Innovations & Inspirations

A hearty congratulations to Skybox, a cutting edge, atypical Silicon Valley company for being recognized by MIT’s Technology Review as a Top 50 Innovative Company in 2012.  And congratulations to co-founder and current Chief Product Officer Dan Berkenstock, one of the most high energy and thoughtful founders I’ve had the privilege of working with, on being named a Top Innovator under 35 by the same publication.  I joined Skybox in 2010 as a “consultant” right after Bessemer led Skybox’s Series B, working 45-50 hours a week as one of two non-engineers in our small team of less than 20.  And now, the team is 50+ people (with many rocket scientists!) and ready to disrupt a stodgy industry.

Skybox is a company building low cost satellites that provide timely high resolution imagery and video.  Imagine being able to see the protests of the Arab Spring in high resolution video, get timely imagery of the damage done by Hurricane Katrina so FEMA can more effectively act, plan construction sites without ever making a visit, or monitor and defend your national borders with video or imagery feeds.  It’s pretty amazing stuff, and use cases go on and on.  It’s a company built on transparency with the belief that critical information should be available in high quality and low cost to many government agencies and the masses.

CEO Tom Ingersoll (a remarkable, almost paradoxical combination of an aerospace executive and entrepreneur), Dan, and the rest of the founding and broader team are going head on in an industry defined by its staidness.  And they’re attacking it with the zeal, mobility, and leanness of a Silicon Valley team.

The sky is the limit…except in this case.