John Howie

Building autonomous systems for the world’s marinas.

Marinas may be the last global asset class still run on pen and paper. The largest investors in the world, Blackstone and Bain Capital among them, have taken notice and are deploying billions. What none of them have is a way to improve operations at scale, and there is not enough talent to go around. Ask any boater how hard it is to get work done, or to get a straight answer on what it should cost, and you’ll know what’s broken.

The moment for these assets to professionalize is here, and it will belong to whoever builds the operating layer. That is Admiral: AI doing the work behind the counter, autonomously. Filling slips, enforcing compliance, taking care of boaters, so an industry serving some of the wealthiest yet most underserved people on earth can finally evolve.

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10+ years as an institutional investor. Spent 8 years at Willett Advisors, Michael Bloomberg’s family office, where I led investment strategy and invested in industries where technology was changing the economics.

Then I left to operate rather than allocate. Capital can find an opportunity. Only an operator can create one.

• I’ve started a lot of random businesses. From an on-the-water food delivery business for boats in my home town when I was 15, to a pest control company in NYC many years later. I still jump at anything that crawls.
• I have always loved writing, and got the opportunity to publish a travel series for the Boston Globe while I was living and traveling throughout Asia.
• Something I never expected: two Dutch museums, the Volkenkunde in Leiden and the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, have exhibited my photography. By dumb luck, I happened to take one of the few photos of a certain Chinese Buddhist cave-temple, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site in northern China. My sister, an actual photographer, was less than thrilled.

Reach me by email.