Michael Autery, SFMBA ’26, a United States Navy Civil Engineer Corps officer with fifteen years of active service, joined host Christopher Reichert, MOT ’04, on Sloanies Talking with Sloanies to discuss his journey from active duty to entrepreneurship. Coming from a working-class background and skeptical of the business world, Autery enrolled in the MIT Sloan Fellows program not knowing what came next, but determined to find work that gave him the same sense of purpose he had found in the Navy. It was in 15.390 New Enterprises (also known as “Entrepreneurship 101”) taught by Bill Aulet, SF ’94 (Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Practice; Managing Director, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship)—through a deceptively simple assignment to generate twenty business ideas—that he landed on the one that would define his next chapter.
That idea became Gander Robotics, a venture-backed company building an autonomous underwater rescue swimmer to address one of maritime safety’s most persistent and deadly problems. Drawing on his Naval Academy electrical engineering background, a master’s in ocean engineering from Texas A&M, and firsthand experience with man overboard situations at sea, Autery identified a gap that technology had yet to fill: locating a person in the water before they disappear from sight. With survival rates of just 28% in the Navy and 17% on cruise ships, the urgency was clear. Autery and co-founder Lael Ayala won the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition unanimously—taking both the top prize and the Audience Choice Award—and secured over a million dollars in investment within a month.
Autery closed the conversation with advice for incoming MIT Sloan Fellows and a look at the road ahead for Gander. He urged prospective students to use every available moment before and during the summer term to clarify their direction, since the one-year program leaves little room to pivot. For himself, he summed up a life philosophy of continuous self-improvement without a fixed destination—enlisting in the Navy after failing out of college, earning his way into the Naval Academy as an enlisted sailor, and now building a company he believes can save lives at scale. His near-term goal is to land government contracts and get Gander’s autonomous rescue swimmer deployed on Navy ships, with the long-term ambition of broad commercial adoption and, eventually, the rank of admiral in the Navy Reserve.
Sloanies Talking with Sloanies is a conversational podcast with alumni and faculty about the MIT Sloan experience and how it influences what they’re doing today. Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Episode Transcript
Michael Autery: When I thought of this idea in Bill Aulet’s class in Entrepreneurship 101 and started working on it, the truth is, it didn’t take long for me to decide I’m going to do this for real. I talked about this when I won the $100K Pitch Competition. We had 90 seconds, no visual aids. It’s just me talking. I tried to put them in the shoes of someone whose shipmate just fell off and walk them through what happens next.
Christopher Reichert: Welcome to Sloanies talking with Sloanies. A candid conversation with alumni and faculty about the MIT Sloan experience and how it influences what they’re doing today. So what does it mean to be a Sloanie? Over the course of this podcast, you’ll hear from guests who are making a difference in their community, including our own very important one here at Sloan.
Christopher Reichert: Welcome back to Sloanies Talking with Sloanies. I’m your host, Christopher Reichert, and today I have the pleasure of sitting down with someone who I think embodies everything we love to celebrate in this community. It’s truly a case of following MIT’s motto Mens et Manus, or Mind and Hand.
Michael Autrey is a professional engineer, a U.S. Naval Civil Engineer Corps officer with fifteen years of active service. He is now the CEO and co-founder of Gander Robotics, a venture backed company building an autonomous rescue swimmer, solving a problem that he had witnessed for years. We’ll learn more about that in this conversation.
Michael and his co-founder, Lael Ayala, were the unanimous winners of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, also taking home the Audience Choice Award. I think the first team in the competition’s history to claim both prizes simultaneously. That must have been quite a quite a moment to get the brass ring and the audience cheers. And just a month after winning the competition, Michael’s venture attracted over a million dollars in investments. And so now he’s now leading Gander working to bring this to market and reduce preventable maritime deaths at scale.
As Bill Aulet from the Martin Trust Center put it, “Michael is using his Navy experience and time at Sloan to build the skills, team and network needed to bet on himself, creating meaningful work for himself and others that will literally save lives.” Those are powerful words coming from Bill, who’s famously enthusiastic about startups, but also someone who’s hard to please and will criticize readily if you’re not heading in the direction he thinks you should go. So kudos to that. Welcome, Michael.
Michael Autery: Thank you Christopher. I appreciate you having me.
Christopher Reichert: So we’ll dig into how Gander Robotics all came together. It’s been a whirlwind. You said that winning proved to me that entrepreneurship can be humanitarian, and I don’t have to be a business monster and chase the easy money. I can make the world a better place and make a decent living doing it. So tell us more about that.
Michael Autery: Yeah. I think, getting out of the Navy, or off active duty. I’m a reservist now, but leaving active duty, I was obviously very well qualified, with a bachelor’s in engineering and a master’s in engineering and professional engineering license and lots of experience leading to go get a job as a project manager, an engineer somewhere. What I mostly wasn’t prepared for was being an individual contributor after ten years of leading, and it was kind of most of the jobs I was qualified for. And they were good paying and, and I could work my way up, but I just didn’t that didn’t really sit right with me.
So, I decided that I thought an MBA was a good idea. I had a GI Bill burn the hole in my pocket. And if you don’t use it, you lose it. And I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I kind of bought myself some time by going to school again. But the whole business monster thing, it is. I come from a very poor family. And yeah, we don’t trust rich people like growing up, it’s like. And those people that go, they, they do all the firing and all the outsourcing and all those things that kind of hollow out the middle of the country.
And but so coming to go get an MBA at an M7 school was like diving into the belly of the beast for all I knew.
I’ve been very pleasantly surprised at MIT, in particular, how it really is, regardless of their background, people who I think largely do want to make the world a better place. And it’s not that monster, it’s not just in the movies. I do think the business world is like that a lot, and, profit is important, of course, but like, so sometimes those decisions are kind of heartless and, whatever. And I never wanted to be that guy, even though I understand it needs like, maybe that’s the way it has to be done, but I don’t want to ever be that guy.so, coming here, I, I knew it would be great for a resume. I knew it would open up opportunities, but I have made deliberate choices where I’m never going to be that guy, that business monster.
And so, when I thought of this idea in Bill Aulet’s class in Entrepreneurship 101 and started working on it, the truth is, it didn’t take long for me to decide, I’m going to do this for real. And, for class, I’m going through the steps and doing my homework, and we’re flying through the twenty-four steps of entrepreneurship. Even though, of course, in reality, if you’re really starting a company, you couldn’t do all twenty-four steps in one semester. That’s like it’s a step-by-step process. So I was like hanging back in the early steps, actually really focusing on that in all my free time and trying to really start the company. But I kept it mostly to myself except for class, and all along, I kind of, I wasn’t sure I knew it was important.
I knew every sailor, every Coast Guardsman that I spoke to, every operator out there was blown away by the idea and thought, we need this. This is amazing. Like what we do now is doesn’t work. Every mariner and sailor understands how hopeless it is if you fall in the water.
Christopher Reichert: I was reading, I was reading some of the stats that that’s 28% survival rate in the Navy as opposed to cruise ships, which is what, 17%? But I mean, I think part of that, right, is that you’re not just jumping off like a pool edge into the water, you are falling ten, twenty, thirty, forty more feet. Whatever. I don’t know what the height of an aircraft carrier to the water surface would be. I mean, that’s like a ten-story building. I don’t know how long that would be, but I mean, a lot.
Michael Autery: Right off top of my head, I couldn’t tell you. It’s more than ten meters. I’d say maybe twenty or thirty meters, somewhere in that range, I could be way off, but it’s definitely the highest you could, and it’s far enough to really hurt you when you hit the water.
Christopher Reichert: So you have the surprise of it, right? I mean, I guess, as Monty Python said, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition. No one expects to fall off a boat. It could be dark, it could be roiling sea. No one noticed. But maybe in the Navy, you did. Maybe that’s why it’s 28%, not 17% on a cruise ship.
Michael Autery: Yeah, we have people on watch all the time.
Christopher Reichert: Right. and then and then somehow you have to get a life, ring out to them and hope that someone took ultimate Frisbee in college and it lands in their zone, right? And that the person is okay. So, so that’s, so when did you kind of put it all together and think, wow, this is something that I can solve?
Michael Autery: Well, this kind of goes back to Bill Aulet’s class as well. In Entrepreneurship 101, our first assignment that was due that first Sunday after we had our first class was, we had to come up with twenty business ideas by midnight on Sunday. And I, and I just thought like, geez, if I had an idea, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be a millionaire with an idea somewhere. So that’s the hard part. I had to come up with twenty.
Christopher Reichert: So, you individually had to come up with twenty?
Michael Autery: Every one of us in the class had to come up. Not as a team like every individual. We had made teams, yet individual assignment was come up with twenty business ideas and I thought that was impossible. And like, to me, that was the hard part. That was the part that I figured some people were blessed. And the muses just like artists and musicians.
Christopher Reichert: Windows 95 had sprung from Bill Gates head.
Michael Autery: Yeah, that’s how I figured it was. Because I know like, I’ve always thought like these guys that are these people with these ideas and start these amazing companies, it’s not like you can go back in their history and be like, oh, it’s because they went to Harvard. Oh, it’s because their IQ was this high or it’s...but there was just something about it that they’re just lucky, and I realized, going through this exercise, that it’s not like that.
so the advice he gave us because that seemed impossible to me to come up with one good business idea, much less twenty, was he said, think about something in your life that every time you have to deal with it, you think, God, that’s dumb. And so how could that be less dumb? Boom. There’s a business idea, and he said they didn’t all have to be winners. Like the point of the class is to go through the steps. Like he always says, it’s to teach you how to fish, not to give you a fish. So and ideally, you go through the steps, even if it’s not a good idea. You’ve walked through the steps. And when you do have a good idea later, it’s your second time going through all the steps and you’ve done it before. So that’s the benefit of that of that twenty-four step discipline, entrepreneurship, framework.
But so that said, when I thought about it, I just, I couldn’t, I couldn’t really help it. My background is all engineering and leading troops and, my entire adult life, I was in the Navy. It was like my only job I had had. So, I couldn’t help thinking things in my life were like, God, that’s dumb. Griping and complaining is like the most common speech, in the military. It’s how troops get by, and there’s a lot to complain about. And whether it’s just like, why are we doing it this way? Oh, because we always have. Or like, that’s so common and as innovative as we are, we’re also pretty slow to change things.
Christopher Reichert: So big organization that’s tough for big organizations.
Michael Autery: Yeah. So a big thing was I was thinking back about, ways that life could have been safer, more efficient, ways that we could have been taken out of harm’s way, and I particularly was thinking about robotics and autonomy because of my engineering background. So, my undergrad was electrical engineering from the Naval Academy. I was particularly interested in power like high voltage kind of power distribution stuff. But n the Navy I was selected for something called the Ocean Facilities Program. And that’s where they send you to become a master. Like to get a master’s in ocean engineering and send you to dive school. And then you work on, underwater sort of infrastructure stuff.
But for my thesis at Texas A&M, I worked on taking a remote-control underwater vehicle and automating a search and using machine learning model and the onboard camera to identify people like to really identify divers. And the proof of the concept was an anti-diver harbor defense. So I’m like trying to help the Navy solve this problem of, right now we use marine mammals for this mission. We use dolphins, and sea lions like to defend high value assets in harbors. So, like a nuclear submarine is pulled into a harbor, enemies could swim up to it, right? So their job is to use their own sort of echolocation to, to notice when people are trying to sneak up on from the from the water.
Christopher Reichert: And how do they know friend or foe
Michael Autery: Friends should not be sneaking up on our submarines from the water. There is no friend sneaking up on our high value assets. So, if you’re yeah, if you’re if you’re swimming around in the water near a nuclear submarine, you’re probably going to get beat up by a dolphin. I can’t tell you exactly what they do, but I’ve heard some stuff about like kinetic, like they actually for them sticking like a beacon on the tank of like a diver. I’ve heard of like a balloon that they’ll put on you and it’ll suck the diver up to the top.
So the point is it doesn’t have to be a submarine, but any sort of harbor defense using. So it was using an AUV, an autonomous underwater vehicle for harbor defense. And so that was just like, I stole my own idea. I’m like, oh yeah, that was my thesis. So I’m just going to throw that in as one of my twenty ideas because there’s no company doing that right now. So that was going to be one of my twenty ideas. And then I kept thinking about ways that like little niche things like that problem, like problems that I dealt with day in and day out, kind of and kind of unique to that mission area. And it didn’t have to be underwater, but just how autonomous systems and robotics could take troops out of harm’s way largely.
I came up with twenty ideas and I waited till the last minute. I waited till Sunday night because I always wait till last minute, do my homework, and then it only takes a minute. And I agonized for like two and a half hours. It wasn’t the muse, it was me just pushing it out of my brain like it was. It sucked. But I sat there and agonized and I came up with, I want to say like eleven ideas that I was pretty proud of. And I thought I would, I would start a company with this nine that were garbage, but that’s fine. Like he said, sure. It’s the exercise of getting them out.
But there were like ten or eleven ideas I was actually pretty proud of and I still would consider starting companies with. But then there was the one that stood out as like, that’s the one I didn’t have to think about it. I was like, that’s the one. And it was just because the mission was so compelling.
But all of my ideas, I didn’t mean to do this. They all ended up being non-kinetic military problems where like autonomy or counter autonomy or, robotics could save lives, have robots in danger instead of people in danger, or make life more efficient for troops, so it’s more the day in and day out stuff and not combat per se. Some combat related as in combat will happen and the robot will take the damage instead of a person, but not like, So, none of my ideas were kinetic and I didn’t mean to do that. I’m not a pacifist. I’m just not particularly well suited to make weapons. I was just kind of sticking to what I know. I ended up finding this problem that was at the perfect intersection of my technical skill as an ocean engineer with underwater robotics and my actual background as a sailor. It kind of that just felt like such a perfect fit. So, I knew that was it. And I knew I was going to start the company as soon as I had the idea, regardless of what kind of traction I found.
Christopher Reichert: It sounds like it’s safe to say that if you hadn’t done that exercise, you probably would not have forced yourself to gestate this idea.
Michael Autery: Yeah, I think you’re right.
Christopher Reichert: And so that’s, that’s the power in the in that that’s what step one in the twenty four?
Michael Autery: Yeah. I don’t even know if it’s considered a step, but I mean, it’s like it was before step zero or something. You got to have an idea first, but, then we formed our teams with that. And then you would go pitch your idea and form your team and then, and then. So you don’t even begin like the twenty-four steps. We were like two, two and a half weeks into class, three weeks into class, because we spent so much time on team forming before we really started going.
Christopher Reichert: Yeah, and did you mention the, the survival rate,to your teammates to say this is just like…
Michael Autery: I didn’t know survival rate when I had the idea. I knew it was bleak because every sailor understands that. You learn a lot in boot camp. But one of the few things that is like you take exams and you have to pass them. You can get a C, you can get an A, whatever. But like one of the things is an absolute nonstarter. You will not pass if you can’t pass survival, swim, right?
Like so it’s not like you have to be a great swimmer and you have to go like, do a five-hundred-yard swim and eight in like six minutes or seven minutes or something. It is, can you can you jump off of this platform and not die? Like be and just be in the water, not touching the side for a certain amount of time and not die like, like they do teach you the skills, but you have to pass.
And there are people who struggle with that, and they go to the pool every day because they cannot graduate without it. So from the get-go, every sailor understands that like man overboard is like is a desperate race against time. And that no matter how strong of a swimmer you are, whether you even if you have flotation, the water is cold. Even warm water will give you hypothermia. It’ll just take longer. So, everyone understands that implicitly. And if and if you serve long enough, you’ll understand it explicitly, like you’ll. You will lose shipmates somewhere along the way. And we just lost a marine in February after Iwo Jima. He fell off in the Caribbean. And it was the same ship that Maduro was sent to. It wasn’t that same time. It was like a few weeks later. he fell off and they searched for three days and never found him. And he was lost at sea. And that was just February. It happens all the time. Like it keeps happening.
I’m not saying my robot could have saved would have saved him. I don’t know, it’s a counterfactual, but the point is, it is a problem. And what we do now is not really all that different from what we did two hundred years ago, except we have a helicopter, which is an awesome machine flying around sometimes. But you still have human beings looking out the window with their eyeballs, looking for people in the water.
Christopher Reichert: So tell us about the solution. Just give us a visual of what it is. And then and then I want to talk about how it all came together from a technology perspective, right?
Michael Autery: Yeah. So even though some of my ideas were not necessarily underwater drones, for me, that is kind of my specialty. That is, it makes the most sense. So, I started there, but I did think about potential other uses, like maybe a service, an unmanned surface vehicle or an unmanned aerial vehicle. And they all have their uses. And it’s really the, the edge cases that made it where, why I chose the underwater vehicle because, so I understood the problem when I started researching it for this course, I understood it even better. That’s where I found the data that showed that there was a fifty-year study done about casualties in the Navy like broad, all the casualties that they had recorded, like they did one big study and “man overboard” was its own category.
And, and it turned out that from 1970-2022, which again, this is we’re not, we’re not in combat with other ships. So, it’s a different world in 1970, but not like ships are sinking and sailors are abandoning ships. So it’s like same kind of every now and again, people fall off right from (19)70 to 2020, 72% of the time ended with a casualty, like when someone would fall off the ship. So it’s like 28% of the time it didn’t.
And then with the cruise lines, it was actually more like someone wrote an article a few years ago about they had gone back and finding all the articles from around the world. It was like clockwork. One to two people fall off a cruise line every month, and not even three weeks ago, a Viking cruise ship, a mariner like one of the crew members fell off and was, they searched for him for twelve hours and he was lost at sea and this was right off the coast of Massachusetts.
So cruise lines, they have a 17% survival chance based from that same data when they go and like, look at all those articles, it’s not like cruise lines are publishing this data, but go look at all the articles of times people fell off of those two a month every time, most of them are never found and never recovered. And 17% of the time they are, they survive. So, so yeah, it’s really bleak.
And so, the point is, I decided on an underwater vehicle that was kind of my bias, to be fair to start with, but I really did dig into the difference. I see as like three distinct problems in a man overboard that each would have their own solution or potentially a suite of solutions that you could have like one system.
But when it comes to like a product, one is man overboard detection, noticing someone fell over, it could be hours sometimes, like when that happens, I have lots of sea stories from people I’ve talked to of. They start the search and they search for three days, but they didn’t even start the search until at least twelve hours after the person was missing because they didn’t know. So, you could come up with a product to solve that problem. And I thought about that.
Another option was recovery. Like once you find them getting them out of the water and getting them safe. My feedback from talking to dozens of search and rescue helicopter pilots, rescue swimmers, ship captains in the Coast Guard and the Navy was focus on search. We’re really good at finding recovering people. Once we find them, we’re good at that. This frustration is that nine times out of ten when they go searching, they never find anyone. Once they find them, that’s their job and they’re good at it.
So that the third problem is finding someone once they’re out of sight, and people who’ve been on a ship and done man overboard drills, or tried to watch something in the water as it gets farther and farther away. If you can look away for a moment, and this is this is key.
And I talked about this when I won the $100K Pitch Competition back in December. We had 90 seconds, no visual aids, no slide deck. It’s just me talking. And the thing I did was I tried to put them in the shoes of someone who’s, who’s shipmate, just fell off and walk them through what happens next.
And the thing is, if you think about the fact that the most important person in that rescue team and that rescue effort is what we call the spotter, whoever is the first person to see that someone fell off, you become the spotter. Whatever your rank, whatever position, that’s your job and your only job is to never take your eyes off the victim. You don’t you don’t turn your head. You don’t blink. You point and you scream man overboard and you never take your eyes off. Because you look away for a moment, and the sea is huge and people are small, and you’re looking for a little warm coconut, a little tiny little head in the water. And just from a few meters away, people don’t get it. And it’s hard to describe it because it seems like it should be. If it was just a pool, like, oh, yep, there he is, but it’s not like that. It’s so easy to lose sight of somebody and it’s so hard to ever get it back. And that’s why that person is the most critical person. And as many people as can jump in and do that as possible is even better. You want all eyes on him, but somebody’s got to turn the ship around. Someone’s got to sound the alarm. Someone’s got to launch the boat to recover. And if there’s air assets available,
Christopher Reichert: Oh my God, I’m getting stressed out hearing this.
Michael Autery: Yeah. No. And that was the thing too. It was visceral for me. Like the only more hopeless feeling I could imagine would be if you were in space floating off, like when your ship is just leaving you behind because the ocean is huge and we don’t belong there.
Christopher Reichert: So how do you go from this idea to starting to, I don’t know, design something that that the shape, the size, the technology. So how do you start building that team and how do you start?
Michael Autery: Yeah. the first thing I did in class was I thought, I wanted to me, I was excited and I thought, other people are going to be excited. And, I don’t know what I’m doing. Like business wise, so I want to get a bunch of co-founders. I want to do this. I want to make it. I want to make it work.
In that class, what’s interesting is, Harvard, MIT from any program can be in it. So, we have a law school student from Harvard, we had PhDs from MIT and everything in between. We had undergrads and MBAs probably it was still mostly MBAs, but everybody had an idea. And so everybody wanted to go find an undergrad engineer. So, I did that. Like everybody. I’m like, I tried, I reached out to some other MBA veterans and stuff.
I went around, I didn’t pitch my idea to everyone. I didn’t because I didn’t want to want to turn people away. I wanted to go pick who I wanted and pitch to them individually and see if they wanted to join me.
I pitched it to three different Mech. E. undergrads, two from MIT, one from Harvard, and all three of them said yes. Which is funny because they were like the most coveted people in the class because everybody had all the MBAs with their great AI ideas. Couldn’t do it, couldn’t code, you know. So they needed to get these kids. And I, and I, and I snagged three of them. I was proud of it.
But the whole point of the class is to find customers to do the product market fit and the primary market research and all that. So we were told and deliberately did not do any prototyping. We weren’t actually building it. We had to make sure first that this pain point was real, that people were willing to pay for it, and which customer base was the right one, which market segment was our best beachhead? And we and we did that and we spent that fall doing that.
Christopher Reichert: And so this is all Entrepreneurship 101, twenty-four step program.
Michael Autery: To be honest, there were parts where like, I kind of let the team keep working on the steps and I hung back on some early steps because I’m really starting this company. I incorporated in October quietly, like without any traction, I incorporated. I’m like, I’m doing this. I don’t care if it fails, I’m doing it. I don’t care if nobody wants to buy it, I’m doing it. And I’m going to go fail doing this rather than not try without any traction or any feedback from the world that this was. I got the feedback from operators. That’s what mattered to me when I talked to sailors and Coast Guardsmen and cruise line operators and all that 100% buy in, absolutely blown away. Like, why is this not a thing?
That was a confirmation that made me decide I’m doing this, but I was still worried about the business monsters not caring about saving lives. And just like, well, like, how are you going to make a billion dollars doing this? And first of all, I do think you can make a billion dollars doing this, I found out, but that wasn’t the important part. That was more from the PMR (primary market research), finding out that there is a big market and the market is every ship in the entire world can use this.
I want to save sailors. I want to save service members. And that was like my primary purpose for starting this. But it’s like, yeah, let’s save everyone. Like everyone can use this. And if we can get the right, if we can get it to a price point, that makes sense, which I think we absolutely can, especially with this amazing team of engineers, I have now hired a few and that we can do that and we can do it cheap, do it at a price point that makes it a tradable, like something that you don’t care about recovering it. You care about finding the person and then if you recover it, fine. If not, who cares?
Christopher Reichert: One year at Sloan Fellows is an intense year. June to June, more or less. And you have all your other courses. And so, you’ve won the prestigious pitch competition in December. So that’s become a focus. You’re building this team and you have a family. What’s the journey been like for them as you’ve come now to have this round of funding. It’s a real thing. It’s a real thing. And you’ve got a prototype. And so what’s the journey like for you as you coming imagine go back to May before you started to leaving the whole Sloan program.
Michael Autery: Yep. Last March. So we moved here last May and we’re just moving in and getting ready to start school.
Christopher Reichert: So what a year. Tell me about that year.
Michael Autery: Yeah. Well, I didn’t come here thinking about entrepreneurship again. I thought it was like the muses and like, maybe I could make myself useful for some other person. Maybe I could be a founder for someone else’s idea or something. But that wasn’t the thought. It was. I want to care about what I do. I want to serve my country as a civilian. So, to me, it was if I could have the same exact job title, but at a company whose mission makes me excited to jump out of bed in the morning, that’s all I cared about.
Christopher Reichert: I think Steve Jobs had a great line when he recruited John Sculley to be the CEO of Apple, he said, do you want to keep making sugar water or do you want to come and change the world?
Michael Autery: Right. Exactly, exactly. So again, no offense to sugar water makers. I like sugar water. But, that was really important to me. It’s like I couldn’t go get a job at that company as an engineer and feel that sense of pride and purpose, but I wouldn’t be leading at the level I want.
So now it’s like, I want to have my cake and eat it too. I want to lead and I want to be part of a company, a mission whose mission I believe in. So that’s all I cared about. But I wasn’t thinking entrepreneurship. But I figured after the summer here, because the summer you don’t choose your courses at the Sloan Fellows program. It’s a really intense summer where you kind of make up for that year you don’t get. And, so while we were here, kind of just exploring the ecosystem, I got introduced to the idea of just entrepreneurship, I got a sense of how this place, how entrepreneurship undergirds everything at MIT, not just Sloan. And I figured I’d keep an open mind to it that I didn’t I didn’t have an idea, but I would just keep an open mind to it. I got responsibilities, I got, I got babies, I got, I got a wife, I got people counting on me. I need a job. Like I have mouths to feed. So I need to do the job hunt. I need to work on that. But I wanted to keep an open mind. And that’s why I took the courses.
Like when I finally had choices for electives, which starting in the fall, I took two. I took an Entrepreneurship 101 and I took Venture Creation Tactics, which is basically like (Entrepreneurship) 102. It’s supposed to be after (Entrepreneurship) 101, but I’m like, I’m a Sloan fellow. I don’t have time for that. I got to do both, you know? So, I got one year. I don’t I don’t get two years to work on this.
So I didn’t have an idea when I started. I told you I came up with it in (Entrepreneurship) 101. And then I used that idea in, in Venture Creation Tactics, which is a different book. Like there’s another book in the discipline Entrepreneurship by Paul Cheek and Paul Cheek was the, the instructor for that course. And, so I was working both at the same time. And that’s kind of also why, when they’re moving on to like step twenty-four, and I kind of I was helping, but my team was, making the products for that. And I was like, building the company. Venture Creation Tactics is more like the actual starting a company piece and less of the, like PMR is part of it too, but there’s a lot of overlap, but it is kind of distinct and it’s meant to be after.
But so I was doing both, I really dove into it. That opened up the opportunity for me. And I think being I’m at the right place at the right time. And if I wasn’t at MIT, I had the same idea at the same time in a different place, without Bill Aulet and without Entrepreneurship 101 and without the Martin Trust Center, and just the fact that this place adores entrepreneurship and encourages it and supports it, and like, even school is like, I’m going to half ass this homework assignment, because I have this pitch tomorrow or I have this potential advisor that I’m meeting with who, if he believes in us, can like become an advisor and put us in touch with all these people and like real stuff for the company was became more important inOctober. Like school, I learned a lot, don’t get me wrong, but school was my secondary priority. Starting in like October. Yeah, we’ll call it tertiary because I also have my family. So it’s like family company, school in that order. Passing is all I cared. I didn’t care, I got straight A’s over the summer, all A’s. I had a five point zero. And then because I hadn’t started a company and then I started a company, I got A’s and B’s. I learned a lot and a lot of very useful classes that are helping me as an entrepreneur and as a, as a CEO. But yeah, I could have learned more if I wasn’t or I could have learned more about that. But I also, it’s own trial by fire, like starting a company. I’m learning a lot.
Christopher Reichert: But it sounds like you were planning on leaving the Navy.
Michael Autery: Yeah.
Christopher Reichert: Before you I mean, that was kind of part of your plan was to say leave active duty. Right. and so was, was graduate school…I mean, did you think about business school because you were thinking about starting a business? Or did you think about it as a steppingstone for something else that you hadn’t quite figured out yet?
Michael Autery: I had not figured anything out. All I knew was..what’s gotten me this far in life has been not knowing what I want to do, but wanting to do something great and trying to just be better. And so wherever I am, I’m like, I’m looking for like, oh, there’s this really prestigious program I can apply to. And I always did that even when I was in the Navy, like I, that ocean facilities program I told you about where I got to go get my master’s in ocean engineering. They took five people every year for that program out of my community. And I never stopped applying. And I got rejected a bunch of times for all kinds of cool opportunities, but it was because I was just never satisfied. And that’s, that’s what this kind of was to me.
It’s like, I’m done with the Navy. I loved it and that really brought me up in the world. It brought it made me a much better man, much better person, and very well qualified for whatever’s next. And I kind of just so I don’t know what I want to do with my life even now. But I just know that, like, when I think back on like the greatest men, greatest people in history, it’s like often it’s, they just spent their lives trying to just better themselves. And then when the moment needed them, they were ready for it because they had spent their lives just being better and better.
So I was like, literally thinking back to Thomas Jefferson, in 1776, like, did he know that was his path? No, but he was just he spent his life becoming better and better and just like striving for greatness. And so for me, it’s like I’m out of the Navy. I don’t know what’s next. And I was really worried about purpose and meaning leaving the military where am I going to find that?
so it, I did it my whole, it got me out of poverty. It got me, I enlisted in the Navy because I was absolutely broken out of options and failed out of college and like, but I kept pushing and striving for the next thing I got into the Naval Academy as an enlisted sailor.
Christopher Reichert: That’s really that’s impressive.
Michael Autery: I mean, and I just kept doing that. So it doesn’t I’m not done like, and that’s kind of why I’m here because I don’t know what I want to do, but I know that MIT is going to help me get there.
Christopher Reichert: So, talking about some of the leadership skills you learned, you’ve been to Antarctica twice and you led a multi, I guess multi country team US, New Zealand and Australia. Six weeks of round the clock logistics work, coordinating workflows in subzero temperatures. And you achieved the highest cargo throughput in operation. Deep freeze history.. deep freeze indeed. Tell us about that. I mean should I have two questions. What was that experience like? And then should people stay away from Antarctica just to keep it as it is and stop being tourists?
Michael Autery: Well, I’ll start with the second one and go back to. So, I think that Antarctica is a, I think it’s pretty well taken care of.the stewards down there and I forget how many countries sign the treaty, like North Korea is one of the treaty countries. It’s funny. It’s like one of the only treaties we have with those guys, but, they’re one of the, they have a base down there, but I can’t, I can’t speak for all of them, but just we demilitarized Antarctica for one thing.
McMurdo Station was built in the 50’s and it was a Navy base built by Seabees (Naval Construction Battalions), which I was a Seabee in the Navy. So we’re proud of that. But, anyway, it’s construction battalions. They built stuff.So they demilitarized it. It’s National Science Foundation runs it all now, but the military still does like the resupply every year.
So they get all the stuff they need for the whole year, including their food delivered. And then they get abandoned down there for like for the rest of the year to do. And over the winter, there’s a very small crew that a few scientists and their support that are
Christopher Reichert: …pretty harsh environment…
Michael Autery: …very harsh. So we go in the middle of summer for Operation Deep Freeze, which is January down there. and the sun never sets the whole time we’re down there. The point there is to bring in everything they need to do the rest of the year.
So, it’s a joint operation. We go down there in January and offload like a whole ship worth of cargo. Backload the ship with all the trash and all the, everything that needs to go back. Like there’s no garbage, no nothing. Even like waste, like human waste gets sent back in a refrigerator to the United States to be processed because we just keep Antarctica pristine. So the US does a very good job at that.
And the tourists, I there was one time in the two years I went there twice, one year in the next year. And the first time there was a ship that showed up like a cruise ship. There was not much to do at McMurdo station. But, I did see some people getting too close to the penguins, and they tell us, like, leave them alone. Like, if they even if they react to your presence, you’re too close. Like, so we have to work like we’re working on the pier. And then penguins are like, right on right down there. Just,whatever.
So it was amazing being, being immersed in it. But, yeah, I think most people respected it. but yeah, there were a handful of tourists who didn’t respect, Antarctica. And so I think there’s a way to do it and do it right.
But the second time we went, it was six weeks. That was way longer than we’ve ever done before. It was almost twice as long as we’d ever done. We’d had two ships that we offloaded instead of one. That was just a really ambitious plan. So my team and I, and it’s a twenty-four-hour operation. So we have two sets two twelve, twelve on, twelve off for, the entire duration, except we got this break in the middle between ships.
But yeah, the whole time we’re down there, it’s again, the worst days in the middle of summer are like negative negative teens, maybe negative twenty. And then the best days were something like thirty. But that was that was rare. But it happened, over the six weeks, it changed a lot.
Christopher Reichert: So you’ve been you’ve been through the Sloan program. If you look back, what advice would you have for prospective students coming in, having gone through it, imagining yourself about to start it?
Michael Autery: Well, it’s a really short time, to make the most of and to pick your journey. So I would say if you want to be an entrepreneur, it’s not a lot of time to figure that out. If you want to get in, if you want to do finance, it’s not a lot of time for that. And so the challenge is you kind of have to decide as early as you can so that you can make the most of the year. I came in here not knowing what I wanted to do. And man, it would have been easier if I did, but I wouldn’t change anything.
Now, obviously this went perfectly, but. Yeah. But..
Christopher Reichert: yeah, I’d say,
Michael Autery:…you don’t have a lot of time. I would really focus in the summer. Like spend the summer really, really focused on what you want to do with your life and how you can. Because you have no choice in what your classes are. It’s really come Fall that you have some choices. And it’s not just what you learn in class. Of course that matters, but that that matters so little compared to the fact that your professors are world class, business people and your network you’re going to gain here is incredible. It’s not it’s not the lecture like that is important, but it’s an opportunity to become part of this alumni network of this group of people to become one of these people, one of these MIT people, one of these Sloan people.
You come here to surround yourself with amazing people and try to be like them. So if that’s your attitude coming here, then it’ll go well. But spend the summer trying to figure out so that you’re not still flopping around what you want to do come Fall because you just don’t have a lot of time. Like two years is already pretty quick for an MBA like MBAs, but because they got an internship to like try to focus on, but they have some time to pivot, you don’t have a lot of time to pivot.
So it’s not the end of the world, but especially for Sloan Fellows, like usually you have maybe you have a little nest egg. It’s like, maybe, but you also have responsibilities. Usually a lot of us have families. A lot of us have kids and people counting on us. So, if you could spend as much time between now and getting here and then certainly over the summer, trying to find the right path, then you can focus on, on perfecting yourself and getting there over the next couple of semesters.
Christopher Reichert: And where do you hope Gander Robotics will be in five years from now?
Michael Autery: Well, I’d say two years from now, I hope we are executing government contracts. So hopefully winning some actual big government contracts and getting these things on Navy ships. And at that point, trying to pivot into the Coast Guard and trying to get, do the same thing there and hopefully we’ll have a much quicker path to sales on the commercial side. I’m hoping that we’re scaling that we are building to manufacturing scale, and we’re employing a lot of people. And it’s only a matter of time because like it happens like clockwork. But if it’s out there, then it’ll get used. And I’m hoping we’ve, saved a few lives by then and then have a path to get it broadly adopted across the world.
And then I think on the, I have, I told you I had ten other ideas. So when I win this market, kind of get it, capture it. And then, think of other ways, other products we can integrate into search and rescue. And there’s other, other, other products that can integrate and do it even better. We can incorporate some detection or some recovery stuff and other, or even just communication and or swarming like multi-vehicle search, there’s things that, the minimum viable product is one thing, but we can do it even better if we incorporate other features, other products and have already know what those are. But I’m a startup, so I got to start somewhere. But so I’m hoping we’re at that point where we have something people are buying, and now we’re selling an improvement and then still trying to capture more, but selling improvements to that system.
Christopher Reichert: That’s excellent. Well, we look forward to following your progress. And I want to thank Michael Autery, a 2026 MIT Sloan Fellow and now CEO and co-founder of Gander Robotics, who’s building an autonomous rescue swimmer as the first step in a multi-step product range for joining us on this episode of Sloanies Talking with Sloanies.
Michael Autery: Thank you so much for having me.
Christopher Reichert: If you want to follow his work, visit Gander Robotics Online. (ganderrobotics.com) online. And if you have ideas for future guests or topics you’d like me to explore on Sloanies Talking with Sloanies, drop me a line at crf@sloan.mit.edu or the podcast inbox at sloanalumni@mit.edu.
Sloanies Talking with Sloanies is produced by the Office of External Relations at MIT Sloan School of Management. You can subscribe to this podcast by visiting our website, mitsloan.mit.edu/alumni, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Support for this podcast comes in part from the MIT Sloan Annual Fund, which provides essential flexible funding to ensure that our community can pursue excellence. Make your gift today by visiting giving.mit.edu/sloan.
