Planet Labs CEO: Why AI Data Centers Will Move to Space

I visited Planet Labs (NYSE: PL) in San Francisco to tour its satellite manufacturing facility and sit down with Co-Founder & CEO Will Marshall. Planet has built more than 700 satellites, second only to SpaceX, and operates the only constellation capable of imaging Earth's entire landmass daily, generating roughly 4 million images per day for defense, government, and commercial customers. Will explains Planet's work with Google on Project Suncatcher and NVIDIA-powered compute in orbit, why AI data centers in space could eventually be cheaper than on Earth, and how its satellite intelligence supports Ukraine, the US Navy, and governments building sovereign space capabilities. We also discuss Planet's growing defense business, AI-powered Earth monitoring, its manufacturing expansion in San Francisco and Berlin, the search for extraterrestrial life, and lessons from 15 years of building Planet. Will Marshall: https://x.com/Will4Planet Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/llGHpPbCtHo https://youtu.be/llGHpPbCtHo 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Harvey http://www.harvey.ai?utm_medium=paid-partner&utm_source=sourcery&utm_campaign=2026-10-brand-sourcery-partnership—The AI platform built for legal work, is helping the best firms and companies close deals faster. More than 200,000 lawyers, 80% of the Am Law 100, and over 20% of the Fortune 500 build with Harvey. Visit: http://harvey.ai/ • Zone https://zonefrontier.com/—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com https://zonefrontier.com/ • Mercor http://mercor.com/sourcery—The human intelligence behind frontier AI. Frontier labs and leading enterprises use Mercor to turn the knowledge of 5M+ experts into the data, evals and benchmarks that make AI better at real work. Visit:http://mercor.com/sourcery • VCX https://fundrise.com/vcx—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com http://getvcx.com • Deel https://www.deel.com/sourcery—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery • Public http://public.com/sourcery–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets https://public.com/generated-asset, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc https://www.sourcery.vc/ Disclosure: Paid Ad. Agents are an experimental AI tool. Its output may be inaccurate and is not investment advice. Public Holding’s, Inc. makes no guarantees about its accuracy or reliability—verify independently before use. Brokerage accounts and services provided by Open to the Public Investing, Inc. See additional disclosures at https://public.com/disclosures/agenticdisclosures. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Will Marshall, Co-Founder & CEO at Planet Labs (00:49) “We go where the cool people are” (01:46) What it takes to image Earth every day (04:13) Why information is power in modern war (07:39) Why countries want their own satellites (08:34) How Wall Street and Big Tech are watching from space (11:16) The most surprising uses of satellite imagery (14:49) Imaging any point on Earth within 30 minutes (17:24) What if you could ask a satellite a question? (19:41) Every AI story comes back to compute (20:38) Do data centers in space make sense? (25:32) Why satellites are so sensitive (26:55) The NASA maverick who made Planet Labs possible (28:37) Who's on Planet Labs no-go list (29:18) Will's prediction on finding aliens (33:34) Inside NASA's alien hotline (35:05) How a childhood hero inspired Will’s space career

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

• 0:00Molly O'Shea?

  Data centers in space, so have you thought about this at all?

• 0:02Speaker 01

  More than thought about it, we just launched last week the first test project for Google. Data centers is all an energy problem. In space, for each solar panel, you get five times more power than you get on the ground. Because you can put them in a sun synchronous orbit that is always looking at the sun. We're seeing two big trends in the world. One is the geopolitical changes that are happening. And the second is AI. We're seeing a lot of countries needing our data really quickly. The point is, information is power. And by giving it to these countries, we can help them diffuse tensions and make it more likely we don't need to go to war.

• 0:33Molly O'Shea?

  You're in beta with your AI. So what are you doing in AI and how does that change?

• 0:49Molly O'Shea?

  Will Marshall, thank you for having us at Planet Labs.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  No problem, welcome again. I mean, it's fun to tour downstairs.

• 0:57Molly O'Shea?

  We didn't mention this in the tour, which I think was a big miss, but we're in the heart of San Francisco right now.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:03Molly O'Shea?

  We're not in South Bay of LA. We're not in the middle of New Mexico. We are literally in San Francisco.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, few people realize that there is a mass satellite manufacturing facility in the middle of San Francisco.

• 1:16Molly O'Shea?

  So why did you choose this location?

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Well, we were at NASA Ames, our founding team, just down the road, near Mountain View. But we all wanted to be in the city where the cool kids hang out. So we came up here. And the same today. Look at the AI companies. Anthropic's a few blocks that way, OpenAI is a few blocks that way. And even the Google Gemini team, you think of Google being in Mountain View, but the Google Gemini team is a few blocks down the road. All the young engineers want to be in San Francisco. So we go where the cool people are.

• 1:46Molly O'Shea?

  So for people who haven't watched it yet, we just came off of a tour of your facility.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:52Molly O'Shea?

  What did we just see?

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, what we just saw was a manufacturing facility for satellites. We've made it way more automated, taken satellites the size of a double decker bus and shrunk them down. You can see some of them in the background here. And enabled us to be able to launch them many more and at lower cost. And with all of that, we have put up enough satellites to image the entire Earth every day, which is the first fleet that has ever done that. We launched the first satellite, set of satellites that grew to over 100 satellites, the first big-ish constellation of satellites. Now Starlink is a bigger constellation. Now, what is all that for? This is what we can talk about now.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  So, I mean, really, in the end, this is an information business. We're selling information. Why? Because we collect all this information about the planet and we want to help people make smarter decisions.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Whether that's for agriculture to improve crop yields, for security, for threats around the planet, for disaster response, for all sorts of, all manner of applications. And the addition of AI that we were just looking at means that more and more people can get access. But let me say in a big sense, we're seeing two big trends in the world. One is the geopolitical changes that are happening, the fragmentation, the changes to the geopolitical environment. And the second is AI. And huge, both huge forces. Now, space generally, and Planet in particular, are super relevant to both of those. Geopolitics is all about understanding threats around the corner,

• 3:37Speaker 01

  understanding what's going on, disasters and so on. And what better than information to help you understand that? And then AI is all about having better information. So we can dive into each one of those a little bit more. But basically, satellite data is critical to underpinning security, sustainability, AI, the lot of it. And so we're seeing a boon right now, which is why we're on this floor, which we've just doubled our manufacturing capacity here in San Francisco. And that's all because we're seeing a lot of countries needing our data really quickly. So let's go into that security piece of it a little bit. Take Ukraine.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  We helped to see the troops build up on the border of Ukraine before the invasion happened, the full-scale invasion.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Now, actually, we help provide data to Ukraine to help them monitor threats well in advance of reaching their borders, to try and stop those threats, to help them defend their country. I can't get into all of the details, but it's really at the core, an information advantage.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  They're facing a conventional disadvantage. Russia has more troops, more tanks, more missiles, more planes. But Ukraine has two distinct advantages. One is they really care about their country and they don't want it invaded. And the second is they have information advantage. And information is power. And they've been extremely active at using latest technology, drones, satellites, AI, to get advantage. So we've helped them as best we can with their incredible innovation. They've used and seen uses of our data in incredible ways. Now, other countries are going to Ukraine and going, what's going on here? And they see that most of their satellite data comes from Planet and they go, wow, okay, we need that too.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  If Russia might invade us, what about China and Taiwan? What about whatever? We also work with the US Navy. The US Navy uses us to monitor all of the South China Sea, 13 million square kilometers, so slightly bigger than the United States area of ocean.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  And they're looking for illegal fishing activities, illegal, like, North Korean vessels going against oil embargoes, Chinese activities that shouldn't be where they are, building islands or what have you. They monitor that and they provide that to their allies in the region, like Philippines, so that they can all have a common understanding of where the threats are.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Admiral Papparo, also in that same area, who runs Indo-PACOM, the Command of the United States out in the Pacific. And he uses our data to monitor China for threats across China. But actually, industrial facilities that might supply them, why? Because he wants to get early warning of any threat. So for example, if China are going to attack Taiwan, he wants to get early warning of that. Can he get not just a day warning, but a week or a few months? If we can give them that sort of warning, then that can help them prepare, deter, help diplomatic options and other things. The point is, information is power. And by giving it to these countries, we can help them diffuse tensions and make it more likely that we don't need to go to war. Right?

• 7:01Speaker 01

  So that's our mission on the security side. And now it's got so big, especially because people have seen what's happened in Ukraine, seen what Admiral Papparo is doing in China and realize, wow, we at Planet are doing something really unique, imaging the whole world. We give everyone a peripheral vision of what's going on to help them see threats earlier. Normally, satellites before Planet were only used to look at the things people knew to look at. The nuclear facility in North Korea, the Russia missile factory, what have you. But we look at everything else and find if there's things that might be emerging that they didn't know they needed to look at. So now countries are coming to us and saying, can we buy your data? Can we buy your AI that sits on top to find these new threats?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  And they're also saying, hey, can we just buy your satellites? Because we want some of them ourselves as well.

• 7:51Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  And we're initially, we were like, well, you could just buy the data. And then they were like, no, no, no, we really want the satellites so that we have sovereign control of them. So then we started answering the mail on that. And now we've done a number of deals. Japan is buying some of our satellites. Germany is sponsoring and funding another fleet of satellites. We're doing some for Sweden. And these are countries that are now getting their first and best optical reconnaissance system that we build, we launch them into space, and then we hand over the keys so that they get to operate them. And that's also a booming business. So now, this is why we're in this lab that built up, because we're seeing so much demand for all of that.

• 8:34Molly O'Shea?

  Is all of the demand on the defense side?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  No, we're seeing the strongest demand there right now. But we are seeing also a boon in commercial business and civil government business as well. So civil government is counties and states trying to use us to help stop wildfires and respond to them. Or NASA using it for science and Earth system science. It's Brazil government using it to stop deforestation. But no one can do that on their own. AI is covering all of that. Satellites and AI enable this scale. That's civil government.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Commercial, we just are working with agricultural companies like John Deere, Bayer, BASF. We're working and there we help them improve crop yields. We work with hedge funds. I can't tell you who, but some of the hedge funds like to work with us to get alpha on stocks and commodities around the planet. We have a lot of understanding of crop yields around the world, a lot of understanding of infrastructure development. We've even had some of the hyperscalers around here buy our data. Why? Because they want to monitor not just their data center construction, but they want to monitor their competitors' data center construction. We have all the understanding of the data center construction all around the world, not just in the US, in China, in other places.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  So we have a wide variety of applications, but it's true that defense is really what's driving the biggest boon right now. We reported a significant growth last quarter. It was 58% growth year on year. But I think the biggest part of that was the defense growth. So the other sectors are growing as well, but the defense piece is growing the fastest.

• 10:22Molly O'Shea?

  Last year at Reagan National Defense Forum, I had an interview with Emile Michael, under Secretary of Defense for the Department of War, and also the CTO there. And of like a few companies, I think it was three or four, he mentioned Planet Labs.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Is that why you came? Because you said it was a good idea. Yeah. Look, again, new technology is changing the nature of warfare. Now it is increasingly hybrid, it's increasingly distributed, and it's increasingly new technologies that can help you address that. Drones, satellites, and AI are the core of that. So satellites is less known than the drones, but they're playing a critical role around the world, whether that's in Ukraine or in Iran and other places around the planet.

• 11:16Molly O'Shea?

  I have to ask you, what is the craziest thing or most surprising thing that you've seen?

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Oh my God, I've seen so many things. But basically, when you think, look at a map and you see it's just static, it isn't. The whole world is changing. If you look at a field, the river will move. The, you know, human activity is changing everything, but everything is changing. But I mean, we've seen, what I'm most excited about is what people do with our imagery. Like, it's a huge range of things. To give you some bizarre examples, we had some people in South America protecting dolphins in rivers, even though we can't see them. We can see the activity that was limiting their range or something.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  And we saw people who use our data in Africa to stop river blindness. And you're like, how on earth can we help with river blindness? It's a disease that's river-based, but we obviously can't see what it is. But it's all to do with how close the village is to the stagnant water. And we can see stagnant water in the imagery. So these NGOs were using it to warn villages, you're close to stagnant water, therefore get out of those way or what have you. So it's just all over the place. The most interesting applications on the defense side are a little bit more sensitive, but just know that it's playing a big role in these conflicts around the world. And I believe one that is really helpful for the planet.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  As I said, diffuse tension, reduce the likelihood of civilian casualties, reduce the likelihood of war at all happening. Because the best, the best situation is that we don't enter a war in the first place. And information diffuses that tensions because it means that different sides can understand what's going on.

• 13:08Molly O'Shea?

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• 13:53Molly O'Shea?

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• 14:35Molly O'Shea?

  to bring compute online faster and at scale. Zone is building the foundation of the AI frontier. Visit zonefrontier.com to learn more. That's zonefrontier.com to learn more. To walk through the satellites that you produce, you produce a handful and they're all called different birds. I know we talked about this on the tour, but could you walk through the different use cases or the specs for each one of them, starting with Dove?

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the Doves are our mainstay scan. That's the thing that no one else has on the planet, the daily scanner of the Earth. They cover all the Earth's landmass, about 200 million square kilometers. So more than the landmass of the Earth. It covers a bunch of ocean territory as well in eight spectral bands at three meter resolution. Then we have our Pelicans, which are our highest resolution satellites. And those ones image particular task locations that our customers are sport. So one is automatically scanning. The other one, you say, hey, take a picture of here, here, here, and then we can do that. The most unique aspect of that is that we're building up to a fleet that has much more revisit than anyone else and faster timeliness.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  So if you say, our goal is that if you say, hey, I want a picture of Tahiti, you can get a picture of Tahiti, you can make the request, get the image back and analyzed in 30 minutes, no matter where it is on the planet. And then we have our Tanager spacecraft, which are our hyperspectral satellites. So instead of having three colors like our eye, these have 420 color bands that enable you to sort of get a fingerprint of what you see on the Earth. It's basically 400 different images for every point on the Earth's landmass that you're imaging. And with really narrow spectral bands. And that, what that enables you to see is not just that that's blue or green.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  There's this type of blue or green, such that you can identify tree species, crop species. So it's useful for ag and biodiversity and monitoring land. But it's also good for defense because you can see camouflage and the distinction between camouflage and a real vehicle. It's good for emissions and pollution, so we can detect methane pollutants around the world. So if there's a gas leak, you can literally see the gas, even though methane gas is colorless. We can see it because in this spectral band, it sticks out like a sore thumb. So we can detect those gas leaks and help people tell operators, hey, you've got a gas leak, and then they can turn it off. That's good for the planet and it's good for them, saves them money.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  So basically, different kinds of satellites that do all these different things. They're all about collecting better information to help people make better decisions and actions.

• 17:24Molly O'Shea?

  And to the point of being in San Francisco, we're moving into the intelligence era.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:29Molly O'Shea?

  You guys are in beta with your AI app. So what are you doing in AI and how does that change?

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, what this enables is an explosion of the number of people that can get value out of data. So I used to work at NASA. I know those guys really well that use our data there. It is amazing what they do. But that's because they've got 1,000 people that know how to Analyze satellite data. That's great for them, but that farmer in Kansas or the, you know, the journalist in Kentucky, what the heck are they going to do with 4 million 47 megapixel images every day? They don't know how to deal with that, right? So AI is coming along and is like, you could just ask questions and get answers. That is going to totally explode the number of users.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  So, you know, I was saying how satellites are going from like a desktop, or mainframe to desktop is what we've done on the hardware side. This is like the explosion of the number of people that could get value out of it. It's like giving people a desktop that with no software on it and say, all right, off you go. And then one in a thousand people can get value out of it. So now you've got a basic operating system that anyone can use. Now suddenly that computer is useful to everyone, right? Basically, and that's what we see today. So space hasn't gone through that transition yet. And I think AI is the thing that opens it up for everyone else. So not just the big countries. So I think it's actually going to help with a lot of defense and intelligence

• 19:03Speaker 01

  because it can, you know, help monitor large areas for threats and so on. But even more, it's going to explode the commercial applications. It's going to explode all the applications in civil government. So many things could be benefited. Firefighters trying to stop and respond to fires. Farmers, counties trying to just stop illegal activity of whatever. People that don't have permits for swimming pools. I mean, there's just bazillions of use cases of our satellite data in principle. But the AI enables it to have value in practice to them.

• 19:41Molly O'Shea?

  Adding the layer of AI as another business model. And we were joking about this when we were walking over there because through all the AI conversations that we have on sorcery, it always comes down to compute. So where are you first, like, where are you storing all this? How are you handling the shift in business model? Like, where are you getting all the compute?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  The compute pieces are simple. We put it on Google Cloud. We have some stuff on AWS as well, but mainly on Google Cloud. Yeah, I mean, it's not changing the business model that much because we were mainly selling data anyway. But now it's just exploding the number of people that can get value out of it. It's true that we're now adding more analytical layers towards what we call solutions, right? That's already using some AI. But the AI tools that you were seeing are much more flexible. So again, it's not so specialized. It's more that you can answer, ask any question in, in simple language terms, and it will have a go.

• 20:38Molly O'Shea?

  Satellites, I mean, between, between what we're seeing with Planet Labs, with Starlink, with even geopolitical issues, like, they've just become a really hot topic. One of the hot topics is data centers in space. So have you thought about this at all? Is this rational, irrational? Why, why would this make sense?

• 20:59Speaker 01

  We've more than thought about it. We just launched last week the first data centers test project for Google. Sun Catcher is the name of their project. And before that, we've launched Nvidia chips on our Pelican spacecraft. The reason we're putting more compute upstairs is to process the data quickly. It's, it's great if we can do the image processing, recognize the ships, do the querying up there, and then just send down the answers. That, that means we can get the answers much quicker. In the case of the LA fires, we took an image within a couple of hours of the fires starting. We got it down a couple of hours later and then had processing time. Maybe that's another hour. And then, then they got the image.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  So now we're talking several hours into the fire. What if we could have got that in minutes? That could have meant potentially those firefighters saving more lives or those other first responders getting more quickly to help people, right? So we want to reduce that timeline. And so having compute in space helps with that. Separately though, yeah, there's like, should we just put all of the computers in space? And yes, I believe it totally makes sense from a, a basic economic analysis. And why? The intuition comes down to something very simple. Data centers is all an energy problem. So on the ground, you would naturally power them using solar panels if you were just thinking about the cheapest way to do it.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Because solar panels are the cheapest watts per dollar. However, then you have intermittency because of cloud and nights. But you don't want an intermittent data center. So then you have to add gas power or you have to add nuclear power. Then now we're starting to get really complicated, much more permitting, much more time. In space, for each solar panel, you get five times more power than you get on the ground. Because you don't, because you can put them in a sun synchronous orbit that is always looking at the sun. And that means that you just keep the panel facing the sun and it always is drawing power. No interruption from clouds, no interruption from day and night. So you don't have to have batteries. You don't have to have gas. You don't have any of those other power systems.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Five times more power, straight to the chips. And then you just have to add radiators to cool those chips into the darkness of space. We know how to do all of those things. And you can, and you can send your commands up via radio and get your answers back via radio. There's a little of a latency, but not very much, actually. So it all actually is just going to be cheaper. Notwithstanding that, it's also going to be better for communities that don't want these data centers in their backyard because of rising energy costs, water usage and other challenges. It's just going to be smarter to put that infrastructure in orbit eventually. Arthur C. Clarke talked about these sorts of ideas, the sci-fi, or the many, many decades ago.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  But now it's finally coming to reality. And the first piece, it eventually will put power in space and beam that down and other things. But the first piece, by far easiest, is compute. Back to the Google demo. We're just doing a demo to see if they're, how their TPUs do in space. We, we already commissioned the spacecraft. It's doing way well in space. We're very happy and Google's very happy and it's very exciting. We will test that TPU and we'll see how that goes. And we'll tell the world more about that as, as we go.

• 24:22Molly O'Shea?

  How good is AI at real professional work? Merckor's AI Productivity Index, or APEX, tracks it with every major frontier model release. Build with partners like Harvey and Cognition. See where the frontier actually stands at mercor.com/apeX. Today's episode is sponsored by V C X by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. Learn more at getvcx.com. Public is a multi-asset investing platform where you can automate your investing with AI agents. Create your own custom agent with a simple prompt. Agents can monitor markets, execute trading strategies and manage your cash across stocks, bonds, options, crypto and more.

• 25:08Molly O'Shea?

  Want to buy at market close and sell the next day is open? Just tell your agent. Automate your investing at public.com. Founders scale faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes. Hire anyone, anywhere. Get visas handled fast and get back to building. Visit deal.com/sorcery. That's D E E L dot com slash sorcery. So there's increased demand globally. There's also increased sensitivity globally. And this brings in new national security concerns, especially with satellites. Why are satellites so sensitive and such sensitive assets? And what can you compare that to if someone took down a satellite?

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Well, in many ways, satellites are like the sensors of countries. They are acting as their eyes and their ears.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  And obviously, it's very threatening if you say, hey, I'm going to take out your eyes and your ears. You can't suddenly, you're suddenly blind. The US, for example, gets its early warning of missile attacks from space. That's how it knows if North Korea is sending a missile this way. It's missiles with GPS. And then there's all this civilian infrastructure that is now dependent on it. You use your maps, you use your iPhone, you're going to be using GPS. You, you pay for a credit card, you're going to be using GPS. You, you, you look at the Google Maps, you have satellite layer. You're using satellites. You use the weather report, you're using satellites. People don't realize how much it's baked into our lives today. So it's also underpins a lot of our economy.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  The space economy, you know, is a few hundred billion a year. But the dependencies amount to much more than that. And so countries' security depends on it and their economies depend on it, in short.

• 26:55Molly O'Shea?

  As you mentioned earlier, you're scaling across globally and there has been more interest per country. So why has sovereignty increased and what are you seeing?

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Well, that's the backdrop of the geopolitical fragmentation. US administration has asked other countries to do more in defense and for the US to shift more of the burden to others. And in doing that, a lot of those other countries, the first thing is, well, I first need to understand the threats in my neighborhood. And how do you do that? Well, satellites, we already just mentioned, are how you get your sensing. It's how, it's your eyes and your ears. So one of the first things countries want is that. Now, they look around the world and they go, "Well, who's produced all the eyes and ears?" Well, we produced more Earth imaging satellites than any other country, company. And so, they, of course, we're one of the first people they call.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  And so, that is driving a lot of demand right now. It's very exciting. We can really help countries with their sovereignty needs. We can help them have their own satellites, which pointing where they want them to point, controlling those satellites, and they get to do that really quickly. In the case of Sweden, we managed to launch the first satellite for them in four months after we signed the contract.

• 28:09Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Which, you know, normally in the aerospace industry would have taken five or 10 years. And we did the same for the one sponsored by Germany in just two months. So, we can do really fast, and that is a complete game changer. So, you know, two big things that Planet does that no one else does is the daily scan and the fact that we can launch satellites real fast for people. And those two things, we're really leading the world in.

• 28:37Molly O'Shea?

  Who's on the no-go list?

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Well, there's definitely no-go lists. I mean, firstly, there's a list of US embargoed countries. The EU has equivalent lists, the UN. Obviously, we don't tell the terrorists and, you know, to North Korea. But we, in addition, have a group of employees that look at deals and really think, "How is this aligned with our values?" And ensuring that we're going to see positive outcomes from that. So, we really care about this. It's something that we think very carefully about. We know that our technology is very powerful, and we want to be good stewards of that.

• 29:18Molly O'Shea?

  Well, this is a difficult question. You have probably seen more images of the Earth than anyone else. One, have you seen any?

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Aliens.

• 29:28Molly O'Shea?

  Aliens.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  I knew it. No, in the short answer, we've seen lots of funny things. In fact, the US Air Force Alien Office, whatever it's called, did ask us for imagery, and we did provide. No, I mean, in short answer, there isn't really anything.

• 29:47Molly O'Shea?

  They move too fast? What's the deal?

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, funny objects, trying to look at flying objects, flying too fast, what have you. Anomalous stuff. Now, most of it, there isn't really. I'm sad, because actually, the interesting backdrop is that the the universe is remarkably silent. We haven't seen any aliens yet, and that's shocking. My co-founder worked on a mission called TESS at NASA, which was looking at other planets around nearby star systems. So, we've now discovered over 6,300 planets all around in the local galactic neighborhood. And none of them have any obvious signs of life yet.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  And now, we're still looking, but in many ways, the universe is eerily silent. And this is what Enrico Fermi, we now call the Fermi paradox after his question, which is basically, "What gives? How come there's so many planets, the universe is so big, and we still haven't heard from the aliens?" This is a big question. I predict that we'll actually find life off-Earth within the next 10 years.

• 31:01Molly O'Shea?

  10 years?

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Actually, I predicted that a few years ago, so now it's probably more like six or seven. And the reason is, we're going to look at all those planets and look at their atmospheres with the modern, best telescopes we have on the Earth and the James Webb Telescope. We can actually tell chemical signatures, doing what we do with our Tannerian satellite, but looking out. And with that, we should be able to see certain signs of their atmospheres that might be indications of life. Like, if you looked at the Earth, you'd see 20% oxygen in the atmosphere. That's a dead giveaway, because oxygen grabs on to anything. It oxidizes iron, it oxidizes everything. The only reason we have all this abundance is because life is, keeps on, all the plants keep on pushing all that up.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  If we saw anything like that, we would go, "That planet probably has life." We won't be certain, we haven't seen the picture of the alien yet, but we would go, "That is anomalous." We haven't done that yet, but with all that survey, I think we'll probably find it. But still, that could be life that's not intelligent. We would expect to see radio waves from these things, and we've looked at most of those kind of things, and there isn't. We haven't seen any obvious signs of technology or technological life forms. And so, that's rather worrying, because one possibility is that we get to technology stages and then we blow ourselves up. You know, people seriously worry about this. Like, we've got nukes, we're sort of getting through that. Now, we've got AI, very scary.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Obviously, amazing upside potential, like we were talking about, but also brings real risks, as we saw with recent hacking events and other things. AI could help terrorists build bad things, and we've got real risks of AI. And then, there's the whole control thing. Can we even control it? We don't know that the reason it's eerily silent is actually because they blow themselves up when they get to this stage. Hopefully not, but this is why what we do right now, we're taking care of Planet Earth, or as I call it, Spaceship Earth, because we're all on a spaceship, a billion of us, like Buckminster Fuller observed.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  And it's the only place that there is life that we know yet. Maybe there's other places, but so far, it's the only one. Therefore, our responsibility to take care of it and not blow it up is like, not just locally important, it's cosmically important. It's our cosmic duty to take care of the Earth. And so, in short answer, no, we haven't seen any aliens, but that makes our role here even more important.

• 33:34Molly O'Shea?

  Question, are there any conspiracy theories we should be paying attention to?

• 33:40Speaker 01

  I'm not a big, I mean, you're talking to a scientist here.

• 33:43Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Most of that, my friend at NASA used to run the hotline for aliens, and 90-something percent.

• 33:52Molly O'Shea?

  The hotline for aliens? Like, if the aliens would call?

• 33:55Speaker 01

  No, no, not the aliens. No, the people calling, thinking they've seen aliens.

• 33:59Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, gosh.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Is what it meant. Or the fruitcake line, as he would call it.

• 34:06Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, no.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Because most of it, unfortunately, isn't real. It's like, most of it's people observing Venus and not realizing that it's Venus. Over 90%, there's that one use case, by the way. So, unfortunately, most of these things have very simple explanations, and even the ones that we can't explain, and there are definitely some that we can't explain, the chances of it being aliens are really low. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and we haven't got that. But it's fun to think about aliens in our galactic neighborhood, and I think, again, in the next few years, we might see some.

• 34:38Molly O'Shea?

  Do you have any particular sci-fi movies or books that you like?

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Well, I like Star Trek. I like, probably my favorite is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was made into a film, but the best is the radio series original, which is, I mean, those guys, sometimes were drunk doing this radio, but they were amazingly funny. And that's why, yeah, my favorite number is 42, The Answer to Life, The Universe, and everything, and all the rest of it.

• 35:05Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing. Okay, so as we close out, I'm going to ask our partner a question. So, our partner is Brex, Spending Sparta Moving Faster, their corporate agentic finance platform. They're super intelligent, because that's what we call it now, super intelligence. So, in terms of the topic of performance, I like to take in this in more of like a personal bend. Like, people say you're a culmination of the five people you surround yourself with, or people that inspire you or mentor you. So, I'm curious, who is that person or people for you?

• 35:38Speaker 01

  When I was a kid, I was really inspired by an astronomer in England called Patrick Moore, who I got to meet. He's a bit like the Carl Sagan of England.

• 35:46Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  And I was young, building telescopes, not so different from these. It's just on the ground, pointing up, not in space, pointing down. And so, one of my teachers took me to meet him, and he was like a god to me. And I was like, "Oh, my God, we're going to see Patrick Moore." So, he became a bit of a mentor, but I have been lucky to have many mentors that I look up to. I did my PhD very fortuitously with Roger Penrose, who's a mathematical cosmologist. But he doesn't limit himself even to that. I was doing stuff with him on physics, but he also has ideas about consciousness. He speculates, he does amazing stuff in mathematics. Like, he came up with these Penrose tiling.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  He made contributions in cosmology. He actually helped to prove that singularities could really exist in practice, like stars could collapse into a black hole. The theory was clear from Einstein, but he actually proved that a non-symmetric star could eventually be a black hole, so in practice. And that also means that there could be the end of time. If the end of the universe collapses, we don't think we're in that scenario. We think we're going to continue expanding now. But anyway, really interesting mathematics. And I mean, when you meet people like that, it's just, I'm inspired by the genius. I mean, these guys are totally different playing field.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  And it's very humbling. He, at 70, when I was doing my PhD, was running rings around all of the rest of the professors and, of course, me as a student, who's probably come in half a hangover from the night before. And this guy is going, you know, talking about string theory and cosmology and all the rest of it. And it's humbling to see genius, basically. And so, I've been very lucky with mentors like that through my career. When I was at NASA, I had Pete Warden, who was a sort of maverick in the space industry. He was in the US Air Force. Then, he went to NASA to run the NASA Center that I worked at.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  And we argued a lot, but I learned a huge amount from this guy. And he really gave us a shield at NASA to do innovative things. And that's where we started with this, "Let's throw some phones into space and see if they work." Which, by the way, is what led to all of this.

• 38:15Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  And so, we're very, it sort of brings us right back to where we began.

• 38:21Molly O'Shea?

  I guess to distill that down, what is the key lesson that you've learned through building the company throughout the years, going public, launching more into space?

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Well, people say startups are all about timing. I say, "And the best idea." And of course, those things are obviously important. But I'd say persistence and endurance is the biggest thing that actually distinguishes entrepreneurs that succeed and don't. Our team has been at this for years, and we knew that we were on a mission that was really important to help the planet. Security, sustainability, AI, all the things that we can envision how it can help us. And we weren't going to stop just because some VC said, "No, you can't. That's crazy. No one's ever launched that many satellites. No one's ever, you know, whatever."

• 39:11Speaker 01

  And that determination, that grit, is what keeps, and that inspiration of helping the planet is making the best positive contribution with these tools is what keeps us going every day. And I was so proud, on our 10th anniversary, that seven of the first 10 employees of Planet were still working at Planet.

• 39:33Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  And we just had our 15th anniversary, and there's still about half of the first 10 still at Planet. That's, says a huge amount, right? They could probably work anywhere, these guys, the incredible skills. But they choose to continue to work at Planet because they think the mission's cool. They're doing amazing. They get to work on satellites every day, and who doesn't like that?

• 39:56Molly O'Shea?

  I don't know. People love it. People love it. And if you haven't watched the tour yet, please watch the tour. It's amazing. Will, thank you so much.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Hey, no worries.

• 40:04Molly O'Shea?

  What an amazing place to end it, and congrats with all the success.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Thanks for coming.

• 40:09Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once-a-week top deals and tech headlines email, and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.