An informative Glassdoor review
An informative Glassdoor review
A fine point on Planet's GTM struggles
I found this review of Planet on Glassdoor the other day. The author makes a few great points in succinct fashion, so I thought I would unpack a few thoughts of my own here.
It’s not a Glassdoor review you dream of reading about your largest investment, but it’s not all bad.
Exciting things are happening
Planet is operating on the leading edge of a powerful technology curve with important implications for a variety of actors. People are curious — the data they produce is unique — but the data’s value (in terms of people willing to pay for it) is still up for debate.
Staffing up did not drive revenue growth
“The GTM did not align with the market demand.” As evident from the financials and the layoffs, Planet simply hasn’t met expectations. It raised a ton of money, ramped up the sales force, and couldn’t justify an ROI. Not great.
But, the commercial market is still incredibly immature. Government demand is steadily rising and importantly, market expectations have changed drastically. The long, long term potential of the business hasn’t changed much.
Partner-centric GTM is good for business
“The Direct B2B aspect of Planet data is yet to be validated.”
It’s too expensive (time and/or cost-wise) for users to extract value from Planet’s data today. Partners bridge this gap by building applications. You can sell applications more easily than you can sell data.
This was always Planet’s vision: “Planet creates data and tools, partners build applications, and people take action.” They may have veered off course in the post-IPO search for rapid growth, but it appears they are getting back to basics.
Acknowledging the company’s recent struggles and the reality of the geospatial data market, my confidence in the data’s value hasn’t changed much. A reasonable outcome of the shift to partner sales could be slower, more durable growth.
Partners have already built some compelling applications (see RAIC Labs and SynMax for two examples), and this figures to be just the beginning as improvements in satellite data and AI continue. AI is an accelerant to Planet’s business as it makes it easier for partners to build applications.
Management has room to improve
To put it gently. “Advice to Management” is indictable — it’s just a shitty thing to do and no doubt had a material impact on culture.
But, in a crudely capitalistic sense, it was necessary. They hired a bunch of people to stimulate demand, and demand didn’t materialize. Being unprofitable, they had to make a choice — a tough one, but probably the right one — to protect the financial resilience of the business. The business and the organization have to scale together, and Planet isn’t the only company who had to right-size for reality.
A closing thought
Planet is still immature. The technology is more and more de-risked, but the business execution challenges are just beginning. The market is emerging slowly, management is inexperienced, and my talk track is mostly potential. This Glassdoor review shares more of the reality on the ground.
FYI: This is part of a new section, Briefs, which I will aim to publish 1-2x a week. The idea is to explore unique investment findings or ideas in ~500 words or less. It will focus on how I filter more timely information into a long-term investing lens.
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