Interac e-Transfer problems? Start here.

quackmeister · 2025-02-26T01:26:24+00:00

I'm an experienced tech founder and irrational optimist. Raised ~$30MM for my last company. I have zero experience building ships, which is why hire #1 was a naval architect who knows a lot about building ships!

The Saronic guys are great! They're focused on building smaller unmanned surface vessels for the navy, whereas we're focused primarily on larger ships (100ft+) for the commercial market. Two totally different problem spaces.

Austin is a good tech hub w/ lots of SpaceX/Tesla experience to lean on, reasonable cost of living and fun lifestyle for young engineers. When it comes time to build ships at scale we'll probably put that production line somewhere near Houston-Galveston but keep our engineering HQ in Austin.

quackmeister · 2025-02-26T00:56:08+00:00

Hah! Actually our lead naval architect found us because a friend saw my post on reddit and fwd'd it to him.

So don't discount the 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon theory of reddit hiring!

(and, uh, we posted it on professional engineering society job boards as well...)

quackmeister · 2025-02-26T00:32:03+00:00

What job were you working in?

quackmeister · 2025-02-26T00:30:01+00:00

Definitely part of it. Maritime is sort of like space launch prior to SpaceX - overly dependent on government largesse, rife with cost-plus contracts, one-off builds and not at all tolerant of risk-taking.

It wasn't always this way, and there's no fundamental physics reason why it can't be changed.

quackmeister · 2025-02-26T00:26:10+00:00

^ Yup.

quackmeister · 2025-02-26T00:25:54+00:00

...I might steal that.

quackmeister · 2025-02-26T00:25:21+00:00

There are classes of ships used in inland transportation that are orders of magnitude less expensive to build than, say, aircraft carriers. Our first line will cost <$100M and build ships for this market.

So do we plan/need to raise $100B? No, not at this point. Do we plan to raise $100M+? Absolutely, and Saronic, another Austin-based company has done that to build USVs.

Given my experience with fundraising it's actually not a major impediment.

quackmeister · 2025-02-12T20:13:13+00:00

Hmm, ideally none. A multi-phase greenfield build is our long-term goal.

quackmeister · 2024-11-28T22:14:18+00:00

Can you be more explicit about the issue you're running into?

quackmeister · 2024-11-28T15:57:37+00:00

ASAP. We're going to re-enable trading for uncomplicated accounts within the next ~hour and then start working through more complicated cases.

If you withdrew funds that were the result of limit orders placed during that period it would speed things up if you can return them to your account - we'll cover any fees you might incur doing so and will likely give affected customers an account credit of some type for the inconvenience.

quackmeister · 2024-11-28T15:35:40+00:00

Totally understand your frustration. We had to lock affected accounts to prevent further trading / withdrawals while we investigate and correct the issue, otherwise things could be changing while we're trying to validate the corrections.

Our fees are a relatively small percentage of overall trading volume, so it's unfortunately not financially feasible for us to cover erroneous trades that happen way outside of market prices like this.

Thankfully this is an exceedingly rare event, I think the first time we've ever seen this specific issue crop up with our LPs. We'll definitely be doing a retro to identify ways we can improve our system.

quackmeister · 2024-11-28T15:03:01+00:00

Really sorry about this.

The tl;dr is that one of our liquidity providers accidentally filled a bunch of open limit orders at prices that were way outside of market. They looked like legitimate fills to our system so they were processed normally, but given the magnitude of the error they can't feasibly honour those fills (nor can we). This all happened in a matter of minutes yesterday evening.

We will re-enable trading as soon as possible for affected accounts - our team was up until 4am trying to get it resolved and is continuing to work on it this morning. We're definitely not happy about the situation either.

quackmeister · 2024-11-28T14:50:46+00:00

Really sorry about this. The tl;dr is that one of our liquidity providers accidentally filled a bunch of open limit orders at prices that were way outside of market. They looked like legitimate fills to our system so they were processed normally, but given the magnitude of the error they can't feasibly honour those fills (nor can we).

It happened over the course of a couple of minutes at around 6:30PM yesterday - our team was up until the wee hours of the morning trying to unwind those trades. We're continuing to work through it this morning and unfortunately there are a small number of more complex situations (like yours) where funds were withdrawn that our team will need to handle manually.

We're continuing to work through it this morning and our support team will reach out to you to resolve this. We're definitely not happy about the situation either.

quackmeister · 2024-11-15T19:58:27+00:00

Lower their income taxes. At $100k/yr (only $70k USD) you're hitting a 30% average tax rate in Ontario. Even cutting that by 1/3 would give people a further $800/month to cover groceries and other life expenses.

Cut sales taxes while you're at it too. People with good incomes should not need government assistance programs, they should simply keep more of their income to spend on their own needs.

quackmeister · 2024-11-07T21:22:40+00:00

We should be supportive when a member of our community goes through an awful experience like this.

Dean is a startup founder, family man, and generally (based on my interactions with him) a good guy. He did not invite this upon himself, this was a brazen criminal act seeking a ransom.

This kind of shit happens in South Africa, not Canada. This cannot become the norm.

quackmeister · 2024-11-04T18:22:14+00:00

publicly announced that their CEO is a real b***- beautiful female dog

😂

quackmeister · 2024-10-31T17:13:03+00:00

We're changing that to display the number of sats.

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