You are listening to the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, brought you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

You can find podcasts and videos of these lectures online at eChorner.standford.edu.

It is my extreme pleasure to welcome our guest today. Will Marshall is the co-founder and

CEO of Planet Labs, and he's a real live rocket scientists. Prior to Planet Labs, Will

was a scientist at NASA, where he worked on a planetary bus, the lunar orbiter, and did work

trying to remediate space debris. He received his

PhD in physics from Oxford and he's here today to share his experience

launching a company as well as launching tiny satellites called doves that take

photos of the entire Earth every single day. Please join me and welcoming Will Marshall.

Thanks guys. Can everyone hear me okay?

Great.

So what I wanted to talk to you guys about today

was a little bit about what we do at Planet Labs

and why and a little bit of some of the lessons that I've learned on this entrepreneurial journey

if you like for others that are interested in taking similar journeys. I hope it will be

useful but much of it will be from my personal perspective, so take it with that grain of salt.

I want to start us here. This is called the Earth. You may have seen it before.

You may have seen it before in particular because of this rather iconic image that the Apollo 17 astronauts took when they were hurtling around the moon in 1972.

It was the first full frame image of the entire planet when it was fully sunlit.

And it's credited with having started the green movement,

not so much because we didn't know we were living on a planet before then,

or at least most people thought we did.

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