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

Minds Behind Maps

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:
Element84
Dan Pilone’s appearance on the podcast
---
About Indra:
- Twitter
- LinkedIn
- Overstory
Shownotes:
- Kaggle
- Planet
- Global Forest Watch
- Vandersat’s Acquisition by Planet
Book recommendations;
- Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation by Paul Hawken
- The Overstory by Richard Powers

Timestamps:

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 recommendations
01:35:48 - Having the same company name as book
Please 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