Ep 10 - Charles Blanchet - Finding focus, Building a scalable product & Dedicating time to thinking

Charles Blanchet is the VP of Solutions at Iceye. Charles has over 20 years of experience building start ups, more recently in companies focused around data. Iceye owns a constellation of Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites, and is also working on providing flood monitoring insights derived from the images these satellites take.

We talk SAR, how Charles joined Iceye, the importance of finding focus as a company, and how thinking is an important task in itself.

Charles Blanchet:

• LinkedIn

Show notes:

• Iceye Solutions
• Charles blog post on hiring
• New Philosopher magazine

Time Stamps:

• 04:00 - Episode begins: Charles presents himself
• 8:45 - Finding product-market fit in Earth Observation
• 13:10 - The importance and need for focus
• 17:00 - Is the space industry different than any other field?
• 21:30 - Is SaaS a good model for companies like Iceye?
• 26:30 - "Deriving value out of imagery and turning it into information is a tough business"
• 36:20 - Can there be too much focus?
• 39:00 - Charles thoughts on Iceye’s current focus on flood monitoring
• 41:46 - Building startups over and over again
• 48:30 - Assembling a team
• 58:10 - The life story interview question
• 1:08:40 - How Charles joined Iceye
• 1:12:20 - Charles’ next 5 years
• 1:14:10 - Taking dedicated time to think
• 1:25:25 - Media recommendation

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