The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

Tonight at Planet HQ in San Francisco, Lorie, Mark and I drew a few things that are now destined to end up in space on the sides of our satellites. Yes, our “art” will be in space!

Last night, Lorie and I went to the Planet HQ and watched a satellite launch, which contained 12 of our satellites. Read all about it here: https://www.planet.com/pulse/flock-2p-launches-successfully-on-pslv/

Back in April, a recruiter reached out to me about a potential job at a company doing something really innovative to help life here on Earth. I did some digging and the company, Planet Labs (planet.com), piqued my interest. I now have another week to wrap up things at Xactly, which has been a great company to work at with great co-workers that I hope to stay in touch with for years to come, but soon I’m off to Planet Labs…

What does Planet Labs do? Planet Labs believes in using space to help life on Earth by imaging the entire planet every day to make global change visible, accessible and actionable. In addition to providing daily images of the entire planet from their own constellation of nanosatellites (built in San Francisco), Planet offers real-time, fact-based data so you can understand the changes in this daily imagery for the geography that’s important to your organization. The problem is that most organizations aren’t even leveraging satellite imagery yet, and those that do are trying to make decisions based on images that only cover parts of the planet that are only occasionally updated. Because Planet provides a definitive, factual, and unbiased account of any area of the planet that’s important to you, their imagery and data can help you harness this information to make quicker and better informed decisions.

What will I do? As of June 20, 2016 I will be Planet Lab’s new Global Channel and Sales Enablement Manager, which means that I’ll get to help figure out how to sell (and train others to sell) satellite images, data and services directly to organizations and through partners.

Want to know even more? A great video that explains it all is Planet’s CEO, Will Marshall, at the Salesforce 2015 Dreamforce event. It’s 30 minutes long, but really interesting. It starts with the launch of a rocket that exploded, resulting in a loss of a bunch of their small satellites:

Piper doesn’t sit unless indoors with food involved, so she hasn’t mastered posing for photos like Busby has. What you don’t see is my arm holding her in place.