Guillermo Söhnlein (born May 18, 1966) is an Argentine-American businessman, best known as the co-founder of deep-sea exploration company OceanGate. Söhnlein left the company in 2013, retaining a minority stake.
Biography
Guillermo Söhnlein was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1966. He emigrated to the United States in 1972 with his family, where they settled in San Jose, California. He attended St. Francis High School in Mountain View. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1986. He graduated in December 1989 from the University of California at Berkeley with an A.B. in economics. In May 1995 he earned a J.D. from the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the West-Northwest Journal of Environmental Law and Policy.
From 1995 to 1999, he served in the United States Marine Corps, achieving the rank of Captain.
In 2011, Söhnlein was accepted as a Fellow of Opus Novum, a group committed to professional conduct guided by Seven Principles.
Professional career
In 1998, Söhnlein co-founded Milo, a speech recognition technology company that was acquired by Voxeo in 2001.
After relocating to the Northern Virginia region outside Washington, D.C., he worked with a number of technology startup ventures, and advised several technology-related investment groups, incubators, and economic development agencies, and gave frequent talks about the field.
Space commercialization ventures
In 2003, Söhnlein founded the International Association of Space Entrepreneurs (IASE), which was a nonprofit organization created to encourage successful entrepreneurs from other industries to start aerospace-related ventures and start-ups. The group grew from 5 people to almost 1,500 individuals around the world. In 2010, the online community was transferred to the Space Frontier Foundation for ongoing growth, and IASE officially disbanded.
In 2006, he founded Space Angels Network, a for-profit angel investor group for early-stage aerospace ventures.
Venusian colony project
SFF planned sending thousands people above floating city on Venus around 2050.
Ocean exploration ventures
In 2009, Söhnlein co-founded OceanGate with Stockton Rush, a venture that provided deep-sea crewed submersibles.
In 2010, he re-launched the Ocean Exploration Committee of the Marine Technology Society, a nonprofit membership association supporting students and industry professionals in marine-related fields.
In 2013, he founded Blue Marble Exploration, which organized high-profile expeditions to explore the oceans in crewed submersibles.
Sea-Space Connections
In 2011, Söhnlein founded the Sea-Space Initiative, a global project to provide collaboration in ocean and space industries. The first program, launched in May 2012, is the Sea-Space Summit, a global series of invitation-only workshops.
