Indra Den Bakker - Overstory & Tackling Climate by Monitoring Vegetation with Satellite Data - MBM #25

Indra Den Bakker is the CEO & Co-Founder of Overstory, a company providing vegetation information to electric utility companies about the state of (mostly) trees around power lines by using high resolution satellite imagery. This can lead to prevention of wildfires by finding hazardous vegetation before it falls on a line.--- Episode Sponsor:Element84Dan Pilone’s appearance on the podcast--- About Indra: - Twitter- LinkedIn- OverstoryShownotes: - Kaggle- Planet- Global Forest Watch- Vandersat’s Acquisition by PlanetBook recommendations;-  Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation by Paul Hawken-  The Overstory by Richard PowersTimestamps: 00:00 - Teaser 00:29 - Introduction 02:18 - Conversation begins, Indra Describes Himself 05:20 - Indra's description of Overstory 08:44 - The Story of Overstory 10:57 - From a Kaggle Competition to Founding a Company 13:54 - Talking to Customers in Early Days 16:58 - Find Product-Market Fit : Why utility companies?19:37 - Finding a Sweet Spot in the Imagery Resolution - Price trade-off 22:02 - Deciding to build a product, not focusing on imagery 28:34 - Bringing in a dedicated designer in an early stage data start-up 30:12 - Finding focus as a company 33:44 - Could Earth Observations Companies ever have millions of customers? 36:13 - Could Overstory get to more consumer facing applications? 39:58 - Failures along the way 42:14 - Moving from bootstrapped to taking investment 44:31 - Staying on the Mission while raising money & losing control 47:49 - Preventing Green-washing 53:20 - What does Indra do today? 55:42 - The transition from Data Scientist to CEO 58:56 - Does a Data Scientist background help as a Leader? 01:00:14 - Hiring 01:04:12 - Deciding to become a Remote First Company 01:07:20 - Building a start-up in a post-covid recession 01:11:15 - A supermarket analogy to the Earth Observation industry 01:15:57 - Is Indra worried of data providers eating into downstream company's business? 01:18:20 - Balancing exits strategies with keeping on a Mission 01:19:51 - Newly public space start-ups are going down in valuation 01:23:45 - What is Overstory's current main challenge? 01:25:44 - Dealing with number of employee growth: Not knowing what everyone does anymore 01:34:00 - Book & Podcast recommendations01:35:48 - Having the same company name as bookPlease feel free to reach out, I truly do want to hear what you think of this :) - Website: https://mindsbehindmaps.com/- My Twitter: https://twitter.com/MaxLenormand- Podcast Twitter: https://twitter.com/MindsBehindMaps- Previous Newsletter: Why I want to do more interviews in person