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- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to the Rundown interview edition. Today I'm talking to Will Marshall, the co founder and CEO of Planet Labs. Planet Labs is one of the most talked about space companies right now and for good reason. They operate over 200 satellites that photograph the entire Earth every single day. And the stock has gone from about $2.50 to over $30 in the past year. So in today's conversation with Will, we get into how he started the company by strapping iPhones to satellites and how the business actually works, who their customers are, the Nvidia and Google partnerships, and why he thinks that AI will be a huge boost for the business. This was a really fun conversation. I think you guys are going to really enjoy it. So let's get into it. Will Marshall, welcome to the Rundown.
- [00:47]
B
Happy to be here.
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A
I'm super excited about today's conversation. Will, I want to start with a bit of your background. I was reading, you know, I was reading about your background and I gotta say, your resume absolutely stacked. I want to paint, paint the audience a picture here. You got a PhD from Oxford in physics, then you were a scientist at NASA for a number of years. And then in 2010, you and a couple colleagues decided to strap iPhones to a satellite. And then you founded a company called Space Labs.
- [01:18]
B
So Planet Labs.
- [01:20]
A
Yeah, sorry, not Space. Planet Labs. What a, what a mess up. This is why it's not live. You founded a company called Planet Labs. So I'm just kind of curious, like what made you think strapping smartphones to a satellite would work and what was like the inspiration behind starting the company?
- [01:34]
B
Well, firstly, I mean most people's background of successful startups, they dropped out. So obviously I failed on that front. But we, we left NASA with this idea that we could really innovate and make satellite cost way cheaper and bring a totally new kind of data set that's possible by putting up far more satellites doing earth imaging, scanning the whole earth every day. And the reason for that wasn't just frivolous and it's cool tech and it is cool tech and I can talk about that, but it's that this data could help the earth economy, could help insurance, fire, finance, agriculture and governments with floods and fires and defense and intelligence applications. And we saw that more rapid information about the earth could help us make smarter decisions. It could be like the Bloomberg terminal with data feeds, but for earth imaging, powering businesses all around the world, countries around the world with smarter data to make smarter decisions.
- [02:44]
A
So you have over 200 satellites in orbit now. You're taking pictures every day, like you mentioned. But haven't there been government satellites that have been, I don't know, taking pictures for decades? I remember Google Earth when it came out back in 2005, you can see like images of the Earth. So like what is different about Planet Labs that wasn't done before?
- [03:06]
B
Yeah, I mean, mainly it's up to date data. So basically, yes, there have been satellites for decades, but they haven't taken the whole world every day or anything close. So basically most of the existing or prior satellites were taking high resolution snapshots of very specific targets of interest for military applications and certain other high prized applications. But what we went about doing was having a commercial fleet so many satellites that we'd just cover the whole Earth every day. Then that opens up loads of other applications areas, agriculture, forestry, disaster response, all those sorts of things. And so it's just a completely different model. We image over 200 million square kilometers a day. That's the whole Earth land mass and some of the oceans because we do maritime domain awareness as well. And so that's just roughly, just give you a sense, about 100 times more in coverage than any prior commercial earth imaging satellite system.
- [04:12]
A
So are your customers, I mean, who are buying these images? You mentioned, you know, governments, you mentioned insurance, hedge funds. Right, I think I've read that as well, maybe Apple tv because I feel like they have like the best screensavers when it comes to space stuff. I don't know if they're buying your stuff too. Can you walk me through who, like the breakdown of your customers? Is it how much is it government versus how much is it commercial?
- [04:33]
B
Yeah, well, we split it sort of into three buckets. Defense and intelligence, which is now the biggest area, which is where we're helping countries with security, monitoring for new threats, doing maritime domain awareness, as I said, so tracking ships, making sure they're not doing illegal things. So for example, right now we're supporting NATO, doing monitoring in the Baltic Sea for hybrid Russian warfare activities. We're helping the US Navy monitor 8 million square kilometers of the South China Sea for illicit activities that the Chinese are doing and other things like that. So that's what we call defense intelligence. Secondly, there's civil government. So there we work with countries, environment agencies doing environmental monitoring, agriculture agencies doing agriculture monitoring, helping agriculture subsidies, disaster response. We work with NASA a lot on science missions. So our data underpins myriad Earth system sciences papers from researchers across the United States. Another example is we work with Brazil Federal Police on monitoring deforestation. Another example is we work with the Welsh government on monitoring agriculture and biodiversity across Wales. So we work with German government on environmental disaster response after floods. So that's civil government. And then the final bucket is commercial. So there our biggest sets of clients are in agriculture. So we help big ag companies help their farmers improve crop yields. By monitoring every farm field around the world every day, we can help them do precision agriculture. So there we work with Bayer Syngenta. We also work with insurance companies, so doing parametric drought insurance. So companies like AXA and Swiss RE use our data for all automated insurance claims. Rather than having to send out people to check that there's been a disaster or flooding or what have you, they can just look in our image and then do the automatic claim without having to send a person out. And that saves the money. So if you like, it's a very wide capable tool set that can help a wide variety of applications. And those are the three major markets that we think about.
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A
Is it, how does like the pricing actually work? I mean, is it, is it like a subscription where someone pays monthly for.
- [06:56]
B
I don't know, if you want a
- [06:57]
A
certain area, then you pay a certain price if you want to. If you want more coverage, you pay a higher price. Is it per image? I'm just kind of curious how that works to your customer. You get it.
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B
It's basically volumetric. So the bigger the area, the, the more imagery you download or view, the more we charge that we also charge analytical layers on top. But basically it's perfect per unit area, per kilometer or square kilometer or per acre or hectare in the more agriculture plants.
- [07:25]
A
What I'm, what I'm curious though is, you know, you've been around since 2010, you've been a private public company since 2021 and has there been an inflection point recently? Like, you know, your last quarter revenues were up 41%. It was a great quarter for you guys. What is driving like the acceleration in for this data?
- [07:45]
B
Well, there's a couple of things. Firstly, a lot of geopolitics around the world, there's Balkanization, A lot of countries need their own solutions for understanding threats around their regions. Another is AI. AI is driving and making it easier for entities get value out of our data to scale up applications and to speed up answers so they get real advantages. So AI, we're, we're, we're really one of those companies that gets accelerated by AI. Every company is affected by AI, as you are well aware, but Space actually has something unique to offer AI. It's not just a one way relationship. It's not that we just get value. Just think the large language models that you use when you're chatting are mainly trained on the text of the Internet. And so they're somewhat limited to knowing about the stuff on the Internet. They don't really know about what's going on in the physical world. They're sort of blind to the physical world. When we add earth imaging data, we've got 3,000 images for every point in the earth's land mass on average. To train these AI so that they know about the physical world, that unlocks huge applications. It's both useful for AI because for AI to get value, to provide value in the real world, like insurance or farming, like we were saying, you know, they need to know about the farmer's field, so they know, need to know real data. We can help that. Right? We can help AI to unlock markets and AI can help us unlock markets because our data is really valuable in principle, but you need to the extraction of specific answers bespoke to the customer. And that solution piece is what has been a bit of a gap. And the AI is now accelerating the crossing of that gap. And so yeah, we're seeing tremendous acceleration in our business, both for security reasons and because of the AI acceleration.
- [09:48]
A
Are most of your customers using your proprietary AI? Do you guys have a proprietary AI model that you're training from your data or are people just like downloading the images and just running it through some of the, you know, the cloud or chat, GPT or stuff? I mean, I guess you're saying that you, the advantage that you have is you can train the data on, you can train the AI on your data which gives it better answers because.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
The other AI that we, everyone uses doesn't have that data.
- [10:12]
B
That's right. So what we are doing is we are providing analytical tools on top of, on our platform. We also have partners that build analytical tools as well. But we have the advantage, yes of the bulk of our data so we can fine tune those models and to be better and better with satellite imagery and doing that at scale obviously has its advantages for making them more accurate and so on. So we provide analytical services. Like our maritime domain awareness solution isn't just a picture of the ocean, it is the latitude and longitude of the ships. It identifies the ship and says it's this IMO number, even if it's not broadcasting on AIs beacon because it has seen that image, that ship before, it's already figured out where it is, it guesses its Heading it does all of this and that's all based on AI. So it's not just pretty pictures, is analytical answers to people's questions.
- [11:07]
A
So not only is AI allowing you to like offer additional services on top of the images that you provide, but it's unlocking like a whole new market because someone might not know what use satellite images have. Like they didn't have like maybe the staff to kind of go through thousands of images a day or a week. And now it's like, well, I can just ask the AI to do it.
- [11:25]
B
That's absolutely right. I mean it's one thing for the National Reconnaissance Office in the US or NASA who had deep experience in satellite imagery processing to get value out of our raw data, but for that little insurance company, that pharma, that hedge fund, this is, it's huge amounts of data. The AI bridges a gap of technology that is important for these entities.
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A
Sticking with the AI thing, I just want to get your take on the whole AI data centers and space thing. I know you guys have, you guys have a partnership with Google. Is this thing actually gonna happen? Because I just, I don't know, I keep reading about it and I'm like, well all the smart people like yourself and Elon Musk and others are talking about it and I'm just like, I just feel like it, it seems like science fiction to me. So what do you think about it? And do you think that Planet Labs will play a role in AI data centers floating around in space?
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B
Well, the answer is yes, it does make sense. And the answer is yes, we are going to play a role. We are playing a role. We are already working on Suncatcher where we put in Google TPUs into orbit for them. Yeah, it makes sense. Fundamentally, if you step back, it does sound sci fi on first flush. I totally understand that. Why would you put a data center in space when you can just put it in.
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A
We have a lot of land in Texas actually.
- [12:48]
B
What's surprising though is that when you do the math, when you look at all the costs of data centers and there's a lot, the building, the permits, the land, the water cooling, all the different pieces, of course, the compute infrastructure itself, and then you do the same for space. There's the launch cost, the satellite cost, the processing costs, all these things, and you put them side by side. We did this as an exercise with Google about eight or nine years ago now. And we assess that simply when launch cost came down to about 200 to $300 a kilogram, it's simply Cheaper to put in space. And let me just give you a little insight that might help you see why. The cheap the in many ways data center growth is a lot of power problem. Because they can't build enough power to power these data centers. They can't just plug it in. There's just not enough capacity in the grid. Okay, so the cheapest by far way of getting power these days is solar. You just put a solar panel on the ground, it costs very little. It's the cheapest. More than anything else. Nuclear, fossil fuels, gas, it's the cheapest. But of course on the ground you don't want an intermittent power, right? You don't want a day night cycle of your data center. You want it on 24 7. So you would make it the cheap way. Only then you have to add batteries or you have to have a nuclear power plant or you have to have gas. All of which is more expensive in space. You just don't need that. Your solar panel can be in a. You can put your satellite in a sun synchronous dawn dusk orbit where it's in permanent sunlight. That means you get five times more power because of the absorption of the atmosphere that you don't have to deal with and various other things. You get five times more power per solar panel and you don't have to carry batteries or anything else because it's always in the sun. So here you've solved your power problem really neatly. The only issue is you have to get that sucker into orbit. By the way, you don't have to have buildings, you don't have to have cooling permits, you don't have to have permits. There's a lot of other stuff that can just go faster. And in space there's a lot of space. And you say this land space. Actually there's a lot of competition. We're seeing data centers drive agriculture, attention land with cities who don't want these data centers in their backyard driving up power costs, driving water problems and they can't get their water supply. Here we have loads of space in space. Like thousands of times more space in space than on the earth's surface. Even if you're just talking about low Earth orbit. So lots of space. But anyway it's a long term project. I just want to point out that this is not going to happen overnight. But yeah, in 10 years time it's most likely that most compute will be done in space and planet will play a role where there's only a couple of companies on earth that have figured out how to Launch large numbers of satellites. It's basically US and SpaceX. And you know, Google chose us for this project because they know we're one of the couple of companies that can do it.
- [15:48]
A
That's incredible. And you know, ever since this conversation started late last year, I've just been a little skeptical. But the more people I talk to like yourself, I'm like starting to buy into it and I'm like, I can see it at least since there's no headache when it comes to like you know, get off my lawn kind of regulation that we're having right now when it comes to data centers.
- [16:04]
B
So it's simply cheaper. It's going to be cheaper within 10 years. And that's what Sundar, the CEO of Google said recently. I stand by the same sort of timeline. This is not happening next year, but it is happening within a decade. I mean we'll do demos and things but it would take a while, but it would actually be cheaper, certainly within 10 years.
- [16:24]
A
Well that's exciting. And it seems like you guys are already plugged in sticking with the AI. I want to talk about your relationship with Nvidia. I think Jensen recently name dropped you guys in his two hour GTC keynote which was cool. I think you have Nvidia chips in your satellites. And what I was curious about though is like what advantage does having the Nvidia chips in your satellites do versus those images, Images just being sent down back to earth and then you run it through, through, you know, your, the Nvidia chips down here. Like what's the advantage of having it in the satellite itself?
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B
Yeah, one word, speed. It's all about speeding up the time to answer. So by putting the computers in space on the satellites that can do the AI processing, processing at the edge, so to say as soon as we take the picture we can process it and get down the answers straight away using lower bandwidth but constant connected RF signals. Whereas normally we wait until we're over ground station and dump the data. So this takes time. So this gets it from hours to minutes and that makes a big difference. Think of a disaster response. So in the La Palisades fires for example, we provided data really quickly afterwards it was a couple of hours later. And not just that, but AI on top saying building by building in Palisades and these other fires, watch buildings were affected, where should the relief operators go? And so on. But had that been minutes? Well minutes, hours might make a difference of saving lives. So we want to get that data faster. Edge Compute actually enables that. And yeah, we're very proud of our partnership with Nvidia and it goes beyond that. We've been talking about some of our partnership pieces recently. Obviously there's a compute and space piece, but there's a lot of other pieces. We've been working together on algorithms that can speed up our processing, shift some of our processing from CPUs to GPUs. That speeds it up on the ground, makes it lower cost, is a very exciting partnership. So we're very proud of our partnership with big folks like Nvidia and Google. As we were previously talking about. We're proud to be partnering with them.
- [18:36]
A
You know what I like hearing from you is that a lot of investors are looking for that AI angle for a lot of companies and sometimes it feels too forced to. This seems like a natural just evolution of the company where you can just layer AI on. It doesn't feel like it's forced and it just is an accelerating. It's. It's an accelerant to your business. And then you just laid it out why.
- [18:55]
B
Absolutely. And you know, I think the companies are going to split into those that are relevant for AI and those that are not, sadly. And it's just a fact, I think the way AI is going and Planet is hyper relevant for AI, space in general is, but Planet in particular. I mean, our data set, as I said, isn't just relevant to AI. It is potentially foundational to these next generations of AI, where companies are all trying to build real world models. Because again, the LLMs, your ChatGPT, your Gemini, your anthropic code Claude, only know about human knowledge. They're multimodal, so they understand pictures and text these days, videos and stuff, but they don't really know much about the physical world. Again, they're blind to the physical world. So if you want a physical world model, obviously an AI is only as good as the training data. If you want a physical world model, which all of these companies, Dario has talked about that, Demis talked about that, Sam's talked about that. Everyone's trying to build world models. To have real world models, you need real world data stands the reason Planet is sitting on arguably, and obviously I'm biased, but arguably the best data set for starting off real world models that exists, 3,000 images for every point on the other whole landmass. So yes, we're very relevant to AI.
- [20:15]
A
You know, I was just, you know, before I was a podcaster, in my previous career I was a civil engineer. So you know, I used to have to track the progress on construction Sites and things like that. And the way we would do it, we would have people take pictures or have a drone go out once a week. And I'm just thinking to myself, like, if I had access to data like this, I could just literally look at the pictures in the development every single day, have an AI just break it down and summarize it for me instead of having to drive an hour to the job site every day, back and forth.
- [20:40]
B
So that's right before first it was AI could do that job for you. You'd look in, it would detect those things. Now you can just have an agent that goes off and goes, okay, well I want you to monitor the heck out of these things and let me know, give me a call. I need to be concerned.
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A
Right?
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And it will go figure out all of that stuff. Build a little dashboard for you that you can check in whenever you want. The where things are going is very exciting. But, you know, a lot of stuff may get commoditized with AI, but if you have a foundation data set, data is core to AI and we're part of that.
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A
You know, I just spent the last 20 minutes just kind of hyping, hyping you up. I do want to play the devil's advocate a little bit though. Right, right.
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B
For it.
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A
Do you, do you feel like sometimes the hype around space and just all of this and I just maybe gets a little out of hand and you have to kind of, I don't know, reel in the, the hype a little bit and set expectations? Because right now, like, space is hot. Everything, everything space related is hot. SpaceX IPO coming up. You have like the, the Artemis mission and everyone's talking about like the. What's going to happen in the space economy. But do you sometimes feel like maybe you have to kind of like, slow it down a little bit and be like, guys, like, all this stuff is happening, but it's not going to happen tomorrow or the next quarter. It might take a decade. How do you manage those expectations?
- [21:57]
B
I kind of flip it on its head. I think for a while everyone didn't recognize really what space was doing. And now people are going, oh, whoa. It's relevant to our daily lives. It's providing our communications with Starlink. It's providing our Earth observation that informs farming to security. With planet's Earth observation, it's helping us on the ground. We think of planet as doing space for Earth, not space for going to Mars or the moon. I'm talking about using satellites to help us with the Earth economy. It's super relevant today to our needs on the ground here on terra firma. And look, I'm very excited by what's been going on recently. Obviously, the Artemis missions are so cool and they give us hope, like inspiration about what we can do is when we come together. So another thing space does. I mean, look at those pictures from Artemis, back of the Earth. They say with the Apollo missions, we went to the moon and what we found was we discovered the Earth. And what they meant by that was we discovered our fragility. Of course, we knew we were on the Earth, but it suddenly gave us the frame that, wow, we're really in the darkness of space. And this planet is so incredible. My co founder, Robbie St, it was part of a mission at NASA. I was doing other lunar things. Actually, he was doing some missions on looking for planets outside our solar system. And they were looking with telescopes, finding all these planets around. I tell you, we've looked at thousands of planets and none of them come close to this one, like, by a long way. Not even close. Right. There's no place on Mars that's as nice as the worst place on Earth. You know, like, Earth is a special environment for life. And so we're focused on using space to help life on Earth. And I think it's really exciting that space is now getting some of the limelight for both, whether that's Artemis or SpaceX going public and others. And I think it's, it's. And at the same time, the AI is taking off, and we see ourselves as the company that's at the intersection between those two, this exciting space takeoff and AI for all the reasons we discussed.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. I think the markets are starting to realize that as well. I mean, the, the, the value, your share price has obviously exploded over the last few months.
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B
And I mean, you know, wait till what you see. I mean, really, like, this is just. I think that we're in an exciting phase here, and actually there's a long way to go.
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A
Well, I'm super excited about it as well. This conversation got me hyped up even more. Well, I appreciate your time, and you guys are crushing it. I'm looking forward to seeing what the next few months, years and decades look like for planet.
- [24:49]
B
Thanks. It's great to meet you.
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A
You as well. Next time, come to Houston. We'll do this in person.
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B
Houston, let's go.
- [24:56]
A
Well, all right, guys. Hope you enjoyed that conversation with Will Marshall. You know, it's hard not to get hyped about a company after a conversation like that and all that hype has been huge for the stock with shares going up over 1000% in the last 12 months. But now the stock is currently trading at 30 plus times revenue, which is pretty frothy. Wall street analysts seem to be pretty mixed about the company. Analysts price targets range from 20 to $40 per share. But you know, if the company keeps growing like they did last quarter and AI ends up being a tailwind like Will thinks it'll be, I can see the hype only growing from here. Let me know what you guys think. Are you buying the hype on Planet Labs or has the hype gone too far? Drop a comment on Spotify and YouTube and while you're at it, consider giving us a five star rating. Now. All that engagement really does help us out and it helps other people find the show. Thank you guys again for listening, watching and commenting. Shout out to Mike and Connor for all the work behind the scenes and we'll see you guys back here tomorrow.
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C
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A
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