Ep 1 - Ian Schuler - Building an impact driven geospatial company
Ian Schuler has been the CEO of Development Seed since 2013, a company oriented towards using geospatial tools to solve difficult problems with partners like the Washington Post, UNICEF and the American Red Cross. We talk open source, how to run a company focused on impact and the state of satellite imagery.
Show Notes
Welcome to the First Episode of Minds behind Maps!
I hope you enjoy this conversation with Ian Schuler. I'm going to try to keep track of most of the things we talked about in this episode if you want to go check them out yourself.
Keep track of what Ian & Development Seed are doing:
- https://twitter.com/ianschuler
- https://twitter.com/developmentseed
Links to materials discussed in the episode:
- Development Seed school mapping: https://developmentseed.org/blog/2021-03-18-ai-enabling-school-mapping
- Joe Morrison's blog: https://joemorrison.substack.com/welcome
- Early days of Development Seed: https://www.linkedin.com/in/egundersen/, https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianshward/,
- Signal's founder, Moxie Marlinspike: https://twitter.com/moxie
I'm going to try to provide a basic version of time-stamps if you want to skip by some sections:
00:00 : Intro
1:25 : Beginning of episode; Ian presenting himself
7:55 : Why open source?
19:00 : Trust in a world of AI models
26:25 : How to communicate the limitations of machine learning solutions
36:45 : Which data to use for which problem?
42:25 : What is important in satellite imagery?
55:00 : Data fusion
1:00:25 : Deciding who to work with
1:07:10 : Origins of Development Seed
1:11:00 : Ian's previous work
1:15:40 : So do you build & lead a company around impact?
1:30:05 : Working in the days of covid
1:40:35 : A last note on the future of geospatial data
Feel free to drop me a line, I'd love to know what you think of this!
- @MaxLenormand
- [email protected]
Thanks for listening