After having working for some of the largest shipping companies and investment banks in different places in the world over the previous 20 years, Johnson decided to challenge himself again by establishing 300cubits, a startup co-founded with Jonathan Lee. Both of them graduated in 1994 as the first cohort of undergraduate alumni.
The pair saw that shipping industry has been in pain and much of those pains could be solved by application of technologies that are common our day to day life. In their first project, the pair implemented the first shipping blockchain project in 2018 where they used blockchain technology to help carriers and their customers to secure shipment bookings.
Recently, the pair has teamed up with a data science company to launch a big data project focusing on container shipping. This project will cover all the granular details of the 7000 ships active in the container shipping, which aims to solve the information asymmetry problem in container shipping. “In shipping, we do not have one place where you can see all sailing schedule of the ships like we could for booking air tickets. And no one can be sure about what ships will go from shanghai to Long Beach in the next few weeks although container shipping is supposed to be a fixed schedule service. Both the carriers and their customers will benefit from our product,’’ Johnson observed.
Graduated in 1994 as one of the first batch of students, Johnson has a great affection for HKUST. “My studies weren’t related to shipping or finance, but the experience of being the first graduates – I think many of them like to try new things, or we wouldn't have entered a university that was still a construction site,” says Johnson.
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