A marina is an excellent place to admire other people’s expensive decisions. Boats gleam. Ropes creak. A remarkable amount of money sits perfectly still. For Sascha Mornell and his business partner Raf Collado, the interesting part was the stillness. Here were boats waiting for owners who were elsewhere, while people who wanted a day on the water faced the considerable inconvenience of not owning a boat.
The pair had been sailing in the Atlantic when the question began to take shape. Collado owned a boat and understood the bills that followed it home. They saw unused vessels in the marina and considered whether those two groups could meet. A rental marketplace would eventually connect them. The observation came before the company; Getmyboat launched in 2013.
It is a pleasing origin story because the object is so visible. You can point at a boat. You can point at the empty seats. Building the business required a much less picturesque collection of activities: finding owners, earning bookings, handling payments, and persuading people to trust an unfamiliar way of arranging a day out. Mornell had already spent years learning how much work follows an apparently straightforward idea.
A one-way ticket before the business plan
His early career does not resemble a carefully plotted route to a boat company. After earning a history degree at the University of California, Berkeley, Mornell bought a one-way ticket to London and worked as a bartender. He later went to Tokyo and found work at Dreyer’s ice cream. Harvard Business School followed. So did a job with the National Basketball Association.
The NBA position had seemed like a dream job. It did not turn out to be the right fit. In later career conversations, Mornell has returned to the usefulness of allowing a professional ambition to change. Getting what you thought you wanted can supply surprisingly good evidence about what to try next. A prestigious employer cannot do that thinking on your behalf.
Then came Register.com. Mornell was its first employee and became senior vice president of sales and marketing. He helped the domain-registration business grow and take itself public in 2000. Domains, federal technology contracts, boat rentals: the eventual sequence has little respect for the tidy industry column on a résumé. What travels between those businesses is experience in finding customers and building an organization that can serve them.
The variety matters because it makes the boat marketplace less of a sudden conversion. Mornell had sold something intangible on the internet before he helped sell access to something very tangible on the water. He had also discovered that a career could survive a change of direction. The next substantial turn would involve a partner who stayed in the picture for decades.
Two founders, four years without salaries
Mornell and Collado started Phacil in 2001. Their customer was the federal government, and their offering was technology services. In Mornell’s account of those early years, the partners spent long stretches traveling the East Coast, pursuing business and waiting to get onto military bases. For four years, neither took a salary. The retrospective glamour of entrepreneurship was evidently running late.
One episode offers a more cheerful view of the office. In 2012, Mornell lost a bet with Phacil’s business development group about how many wins the team would produce. He paid with a Mohawk. The photograph survived, and he later described the result as the “best bet ever (to lose).” It is an unusually legible incentive plan: the team gets the contracts; the boss gets the haircut.
By the end of 2016, the business was large enough for a very different transaction. Mornell and Collado sold their stakes to an employee stock ownership plan. Phacil became wholly employee-owned. Contemporary reporting put annual revenue at roughly $140 million, with about 850 employees. The existing leadership, headed by Tom Shoemaker, remained in place.
That handover gives the partnership’s history a useful second dimension. They had built a company, then transferred ownership to the people working in it. Phacil was subsequently acquired by By Light in 2019. The founders’ exit in 2016 and the later acquisition were separate events, with employees occupying a different position by the time of the second deal.
All those boats. All those empty afternoons.
Getmyboat put Mornell and Collado back together around another problem. The early proposition was easy to describe: let people with watercraft offer them to people seeking time afloat. The 2015 press kit listed 40,000 boats in 143 countries. It also made clear that the supply included businesses as well as private owners. A marina operator and a weekend boat owner could both have something to offer.
The familiar comparison with Airbnb helped explain the idea, but Mornell was precise about its limits. In 2019, he explained that Getmyboat also connected tour operators and marinas with renters. The owner’s side included availability, pricing, photographs, requirements and guest approval. The renter’s side included searching by location, boat type, price and group size.
“We give an owner the tools they need”
Sascha Mornell, 2019
The administrative details are worth lingering over. A boat listed online still needs an available date, an appropriate group and an agreed price. A renter may have questions before paying. Mornell’s explanation concentrated on those exchanges. The platform had to make an owner’s business manageable while making a customer’s booking comprehensible. An attractive photograph could begin the conversation; it could scarcely finish it.
There was geographical variety, too. In that same period, Mornell discussed bookings in places including Montenegro, Latvia, Albania and Slovakia. The company was pursuing experiences beyond the most familiar holiday destinations. A broad catalogue could introduce people to a different stretch of water as well as a different way of arranging the trip.
Reported catalogue snapshots, not completed bookings. The 2022 figure includes water experiences.
A Japanese partner joins the voyage
Yanmar first invested in Getmyboat in March 2018. The Japanese company brought an established marine business to the relationship. Four years later, in February 2022, Getmyboat announced that Yanmar had acquired a majority stake and supplied $21 million in growth capital through its Series B round. The company would continue operating separately under its existing executive team.
At that announcement, the catalogue exceeded 150,000 boats and water experiences across 9,300 destinations. Getmyboat also reported more than tenfold net revenue growth since 2019. Those are different measures: listings describe the available offering, destinations describe its spread, and net revenue describes business performance. Keeping them separate makes the growth easier to understand.
Mornell’s stated ambition was to make boating accessible globally. Yanmar’s interest included learning from the marketplace and advancing its own digital transformation. The relationship joined a company accustomed to machinery with one accustomed to matching people online. For Mornell, who had once worked in Tokyo selling ice cream, Japan had reappeared in the story through a rather different product.
His experience also became teaching material. The Platform Innovation case series follows Getmyboat through recorded conversations with Mornell, organized around launching, scaling and investment. It gives students a business observed at different moments rather than a single polished account delivered after everything has worked. Decisions acquire a different texture when the outcome is still ahead.
The first employee gets the chair
In February 2025, Bryan Petro succeeded Mornell as Getmyboat’s chief executive. Mornell remained on the board. Petro had been the first employee and had spent years building the company’s product, organization and departments. The succession placed the job with someone whose history inside the business reached back to its beginning.
Petro’s own account supplied a small, revealing example of how that relationship worked. A year into the business, Mornell gave him the opportunity to represent Getmyboat on Fox News. Petro also recalled being included by both founders in important strategic conversations from the outset. An employee can acquire responsibility long before acquiring the title that formally recognizes it.
“There is no Getmyboat without Bryan.”
Sascha Mornell, on Bryan Petro’s appointment
There is a resemblance here to the Phacil handover, although the transactions were different. At Phacil, employees became owners. At Getmyboat, the first employee became CEO. In both chapters, the founders’ work extended into preparing other people to carry responsibility. It is a quieter subject than an investment announcement, and arguably a more revealing one.
Still taking an interest
Mornell’s activities now include investing and advising. OuterVision Capital lists him as a founding partner and advisor focused on management and exits. His education work continues as well: Harvard Business School lists him among New Venture Competition judges, and Crystal Springs Uplands School’s 2026-27 trustee roster names him co-vice president and compensation committee co-chair.
His connection to Getmyboat has also entered a more contentious chapter. On January 16, 2026, he filed a Delaware Court of Chancery action seeking access to the company’s books and records. Getmyboat filed an answer contesting allegations in the complaint. The proceeding concerns inspection rights; the parties’ assertions remain distinct from a court’s findings.
Away from company transactions, Mornell has described spending time with his three sons and road cycling in the South Bay. The bicycle is a modestly amusing companion to the boat business: another machine whose usefulness depends on someone actually taking it out. His professional life has repeatedly returned to that practical question of use. An internet address needs a customer. A company needs people who can run it. A boat needs someone who wants to leave the dock.
The marina supplied the visible opportunity. The years alongside Collado, the trips to win contracts, the employee ownership plan and Petro’s growing responsibilities supplied the harder part of the story. Mornell’s career is full of departures. Some involved a one-way ticket; others involved handing over the keys.