Will Marshall
Co-Founder and CEO, Planet Labs PBC. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutivescientist@Will4Planet ↗LinkedIn ↗planet.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Will Marshall co-founded and leads Planet Labs, operating the world's largest commercial constellation of Earth-observation satellites. He previously earned a PhD in physics from the University of Oxford and worked as a scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center.
2shows
2appearances
23statements
12resolved
8supported
2contradicted
67%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Will Marshall said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Marshall: Most compute will move to space within 10 years
“I think no question within 10 years, most compute will be putting in space, which, to give you a sense, is a lot of money, like trillions, and will be bigger than any of the other space businesses today, comms, earth imaging, this is why we're getting into thi…”
Marshall: Starship will drastically lower space launch costs in 2-3 years
“On the current trajectory with Starship in particular, I would expect it, the launch costs come down there in two to three years.”
Marshall: Large satellite constellations allow companies to tolerate higher unit failure risk
“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 …”
Marshall: SpaceX's reusable rockets drove a fourfold drop in launch costs
“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”
Marshall: Transparency regarding nations' military activities increases the likelihood of peace
“The more information different countries have about each other's activities, including military activities, the more it's likely to be peace.”
Marshall: Planet has repeatedly refused data requests to prevent civilian harm
“We have our own ethics committee. That reviews every case with the government and checks. Is, 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.”
Marshall: Planet projects over 40% annual growth and profitability within two years
“So we have very clear line of sight now on a growth path, you know, going just over 40% a year for the next five years we project. And that gets us to profitability in the next couple of years.”
Planet Labs launched NVIDIA GPUs in space and is testing Google TPUs
“So we're partnering, ah, with Google to launch some of their TPUs into space. We've already launched NVIDIA's, ah, some of NVIDIA's GPUs into space. We're launching Google's TPUs into space on an early test.”
Marshall: Current LLMs are blind to real-world physical data
“I like to say, like, all the cool stuff that we're doing on the, with LLMs now, is really based on just the text of the internet being absorbed into these models, which is incredibly powerful already, but they don't know shit about the real world. I call them …”
Marshall: Pre-Planet Earth imagery was only captured monthly or annually
“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.”
Marshall: Planet applied Silicon Valley's agile software strategy to satellite hardware
“We wanted more like the Silicon Valley release early, release often software strategy than the requirements-driven, very careful science project of NASA.”
Marshall: Planet's Earth-observation satellites cost roughly $200,000 to $300,000 each to build
“It's about 300 K, or just slightly less than that, two or 300 K.”
Marshall: Traditional NASA satellites average approximately $1 billion in cost
“Most NASA satellites average, average about a billion.”
Marshall: Planet launched 460 satellites for less than one typical traditional 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.”
Marshall: Rocket launch costs dropped 4x to 5x over 10 years
“Rocket costs have come down about four or five X over the last 10 years, which has helped tremendously.”
Marshall: NASA's PhoneSat successfully operated commercial smartphone cameras and radios in orbit
“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 the Phone camera. And email the…”
Marshall: Apple and Google's consumer electronics R&D far outpaced NASA's electronics budget
“But now, the billions and billions of dollars that would be going on in the consumer electronics industry, like Apple and Samsung and Google and all these companies, was far outpacing what NASA could spend on the development of electronics.”
Marshall: Planet built its first satellite prototype using consumer electronics chips
“We built a test one at Rainbow this 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, …”
Marshall: Planet paid roughly $300,000 per launch for its first two satellites
“I think it was 300,000 dollars 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.”
Marshall: Planet generated over $100 million in revenue last year
“We did just over a hundred million in revenue last year, and that's a mature business at some level.”
Marshall: Planet supplies satellite data to Google for Google Maps
“So we supply data to Google for their maps. They do huge numbers of requests to us.”
Marshall: Planet founders shared a communal house with Apple, Google, and Stanford peers
“Yeah, no, actually, but it wasn't just NASA people. We had Students who are 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 mi…”
Planet's first two satellites launched within 48 hours despite six-month plan
“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, and they ended up …”
The other half of the tape: Will Marshall's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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2023 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Will's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Planet Labs PBC | 1 | 18 | 73% 8/11 | full record on How I Built This → |
| ALL-INLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Planet Labs PBC | 1 | 5 | 0% 0/1 | full record on All-In → |