Electric boat maker Arc’s new head of revenue on his people-first approach

During his nearly six-year stint at EV maker Rivian, Marco Batra experienced firsthand an enduring challenge for manufacturing startups: getting from zero to one.

And then, scaling up to hundreds and eventually thousands of units, which Batra helped with as Rivian launched its first generation of vehicles: the R1T, R1S, and a commercial van.

Batra recently left his role as the VP of commercial operations and analytics at Rivian and joined electric boat startup Arc as head of revenue.

Founded in 2021 by former aerospace and automotive engineers, Arc has raised $110 million in funding from Eclipse Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Menlo Ventures, among other investors. The LA-based startup debuted on the market with the Arc One, then followed up with the Arc Sport in 2024. Both boats are geared toward recreation.

Now, the company is focused on scaling across the marine industry, including into commercial segments. Last year Arc announced plans, in partnership with West Coast shipyard Diversified Marine, to retrofit a 26-foot tugboat for use in the Port of Los Angeles. In September, Arc announced a $160 million contract with Curtin Maritime to supply an eight-vessel fleet of hybrid-electric ship assist tugboats.

Morning Brew recently spoke with Batra about what lessons he’s bringing with him from the auto industry, why his focus is on people above all else, and his plans to go into the field to learn about Arc customers in the coming months.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about your background and why this move to the CRO role at Arc made sense for you right now.

My background has been largely in the EV auto sphere, and so electrification has always been near and dear to me. At this moment, Arc, and marine EV in general, it’s kind of where EV auto was six, seven years ago, right before we really saw scale. And that is really interesting to me. Demand is real. The product’s awesome. And so the question starts to shift from, “Can we build this incredible thing?” to, “Can we deliver it well?”

Can you talk about the shift from a more established brand like Rivian to a more niche one like Arc, and what that means from a marketing and sales perspective?

When I joined Rivian, it was actually quite a fledgling brand as well. I’d go to my family and say “I work for Rivian,” and you get the quintessential, “Who’s that?”

And at that time, I really had no part in the marketing journey. I got to be witness to, and partner with, a really incredible brand and marketing team that told a wonderful story about building a community and building trust and transparency. Those are learnings that I intend to apply here. We have an awesome product. There is demand. It makes a tremendous amount of sense for so many consumers in application form. But to create that community, that brand trust, is a really critical step here, to not just get our name out there, but make people want to participate in the brand.

You were involved with helping deliver R1T, R1S, and the van at Rivian. What was that journey like?

To go from zero of anything to one ends up being the hardest part, and where I learned a lot of my initial lessons. Because when you go from that first handful of R1 deliveries—of any product, frankly—you go from feeling like, I can do everything manually on a spreadsheet and these touchpoints will perhaps scale and get us through tomorrow, but then you go from that zero to one and recognize that it won’t support you beyond that moment.

And you want to make sure that everything you’re building, from a people standpoint, from a process standpoint, from a tool standpoint, thereon across all of your partners, can actually prepare you for scale. Because what I certainly realized in going from…single digits per week to hundreds per week is that things will break. And trying to relearn those people behaviors, those process behaviors, any of those cross-functional communication touchpoints, even if you have excellent soft tissue, relearning it in that moment of scale is tremendously difficult…One of my colleagues said something along the lines of, “We all have to be singing from the same sheet music to provide a delightful experience.” And I could not agree more. That’s what that journey was. Initially starting with, in some cases, too many different pieces of music and too many different teams trying to optimize for what was best to get them to the end of the day, to get their piece of the journey for the customer done.

And once we started to get into a rhythm of building that operational efficiency and that cross-functional transparency, it didn’t just show up for the brand and the customers. It also showed up for the employees and the people…And that’s such a critical piece of what I’m bringing to Arc now is, what are those people, those processes, those tools…those behaviors, those systems in place ahead of scale so we’re not relearning it later?

How do you envision applying those lessons to the revenue side of the business at Arc?

This isn’t to diminish AI and automation; those are really critical in how we scale. But particularly when you are reinventing the way consumers participate with a product and a brand, people and their behaviors are super critical…Focusing on the people component is a really important aspect of what I’m doing here…The people here are extraordinary…There’s so much passion for the product, for the mission. There’s so much enthusiasm that that’s not a particularly steep climb for me. It’s just making sure we know how to interact with our customers. The other side...is [spending] time with our customers. I need to learn how it is that our consumers use their products. What are the problems they face every day? We know at the very highest level the value that Arc brings to these customers, what electrification brings to these customers: You don’t have fuel. There are fewer moving parts. You wake up with a charge every day. All the wonderful aspects of electrification. But we can save and serve so many other problem statements for them; I just need to go and learn what those are, so we can make those connections and inevitably solve those problems and create demand.

What are the scalable processes?...What are the things you can do, over and over again, which are sustainable for the humans in the company, which are predictable for the consumers we’re participating with, so they can trust what we tell them. That transparency, that authenticity, it doesn’t come from just saying what you feel. It comes from a really predictive, cross-functionally built model that everyone can stand behind.

When I think about a delivery experience or a sales experience, you would want to know when my product is going to get there. You want to trust that I’m telling you this date and it will show up on that date. Behind the scenes, that’s not the revenue team. That’s not just one team. That is your operating teams and manufacturing and your planning teams and your supply chain teams and your service engineering teams. That’s everyone focused together, aligned on every aspect of one another’s businesses. So we know that when we tell you, “Your product will arrive on this date in this condition, through this experience,” it is predictable. So those processes are incredibly important.

Once you’ve established who your customers are, how your employees should be behaving and operating, what the processes are, that’s where you can start to bring in automation. That’s where you can start to bring AI to scale those individuals internally to be able to do more of that predictable work. That’s where you can allow for customers to participate with the brand in a more self-serve manner so they don’t feel like they’re waiting for someone else. They’re part of this consumer journey. Those people, that process, that tool, that will help inevitably with demand…You can have an awesome product. You can have an incredible mission, an incredible brand, and everyone can know you at every Thanksgiving table around the world, but if you don’t have an excellent, cohesive go-to-market strategy and supporting operation, you’re not going to be able to generate that revenue, to get into an efficient rhythm of business, to create a profitable model.

How would you apply what you learned about Rivian’s customer base to the customers you’re going after with Arc?

I want to know who our customers are. Where they are. How they behave. Because I think what will make us successful is meeting them where they’re at, not just in the product behavior interaction, but the community. Understanding the customer is a critical component of this, so then I can go out and not build a brand around them. It’s to build a community with them. I think that’s what Rivian did really beautifully. That’s what I want to do with Arc.

What will you be laser-focused on in your first six to 12 months?

My first focus over the next few months needs to be getting out into the field, meeting our customers where they’re at, going to boat shows, going on demos. I need to learn. I need to learn a great deal. I also need to learn a great deal from the team. And what are the things that have been working for them? What are the things that have not been working for them?

The second piece of this goes back to that go-to market strategy. I want to make sure that we pressure-test our go-to-market strategies and further develop them ahead of scale…There’s a lot happening. And a lot more will happen in the next year. So making sure our supply chain teams, our production teams, our sales teams, our delivery teams, our service teams, our marketing…all those teams are working cohesively together, and that we can all sit down and say confidently, we will be able to operate under pressure and scale for the next two years. That’s the next focus…I don’t want us to have to relearn anything I can help us see in advance. I don’t want us to experience that awkward middle, those pain points that every company that has ever scaled has gone through, because I’ve had the privilege and benefit of being in that awkward middle.

The final fundamental piece: Do we have all those right foundations in place, and do we have the right plans in place, so we’re not relearning a lot? We will relearn some. We’re doing so many things that are net-new to the industry; we’re the first mover here. But I don’t want us to spend a lot of time relearning every last process and tool, at scale.

Where is Arc meeting prospective customers on their buying journey? Any quirks or idiosyncrasies that come with the buying journey for electric boats?

The specificity of marine I will have to learn, in terms of anything that’s particularly unique there. However, the specificity of a company at this stage of a genesis, I think I’m quite familiar with. You have these early adopters who tend to be extremely passionate, and enter the sales funnel quite a bit closer with a lot more intent, and/or they’re massive fans and they’re not ready to purchase—both of whom are incredibly important to our ability to build a brand and community.

What I also took away from the last several years is, the early adopter now is a bit different than the early adopter 10 years ago, at the advent of electrification in auto. Electrification is more common. People know what it is to charge. People are familiar with brands like Rivian and Tesla and so on.

And so there is a higher expectation for some of these early adopters, who once upon a time would be very forgiving with reliability or early quality or perhaps communication that wasn’t entirely accurate. I found that to be less the case now. In fact, I found that there are many of our early adopters who are those higher-intent, who enter lower in the funnel, actually have higher expectations.

The early challenge in my career, across a lot of these startups, was how do you move from early adopter to general consumer? It’s more, how do you take an early adopter who wants to participate so frequently with the brand and actually has very high expectations on what that participation looks like? That is not idiosyncratic, but net-new to where we are on the stage of electrification across industries.

The auto industry has been focused for years on the potential to create new recurring revenue streams from software-defined features. How do you think about the potential for revenue generation from those types of software features in this market?

You’ve seen so many different approaches, just between, say, Rivian and Tesla, that because we are a clean-sheet platform, that the applications are countless. And for me at this stage, not necessarily unpredictable, but I think we have to be very thoughtful about how we first approach our existing priorities with our recreational products, with our tugboats, our movement into commercial, and be really thoughtful about where we apply that next.

But yes, I do think there are multiple opportunities out there because there’s so many applications. It’s really on us to go out there and say, what is the right opportunity for us next? And can we deliver on it in a successful way?