Planet: Will Marshall and Robbie Schingler

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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 5:45Speaker 01

  The first image that we got was a forested region in Oregon.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Like, we can do this.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  We can do this.

• 6:24Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:36Guy Raz?

  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 3 million photos of the Earth every single day.

• 6:58Guy Raz?

  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.

• 7:40Guy Raz?

  Robbie, Will, and their partner Chris Boshausen 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 if 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

• 8:25Guy Raz?

  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 particles, so they made their own version using off-the-shelf items from Target. The company has come a long way since then.

• 9:04Guy Raz?

  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.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Yes, it was 2001 in Graz in Austria, where it was a UN-organized conference on basically using space to help humanity. And it gathered some really amazing people and met Robbie. I can't remember the exact moment, but we definitely got on world together at that forum.

• 10:10Guy Raz?

  And you clicked right away, Robbie? What do you remember about Will at the time?

• 10:15Speaker 01

  I remember, what I remember of Will is outgoing, gregarious, and really a motivator for people. You know, he really would 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-of-the-envelope maths, but also the ability to motivate people.

• 10:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah, and all right, so the two of you meet at this conference and 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?

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so again, we have to remember this is 20 years ago and we were, you know, in our early twenties 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.

• 11:15Guy Raz?

  Yes.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  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 a time and hand it off and go around in a week, you'd have a really, really good paper. And yeah, that was, that was actually kind of the genesis really of our friendship and partnership was all about the art of creation.

• 11:41Guy Raz?

  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, you know, 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, is that fair to say that that's sort of how you, how you saw yourselves?

• 12:12Speaker 02

  I wouldn't say quite that the goal was policy. The, the goal was to have the effect on the world. We thought policy is one mechanism. I mean, in others, 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.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  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, we all now have, you know, we don't know GPS and, and location now and it's just, that is just backend infrastructure for society that we actually always expect to be there. And those all come from space. And in fact, if, I mean, like, I don't know how deep you want to go into this stuff, but all of that started from military application and now has become a public good.

• 13:12Guy Raz?

  I remember, I mean, in, 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 under their iPhones and they were amazing.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Yep. And that was, that was 20 years ago, right? Like we have to remember that that was not very far into the past.

• 13:39Guy Raz?

  Crazy, yeah.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  And as Robbie was saying, the fact that you could navigate, I mean, the military had GPS back into the seventies or certainly by the eighties and were using it for guiding missiles, tanks, all this sort of stuff. But they, 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 Robbie's point, a lot of these things started in the military vector and, and a lot of our thrust was how can everyone else benefit from these things? And again, like back to that theme, how do we use space tools to help everyone on the planet?

• 14:15Guy Raz?

  So, all right, you're, you're both writing and collaborating on, on various papers about, about these types of things. And I guess in 2002, you got together at another space conference, but this, this one was in Houston?

• 14:29Speaker 02

  That's right. One of the fun things that happened at 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 is at, a mutual friend had introduced us to General Pete Warden, who is 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 bad idea. These are people that runs the space weapon programs. Have a go. And, and we're in, in this evening, we had this fascinating conversation about

• 15:13Speaker 02

  you can't build space weapons. That's bad, it's economically doesn't make sense and it doesn't even work technically. And we were writing equations out on why it can't work technically. And then he was like, oh, you don't understand, I've got to protect US 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 us 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 pros 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.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:06Guy Raz?

  This guy Pete Warden, we should mention, he was the director of the Ames Research Center, I think until like 2015 or something. For like, 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?

• 16:28Speaker 01

  A self-licking ice cream cone, yeah.

• 16:30Guy Raz?

  Self-licking ice cream cone, he wrote about NASA.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  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, let's see what comes out.

• 16:53Guy Raz?

  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 seventies, right? Where all this, 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.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  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's 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.

• 17:36Guy Raz?

  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.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  Yes, when we flew out to NASA Ames, we were looking to build a community house. We like living in community, the fervor 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.

• 18:10Guy Raz?

  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. You, 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?

• 18:44Speaker 02

  That's right, as if we weren't full enough during the day. Actually, but it wasn't just NASA people. We had students who were 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 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.

• 19:15Guy Raz?

  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?

• 19:38Speaker 01

  We really wanted to, well, we were working on bringing small satellites to NASA. So, you know, Will and I and a bunch of other people worked 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 can 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, then you can have, 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.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  And so we worked to systematize that. And we set up the Small Spacecraft Office there.

• 20:28Guy Raz?

  All right. So you were, and what were you working on, Will?

• 20:31Speaker 02

  Well, the same, setting up the Small Spacecraft Office. But then Robbie and I worked on a few different missions.

• 20:37Guy Raz?

  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? Not unlimited, but I mean, is there kind of a big sandbox to play in and funding for it?

• 20:58Speaker 01

  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 a 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 Warden wanted a bit of a, you know, 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 of that stuff.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  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, to 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.

• 22:08Guy Raz?

  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?

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Yes, well, it's pretty much what it says on the cover. It was putting a phone into space.

• 22:28Guy Raz?

  Putting a phone into it, like into space as a satellite?

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Pretty much. It was to throw some phones into space. We actually put three, and they were Google Nexus ones that we had got donated from Google.

• 22:40Guy Raz?

  Now, the big donation, they're like 250 bucks each.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, they gave us a box of them, but still, I agree.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Robbie is exactly right. If you like, 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 spacecraft needed. We had to add some extra batteries and 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.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Actually, I think I almost got fired for that project. Chris and I had started PhoneSat and we had a small team on it. But we got quite a long way before, if you like, the officials at NASA knew what 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 were like, come on, it's gonna be really interesting because we're gonna 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 Yagi 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.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  And then we reconstructed these pictures and we're like, okay, it worked.

• 24:37Guy Raz?

  All right, so this was a time where, I mean, the idea was, let's talk, 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, you know, one of these museums where they've got decommissioned spaceships can see how big some of these satellites are. They're huge, they're expensive, they, you know, 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 like the Hubble

• 25:21Guy Raz?

  can do, but could do pretty important things like take images of the Earth. Was that the idea behind this NASA project?

• 25:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  And we were just like, okay, well, what have we learnt 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.

• 26:22Guy Raz?

  Right, right.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:31Guy Raz?

  Right, because there are obviously different kinds of satellites or communication satellites. I mean, some people have

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:36Guy Raz?

  watched DirecTV or, you know, watch television through satellite.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:40Guy Raz?

  Sirius XM radio channel is it satellite beamed from satellites?

• 26:45Speaker 02

  Exactly right. And, and so when we briefly thought, when we were thinking of leaving NASA to do this project, we were mainly thinking about humanitarian and, and commercial goals. And 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.

• 27:09Guy Raz?

  These are the UN Millennium Development Goals, right?

• 27:11Speaker 02

  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. There were 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, well, why couldn't it be every day? And then that would be much more useful at disaster response and not have to wait

• 27:56Speaker 02

  for a month for the flooding information. How about have the day before and the day afterwards?

• 28:01Guy Raz?

  But help me understand how

• 28:05Guy Raz?

  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?

• 28:23Speaker 02

  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 and we were 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 electronics, to make it happen. And so we were like, oh my God. It wasn't just a... It didn't seem like an option to me at the time.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  It felt I was compelled because it was so obvious we should do this project. Everything lined up.

• 29:13Guy Raz?

  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. Does your team want a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship? Well, Framer is built exactly for that. With Framer, you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting and a CMS built in, so the work is production-ready from day one.

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• 32:48Guy Raz?

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• 33:23Guy Raz?

  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 Bosshausen, 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.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  We were there, and Chris was there, Will was there, and they're like, "We're gonna 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.

• 34:17Guy Raz?

  Why not?

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Well, if you, Guy, you started talking about the Hubble. It's the size of... 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, and that's how you build an engineering system.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it was mainly, we wanted more like the Silicon Valley, release early, release often, 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's really, pretty much mandated to focus on science and exploration. This was about neither.

• 35:48Guy Raz?

  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?

• 36:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I guess we sort of slowly evolved over that next year. That was in 2010, just at the end of 2010, we 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.

• 36:30Guy Raz?

  All right, so now you guys decide to start a company. And it's going to be a company that that will launch small photographic satellites into space. What what that's not the right term, not photographic satellites. What are they?

• 36:44Speaker 02

  We call them earth observation satellites.

• 36:46Guy Raz?

  Earth observation, got it. Okay, earth observation satellites. So building these things, by the way, just to build a prototype, right? How much did that cost? I'm just curious. How much money did it cost you guys?

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Do you recollect, Robbie?

• 36:58Speaker 01

  It was probably like on the order of like $10,000.

• 37:02Guy Raz?

  $10,000. 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.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  That's exactly what we did. We each put in $50,000, I think.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  No, it wasn't that much. It was it was actually three different amounts. I can't remember, but it was it was it was upwards to 50K.

• 37:19Guy Raz?

  Because that's still a lot of money.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 37:30Guy Raz?

  Right. So how did you guys have the cash?

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Well, we just saved up. I guess we didn't live exactly a luxurious lifestyle. I mean, we didn't have family. We and and we lived in a community house by choice.

• 37:41Guy Raz?

  And I guess one of the first things you guys did was to build a a prototype of what your satellite would look like. I mean, you had some experience building things. So tell me about that prototype.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  We built a test one at Rainbow, the community house in the garage. We added a camera system. Then we added all the other systems, radios and so on, to make it a working satellite, leveraging consumer electronics, not exactly a phone like we'd use in phone sat, but a lot of the same underlying chips. It's actually all 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 put the the whole thing on a balloon and take it to 60,000 feet and really cold

• 38:35Speaker 02

  atmosphere and and take the pictures and things like that. So a very iterative approach.

• 38:42Guy Raz?

  All right. So you have so you've got some savings that you throw into into this company and you've got a prototype. But then what do you do? It's 2011 and

• 38:55Guy Raz?

  I mean, to get this off the ground, this is not like Tate's Cookies it's been on the show, or Stacy's Pita Chips, like, you know, or kombucha. Like, you need millions and millions of dollars

• 39:08Speaker 01

  You do.

• 39:08Guy Raz?

  to start your company. Help me explain what you then, once you have a prototype, what do you then do?

• 39:14Speaker 01

  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, we could understand how much money we think it's going to cost, what the schedule looks like, and all of this stuff. But instead of asking for a hundred million dollars, 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.

• 39:46Guy Raz?

  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?

• 39:56Speaker 02

  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 was, it was the whole Earth that was designed because we 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,

• 40:40Speaker 02

  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?

• 40:48Guy Raz?

  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 we've got to get into space.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:58Guy Raz?

  How much does it cost to put something on a rocket ship into space?

• 41:02Speaker 01

  At that point in time, there was the ability to hitch a ride to space as not the primary payload, but a secondary payload. That is what we used to first get to space.

• 41:13Guy Raz?

  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?

• 41:37Speaker 02

  Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• 41:39Guy Raz?

  Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  I think it was $300,000 for the first one, and it was about that for the second one. And we decided it'd be best to put one satellite on each of two rockets to give a bit of redundancy.

• 41:50Guy Raz?

  And by the way, these satellites weighed, what, five, 10 pounds?

• 41:53Speaker 02

  Five kilograms, which is about 10 pounds, yes. Just the size of a loaf of bread.

• 41:58Guy Raz?

  Got it, okay. So you sign up to get your satellites on to a rocket. But just to be clear, it's not like, you know, our arrival and departure times are 98%. If you're booking a date on a rocket, it's not likely it's going to go out on that date, right?

• 42:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:48Guy Raz?

  So, all right, now that you had space on a rocket, 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 a year before you could launch this proof of concept.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  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 Phonesat, the satellite project that we work on at NASA, we met someone there who was quite unassuming there called Steve Jervetson, who was a venture capitalist, actually became the main funder 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.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  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 100 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. Well, do you give us some money? We also attracted a couple of other investors and then we had our first money in December 2011.

• 44:19Guy Raz?

  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 were you guys going to make money for them?

• 44:44Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 45:27Guy Raz?

  How much money did you raise in that first year, by the way?

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, 3.2 million. We ended up having 200K. We also had friends and family came in a little bit.

• 45:36Guy Raz?

  So with that money, did you begin to staff up?

• 45:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 45:58Guy Raz?

  And I guess eventually you had to set up like a kind of a clean room to build the satellites, which is a room with like no dust and no contamination at all, right? Like it's beyond sterile, it's like crazy, super sterile.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  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 into 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?

• 46:32Guy Raz?

  So it has to be totally perfectly clean. You don't have a lens cleaner up in space. Like that lens has to be so clean and that's it.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  That's right. If you launch with that spec on the lens, it's going to be there forevermore. 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.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  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, you know, a lot of people have this right now because of fires and because of, you know, COVID and so forth. But those HEPA filters were able to then filter out the air and 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 like 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.

• 47:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  And just before you go to 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

• 48:29Speaker 02

  that one.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it turns out you can go in space and wipe off the dust.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  But that's a very expensive way of doing business.

• 48:36Guy Raz?

  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?

• 48:52Speaker 02

  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 at action stations, you know, manning the ground stations, manning the mission control and making sure the thing works.

• 49:33Guy Raz?

  How quickly before you guys knew that the satellites were working?

• 49:37Speaker 02

  With one of them, it was in within an hour. In fact, we got telemetry for it, a health packet, basically saying, hey, I'm alive. I'm doing OK. And that was already huge relief. And then, within a few hours of that, I, I want to say even just two, the next one flew over that had been launched from a different continent and, and also made contact.

• 50:02Guy Raz?

  So what was the first, I mean, what were the first images that you were getting?

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Funnily enough, the first image that we got was a forested region in Oregon. And, um, you know, the original idea was to count every tree in the planet. And sure enough, that was our first picture.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  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 4:00 AM or something. Say, here it is.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:31Speaker 02

  And we were just like in awe because we could see that the picture was in focus. It had taken 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.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Like, we can do this.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  We can do this.

• 50:51Guy Raz?

  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.

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• 52:50Guy Raz?

  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.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  Now, we had a picture. We could say, like, we can definitely do it. It's just a matter 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 Robbie said, that could pull this off technically. And in that year, we got a much bigger funding round 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.

• 53:38Guy Raz?

  So just roughly, how much does each, does it cost? Does each satellite cost to make?

• 53:44Speaker 02

  It's about 300K or just slightly less than that, 200 or 300K.

• 53:47Guy Raz?

  It's nothing. I mean, that's, I mean, compared to a NASA satellite.

• 53:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, most NASA satellites, average, average about a billion.

• 53:55Guy Raz?

  A billion?

• 53:56Speaker 02

  Yes. So we're talking about 1,000 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 rockets for less than the cost of a typical satellite, a lot less actually still.

• 54:16Guy Raz?

  And one of the things that I have 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 OK with that because your satellites are so cheap that you could take the risk that if one of these rocket launches fails, it's OK because another one will be OK. And that's the price of doing business.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  We have been on 33 different rockets and three of them have failed.

• 54:53Guy Raz?

  But it's not a billion-dollar loss for you, it's a couple million.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Exactly right. It's a bad day, it's a bad week. But it's not catastrophic for our mission and for our business. And that is by design.

• 55:07Guy Raz?

  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? Is it possible to make rocket launches cheaper?

• 55:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  That sort of change of 1,000x in five or 10 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 1,000x. A closer analogy for this is not Model T Ford, but the transition from the mainframe computers to desktop computers. Big companies would have one or two computers, right? Whole countries would have one computer. It was the size of a factory. And now with desktop computers, suddenly everyone could use them for lots of more purposes. Space is undergoing a revolutionary shift right now.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  And that is leading to all these changes. What in particular, the biggest upshot is the revolution in data that helps us to take care of the earth.

• 56:56Guy Raz?

  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 row seat to some of what's happening.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 57:10Guy Raz?

  So how, I mean, I understand how the existing data can help us track some of these things. But, but when you talk about making an impact in an even bigger way, what do you imagine? Is it more people using your, your data and then making policy decisions based around it?

• 57:29Speaker 02

  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?

• 57:40Guy Raz?

  So I think it's the biggest fire in California history.

• 57:42Speaker 02

  Biggest fire in California history. And they said, where is the front of the fire? Where is the smoke blowing?

• 57:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 57:47Speaker 02

  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? So all the time, so that we can actually look, where might the next fire come? And this data is relevant for day to day decision making across the globe.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. Based on everything we can forecast out today.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  We believe that this is really going to help us take care of our planet. And you cannot manage what you don't measure.

• 58:23Guy Raz?

  Okay, so you're, you're talking about the, the planet and crisis and the need for more data and information. And meanwhile, by the time this episode is released, you, you guys will have literally gone public on the New York Stock Exchange. And I wonder what the thinking behind that was. I mean, I mean, one reason obviously is to bring in more cash, which clearly you'll, you'll do. And the other is to make a return for the investors. Well, I guess those are the two main reasons, right?

• 58:55Speaker 02

  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 a hundred million in revenue last year. And that's a mature business at some level. I mean, I, 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, 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, et cetera, et cetera? Before you had that, how did you even know what to do? So like, like, how did you meet up before you had cell phones?

• 59:38Speaker 02

  You know, and you had to make all these more complex plans. Now, we have that data that can help us to take care of the earth. And as Robbie's saying, you can't manage it if you don't measure it.

• 59:50Guy Raz?

  So here's what I'm wondering about, right? And I can't be the first person to, 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 there are, that it couldn't be used in ways that are, 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, but you also track for, for military intelligence purposes, like, like looking at missile installations or the location of

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:33Guy Raz?

  airplanes and subs and, and the movement of people across borders and, and things like that. And, and I could also imagine it could be used, it could be used easily by governments looking to quash dissidents and people who are trying to, you know, to promote human rights.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, we, 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.

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  And when it's 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 during the Cold War, it almost led to a war. So actually, we lean into the security side. We work with governments and security agencies, military or 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.

• 1:01:56Guy Raz?

  Would you give it to ISIS or Al Qaeda?

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  No, it's banned. That's a great question. And we have two checks. One is that we don't give it to 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.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:02:51Guy Raz?

  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, 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.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So Andrew Zolli, who's our chief impact officer, you know, he says that like, Regulations tell you what the law requires.

• 1:03:30Guy Raz?

  Yes.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  And ethics tell you what your values require.

• 1:03:36Guy Raz?

  Yes.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:03:51Guy Raz?

  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, 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, I think your satellites produce like 15 terabytes of data a day, right?

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  It's about double that now.

• 1:04:28Guy Raz?

  Double, it's just, it's a lot of Google drives. And, and so you are not profitable. You haven't, you're not, but, but is there a path to profitability? A clear path to profitability?

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  Yes, it's absolutely clear.

• 1:04:43Speaker 02

  We already have very clear users in at least four markets. In agriculture, where big companies buy our data. That's the biggest market we have. We also service 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 us. I'd like 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 and they're growing very fast. And so we have very clear line of sight now on a growth path. We're going just

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  over forty percent a year for the next five years, we project, and that gets us to profitability in the next couple of years.

• 1:05:34Guy Raz?

  I know we touched on this earlier. You guys had originally moved into a community house or group house for more than fifteen years. And I think both of you are in your forties. You both, I think either one of you or 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 a super introvert. 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?

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  Well, personally, I love it. We live a house with fifteen people.

• 1:06:12Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  We have fascinating discussions about technology and society, philosophy.

• 1:06:17Guy Raz?

  It sounds stressful. Always discussions all the time around the house. I just want to put on my slippers and like watch Ted Lasso.

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  Well, it is big enough. It is a big enough house where there are nooks and crannies for you to actually read if you 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 that environment where you can push one another.

• 1:06:46Guy Raz?

  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?

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  I don't know what that is, but.

• 1:06:54Guy Raz?

  People listening will know.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  So we communicate. We communicate through conflict. And, you know, we have values and shared agreements. And people have moved out. They choose to leave. And some of them have been more difficult conversations than others.

• 1:07:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I bet.

• 1:07:14Guy Raz?

  Bet. So, 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, which is why I asked this question, because some people think I'm asking, by the way, some people think I asked 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

• 1:07:58Guy Raz?

  how lucky 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? Will?

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  Gosh, I mean, it's not a, this is a simple question to answer, but it was definitely right place, right time. I mentioned how when we left NASA to start 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.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, there is a, 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 Will said, like, you get a lot of things wrong, you know, and you, 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, and you take the next step again.

• 1:09:01Guy Raz?

  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.

• 1:09:37Guy Raz?

  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 [email protected]. And if you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at How I Built This, and mine is at Guy Raz. Our Instagram is at How I Built This NPR, and mine is at Guy dot Raz. This episode was produced by Liz Metzger with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. 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, Kerry Thompson, Elaine Coats, and Harrison Vijay

• 1:10:19Guy Raz?

  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.