Conference Transcript - PL 2026-02-18

Matt Spence, Other

Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us for our lunchtime presentation. I'm incredibly fired up to have an amazing American patriot, leader in intelligence, and a corporate leader at Planet. My name is Matt Spence. I'm a managing director here at Barclays, and I'm here from Silicon Valley. I work out of that side of the office. And one of the reasons we wanted to have this conversation today is at the intersection of technology and national security. This conference has been around 43 years, and for the last four years, we have introduced the Defense Technology Summit as part of this conference. Started with just a few ragtag folks, and now we had seven panels yesterday, which had a packed house, which I think reflects a lot of the interest a number of you in this room have about seeing what can be done to both increase our national security through technology, but also in a market that is really ripping and promising a number of things. For that, I am really thrilled to welcome my friend Robert Cardillo. Robert has a storied and amazing career in both public service and the private sector. Robert Surt is the sixth director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency from 2014 to 2019, led an organization of 14,500 people responsible of analyzing our nation's SIGINT and other types of intelligence. Prior to that, Robert was the deputy director of the director of national intelligence after having a three-decade career in the intelligence community. So if you're wondering why I'm so excited, we have a legit spy here to tell us what the secrets are. In a previous life, I served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and at the National Security Council and had the great fortune to spend many hours with Robert in the White House Situation Room with the President and the Cabinet, seeing Robert in action, answering some of the toughest questions that the President would ask. Now Robert leads Planet Federal as the chief strategist and chairman of the board. It's a division of Planet which is focusing on U.S. government and defense customers. As many of you know here, Planet operates the largest fleet of Earth observation satellites in history, over 200 satellites providing daily imagery with the entire planet. And I think why it's so interesting now, it's a capability that fundamentally did not exist when Robert was running the NGA. And we're having a conversation today about the evolution of intelligence, the role planet and the commercial sector is playing. And then as folks finish up their salmon, please let me know, raise your hand, and we also open it to questions as well. So, Robert, thank you so much for joining us.

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

Thanks, Matt. It's a great pleasure to be here with you all, and I look forward to our conversation. And I just noted, given the 43rd year, it was 43 years ago that I joined the community. Oh, really? Out of college under President Reagan. So there you go. There's the rise of Barclays Conference in my career. It's well-timed.

Matt Spence, Other

So maybe we can start with that. So, Robert, in the 43s when you joined the intelligence community, running to its very highest levels, what prompted the move to the commercial sector? And what has surprised you most about that transition?

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

So I think the best way to describe that transition is to give you a little bit more color on what my world, no pun intended, was like in the 80s as an imagery analyst, what we now call geospatial intelligence, supporting what was the dominant national security issue at the time, the Soviet Union. And so I joined an agency called the Defense Intelligence Agency because in those days we didn't have an agency dedicated to imagery and mapping and geospatial intelligence. since that didn't come until 1996. And so you got welcomed into this community. Your background was checked to make sure you were trustworthy enough to hold a top-secret clearance. And then, quite literally, you got thrown in the basement. No windows, doors with ciphers on them, very low light in the spaces because you were about to exploit imagery that was taken the following way. And so we would fly around the earth at 23,000 miles an hour, open an aperture, and by the way, it carried film in those days. Some in the audience will remember what film was. Expose that film over areas of interest, capture the canister of film, and actually eject it out of the back of the satellite, have it drop back through the atmosphere, deploy a parachute, and I'm not making this up, a plane with a trapeze behind it would try to time the descent to catch the canister of film before it fell into the Pacific Ocean.

Matt Spence, Other

And how many times did they miss? Did you lose the great film?

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

And you can imagine. because, look, that was a top-secret satellite with top-secret imagery, taking top-secret photos of top-secret, you know, facilities. There was a lot of concern when the canister went into the ocean, right? Again, height of the Cold War, at great expense, that was recovered eventually. But the point I'm making is really how closed that world was, right? Because basically, if you were my customer, you had a top-secret clearance. and she'd ask me a top-secret question, I'd task that top-secret satellite, get a top-secret image, write a top-secret report, and give it back to you, right? So it's a very small, important, but small world. Notice I've said nothing about commercial. Now, the U.S. government didn't build that satellite, right? A prime contractor would have built it, right, for us, and I think they should be paid great tribute for their service and contribution. But the utility of that result was kept to a very small group, purposefully so. We were in a Cold War with an adversary that was quite dangerous, and in such a world you're always looking for an increment of advantage.

Matt Spence, Other

And against such a dangerous adversary, what types of questions would you be asked, and what were the best secrets you found that you could tell us without having to kill us all?

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

So you'll, I mean, I'm sure most people will remember, you know, that, you know, as in what became the space race and the nuclear competition and, you know, for global dominance, there was many debates in the early days about, you know, Soviet bomber programs and missiles and capacities and capabilities. The most famous was the Cuban Missile Crisis when they actually did move capabilities to quite close to where we are right now in a way to convey a threat that was meaningful to create an outcome that the Soviets wanted. The imagery played a role in those days, but it was from air breathers, the U-2 spy plane. And as we move forward, even though the, well, as the technology was evolving and the intelligence challenges were evolving, to me, it all came back down to the core value proposition. Because as you and I served in the White House from 2010 to 2014, the way I used to describe my job to others. You basically have about 30 seconds to get some of the most busy people in the world, including your boss, Mr. Donilon, to get their attention. One, because again, they're juggling 18 issues and three crises, and the president's waiting for some do out from them. If you're successful getting their attention, you have about 30 more seconds to prove they didn't make a mistake giving you the first 30, right? So what have you done for me lately? And so I know I skipped over a lot in your question from the way things were and the way things are, and we can unpack this, but basically I had to find a way to create an increment of advantage, information advantage ultimately leading hopefully to decision advantage that would tell Mr. Donlan, the national security advisor, or to give him more confidence about an Iranian threat, right? And let's face it, we were still engaged in both Iraq and Afghanistan, something more strategically, the rise of Chinese nuclear play. So it could have been any or all of those things and tended to be a mix of everything every day. One thing we might want to talk about is the other hat I wore during that job was editing the president's daily brief and then delivering it on most days to President Obama. And obviously that is the centerpiece of our value proposition. So maybe on that,

Matt Spence, Other

the president's daily intelligence briefing is the stuff at the time the president would receive a leather bound notebook. It said Barack Hussein Obama on it. It had a presidential seal on it. Basically, the way we talked, it was the 20 front-page stories that would break at any minute that we never wanted anyone to find out about. Tell us what was in the presidential daily briefing, what type of topics, how you thought about putting that together, what you decided went in and went out, and was there any role that any of these commercial technologies played in gathering some of that information that you would serve up to the president?

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

Yes. So first, let me give you a little bit of insight into that world of the president's daily brief. So actually, to this day, it still isn't quite daily. We do take Sundays off, which I was grateful for because it allowed at least one part of the week where you could decompress a little bit, but not much. So you can imagine there's a team from across the intelligence community that is dedicated to creating the handful of stories that we put in front of the president every morning. And there's two fundamental questions that I, as the final editor, you know, I would do. So basically, if you think about the clock, around 6 or 7 at night, Sunday night through Friday night, I would get a set of draft articles for the next day that were proposed from the PDB staff. My first challenge was, do we put it in the book or not? And the way we made those decisions, at least I did, was I had to answer two fundamental questions. And the first one was, why does the president need to know this information? You know, what's differential about it that needs to be in front of him? Now, that one, a lot of things got through that one because as President of the United States, you can imagine, you know, his expanse and interest area is quite large. But it was the second question that was more critical. And the second question was, why does the President need to know it now, like tomorrow morning? And obviously, it could be because of an upcoming trip or a decision or a negotiation or a deployment that he's got to consider. And so that would winnow it down. You know, at least, and by the way, the most important letter in PDB is the P. So every president, and I served mostly under President Obama, I see three years under President Trump's first term. But again, I was at the NGA director. I was not in the White House for that service. But President Obama was quite particular about the way he wanted to consume the president's daily brief. He was a reader, and he wanted to digest it himself in his residence before we came in to do the morning brief. It's quite different than the former president's, quite different than it is today, but again, that's the president's choice. So the book would get to him around 6 in the morning. Again, I would have done my editing and decision-making and approving probably by 10 or 11 the night before the production would go into play. and then be delivered to him. And then once we saw him generally at 9.30 in the morning for our half-hour session, he's read the book, he'd have it with him. Sometimes he would hand it back, sometimes he wouldn't. It's his book. And then if he had questions about the book, that was the time to answer them. Not, we then built what we called a walk-on brief, which was, again, kind of like live theater. You just had to look across the expanse of the news, and this is where commercial had a big play. Because let's face it, while we were quite proud of our contribution of giving him the most exquisite secrets, right, that we could help inform his understanding, ultimately his decisions, the president's awash in information, right? He's got his own sources. And by the way, this is 2010 to 2014, and it's only scaled up since then with the amount of information and questions about the credibility of said information, right? If I could take a quick segue, and I'll get to the commercial question here. I built a walk-on brief, I think it was about 2012. Generally, look, our job was to bring as much honest, well-developed, crafted intelligence as we could about the world as it is. that's the intelligence community's job. Now, you're supporting somebody who's a policymaker who's seeing the world as they wish it would be or would want it to be, and so there's always going to be a tension between that provision of intelligence and their job, I guess, is the shortest. Sometimes we get some criticism, including from your old boss, that we would only bring it back. It's always where the world's breaking, where the biggest risks are, but we said, well, I'm sorry, that comes with the territory. You have other ways to find the good news stories. But I was building this walk-on brief, and again, I'm an imagery guy. That was my background. And one of the government-classified satellites had taken just an exquisite, amazing image that I just thought was going to knock the president's socks off because we said, wow, I had no idea you had such powerful satellites and whatnot. Well, it happened to be of a North Korean mobile missile. It happened to be on a launch pad. So North Korea builds pre-mensurated positions by which if and when they choose to employ their mobile missiles, they'll come out from their underground bunker, often in a mountain, right? They'll get fueled and they'll go to these pre-designated spots so they know where they are and they can... So I made a mistake, though, because I thought I was showing off a capability, right? So I handed it to the president. I said, oh, look at this. You can see the wing nuts there on the side. It was just the most, I thought, as an imagery person, most beautiful photo. And he looked at me and he said, well, that's travel mode, right? And I said, yes, sir, meaning the missile was in its bed because it's on an eight-axle vehicle. He said, well, how long does it take to go from that mode to launch mode? And I said, oh, sir, about six or seven minutes, because it's got to have some final fueling and whatnot, and it's got to move to its erect position. And he said, and then how long before launch? And I said, it's up to them at that point. He said, so you're telling me that in that photo, there's, and by the way, these were the days, North Korea has kind of always been North Korea, But they were threatening the U.S. with intercontinental ballistic capabilities, right? That they could put a missile on our homeland. And there was a lot of debate within the intelligence community about whether that was verified or not. And he said, so what you're telling me there is that you're showing me something that in 17 minutes, right, could threaten Seattle. Okay, like the blood drained out of my head, right? I said, oh, this is going very badly. I just wanted him to say, what a nice, lovely picture you brought to me, right? But I bring up that story to tell you two things. One, you've got to be very discriminant about what you decide to put in front of the president, especially that president. But two, because of the sensitivity of the image, there was no way that we could use it. well, it would be very difficult to use it diplomatically and to try to create an alliance, an agreement about North Korean sanctions, for example. But if I had tasked a commercial image of that site at that time, a commercial imaging company, then I could have, if you don't know, the U.S. licenses commercial imagery satellites in ways that restrict their abilities for just this reason. Current limit is a resolution no greater than 25 centimeters. And what does that mean?

Matt Spence, Other

Put that into context. So if the resolution is less than 25 centimeters, what can I see and what

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

can I not see with those restrictions? So what it means technically, and I'll get to you, what does it mean to you as just a consumer, is that the pixel that you collect from your sensor can't be any smaller than 25 centimeters, right? So it's about nine or 10 inches, which means that you can resolve something on the ground of that size. Now, it doesn't mean you can identify everything that's nine inches square on the ground, but it does tell you that you can, when you put those pixels together, understand the difference between a pickup truck and a car, right? Or, you know, certainly an armored personnel carrier and a tank or a variant of a tank. And so it allows you to interpret and to understand details at a lower level. And again, those restrictions are still in place. Actually, the U.S. has recently liberalized the policy to include the reality that the U.S. isn't the only player in space. So it didn't make a lot of sense for us to restrict American companies from imaging a certain resolution when, et cetera, would be out there imaging at a different resolution. So now there's a recognition that there is a foreign space capability, and it's in our U.S. national interest that the U.S. commercial imagery industry is as competitive as possible. And so they've loosened some of those to allow U.S. companies to be more competitive.

Matt Spence, Other

So moving into, so I want to focus before we get more into sort of what Planet is doing and how it is, I want to talk about one of the most difficult intelligence issues we had been on together, which is the operation against Osama Bin Laden. When I think about this, you know, the outcome is like the United States is able to find the smallest needle and the largest haystack on the planet, you know, a small, a compound in Abbottabad. To the extent you can talk about it, I remember when we're in the room with the president, and he's presented with the model of the compound, the person who we believe was Osama bin Laden, but the intelligence was very unclear. There was a moment which our colleague, who was the acting director of the CIA after, Michael Morell, said on the final decision, Mr. President, I believe Osama bin Laden is the person in this compound, but I was more confident that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction than I am that this is Osama bin Laden. That said, my recommendation is we should... Deputy Director of D&I, how did you think about delivering that intelligence to the President on what was arguably one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency?

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

First, a little context. So I joined or began that position in August of 2010. Late that month, early the next month, so on August, September 2010, Leon, Panetta, who is the director of CIA, we were finishing up a meeting in the situation room. I was in the meeting for my boss, so it was a principal's meeting, and he taps me on the shoulder, Mr. Panetta, and he said, oh, hey, come on upstairs, we need to brief the president. Now, it's five or six at night, and I go, no, no, I don't brief the president at night. I'm the morning guy. I didn't say that, but I mean, I'm thinking I'm not supposed to be upstairs at 530 at night.

Matt Spence, Other

That doesn't sound like the right answer. No, no, he said come with me, so I came with me.

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

And by the way, I'm still two weeks into the job. I don't know the West Wing. I don't really know where things are. I'm kind of getting lost. So I just follow Mr. Panetta upstairs. We go into the Oval Office. By the way, the Oval Office looks quite different at dusk than it does in the morning. In the morning, it's very bright and airy. It's kind of more somber at night. Anyway, I see a number of briefers from CIA sitting on the couch. John Brennan was there, National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. And I just go stand behind the couch because I'm not supposed to be here other than Leon told me to come upstairs. And they rolled out on the coffee table that you see in the middle of the Oval Office a commercial image in color. It was the first time I'd ever seen Abbottabad, the first time I'd ever heard of the town of Abbottabad. And I'm hearing them update the president on the case. Now, this is September. The raid wasn't until May, so we're nine months away, really, from decision. Well, I'm processing all this quickly, and I said, oh, goodness. And you can imagine how closely held even the assessment was, right? There was just very few people.

Matt Spence, Other

The number of people in the White House, any time it was probably four people. Yeah, it was very few. I'm pretty surprised they knew about this.

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

And, you know, to this day, I credit Leon Panetta for at least really trusting my boss, Jim Clapper, at the time to invite me upstairs because he didn't have to. But back to your question, what we then did was, you know, the case was really run out of Langley, out of CIA. Now, you know, whether you've seen the movies and the documentaries or not, National Security Agency played a large role as well. NGA, my home agency of the model, fame, contributed. So it was completely a team sport, but it was run out of lightly, the case, whether or not this was it. And over the next 10 months, I felt like my job was to be somewhat of a red team, because I wasn't doing the job daily. I was on the receiving end of the analysis and the update. but to your point about weapons of mass destruction I thought we owed the president and obviously the country to make sure we were asking every question that could be asked to try to poke holes in the case so that we could at least give him the clearest picture what do we know, what do we assess, what don't we know and keep those things all very clear and appreciate Michael's recollection of it I remember when the president was going around the room This is like April now, so we're moving up on the point of decision whether or not to authorize the raid, and this has been documented in a few books. Somehow we got into a numbers game, and people were asked, well, what odds do you say, right? Somebody would say 20%, somebody would say 50%, and of course the analysts were up at 80 or 90, but that's kind of analyst life, right, because you start to get your belief system built into your case. And Mike Leiter, who was the director of our National Counterterrorism Center, said I thought it was a very important thing, and it was quite different than Michael Morell's point. Mike said at that table, he said, Mr. President, I don't know if it's 40, 50, or 60, and actually I think it's a little silly for us to be giving you a number like that, but I will tell you I think this case is 10 times better than any other case we've had for bin Laden's location. So he just put it in a comparative mode, and I thought that was very helpful. but as has been noted, it was an assessment.

Matt Spence, Other

And the stakes are high. The reason why I'm pressing on this question is we've all sat in boardrooms and briefing your investment committees or your CEOs, and important decisions are made under uncertainty. If it's an easy case, it doesn't go to the president. And in retrospect, much like the amazing raid with Maduro in Venezuela, it's due to the heroics of our special forces operators and that, But there's so much uncertainty that remains. And I remember the risk is at that very end, there was divided council. Around that table in that last meeting on Thursday evening when the president was there and asked his national security cabinet, what should I do? Half the room, including some cabinet secretary, others said we should. It was the president's decision to make on his own as he made that lonely walk from the Situation Room through the Rose Garden. The key question is, part of it is, Robert Gates, Republican-appointed Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush, sat there as probably one of the more experienced people in the room had been, Deputy Director of the CIA, Deputy National Security Advisor. He said, Mr. President, I know this sounds like a very compelling case, but I was here in the Iran hostage operation, and he pointed to me because he had the job I had then, and we were so confident it, everything would work, and we know how that ended. It stays dramatically to know we're violating the sovereignty of a foreign country, going after one of the most notorious terrorists who took so many American lives, and the question that he's asking the intelligence is sort of an impossible question, and you're given circumstantial evidence. You have a photograph of it. Robert, having been in the room for that, having been in the room about the nuclear program in Iran, the nuclear program in North Korea, with the new intelligence satellite capabilities we have now, now in 2026, how would that have expanded the decision? Like, if you know what you know now and we have the technology, either for the Belan operation or the other things, how would that have changed the decision?

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

I think the first thing that just is different from today's world is it's a more transparent planet for good and for bad. Some of that is owed to a workforce called Planet Labs and 200 Satellites and providing an unclassified daily scan of the Earth. But there's multiple companies that are doing that. Some part of it is coming from our mobile devices and our posting and our sharing and whatnot. The world is in many ways more open. I think we could have provided more context For the strategic environment, and you mentioned Pakistan, and for the implications of a rift with a major ally who was supporting our operations in Afghanistan, I think we could have had a better understanding about the risk to people think about the raid itself, which obviously was the most important part. But the raid doesn't happen until you have a logistics flow and you have base camps and you have rehearsals and you have courses of action depending on what's found and what occurs. And I think today we could have provided the president with more confidence about that environment in which he was making the particular decision. To me, I think it's the beauty of the confluence of the highly classified information that I've talked about and this open and transparent and recurring, on the escalator, the term global insights. I said, yes, exactly that. It's these global insights that I think just raises your level of understanding and confidence. And so it doesn't make maybe the decision any less hard, but maybe you can just be more confident about it at the point of decision.

Matt Spence, Other

And as we finish that, how should we think about, like if we're having this conversation in China right now, and there's the Robert Cardillo who had briefed President Xi, how do they're Cape America, both when you add in the government, top secret side of things, as well as?

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

Broadly speaking, analogous, similar. i think we still have an advantage that advantage is shrinking i'm explaining the value proposition of planet labs to people will show them the 200 satellites and how they do the line scanning and will proudly say that while we've been doing this for eight years now there is no other company that does that daily scan the daily skin of the earth and you know has now eight years of archive with AI applications to unlock the value. But then I have to add, but there is a company called Xilin in China that is pursuing not exactly the same, but close to 200 satellites themselves to provide a similar type of awareness. So sometimes when I'm in meetings with national security officials today and I'm trying to explain to them the value that commercial imagery could decision. I often remind them, by the way, whether or not you use this commercial aspect of that, do know the adversary has this capability to monitor your movements. And that's that red team analysis that I talk about. So this is why I say transparency is broadly good. I think transparency is good for liberal, democratic, lowercase d, societies where open information is generally a good thing. China has a different social compact with its citizens, and so less so there. But my top-level answer to your question, Matt, is still better, but closing. Getting closing.

Matt Spence, Other

You know, this reads the point about Planet as a disruptor in this space. So I want to talk about how, as a venture-backed, now a public company, Planet thought about operating in a market that has historically been dominated by cost-plus. Like when you mentioned the satellites that you viewed in this, the U.S. government didn't make those. How do you navigate working in a market that has historically been dominated by cost-plus? You're bringing in a different DNA than where they grow now.

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

Look, we're quite proud at Planet. of the growth we have experienced, especially in the past few years. We went public five years ago now. So quite frankly, we're getting better at answering your question each quarter, and we're proud of that. But Planet basically introduced a different value proposition to the government and to commercial partners. And it was less about, I'm interested in selling you an image, right, or a data set that's filled with pixels. And it's more about are you interested in subscribing to alerts and to answers and to tip-offs, et cetera. And this is where the confluence of artificial intelligence has made all the difference. Because I mentioned the eight years of archive. And as a matter of fact, when I was at NGA, the planets first started to fly these, they call them dove satellites, imaging at three meters resolution. Remember I said 25 centimeters, so think 3 meters pixel size. And frankly, my experiment at NGA didn't go over well because I was turning that imagery over to humans, people that were succeeding me in those jobs. Now, they weren't in basements anymore, but they were still basically exploiting imagery the old-fashioned way by squinting at it and writing down what they saw. Daily scan is much more of a machine-first proposition. and the idea is let the machine answer three questions that machines are quite good at and getting better at all the time and the three questions are what, where, and when what's the object, where is it, and at what time because algorithms are helping the machine extract that automatically out of imagery in a very efficient and effective way you can save your human analyst like I had at NGA for two much more difficult questions which are why and what's next. And especially as an intelligence analyst, that's really what you're there to do is to make your best call about why. Why is this Chinese development happening? Why is this Russian movement occurring? What's the meaning of this exercise or this deployment? And then more importantly, what do we think is going to happen tomorrow and the next week?

Matt Spence, Other

And on that question of what's going to happen tomorrow and the relationship between the questions you ask machines changing that, As you guys know, investment banks are not allowed to have a conference by the SEC without talking about AI these days, so this is the required question. But how has AI changed that analysis of what you guys can do? Obviously, you're a tech-first company. You developed this. What is the role of that human analyst now compared to where you think it's going to be?

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

call it just AI is accelerating everything I just described right about the power of the algorithms and the ability of the machine to do those three basic questions to me it's it's it's now elevating the human because again you know to do why and what's next you've got to have experience and expertise and context and understanding now again that too can be machine aided, but ultimately you're going to make a call. You're going to make an assessment. And I, at least today, that's still in the realm of human capacity. But let me add that, you know, those that don't know, Planet Spun out of NASA. The founders worked at NASA. They actually had a project when they were in government called PhoneSat. And this was the early evolution of the iPhone. And the real question was, you know, hey, can these things work in space? Now, I'm sure it was a little bit more complicated than that, but basically NASA wanted to find out, and guess what? They work pretty well. Now, they don't work perfectly, and there are some things, but basically the technology that you need to resolve an image from space had moved quite quickly and powerfully to smaller and smaller unit economics. so that experience helped you know motivate the founders to leave NASA and say hey let's let's try this and so by the way the the satellites they first built and built today are they're called 3U satellites they're literally this big think a loaf of bread and they have a little bit more than an iPhone on one end now but you know they have a sensor that that scans down so the And what's exciting about AI today is that most of us experience the advancement through large language models and asking questions about what can you do with my refrigerator's ingredients to help me make dinner tonight, or how can you help me think about risks, balance risks and opportunities with respect to some financial decision or legal decision I need to make. They are now doing the same thing with what they call multimodal models, right? Where certainly they're consuming text, but they are now consuming pixels as well and video. And so the interaction of those multimodal capabilities in that eight-year history of the earth. Because of my background, I'm interested in patterns over time to what they could indicate about future events. but you could do the same thing with respect to land management and supply chain and transportation, et cetera, to get a history that could inform decisions in those as well. So I think it's easy to say, if we have this same conversation about a year from now, there will be applications that don't exist today that will literally change the value proposition of that data set.

Matt Spence, Other

I want to, if folks have questions, please raise your hand and we can send folks around. Before we get into those, one quick question and then want to talk a little more about the business model. To the extent you can say, as we've moved from the 3 meters to 25 centimeters, what is the best that a satellite can pick up now? Like, could they identify you and I by face? Is it something else? Like, how good is the technology?

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

So, no. You get a much greater threat from a drone, frankly, obviously. But look, could it discriminate a crowd, a number of humans in this area? And if you were to combine that image with, for example, cell phone, you could combine the two things and say, oh, I had that signal at that time, and I'm going to correlate those two events. So you're not exactly identifying a human, but I guess you could contribute to that question through today's technology. As I said earlier, I mean, it's, you know, pretty easy to resolve the difference, you know, at the highest resolution, like I said, between, you know, a sedan, a minivan, you know, a pickup truck, those kinds of classifications back at the beach, you know, and not working. Got it.

Matt Spence, Other

As we move again to the business model, so can you tell us a little about what Planet's business model is? You're obviously building satellites with private capacity. You sell capacity. You're using this as private capital. That's a very different model from the traditional defense contractors. Tell us about Planet's business model, and how do you sort of deal with your different business model working with these government customers?

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

I'll talk about it in layers. So Planet has and will, it does and will obviously sell its imagery, core raw imagery to anyone who's interested, who wants to do their own processing and their own analysis and their own manipulation of the image. And there's still that group of people by the U.S. government is still a consumer of, if you will, kind of that raw data. The two areas that are growing most relative to that baseline capability are those that want the analytics. I talked earlier about those subscriptions. And so Planet has two broad applications that we market. One is called maritime domain awareness, which is what it sounds like. If you're interested in ship traffic over time and the movement thereof, there's a service that provides that. and planets proud of winning market share there with the U.S. Navy in very challenging areas like the South China Sea. And then there's also what we call global monitoring service, which is think of that kind of monitoring but over land masses. And so tracking, again, supply chain movement and land management and for a nation state, military activity. across the land but the third category that is quite new for planets literally in the past two years is what we broadly call satellites as a service and i just came back by the way from the munich security conference last weekend and this was front and center again because as most people know that u.s security blanket is less assured these days especially in europe there's much more interest in our allies obtaining their own capacity for overhead sensing. Planets announced three deals in the past 15 months in that regard, one with Japan, one with Germany, and the most recent with Sweden. And it essentially works as a, if you think of the constellation of satellites that orbit the Earth, how can you fractionalize I'll say the ownership of those constellations in a way that's meaningful. So our arrangement with Japan is that contract comes with two ground stations, which can both task and receive imagery to the satellites. And as our satellites come over those ground stations, they're essentially Japanese. They buy all that access over their ground station. But once the satellite traverses outside of theirs, then it goes back to global and the planet then markets and monetizes the rest. So think of it as a piece of the overall capacity. Similar, not exactly the same deal with Germany that we announced, and most recently with Sweden. And what it does for companies, because Planet's ability to both build and innovate and fly satellites in a very timely way, if you want increased confidence in the near term, and I mean near term as in months, not years, we can move capacity to you. And so as countries get a little bit more nervous about what they know and what they don't know, this gives them increased confidence.

Matt Spence, Other

So I can buy a capacity when I need it, almost like the ADOBS of satellite collection.

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

The model that we have is you're really buying the capacity. What you do with it, it's completely up to you. And so you could, quote, maximize the throttle, Well, but you own the throttle then. But the contract arrangement basically is that capacity.

Matt Spence, Other

You mentioned, Robert, you came back from the Munich Security Conference. One of the headline European defense forums last year, J.D. Vance, made a lot of headlines talking about this new relationship. Huge amount of attention. When I used to attend, they were mostly government teams, like there are a lot of companies participating in this conference. What is your role there, and what does this say about the new role of the private sector in playing it critical?

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

Well, I think it goes back to the core issue we've been discussing, Matt, which is, you know, in the old days, if you wanted, quote, your own intelligence sources and capabilities, you would have to either build them yourselves or contract with a bespoke provider to build them for you. And because the world has become a more transparent place, you now have more options. And so, you know, as I mentioned earlier, broadly speaking, you know, Europe had been the recipient, quite frankly, of security for a long time. It was us. So we were providing the security blanket for Europe. And you can have a reasonable debate whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. But it's not a thing anymore. We've made it quite clear to them that it's time for you to increase your investment. And look, I used to, you know, when I was the director of NGA, I would have dozens of international partners. And, of course, I never met with a partner who had the same capabilities I had. I was always dealing with somebody who had something less. But in many ways, I envied them because even though we had the largest, you know, enterprise, we also had the most baggage, meaning cultural baggage and technology baggage. And it was tough to reinvent yourself that way. And I used to envy some of my very, if you will, nascent partners. I said, oh, you have a clean sheet of paper. I would create quite a different intelligence architecture today if I had a clean sheet of paper. And so in many ways, and again, Planet's proud to be competitive in this space, you can create a baseline of understanding that's completely unclassified, right? And then on top of that, then just build the bespoke pieces that you need, which tend to be more expensive anyway. And so, you know, as these countries in Europe and in Asia now build up their systems, I think the reason why commercial companies are so compelling is because, one, we compete. So, you know, we would have a meeting with a senior leader and another commercial imagery company would come in behind. So, you know what I mean? So the market is essentially trying to work competitively to satisfy your needs. So that's good for you.

Matt Spence, Other

and then you can be more efficient

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

in how you scale it and so you're right Munich is a madhouse just because of the chaos of bringing 60 international leaders into one small space with 60 security details and all of the challenges of logistics but it is the crossroads of the world in the sense of it's bringing that world together and those industries together both government and commercial in a way that just hasn't before. Robert, as we wrap up,

Matt Spence, Other

you've had this amazing career in some of these intelligence questions we've had. You have a broader lens now, seeing this from plant, what we can collect. What keeps you up at night? What are the biggest threats in today's world we should be?

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

I don't mean my answer to be political, because I would have given you the same answer under a Biden administration or even an Obama administration. I mentioned that I was joining the community during the height of the Cold War Soviet Union Robert McNamara in the 1960s God bless him, built a machine to beat the Soviet machine Soviets had their kind of infamous five year plans in which they would set these goals, the national goals and they would rally the nation to achieve them they weren't all that efficient but they were very ambitious and so we built something called the Future Years Defense Program, which was another five-year plan. And, by the way, our five-year plans ended up being better than their five-year plans. And so we, quote, won the Cold War, right, and the wall came down and the Soviet Union became the Russia Republic. Even, you know, in the past 30 years, we've made a lot of changes. We still keep that system, broadly speaking. And so what, and by the way, I sleep well. I don't really lose sleep over this. But what frustrates me is, broadly speaking, even though our government often talks about being more agile, being more innovative, being more businesslike, the requirements process that the government implements and adheres to is still that old process. And so it's very deliberate because you do want our taxpayer dollars to be cared for, but it's so methodically slow. Very frustrating for a company like Planet because we tend to innovate on quarters, not years. Even when you find the right government customer with the right need and the right budget, it tends to be, oh, yeah, I can put that on contract in six or nine months, maybe if it's fast. And then maybe I can program it in a year or two. So because I know China doesn't have the same system, I guess that's what I worry about, Matt, is that we now have a peer adversary, a near-peer adversary called China. They don't have, I mean, they probably do have, and they do have five-year plans, but they don't operate that way. They operate in their own market.

Matt Spence, Other

They're operating, innovating faster.

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

Very close to our speed. And by the way, I want to compliment this conference and Barclays, what I used to always say is I had no interest in out-China-ing China. I want to out-America-China, Which means, you know, get the new idea, deploy the risk capital, interact with the market, let our competition happen, and our capabilities will broadly grow. I still think that's the secret sauce here, and obviously this conference is kind of part of that core heartbeat.

Matt Spence, Other

Well, I think that's a wonderful place to end as we think about how do we out-innovate and think about that piece. It's not a question of keeping the others down. It's racing faster. I've had a fascinating time learning from Robert. I think three things that I take away as, first, his job is pretty freaking cool. Second of all, the role of commercial in expanding the decision-making is really essential. And then third, to really break through what I'm hearing, we continue to need to change how the government buys things, how the government uses technology, and ultimately that's the key to this out-innovating for national security. Please join me in thanking Robert Cardillo for spelling too much.

Robert Cardillo, Chairman

That was awesome.