Find the Big Dreamers

You've had to assemble a team at a very young age, you're still in your twenties, to help carry out your mission. What is your strategy for selecting new team members?

You know, I always laugh about this, because no one teaches you how to be a CEO.

It's a complete job.

It's one of those things where you're kind of expected to know all the things. For me, hiring was definitely one of those big learning curves, where I had to do a lot of research to understand how I should hire people. Ultimately where it ended up is finding people that are big thinkers, that are big dreamers, that are fearless, and that also come from different sectors was so important. So my initial hires, none of them came from the ocean space. I made that decision very consciously. I didn't want anyone who worked at another ocean nonprofit or in the ocean space. I want people like--

Why is that? Why?

Because if they had worked in that area, they came with this very restrictive mindset as to how things are done and how things in the past have worked. Because I was building a very different and innovative organization that was going to disrupt our approach of solving the biggest issues facing our ocean, I wanted people that came in with a fresh outlook on how to tackle these problems. I found people from the energy space, I found people from the technology space, people that, again, didn't have any ocean knowledge, which was easy to build, they could just learn. But I wanted to have that different expertise and skill set.

And was it hard? Convincing these people who had not worked in the ocean space, if I may call it that, before to convince them to come along to your fledgling startup?

It wasn't hard at all, because they all cared for the ocean. I think that their heart was in the right place and that they wanted to help the ocean, they just didn't necessarily know how, and enabling them to be a part of SOA and giving them the role in their responsibilities and the leadership that they needed to be able to take a direction and follow their passion, their dream was what made them successful at the end of the day.