I am not rooting for people to fail. We’re building an industry together, not playing a zero-sum game
Of course this is not the way many folks see industry competition. I think, for example, Intel, AMD, and nVidia can all "win." In fact, when one improves they can all move forward.
The satellite imagery industry is quite small in terms of the people who work in it. I love and respect the people who have built the same products that I am indirectly critiquing in this piece.
This is a cool industry, because most of the effort is going toward things like monitoring the effects of climate change, or mapping natural disasters in real time to support crisis response, or illuminating human rights violations around the world. Rooting against the people working on that is icky.
In my opinion, we're all competing against obscurity (who buys satellite data today?!), not each other.
I predict this changing in 5 years or less, as demand increases and the profit potential attracts new money. Hope I’m wrong about that, because as you say there’s so much untapped potential value for a bunch of disparate, but critically important fields.
As someone who just got out of one of the thousands of "new" startups to now be at a boring run of the mill software firm... i grapple with this a lot. 90% of the work I did was on defense stuff (i think you wrote about it before) but that 10% supporting NGOs or deforestation or ESA/NASA research grants always keeps gnawing at me to run back into the space. Its tough to tell if a RS company really has their money where there mouth is on stuff like that until you work there.
