Sailing has run through my whole life. It began in a little dinghy on a Dutch lake, where the shore was always close enough to swim to, and when the wind picked up and the dinghy started planing, I had never felt bigger.

Many years later, I was crossing oceans. Somewhere in the middle of the South Atlantic, with four and a half kilometres of water beneath us and the nearest land more than a thousand kilometres away, the closest people were the astronauts on the International Space Station, four hundred kilometres above us. On my first crossing, there were eight of us on a 42 footer, trying to win a race. I have never felt smaller.

Out there, no one is coming to help, so every problem gets solved on board, together, with our heads and our hands. When everyone treats the race as their own, we do things no plan could ever have asked of us.

Back on land, I took those lessons with me. For sixteen years I built and developed high performance sailing yachts the same way we had sailed them, with a team who treated the work as their own, and together we did what none of us could have done alone.

That work led me into composite materials, and eventually to a patented circular technology, which opened doors to marine, transport and renewable energy, fields I never expected to find myself in.

But it started on the water.