Governments started the space age. Now, billionaires and private firms are reinventing it. Guest host Steve Levitt explores what the past can teach us about a high-stakes future. (Part two of a two-part series.)
SOURCES:
Blaise Agüera y Arcas, vice president and fellow at Google, C.T.O. of technology and society.
Rosanna Hoffman, head of space law, policy, and sustainability at the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.
Alex Macdonald, former first chief economist at NASA, senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Will Marshall, co-founder and C.E.O. of Planet Labs.
RESOURCES:
"The mission to create a searchable database of Earth's surface," by Will Marshall (TED, 2018).
The Long Space Age, by Alex Macdonald (2017).
Planet Labs A.I.
EXTRAS:
"Should A.I. Move to Space?," series by Freakonomics Radio (2026).
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At first it sounds ridiculous. But it might be inevitable. Guest host Steve Levitt talks to a team that hopes to push A.I. infrastructure off the planet. Part one of a two-part series.)
SOURCES:
Blaise Agüera y Arcas, vice president and fellow at Google, C.T.O. of technology and society.
Travis Beals, senior director of product management at Google, Project Suncatcher lead.
Will Marshall, co-founder and C.E.O. of Planet Labs.
RESOURCES:
What Is Intelligence?, by Blaise Agüera y Arcas (2025).
"Towards a future space-based, highly scalable AI infrastructure system design," by Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Travis Beals, Maria Biggs, Jessica V. Bloom, Thomas Fischbacher, Konstantin Gromov, Urs Köster, Rishiraj Pravahan, and James Manyika (Google, 2025).
Reason, by Isaac Asimov (1941).
EXTRAS:
"Are Our Tools Becoming Part of Us?," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2024).
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(0:00) CEOs Andrew Feldman (Cerebras) and Will Marshall (Planet Labs) join the Besties!
(2:05) Both CEOs on going public: Impact on employees, customers, and business operations
(13:18) Timelines for datacenters in space
(19:28) Cerebras business breakdown, AI's impact on the silicon market
(24:45) How Founder/CEOs think about liquidity on the road to going public
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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.
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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 internet moment where cost reductions and performance enhancements have led to a seismic shift in what’s possible above our atmosphere, and how that can drastically improve life on Earth through unique datasets like the one Planet is 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.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here.
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Show Notes
[00:02:57] - [First question] - His thoughts on the renaissance of the space industry
[00:05:09] - The earliest days of Planet and why he started the business
[00:09:22] - Unique data units captured by their satellites
[00:13:35] - The real estate of space and interesting angles to consider
[00:15:59] - How customers interface with Planet and their early use cases
[00:20:57] - Thoughts on the sovereignty of space and the laws that exist currently
[00:23:43] - Figuring out the dynamics and pricing of Planet’s business model
[00:27:34] - Examples of stress and tensions when working in space
[00:29:08] - The future of privacy and concerns we should have there collectively
[00:30:29] - Five different types of satellites and their functions
[00:31:39] - The most sci-fi potential futures that Planet may unlock someday
[00:32:54] - Indexing the Earth and using data to train machine learning algorithms
[00:34:02] - What he’s learned about Earth that is most surprising
[00:37:12] - Contributing factors to a 70% decline in life on the planet in 40 years
[00:38:35] - Ways that going public might impact Planet’s long term goals
[00:40:23] - The hardware story of building various prototypes of satellites
[00:42:18] - How much is built in house versus outsourced to fabricate their satellites
[00:43:48] - Complimentary space trends that are compounding beyond imagery
[00:45:32] - Whether or not they plan on making their data open-source
[00:47:15] - Democratizing their data and allowing other companies to build on top of it
[00:48:30] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him
What if you could search the surface of the Earth the same way you search the internet? Will Marshall and his team at Planet use the world's largest fleet of satellites to image the entire Earth every day. Now they're moving on to a new project: using AI to index all the objects on the planet over time -- which could make ships, trees, houses and everything else on Earth searchable, the same way you search Google. He shares a vision for how this database can become a living record of the immense physical changes happening across the globe. "You can't fix what you can't see," Marshall says. "We want to give people the tools to see change and take action."
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