When she was an international studies major living abroad, Ashley Johnson tells us, she met a U.S. ambassador whose unvarnished advice subsequently led her to divert her career path away from the diplomatic corps of the U.S. Foreign Service. “I had thought that I would be going into the State Department,” she recalls. However, a weekend spent in the presence of Ambassador Roy Huffington, immersed in discussions about the pivotal role of a strong economy, sparked a profound realization. “You cannot be an effective leader if you don’t understand how to make a strong economy,” the ambassador and renowned Texas oilman emphasized, leaving Ashley determined to delve into the world of business and finance.
More encouragement followed, when a friend from a study group introduced her to the intricacies of Wall Street, igniting her fascination with financial statements. “Financial statements tell a really interesting story,” she notes, “and if you know how to read them, you’re going to understand something about that company that maybe other people won’t.”
Johnson routinely draws our attention to lessons and moments of insight, such as when she illustrates for us the origins of her unwavering commitment to thorough analysis. During a pivotal investment decision, her scrutiny of financial assumptions saved her firm from a potentially catastrophic loss. “Look for those assumptions, question them again and again,” she advises, emphasizing the critical role of meticulous examination in financial decision-making. –Jack Sweeney jb
CFOTL: Tell us about Planet … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Johnson: Planet is a really interesting company. We have a massive data set of basically everything that’s going on on Earth. The founders came from NASA. They recognized the paradox of building billion-dollar satellites with 10-year development cycles in the context of a world where, for example, your cell phone is updating with new capabilities every year. You certainly wouldn’t want to be using the cell phone that you had 20 years ago.
Yet, when you think about the satellites that we were launching into space for Earth observation, you realize that many of them were 20 years old. Their design cycles were long and their useful life was very long. This basically meant that in space we were not taking advantage of everything that was going on in Silicon Valley. Our founders had this notion to basically let Moore’s Law apply to satellites by having more of them that were far less expensive.
We don’t build billion-dollar satellites. Ours cost only about $300,000 apiece, so we can launch a lot of them. By having so many, we could actually scan the whole Earth. Every single day, we can take images of Earth such that we’re scanning the entirety of its landmass in a very uniform way. Then we can process the data by using modern capabilities such as machine language. Now, of course, we also talk about employing AI to understand the changes that are happening on the planet that have to be factored into decision-making by governments as well as companies. So, this is what we do. We have over 200 satellites in orbit that are collecting this incredibly powerful data set. We sell this data to our customers to help them to make more empowered decisions. jb
“Ask questions and have the confidence to ask even more questions as follow-up. When you’re new in a role, especially as the result of an internal promotion, it’s easy to feel intimidated, be overcome by imposter syndrome, and back down. This is exactly the moment when you need to dig in more because—more likely than not—you’re probably dealing with exactly the areas where assumptions are not aligned with reality.” –Ashley Johnson, CFO, Planet
[/expand]Planet | www.planet.com l San Francisco, CA