Satellites, team, and family
I’m leaving the amazing team at Astro Digital.
When Mikhail, Chris, and I started 2018 planning; I got even more inspired by the vision, energy, and pragmatism for how they lead Astro Digital. And we had to be more pragmatic than ever, a rocket failure had just destroyed our 2 satellites a few weeks earlier. Instead of the Q4 planned launch of our imagery platform we now needed to quickly change course, and change our spend to let us bridge the loss. In the satellite business insurance money covers a lot, but the loss of time to market means you have to be super agile.
What should have been a champagne sabering moment celebrating our launch turned into re-org. We started to buy time for us to get new satellites built and launched. This meant deploying all available resources to the satellite and launch program and continuing to run an uber lean platform team. We decided to leverage the platform that we had built to date and just focus all our energy on building satellites and getting more coverage.
This July rocket failure got a lot worst, our second major launch blew up on November 28th when another Soyuz rocket failed and our satellites splashed back into Earth. This is what’s called a “short term liquidity situation” our satellites were about to start generating revenue that we were going to use to build the next phase of the constellation. There we were at our height - the team and technology was the best ever. The dream is so close; years of satellite design and building where about to come together with years of platform design - and then the satellites came crashing down (literally).
Since I ran point on building our platform it was my job to find a way to make this team sustainable, buying us time until we had imagery flowing in from our satellites. Mikhail and I quickly accelerated our plans to build out our team in Moscow. This buys us not only brilliant platform engineers, but also real cost savings by working outside of the Valley. This plan of running a round the world operation also meant that the leader of platform had to be in two places at the same time. My Russian is нуль but the real challenge came down to my boys, the idea of spending a week a month in Russia on top of a crazy startup week meant that my 2-year-old and 1-year-old would not know me. This meant I didn’t just need to build the team in Moscow, I needed to build a team that could function without me being a part of it.
It’s working; we are now working with 5 amazing engineers in Moscow, and if all goes well this will be 10 by mid 2018. Chris continues to lead the satellite engineering team and inspires me every day. We’re on course to be fully operational with the Landmapper constellation by summer 2019, and while this means we’re operating learner than ever, it means we will pull this off and build a great company with an even stronger and more experienced team next .year I’m excited to stay close to this amazing team, and cheer and support from the side line as an advisor. And happy to catch my breath and get time with my boys for a little. My plans after wrapping up final transition details at Astro Digital is spending Christmas on a tequila soaked beach in Mexico with my family and a stack of books that I’ve been collecting for the last 3 years.
Thank you for such an amazing ride everyone, this team and our partners, and especially thank you Mikhail and Chris for the support and inspiration.
