MARINA HADJIPATERAS, THE dashing American venture capitalist, has only one word of derision. She speaks it softly and rarely. Conservative. A family can be conservative. An investment, a choice. The way she uses the word, it's never political. It's also never a good thing.
The first time I hear Marina deploy her tender curse is during lunch with her brother Alex on the harborside deck of Zephyros, a seafood restaurant in the fifth-century-BCE port city of Piraeus, near Athens. Sophisticated-God, they're sophisticated, I keep thinking, dimly recalling a line from Fitzgerald. As platters arrive, I'm aware that I've never settled on a way to gracefully extract bones from fish.
Marina, a general partner of the VC firm TMV, which she founded with the Iranian-American entrepreneur Soraya Darabi in 2016, is brooking my questions about something else: Dorian LPG, the public shipping company started by her forebears in the 19th century. At the end of 2023, the company was valued at around $1.9 billion. Its stock price shot up 141 percent in the past year. But it's the company's history that's most thrilling, and each version of the fairy tale I hear is more romantic than the last. Marina's background in shipping, in fact, makes the origin stories of just about every other VC frat house at Harvard, at Stanford, you don't say-look like provincial banalities.
Greek shipping companies like Dorian sometimes seem to have emerged fully formed from tiny, rocky islands, as Athena from the head of Zeus. The tales of their genesis constitute latter-day Greek myths whose gods have bold-faced names like Onassis and Niarchos. Hadjipateras is a less bold-faced name, but these days it's a far more valuable one.
At the same time, Marina's past and patronym haven't been her calling card for a long time. At TMV, she ventures rather than hedges, and she much prefers the future to antiquity.
Lately she's been betting on new maritime technology so successfully that, at 41, she was named to Lloyd's 2023 list of the top 10 people in ship finance. On that list she sits in the company of Xu Bin, of BoCom Leasing, who has more than $18 billion in vessel assets, and Akihiro Fukutome, president of the Japanese leviathan Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation.
As it turns out, it's not social media that connects us in the 21st century. It's ships. Shipping is a $14 trillion-plus industry, and the overwhelming majority of the world's goods-a colossal 90 percent of them-spend time at sea. Marina believes that shipping is good for humans, as to trade with people around the world is to acquire empathy for them. "To see them in their places, to see what they need, what they want. It's globalization." And with the ramp-up of TMV's latest fund, it seems to me that Marina, in her steel-bougainvillea way, is currently orchestrating a one-woman overhaul of the entire shipping industry.
WHEN SHE WAS 11, Marina, whose family had recently moved from London to Connecticut, was on a summer-long holiday at sea with her siblings, her cousins, her grandmother, and her grandmother's longtime companion, a woman the kids called Roula. This is the part of Marina's story I can't stop thinking about. The family never owned pleasure boats. They'd rent a yacht or a sailboat for the summer holiday and cruise out onto the Ionian or Aegean, going where the winds took them. That summer, when it was time for the children to go back home, Marina's grandmother, the formidable Maro Lyras, designated the girl her protégée. Maro had been closely observing the grandchildren, and had settled on Marina as the one with the most potential.
"She ordered me to stay," Marina says. "Or-not ordered. She offered me a carrot. She said, 'Stay for three more weeks, and I'll teach you shipping.""
Maro's husband's shipping fortune (Hadjipateras) and her father's shipping fortune (Lyras) both launched on islands in the Aegean. Growing up female in the pious Greek Orthodox Lyras family in the 1930s, Maro was deprived of higher education. At 19, she consented to an arranged marriage with a member of an allied shipping family. Dutifully, she produced four children: John, Mark, Kathryn, and Angela.
Then, in her mid-twenties, she turned autodidact. It quickly emerged that she had a steel-trap mind for the near-infinite compendium of numbers that have defined shipping since the 17th century, from tonnage to nautical miles to tariffs to insurance rates. She left her husband, Marina's grandfather, in 1979 and moved into Roula's villa soon after.
Summer after summer, Maro singled out Marina to stay overtime with her at sea. Grandmother would tutor granddaughter every afternoon, teaching her about the global economy, the fair treatment of crew, and how to endure the devilish volatility of the shipping business. Maro kept screens showing t...
The first time I hear Marina deploy her tender curse is during lunch with her brother Alex on the harborside deck of Zephyros, a seafood restaurant in the fifth-century-BCE port city of Piraeus, near Athens. Sophisticated-God, they're sophisticated, I keep thinking, dimly recalling a line from Fitzgerald. As platters arrive, I'm aware that I've never settled on a way to gracefully extract bones from fish.
Marina, a general partner of the VC firm TMV, which she founded with the Iranian-American entrepreneur Soraya Darabi in 2016, is brooking my questions about something else: Dorian LPG, the public shipping company started by her forebears in the 19th century. At the end of 2023, the company was valued at around $1.9 billion. Its stock price shot up 141 percent in the past year. But it's the company's history that's most thrilling, and each version of the fairy tale I hear is more romantic than the last. Marina's background in shipping, in fact, makes the origin stories of just about every other VC frat house at Harvard, at Stanford, you don't say-look like provincial banalities.
Greek shipping companies like Dorian sometimes seem to have emerged fully formed from tiny, rocky islands, as Athena from the head of Zeus. The tales of their genesis constitute latter-day Greek myths whose gods have bold-faced names like Onassis and Niarchos. Hadjipateras is a less bold-faced name, but these days it's a far more valuable one.
At the same time, Marina's past and patronym haven't been her calling card for a long time. At TMV, she ventures rather than hedges, and she much prefers the future to antiquity.
Lately she's been betting on new maritime technology so successfully that, at 41, she was named to Lloyd's 2023 list of the top 10 people in ship finance. On that list she sits in the company of Xu Bin, of BoCom Leasing, who has more than $18 billion in vessel assets, and Akihiro Fukutome, president of the Japanese leviathan Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation.
As it turns out, it's not social media that connects us in the 21st century. It's ships. Shipping is a $14 trillion-plus industry, and the overwhelming majority of the world's goods-a colossal 90 percent of them-spend time at sea. Marina believes that shipping is good for humans, as to trade with people around the world is to acquire empathy for them. "To see them in their places, to see what they need, what they want. It's globalization." And with the ramp-up of TMV's latest fund, it seems to me that Marina, in her steel-bougainvillea way, is currently orchestrating a one-woman overhaul of the entire shipping industry.
WHEN SHE WAS 11, Marina, whose family had recently moved from London to Connecticut, was on a summer-long holiday at sea with her siblings, her cousins, her grandmother, and her grandmother's longtime companion, a woman the kids called Roula. This is the part of Marina's story I can't stop thinking about. The family never owned pleasure boats. They'd rent a yacht or a sailboat for the summer holiday and cruise out onto the Ionian or Aegean, going where the winds took them. That summer, when it was time for the children to go back home, Marina's grandmother, the formidable Maro Lyras, designated the girl her protégée. Maro had been closely observing the grandchildren, and had settled on Marina as the one with the most potential.
"She ordered me to stay," Marina says. "Or-not ordered. She offered me a carrot. She said, 'Stay for three more weeks, and I'll teach you shipping.""
Maro's husband's shipping fortune (Hadjipateras) and her father's shipping fortune (Lyras) both launched on islands in the Aegean. Growing up female in the pious Greek Orthodox Lyras family in the 1930s, Maro was deprived of higher education. At 19, she consented to an arranged marriage with a member of an allied shipping family. Dutifully, she produced four children: John, Mark, Kathryn, and Angela.
Then, in her mid-twenties, she turned autodidact. It quickly emerged that she had a steel-trap mind for the near-infinite compendium of numbers that have defined shipping since the 17th century, from tonnage to nautical miles to tariffs to insurance rates. She left her husband, Marina's grandfather, in 1979 and moved into Roula's villa soon after.
Summer after summer, Maro singled out Marina to stay overtime with her at sea. Grandmother would tutor granddaughter every afternoon, teaching her about the global economy, the fair treatment of crew, and how to endure the devilish volatility of the shipping business. Maro kept screens showing t...
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WIRED (Digital) - 1 Issue, March - April 2024