Speaker 1: Pushkin. I'm looking right now at the Google Maps satellite
Speaker 1: image of my block, of my house and the houses
Speaker 1: next to my house, and I can tell from looking
Speaker 1: at the picture that it is at least a year
Speaker 1: or so old. I know this because last summer, my
Speaker 1: kids and I watched as our next door neighbors had
Speaker 1: the time of their lives in their brand new above
Speaker 1: ground pool, and in this satellite picture on Google Maps,
Speaker 1: there is no pool. This is fine. I don't need
Speaker 1: to look at Google Maps to know that my neighbors
Speaker 1: are living their best lives now, and I perhaps am not.
Speaker 1: But there are other instances, other use cases, if you will,
Speaker 1: when you might want satellite images that are updated more
Speaker 1: frequently than every year or so. For example, if you
Speaker 1: were a hedge fund who wanted to know how many
Speaker 1: cars were in the parking lot of every home depot
Speaker 1: in America last weekend, or an NGO monitoring deforestation in
Speaker 1: the Amazon, or a government that wanted to see if
Speaker 1: foreign troops were massing near your border. If you were
Speaker 1: any of those things, you might want satellite images that
Speaker 1: are updated much more frequently than once a year. You
Speaker 1: might even want a new picture from space every single day.
Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the
Speaker 1: show where I talked to entrepreneurs and engineers about how
Speaker 1: they're going to change the world once they solve a
Speaker 1: few problems. My guest today is Will Marshall, the co
Speaker 1: founder and CEO of Planet. Planet is a private company
Speaker 1: and they own a fleet of over two hundred satellites
Speaker 1: that takes a picture of the entire Earth every day.
Speaker 1: Will's current problem how to turn a daily picture of
Speaker 1: the Earth into useful information. Will started his career as
Speaker 1: an engineer at NASA, and while he was there in
Speaker 1: a colleague came up with the idea for Planet. But
Speaker 1: to get started, they faced a simple, massive problem. Satellites
Speaker 1: were way, way, way too expensive, about a billion dollars
Speaker 1: per satellite, and they knew they'd never be able to
Speaker 1: get a whole fleet of satellites into space at that price.
Speaker 1: So they asked themselves a question, what's something that is
Speaker 1: a lot like a satellite, but much cheaper. We had
Speaker 1: looked at a phone and said, well, that's got most
Speaker 1: of the ingredients of a satellite. If you look at
Speaker 1: a smartphone, it has GPS telling you where you are,
Speaker 1: It has cameras, It has hard drives, it has accelerometers,
Speaker 1: It has rate gyros that used for gaming, so people
Speaker 1: know when they're tipping the thing. Actually, that's kind of
Speaker 1: handy for spacecraft. The only thing it doesn't have that
Speaker 1: spacecraft has is continuous power supply. It has a battery, right,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't have the ability to power itself. So
Speaker 1: and it doesn't have a bright enough radio if you like.
Speaker 1: It's it's radio is the most short range, whereas we
Speaker 1: need a more substantive radio. But it has a lot
Speaker 1: of ingredients. But also it doesn't cost a billion dollars
Speaker 1: on the plus, well that's the other thing. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: because maybe because five hundred dollars not five hundred million dollars.
Speaker 1: And so we thought it would be cunning to throw
Speaker 1: some of these phones in space and see what happened
Speaker 1: to them. And we did. This is when we're as
Speaker 1: you like, put it in a box with the solar
Speaker 1: panel and a stronger radio, yeah exactly, binger, and then
Speaker 1: put it into space. They were tumbling around and they
Speaker 1: took a few pictures of the Earth with the cameras
Speaker 1: on the phone, just with their regular smartphone here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then we had amateur radio observers pick up the
Speaker 1: signals from these, they're like texting the selfie of the
Speaker 1: Earth batter Yes, And then we recompiled all the bits
Speaker 1: of the pictures into a picture of the Earth. And
Speaker 1: then then we were like, oh, okay and dipso did
Speaker 1: it work? Yes, it worked. The phones worked just fine
Speaker 1: in space. We flew three of them, three Google Nexus ones,
Speaker 1: because they were easier to hack at than the iPhone.
Speaker 1: And that was when we decided, okay, we could do
Speaker 1: this very differently, but it's probably makes more sense as
Speaker 1: a private company because NASA set about doing exploration and science,
Speaker 1: but this was more applied. This is more about commercial
Speaker 1: benefits or humanitarian benefits or it's very applied in nature.
Speaker 1: And so we thought we could do it a little
Speaker 1: bit faster outside of NASA. So we left NASA to
Speaker 1: do this project of setting out this goal of launching
Speaker 1: about one hundred satellites to image the whole Earth every
Speaker 1: single day. So you leave NASA at this moment when
Speaker 1: a satellite costs a billion dollars, so you need something
Speaker 1: between a five hundred dollars smartphone and a billion dollars satellite, right,
Speaker 1: So what is the thing you've got to build, like
Speaker 1: more or less, how much does it have to cost?
Speaker 1: How cheap do you have to be able to make
Speaker 1: a satellite when you set out for it to work,
Speaker 1: we thought that we could do it of order a
Speaker 1: couple of hundred thousand dollars per satellite, and so to
Speaker 1: get from a billion to three hundred thousand all the
Speaker 1: way down, Like, can you just tell me maybe one
Speaker 1: problem you solved, like one thing you had to figure out? Obviously,
Speaker 1: I'm sure you had to figure out a thousand things,
Speaker 1: a billion things to save a billion dollars, but like,
Speaker 1: what's one little problem you solved on their way? One
Speaker 1: is radios. So the smallest radio that would work in
Speaker 1: the frequency band that is designated for satellites to do
Speaker 1: Earth imaging costs more than a million dollars I think
Speaker 1: a few million dollars and was bigger than our entire
Speaker 1: satellite is meant to be. And we were like, well,
Speaker 1: damn it, that's not going to work because most of
Speaker 1: the satellite needs to be our telescope. We need to
Speaker 1: scram it into a little motherboard and have a little
Speaker 1: antenna on the side. And by the way, that that
Speaker 1: system would only produce about a few megabits a second,
Speaker 1: and we needed gigabits a second, so it was not
Speaker 1: only too expensive and too massive, it didn't even do
Speaker 1: the job. And so we built our own radios from scratch,
Speaker 1: designed these antenna that was based on pieces of wire,
Speaker 1: but their machine learning designs so that they even though
Speaker 1: it's just like a paper clip, almost we now get
Speaker 1: it's the perfect paper clip. Yes, it's a perfect dedesigned
Speaker 1: paper clip. And we can now get one point eight
Speaker 1: gigabits a second over a thousand kilometer arrange, which is
Speaker 1: unheard of. And how much does it cost? How much
Speaker 1: does it cost of order a thousand dollars thousand dollars
Speaker 1: instead of a million, Yeah, exactly. You know, we didn't
Speaker 1: take space grade components. We took components that we knew
Speaker 1: of work in a vacuum and tried them and had
Speaker 1: instead of trying to put all our energies into one spacecraft,
Speaker 1: we would build lots of them and if one or
Speaker 1: two spacecraft die, it's not the end of the world either.
Speaker 1: So by doing that it enabled us to leverage the
Speaker 1: latest technologies. Because if you don't care so much, if
Speaker 1: it's for sure going to work. You know, you just
Speaker 1: want it to be like eighty percent probable of working
Speaker 1: or ninety percent probable of working. You can take bigger risk,
Speaker 1: which actually means you can more use more latest gadgets tree. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's a bigger idea. So by using cheaper components,
Speaker 1: it's okay if they fail, because you're launching one hundred
Speaker 1: satellites and if ninety five of them naked, that's just fun.
Speaker 1: That's just fine. And let me give you a concrete
Speaker 1: example of the last launch we did just a few
Speaker 1: weeks ago on a SpaceX rocket. We launched forty four
Speaker 1: satellites and one of them hasn't worked, and we barely
Speaker 1: you know, blinked as an organization, you know it was.
Speaker 1: In fact, that's part of the place they're they're built
Speaker 1: to fail. What how is there some amount of time
Speaker 1: like you expect ten percent failure rate or five percent
Speaker 1: or do you have that sort of penciled down? You know,
Speaker 1: I've I've asked the team to shoot for more like
Speaker 1: ten percent or twenty percent failure rate, but we've never
Speaker 1: achieved that. We've always been much lower. You need to
Speaker 1: take more risks, you need to make the right or
Speaker 1: whatever right, right, right right. That's really just that we're
Speaker 1: being too conservative. So you build the satellites. It works.
Speaker 1: You got your cheap satellites. Now you got to get
Speaker 1: them to space. Yes, correct. We call it piggybacking, piggyback payloads.
Speaker 1: So obviously there's a big satellite paying for most of
Speaker 1: the cust of the bucket, and we say, well, there's
Speaker 1: a little bit of space there, can we shove a
Speaker 1: few satellites in. It's like we're hitchhikers. So it's like
Speaker 1: we're going to the Florida and we're sticking up our
Speaker 1: thumb and saying, hey, can we can we come up
Speaker 1: with you guys? Well, and your satellites are in fact small, right,
Speaker 1: just like yeah, very small. Tell me what one looks like.
Speaker 1: It is about the size of a loafer bread is
Speaker 1: ten by ten by thirty centimeters. It weighs about five kilograms,
Speaker 1: So it's so tiny for a satellite, tiny, smaller than
Speaker 1: anybody would think of a satellite being absolutely, you can
Speaker 1: take them on our hand luggage. In fact, that's how
Speaker 1: we did get them to the launch site. Early on.
Speaker 1: You checked them on the you carried out, just carried
Speaker 1: them on a carry on luggage. Yeah, you put them
Speaker 1: in the overhead or just put them in the overhead.
Speaker 1: I mean we wrap them up a bit and stuff,
Speaker 1: and we have to tell you really have carried them
Speaker 1: on the plane. Oh yeah, yeah to the launch site. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I mean in a sense like the satellites are cool,
Speaker 1: but you're a data business, right, Your business is not
Speaker 1: really launching satellites. It's selling data and specific So you
Speaker 1: take a picture of the whole earth every day. Who
Speaker 1: do you sell it to? What do you do with it?
Speaker 1: So the biggest one is agriculture, the one I just mentioned,
Speaker 1: and we help them improve efficiency by twenty or forty percent,
Speaker 1: decrease use of fertilizer, similar sort of amounts. So that's
Speaker 1: a big deal for big industry like that forestry. We
Speaker 1: work with mapping like Google, help improve the maps, civil
Speaker 1: government with disaster response, so floods, fires, earthquakes. We help
Speaker 1: countries monitor marine protected areas and coral reef zones and
Speaker 1: make sure that there's not illegal fishing. Insurance, hedge funds.
Speaker 1: Spying comes to mind, like our intelligence agencies clients of yours,
Speaker 1: Yes they are, but we take a super important principle
Speaker 1: which is why I think it's different than the classical
Speaker 1: way the earth imaging can be used in this arena,
Speaker 1: which is non exclusivity. We can provide that data because
Speaker 1: we scan automatically. We are not mainly just taking task
Speaker 1: for a specific location for a specific customer, say the CIA.
Speaker 1: You know, we are scanning the whole earth, and if
Speaker 1: they want to buy it, that's okay. But other people
Speaker 1: could also buy the same thing, and that's really important.
Speaker 1: Let me ask you about privacy though, is there a
Speaker 1: creepy version of your company? Not that you're that version,
Speaker 1: but like, do you know what I'm saying? Basically, the
Speaker 1: answer is, we don't really get into personal privacy. And
Speaker 1: here's why. With five hundred kilometers up. That's like me
Speaker 1: in San Francisco pointing my camera at Los Angeles and
Speaker 1: expecting to see personal details. It turns out you can't.
Speaker 1: You're too far away that pixel size. Maybe that will
Speaker 1: go in half in time, you know, but you're still
Speaker 1: not going to be identify a person. You know, even
Speaker 1: if it goes in ten x, you still won't be
Speaker 1: able to identify a person. So we're a very long
Speaker 1: way from being able to do anything like that. After
Speaker 1: the break Will's next big problem? How do you turn
Speaker 1: a picture of the earth into useful, actionable information. That's
Speaker 1: the end of the ads. Now we're going back to
Speaker 1: the show. So I want to talk about some of
Speaker 1: the problems you haven't figured out how to solve yet,
Speaker 1: and I think in particular with the data business. Right,
Speaker 1: I mean, it seems like that's really the sort of
Speaker 1: frontier for you. Right. You have these pictures every day
Speaker 1: of the earth, and it's sort of how do you
Speaker 1: make them useful? Right? So what is something? Yeah, what's
Speaker 1: a problem you haven't solved in that part of your business? Well? Many,
Speaker 1: because the use cases are many, And you're right, a picture,
Speaker 1: it can be useful, but most people, most of the
Speaker 1: time want more than a picture. That agriculture of farmer
Speaker 1: actually doesn't want the picture. They might look at it,
Speaker 1: they know what their field look, but they more want
Speaker 1: where do I should I add fertilizers? Where should I order?
Speaker 1: The civil government doesn't want to have pictures. They want
Speaker 1: to know where other roads that are still working after
Speaker 1: the flood or the bridges down after the you know,
Speaker 1: a hurricane or whatever said that they can send in
Speaker 1: the relief supplies. So they want more detailed information that
Speaker 1: it's in principle in those images, but you have to
Speaker 1: extract out. So the big project across all of these
Speaker 1: things that we're doing is something that I call queriable Earth.
Speaker 1: Queriable like searchable, like a search query, searchable earth shot.
Speaker 1: And the reason I think about it the way about this.
Speaker 1: Google indexed what's on the Internet and made it searchable. Right.
Speaker 1: It made a database of where all the pages are,
Speaker 1: what contents are where, so that when you type in whatever,
Speaker 1: you get an answer that's relevant. We have the ability
Speaker 1: with the machine learning. The same tools that pick out
Speaker 1: cats and dogs from pictures that you post online and
Speaker 1: can pull that out is the same too. We can
Speaker 1: use to put out this is a tree, this is
Speaker 1: a road, this is a house, this is a building,
Speaker 1: this is a ship. There's a plane out of our images.
Speaker 1: So we call it object identification using computer vision or
Speaker 1: machine learning or artificial intelligence is the broadest category. Then
Speaker 1: you can imagine that the interface to our data becomes
Speaker 1: less and less the imagery of the earth and more
Speaker 1: and more a little search box and you can put in, hey,
Speaker 1: how many roads are there in India? Give me a
Speaker 1: plot of that, versus time, tell me where the deforestation
Speaker 1: is between this month and last month in the Congo
Speaker 1: basin or the Amazon. The kind of data that you
Speaker 1: should be able to pull out and I call it yeah,
Speaker 1: queriabile Earth. So that's the dream. That's the problem. It's
Speaker 1: a big problem. I mean, it's fundamentally an AI machine
Speaker 1: learning problem. Like, are you guys? Do you guys have
Speaker 1: to solve that AI machine learning problem? Is it sort
Speaker 1: of the frontier of machine learning and really turning images
Speaker 1: into the data right or at least into language? I mean,
Speaker 1: what has to happen? How do you solve that problem? Well,
Speaker 1: luckily computer vision has come a long way and we
Speaker 1: don't have to solve it all ourselves. We are doing
Speaker 1: some of that machine learning ourselves, but we also work
Speaker 1: with partners, especially because a lot of it's bespoke to
Speaker 1: different regions, to different problems, statements. So we have done
Speaker 1: some core things that we think a lot of people
Speaker 1: are interested in, roads, building ships, planes, there's a number
Speaker 1: more who are we going after? And just to be clear,
Speaker 1: can anybody who wants to just go to your website
Speaker 1: and search whatever how many roads are there in Michigan? No, No,
Speaker 1: you can't. Actually you can sign on a trial account
Speaker 1: and you can get some of these capabilities, but generally
Speaker 1: this is set up for at the present more sophisticated users.
Speaker 1: I don't mean to I don't know how sophisticate you
Speaker 1: are personally sitting here in my closet recording a podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm happy to be an unsophisticated US. But you know,
Speaker 1: Google uses our APIs, and those big agg companies use
Speaker 1: our APIs, and they have teams of people and but
Speaker 1: but that's exactly the problem we're trying to crack, is
Speaker 1: to help everyone to be able to have access to
Speaker 1: this data, not just the big organizations that have teams
Speaker 1: of people with PhDs in satellite imagery processing. You know,
Speaker 1: we want to enable it to be that little insurance company,
Speaker 1: that little that little ngo, that university team that's doing
Speaker 1: research on penguins or whatever, you know, Like, we want
Speaker 1: them all to be able to leverage the data. So
Speaker 1: how do we make it easier to use How do
Speaker 1: we help them to build the models that they need
Speaker 1: and build So we're trying to build infrastructure that helps
Speaker 1: them refine this data to make it useful. I mean,
Speaker 1: you need like automation in the middle. Right, there's like
Speaker 1: you got all the pictures, and then you got people
Speaker 1: who want information out of the pictures, and right now
Speaker 1: it's hard and expensive to get the information out of it,
Speaker 1: and so you've got to automate a lot of that process. Bingo. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's get back to the show. We're gonna close with
Speaker 1: the lightning round. Okay, uh, just have a very few
Speaker 1: quick lightning round for the end. What are the chances
Speaker 1: that are Kardashian will go to space? Before you? What
Speaker 1: is a Kardashian? Let me ask it another way, what
Speaker 1: are the chances you'll go to space? I think that
Speaker 1: there's a good chance that anyone that wants to go
Speaker 1: to space will go if they really you know, in
Speaker 1: our lifetime, do you want to go to space? Do
Speaker 1: you want to? I would quite like to, but it's
Speaker 1: not my main goal in life. I would love to
Speaker 1: see the Earth. I'd especially enough to go around the
Speaker 1: moon and look back at the Earth like four times
Speaker 1: wider than the Moon in the sky and be able
Speaker 1: to see the beautiful cradle of civilization. That's a good one.
Speaker 1: Um Star Wars or Star Trek Star check for sure.
Speaker 1: What's one piece of advice you'd give somebody trying to
Speaker 1: solve a hard problem. Um, stick with it, you know.
Speaker 1: I think the biggest thing that differentiates those succeed those
Speaker 1: that don't less the idea than the timing, both of
Speaker 1: which are important, but more of the staying power. It's
Speaker 1: it's perseverance and I think, you know you've got to
Speaker 1: do keep on going in the face of a lot
Speaker 1: of people saying it's not possible. Good. Do you have
Speaker 1: any favorite images that Planet has ever captured. I think
Speaker 1: the very first image we ever captured is an Oregon
Speaker 1: area of partially forested, partially agricultural lands, pasture lands, and
Speaker 1: we could immediately see from that first picture that we
Speaker 1: could identify individual trees in the field. And then we
Speaker 1: were like, oh my god, we can we can do
Speaker 1: this mission. You think you'll ever leave Planet? Leave planet?
Speaker 1: Did you say? Yeah, like the moment when it will
Speaker 1: be time for you to do something else. Last question,
Speaker 1: it's it's definitely my life's work, and I'd be surprised
Speaker 1: if we're not working here in some capacity for a while.
Speaker 1: I mean, look, I enjoy it, and I think I'm
Speaker 1: more likely to leave the planet than Planet. Will Marshall
Speaker 1: is co founder and CEO of Planet, big news in
Speaker 1: the What's Your Problem universe. This week we got our
Speaker 1: own email address, It's problem at pushkin dot Fm. I
Speaker 1: would love to hear what you think of the show.
Speaker 1: If there's topics you want to cover, guests, you want
Speaker 1: to hear, things you like us to do differently, Please
Speaker 1: please do let us know again It's problem at pushkin
Speaker 1: dot Fm. Today's show was edited by Robert Smith, produced
Speaker 1: by Edith Russlo, and engineered by Amanda Kwong. I'm Jacob
Speaker 1: Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode
Speaker 1: of What's Your Problem