The Generic Foiling Podcast — a second brain

S - Ep 110 Tiesda You Starboard

8 min read

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S - Ep 110 Tiesda You Starboard

“Mr Starboard Foils” Tiesda You joins Liam and Freddie for a wide-ranging, technical episode: his 25-year path from windsurf shaper to foil designer, how CFD/optimisation software has replaced hand-shaping at Starboard, his read on AI’s limits, the design philosophy behind Starboard’s Universal Connection System (UCS), and a long closing riff on the parawing trend.

In brief

Tiesda has been at Starboard since 2000 (mechanical engineering grad, ex-windsurf shaper), spun up Starboard Foils as a separate licensed company in 2017, and now works almost entirely on foils. His central story is being “displaced as a designer” two years before the episode by an optimisation process run with Martin Fisher: a computer-optimised wing outperformed anything he could hand-shape, which he now embraces rather than resents. The back half of the episode is UCS — the sleeve-over-saddle front/tail-wing connection and four-bolt mast connection he designed as an open, USB-C-style standard — plus a discursive close on power/parawings, carbon construction (foam-core vs solid-core), and modulus grades.

Key topics & claims

  • Career path (Tiesda): grew up in Qatar (transcribed “guitar” throughout — flagged below) windsurfing from age 10, French nationality, studied mechanical engineering at UCL, did a summer job at a trifle factory in (likely) Torquay (“St Ival”/“Ival Trifles,” transcribed “near Turkey” — probably Torquay/St Ivel, uncertain), then interned at Starboard in Thailand in 2000 over BIC and a custom factory in Tenerife (“Witchcraft”). Got the internship by sending ~150 speculative emails, not contacts — he and the hosts frame this as still the way into the industry for engineering-minded riders.
  • Starboard Foils as a company: spun off in 2017 with Starboard’s blessing (Tiesda says Svein was initially skeptical foils were “a niche product”); it is a separate Thailand-registered entity licensing the Starboard name, deliberately built “location-agnostic”/cloud-based (laptop + internet, parts shipped by FedEx, riders and team spread worldwide) so Tiesda isn’t tied to living in Thailand long-term.
  • Optimisation displacing hand-shaping (Tiesda, extended personal account): he used to shape foils “by hand” in CAD the same way he shaped windsurf boards — iterating hundreds of prototypes. Working with Martin Fisher’s optimisation process, a computer-generated wing shape he “would never have shaped… in a thousand years” outperformed his own on the water, convincing him hand-shaping was “irrelevant, redundant.” He’s explicit that optimisation isn’t AI (“a marketing term”) — it’s a parameter-driven convergence process (~7000 iteration loops, hence the “7000X” marketing name), fed real-world inputs (event wind/weather statistics, course angles, speed distributions, structural/carbon constraints, price point).
  • What optimisation actually buys you: Tiesda stresses it’s not magic — roughly a 5% performance boost within a chosen trade-off (his bicycle-gearing analogy: pick the right “gear” for the conditions, you can’t have max top speed and max climbing at once). Racing and downwind wings were optimised first because they have fewer competing constraints than, e.g., a freestyle wing’s unknown inverted-flight behaviour. He gives a personal example: a downwind MF prototype (built for a teammate’s Maui Ho’olauna race) felt “like skating on ice” when he rode it on his home lake at his own casual wing-foiling speeds (19–24 knots), because the optimiser targeted that same speed range.
  • AI/automation take (Tiesda): he initially assumed foil design was safe from AI/software disruption (“no one’s going to design a foil with AI”) and was “the first guy” proven wrong. Board design, by contrast, hasn’t been optimised the same way yet — he says water-surface interaction is too complex to model/simulate currently, so board shaping (now led by Redmay for windsurf, Trevor and Oly for wing/SUP/tow boards) is still done “the classical way”; he expects foils to get there before boards because a foil interacts with one fluid, not two.
  • Universal Connection System (UCS): Tiesda’s design, released as an open/downloadable platform (explicitly inspired by USB-C). He walks through prior connection types — saddle (bolt-on, continuous carbon strand through the joint, strong but inflexible to wing shape/thickness changes — his own older windsurf foils, and he says Axis uses saddle front/tail plus a socket mast), sleeve (wings slide in, more shape flexibility — he attributes this to Armstrong and “Goldfoil”/possibly a mis-transcribed brand name, flagged below), and socket mast connections (his own older masts; he says socket eats into fuselage material versus a V-shaped saddle mast approach he credits to Mikes Lab). UCS combines a saddle core with a sleeve cover for the front/tail wings (continuous-carbon strength plus shape flexibility) and switches the mast from socket to a four-bolt saddle connection, chosen because four-bolt mounts “never move.” Adjustment (tail-wing angle, wing base/fuselage length) is preserved via hidden internal shims so non-adjusting users never have to know they exist.
  • UCS as an open standard: Tiesda frames it explicitly as a USB-C analogy — meant to cover ~90–95% of use cases, not 100% (brands can still keep specialist connections, just as USB-C coexists with MagSafe). No royalty/fee structure — he says it’s public, downloadable, with a “Works with UCS” logo he hopes adopters credit him with but doesn’t require. He name-checks conversations with a “couple of brands” investigating adoption and floats a wishlist collaboration with Bobby Johnston (creator of Slingshot’s “One Lock” system) to compare design trade-offs between the two open connection approaches.
  • Manufacturing/factories: Starboard Foils sources its own supplier network rather than leaning on Starboard’s; Tiesda evaluated the Cobra factory in Thailand (which also builds Starboard’s boards and many other brands’) among candidates. He pushes back on the idea (raised re: Code’s early days) that suppliers are hard to land as a small brand — his experience is factories are “hungry” for a stream of smaller customers alongside big ones, though he concedes it can depend on industry timing/demand. He notes Armstrong and (he believes) a windsurf brand “Phantom” both ran early small production at the same factory as Starboard.
  • Full carbon vs foam core: Starboard uses “FCC” for both foam-core carbon (lighter, cheaper, used where parts are thick enough) and solid-core carbon (stiffer, thinner, heavier — used where parts are too thin for foam, e.g. racing wings/masts). Racing masts are graded by carbon modulus (e.g. C400 ≈ 400 GPa “high modulus,” C600 ≈ 600 GPa “ultra-high modulus” — Tiesda cites this as an industry convention, not a Starboard-only term).
  • Parawing riff (long closing section, mostly Liam/Freddie with Tiesda’s own arc): Tiesda describes flip-flopping from skeptical (“that looks so dorky,” frustrated by tangled lines) to intrigued after learning the bar is perpendicular rather than parallel like a kite bar, seeing its value for paddling out through swell. Liam and Freddie discuss Hood River locals (Dylan of the “Kai Porta Rica”/X4’s podcast, a rider “Ren”) increasingly swapping downwind paddle boards for parawings, and debate whether it changes foil choice (bigger/more efficient foils, per Liam, similar to the downwind-foiling efficiency arms race) without forcing new foil design — Tiesda agrees it’s currently an accessory to downwind foiling (“the foil doesn’t know the difference”) rather than a discipline unto itself, though he’s open to it becoming one. A tangent covers a fly-surfer/wing racer competing on a parawing at a race (name/event not clearly given) and joking speculation that parawing racing evolves toward kite-foiling gear.

Gear / brands mentioned

Starboard (Starboard Foils, UCS, 7000X optimisation, FCC foam-core/solid-core carbon, C400/C600 masts), Armstrong, Axis, Mikes Lab, Slingshot (One Lock, via Bobby Johnston), Code, F-One (fireball-style efficient downwind foils referenced by Liam), Cobra (factory, Thailand — no existing page), “Goldfoil” (uncertain brand name, flagged), AK Foils (uncertain whether linked to Ken Adgate’s own brand, flagged), BIC (French windsurf brand, historical), Witchcraft (custom board factory, Tenerife), Phantom (windsurf brand, uncertain).

Notable quotes or takes

  • Tiesda, on being out-designed by software: a computer-optimised wing was one he “would never have shaped… in a thousand years of iterative process,” and riding it convinced him hand-shaping was now “irrelevant, redundant.”
  • Tiesda, on AI anxiety: he initially thought foil design was safe from automation (“I’m pretty sage… I’m good, no one’s going to design a foil with AI”) and then became “the first guy to not have a job anymore” in that sense — though he’s careful to separate optimisation from AI as a marketing term.
  • Tiesda’s UCS philosophy, paraphrased: a connection system doesn’t need to cover every use case — like USB-C keeping MagSafe alongside it — just the majority, so brands and riders aren’t permanently boxed in by an early design choice.
  • Sign-off callback: asked for final words, Tiesda returns to the episode’s running joke (his old trifle-factory job) — “when you put a cherry on top of a trifle, it has to be really centered.”

Mentioned

Tiesda You · Starboard · Liam · Freddie · Armstrong · AXIS Foils · Mikes Lab · Slingshot · Bobby Johnston · CODE Foils · F-One · Ken Adgate · Hood River · Masts · Front Wings · Fuselages and Rear Wings · Boards · Parawing · Downwind · Wing Foiling · SUP Foiling · Kite Foiling

Upgraded from the earlier description-only stub. Auto-transcribed (faster-whisper, unreviewed): Tiesda’s name is rendered inconsistently (“Tiesta,” “Tiesda,” and once “Chester” at the sign-off) — treated throughout as Tiesda You. “Guitar” is a consistent mis-transcription of Qatar (where he grew up). His UK trifle-factory summer job is transcribed as “near Turkey,” almost certainly Torquay; the factory name “St. Ival in Ival Trifles” is likely St Ivel but unconfirmed. “Goldfoil” (a sleeve-system brand alongside Armstrong) and “AK Foils” (a saddle-system brand, possibly but not confirmed to be Ken Adgate’s own operation) are both uncertain transcriptions/attributions. The Hood River riders “Dylan” and “Ren,” and an unnamed fly-surfer who raced a parawing, are named only in passing with no surname or clear spelling confirmed.