Will Marshall - Indexing the Earth

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:41)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:07)
My guest today is Will Marshall, the co-founder and CEO of Planet.
Will founded Planet in 2010 with a small team of NASA scientists to build a constellation of satellites that would image the entire Earth every day. Since then, Planet has successfully built and deployed 450 satellites into space, which the company is using to create a time series of images for every place on Earth. Our conversation covers the untold space story, how space is going through an intranet moment where cost reductions and performance enhancements have led to a seismic ship in what's possible above our atmosphere and how that can drastically improve life on Earth through unique data sets like the one Planet's piecing together. Once you listen to Will speak about Planet's progress and mission, it's hard to think of a more underappreciated company in business today. Please enjoy this great conversation with Will Marshall.
So Will, I think the place to begin, since this is such a cool, exciting area, space, the space renaissance that we're gonna be talking about today in your company Planet Labs, maybe you could just give us your impression of what's happening in space. And I think it's gonna draw a nice contrast to the very obvious rocket focused, billionaire focused thing that ever going to Mars, going to the moon. I think you're seeing a very different side of space and are a part of building that new industry and that new world. Just give us your overview, how you interpret what's happening in this space renaissance.

**Will Marshall** (3:25)
It certainly is a space renaissance out of the gate. So there's no question I agree with that statement. We are seeing massive shifts. Rockets have decreased their cost about 4X. That's a big deal, mainly through reusability, especially because of SpaceX. And then, and the proliferation of nano rockets as well, which is kind of cool.
But I think the other side of it is what's happening to satellites, which is we've seen about 1000X cost performance increase in satellites over the same period of the last 5, 10 years. What the main upshot of both of those trends compounding, and they do compound, is that we are seeing vastly new data sets emerging. We are generating and transporting vastly more data, like 10 times more than we were before or more about the Earth and transmission that around the Earth. And what's that relevant for? It's relevant for everything here on the Earth. It's about data about the Earth that helps us to transition to a sustainable economy.
Everything that the countries are trying to do in missions, every company trying to measure ESG targets is relevant for that.