Founder and CEO at PierSight Space
Gaurav Seth is the Co-founder and CEO of Piersight Space, an Indian space tech startup developing specialized Synthetic Aperture Radar systems for persistent Earth observation.
I'm Gaurav Seth, CEO and co-founder of PierSight Space. So before starting PierSight Space, I was working with the Indian Space Research Organization for 10 years and then started PierSight Space last year.
We are building constellation of satellites with these cameras, which can see through clouds and image at nights. The goal is ocean surveillance. Oceans which are currently 70 percent of the Earth are very surprisingly not monitored at all. And all sorts of illegal activities happen in the oceans.
Like drug trafficking, dump wasting, oil spills, illegal fishing, etc, etc. So our satellites will be able to peer through clouds and image at night in order to monitor all the human activities across the oceans at all times.
100%. I mean, this journey is a bit overwhelming and without a co founder, putting the right checks, being by your side. I, I think it will be very, very difficult. I personally cannot imagine this journey without a co founder.
We didn't start by looking for traits. It was more like, two people coming along who had the same vision. And wanted to do the same thing. If I now have to go back and advise someone to look for traits, I would highly advise to find someone who is very complementary to you. So you can balance out things.
You'll have different opinions. As a founder, every day you take what, like 20, 30 decisions. And while being complementary has the pro of matching both sides, it will definitely lead to conflict in each of those decisions. The key is to be very, very good at communication with each other because it's a highly stressful time. It's really important to constantly communicate with each other.
You get the other side of the opinion. If you're in an echo chamber where both of you think the same thing, it's more dangerous than having a conflict because when you have a conflict, you see every side of a topic.
Talk to each other, keep your egos low because any kind of partnership, be it a partnership in business or a partnership in life, you need to let go. That's something very important to understand, have respect for each other. If you have that basic respect, you don't cross a line and you're very proactive at communication.
I think that will solve everything because end of the day, both of you started towards the same goal. Everyone is looking at the same direction. Everybody wants the best for the company. It's just that human nature is different. One way to solve for that is by being very proactive at communication.
Have you started seeing cricket? It's a very popular sport in India. So in cricket, there are two batsmen playing on the ground. As they play along the day, the partnership becomes so good that you don't have to call for a run. You just look at each other's eye and you know that it's time to run. So that's how a startup works when you start, all of you are doing everything together.
It's basically a gradual process. I feel it's not very easy to delineate responsibilities to start with and be very organized about it. It's a process and slowly, you start realizing that that person is handling this part. He's doing it well, so let him do that.
There are so many things to take care of and you divide that accordingly. And once you grow, you become a larger team. Then you need to, of course, set in processes, have weekly updates with each other and then, come back to them each week.
But it's a gradual process. So to start with, it's very common for both of us doing everything and then as the partnership grows, you start realizing how to divide that on your own.
Both of us started as equals at the same point of time, taking the same amount of risk. So the equity was divided equally.
I try to put myself into that person's shoes and look at the company from his point of view. And then think about what would it take me if I was in a situation to join this company? So that helps me decide the right amount of rewards, be it in terms of equity or cash compensation.
Cultural fit is like a go, no go test. If somebody is not a cultural fit in the company, no matter how strong they are technically or whatever else they bring into the table, it's a strict no go. Because the kind of business we are in, which is the space business, building satellites, it's pretty challenging and also requires huge amount of teamwork. One person taking things lightly or having a wrong cultural characteristic can sabotage years of hard work. So it's very, very important for us to look at that cultural fit in the team. And then everything else comes.
Be hopelessly optimistic. I'm a first time founder. I didn't know how difficult this is, how many no's you'll get. Fundraising, hiring, or, looking for customers, each of them has a snowballing effect in itself and to be successful, to go through it, you need to be hopelessly optimistic, and just keep going about. as my friend, Andreas Klinger says, investors are like people on a train station who decide to go on the train once it starts moving. So they will not choose the train till it starts moving. So, you need to be hopelessly optimistic, get a kickstart to your train and, eventually you will get there.
The first three months at the accelerator helped me a lot. Of course, accelerators teach you the best practices to run a business. They connect you to a large network, et cetera, et cetera. But to me, the best part was, make friends and have fun. This is what we used to internally joke that this is what an accelerator is about and it actually really helped seeing 12 other companies in the same situation as you who are facing the same difficulties that makes this overwhelming problem easier because you see more people in a similar place as you. You see how they approach things, how they feel, how they get successes. That will be the highlight and the little lessons I learned about people, relationships were the most valuable ones.
Initially, never cared about valuation. I didn't even understand valuation much. My entire goal was to convince people in the idea that what we were saying should have been solved long before. Once somebody is convinced about it, valuation is no bar then, because specifically for space companies, where you need huge amount of capex investments, valuation is not a question of the revenue or the traction. It is more about the scarcity value. How many people can start a space company and actually have the potential to execute building a satellite and operating it. That scarcity value is actually the valuation. Based on the amount of capital somebody is ready to infuse in, that would decide the valuation and not anything else.
I do not believe that a space company should only look at space focused investors. We should not term ourselves as a space company. End of the day, we are a data company which happens to be in space. So you should be able to excite every single investor and not just the ones who are familiarized with space. You need to sell this data to even customers who would not be aware at all about space. We do not try to pitch only to sectoral focused space investors.
I don't see a lot of value in judging an investor or a founder. It's very difficult to judge someone in a few weeks and how that long term relationship will pan out. Something which can be done is, we also did speak to other companies which have been funded by that fund. Ask them how was the behavior in difficult times? How was the behavior in good times? And that feedback coming from another founder is the best thing you can do at that point.
Be careful of strategic investors in early stage, because there are a lot of industries, having capital on their balance sheet who then lure you to take their money and run the technical part of the business while they run the show. I think this happens a lot for space sector companies or tech heavy companies where the founders have background in that tech.
Luckily we found out before we took a wrong step. But something I would advise is venture capital model is the best model to run a company. Compared to a strategic advisor, a strategic investor, a strategic investor is someone like a large space company or large tech company who comes to you and says that we want to open a space wing of our company and why don't you run it? That eventually never works out, so just be aware of that. To build your own company by your own values, your own beliefs, I think venture capital is the best way to do that.
I used to work on planetary science missions. Like the Moon mission, Mars mission, Venus mission. I was building the next version of human eyes to Venus. I was leading the project, was very excited about it. And then COVID came in. And Earth and Venus align in a way such that the next launch opportunity after 2023 was 2033. That mission almost got scrapped off. And, during the pandemic, Indian government also announced the space reforms where they allowed private entities to build a rocket, a satellite, own and operate it. And also they cleared the framework that the national space agency is no longer supposed to proliferate satellites.
So both of these events, number one, my mission, which is very close to my heart, got pushed out by 10 years. So I was figuring out what to do in life. And at the same time, Indian government allowed private people to manufacture satellites.
There will be private companies owning constellations in five years from now. So why not us? We are the best suited to do that. We've been in the sector and we know how things work. So let's just take the plunge. So we started with the idea, kept working on it and then we never looked back.
It's mainly my team. I'm super proud and close to the team at this point. A lot of them believed in us, like in the last six months, we've grown from two to 20 people, right? So each one of them who took the plunge on our vision, on our beliefs, has now made their own mission.
These are the guys who keep your passion running that now there's no going back. You started on a small canoe and now there are 10 people. It's a big boat already, so you can't go back down. You just need to get there and the passion also keeps multiplying with each motivated individual joining in.
It's a very fun culture at office or work. I'm not amongst the people who separate work and personal life too much. Even at office, we are having fun sometimes, joking around with each other and taking breaks during office hours. And similarly, While on a vacation also, we are answering emails.
Rather than having the strict time off, it's more about taking those small little breaks through the day and chill whenever you can. When I'm close to a burnout, we took a break. We went to Thailand for a couple of weeks and that was good to recharge and start back again. Similarly, with the team , just tell them take these small little gaps throughout the day and when you're close to a burnout, just take off for a few days.
Countries like US and large superpowers have their own reconnaissance offices, which actually protect their waters, the fishermen. While there is a global South, like countries like Somalia, they were pushed into piracy right now.
Somalia is known for piracy. They were pushed into piracy because of illegal fishing because their fishermen lost all income. Similar is the case with Indonesia and several countries in the global south. Right. And apart from that, in waters of these regions, a lot of waste oil is being dumped, which leads to an extinction of fishing species. And a huge amount of loss to flora and fauna. So at PierSight, we are totally focused on this domain.
We have developed a solution for oil spill detection in waters and to real time detect that. We've worked on the problem for illegal fishing by developing a solution For detecting the illegal fishing hours and giving an advanced forecast of that so that this problem can be solved.
So, you know, these are our measures of success that the problems we are trying to solve will actually help the common man, people right now who don't have backings of national reconnaissance offices and large, wealthy governments.
I rely a lot on gut feeling. Other than that, try to discuss everything with my co founder. And then, you realize who are the right people who can be your support staff, who are just well wishers and don't have any external interests. I have a few of them and keep going back to them for every decision I need help. I have these fixed set of people who I can go to, to understand the problem more. And have their perspective on it and then make a decision.
How many cars does the earth have? It's way more than 7, 000. So it's not as crowded as you really think. But, space situational awareness is something we need to very seriously look into because, what do you call the Kessler syndrome? It's not very far away from happening. So we rely on space situational awareness vendors who provide this real time insight of the objects around your satellites so that you can navigate and avoid collisions, but these things are not as often as people think, maybe one collision avoidance manual per year, or a few.
If you see a satellite business, there are different models to it. There's a data as a service model, then there's insights as a service, and then finally application as a service, right? So for data as a service, there are customers like the NRO, NGA, the Indian Coast Guard, who are aware of that these problems can be solved by space based surveillance.
So our initial goal to was to go to these vendors and speak to them about their problems and tell them that we are really building these solutions. And since they are working with satellite data often, they are very easy to accept this data. Then there are other customers who indirectly solve these problems like insurance companies, shipping companies, NGOs.
You go to them with that particular model where you're providing actionable insights to them, rather than giving them a raw data, which they need to work to. And then lastly, there are certain customers such as port authorities who end of the day need a complete application. They want a list of all the ships, which anchor to their ports, et cetera.
So then you approach them with that kind of application as a service. So you need to basically divide your customers in terms of the persona and then approach them with what they really need rather than just push space based technology while they don't have anyone to handle it.
Not that we've come to so far. There are no bad customers and there are no bad investors. Take money from wherever it's coming.
I was working on a similar problem even in my previous job, but that was solving it with a single monolithic satellite, which covers a very wide area and the buildup cost is close to a few hundred million dollars for a single satellite. Now access to space, thanks to the new space era and SpaceX, is not as difficult as it was five years ago. So why build a single satellite worth 500 million dollars and not build a constellation worth 120 million dollars where you have distributed system looking at it and even if due to a bad solar activity or a storm each single of one of them 120 will not conk off.
When you have a single one, there's a good chance that thing conks off and the service ends, but here you have a very graceful degradation. That particular thing was very obvious to me. And I felt that we know how to build these satellites in such a small form factor.
That's how we started with this. When I meet different people from the Navy, or related to the maritime area, they tell me that if you can build this, uh, nothing like it. The conviction has been growing more and more. We started with a tech idea where we believe that this is the right product market fit for this kind of a model. And now as we speak to more and more people, the conviction is only getting stronger.
We're launching our first satellite in quarter four of this year, which would be our demonstrator. It's called Varuna after the Indian sea God. Post that, we want to build the complete maritime constellation such that every ship across the globe is on a rise and we don't miss it.
And after the maritime constellation, we plan to build another application-specific constellation where we can monitor land subsidence. Synthetic aperture radar is the only technique using which you can measure five millimeters of changes from 500 kilometers in orbit. Nowadays when houses are being constructed, there's something called building code. And in the building code, you measure the soil, you see how stable it is, et cetera, et cetera. We want a SAR-based insights become a part of the building code so that this particular area is subsiding slowly. You cannot really build a 50 story tower there because it's a risk in the next 20 years.
This kind of insights from space right now are not a part of common door-to-door applications and which is what we want to solve. And then there are several other specific areas which are gripping the world, like wildfire, for example. Wildfire spreads in the night, and you need to find the center of that wildfire in order to mitigate it.
To do this, you need a SAR kind of a sensor, which can see through that smoke. Otherwise, optical cameras can never find out where is the center of that fire. So we want to solve all of these real problems on earth using our technology in the next 10 years.
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