Roughly 90% of the world's goods move by sea on vessels powered by technology that, in many cases, hasn't meaningfully advanced since the textbooks Mike Carter studied at Kings Point — which were printed in the 1960s. Mike and his co-founder Steven grew up together in the mountains of North Carolina, spent careers at offshore drilling contractors and energy majors like Shell, and eventually built Fleetzero to solve what they saw as an existential crisis for American shipping. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Mike to learn how two ship engineers are electrifying container ships, bulkers, and offshore supply vessels — and what the go-to-market for deep industrial transformation actually looks like in practice.

Topics Discussed:

Why batteries beat diesel, ammonia, and methanol on pure economics — not just emissions
How to run a multi-stakeholder sales process when any one party can kill the deal
The decision to buy a 265-foot offshore supply vessel to compress the product and team development timeline
What a three-to-five year payback period unlocks in a market where most green alternatives never pay back at all
How Maersk and MOL became both investors and operating partners

Why "do nothing" is the real competitive threat — and how to sell against it
Fleetzero's expansion beyond propulsion into uncrewed vessel operations and remote ship control

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

In slow-moving industries, your real competition is the status quo — and it requires a different sales motion. Fleetzero doesn't spend much time worrying about other electrification companies. Their primary adversary in every sales cycle is the "kick the can" decision — vessel owners who are intellectually convinced but operationally reluctant to move first. Mike's approach isn't to push harder; it's to maintain the relationship and let improving unit economics do the work over time. Battery prices keep falling, energy density keeps improving, and deals that didn't pencil two years ago are starting to look obvious. Several owners who originally passed have already come back to reopen conversations. The tactical implication: in industries with long adoption cycles, your pipeline management system needs to track relationship quality with dormant accounts just as rigorously as active ones. A "not yet" in deep industrial markets is often a delayed close, not a loss.
Map every stakeholder with veto power before you run a single sales play. Fleetzero sells to three distinct groups — vessel owners, system integrators, and shipyards — and a champion in one group provides zero protection against a skeptic in another. Mike describes deals collapsing when an enthusiastic vessel owner gets steered away by an integrator with competing interests. His fix isn't a better deck — it's running parallel relationship tracks across all three groups from the start of the process, not as a follow-up motion after an owner shows interest. Founders selling into industries with distributed buying committees should diagram every party who has influence or veto power over the final decision, then treat each as an independent sales motion with its own champion development plan. Letting one relationship carry the deal is how you get surprised in the final stages.

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How Fleetzero sells against "do nothing" | Mike Carter