David Sampsell’s journey to MATE started with a couple of deep dives. When he was 12, he picked up a copy of Gary Kinder’s book Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, which chronicles an early attempt to open the ocean floor to human exploration. After that, he was pretty hooked on the idea and wound up waist-deep in a Google search, reading about how to build his own ROV at home.

He did just that over the course of the next year. At some point during construction, he learned about MATE, and his mother convinced him to form a team. David roped in a few friends and his sister, Natalie, and they first competed in 2012. 

“MATE was the childhood incubator for my desire to design and build things,” David said. “It was the source of some of my dearest memories and lifelong friends.”

One of those dear memories? At a competition in Seattle in 2013, his team ran a successful test of their vehicle the night before showtime. They celebrate by taking a victory lap around the parking garage of their hotel on a luggage cart, blasting the Pirates of the Caribbean title theme. David remembers this so well because in addition to being the team CEO and earning the nickname “Mr. President,” he was also the team’s self-appointed documentarian. He caught the whole scene on tape.

Now, David works at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico as a product design engineer. A lot of the projects he’s involved in deal with national security, so he’s not at liberty to speak about them—but he promises it’s not as interesting as that makes it sound. He’s still using the lessons he learned at MATE, though, and hopes to one day take those skills to a start-up.

“You don’t necessarily have to have the most money or resources to be successful,” he said. “If you can be scrappy and innovative, you can solve old problems in new ways.”