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November 29, 2022 24 mins

Sailing the high seas has been a right of trade, survival, and sport for as long as time.  For centuries, advancements came at a slow pace. Navigating through the stars and elementary improvements in shipbuilding eventually progressed with the technology age into data-based advanced tracking of currents and GPS navigation capabilities. The advent of 5G has brought an entirely new set of tools and insights to the masses, allowing for a leap forward in boat designs and controls, real-time mapping, and the ability for audiences to engage in the sport in new and exciting ways. SailGP is leaning into all three of these advancements to create the next great spectator sport.

For this episode of The Restless Ones, I had the opportunity to sit with Sir Russell Coutts, CEO of SailGP, a lifelong sailor who is bringing the sport he is so passionate about into the connected age. Sir Russell sees the advancements in data, and the 5G networks that carry that critical information, as the key to unlocking innovation and fandom in the sport. SailGP harnesses the power of boat tracking, remote cameras and course sensors, tidal scanners and more to bring competitors and fans the real-time data and insights that improve their experiences.

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Right now, we're taking the data off the boats and
distributing it to those various ues is But what we
really want to do, and I think five G is
going to enable us, is to send that data back
to the boats and enable them to look at that
data in real time as well. Because our data is
in the open source. All of the boats are the same,
they use exactly the same technology, and so we've put

(00:26):
the data in the open and they can look at
each other's performance and analyze that. But imagine if they
could do that life. Welcome to the Restless Ones. I'm
Jonathan Strickland. As you may know, I've spent the last
fifteen years covering technology and learning how it works, demystifying
everything from massive parallel processing to advanced robotics and everything

(00:50):
in between. Yet it's the conversations with some of the
most forward thinking leaders, those at the intersection of technology
and business that fascinate me the most. Leaders like Russell Coots,
CEO of Sale GP. I've had conversations with a lot
of fascinating people here on The Restless Ones, but I

(01:14):
think this episode marks the first time I have interviewed
a night Sir Russell has had a colorful history. He
has been a sailor practically all of his life. He
won his first regatta when he was just nine years old.
He competed in the Olympics in nineteen four. He also
has competed in numerous America's Cup sailing competitions, serving as

(01:36):
helmsman and skipper and accumulating an impressive winning streak in
the process. He led the administration of Team New Zealand,
transitioning into a role that required him to work behind
the scenes and everything from securing sponsorships to negotiating broadcasting rights.
A few years ago, Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Sir

(01:57):
Russell collaborated to create a new company called Sale g P.
That company's mission is to bring competitive sailing into the
modern era, leveraging numerous technologies to make the sport accessible
and immersive to viewers, while also opening up opportunities for
people to pursue the sport itself. As I would learn,

(02:17):
the combination of technological innovation and skilled production has brought
in new fans to the sport and that fandom is growing. Russell,
I want to welcome you to the restless Ones. Thank
you so much for taking time to join us today
that it's a pleasure to be here. Before we get
into the nitty gritty, I'm curious if you could tell

(02:41):
us about when you first developed your love of sailing. Well.
I grew up in New Zealand and my family were
connected with sailing, my father in particular kind of passion
for us, so it was a natural thing for us
to do. It was one of those sports that I
really connected with and love the fact that it's got
that inherent connection with nature and that you're out there

(03:03):
and are able to steer your own course, so to speak.
So that freedom of being out there in the environment,
I think really appealed to me. I'm curious what sort
of role did tech play early on in your sailing career,
because obviously we're in an unprecedented era today where technology
can help shape the design of boats as well as

(03:25):
the operation of them. But when you started out, did
you have those sorts of tools or anything comparable to
measure things like boat's performance. Well, I used to definitely
look at foil shapes and sales shapes and dream up
all kinds of theories just that why something might be faster. Also,
the surface finished on the on the boat and even

(03:47):
the balance of the boat. I was intrigued by all
of that, you know, because when you get on a
sale boat for the first time and you realize that
you're powered by nature, you're powered by the wind, that
can be quite intimidating at until you really start to
get a field for it. So from a very young
age I was pretty interested in then, and I did
do a lot of skitches on various ideas and so forth,

(04:10):
but they probably didn't have a lot of foundation in
terms of science or technology. I imagine that the evolution
of technology, where now you're able to use various sensors
and devices to measure boat performance, it must be an
absolute quantum leap ahead of where you were in the

(04:32):
sense of being able to iterate and to innovate. Yeah,
that's right. I mean, if you go back and you
look at the early origins of yacht design and used
to be probably more of an art than a science,
although the early designers probably by the trial and error processes,
and of course historically it was vitally important to business

(04:53):
and trade. You know, the fastest boats used to get
the business, so there were lots of secrets involved, both
in terms of design and also where their currents and navigation.
If you think back to the early evolution of ocean
crossing vessels and so forth, a lot of the structural
designs made their way into the aircraft industry in later years,

(05:13):
so it was highly competitive then. Alone came from the
digital era with programs for the loud wonder not only
measure the influences of the flow either of the air
or the water, but also get information of including visualization
of what was actually going on. And as the computers
became more and more powerful, the codes are more complex

(05:36):
and more accurately approximate or simulate the performance and the conditions.
So nowadays you can you know, in terms of yacht design,
you can typically modify something about the design and instantly
see where it improves it and conversely where it might
compromise certain aspects of the performance. Let's talk about the

(06:00):
birth of sale GP. Can you tell us about the
company and its mission and how important is this work
to you. Well before the age of high speed boats,
and I'm referring to the recent hydrofoiling boats that we
see today, it probably wasn't the product to make sailing

(06:20):
an exciting sport to watch on broadcast you know, of
course the sailing official Nado's out there might disagree with
me here, but to the broader sports fans, selling was
was too slow to watch, and the races were difficult
to understand, and you know sometimes that those races that
take hours to complete and we're very hard to follow.

(06:40):
And then along came the Falling Generation, and all of
a sudden you had this extreme high speed sport and
covered with that the new broadcast graphics that define the
field of play and identified who was in front and
behind and as well as you know, sort of produce
other insights like the speed of the boats and the

(07:01):
precise direction they were sailing, who was a hit and behind,
and so forth. So you moved the clock forward to today.
We recently had an average viewership here in the US
on CBS. I've just had one point six million viewers
for our event and Center pay and it's clearly now
developed into a sport that can and is beginning to

(07:24):
appeal to a wide wider audience. So for me, I guess,
you know, to take the sport that I loved and
grew up with and love competing in and so forth,
and package it into a more marketable watchable format that's
creating a chance to really grow it. Well, that's of
course greatly appealing to me, and it's exciting to be
part of this. Yeah. I love that this is a

(07:46):
case where technology has created accessibility. Yeah. Well, well, you know,
if you look at those viewership figures we had, as
I said, I just have one point six million in
the US and I think thirteen point six million, well boy, well,
clearly they're not all voting enthusiasts. You know, it's definitely
a much more interesting sport to watch. And you know,

(08:09):
I guess that's one of the challenges that we've got
is that people have an image of exiling and when
they look at sal GP, they invariably get surprised and say, wow,
I didn't realize it was like this quite like this,
you know, say, we get we pretty much get that
reaction every time we put an event on in a
new country. Conventional thinking says you have to pay more

(08:35):
to get more. I want the world. But T Mobile
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(08:55):
business capable device required covers on available in some areas,
some US require certain planter features. See Speaking of how
people view sailing, you know what they think of with sailing,
I imagine a lot of folks think of it as
an environmentally friendly sport. I mean it's when bowered after all.

(09:19):
And sale GP has emphasized sustainability as one of the
company's values. Clearly the technology is aligned with that goal.
But I'm curious how this plays into sale GPS business strategy.
How does that strategy combined with the tech sale GP
relies upon work towards sale GP emphasizing sustainability. Well, I

(09:42):
guess from a financial perspective, treading a sustainable business model
is a big focus, and the cost and revenues are
clearly defined. But what we've found in terms of becoming
more sustainable from an environmental perspective is it it's not
necessarily an additional cost when you really focus on becoming

(10:03):
more sustainable. But I'll give you some examples. When we
were looking at broadcast and we used to send about
fifty people around the world to our events each time
we ran an event, and we sort of figured that
let's try and do that and create a remote production

(10:25):
because essentially used to have the broadcast facilities on site
and a lot of the people used to create the
various functions that you need for a broadcast from their
containers on site, and so we started to think, well,
how can we do that where we're not flying all
these people around the world and we're doing it from

(10:45):
you know, a studio somewhere else in the world. Clearly
that would be a lot cheaper. We could also imagine
it being more efficient. Of course, you know, there were
some pros and cons for that second part, but we
were the first to try it. And what we found
not only to save a lot in their carbon footprint,
to say, it's a lot of costs as well, and
and extual fact, you know, having the broadcast team together

(11:08):
in the one entity proved to be somewhat of an
advantage as well. And now the team has scattered around
the world and they empire. They make decisions on our
racing almost instantaneously using all the data that's available to them,
and there's lots of examples that we've set out to
do that. We're very proud of our achievements, satisfied with

(11:29):
Still it a long way Togo, because eventually we want
to make even a greater game to their carbon footprint.
But yeah, I think it's about approaching it with the
right attitude. Well, and I think it's an astounding achievement
to be able to do a live television broadcast where
the production is happening across the globe from where the

(11:49):
actual event is happening. Obviously, sale GP holds races all
over the world, and for your production team to be
in a centralized location and to be able to take
in live feeds from various sources and produce it in
real time for broadcast, and the end viewer may have
no understanding of the processes that have to happen for

(12:12):
that to work. It speaks to our incredible evolution of
technology where we've got the level of connectivity that allows
for this kind of process, that we're able to move
data that effectively around the world and put it together
and package it in a way that is digestible and

(12:32):
entertaining to the end audience. I think that's right. Actually,
I think we might have been the first sports entity
to not have our umpires on site. For example, not
only a broadcast, but our race management team and umpires
to not have them on site. We're developing a system
now where a race turning marks that a of course
like kind of various places around the harbor. You know,

(12:56):
because we race on in a city harbors, they are
already positioned remotely, so our race management team does not
have to be on site. Currently, we anchor those marks,
so we tow them into position and then they have
an anchoring system on board with the anchor, and they
have a very accurate GPS system that locates the position
to within one inch or twi millimeters. But we are

(13:21):
moving towards a robotic system with electric motors, so using
clean energy, they'll be able to be positioned the same way,
but they won't need to be towed into position, they
won't need to anchor, and they'll be able to be
moved much more efficiently. If there's a wind change, or
if the racing is not running to time, we need
to shorten the course slightly, or whatever we need to do.

(13:43):
There will be a much more efficient system that will
be able to be driven by our remote race management team.
It's an amazing system where they have access to all
of the data, including such things as the boat speeds,
the runner angles, the video images, the camera angles or
the different camera angles on the boats, and all of
the audio coming off the boats as well, so the

(14:03):
conversations the crew is having. So when there's an incident
that they used that same very sophisticated GPS positioning system
that tracks the position of the boats to within one inch,
and they can replay that incident use all that information
to judge any woual infractions with much greater accuracy than

(14:23):
what they could have ever could have by watching the
racing live. The whole world has moved on and taking
tremendous strides in the last even five years, I think, well,
and for all of this to even be possible, the
ability to use things like wireless connectivity, whether you're talking

(14:43):
about five G or you're talking about beaming to satellite.
If you don't have those capabilities, then this doesn't work,
because this is definitely one of those cases where being
tethered by a cable is just not an option. To
that end, can you talk a little bit about the
use of five G within cell GPS events. Yeah, as

(15:03):
you've correctly said. We're completely on a wireless system. So
each boat has around eight hundred censes and we have
nine boats racing in our championship right now, so eight
hundred censers that create about thirty thousand data outputs per
second and then will get sent up to the Oracle
cloud and then get sent out to our various users.

(15:25):
Be that as I've said, Race management and data Analytics team,
maintenance team, the team coaches are umpiring and broadcast teams,
as I said, based in our London studio, or a
bone Fex graphics team that's also based in London, so
that all gets created there. And if you take San
Francisco and Chicago as an example, we tested a team

(15:47):
mobile five G network in San Francisco and found that
it was incredibly fast, I think about a third faster
than those systems. So that was really a game changer
for us and allowed us to send a lot more
information essentially from the boats. I mean, we have some

(16:08):
some pretty wild plans in the future as well. You know,
so this is really any of the start of it. Russell,
I can't tell you how excited that makes me, because
you have described an implementation that relies heavily on this
high speed, high broadband wireless connectivity, and it's a specific
one where you're looking at generating and then analyzing thousands

(16:32):
and thousands of data points simultaneously in different use cases.
Everything from team managers figuring out what to do next,
to the umpires who are monitoring to make certain that
everyone is abiding by the rules, to broadcast who are
putting this together so that they can create a package
for the end consumer, even potentially to boat manufacturers who

(16:56):
are going to look at the data returns and wonder
where can we get another boost in performance from our designs.
All of these things are capable because of this convergence
of sensor technology, the wireless connectivity, and the fact that
you've designed this incredible company around bringing sailing to more people.

(17:21):
And it's to me, the fascinating thing is that that
mission necessitated all of these choices so that you can
achieve your mission. But on top of that, it lays
out a blueprint that other organizations can look at and
say we can take advantage of this, even if they
have nothing remotely to do with sport. They take a

(17:42):
look at this approach and they say, imagine applying this
to our business. Yes, I think the possibility is incredible.
You know what we found with five g you know,
as you said that, I think it was tasted something
about faster and then our abious systems, so we had traditionality,

(18:02):
and I think it was a two point five giga
hurts frequency radio system. And the throughput of five gars
of course much larger, which is going to open up
quite a few different possibilities. Not only was it delivering
the current product if you like, to all of these
different facets in a much more efficient way, but we

(18:26):
can now start to think about other things that we
couldn't achieve before. So different types of cameras you know
where were restricted before. Is that what sort of cameras
we could use in a life sense? So we can
really take the fan onto the boat, start to give
the fan the exact same vision as what the driver
might be seeing. Ultimately, right now we're taking the data

(18:50):
off the boats and distributing it to those various users.
But what we really want to do, and I think
five gs gonna enable this, is to sit then send
that data back to the boats and enable them to
look at that data in real time as well. And
because our data is in the open source. All of
the boats are the same, they use exactly the same technology,

(19:12):
and so we've put the data in the open and
they can look at each other's performance and analyze that.
But imagine if they could do that life, you know,
I think that would be really super cool. And of
course that actually produced a bit of racing product for us,
because new teams can come and they can access that data.
They can see what how the top teams are operating

(19:33):
and become competitive very very fast. And I think that's
what's drawing the fans two cell GP is the quality
of the racing, the closeness of the racing, the fact
that you get so many lead changes in passing, and
you know, the jeopardy of actually not knowing who's going
to win beforehand. You might have the favorites, but it

(19:54):
really you know, we've had I think five different teams
winning events now out of the night, and clearly that
the fact that the data is in the open source
and it's able to be so efficiently used by the
various stakeholders is a big contributing factor. Well, Russell, I
have to say that I'm really excited about the future
of sale g P and especially seeing how sale GP

(20:18):
is able to exploit technology to even greater extent. I
imagine that it won't be long before I could put on,
say a VR headset and look into a three sixty
degree camera and look around as if I were on
the boat myself. Not will you be able to do that,
but you'll be able to race against the real boats
in the real race as a virtual competitor. Now, the

(20:40):
real boats may not be able to see the virtual competitors,
but the virtual competitors will be able to see the
real boats. So I think that is the next step
in true sports engagement, and one of the next steps
is that you can really become immersed in it. And
for a racing fan to be able to compete against
the best on equal terms will be a in a

(21:00):
virtual space, I think, you know, will be incredible. Well,
I love that idea. Before I could let Sir Russell go,
I had to ask him one more thing. I'm curious, Russell,
what do you think of when you hear the term
restless one? Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. I guess

(21:23):
it would be somebody who isn't necessarily content with in
the conventional ways of doing things, someone who is perhaps
looking for new innovations or new ways to consider a problem,
and you open to a new way of of doing
things to create the best solutions. Excellent, it sounds a

(21:43):
bit like yourself, Russell. Thank you again for taking time
to be on our show. It has been a pleasure
to have you on. I could talk to you for
hours about sailing in tech, but I know you're a
busy man, so thanks for being our guest today. It's
been a pleasure. Thank you. Sir. Russell's insight into the

(22:08):
importance of building the right team, not necessarily a team
that has just one voice, really was fascinating. Yes, it
is of critical importance for everyone to understand the company's
mission and goals, but it's equally vital that you have
a spectrum of perspectives so that you can identify the
best path forward to pursue that mission. As we've heard

(22:29):
numerous times on this show, communication is key and finding
the right people to work towards your goals should be
of the highest priority. I was also fascinated with sale
GPS use of technology leveraging hundreds of sensors to gather
thousands of data points on how a boat performs in
a race has more uses than I anticipated. In my mind.

(22:53):
I had imagined it being useful for broadcast packages and
maybe to inform teams about what was working best. I
hadn't considered the fact that umpires who might be on
the opposite side of the world would be able to
access data to keep an eye on racist and ensure
that all are abiding by the rules. The power of
data is undeniable, and when paired with high speed connectivity,

(23:15):
it creates unprecedented opportunities, and I really am excited to
see where things progress from here, not just with sale
g P, which is an amazing case study for the
power of wireless connectivity and the potential of the Internet
of Things, but also for businesses across all industries as
they devise strategies to take advantage of today's technological capabilities.

(23:37):
We've had a lot of common threads throughout this season
of The Restless Ones, and one of the big ones
is that companies in every industry are finding new approaches
towards exploiting technology to become more efficient and competitive in
their respective fields. Thanks again to Sir Russell for his time,
and thank you for listening to The Restless Ones. This

(24:00):
episode concludes season three, and I want to thank T
Mobile for Business for the opportunity to speak with some
incredible thought leaders and innovators this season. Be sure to
explore our past episodes as each one has within a
unique insights. This has been Jonathan Strickland signing off until
next time. T Mobile for Business knows companies want more

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want to work, so we provide three sixty support customized
to your business. From discovery through post deployment. You'll get
a dedicated account team and expertise from solutions engineers and
industry advisors already right now, I want it now. Three
six support that's customized for your success. That's unconventional thinking

(24:49):
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