Stories
Stories
Mission Control
Hi, this is Dan Morrell, host of Skydeck.
By the time Peter Platzer (MBA 2002) was a teenager, he knew he wanted to be a physicist—and he was fascinated by space, eagerly engrossed in space-time diagrams and Einstein's special relativity. Those interests led to degrees from the Technical University of Vienna and even some opportunities to work on projects at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
But his life plans took a sharp turn on a Tuscany hillside one afternoon during a summer astrophysics program, where a professor recounted how a colleague's career was completely derailed when the rocket carrying his experimental instrument exploded at launch. Platzer decided to put his dream on hold and pivoted to a career in technology consulting. He never lost hold of his boyhood dream, though, and today he's the founder and CEO of Spire, a global provider of space-based data, analytics, and space services.Making good on those long-term goals, Platzer says, was the result of building a very specific mission for himself while he was at HBS: "To lead, inspire, and create the business of space for the benefit of all."
In this episode of Skydeck, Platzer and I talk about how he built that mission, how it culminated in the founding of Spire, and what advice he'd give to anyone who is still searching for their own mission.
- READ MORE
-
DM: When you come to HBS, you go through this process of building a mission for yourself. What spurred that movement? Why did you sit down and say, I need to figure out a purpose here.
PP: So, I have always been someone that, driven by this question about who am I and where are we going? Why are we here as a species, as people? So that thought process about who we are, what we are meant to do, is something that I have been, in various forms, following since being a teenager.
I had a very inspirational preacher in our community, very open, ecumenic, always forcing us to ask the difficult questions about life. And also recognizing that some questions you can't ask because there is no answer to them. And HBS was a fantastic environment to take just an extra time out, given that they don't give us anything to read or cases to do and, legitimately bored in school anyway, right? And think about, okay, what is my mission? And there's a fabulous book written by Laurie Beth Jones, which is called The Path. And it takes you through a process of discovery. And in the end, you come out with a very simple, three-element statement that is a mission statement for your life. Not for your job, not for your spiritual journey, not for your family. It is for your life. And that’s the process that I went through in the first year or so when I was at HBS.
DM: Take me through that process. What did you reflect on and were you surprised by the result?
PP: The process starts with really getting in context of what is your asset? So one of the first exercises is okay, there are four elements that many cultures talk about: fire, wind, water, earth —which one is you? And so, you start off by saying, okay, earth for me is, and then you write all the elements that make up earth. And water is for me. And then you're like, I am this element, right? And so that's one element. And then they say, okay, reflect upon your growing up environment—your parents, your siblings, your teachers, your friends. What did they tell you that you're really good at? What gifts have they given to you growing up? What gifts that they had offered have you taken? And what gifts have you not taken? What were their dreams that they lived or didn't live? And which one of their dreams did you make your own or didn’t make your own? Who told you something about yourself that stayed with you for a very long period of time?
And so, you really reflect, you start with reflecting just on yourself and then you reflect on the environment that you grew up in. And they have a few other exercises around that. And so, you really spent a substantial amount of time just collecting data and associations and thoughts from your history.
DM: When Platzer graduated from HBS in 2003, the post–dotcom bust job market was far from welcoming. His dream would, once again, have to be deferred. Instead, Platzer applied his quantitative background at a hedge fund and in other investment management roles. In 2009, though, while at an event at NASA Ames campus in Silicon Valley, Platzer saw his opening. Sitting in the front row, he listened as famed space entrepreneur and futurist, Peter Diamandis, spoke about how certain technologies have linear trajectories and others have exponential trajectories. And space technologies, Diamandis argued, were definitely on an exponential trajectory. The moment had arrived, Platzer knew. The time to make good on his mission was now. After a bit more research, Platzer left Wall Street and set out to build Spire.
DM: Talk about how that mission statement finally culminated in the founding of your company.
PP: So, I then felt, okay, the time is right now, but it is a different industry. Like I wasn't an aerospace engineer, I was just a physicist, right? And I had an MBA from Harvard. And so, I'd be like, okay, what is the most efficient way for me to learn everything about the space industry?
And so, I researched various programs across the world and least not because of the conversations with Peter D[iamandis] knew about the university in France in Strasbourg, and went into a master's program, which was just 12 months. And the program was set up (so) that you'd have to learn everything. You had to learn space policy. You had to learn space business, space finance, space engineering, sensors. You had to learn every single subject about the space industry. And then you had to do a mini thesis, like a research project, that you had to write. And then yes, we had to find a job as well. And that's what I did.
So, I moved as a 42 year old. I sold part of my calculator collection to pay for my rent in the halfway dorm in France. I bought myself a bicycle for 50 euros and I bicycled to university and sat with everyone half my age. And learned about space policy and quaternions and everything in between.
DM: What was it like to go back to school at 43? Here you are. You have a very good career, right? You could have done any multitude of things. You could have coasted. But you said, no, I'm going to do this hard thing and I'm going to go back to school. Talk to me about that decision.
PP: It was fascinating. I have to tell you, because everyone around me was like freaking out a little bit. I had friends, I remember, you know, Paul, he's like, oh, Peter, I want to sit down with you. And so we sit down in New York, we had a beer, and he's normally like a very gregarious, he's a Russian guy, he worked in finance as well, and he's normally very gregarious. [He’s] like very somber, a bit more like Dostoyevsky. "I'm a little, I'm a little bit concerned." I was so confident. It could not have felt any more right.
It's really hard to explain other than, I just knew it was the right moment, the right thing for me. It just felt right in every single cell of my body.
DM: But Peter, do you think that was in part because you had spent so much time defining this mission so purposefully?
PP: A hundred percent. You know what Michelangelo says, like the difficulty in doing the David is not figuring out what to do,you just take away the stuff that doesn't belong. And I think that's a little bit was like this mission statement for my life, right? I had spent truly decades chipping away that internal feeling of what it is that I want to do. And so, it became clearer and clearer, so that when it was there and it was in sync with the, with the universe, pun intended, from a timing perspective that you didn't have doubt. It just felt right.
But I agree with you, what helped that certainty was all the countless hours and years spent tuning in, shaping it, looking at it, writing it down, making it clear, sitting with it. Does it feel right? The statement now is like easy and simple, but the first one was not that. I took some time to sift for the 400 words, and I don't know, something doesn't feel right. So it is a process. It's not something that you do and then it gives you that certainty. It was the culmination of a lot of work that gave that certainty in that moment.
DM: Peter, it sounds like it helped you obviously make hard decisions or what seemed like hard decisions externally. How did having that mission help in the founding of the company?
PP: I think there's like a couple of elements there, right? One of them is analytical work. I did a piece of research that uncovered or discovered the equivalence to Moore's law from the computer industry in the space industry. And I had full understanding of how Moore's law, 2x performance every two years, had driven the computer industry and the internet and all the transformation that happened there.
So, I had a blueprint of how disruptive innovation, so to speak, looks like. And then I had gone to a school, where they do talk about this, and they have probably the most famous guy in the world to talk about disruptive innovation—teaches there. And so, I then discovered the same thing, in space, it's 10x every five years, which is about 60 percent faster than Moore's law. But other than that, it's the same thing. I had a blueprint that I could compare it to, like, I knew how the world is going to look like. I was a quantitative investment manager beforehand, so I was used to calculating something and predicting how the world will look like—and put hundreds of millions of dollars behind it. So, when I made a prediction based on my analysis of how the work would look like in five years and in 10 years with 10x and a hundred X performance. I had the arrogance or the confidence, depending on how you want to look at it, to trust that and bet truly my life on it.
And that's what I did. I predicted where capabilities will be, and then I used my consulting and my HBS background to say okay, we understand the technology, we know it's going to be disruptive. Here's where the world is going to think it's going to go. I interviewed about a hundred people from the space industry and asked them what they think is going to happen; here’s what we predict. And the delta between that exponential capability and that linear prediction of the rest of the world, that's a business opportunity. And then we said, now we need a business model. What kind of business problems are we going to solve where this technology is the single best solution? We made a prediction and then we said okay, but now we need a business model and we built a business model, and that's then how we started the company.
DM: And Peter, these are all core concepts and core strategies. At a practical level, what did this company look like in the garage?
PP: Okay, I'm gonna paint you the picture: San Francisco, grungy garage, and it is so grungy that we were not the only company, and it was a hardware incubator. There was a specialty coffee maker on one end, right? So, you walk in there, you have like coffee there. It's like brewing. There was a hamburger-making robot behind us. So, you had the smell of hamburgers, right? You had a specialty guitar in the back end. And then in the front, you had us building satellites. The entrance was a garage door that couldn't really close. The car that was standing there was like the single most beat-up Toyota Corolla, in white, that you can imagine, which was our phone booth.We also had a former bank safe, like walls like this as our phone booth. And after one person almost suffocated in there, we actually figured out that you can't close the door with a person inside because there's no circulation and you die, so you put like a brick in there. And we had a sex toy–making shop on top.
DM: Classic American entrepreneur story. Talk about where Spire's at now.
PP: Spire today runs the world's largest multipurpose constellation. We track every spot on Earth over 100 times a day. All of the world's maritime aviation and weather activity is tracked and predicted based on the data that it comes off of.
And the two driving forces that we had identified back then, climate change and global security, continue to drive massive demand for our product. We have had a compound annual growth rate over the last seven years of our revenue of 118%.
DM: I asked that question because it would seem that you've achieved this mission. You have achieved this mission that you set out as a young man to do, right? Do you feel that's true? And if so, how does it still energize you?
PP: For me, it feels I have done most of a first step of a journey, which is reaching to a place beyond the horizon for me. Space has the incredible power to impact every single person on planet Earth. The data that we have today is impacting about a billion people by the accuracy of the weather forecast that they had.
We have customers in 65 countries, but there are 192—and there are 8 billion people. So the power of space is that it is truly relevant for everyone on planet Earth. And at a tiny company of a hundred-plus million in revenue, a few hundred people in the company, we don't have the impact that our technology and our products could have on humanity in tech, climate change, and global security. So there's much more that we have to give, we have to help humanity with, than what we have done so far.
DM: Peter, you were blessed in some ways to know at a young age what you wanted to do, right? That's not the case for everybody. What advice would you give to people who are still in search of their mission?
PP: I think keep searching. I think that's the important part.You're 100 percent correct. It's important for me to say like, I know I was very fortunate to know at 13 that you want to be a physicist, that's really very lucky. But the key part is just stay on that search, spend the uncomfortable time trying to figure out what, really, you're made of, in terms of what is meaningful to you. And realize when is it a rat race or a race that you’re running for someone else. And when is it a walk of your life, that you are doing, because it is your life. And you get to do something every single moment that gives you the sense of, I am doing what I'm supposed to be doing, what I'm meant to be doing, what I want to be doing right now, this very moment. Not because I want to do something tomorrow or in 10 years, but because it is meant to be done, by me, right now, in this moment.
Skydeck is the Harvard Business School alumni podcast featuring interviews and insights from across the world of business. It’s produced by the External Relations Department at HBS. Our audio engineer is Craig McDonald.
It is available on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And If you could take a moment to rate and review us, we’d be grateful.
For more information, or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.
Post a Comment
Related Stories
-
- 20 Dec 2023
- Making A Difference
New School
Re: Rob Waldron (MBA 1992) -
- 01 Sep 2023
- HBS Alumni Bulletin
End Game
Re: Charles Conn (MBA 1990); Geoffrey G. Jones (Isidor Straus Professor of Business History); By: Jen McFarland Flint -
- 19 Dec 2022
- HBS Deep Purpose
The Rise Philosophy at Mahindra Group
Re: Anand Mahindra (MBA 1981); Ranjay Gulati (Paul R. Lawrence MBA Class of 1942 Professor of Business Administration) -
- 25 Aug 2022
- HBS Alumni Bulletin
On Purpose
Re: Jenny Cohen (MBA 1997); Ranjay Gulati (Paul R. Lawrence MBA Class of 1942 Professor of Business Administration); By: Jen McFarland Flint
Stories Featuring Peter Platzer
-
- 06 Feb 2015
- Smithsonian Magazine
Improving Weather Forecasting
Re: Peter Platzer (MBA 2002) -
- 10 Oct 2014
- Fast Company
Meet the CEO Who's Never Fired Anyone
Re: Peter Platzer (MBA 2002)