"Motion Ventures came really from a market need more than anything else. And the market need is this: For the supply chain and maritime space to function at the same speed, if not faster, the industry can no longer afford to work in silos." Want to know how a corporate consortium network is transforming the maritime space by accelerating tech adoption and bringing stakeholders closer together? Tune into this episode with Shaun Hon, General Partner at Motion Ventures, to find out more.
"Motion Ventures came really from a market need more than anything else. And the market need is this: For the supply chain and maritime space to function at the same speed, if not faster, the industry can no longer afford to work in silos." Want to know how a corporate consortium network is transforming the maritime space by accelerating tech adoption and bringing stakeholders closer together? Tune into this episode with Shaun Hon, General Partner at Motion Ventures, to find out more.
Shaun: (00:02)
Motion Ventures came really from a market need more than anything else. And the market need was also catalyzed by COVID and the market need for the supply chain and maritime space to function at the same speed, if not faster, the industry can no longer afford to work in silos.
Christine: (00:23)
Welcome to the Lost in Transformation podcast series dedicated to the complex world of Digital Transformation. We feature guests from large corporations, start-ups, consultancies, and more, to shed light on the success factors around Innovation, Transformation, and adjacent topics.
We share first-hand insights and inspiration from experts for all the intrapreneurs, entrepreneurs, and anyone curious about Digital Transformation.
Christine: (00:52)
Hi, I’m Christine, the Marketing Manager at MING Labs, and today, I am talking to Shaun Hon. Shaun is the General Partner at Motion Ventures, which is a strategic venture investment fund that invests in early-stage tech startups, and specifically focuses on maritime. He shares more about the challenges and the learnings that come with building a corporate consortium network in this space. We hope you enjoy this episode.
Christine: (01:19)
Hi Shaun, I'm very excited to have you on our podcast today, on "Lost in Transformation." And thank you also for taking the time today. You are a general partner at Motion Ventures, which is essentially a venture investment fund with a specific focus on the maritime value chain as well. And I'm really curious to learn more about how Motion Ventures came about and how your approach might be different from others and all that today in this episode. So, let's dive right in. I'm happy to learn more about yourself first. Could you share maybe more about your background and your experience, everything that brought you to where you are today?
Shaun: (01:57)
Thank you for having me here, Christine, and that's a great place to start. I'll tackle the question chronologically. I've always been innovating in the transport space as an engineer. I did my Master's in the UK. I did my Master's in engineering at Imperial College London and then went on to start my career in the UK building predictive models with an electric vehicle company for large corporates like Amazon, BMW, Ford. And in many years as an engineer, I felt a very pigeonhole to solve one part of the supply chain in transport. And I wanted a more macro view of the industry. So I subsequently moved to Singapore to join the venture capital industry where I let investments in the AI, deep tech domain, invested in those companies at those. That was my domain expertise. The venture space has allowed me to get a front-row seat to the industry and see multiple products and businesses being developed at the same time, which I find super fascinating.
Shaun: (02:51)
And as I move from an engineering to a non-engineering role, I still take a very product-building mindset to the work I do. So at Motion Ventures, I still think about what sort of features are relevant to make offerings more competitive, just like I would for an engineering product. I'm currently the general partner of Motion Ventures, a strategic venture investment fund investing in early-stage technology startups across the maritime value chain. And as a fund, we're backed by some of the most progressive corporates in the maritime ministry: Wilhelmsen, MOL, HALO, IMS, SIGNAL, and more. We're also an investment partner of the Singapore government seeds capital. And what we're all really trying to do here together is to accelerate the adoption of technology through the corporate consortium network to collaborate work and pick winning innovations together that will change the industry for the better.
Christine: (03:38)
Wow, super interesting path, also to understand a little bit more about your background in the corporate venture building and the investment space, and also your personal background between Asia and Europe and how you then came back now. And you are now based here in Singapore with Motion Ventures. You were also touching on a couple of things already and also super interesting to kind of understand the work that you're doing today. And if we now take a closer look at your journey here, could you let us know a bit about how things used to work before Motion Ventures came in with their offering and before the journey started there? You were also saying a little bit about your previous experience, but what was the status quo? What venture space in the maritime industry looks like, or might still look like today?
Shaun: (04:25)
I'll tackle this from a few perspectives. So A/ the market perspective, B/ the startups perspective, and C/ from the venture investment perspective. So from a market perspective, the divide between the size of the top maritime companies and the rest of the companies in this space is huge. And the reason for that is this, most of the shipping companies we see are multi-generational family-owned that are more than a hundred years old. So in fact, our ALP/investors in the fund like Wilhelmsen, [...], MOL were all founded in the 1800 hundreds. And these are institutions in the maritime space and amongst the largest, as they've had [...] if not long decades to solidify their market share. So this space has some of the largest barriers to entry. B/ from a technology startup perspective, we historically have not seen a lot of entrepreneurs entering the space.
Shaun: (05:14)
So the maritime industry is in a conventionally sexy space like FinTech or web 3.00, or any other hot spaces in the market. It's also a bit of a black box. That's difficult to navigate for outsiders due to the lack of transparency. So some of the best entrepreneurs rather solve problems elsewhere. See from a venture capital funding perspective, it's largely been very quiet. Before Motion Ventures, the other independent maritime focus VC fund is the DOCK and they're based out of Israel. And the rest are corporate venture capital like Interport the venture arm for [...], KMV the venture on for the [...], Maersk Growth, the venture arm for Maersk. Because the space has been heavily skewed towards CVCs corporate venture capital, the intent and interest for investing into startups largely remain strategic, which can have a lot of different interpretations. And because of that range of interpretation, it isn't always so easy for entrepreneurs to read. And as a consequence of that, the lack of certainty on how capital is allocated to the entrepreneurs makes it difficult for them to make a jump into this space.
Christine: (06:23)
I think, from all of those perspectives, when you are laying it out like this, it definitely sounds like a space that is difficult to get into. That's why I'm also curious to hear how you guys went in there and basically how you are kind of transforming or changing up the space there since it's such an old or traditional space, as you were saying as well, and also not a conventionally sexy space as well. So I think, definitely a challenge to take on, but it's also really interesting to hear how maybe some factors there are shifting or how you bring about that change in this field. And, you've already touched on a couple of factors here, but what would you say served as the main catalyst for change for you to then really act and decide to take on such a big project with Motion Ventures to kind of transform the space?
Shaun: (07:12)
Motion Ventures came really from a market need more than anything else. And the market need was also catalyzed by COVID and the market need is this, for the supply chain and maritime space to function at the same speed, if not faster, the industry can no longer afford to work in silos. Here's the problem when COVID happened, right? COVID introduced a lot more new ones needed to keep the efficiency and resiliency of the supply chain. And now I'll give an example here. So in vessels or ships are on voyages. These vessels are made up of crews of different nationalities because of COVID and the restrictions imposed by each country, crew changes for onboarding and offboarding are no longer universal ports. Each country has its own white lists of nationals that are allowed to onboard or offboard at their respective ports. What this means is that a ship manager has to constantly figure out changing restrictions if his or her Filipino crew can be offboarded in the Netherlands, or if an American crew can be off-boarded in Dubai.
Shaun: (08:14)
In this case, there are a few ways to solve this, one is obviously to hire more people to be in and communicate with various parties in the exchange to ensure that they always have the latest information. This method has been proven difficult to scale because it requires hiring a lot more people in a short period of time, which is not easy given the saturated shipping market and difficulties in attracting talent outside the industry. In addition, it's also very costly to increase headcount for every problem faced in a thin margin business like maritime The second way around it is to solve it using technology. So one of our portfolio companies, Greywing, works with various stakeholders in the industry like port operators, managers, shipping liners, to ensure that there's real-time visibility of data across all the players. And they've helped facilitate more than 20,000 crew changes last year. So I think most of the industry players are converging on the second solution, which is the use of technology to solve for the inefficiency, and Motion Ventures is a vehicle for that.
Christine: (09:15)
It's interesting to understand how actually COVID was a catalyst there as well, or how COVID actually then drove this transformation to go even further and to say, maybe we need a solution there. And, then how tech came in to drive this and to create more visibility and also like the fact that you are touching on that communication aspect there, that it's not about working in silos anymore, but you want to bring people together. That's why you have that corporate consortium network. And I think that's a really interesting approach and that's something that, especially in that field, you know, hasn't been there before. So I think that's a super interesting mission to take all on. And if you were to put it in a nutshell, how would you describe the purpose of Motion Ventures' journey in general?
Shaun: (10:03)
Motion Ventures is really here to accelerate the adoption of technology that enables the backbone of the supply chain. We do that through bringing a network of corporations across the different value chains to discuss, iterate, consume the suites of solutions available in the market, by the founders. This is very doable because declines for startups in a business-to-business setting are the corporates themselves. So our investors consist of ship agencies, shipping lines, ports, maritime tech companies that have real-time visibility of ships globally, and also many more. And by having all these decision-makers from large corporations in the same room, we're able to find alignment faster to ensure that on an industry level, we agree on the solution to adopt as a consortium effectively short-circuiting the path for critical mass needed.
Christine: (10:54)
I think that's probably the best way to sum it up in a nutshell, I think, you had all the aspects also there that you highlighted earlier as well with, you know, the network, the tech, also bringing all the key decision-makers in there as well. It's super interesting to also hear how you then come in to help with the growth and scaling that you mentioned earlier, and also basically build a consortium to come together and create a solution to the problem that you were already seeing in the maritime space. Really cool. And, you were already mentioning also a little bit about your approach in your work. Also, some challenges that you saw along the way, what would you say were quite common challenges that came up when trying help ventures grow and scale better and create a solution for this?
Shaun: (11:38)
So one of the common problems, B2B business two business ventures face is finding product-market fit and navigating that long sales cycle process. So given our mission to accelerate the adoption of technology to do that, we had a look at where the largest friction is in the process. In this case, we've seen various organizations piloting different startup solutions and not being able to agree on which one to proceed with. So for example, a port operator would lean towards one solution, a shipping line would want another solution and a ship manager would want a third solution. And as with the example in crew change, [...] it's really important for various parties to come together and adopt the same solution. My hypothesis is that by aligning our corporate consortium beforehand, which consists of players across the value chain and engaging founders early enough in the innovation process, founders have a chance to tweak and iterate their offerings, so thee corporate users would consume it, that in my opinion, would help shorten the long adoption cycle we're experiencing. And sometime down the road, you know, that may no longer be the largest friction in the process. And it could be other frictions that surface like recruiting or operations. And at that point, you know, Motion Ventures as a whole has to extend further, build a solution that's needed to accelerate again, the adoption of technology.
Christine: (12:57)
Interesting. So also really understanding the problem there then also then you are coming into also shorten the adoption cycles and also coming together and making sure that you adopt the same solutions. I can imagine that in a very traditional space where you come in that must not always be easy there as well. Great to hear about the work that you're doing there and how you're tackling those challenges. But now also looking back on the journey so far with Motion Ventures and working with change and transformation in that very traditional industry, that's actually also rather known for being more risk-averse. There are probably a lot of things that you learned along the way, too. What would you say all in all is your biggest learning or your biggest takeaway from the journey? Anything that you would like to specifically highlight here?
Shaun: (13:48)
Yeah, I think it's a really good point you brought up and one of the biggest learnings from the journey is understanding the importance of lowering the risk barriers for others. So this is how I see it. Everyone has a maximum threshold of risk level or bar that they would accept before not acting on the proposition and turning it down. Therefore lowering the risk level for others is important to move forward. So how does one do that, right? There are many ways. And for me, a lot of it really comes down to listening and understanding the concerns at the other end of the table and addressing those concerns. As an example, from a fundraising perspective, even if I was speaking to the CEO of a company for an investment, he probably wouldn't be this sole decision-maker. He very likely has to get alignment and a majority go-ahead from his board of directors.
Shaun: (14:37)
And if I don't understand what those concerns are from the board and address those concerns, it's going to be really difficult for the CEO to push an investment on my behalf. But if I can address those concerns and bring down the risk barrier for the CEO and the board members, it's a much easier process to move forward. And I think this concept is applicable beyond fundraising to also B2B sales, to recruitment, to working in a team, and a lot more. And I think ultimately comes down to two things: one is having more empathy for people I work with and people around me. And number two: it's extending the scope of who a stakeholder is to me, such that my stakeholder stakeholders are also my stakeholders.
Christine: (15:20)
So really taking everyone from the whole universe around you, that you're working in into account and really practicing that empathy towards them. I really like that here. I think that's great learning and I think it's very valuable learning as well, especially if you are working with that network approach that you work with a lot of different people who have different connections to the people that you are working with to really understand how can you make the best solution for everyone with also understanding them, having that empathy and not just thinking from your own perspective. I think that's very great learning here. And now that also Motion Ventures is already helping ventures. I'm also curious about what success actually looks like for you in working with different ventures. How do you actually measure your success or how do you know whether you are actually successful with your solutions?
Shaun: (16:12)
So given that we're invested in the ventures, their success is our success. So for us, it's important that the ventures that we back do well and how would I measure success across different ventures, right? On a high level, the measure is that the companies are getting strong revenue, traction, and also scaling well. There are a lot of nuances to this, of course, and I can break it down a little bit better by asking a few questions in the following order to measure if a venture creates value. So number one to me is can the venture make and build a product? And I think this is the bare minimum needed for a venture to be able to build. Number two, once they've built a product, do people want to buy it? So if people wanna buy it, that proves that there's a product-market fit to what's being built. Number three, can the venture make a positive growth margin selling that product to those people?
Shaun: (17:06)
This proves that the cost structure is sustainable as the venture is not selling something at a loss, right? Number four, can the venture make, could return on the marketing dollar needed to spend, to generate those cross profit. In other words, what this means is, is the lifetime value of the customer larger than the customer acquisition costs? Number five, can the venture scale with more money deployed to grow that business? And what this means here is that growing 10%, when you have a hundred users is really different from growing 10% with a million users. And is that money invested, proportional, is it less, or is it more, and if we're talking about a company that's scaling, then the expectation is for the money to be invested, to decrease as the growth rate stays constant or increase? And I think those five questions are good indicators and benchmarks on where in the journey of value creation and startup is. And the more they can take off these boxes, I think the more successful they are and the more successful we are as well, and we're in the process to help them do that.
Christine: (18:10)
Cool. Definitely, I think those are great questions to kind of measure where you're standing and whether or not you're being successful. I think, probably in a lot of cases, it might be difficult to have exact metrics, that are set in stone, but it's good to know about your ways of measuring success and how you are actually checking if you're on the right track or if the ventures are on the right track. I actually really like what you just said about their success, it's your success. It's not, you are walking this path alone, but you're really in it with them together. And you wanna make sure that they're on their path to success and that makes you successful in the same way. So I think that's a really cool approach. And, now basically looking at the future and looking at your work in driving growth, helping ventures, and also accelerating tech adoption in the field of maritime, what would you say is your future outlook here? Is there anything that you're especially looking forward to or anything significant that you see coming in the next years?
Shaun: (19:11)
Yeah, I really love the question because here's the thing, the maritime space is like a time machine where it's a few decades behind our 21st-century consumer life. And that's a really good thing because, the future pathway forward is really clear, right? How we should bridge that gap? And I believe we'll see a lot more of what we experience and the consumer will propagate into the business to the business world in this space. So more specifically, maybe there are a few observations off the top of my head, which I see the industry moving towards. And number one is data interoperability. For the last few years, the maritime industry has been mining data in silos in their various organizations. With legacy systems that safe unstructured data, given the need for transparency and for a resilient supply chain, the industry will move towards ensuring that relevant data is easily shared across a standardized set of APIs that can also interoperate across various platforms.
Shaun: (20:08)
So I think that's one. The other one is workflow automation. So the supply chain and maritime industry are full of inefficient workflows that cause specialized workers to waste their time on low-value tasks like data entry. So thanks to recent advancements in computer vision and machine learning, there are many opportunities for software to automate common workflows, whether it's data entry or invoice processing, and these all need very limited oversights from humans. So these technologies have a large potential to dramatically increase the productivity of the supply chain and also free up their time to spend on higher-value tasks. So off the top of my head, those are a couple of things that I'm really looking forward to in the coming years for the industry.
Christine: (20:51)
Cool. That's a great outlook. I think it's nice that you're saying that the maritime space is kind of like a time machine. I think that's a good way to sum it up also based on what you were sharing earlier. And then also super interesting how you see them developing in the next coming years, what do you see coming up? Yeah, I would say that was a good deep dive into what you're doing at Motion Ventures. Shaun, thank you so much for sharing all about your journey with Motion Ventures and how you're helping ventures grow and scale better, and how you're ultimately transforming the maritime space and setting it up for the future. It's been really exciting to get an insight look here as well. It's been a pleasure having you on and thank you again.
Shaun: (21:36)
Likewise. Thank you for having me, Christine.
Christine: (21:39)
Thank you for listening to this episode of “Lost in Transformation”. If you enjoy our podcast, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a review on iTunes. Join us next time for another episode of our podcast.