10 Things You Didn’t Know about Will Marshall
Will Marshall is an American citizen, a scientist, and the current CEO and the co-founder of Planet Labs. He has an interesting personality and view of the world, which makes him outstanding. Read on to find out 10 things you didn’t know about him and the many reasons he’s been able to succeed in business throughout his long career.
1. His educational background
Will Marshall joined the University of Leicester in 2000, where he attained his Masters in Physics with Space Science and Technology. According to Topio networks, Will joined the University of Oxford in 2004 to do his Ph.D. in Physics with Quantum Optics after his masters. Later on, in 2006, he joined Harvard University to study Space Policy.
2. His career
Will’s career has been one of a kind. He worked hard at various companies to achieve his dream. He started from a humble beginning and climbed his way to being a Planet Labs co-founder and CEO. He started working as a summer intern at the California Institute of Technology, and in 1997 he worked at Nasa Marshall Space Flight Center.
He was employed for one year at European Space Agency in 1998, and later in 1999, he became a board member at the Space Generation Advisory Council. Will was smart and knew how to juggle school and work; he started working at Nasa Ames Research Center as a scientist for two years (2005 to 2007). Marshall gained a lot of experience from the different institutes he worked with previously.
He decided to set up his own company, which is how Planet Labs was formed with the help of other founders. They founded the company, and his career took shape. He started working in 2006 till date, and he took up the role of the CEO.
3. Excellent leadership skills
Will has showcased his leadership skills as the CEO of Planet Labs. He is in the front line leading the company to various scales of development stage and ensuring the company becomes profitable and maintains itself even in the future. According to CNBC, the company under its CEO Will Marshall brought investors to a deal of $2.8 billion as the company prepared itself to go public. This move resulted in the company being listed in the NYSE under ticker PL.
4. Team player
Will was a scientist at NASA. He helped formulate the spacecraft Office at a Research center belonging to NASA based at Ames. He has been involved in several missions, such as Being the system Engineer on the; Lunar orbiter mission named “LADEE,” the Common Spacecraft Bus (which is a modular planetary spacecraft), and the Hover Test Vehicle (which was a ground-based test vehicle for lunar descending and landing. He was also on the science team, “LCROSS ” that discovered large quantities of water on the moon. While on all these missions, he has been part of a team, and for positive results, he had to be a team player who did his part for the success of the missions. According to his LinkedIn, Marshall worked for NASA for 5 years and 9 months.
5. Will the scientist
Science might sound like a foreign language to many people. It is amazing how Will embraced it and created solutions that help solve the planet’s problems. He formulated the Small Spacecraft Office while he was working at NASA Ames Research Center. Will has published over 30 scientific publications, and he has also written for the New York Times and Boston Globe several space-related articles. He has impacted the science world with various researches that he has performed, including research in orbital space debris remediation and many others.
6. CEO and co-founder of Planet Labs
Will Marshall leads the overall company strategy as the CEO and Co-founder of Planet Labs. The company was founded on 29 December 2010 by Will Marshall, Chris Boshuizen, and Robbie Schingler in San Francisco, California, United States. He took over the company’s position as the CEO and has been on the lead to promote and sell their product to a great height, increasing its net worth and profit.
7. He is a social man
Will is a confident man and ready to share his ideas. He has more than 13 thousand followers on his Twitter handle, proof of his social nature. In his TED talks, he serves as a very important member by educating many people on what Planet Labs does and how it is helping the world.
8. His vision of disaster management
When Will decided to create Planet Labs, he envisioned helping the world using imagery captured every day. Space imagery is normally hard to access, and if one gets access to the images, they are years old and might not be as useful as intended. With the images of satellites from Planet Labs, he believes disasters can be spotted fast and affected areas identified fast enough, hence saving many lives.
9. His humanitarian efforts
In an interview with Climate Action, Will’s humanitarian efforts through Planet Labs became evident. He states that the imagery from the company’s satellite that shows deforestation, and the area covered by forests, enable scientists and the world to know the effects of global warming on our planet. He says that Planet Labs will assist the agricultural industry, which is the backbone of human existence. These images can save the world from disasters that are slowly acting on the Earth since they can be monitored.
10. He is a hardworking man
His hard work is evident in how he started from working on Planet Labs’ first satellite prototype in a garage to owning a whole company that has launched the largest network of imagery satellites in human history. From just being a nerd working with his friends to being funded by Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire, Will has proven that you can achieve a lot with self-belief, teamwork, being visionary, and good communication skills.
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