Jan 26, 2020

Interview with Peter Platzer, Chief Executive Officer, Spire Global, Inc.

0

“Our customers are global; our product is global; our data collection is global. We have people across the world; we travel all over the world. If you work with space, you’re working with something that unifies the planet across borders, and that is something not unique just to Spire Global, but to all space companies.”

                    
Peter Platzer is the Chief Executive Officer of Spire Global, Inc., a private company in the United States that designs, builds, launches, and manages a network of small satellites. It has successfully deployed more than 80 Earth-observation CubeSats into low Earth orbit.

Key takeaways:
●    Private-public partnerships can be found across all industries, including space, and are essential to an environment of vital innovation.
●    With a lack of suppliers that have the scale and capabilities necessary to provide some of the parts needed for CubeSats, companies who build them must plan to focus on becoming a vertically integrated company.

Robert Jacobson: Can you share a bit about yourself and your role as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Spire Global, Inc., which has become a multi-cultural international startup?
Peter Platzer: I don’t think my role and responsibilities are any different from the typical CEO: having a strategy—making sure that the ship goes in the right direction—and keeping up morale by making sure that everyone is engaged, happy, and working efficiently. I think customer engagement is also a critical role for CEOs. Early on for a startup, that’s with investors, but it eventually becomes more focused on customers, or potential customers, and structuring deals.
Robert: How would you characterize Spire Global to someone who’s unfamiliar with the world of data, particularly space-enabled data? How would you describe what the company does?
Peter: It’s a space data company. There are three types of satellites: looking satellites, which are imaging satellites; talking satellites, which support internet connectivity (like an Iridium); and listening satellites, which are the ones that Spire Global deals with and they use radio frequency to listen to data from Earth. That supports various forms of tracking—anything from ships to planes to hurricanes and other weather—through the use of radio frequency, which has many physics advantages and is far more definable and changeable via software than are talking or looking satellites.
Robert: I’ve seen recently that Spire Global is going to be working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which has traditionally provided weather-related services, and there’s been some discussion that maybe there’ll be less reliance on the government for those services going forward. Can you share more about how this newer commercial model working in public-private might benefit people?
Peter: First of all, it’s really a private-public partnership, which you see in virtually all areas, from building streets and bridges to building computers to private security on airplanes; there are public-private partnerships all over.
NOAA is using satellites to get to the data; satellites are not an ingredient for a weather forecast; the data from them is. Right now, NOAA procures those satellites from the private sector, meaning that NOAA carries all the risk of schedule delays and cost overruns. For example, it is currently suffering from severe delays in the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) program because it’s not in their hands. They have put down money already, and yet they still have to deal with any and all of the schedule delays.
We see this public-private partnership in the imaging world. Instead of observing all the imaging satellites for the purpose of getting access to the images, the government is just buying the images, primarily from DigitalGlobe these days. [DigitalGlobe provides space imagery and geospatial content and operates civilian remote sensing spacecraft.] I think what we’re seeing on the weather side is that the public sector, in a measured and careful way, is leveraging private-sector technologies to augment the data that’s coming from their own satellites to improve their forecasts.
At the end of the day, the only thing they’re interested in is the data. If they can remove some of the cost, schedule, and capability risks by just purchasing the data directly and not buying the satellite, that’s a clear benefit for everyone. This has been done successfully in imaging, for example.
Robert: Another part of your model involves a type of asset tracking, and I saw recently that you’re going to be looking at illegal fishing. How specifically could Spire Global help reduce illegal fishing?
Peter: I personally was really surprised to learn about the magnitude of the problem of illegal and unreported fishing, which totals over $20 billion a year in losses, not to mention the risk it poses to the supply and completely depleting the fish stock in our oceans.
With a ship-tracking constellation the size and accuracy of what we have at Spire Global, we get a picture of what ships do at a highly accurate level. Think of it as playing a computer game on five frames per second versus playing it at 60 frames per second, on a black-and-white monitor versus a 5K monitor with a Retina Display. We get much higher resolution pictures and can see what ships do.
Illegal fishers often venture into cordoned-off territories and fish where they’re not supposed to. If you track them every few minutes, you can see when a fishing vessel goes into an illegal area. They will also often take their catch to a carryover vessel, which waits somewhere outside of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Takes the illegal catch from fishing boats, and drives it into another region. That’s a particular kind of movement pattern that you can see if you have a high-resolution tracking service. Then you can go after both the illegal fishers and the vessels that smuggle the fish away.
It goes down to the level of being able to detect even what type of species a fishing vessel is fishing based on the types of movements. You can tell if they have a license for line fishing for tuna, but what they’re actually doing is dragnet fishing. All those kinds of capabilities need a high-resolution ship-tracking AIS (Automatic Identification System), which Spire Global is able to provide given our large constellation.
Robert: Looking back, knowing what you know now, is there anything you would have done differently, maybe something that could help potential astropreneurs or those looking at starting a business in the larger space arena?
Peter: One of the wrong assumptions we had when we started was the idea that CubeSats had to involve commercial-off-the-shelf components, so you just buy the stuff and put them together and have your focus be on the payload. That’s turned out to be entirely wrong. Our first satellite was 90 percent vendor technology; today, our satellites are 90 percent proprietary technology.
Similarly, if I could go back, I would have paid closer attention to what SpaceX did, as it basically went through the same kind of journey. It started off by saying, “let’s buy rockets in Russia,” and it ended up being the only fully vertically integrated rocket builder in the world with things like the world’s largest macro 3-D printing operation in the process.
A similar thing has happened at Spire Global, and I would say that astropreneurs should realize that if you want to build a satellite, there are very few things that you can actually buy off the shelf. There just aren’t really suppliers that have the scale and capabilities necessary to provide some of those parts. You will have to build a vertically integrated company. That is something that we didn’t expect when we started.
Robert: You have worked with Craig Clark at Clyde Space. [Clyde Space Ltd. is a global provider of CubeSat and small satellite spacecraft.] I think you were spending a lot of time in Glasgow, Scotland. Can you share a little bit about the dynamic that’s developing in Scotland and a bit more about that relationship with Clyde Space?
Peter: I think that Clyde Space is the single best company in the world in building parts for CubeSats. They have the largest scale, and they have the largest amount of space heritage. It’s a company you would want to work with, that you would potentially want to partner with as you build a constellation. A number of astropreneurs are doing just that right now with good success.
There are more CubeSats being built in Glasgow on a regular basis than anywhere else in the world. It is hosting a big conference on data space focused solely on the applications of data, which is a unique angle, different from typical space conferences that focus on the technologies or the funding. This is a conference that has little interest in the underlying technology and is instead mostly interested in how the data from the satellites is changing the world and what we do on the planet.
Glasgow is worth watching, as it is starting to emerge as a potential center of excellence for small satellites.
Robert: What are some of your earliest influences, perhaps from science fiction?
Peter: I read a large amount of German science fiction, an ongoing story that was published once a week in magazines and then compiled into novels. I read probably a couple hundred thousand pages of those types of science fiction series. One called “Perry Rhodan” had an underlying theme of unity, unifying people across external boundaries such as skin color, religion, and sexual preference and focusing instead on the internal qualities of individuals.
That concept of unity is something that deeply resonates with me, which is why the first and most important value of Spire Global is “global.” It is a global company that was set up early to have offices across the world. When I was a teenager, I had a passport, but I didn’t understand the whole border thing. I wanted a passport that said “Peter Platzer, Citizen of Earth.” I think the idea of borders is kind of silly, which is partially driven by me growing up literally 30 minutes west of the Iron Curtain. I was very close and could see that, as a physicist, from a rational perspective, it’s entirely random that I was born on the left side of the Iron Curtain rather than the right side, and my life would be entirely different if I had been born on the right side of the Iron Curtain.
Robert: You’ve got “global” in the name Spire Global, would you say that are you articulating that philosophy through this entrepreneurial pursuit?
Peter: I do think that space, in general, engenders that. Satellites are global, are outside of country boundaries. Space is extraterritorial; it has a different set of laws. There are a lot of things about satellites that by definition make them global. Our customers are global; our product is global; our data collection is global. We have people across the world; we travel all over the world. If you work with space, you’re working with something that unifies the planet across borders, and that is something not unique just to Spire Global, but to all space companies.
There is a psychologically defined and diagnosed effect called “the overview effect” that humans experience when they leave Earth and see the planet for the first time from space. It’s a distinct experience with lasting psychological impact that makes people experience Earth as a fragile, precious blue marble, that makes them connect to people of different cultures and countries in a far more profound way than they might have been able to beforehand.


“Our customers are global; our product is global; our data collection is global. We have people across the world; we travel all over the world. If you work with space, you’re working with something that unifies the planet across borders, and that is something not unique just to Spire Global, but to all space companies.”

 


Robert: You have a philosophy that "We, as a company, will never give up on you," and it's an extremely difficult process to become a member of the Spire Global team. What’s behind that philosophy?
Peter: It’s a philosophy that Carol Dweck, in her research about growth mindset versus fixed mindset, brought excellent data to, and a bunch of related research on the power of grit and the importance of that, and not just belief. We’ve learned in the last 20 years or so that even things that we considered fixed, such as intelligence, is quite malleable. There’s a great amount of brain plasticity assuming that there is an excess amount of grit.
The concept is that if you’re relentless in the pursuit of growth and willing to endure the pain that is necessary to achieve greatness, greatness is in your grasp. The defining characteristic that’s significant to us is the amount of grit, the amount of perseverance you have in sustaining the necessary pain that comes with growth.
Robert: You worked as a coach at Harvard. If you were to have a one-on-one coaching session with a person aspiring to be in this industry, what would you share?
Peter: If someone wants to succeed in starting a space company or any other company, I would suggest they read a couple of books.
The first one is Do More Faster, from Brad Feld and David Cohen, which describes a lot of important lessons for companies early on. The other is The Hard Thing About Hard Things, which is an unusually somber and honest look at entrepreneurship, which often is glorified as something special, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true at all. The poem called “The Struggle” from Ben Horowitz puts it succinctly; if you don’t get comfortable with and even look forward to the experience of the struggle, then you shouldn’t start the company, space or otherwise.


“…if you don't get comfortable with and even look forward to the experience of the struggle; then you shouldn't start the company, space or otherwise.”

 


Robert: Along those same lines, what would you share with those who are interested in allocating some funds to some part of the space industry?
Peter: I don’t think there’s any compelling reason to. People have an impression that there’s all this investment in space happening in Silicon Valley, but I don’t think there’s any investment in space happening. I think there is investment in valuable data, and some of the data happens to come from satellites. Whether it comes from satellites is not the defining feature. People should be allocating money to data and should be allocating money into the application of data. For some data, probably the most powerful way of getting it is from space. For other data, it makes no sense to try to get it from space, and there are much better ways of getting that data.
Robert: That’s a very balanced answer; I appreciate that viewpoint. With your team, how do you balance between planning and execution in such a highly regulated industry?
Peter: I think Thomas Edison’s statement from centuries ago still holds true: “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”


Key takeaways:
●    Private-public partnerships can be found across all industries, including space, and are essential to an environment of vital innovation.
●    With a lack of suppliers that have the scale and capabilities necessary to provide some of the parts needed for CubeSats, companies who build them must plan to focus on becoming a vertically integrated company.

Peter Platzer reminds that private-public partnerships are possible across all industries. If one is going to work commercially with CubeSats, you will need to think about becoming vertically integrated due to supply chain challenges. For more entrepreneurial insights, visit RobertJacobson.com.
 

Subscribe
Join the mailing list to always stay up to date. You know you want to.