How I Built This with Guy Raz - Planet: Will Marshall and Robbie Schingler

Episode Date: December 13, 2021

In 2010, rocket scientists Robbie Schingler and Will Marshall set an ambitious goal for themselves: to launch an aerospace mission with the speed and agility of a Silicon Valley startup. They set up shop in their garage, left their NASA jobs, and began pursuing their vision of building small, relatively inexpensive satellites to take daily images of the earth. Today, their company Planet has a fleet of roughly 200 satellites that capture millions of pictures daily, tracking everything from forest fires and oil spills to the health of coral reefs and crops. The company now has hundreds of clients around the world, and just went public on the NYSE. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. I talk to entrepreneurs all the time who are looking for a way to upgrade their digital footprint. Well, whether you're just starting out or you're scaling your business, Squarespace is the easiest way to build a great website that stands out. It's an all-in-one website platform that gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your products, and get paid. Anyone can use Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools to build an online presence that truly reflects what makes your business special.

There are templates, intuitive drag-and-drop editing, and even an AI-enhanced website builder. Then, Squarespace's built-in analytics tools help you make smarter business decisions. Review website traffic, learn where to focus engagement, and track revenue all in one place. Looking to grow your business, Squarespace even offers fast, easy business financing

through Squarespace capital. Go to Squarespace.com slash built for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Loans issued by Celtic Bank and serviced by Stripe, all loans subject to credit approval. This show is in partnership with Airbnb. This past summer, I took my family to Vienna, and it was incredible. We spent our days wandering the old streets, stopping for coffee and pastries, visiting museums, and just soaking up the history of one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And one of the things that made the trip so special was the home we booked on Airbnb. It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city,

made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hey, really quick before we start the show, a lot of you have lots of questions about how I built this. Like, how do you pick guests or where do you record the show? Or how can I get in touch with Howard Schultz?

Spoiler alert on that one. We can't help you. But we can try and answer any questions you might have about the show, our work, or even me. If you'd like to submit a question, please visit gairaz.com and fill out the form. And we'll answer some of your questions right here on the show in the coming weeks. Again, that's g-u-I-R-A-Z.com. The first image that we got was a forested region in Oregon. I was asleep when we got our first picture in.

And, Robbie, didn't you come and wake me up with the picture? I seem to remember like, yes, here it is. And we were just like in awe because we could see that the picture was in focus. We could see individual trees. We couldn't believe it. I mean, we were in tears. And we were like, oh, my God, we've done it. Like we can do this.

We can do this. From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how three scientists at NASA left their jobs to build satellites literally in a garage and launched Planet Labs, a data company that now takes about three million photos of the Earth every single day. Sometimes starting a business can feel as complex as rocket science. The legal filings, the compliance letters, the accounting structure, and that's just the first few months. Now, imagine doing all of that in addition to actually doing rocket science, which is what makes the idea of planet labs seem almost insurmountable. Because what Robbie Schingler and Will Marshall set out to do more than a decade ago was to completely reimagine the business of space satellites and to turn it into a simpler, cheaper, and fundamentally more accessible tool for people to use.

Robbie, Will, and their partner, Chris Bosshausen, were all scientists at NASA and were way too familiar with the slow, bureaucratic, and expensive process of getting a satellite launched. Not to mention the size of those satellites. Some of them can be as big as a school bus. So what if the co-founders wondered, you could launch a much smaller satellite, as small as a loaf of bread, and do it for a few hundred thousand dollars? rather than hundreds of millions of dollars. And what of those satellites, instead of peering at distant stars, could be used to explore our own planet to take millions of images of the Earth every day, tracking the health of crops and coral reefs

and detecting things like oil spills and forest fires? It turns out you can learn a lot about how the Earth is changing simply by photographing it every day. Anyway, back when they launched Planet Labs in 2010, the three founders built their prototype satellites in a small garage in the Bay Area. They didn't have the money to work in a so-called clean room, a hermetically sealed lab without any dust or particle, so they made their own version using off-the-shelf items from Target. The company has come a long way since then. Today, it captures about 3 million images of the Earth a day.

And it's now simply known as Planet. It also just went public on the New York Stock Exchange, raising nearly $600 million in capital. But let's start at the beginning. Before Will Marshall and Robbie Schingler met in 2001, they were leading sort of parallel lives on different sides of the world. Will grew up in England and got a PhD in physics at Oxford. Robbie grew up in California and the Midwest. He also studied physics, and both he and Will spent time doing internships at NASA. The two of them finally met when they were both in their early 20s and attending a conference in Europe.

Yes, it was 2001 in Gratz in Austria, where it was a UN-organized conference on basically using space to help humanity. And it gathered some really amazing people. I met Robbie. I can't remember the exact moment, but we definitely got on well together at that forum. And you clicked right away, Robbie? What do you remember about Will at the time? I remember what I remember of Will is outgoing, gregarious and really a motivator for people. You know, he really would always, always dream big and get people to stretch out of their comfort zone. So I remember that when I first met him and it's so now true today than ever before. That is, again, one of his superpowers. Not only back the envelope maths, but also the ability to motivate

people. Yeah. And all right. So the two of you meet at this conference and what, what you just kind of kept in touch or what, like, what did you, because I know that you would begin to collaborate on different projects over the next few years, but at that conference, what were you talking about that you wanted to collaborate on? Yeah. So again, we have to remember this is 20 years ago. And we were, you know, in our early 20s. And for me, it was like meeting a tribe, right? People who saw the world in a similar way. And also all highly accomplished and highly motivated. So people wanted to work on projects. And at that time, we had email. Yes. And so we'd go back home, back to our schools or grad school. And so we would write papers together around space policy. So we would

actually do around the world editing. You know, everyone would have it for like eight hours at the and hand it off and go around in a week, you'd have a really, really good paper. And yeah, that was actually kind of the genesis, really, of our friendship and partnership was all about the art of creation. So is it fair to say to both of you, Will and Robbie, that at this time, you guys were sort of part of this group of young kind of researchers working for space agencies and space research agencies, part of this group of young emerging, you know, scientists, what have you, who were really wanted to see if you could have some kind of influence over policy eventually, right?

Is that fair to say that that's sort of how you saw yourselves? I wouldn't say quite the goal was policy. The goal was to have the effect on the world. We thought policy is one mechanism. I mean, another is, of course, just executing projects. I mean, I think it was more towards the vision of using space to help humanity. You know, we can see that space played a big part in the Cold War and in geopolitics. And it plays a big part in sustainability, monitoring the environment, plays a big part in commerce.

Yes, and so much of infrastructure of our modern interconnected economy flows through space. And a lot of people just don't know about that. Yeah, we all now have, you know, we know, no GPS. and location now. And it's just, that is just back-end infrastructure for society that we actually always expect to be there. And those all come from space.

And in fact, I mean, like, I don't know how deep you want to go into this stuff, but all of that started from a military application. And now has become a public good. I remember, I mean, in 2002, I remember going to Afghanistan as a reporter, and there were a few people who had those Garmin, like, handheld devices that could kind of geolocate you, but they were very

crude compared to what you see today on just our iPhones, and they were amazing. Yep. And that was 20 years ago, right? Like, we have to remember that that was not very far into the past. Crazy, yeah. And as Robbie was saying, the fact that you could navigate, I mean, the military had GPS back into the 70s or certainly by the 80s, and we're using it for guiding missiles, tanks, all this sort of stuff. They had a very smart forethought that this would be a global good and important economically. And of course, we certainly agree with that. And to Robby's point, a lot of these things started at the military vector. And a lot of our thrust was how can everyone else benefit from these things?

And again, back to that theme, how do we use space tools to help everyone on the planet? So, all right, you're both writing and collaborating on various papers about these types. things. And I guess in 2002, you got together at another space conference, but this one was in Houston. That's right. One of the fun things that happened that conference is we met Pete Warden. He's a good character introduced because he's relevant to our stories. So we've written one of these papers. One of them was basically about space weapons and keeping space from weaponization. And then in this bar in Houston where this conference was there, a mutual friend had introduced us to General Pete Warden,

who was basically running all the space weapon programs for the United States government in the Air Force. And we were like, what? And our friend was like, well, this is, you know, the people that think that space weapons are a bad idea. This is Pete Warren that runs the space weapon programs. Have a go. And we're in this evening.

We had this fascinating conversation about, you can't build space weapons. That's bad. that's economically doesn't make sense and it doesn't even work technically and we were writing equations out and why it can't work technically and then he was like oh you don't understand i've got to protect u.s assets from threats and you don't know what you're talking about da da da and we got increasingly drunk actually because he kept on buying his drinks and but the next day to his credit he wrote us an email and he said well i really enjoyed our conversation last night why don't we write

a paper together you guys write the cons and i'll write the proxie of space-based weapon systems. Well, roll forward a few more years. He moved from the Air Force to NASA to run NASA Ames Research Center, and he basically invited us to come work with him. And he was like, well, I know we disagree on this area, but this will be more about, obviously, science and exploration, and would love you to come and work for me out there.

So this guy, Pete Warden, we should mention. He was the director of the Ames Research Center, I think until, like, 2015 or something. He's kind of a legendary figure in that. world and he was also, it's interesting because I read a little bit about him. He was a real critic of NASA. Like he was a public critic of the NASA bureaucracy and stuff like that, right? A self-licking ice cream cone. Yeah. Self-licking ice cream cone. You were about NASA. Yeah, he was critical and he was also just very creative, but he was brought in to shake things

up a little bit. And one of his ways of shaking things up a little bit was inviting young whippersnappers like Robbie and I and others to come work for him. and alongside some of the more, let's say, institutional folks that have been there for a while. And let's see what comes out. So that was it. Like he was basically, he ran the Ames Research Center. I mean, it sounds a little bit like Park Xerox, you know, in the 70s, right? I mean, he was a guy who could say, hey, he liked you guys.

You challenged his thinking maybe or, you know. And he said, hey, why don't you come work for me at Ames Research Lab? And eventually, you guys both said, you both did. We jumped at the opportunity because he was. very much like we'll sort of give you a canvas to help you to build spacecraft missions. And we thought, wow, I mean, that's a really unique opportunity. And it was very practical. We wanted to not just write the policy paper.

We wanted to work on the system, whatever it was, to get that to become a reality. All right. So you guys get to the Ames Research Center in Mountain View. At this point, I mean, you guys have known each other now for five years. Now you're in the same place and you move in together, right? You get a house together. Yes, when we flew out to NASA Ames, we were looking to build a community house. We like living in a community, the further of intellectual conversations.

And in fact, we've got a bit of a reputation for being a place where creative ideas happened, especially again at this intersection of space and Silicon Valley. And we'll get to this later, but you still, both of you still live together in a community house. which I always called the group house, but I guess it's a little different. So help me understand this. There's nothing kind of different or unusual about like a group house, especially for young people trying to save money. But this is not what that was.

It sounds like you very deliberately had this idea of a bunch of colleagues who worked together at the Ames Research Center also living together to continue the conversation that they were having at work at home. That's right, as if we weren't, we weren't full enough during the day. Actually, but it wasn't just NASA people. We had students at Stanford, people that worked at Apple, people that worked at Google, all these places. And that created a fervor of intellectual dizziness that was always fun for us. So it was a mixture of sort of Silicon Valley and space in one house.

I had found it just on Craigslist. I just searched for a house with more than six bedrooms. and it was pretty much the only one in that area. All right. So you guys moved to the Bay Area. You're living in a group house in Cupertino, and Pete Warden is your boss. And what did you guys do?

What were you tasked to do? Help me understand. I mean, this is, not everybody understands space research can mean a million things. Like journalism can mean a million things, or finance can mean a million things. But what were you actually working on? We really wanted to, what we were working on bringing small. satellites to NASA. So, you know, Will and I and a bunch of other people work to set up a mission

design center, which is, you know, when you think about a new mission, what you can do with technology, the scientific utility, how to actually bring the team together, how much it's going to cost, how long it's going to take. That is the very beginnings of articulating what a new mission could be. So we worked to actually set that up with the insight that we wanted to do satellites that were much smaller. If they're smaller, they're cheaper. If they're cheaper, you can take more risk. If you can take more risk, and they're cheaper, then you can do more missions. If you can do more missions, then you diversify your risk. Then it increases the acceleration of knowledge. And so we work to systematize that, and we set up the small spacecraft office there. All right. So you were,

and what were you working on, Will? Well, the same setting up the small spacecraft office, but then Robbie and I worked on a few different missions. When you're working, for both of you, When you're working in a place like the Ames Research Center, obviously a NASA lab, is there just like unlimited money to play around with? Like is it pretty straightforward? Like, hey, I have this idea and there's just money available and not unlimited. But I mean, is there kind of a big sandbox to play in and funding for it? I would say money is really hard to come by. But what you do have at Ames in particular, which is, you know, one of a research center. So it's not a development center or not. or human spaceflight center, it's more of a research center. It's a really unique place. It's almost like being in a university as well as being in like a prototyping lab and capability kind of together. And so that's a perfect petri dish.

And I think that that's one of the reasons why Pete Wharton wanted a bit of a younger generation of people to come in is to, you know, we were blind to all of the constraints. because most constraints of a large organization is kind of like, you know, cultural and process oriented. So we were blind to all that stuff. And it allowed for us to just like take a first principles approach toward why don't we build it in this way. So we then came up with what would be like systemic projects, you know, projects that, you know, just get it done in 12 months or 24 months to then learn from that and then iterate and iterate. So then we can change how space systems are developed. And what is the art of the possible that could be done? And meanwhile, Will, you and another guy at NASA, whose name is Chris Boshausen,

you were working on this project called PhoneSat. What exactly were you guys trying to do? Yes, well, it's pretty much what it says on the cover. It was putting a phone into space. Putting a phone into space as a satellite. Pretty much. It was to throw some phones in space. We actually put three, and they were Google Nexus ones that we had got donated from Google. Not a big donation. They're like 250 bucks each. Yeah, well, they gave us a box of them, but still, I agree.

But that was important because it was the first operating system that was open source. And really the insight that the team had is, what's so different about a phone from a satellite? and turns out like the engineering processes, the capabilities internally, all of that stuff is very similar. Robbie is exactly right. If you look at the innards of a phone, it has GPS, it has cameras, it have radios, it has, and if you look at the list of things you need in a satellite, it's GPS and cameras and radios, and it's actually most of the same.

Remember, smartphones were very new. You know, it's only a few years after the iPhone had come out, And but before they were just these clunky phones. And now they suddenly had all these other things that were most of what a space graph needed. We had to add some extra batteries and a slightly bigger antenna for the radio in particular. But apart from that, we literally stuck the phone into a little box and put three into space. So actually, I think I almost got five for that project. Chris and I had started phone sets.

And we had a small team on it. but we got quite a long way before, if you like, the fish was at NASA knew it was happening. They were almost stuck on the rocket by the time they did. And then they're like, what the heck are you doing putting phones into space? And we're like, come on, it's going to be really interesting because we're going to figure out if you can make satellites even cheaper. And eventually they're, okay, fine, have a go.

And the phones worked just fine in space, and we had amateur radio astronomers around the world, get these little yaggy antennas, these little handheld antennas, to follow the satellite, the little pictures it had been taking with a phone camera, and email them to us, and then we reconstructed these pictures, and we're like, okay, it worked. All right, so this was a time where, I mean, the idea was, let's kind of dive into satellites for a sec, right? NASA obviously has the greatest space satellites in human history, right, that, you know, can look way out into the cosmos. but they're huge.

Anybody who's been to the Air and Space Museum or one of these museums where they've got decommissioned spaceships can see how big some of these satellites are. They're huge or expensive. They're not always totally reliable. So the idea was, hey, can we start to look at smaller satellites? It may not be as robust.

It may not be able to do the kinds of things that the Hubble can do. but could do pretty important things, like take images of the Earth. Was that the idea behind this NASA project? That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And especially leveraging the miniaturization of electronics for phones and computers, it was a revolution. And we were like, how can we, in the space community, leverage that revolution?

Historically, NASA had had to invent almost everything. its radios, its microprocessors for the Apollo program, and they developed all this stuff themselves. But now the billions and billions of dollars that would be going on in the consumer electronics industry by Apple and Samsung and Google and all these companies was far outpacing what NASA could spend on the development of electronics. And we were just like, okay, well, what have we learned to follow

and leverage this technology? A small phone sat like the one that we launched, couldn't do what Hubble does because it doesn't have a big telescope. Right, right. But they could do some things. They could take pictures at lower resolution and that might be still useful for something, especially because we could put a lot of them up there. Right, because there are obviously different kinds of satellites or communication satellites.

I mean, some people have watched direct TV or, you know, watch television through satellite. Yes. Sirius XM radio channel is a satellite beamed from satellites. Exactly right. And so when we briefly thought, when we were thinking, of leaving NASA to do this project. We were mainly thinking about humanitarian and commercial goals. We were thinking about communication satellites or Earth observation.

But when we looked, and this is back to how Robbie and I met, when we looked at what was then the Millennium Development Goals. These are the UN Millennium Development Goals, right? Yes, correct. Which was basically a summary of all the world's problems. We looked down that list and said, how can we, as space geeks, help the biggest challenges on the earth. It seemed to reason that if we could take more regular images of the earth, we could help

a lot of them. And it's really true, like we could help stop deforestation, help people grow smarter crops, so help with their food access. We could help after disaster response, after floods or fires. It was so many things that if we had more regular imagery of the earth, typically before our mission, you could only get a new image of the earth, maybe once every month or sometimes every year, depending on the resolution you needed. We thought, why couldn't it be every day?

And then that would be much more useful of disaster response. I'd have to wait for a month for the flooding information. How about have the day before and the day afterwards? But help me understand how working on this project would eventually kind of inspire you guys to go off and do this on your own. What was it that you saw in this technology and the possibility of it? that then led you to say, hey, we can actually do this and turn this into something bigger. It was very much a stars-aligned moment.

What we realized was we had learned a little bit about how to build spacecraft at NASA, and here was this list of all the world's problems. And if we put up a lot of these little satellites that would take pictures of the Earth, we could help a lot of those problems. It made most sense, especially we were in Silicon Valley, we're like, we could go fastest if we could just get private capital, and we had just enough skills to pull that off. The world needed it, and the technology was just about ready,

like from all these consumer electronic, to make it happen. And so we were like, oh my God, it wasn't just a, it wasn't, it didn't seem like an option to me at the time. It felt I was compelled because it was so obvious we should do this project. Everything lined up. When we come back in just a moment, how will Robbie and Chris start working on building a satellite the size of a breadbox? And then how they manage to get that tiny satellite into orbit. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the last day of 2010. And Will Robbie and another NASA scientist, Chris Bob, are getting together as they always do on New Year's Eve. And as they clink their champagne glasses, the three of them are also talking about starting a business to build and launch small satellites for taking pictures of the Earth. We were there and Chris was there, Will was there, and they're like, we're going to do this.

And so I could tell from Will and Chris there was that spark that the team knew they could do this and do this quickly. And it does require throwing out a bit of the traditional processes around building aerospace systems. And so it wasn't something that we could actually do within NASA. Why not? Well, if you, guy, you started talking about, you know, the Hubble, you know, it's the size of a school bus.

It is huge. These are exquisite systems. They are amazing systems. Like the microprocessor was really. scaled through aerospace capabilities, right? They had such hard problems to solve. They had to invent new technology. And just like any organization, when you become successful with a particular thing in the future, that could become an anchor for you, right? And so, great, that's your success. You make a system out of it. You have all these processes. And then you actually do a

requirements flow down. That's how you build engineering system. And that is how space systems are built at NASA. And what we wanted to do was to do it the other way around. Just do good enough and prototype it, learn from it, iterate. Yeah, so it was mainly we wanted more like the Silicon Valley, release early, release off and software strategy than the requirements-driven, very careful science project of NASA. Also, the application was more like how do we help farmers?

So that's a commercial application. How do we help disaster response? So that's a more humanitarian application. We wanted to help those things. Whereas NASA is really pretty much mandated to focus on science and exploration. This was about neither. Got it. Okay.

So you had this idea that in order to do what you wanted to do, you had to leave NASA. So what was the first step you took? it was the three of you, right? It was Will and Robbie, the two of you and Chris, and the three of you, what, sat down and said, hey, let's start a company together? Yeah, well, I guess we sort of slowly evolved over that next year. That was in 2010, just at the end of 2010, we were technically formed the company, incorporated the company. But we slowly started moving more and more time from NASA to what became planet. And Robbie and I were living in that group house called Rainbow. We literally started building it in the garage and then eventually left NASA. All right.

So now you guys decide to start a company. And it's going to be a company that will launch small photographic satellites into space. That's not the right term, not photographic satellites. We call them Earth observation satellites. Earth observation, you got it. Okay. Earth observation satellites. So building these things, by the way, just to build a prototype, right?

How much of that cost? I'm just curious. How much money did it cost you guys? Do you recollect Robbie? It was probably like on the order of like $10,000. 10,000 bucks. Okay, so between the three of you, you could probably pull some money together and make it happen because you had savings from your job. That's exactly what we did.

We each put in $50,000, I think. No, it wasn't that much. It was actually three different amounts. I can't remember. But it was it was upwards to $50,000. Because that's still a lot of money. Yeah, you're right. It was a lot for our, we were NASA type stipends.

You know, this was not, we were not working for Google. Right. So how did you guys have the cash? Well, we just saved up. I guess we didn't live exactly a luxurious lifestyle. I mean, we didn't have family. And we lived in a community house by choice. And I guess one of the first things you guys did was to build a prototype of what your satellite would look like.

I mean, you had some experience building things. So tell me about that prototype. We built a test one at Rainbow, this community house, in the garage. We added a camera system. Then we added all the other systems of radios and so on to make it a working satellite. Leveraging consumer electronics, not exactly a phone like we'd used in phone sat, but a lot of the same underlying chips. It's actually on our own boards.

And we would do tests of it, like radio tests across the whole of Silicon Valley, across to the Lick Observatory where we'd have some people go over there with a radio receiver, take them a couple of hours to drive there, we'd stay with the satellite, and then we'd test the radios, then we'd put the whole thing on a balloon and take it to 60,000 feet and really cold atmosphere and take the pictures and things like that. So a very iterative approach. All right. So you have, so you've got some savings that you throw into this company. and you've got a prototype. But then what do you do?

It's 2011. And, I mean, to get this off the ground, this is not like Tate's cookies that's been on the show or Stacey's Pita chips, like, you know, or kombucha. Like, you need millions and millions of dollars to start your company.

Help me explain what you then, once you have a prototype, what do you then do? You know, Will and I, as we were talking about, when we first went to NASA Ames, one of the first things we did was set up that mission design center to then design new missions and so forth. And all of this was was a new mission. And so we could understand how much money we think is going to cost, what the schedule looks like and all of this

stuff. But instead of asking for $100 million, right, in order to actually build out the whole thing or actually at that point in time, we thought $20 million would do it, we said, okay, let's just get a satellite in space and just take a picture. Just prove that one node can kind of work. All right, here's my question. Why did you need to prove this concept if you had already essentially tested it when you worked for NASA? PhoneSAT didn't take exquisite imagery. Remember, it's just a phone camera floating around in orbit. To take quality imagery, we were really going to have to add a telescope.

That was a really high-quality telescope to take pictures. We were going to have to add a high-resolution camera. You know, I mentioned our mission. It was the whole Earth that was designed because we were really high-quality telescope. wanted to be able to see a tree because we thought we can't stop deforestation if you don't see all the trees every day and see one being knocked down. And so we didn't know for sure we could see that tree from space. The physics said it should be possible but it wasn't completely obvious and we had to design a telescope out of a material that wouldn't expand and contract with temperature.

Otherwise the camera would go out of focus. So we had to really put it in space because that's the only way you can really test it ultimately is it going to work. So just to be clear, the idea was let's test the concept, let's get our prototype up into space. It sounds straightforward, but you've got to get into space. Yes. How much does it cost to put something on a rocket ship into space? At that point in time, there was the ability to hitch a ride to space as not the primary payload, but as secondary payload. That is what we used to first get to space.

All right. So you could hitch a ride for this small satellite on a rocket that was already going up with other cargo. And I guess I should point out, there's like a whole industry that offers these kinds of services. And I guess you guys ended up working with two companies to get your satellites launched. There was an American company and then a Russian company you worked with. And how much was this going to cost you? Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think it was $300,000 for the first one. It was about that for the second one, and we decided we'd best to put one satellite on each of two rockets to give a bit of redundancy. And by the way, these satellites weighed, what, five, ten pounds? Five kilograms, which is about ten pounds, yes. Just the size of a loaf of bread.

Got it. Okay. So you sign up to get your satellites onto a rocket. But just to be clear, it's not like, you know, our arrival in departure times are 98%, you know, that, like, If you're booking a date on a rocket, it's not likely it's going to go out on that date, right? That's exactly right. And the primary reason is because the thing that the rocket is delivering, they set the schedule. So if they are late in building their satellite or there's an anomaly that comes up and they need to spend more time testing something, they'll push out that launch date.

us as a hitchhiking like ride secondary payload we are committed to that rocket whenever it ends up going so all right now that you had space on a rocket what and you knew that it was going to happen this is 2011 when you signed this deal did you were you now able to go out and raise money

because it was still going to be another what presumably year before you could launch this proof of concept we had to raise a little bit to do these first couple of missions. So we decided to do the first two satellites. We worked out that we'd need two or three million dollars, but we didn't have all the capital to pay for those rocket rides in full. So let me rewind just a tiny bit on one of the tests of FONSAT, the satellite project that we were working at NASA. We met someone there who was quite unassuming there called Steve Jervison, who was a venture capitalist, actually became the main funder of,

of Tesla and SpaceX. And we met him because he likes launching rockets on the weekend. And we were doing our NASA rocket. And he was doing his personal rocket. And we took our test satellite. And around November 2011, we plonked it on his desk. And we told him the plan. We said we're going to put a hundred of these into space and they're going to image the whole world.

And it's going to have all these commercial opportunities. And it's going to have all this impact. on the planet, will you give us some money? We also attracted a couple of other investors, and then we had our first money in December 2011. When you pitched the idea to investors, I understand that, you know, that you had idealistic motivations, which, you know, many entrepreneurs have, and that certainly continues, but you still have to appeal to people who want to make money. And so what was the, how did you explain to investors that they would make a return on that investment? Like, how, how are you guys going to make money for them? We actually had quite a

clear view about this that it was obvious that this data had value to people to help improve crops for farmers, to help Google get better maps, to help governments do but disaster response. There was obvious value in it. I mean, Remember that if you went back and asked Google what their business plan was, they didn't have an extensive business plan. What they realized was that search would really help the world, and that had value, and there was probably a way to monetize it. Similarly here, like the venture capitalists didn't have to believe that there was value.

They just had to believe that we were going to be smart enough to then harness that somehow. How much money did you raise in that first year, by the way? Yeah, 3.2 million. We ended up having 200K. We also had friends and family came in a little bit. So with that money, did you begin to staff up? Yeah, that's when we actually decided to move to San Francisco and rent our first office. You know, we were in the garage until then.

And, yeah, we definitely started expanding staff and hiring people more formally and all the rest of it. And started building these satellites. And I guess eventually you had to set up like a kind of a clean room to build the satellites, a room with like no dust and no contamination at all, right? Like it's beyond sterile. It's like crazy super sterile. That's exactly right. Yeah. And it allows for you to really control the, especially if you have sensors, you don't want dust on it or any of that type of stuff. So it keeps it so it's almost like it's in space again, you know, before it goes up in a space. So it's actually really, really ready to be in space. Because once you get up there, you can't really wipe off the lens, right?

It has to be totally perfectly clean. You can remember a lens cleaner up in space. That lens has to be so clean and that's it. That's right. If you launch with that spec on the lens, it's going to be there forever more. Actually, in many ways, though, this is one of the areas where we tore down some of the rulebook. I mean, for example, at Planet, we have what we call clean enough rooms. And, you know, it turns out that you can have it slightly less clean.

and it's much, much less expensive. Absolutely. So I believe it was less than $100, which was a deployable greenhouse that was bought at Target. Then it had some hepa filters. So a lot of people have this right now because of fires and because of COVID and so forth. But those hepa filters were able to then filter out the air, then push the clean air down. So it was just clean enough. in order to test out the entire thing.

I could tell you that now we have much better clean rooms because it is worth investing in it when we know that it does work. But at the very beginning, we really just needed a picture from space. Yeah. And just before you go to the launch, you can blow off the optics with a little airbrush and get almost the same, but having spent millions and millions less on those processes.

And it's just one example of many of how we've changed. the way we do it. And mainly it's about a risk approach, which is just assuming more risk per satellite. Okay, that one satellite has slightly more chance of having a dust on it. But we're going to put more satellites up than we need. And if a couple have that, it's not the end of the world, because we're going to put up a hundred or more. It's something we can live with. Whereas if you made Hubble Space Telescope wrong, and of course initially it was launched with a slight error in its optics and was blurred, then you really got to fix it because that one. It turns out you can go in space and wipe off the dust.

That's a very expensive way of doing business. Okay, so you've been working and basically building all these small satellites. And then I guess around April 2013, it's launch time. And you've booked one satellite on an American rocket and one on a Russian rocket, right? Yeah. We had planned them to be six months apart so that we could take the results from the first one. And if something went wrong, iterate the satellite. and try and fix that before the second one,

except because you can't control the launch date, they ended up launching just days apart. And in fact, the two satellites got deployed within 48 hours of one another. And we were like, what is the chances of that? And then it was suddenly a scramble to try and connect with both of them as they popped out of the rocket.

And it's really critical time when the satellite pops out. We need to be action stations, you know, manning the ground stations, in the mission control and making sure the thing works. How quickly before you guys knew that the satellites were working? With one of them, it was within an hour. In fact, we got telemetry format, a health packet basically saying, hey, I'm alive, I'm doing okay.

And that was already huge relief. And then within a few hours of that, I want to say even just two. The next one flew over that had been launched from a different continent. and also made contact. So what was the first, I mean, what were the first images that you were getting? Funnily enough, the first image that we got was a forested region in Oregon. And, you know, the original idea was to count every tree in the planet. And sure enough, that was our first picture.

I was asleep when we got our first picture in. And Robbie, didn't you come and wake me up with the picture? I seem to remember, like 4 a.m. or something. say, here it is. And we were just like in awe. Because we could see that a picture was in focus, taking a picture of this forested area. We could see individual trees.

We couldn't believe it. I mean, we were in tears. And we were like, oh my God, we've done it. Like we can do this. We can do this. When we come back in just a moment, how that one photo of a forest in Oregon led to many millions more.

Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2013, and Chris, Robbie, and Will have finally proven that they can take a photo from space, which allows them to go to more investors and say, see, we actually know how to do this. Now we had a picture. We could say, like, we can definitely do it. It's just a message. of scaling this now and of course building a business around it when we left NASA we said we were going to image the whole earth every day we had the team as probably said that could pull this off technically and in that year we got much bigger funding around from led by Yuri Milner and he gave us a check

for I think 30 or 50 million and that was a much more significant adventure from there so just roughly how much does each does it cost does each satellite cost to make. It's about 300k or just slightly less than that, 2 or 300k. It's nothing. I mean, compared to a NASA satellite. Yeah, most NASA satellites average, average about a billion. A billion dollars. Yes, so we're talking about a thousand times to 10,000 times lower cost than a typical satellite. That is why we've launched all of the now 460 or something satellites that

we've launched on 33 rocket for less than the cost. of a typical satellite, a lot less actually still. And one of the things that I've read about your company, which I think is actually pretty amazing, is you know that there's always a possibility that a launch is going to fail. Because there's so much fuel, there's so many moving parts in a rocket launch

that it could just explode. And you're okay with that because your satellites are so cheap that you could take the risk that, you know, if one of these rocket launches fails, it's okay because another one will be okay and, you know, that's the price of doing business. We have been on 33 different rockets and three of them have failed. But it's not a billion dollar loss for you. It's a couple million. Exactly right. It's a bad day. It's a bad week, you know, but it's not catastrophic for our mission and for our business.

And that is by design. I mean, I know that you've kind of solved the problem of cheap satellites and they'll get cheaper and cheaper. obviously as time goes on. But is there a way to solve the problem of expensive rocket launches? Can you make, is it possible to make rocket launches cheaper? Yes, it is our biggest expense. So it was. Now it's actually people, but it's our biggest capital expense. The rockets have in fact got cheaper. Just the last five or so years, they've gone down about fourfold. And mainly because of SpaceX. SpaceX with its reusable rockets has brought the price down, which is really quite a big deal. But I would say,

One thing that people often miss that is actually even more radical is that the capability performance of satellites, the cost per kilogram, the cost per given capability has gone up about a thousandfold in that same period. That sort of change of a thousand X in five or ten years is very unusual in history. Even the Model T Ford when it first came out was two to three times lower cost than the lowest cost. car at that time and people were like that's a revolution but we are talking a thousand X that a closer analogy for this is not model T forward but the transition from the mainframe computers to desktop computers big companies would have one or two computers right how countries would have one computer and it was the size of a factory and now with with desktop computers

suddenly everyone could use them for lots of more purposes space is undergoing a revolutionary shift right now. And that is leading to all these changes. What in particular, the biggest upshot is that revolution in data that helps us to take care of the Earth. All right. So we are in the midst of a not only a planetary crisis, a mass extinction. We know that. And you both live in California and you have a front of a seat to some of what's happening. Yep. So how, I mean, I understand how that the existing data can help us track some of these things. But when you talk about making an impact in an even bigger way, what do you imagine?

Is it more people using your data and then making policy decisions based around it? Yeah, well, let me just give you a concrete example. Recently, we had the Dixie fire here in California. And the county of Pluma said, hey, can we use your data? We want to track where is the fire? So I think it's the biggest fire in California history. Biggest fire in California history. And they said, where is the front of the fire?

Where is the smoke blowing? We could give them that data. And then they use that to decide where to put people for the firefighters. Also, straight after that, they were like, my God, can we just have all of that data all the time so that we can actually look where might the next fire come? But this data is relevant for day-to-day decision-making across the globe. That's exactly right. Based on everything we can forecast out today, we believe that this is really going to help us take care of our planet. And you cannot manage what you don't measure. Okay. So you're talking about the planet and crisis and the need for more data and information. And meanwhile, by the time this episode is released, you guys will have literally gone public on the New York Stock Exchange. And I wonder what the thinking behind that was.

I mean, one reason obviously is to bring in more cash, which clearly you'll do. And the other is to make a return for the investors. Well, I guess those are the two main reasons, right? Yeah. Well, there is a little bit of that, but it's mainly something else. So we always intended Planet to be a standalone company. Planet is now ready. We did just over $100 million in revenue last year.

and that's a mature business at some level. I mean, I always think, you know, our grandkids will be asking, how did humans take care of the earth before you had regular images of it so that you knew what effect you were having and where was the deforestation, where are the illegal fishing, where is the, how is the harvest doing on that crop field, etc., etc. Before you had that, how did you even know what to do? It's a bit like, like, how did you meet up before you had cell phones? And you had to meet all these more complex plans.

Now we have that data that can help us to take care of the earth. And as Robbie is saying, you can't manage it if you don't measure it. So here's what I'm wondering about, right? And I can't be the first person to ask you about this. I suspect that there are safeguards built into what you do. But what I'm worrying about is, I mean, this technology is amazing, right? Which you made available to companies and businesses and governments and so on. But I can't imagine that it couldn't be used in ways that are not wonderful and bright and sunny and optimistic.

Like I know you talk about, you've talked about how you could track, you know, environmental degradation and, you know, humanitarian disasters and refugee movements. But you also track for military intelligence purposes like looking at missile installations or the location of airplanes and subs and the movement of people across borders and, and the movement of people across borders. and things like that. And I could also imagine it could be used easily by governments looking to quash dissidents and people who are trying to promote human rights. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, we probably both have a lot to say on this,

but Robbie and I have been thinking about this for decades. And the reason we had called our satellites' doves was partly a little poke at the military that would call their satellites birds, but birds of prey. And we were like, no, they're on a peaceful mission. We actually have a very particular thesis about this. The more information different countries have about each other's activities, including military activities, the more it's likely to be peace.

And historically, it was when governments didn't know what each other were doing, that it led to tension. So, for example, when the US put missiles in Turkey and the Russians didn't know, the Cold War. It almost led to a war. So actually, we lean in to the security side. We work with governments and security agencies, military organizations, even. And we think it's the right thing because we think it reduces tension. As long as we focus on one principle, which is, don't give that data exclusively. Would you give it to ISIS or Al-Qaeda? No, it's banned. That's a great question. And we have two checks. One is that we don't give it to any.

any known organization on these embargoed lists. That's both countries like North Korea, or terrorist organizations or individuals. And then, in addition, we have our own ethics committee that reviews every case with the government and checks. Is there some way in which this might bring civilian harm? And we have many cases refused to give data where we think that would be the case. We had an ethics team internally before we launched our first satellite.

And I anticipate over the coming years, it will get more sophisticated as we have orders of magnitude more users and need to really think about and be responsible for the unintended consequences of this level of transparency and this level of data on society. This is an important point because oftentimes on the show I talk about, we hear from companies talk about mission. And most companies have a mission, right? You have to have a mission to motivate people and for people to feel connected to what you do.

But mission has to be baked in, it doesn't mean mission can change, but it has to be baked into the company from day one. And I think this idea of baking in an ethics team from day one is absolutely crucial, right? I mean, I'm assuming that's how you thought about it. Absolutely. So Andrew Zolli, who's our chief impact officer, you know, he says that like regulations tell you what the law requires. Yes. And ethics tell you what your fact. values require.

Yes. And ethics is really more of a process. So anytime there's a crisis, if you bring out your ethical framework, then you can follow a predetermined process that allows for you to look at it from different perspectives to then make a better decision. You know, most of the companies that we profile on the show produce consumer products, they, they tend to hit profitability, you know, within four or five years. We profiled Moderna recently, and obviously that company took 10 years, right, before they became profitable. I think they spent $4 billion. What you do is very capital intensive. It requires a lot of money to get satellites up into space and to process all the data.

I think your satellites produce like 15 terabytes of data a day, right? It's about double that. Double it. It's just a lot of Google drives. and so you are not profitable. You haven't, you're not, but is there a path to profitability, a clear path to profitability? Yes, it's absolutely clear. We already have very clear users in at least for markets in agriculture where big companies buy our data.

That's the biggest market we have. We also serve as governments and then we help with defense and intelligence customers. where we help them to see new threats around the corner. And then we also help companies like Google improve maps. So we supply data to Google for their maps. They do huge numbers of requests to our satellite to update the maps online so that it stays up to date so your directions are up to date.

Those are four use cases that are already working very well. They're growing very fast. And so we have a very clear line of sight now on a growth path. We're going to be just over 40% a year for the next five years we project. And that gets us to profitability in the next couple of years. I know we touched on this earlier. You guys had originally moved into a community house or group house for more than 15 years. And I think both of you are in your 40s.

I think either one of you, both of you have partners in your lives. You still live in a house together with other people. Like, no judgment at all. Like, I'm super introverted. I don't like to live around other people except my family. But can you explain this why you guys choose to live this way now at this point in your lives? Well, personally, I love it. We live a house with 15 people.

Wow. We have fascinating discussions about technology and society, philosophy. It sounds stressful. Always discussions all the time around the house? I just want to put on my slippers and watch Ted Lasso. Well, it is big enough, it is a big enough house where there are nooks and crannies for you to actually breed if you want. want to or to, you know, be more social. But what I love about it is people are passionate.

They are conscious, turned on. And I really do enjoy having that environment where you can push one another. I'm thinking of like the real world on MTV. Like, did you ever have to kick anybody out like they kicked out puck from the real world? I don't know what that is, but people listening will know. So we communicate. We communicate through conflict. and, you know, we have values in shared agreements, and people have moved out.

They choose to leave. And some of them have been more difficult conversations than others. Yeah, I bet. I bet. So when you think about, you know, how far, you know, where you are now and what you have up in space and what you're able to do, how much do you think that, you know, that it has to do. and we're just kind of reflecting on your journey to get here, which is why I ask this question, because some people think I'm asking,

by the way, some people think I ask this question, and I think you know the question I'm going to ask, because they want a binary answer, like, oh, it's luck, oh, it's skill. It's 72% luck, and, you know, 37.8% skill, whatever. It's really a question that is designed to be reflective, you know, where you've been and where you've arrived to. How much do you think that has to do with how, you got and how much do you think it has to do with how hard you worked and how smart you were and

all that stuff uh will gosh i mean it's not a this simple question to answer but it was definitely right place right time i mentioned how when we left nassar to star planet it was a very much a stars aligned moment it was just like what we have to do this but i would say persistence is the biggest thing that comes through it's not quite either of what you just said it was it's persistence and endurance You have to keep going. Yeah, there is a drive and a motivation in the art of creation. You've got to love it, right? You have to be okay not knowing and being on that edge

and right into that edge of being like comfortable and overstretched. I always find that that's where the most creative things come from. And as well said, like, you get a lot of things wrong, you know, and as long as you learn from it, you have a safe space to allow for people to actually learn from it, then that collective knowledge is actually internalized by the team. and then you take the next step again. That's Robbie Schingler and Will Marshall, co-founders of Planet.

Their satellites last about two to three years before they basically disintegrate, which is why. Even though Planet has launched more than 400 of these satellites, they only have about 200 circulating the Earth right now. Still, that's the largest fleet of Earth imaging satellites in history. And by the way, one of the coolest things their satellites recently detected, a fleet of World War II ships that slowly washed ashore in Japan. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you can always have the latest episode downloaded.

If you want to contact us, our email address is hibt at npr.org. And if you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at How I Built This, and mine is at Guyron. Our Instagram is at How I Built This NPR, and mine is at guy.org. This episode was produced by Liz Metzker with music composed by Ramtin Arablui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Claire Murashima. Our production staff also includes Casey Herman, Farah Safari, J.C. Howard, Julia Carney, Carrie Thompson, Elaine Coates, and Harrison V.J. Choi. Our intern is Catherine Seifer.

Jeff Rogers is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. This is NPR.