Founders and CEOs on Reddit

Boyan Slat

Founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup

Company The Ocean Cleanup ↗

u/TheOceanCleanupBoyan ↗AMA only

How we know it's theirs

His 2024 r/IAmA AMA, posted from this account

We retrieved 1 post and 13 comments from u/TheOceanCleanupBoyan, all from 2024, most often in r/IAmA.

Best moment

A redditor wrote in r/IAmA

On “I'm Boyan Slat, the founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup. We've just shown we can now clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for $7.5B. AMA!”

What would you say to Mr. Trashwheel of Baltimore, USA?

u/TheOceanCleanupBoyan replied

I generally don't engage in conversations with inanimate objects.

PS Much appreciate the pioneering role they played and every river other people are tacking is a win for the planet!

More moments

A redditor wrote in r/IAmA

On “I'm Boyan Slat, the founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup. We've just shown we can now clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for $7.5B. AMA!”

Hello Boyan, fellow Dutch engineer here. Is the 7.5B a figure with margins or can we expect the usual (referring to huge projects in general) cost overruns? Im not asking to be snide! 7.5B sounds like a bargain on a problem this scale. I ask because in the video you present a…

u/TheOceanCleanupBoyan replied

Good question! Currently reading "How Big Things Get Done" by Bent Flyvbjerg which includes the amazing stat that historically just 0.5% of megaprojects have been delivered on time/quality/budget which is totally insane. With our cost calculations we produced high and…

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With our cost calculations we produced high and low scenarios and the numbers we shared are the average of those scenarios, based on the performance we've achieved today. As shared during the press conf last week, the key way we're working on robustly getting the cost to the lower end of the range is by adding 'hotspot hunting' to the operation. Doing so should get us to the ~4B mark.

The nice thing about the cleanup operation is that it's modular. It's just copy-pasting the current system. The cost projections are an extrapolation of operating 1 system. Historically, doing one-off projects are the ones sensitive to cost overruns (e.g. nuclear power plants) while modular activities see the opposite: a learning curve.