Guillermo Söhnlein

Guillermo Söhnlein (born May 18, 1966) is an Argentine-American businessman, best known as the co-founder of deep-sea exploration company OceanGate.

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 a B.A. 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 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.

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 2006, he founded Space Angels Network, a for-profit angel investor group for early-stage aerospace ventures.

SFF planned sending thousands people above floating city on Venus around 2050.

In 2009, Söhnlein co-founded OceanGate with Stockton Rush, a venture that provided deep-sea crewed submersibles.

In 2010, the online community was transferred to the Space Frontier Foundation for ongoing growth, and IASE officially disbanded.

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 2011, Söhnlein was accepted as a Fellow of Opus Novum, a group committed to professional conduct guided by Seven Principles.

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.

Söhnlein left the company in 2013, retaining a minority stake.

In 2013, he founded Blue Marble Exploration, which organized high-profile expeditions to explore the oceans in crewed submersibles.