Payam Banazadeh (Capella Space) - Prepare to Launch
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)
Stanford eCorner
4.5 • 740 Ratings
🗓️ 8 May 2019
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When Capella Space’s first prototype satellite launched in December 2018, it was the culmination of over three years of nonstop effort. Capella Space founder and CEO Payam Banazadeh explains how he fused experienced gained at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Stanford’s Management Science and Engineering masters program to build the satellite imaging company. As an early-stage CEO, he provides insights into the many risks and strategic decisions that precede product roll-out.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Who you are defines how you build. |
| 0:06.7 | This is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series. |
| 0:10.6 | Brought to you by Stanford E-Corner. |
| 0:13.6 | On this episode, we have Payam Banazade, founder and CEO of Capella Space, |
| 0:19.4 | which aims to build a global satellite-based radar network |
| 0:22.7 | to solve problems in areas like agriculture, infrastructure monitoring, and disaster response. |
| 0:29.7 | Before founding Capella Space, Paiam worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. Here's Paiom. |
| 0:39.7 | I thought a lot about how to make this a little more useful, and if I were in your shoes, |
| 0:44.8 | which I was, how this would have been a little more efficient. So I'm not going to talk about |
| 0:48.5 | Capella, and I'm not going to give you a marketing presentation on what the company does. Look up |
| 0:53.1 | or come talk to me afterwards, happy to talk about it. But how many of you know about Keppella actually? Let me just, |
| 0:59.2 | okay, that's actually pretty good. I thought I would talk about very quickly, maybe just over |
| 1:03.7 | 10 minutes of the first few months of starting the company and give you a glimpse of the stressful |
| 1:09.7 | times and the uncertainties that existed every day |
| 1:13.1 | in those first six months. |
| 1:15.0 | And then hopefully we can get into some Q&A and dive deeper into any other topics. |
| 1:20.4 | A little context on Capella very quickly, we are trying to build an infrastructure around |
| 1:25.4 | our planet in space using satellites in order |
| 1:28.3 | to monitor our planet and observe changes. |
| 1:31.3 | Believe it or not, this doesn't really, really exist. |
| 1:34.3 | I mean, we have certain capabilities, but there are a bunch of gaps that requires, in our opinion, |
| 1:41.3 | to be changed. |
... |
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