From Sea to Success: How Argyris Stasinakis Turned MarineTraffic into a Global Leader in Ship Tracking and Data Intelligence (Part One)

Forbes Books presents the Startup Science Podcast with Gregory Shepard, brought to you by startupscience.io. Greg is an entrepreneur who has built and sold 12 businesses. He's a recipient of 4 private equity awards and is a featured TEDx speaker and Forbes author. Here's Gregory Shepard.

I'm honored to welcome my old friend to the podcast. Argiris Stasinakis. Argy is an extraordinary entrepreneur, executive partner, and board member at MarineTraffic. He has a remarkable history of building prosperous businesses, and today we'll be diving into how he transformed MarineTraffic into the primary source of ship tracking data for maritime professionals, companies, and enthusiasts. We'll also explore its acquisition by Kepler and data intelligence and cargo tracking company based in Brussels. Argy, it's an honor to have you on the podcast. Thank you.

Thank you, Greg. It's a real pleasure to be here. I have been privileged to be, you know, your friend for years now, speaking about the businesses we've been running, each one from their own end. And I'm really, really excited to be here to discuss the You know, all this long journey of mine and hopefully sprinkle it with your own gold dust.

Well, thank you. So this is a really cool story. I mean, a lot of the guests that I get on the podcast are big investment bankers or famous people with a book or something like that. But this is something that you want to listen to because this is the real deal. This is an actual entrepreneur starting an actual business, driving it for years all the way to an exit. Argy, can you tell us a little bit about your company?

Yeah. So, uh, MarineTraffic was founded by Dimitris Lekkas, an ingenious and very creative person, back in 2007. Around about 2012, uh, my longstanding partner Dimitris Memos and myself joined the business and we incorporated. And well, we essentially started running it as a business. But what is it? So perhaps the easiest way to understand it is, you know, refer to the plane tracking that is familiar to many of us. It's similar for ships. So marine traffic, most common view is a global map where you see the ships sailing the 7 seas. The data is collected from the AIS, Automatic Identification System, that every ship needs to be equipped with. It emits via radio waves the position of the vessel, the destination of the vessel, and various other parameters of the voyage. What we have done since 2007 is collect those radio transmissions from the ships through a global network of radio receivers, which are installed across the coastline all over the world. The founder, Lekas, he set up the first couple of receivers in Greece, actually, at a time when AIS had become compulsory on the one hand. So regulation drove that. And on the other hand, technology drove it through essentially Google Maps becoming a popular tool back in the day. Dimitris Lekkas in 2007 set up a couple of AIS stations in Greece, but was clever enough to realize that people were already collecting AIS data. These were radio amateurs. So he also introduced crowdsourcing of information on marine traffic. And marine traffic actually became extremely popular because people were sending in their data and then they were able to see it on the live map. So that was another little cog in the success. And this community, the global community of AIS, Automatic Identification System stations, was grown since then from adding traffic. Now most of the stations that we collect data from actually belong to us but are operated by contributors everywhere in the world. So that is the basis of the global Automatic Identification System dataset that we collect today. So what we do with that is we also fuse it from equivalent AIS data, which is also collected from satellites. Interestingly enough, satellite and terrestrial data You need both in order to have the global view. You cannot have one or the other. And what you see today when you come on marinetraffic.com is the amalgamation of a truly global, unrivaled dataset.

Yeah, I mean, so it's true then that this actually started out as an experiment around 15 years ago with the goal of making the shipping industry more efficient, right? So having the ability to have transparency on where all the ships are and who's getting to what dock at what time to make sure people are ready for offloading and just generally making it really more efficient so that you basically have the Southwest or airline equivalent of shipping where everything is known ahead of time and people can act in a quicker way and be ready for vessels as they approach the different offboarding locations. Is that correct?

Exactly. You used a great word, transparency. Visibility, if you put it more mildly. Definitely the uses of marine traffic today are very broad. We have people from, you know, across all industries linked with shipping. Of course, the shipping company, ship operators themselves, but also those who carry cargo, those who finance the vessels, the assets, and the movement of cargo. We've got all of those who operate ports, terminals, provide services to the ships. All of them are shown how they operate on marine traffic and also use marine traffic in order to, to monitor their own operations or indeed extract intelligence in relation to their own businesses or perhaps other competing or collaborating businesses. So, so yes, we started with something humble, which is the display of vessels on a map, but now it's become a really big data business.

So from 2021 up until now, the supply chain was in crisis basically, right? Because there was problems with people not knowing what is where and when something is going to arrive at what location. And this was a contributing factor to the shortages that you see out there when things don't come on time and when you order things on Amazon and And so on and so forth, and things don't show up when they're supposed to. Can you talk a little bit about the last couple years of MarineTraffic and how you managed through the turbulent times that you get as a founder in a new business?

That's a brilliant question. And there are many angles here, actually. I think to start with, we were blessed by the fact that in a crisis, data is needed. People need information, need visibility in order to make decisions about their own businesses. So we were grateful. We were thankful that at least as a business, we went through the crisis unscathed. Yes, there were pauses. And then, you know, in terms of demand for our services, because people were trying to figure out what's going on. But after a while, then demand for either data services or online services of marine traffic continued normally. And we were, as I said, blessed to continue growing at our usual rate, which was about 25-30% year on year. So that's one side of it, and it relates to the topic. And even though supply chain was strangled during the COVID era, Still, movement of goods did continue, and hence the necessity for such data did continue as well. Now, that's one side of it. The other side, of course, relates to the team and the people. And I think, you know, we did a great job there. Kudos to my other partner, Dimitris Memos, leading the way there. And it was all about making the team feel comfortable with the transition.

Mm-hmm.

I'm sure you've heard the story. from many other businesses, well, all businesses essentially trying to go through the era. I still remember sitting on a leadership meeting and we were saying, okay, so we were at the office, right? And we're saying, you know, tomorrow everyone goes home. And we were looking at each other and not knowing what was going to happen. And people took it really seriously, very maturely. And there was a long period of transition. Although it happened overnight, there was a long period of transition trying to replicate ceremonies that were happening in the office, replicate them online, advising people, making people feel secure one-to-one remotely as they were going through their own also personal troubles and crises in that era. So yeah, many angles to that. And on top of that, of course, it was the question, which I already answered, you know, how will we do as a business? How do we fare? Is that a useful service in this time? And again, those questions took a few months to be answered, thankfully in a positive way for us.

So that leads me to the fun part of this, right? What I think is the fun part of this. This year, MarineTraffic was acquired by data and analytics firm Kepler, right? And I wondered for those listening, if you could explain the experience that you had From the point that you started incubating or fostering the relationship with the acquirer all the way up until the point that the deal was exited. And I'll sort of interrupt you along the way to make sure that the listeners are getting what they really want out of it. But, you know, this is for the founders that are out there who are, you know, thinking, well, you know, I'm pretty close, I think so. And they have no idea what's ahead. And it's pretty scary for a lot of founders.

Yeah, beautiful question. So Kepler was a client of ours already nearly eight years now, and their business is in turning initially at least they were focusing on on LPG liquid petroleum gas liquid natural gas commodity tracking, and a lot of the cargo is transferred by ships. So the the initial relationship was that of a you know client supplier. We would supply them with data, which would they would then use create. In order to report about the movement of commodities. Their business has since grown into additional commodities, into additional input data sources, to become a true rapid-growing business, faster than us, I'm happy to say, for Kepler, definitely, in this context. So initially then, the relationship was that of Building trust. They needed us to be a reliable partner, and that we did prove to be. It's it's a recurring subscription service that you have with such customers. So it's about the quality of service, nurturing the relationship at a personal level. So you know they they were originally French now have grown to be global as as we have been. My my space is in Oxford, um, so we would— in the UK, we would meet in London typically to discuss growth. Interestingly enough, a few years down the road, we found each other in the circles between private equity or strategic investors looking at both businesses and investing in both businesses. So we both shared experiences in terms of, you know, potential partial exit. They They did receive funding last year themselves, which they leveraged in our acquisition. So yeah, it was a steady path between 2 parties, ultimately one depending on the other, on the data at least, and one acquiring the other in the end.

I tell founders all the time, like the most frequent, and I can tell you this in my personal scenario, All of my transactions have been acquired by either a partner or a customer, every single one of them. And I tell everybody, I'm like, listen, you need to be very particular about your ideal customer profile and your persona to make sure that you're working with people that are the perfect customer for your acquirer and also possibly your acquirer. And you tell that story to the T, right? I mean, you started working with these guys, you developed a relationship. So they had some of the elements that are risky for a new acquisition off the table, like culture and integration and understanding and expectations of revenue and production. They had all that stuff understood over the years. Is that correct? And is there anything I'm missing there?

No, you're absolutely right. I love what you say. I've also heard you say that, you know, once you set up your business, try to it's exactly that, try to imagine who would be your top acquirers and develop a relationship with them. That's a good solid path towards your exit. And I fully concur with that. I mean, Kepler was the most recent candidate to acquire us that we had discussions with. Over the years, MarineTraffic has been a potential acquisition target to both PEs and strategic investors. So we have had a fair share of discussions. Trying to identify a business not only interested in a potential investment vehicle. So we were, you know, we had healthy growth rates, we were bootstrapped and all of that. So there were many ticks there. But we also wanted a partner there who would appreciate, if not all, at least most of the assets that we had. So, you know, MarineTraffic has an extremely strong brand. You know, our brand is stronger than Kepler's, you could argue, definitely in the maritime space. We have half a million people on the website daily, about 6 million unique visitors on a monthly basis. You know, these are valuable in themselves. It's not just the data. There is more there. There's a strong brand recognition. You can leverage that in order to develop new services. You know, go even more aggressive through investment out in the maritime space. And what we found in Kepler was exactly that. There was a recognition across the board of what we had to offer and not just a partial appreciation of the business. And that was very important.

I love that. Well, hang on, Argy. We have to take a break. But coming up in the second part of my conversation with Argy, Argy shares some advice on how startups can retain top talent.

I think being fair, giving them responsibility and accountability and ownership for their work are extremely useful elements in that recipe. People feel proud for what they achieve. They feel they belong. More often than not, that's even a more important factor for staying along with a job even beyond You know, what you earn as, as your own salary.

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