“No wind, no problem” could be the motto for two of Australia’s latest sports tech entrepreneurs, with Andrew Ross and David Trewern reshaping surfing one wave at a time.
From something that can only be done in the right weather conditions at beaches with waves, surfing will become a year-round sport thanks to innovations from Ross, who founded wave park Urbnsurf, and Trewern, whose Fliteboard already has a growing clientele of business and pop culture identities including Katy Perry, Mike Cannon-Brookes, Rod Drury and Shopify founder Tobias Lutke.
Fliteboard
Tackling the other aspect of surfing, the board, Fliteboard is Trewern’s fifth business and his electric flying surfboard (eFoil) has already caught the attention of some of the world’s wealthiest water sports fans.
Counting brothers and SEEK co-founders Andrew and Paul Bassat as investors, alongside Hong Kong’s Lei Zhang of Hillhouse Capital, the company has sold 650 boards to date after beginning to ship them about six months ago.
Described by Shopify founder Tobias Lutke as “the most magical gadget on the planet”, the boards, which sell for $15,950 in Australia, have already been purchased by former Formula One world champion Nico Rosberg, Sydney to Hobart winning skipper Mark Richards, Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes and Social Network Path founder Dave Morin.
With a love of surfing while growing up, the idea for the business came to Trewern during a sabbatical in Byron Bay, having previously spent two decades founding and running digital agency DT (now AKQA) and Republica Education.
“I thought it was going to be a niche of a niche. Hydrafoil surfing with a kite is really, really hard. I initially thought not many people would want to do this, be able to do it and it was going to be expensive,” Trewern says.
“You have to use your core and lower body to control the foil and upper body to control the kite, when you get it all worked out it’s an amazing thing … but what I didn’t realise was how easy this would be for people and how much it would capture people’s imagination.”
The motorised boards mean users can ride them even when there are no waves and its larger hydrofoil wings, designed by the America’s Cup foil designers, mean they’re easier to operate and less sensitive to small movement changes than the similar kite surfing products.
The first prototype was made by Trewern on a 3D printer, but the boards are now manufactured using parts from Australia, Thailand, China, Germany and the US.
It started as a passion project and he wanted to be uncompromising in his vision like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, Trewern says. That means that even with the board’s high price tag, it’s still a low-margin product at this stage.
“It’s my fifth business and it’s been more challenging than all the others because it’s a huge undertaking. I was creating a vehicle that had hundreds of parts and had to be custom designed and tested,” he says. “But if entrepreneurs weren’t optimistic, they wouldn’t do anything.”