Interviewee
Founder of the venture capital backed earth observation company LiveEO & new space community NewSpaceVision. Background in business engineering, startups & politics. Curious space & startup enthusiast.
Transcript
Sven Przywarra: So exactly. I'm Sven, I'm one of two co-founders who started LiveEO, my other co-founder Daniel, and we started live year back in 2018 with, to really bring satellite insights and satellite analytics into the mainstream. We wanna monitor a billion assets and I'm gonna explain in a couple of seconds what that means. We really wanna help to make infrastructure grids more efficient, safer and just really wanna make sure that the global networks and infrastructure operate correctly. So over the last couple of years there's been a revolution in earth observation. We now have hundreds of sets and space monitoring every single place here on the surface of the earth. The problem is, in fact the big opportunity with the data is that you can really change a lot of processes and improve a lot of processes thanks to set data.
But the problem is no one is using the data and we are alive, you're changing that. We're taking satellite data and translating it into actionable insights so that for example, railway operators, electric grid operators, and in the future also forestry companies, insurance companies can leverage satellite insights to make their processes more efficient. We are right now 110 people based here below. It's true, but we also have people all across the globe and in fact I think people from 40 nations, which is pretty cool.
Elisa Muñoz: Wow. So you guys are a big team and I was curious to ask like I know that you went to school for engineering and management. Yeah. So why the interest in earth observation?
Sven Przywarra: I was always fascinated with space and yeah just like, like I think the, the incredible potential behind space and satellite technology and I was telling myself, hey it's great to work in the space sector and build rockets and stuff like that. But I asked myself, how can I have the biggest direct impact on life here on earth? And for me the answer has been observation, data monitoring the surface of the earth and how things are changing can have huge potential in how we are living on this planet. And so I said, okay, let's build a company in that space. And this is how I came from studying mechanical engineering to starting and now running in the earth observation company.
We started with a blank piece of paper when we created the company. We just said, “Hey, the earth observation industry is great and we now have all this data, what can we do with it?”
Elisa Muñoz: I know that you guys focus on vegetation management and I wanted to ask you: What would you say is a big problem nowadays?
Sven Przywarra: What we focus on where one of our big focus points is on is how do we make electrical over lines and railway networks more, more efficient and make sure that for example, the power outages or white fires are happening due to the fact that trees grow into overhead lines. And we, we, we see that this is an increasing problem for two reasons. One, the weather is becoming more unpredicted, meaning there are more storms which lead to, for example, mo trees falling onto over lines and causing power outages. In fact, a third of all power outages globally are being caused by vegetation which comes in contact with over lines.
And the other one is that if we think of drier and drier summers hotter and hotter climate. And so if a tree is really dry and it's too close to the over line, it's likely that they will catch fire. A wildfire starts and then we have hundreds to millions of tons of co2 which are being created by this, this, this single wildfire. And we wanna help to prevent both of these things to A, make these assets more climate resilience and b, to not further increase the effect, the negative effect on our climate.
Elisa Muñoz: When talking about the beginnings of the company, do you remember what was the first idea you guys ever pitched?
Sven Przywarra: We started with a blank piece of paper when we started the company. We just said, Hey, the earth observation industry is great and we now have all this data, what can we do with the data? And so at the very beginning we played around with different, different ideas including ideas in the tourism industry. But in the end we, the first proper idea which we've had was combining satellite data with drone data to provide live earth observation. And, but we soon realized that you don't really need drone data and drone data is still kind of an area of innovation. And so we said let's focus on satellite data.
Elisa Muñoz: I know that you're an engineer and our audience is actually filled with engineers. So maybe you can share a little bit about the technical side of the satellites or the space technology that you guys are using.
Sven Przywarra: So exactly coming back to a little bit the basics of satellite technology, right? So we now have hundreds of satellites in or, and they're taking pictures of the earth and they're taking these pictures of the earth by, so every satellite is flying over the earth and taking pictures of the surface and they are different types of satellites, optical satellites and radar satellites. We at life just take data from any of these satellites and we are combining it in a unique way building a data stack. And then on this data stack we are applying our machine learning models which we have previously trained on our own machine learning data training data which we have created.
We have our own team which creates training data to be really efficient in analyzing large scale assets. And then the thing is, okay if you have a classification machine learning classification, you can't really do a lot with it because like in the end it's a nicely, I dunno, colored image or maybe some bounding boxes. No one really cares about that. So the question is how do you make it useful for an end user? And we've put a lot of time, effort and resources into taking machine learning classification and making it useful to an end user for example in the infrastructure industry so that the typical lineman, a typical person in the field can take this data and interact with it through our app and mobile app and yet can directly see where for example, that alongside an overhead line vegetation has come too close to it.
Elisa Muñoz: Was it really hard for you and Daniel at the beginning, to find the real product market fit?
Sven Przywarra: It wasn't easy but we were lucky as we've at the very beginning try to be very rare customer centric. So we maybe spent a month just thinking about what we could do with satellite data for the infrastructure sector and then we directly went in customer customization, really tried to develop the product based on what the customer wanted. And that gave us really this, this feedback and and directly also got customers which said hey I wanna buy buy this. And there was obviously a strong indicator of product market fit and and now we are executing on top of that.
And now here we are like a couple of years later and I know that you guys, correct me if I'm wrong, you guys like started the company back in 2018 so like you had the pandemic in the middle of it. Did you have any or did you find any procurement process challenges. If you had a trade fair where one vendor has a huge move and you're usually a startup in a physical world, it's harder to compete with them but in a digital space maybe it's not that hard to compete with them. So it's always hard to say whether Covid benefited us or was to our disadvantage. I would say we've crossed Covid quite well so I think Covid wasn't too bad for us.
Elisa Muñoz: Can you share maybe what has been the biggest technical challenge you guys have managed to solve?
Sven Przywarra: Yeah, I think the biggest technical challenge which we've also have highly underestimated is just analyzing satellite data at scale. Meaning you analyze an entire country or nearly entire continent is incredibly complex and scaling geospatial analytics in a large way. I think it was one of the first challenges which we've overcome but it's also one of the ones where I'm most proud of.
Elisa Muñoz: Do you have any advice for future entrepreneurs or people starting in this space industry?
Sven Przywarra: Okay, well that's a good one. Do I have any advice? I think like at the very beginning is like to, to start with the fundamentals. Thinking about okay, what problems can my technology really solve and can it solve any problem really fundamentally better than any other technology? And then build on top of that your hypothesis about which market cares and customer segment or could could be interested in that. And then really, really quickly go into customer conversation and to really understand whether your hypothesis is true and maybe one thing is exactly to speak as early to customers as possible.
Elisa Muñoz: Thank you very much Sven, for taking the time today.
