Inside Arc's vision with CEO Mitch Lee

Arc’s CEO and co-founder Mitch Lee fell in love with the water on the California Delta, where the Sierra Nevada’s great rivers carve through the Central Valley. Boyhood summers on the family boat inspired his mission to modernize boating. The pleasures and pains of that old gas ski boat planted the seed. With Arc, he's pursuing a vision of the marine industry with more style, adventure, and purpose.

In the first episode of Inside Arc, we sat down at our headquarters in Los Angeles for a deep dive into what that future looks like — and why it matters.

How did you get into boating?

My family had an old gas ski boat. I grew up in the Bay Area and almost every summer weekend we would be out on the Delta. All of us would take turns knee boarding, skiing, or wakeboarding. It was our favorite way to spend time as a family. I’ve been on boats since I was just a baby.

When did you start to realize some of the challenges associated with it?

We almost always had to do work on the boat to get it to turn on after sitting in storage during the winter. Sometimes that would mean actually taking it into a shop and waiting for weeks for somebody else to fix it. Not only was that expensive, but the summer boating season would just tick by. And don’t get me started on the number of times I’ve run out of gas on a boat with an unreliable fuel gauge.

It doesn’t matter if you bought a brand new boat and have only put 20 hours on it, you have likely experienced some of that pain. As the saying goes: the best days of a gas boat owner’s life are the day they buy it, and the day they sell it.

How does Arc tackle these problems?

By going electric, you solve those core paint points. You have a boat that is far more reliable. It's much easier to maintain. You don't need to worry about winterization. It's cheaper to operate. Every part of that ownership experience gets better.

"The marine industry is the next frontier of electrification for good reason."

Can you talk more about that experience? How do you want Arc ownership to feel?

Definitely. To make owning a boat a way better experience, that comes down to making every part of ownership more effortless. From launching the boat, to never needing to think about lugging gas cans down to a dock, to incredibly intuitive controls, to cameras expanding visibility in front of and behind you, our goal is to make every part of that experience more simple.

We really want to celebrate simplicity. In the industry we’ve noticed trends toward louder designs — sparkles in paint, a bunch of features in the upholstery. There’s an opportunity for us to go back toward that premium experience delivered through simplicity. When you step on our boats, you notice how clean everything is, and the large touchscreen display. It’s premium through simplicity.

How do you imagine Arc impacting the industry?

The marine industry is the next frontier of electrification for good reason. From an ownership and experience perspective, it makes so much sense. But also when you think about the impact that these boats have, they're not just polluting the air, they're also polluting the water. They're generating noxious fumes, exhausting those fumes down into the water, and heating up lakes and rivers. We have an opportunity not only to address making boating better, but also to have less of an impact on the environment in the process. We want to accelerate the transition to electric while making boating so much more enjoyable.

What does that acceleration look like in practice?

Boat building is as much an art as a science. If you look at the industry today, not a lot of money goes into research and development. Automotive spends 10% of revenue on research and development, and the marine industry spends something closer to 1%. We are able to bring a lot more R&D firepower. We develop the things enabling the boat to go electric: the electric powertrain, the software stack, the testing infrastructure, and the manufacturing. Then we can apply that core technology to a bunch of different products.

To that point, what’s on Arc’s horizon?

Our team is developing the core technology to electrify every sector of the marine industry. All of the engineering that we’ve completed to build the Arc Sport compounds over time. Our ability to deliver better and better products to the market strengthens with all the learnings we accumulate. I’m so optimistic about what we are doing here and for the team to apply what we’ve learned to bigger and bigger opportunities moving forward, both recreational and commercial. The Arc Sport sets the stage for everything. Our mission is to electrify the marine industry until everything that floats is electric.