Dan Pilone is the CEO and co-founder of Element84, a software engineering company focused on building geospatial solutions at scale. We touch on Dan's experience working on geospatial software engineer problems and how those have changed over the past decade. We discuss the work Element84 has done to contribute to AWS's Open Data program, as well the journey of co-founding a company with Dan's wife Tracey, and how they're thinking of growth through a people-focused mindset.
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About Dan:
Time-stamps:
- 03:16 - Conversation starts, Dan present himself
- 07:03 - Presenting Element84
- 09:33 - Element84’s early days - Moving towards geospatial over time
- 12:16 - Problems change over time
- 16:15 - Scale changes too
- 20:48 - Contributing to Amazon’s Open Data Registry
- 26:16 - Making Sentinel data more accessible
- 34:30 - Getting nerdy: What do Dask & Xarray mean for the future of geospatial data processing
- 40:16 - Moving towards more layers of abstraction
- 41:52 - Business model behind different open data contributions
- 45:11 - A game theory approach to Open Source
- 50:28 - The Openness of Geospatial compared to other fields
- 56:16 - Co-founding a company as a couple
- 1:04:21 - Preventing people “careering out” of the company
- 1:11:19 - People-focus growth
- 1:16:58 - Element84’s hiring process
- 1:21:14 - Changing culture as the company grows
- 1:27:54 - How Dan’s role has changed over the years
- 1:30:47 - The relevance (or not) of keeping a foot in the code as a CEO
- 1:33:29 - Opportunity cost from Dan’s point of view
- 1:36:34 - Book & podcast recommendations
Show notes:
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