A retail-and-tech lifer, photographed for a company that makes robot catamarans. The suit is corporate. The address is Rotterdam. The product is a shark that eats trash.
Chief Executive and Chairman of RanMarine Technology. He sells the shark that eats the harbour.
Michael Foss runs a company in Rotterdam that makes a robot named after a shark. The robot is a catamaran. It floats, it hums along on electric motors, and it eats whatever plastic, biomass, oil or algae is on the surface of the water. Then it comes back to a dock, empties itself, and does it again. This is the business. RanMarine Technology calls the robot the WasteShark, sells it to ports, marinas, cities and industrial customers, and increasingly sells adjacent shark-branded variants for algae control (CyanoShark), oil-spill response (OilShark) and larger-scale industrial cleanup (MegaShark).
Foss is the CEO and chairman. He did not build the drone. He did not draw the sensors. He is a 30-year retail and technology finance executive who ran Sports Authority as chairman and CEO, was CFO at Petco and Circuit City, and spent earlier stretches inside Eastman Kodak, IBM and a digital-imaging company called PictureVision. In 2022 he showed up at a Dutch water-tech startup as an advisor. In 2023 the board made him chair. Now he runs it.
You can read that as a mismatch or as the point. Rotterdam already had the engineers. What it wanted was somebody who had spent thirty years telling boards how much to charge a customer, how to package a hardware product, how to pursue a public listing. Ports and municipalities are not startups. They buy the way retailers buy - on unit economics and vendor legitimacy. Foss is the vendor legitimacy.
Foss's career is not a straight line, but it is a legible one if you squint. He studied at the University of Washington. He went to Michigan for an MBA. He then spent decades inside American companies that either sold things people wanted (Kodak, Rally's, Sports Authority, Petco) or ran the systems that made those companies work (IBM, TeleTech). He was a CFO at Circuit City when Circuit City was still a Fortune name. He was CFO at Petco for the last six years of the private-equity era there. When Sports Authority needed a CEO in 2013, its board reached across the table and asked him to switch chairs - he had been a director since 2009 - and he did.
What followed at Sports Authority is public. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2016. This is the least-flattering fact on the CV, and also the most-formative one. You do not run a big-box retailer through the Amazon decade without learning something about margin compression, inventory drag, and the fragility of any business that leans on physical footprint. Foss's next move, in 2017, was to co-found Independent Pet Partners, a premium pet retail rollup. So he had opinions. Retail was not done. It was just going to look different.
In 2022 he joined RanMarine as an advisor. Nothing about his LinkedIn suggested cleantech. Nothing about the Rotterdam company suggested it needed a retail exec. Both of those things were wrong. RanMarine had a product, a market and a founder story - Richard Hardiman, the South African who dreamed up the WasteShark in 2016 after watching workers scoop trash out of Cape Town harbour with pool nets. What RanMarine needed was somebody who had been on the other side of a purchasing conversation with a global customer. That is what Foss had. Twelve months later, he was chair. Then he was chief executive.
He runs the company from New York. RanMarine's operations remain on the Galileistraat in Rotterdam. The time difference is six hours. The Atlantic is 3,600 miles wide. Neither, apparently, is a problem.
A WasteShark is a small autonomous surface vessel with a wide mouth and a basket. It patrols pre-mapped routes, skims floating waste up to a set volume, and returns to a docking station called a SharkPod to charge and empty. It costs less than a boat crew, works around the clock, and produces a data stream on its way through the water: temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, chlorophyll. The data is arguably as much of the pitch as the trash collection - ports have to report on water quality anyway, and RanMarine hands them the numbers as a service.
The variants extend the same chassis into other jobs. CyanoShark targets cyanobacterial algae blooms, the toxic ones that shut down lakes in the American Midwest every summer. OilShark chases hydrocarbon spills. MegaShark is bigger, industrial-scale. The strategy is legible even if you cannot draw the propeller: one platform, several appetites, sold into water bodies whose owners were previously buying boats, nets and consultants.
The interesting move Foss has to make is not engineering. It is unit economics. A WasteShark that costs a port less per year than a two-person clean-up crew is a straightforward sale. A WasteShark that generates a compliance-grade water-quality dataset the port has to pay somebody else for anyway is a better sale. A fleet of WasteSharks the port leases rather than buys, dispatched from a shared control room, is a subscription business. RanMarine has hinted at all three. Its CEO has priced hundreds of things in his career, from cameras to pet food. He is doing it again.
RanMarine has been pursuing a listing on the Nasdaq Capital Market. The registration paperwork is on file with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The company's Series A was $1.75 million in May 2020 - a small round by cleantech standards, which is either a story about capital efficiency or about the difficulty of financing hardware. Either way, it means the public-markets thesis matters. Small cleantech hardware companies do not go public because it is glamorous. They go public because it is a way to raise growth capital when the private cleantech market is uneven.
Foss's prior seat as CFO of two large US public retailers, plus his Sports Authority stint, means he knows the audience. The pitch to a US retail investor for a Dutch water-drone company will not be about robotics. It will be about recurring revenue per SharkPod, contracts per port, and a defensible margin at scale. That is a language he speaks fluently.
Public records give the outline. He is American. He is New York-based. He is a University of Washington undergrad and a Michigan MBA. He has been on public and private boards for decades. He co-founded Independent Pet Partners. He shows up in press releases with words like "financial and general management operations" attached, which is the corporate way of saying he can read a spreadsheet and stand in front of a board on the same afternoon. He does not appear to give many interviews. He does not appear to be on Twitter under his own name. His public voice, largely, is a company press release.
The company he now runs, meanwhile, gives him plenty of material. Ports call. Cities call. The New York Harbor Foundation talks about microplastics. The Great Lakes fill with algae. Somebody has to sell them a drone. Michael Foss is that somebody.
An electric surface catamaran that skims floating debris out of ports, marinas and canals. Mouth open, mapped route, quiet motor.
Targets harmful cyanobacterial blooms - the toxic green mats that shut down freshwater lakes and utility reservoirs.
Autonomous hydrocarbon recovery for spills and slicks in ports, industrial sites and small waterways.
A larger platform for high-volume commercial waterway cleanup and infrastructure work.
Docking station that charges the drone, empties its basket, and returns it to duty without a human on the pier.
Every WasteShark collects water-quality data on the way through: temperature, pH, turbidity, chlorophyll, dissolved oxygen. Ports report on this anyway. Now they own the sensor.
Not a scientific breakdown. A rough sense of where his career sat, and where it sits now.
Between his desk and his desk. He's the CEO of a Rotterdam hardware company, and he lives in Manhattan. Two workdays only overlap by a few hours.
Joined Sports Authority's board in 2009. Became its CEO in 2013. The move from director to operator, especially at that level, is rare.
Foss has sold to consumers via Kodak, sold to sports customers via Sports Authority, sold to pet owners via Petco, and is now selling to ports via RanMarine. The category changes; the discipline doesn't.
CEO and Chairman of RanMarine Technology, a Rotterdam-based maker of autonomous water-cleaning drones. A longtime US retail and technology executive who previously ran The Sports Authority and was CFO of Petco and Circuit City.
No. RanMarine was founded in Rotterdam in 2016 by Richard Hardiman. Foss joined as an advisor in 2022, was appointed Board Chair in 2023, and now serves as CEO and Chairman.
An autonomous, electric surface catamaran that skims floating plastic, biomass and other debris from ports, harbours and inland waterways. It's the company's flagship product.
Undergraduate degree from the University of Washington. MBA from the University of Michigan.
New York. RanMarine's headquarters remain at 15 Galileistraat in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.