In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dylan Keil.

Dylan Keil is the co-founder and CEO of Bearing, a Silicon Valley-based global startup powering the transition to green shipping. Bearing’s platform marries real-time vessel data with Artificial Intelligence to improve operational efficiency, provide competitive advantages, and reduce carbon emissions across the maritime shipping industry. Dylan is an experienced founder with deep expertise in building products that leverage real-world sensor data. Before founding Bearing, Dylan was the CEO and co-founder of Chronos, a startup that developed a leading contextual-awareness engine for mobile devices. _

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

My parents were academics, so I spent the first 22 years of my life on college campuses. Having spent a lot of time in dining halls, I was exposed to different fields and ways of thinking from a young age. This unique experience allowed me to explore different approaches to problem solving and to think more deeply about what I wanted to dedicate my career to.

I’ve always been obsessed with experimenting and had a deep fascination for tools that helped make life easier. I remember being mesmerized by the set it and forget it ovens I’d see on infomercials. The idea that someone created something brand new to solve a problem was mind blowing.

When I first started college I thought I wanted to be an engineer, but I ended up majoring in mechanical engineering for my undergraduate degree. Over time I came to the realization that making something also includes building a business, it’s not just limited to building the technology. It includes creating everything that goes into supporting the technology.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

When the first iPhone launched, I worked at an early stage startup where we attached sensors to mobile devices to generate insights from them. These accelerometers on the back of phones helped us to get a better understanding of people’s movements while using their devices. While this was early in the iPhone coming to market, we were forced to think about the intersection between digital and physical.

Some of the biggest problems we face in the world are physical — climate change, energy, water access — but it’s not relevant if we don’t leverage the progress we’ve made with software.

As a mechanical engineer, this concept is interesting to me and was the inspiration behind the first company I co-founded, Chronos. It was a mobile app that ran in the background of a cell phone and showed users where they’d been, how much time they spent places and which people they were with. The app allowed users to set time-related goals and helped motivate users to achieve them. Our goal was to help users make better real-world decisions through passively collected data.

In a way, this is similar to what I’m doing at Bearing. We’re taking the data from very large ships and using cutting edge software to solve the physical problem of moving goods around the world while also solving a problem like climate change.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

As a business leader, you have to be a jack of all trades, but three traits that stick out to me, include:

• Be a generalist: You have to be comfortable with a range of different areas — engineering, business, communications — so you can assess what’s happening at the intersection of those different domains. You have the opportunity to work with people across the organization and get a true understanding of how everything works together.
• Remain humble: In business you must have humility. It says a lot more about you to recognize you don’t know everything rather than pretending you do. Being humble also gives you the ability to rely or listen to others to gather the learnings you need to make a decision.
• Don’t be afraid of the future: Be excited about the long term and don’t be afraid to take the leap in the short term for the end goal to pay off. Whether you’re trying to change an industry or build an industry from scratch you have to be able to focus on both the day-to-day and where you’re trying to get in 5–10 years. Business leaders learn to outgrow the short term pains and focus on the end goal.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on the planet and the environment. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?

In 2023, new environmental regulations went into effect that have begun to reshape the maritime shipping industry. Ship owners are required to report Carbon Intensity Indicator (CII) scores on an annual basis, with each vessel receiving a grade from A to E. Ships with better scores are expected to command higher rates. The trouble is, owners don’t know how their ships will rate, or how to best improve their ratings. As a result, many companies are expected to respond with a blunt measure: slowing their fleet down. This action may end up further exacerbating existing supply chain bottlenecks.

Last summer, Bearing launched an AI-powered simulator that predicts Carbon Intensity Indicator (CII) scores for every vessel in the maritime shipping industry, so companies can quickly gauge their risks, increase their ratings and make better-informed business decisions about the effects of the regulations.

Bearing’s AI platform aggregates and analyzes a range of data about the global shipping fleet, enabling it to predict vessels’ fuel consumption, speed and other aspects of performance with startling accuracy — even without data from onboard sensors.

Bearing gives owners and operators the information they need to make fine-grained decisions about individual vessels that are good for them, consumers and the environment.

How do you think your technology can address this?

Traditionally, the shipping industry has used physics-based models to estimate fuel consumption based on factors like the weight and size of the ship and the design of its engine. In testing, these models can be less accurate than AI-powered models. Physics alone can’t be the only way to predict fuel consumption. Too many variables like weather, cargo and vessel condition are at play. A difference of one or two percentage points in a fuel consumption can translate to millions of dollars of savings — or unexpected expense.

Bearing’s AI-powered model simulator leverages deep learning models and a database of historical weather conditions to forecast CII scores and recommend potential changes to improve CII performance, including vessel speed, fuel type, sailing schedule and underwater cleaning.

Using Bearing’s CII Optimization product, shipping companies can:

Easily track and monitor real-time CII ratings for all vessels (as the year progresses) and easily see which vessels potentially have problematic ratings

Accurately forecast a ship’s end-of-year CII rating based upon historical routing and weather patterns

Simulate different operating conditions (e.g., different speeds) and different weather scenarios to see how that would impact the CII rating

See the tradeoff between financial returns and potential CII rating

Only AI can deliver the level of accuracy the problem requires. Precision isn’t just important for financial forecasts. It’s also the key to effective intervention. With Bearing’s AI simulator, shipping companies can not only predict their CII scores, but improve them. That’s the key to avoiding a general slowdown.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?

Shipping is not an invisible thing that a lot of people can ignore. Shipping is the backbone that powers global trade. Not until the pandemic did we really recognize how important it is and learn that there is room for improvement.

My curiosity for intersecting digital and physical drew me to explore the different solutions that the maritime shipping industry needed. I quickly discovered the potential for impact in this space was so large because there was so much room for improvement.

Bearing broke into the industry exactly when key stakeholders were starting to gather a lot of data. Lucky for us, the hard work of collecting data had been done, but the big question was what to do with it and how to turn it into useful insights.

To an extent it feels like we were in the right place at the right time, but we had an understanding of how crucial this industry is and had the proper technology to help companies better understand their data to help them combat market and regulatory pressures as well as pandemic demand.

How do you think this might change the world?

Maritime shipping moves 90% of global goods. Everything we use is connected to shipping — the fuel in our cars, the clothes we wear, the goods we get at local stores — the majority arrives by ship. Our globally connected economy functions because of maritime shipping and it’s a system that is fairly rigid and inflexible. It’s also under the most pressure it has been over the last few decades for various reasons.

Bearing is trying to help the system become resilient and be able to withstand the stress and transfer to this new future.

Shipping might be the backbone of global trade, but it is also a large contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. This is an industry where there is a large number of ships creating this big impact and Bearing can help significantly chip away at it. If Bearing can help reduce global shipping emissions by just 10% — which we think is quite achievable — that would be the equivalent of taking millions of cars entirely off the road. There’s a big impact we can have in a concrete way because of the fact that there’s a small number of players that have a lot of power here and we can use that as leverage to have a significant impact.

Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)

• Have a similar mission: We’re trying to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions and global warming impact maritime shipping companies are responsible for and so are they. This is an industry where the scenario of what’s good for the environment is also good for the bottom line. When missions are aligned, it’s easier for companies to execute on doing what is best as it fits all of their core objectives.

• Be flexible: If you’re trying to change an industry, you need to meet it where it’s at. When Bearing first came to market, we wanted to have a super fancy interface and mobile app, but we quickly realized a lot of the interactions that companies are using are driven by PDF and email. It’s not a fancy consumer experience you’d expect in other industries. We pivoted our approach and made it easy for users to ingest data and interact with customers entirely over email and give them results via PDF. This meant that no changes to workflows were needed. Our goal is to make it easy for maritime shipping companies to keep doing what they’re already doing.

• Stress free onboarding: Companies have to make it as easy as possible to get customers through the door. A seamless integration is necessary. Customers can’t be expected to turn to their IT departments every time they try out a new technology. Companies have to have a version of their product that is easy to use from the start and add features as needed. On the business side of things, customers need to have the ability to try the product for free or at a discounted price so they can see the value of it. This allows customers to get the exposure from the get go and see the value.

• Social impact: For Bearing, we found out early on we needed to prove the impact our business is making in a quantitative way. When we first broke into the maritime shipping industry, we wanted to prove our models understood ship performance and emissions were more accurate than the other models that existed. So instead of saying our technology was better, we signed up to do blind tests. We put our reputation on the line, and said, “you give us data, we will make the predictions.” We gave future partners the opportunity to judge us in a very objective and quantitative way. This helped us show what we can deliver and how it compares to what they were already using.

• Find the right customers: It’s imperative to find early adopters that are willing to be the right partners that give you feedback on how your product can be better and offer a holistic view of how their experience is going. You’re not going to be the best person to know the industry, having a customer willing to be a partner is invaluable. Transactional relationships aren’t helpful, especially in the early days, because you’re fine tuning your product to ensure it’s well suited. This was the case for Bearing as we started deploying different tools across our platform. In fact, fostering these early relationships helped us bring our current AI product to life. In our conversations with customers and partners it was evident they were worried about new CII rules and needed an effective solution, so with their feedback and help, we brought it to market.

If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

Life is short. You spend most of your time working, so find something that you care about, makes you happy and has a meaning. So often people are told there’s this tradeoff that to be fulfilled, you need to work at a nonprofit or go make a bunch of money at a hedge fund. Success and happiness are not mutually exclusive. Every year there is more opportunity for people to find things that are both helping the world and having a positive social impact, that leave you feeling personally fulfilled and actually change the world.

Soon enough there isn’t going to be this juxtaposition of we’re doing good over here and we’re doing bad over there and the two are fighting against each other. Rather, it’ll be about trying to do good overall, so we’re helping on all fronts.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

You can learn more about Bearing and our products on our website and LinkedIn.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.

You can read the full from Authority Magazine here.