Two hours before the submission deadline, we were still editing our pitch video. By then, I had practiced that pitch more than a hundred times and knew every pause in it. My feet hurt, my head was full, and the file still was not ready. What I remember most is that nobody suggested we settle for what we already had. We simply kept working until it was right.
That is the honest summary I can give of the QSTP x YEC Summer Bootcamp. It was an eye-opening experience of learning, working, and building with a team for whom winning was the only possibility. For OceanEdge, it was the kick-start to a new beginning, and I am certain it is the first of many.
My journey to the Bootcamp actually began earlier, when I joined Vora through the QSTP Internship Program for a three-month internship. Working closely with the team gave me firsthand experience of how a startup operates, builds, and develops. As part of the QSTP Summer Cycle, I then joined the Summer Bootcamp & Hackathon with OceanEdge, a project that began as my university senior project, alongside a team of fellow interns.
What we built
OceanEdge is developing underwater drones that inspect offshore pipelines and platforms, so that divers do not have to. Offshore energy runs on steel that sits underwater, and every part of it has to be checked, over and over, for decades. For as long as this industry has existed, the person doing that checking has been a diver, working in cold and dark water on one of the most dangerous jobs there is.
Our drone swims the route on its own, films everything, checks how the metal is holding up, and comes back with a report. No one has to go into the water. We arrived at the Bootcamp with a machine. We left thinking about what it could become.
An inspection should never cost a life.
The session that mattered most
If you ask me which session I enjoyed the most, I will not name a workshop. The ones I valued most were the sessions where we got to know one another, as a team and as individuals. That is the reason we stuck it out to the very end, and it is the reason we were standing on that stage at all. When you understand why the person beside you is in the room, a long night stops feeling quite so long.
Somewhere in those conversations, we found the sentence that now sits at the center of everything we do: An inspection should never cost a life.
Forty-eight hours
The sprint itself was the hardest part and the best part. Tired feet, tired mind, a deadline that did not move, and a team that refused to hand in anything it was not proud of. We pushed through, and we finished in first place. I want to be clear that this was not one person’s result. Every one of us gave something up to get that submission in.
Throughout the Bootcamp, the Vora team also supported me along the way, helping us refine our pitch deck, presentation, and even our Hackathon submission video. Having spent three months working alongside a startup team gave me lessons and experiences that I could bring into what we were building.
Preparation is what makes you calm, not confidence.
What I am taking with me
Three things stayed with me. Preparation is what makes you calm, not confidence. A hundred rehearsals are the reason I could stand still and speak slowly when it actually mattered.
Secondly, at this stage, the team is the product. A technical problem can be solved in the afternoon. Trust takes far longer than that.
I was also grateful for the opportunity to meet so many good people from different backgrounds, with different passions and different dreams. Some of the most useful things anyone said to me came from people working on nothing like our problem.
What comes next
My co-founder and I would like to thank QSTP and YEC for making this possible. Building something like this has been a dream for both of us for a long time. It is something that was once ignited, quietened for a while, and has now bloomed into existence again.
My internship with Vora has now come to an end, but I am carrying many of the lessons I learned there into what comes next for OceanEdge.
We are still early. The prototype works, and we are looking for our first pilots. Now, we are exploring what it could mean to take OceanEdge forward as a startup. But we walk away from this Bootcamp knowing exactly what we are building, and exactly why.
Ready to gain hands-on experience in Qatar’s innovation ecosystem? Explore the QSTP Internship Program and apply for the next cycle.
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