

23:10And now we are able to deliver a set of technologies which are driven by LLMs in a safe and reliable way. And we can connect those to make the industry a lot more effective and safe. And green, actually, because I don't think the decarbonization comes without optimization. And so I'm pretty excited about operating at scale now. I think that's where finding the right investment partner, we have insight in New York. They've been great for us in terms of what does it mean to build a global leader? What does it mean to build a big company? What does it mean to really solve the problem you've been working on for 25 years?

23:52so I think we're getting closer to that every day and so that's what I'm excited about amazing

23:57Bill Dobie:sounds great and I will be uh watching along closely it's been such a pleasure to have you Bill thank you for having me and best of luck let's stay in touch yeah definitely cheers take care