On this week’s episode of Pathfinder, we sit down with Kevin Weil, president of product and business at Planet, a ~$1.3B Earth-imagine company based in San Francisco.
Kevin joined Planet last April to accelerate software development, build new analytics products, and further help the company move “up the stack.” Before he worked in commercial space, Kevin held leadership roles at Silicon Valley mainstays that have become household names: Twitter and Instagram. While at these consumer social media companies, he managed products with hundreds of millions of daily active users.
As always, Pathfinder is brought to you by SpiderOak Mission Systems, an industry leader in space cybersecurity.
What we discuss
- Kevin’s journey from studying particle physics to Silicon Valley startups and quickly shipping code
- How many PM tactics he was able to take from the consumer social world to Planet, and where he needed to start fresh
- Selling to governments vs. commercial users
- The value chain, from data to analytics to insights
- Going public, SPACs, and the trials and tribulations of being publicly traded. On the business fundamentals, “growth is accelerating” and “we have a proven business model,” Kevin says.
- Planet imagery has been front and center in helping shape the general public’s understanding of the war in Ukraine. “Bringing transparency is a massive positive,” Kevin says, “even if sometimes that means you capture some of the bad things that happen in the world.”
