010: Dan Berkenstock: The Journey From Space Founder to Defense Tech Advisor

Dan Berkenstock is an entrepreneur, aerospace engineer, and Stanford PhD who co-founded Skybox Imaging, a satellite imaging company acquired by Google in 2014. He is a Distinguished Research Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, focusing on space and defense policy research and recommendations. Dan sits on several boards of venture-backed aerospace start-ups and teaches aerospace entrepreneurship in the Stanford School of Engineering.

On this episode of the Defense Tech Underground, Dan describes the journey of building Skybox Imaging, launching SkySat-1, and joining Google post-acquisition. He discusses his recent Hoover publication, the Defense Tech Playbook, designed to help new founders in defense build a strategic, financial path to quickly transition capabilities to the warfighter. Dan shares detailed recommendations for expanding the impact of the STRATFI program and how the DoD can better articulate demand signals to the startup ecosystem. 

This episode is hosted by Helen Phillips and Jon Hoey. 

Full Bio:

Dan Berkenstock is a distinguished research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His work aims to ensure sustained American aerospace leadership well into the twenty-first century and provides space-related scholarship and policy recommendations through Hoover's Technology Policy Accelerator. From 2008 to 2017, Berkenstock was the founding chief executive officer, later chief product officer, of Skybox Imaging.

In his policy research, Dan focuses on the critical advancements needed to reduce the risk of conflict in space during a forthcoming period of rapid expansion. His technical research focuses on expanding convex and polynomial optimization techniques to identify globally optimal vehicle designs in aerodynamic shape optimization problems, with a focus on low-observability hypersonic vehicles.

At Skybox, he oversaw the fundraising of more than $100 million in venture capital, helped reset the benchmark for performance in the optical, small satellite arena, and led the company through a $500 million acquisition by Google. The twenty-one Skybox satellites continue to operate as the world’s largest high-resolution commercial imaging constellation, providing timely imagery of major conflicts that is often featured in major media outlets and imagery used daily by defense and intelligence customers.

For his work at Skybox, Dan was recognized as Via Satellite magazine’s Satellite Executive of the Year in 2014 and was named to MIT Technology Review’s “Innovators under 35” in 2011. He continues to engage with the space start-up community by serving as an independent director on several boards of venture-backed aerospace start-ups and teaching aerospace entrepreneurship in the Stanford School of Engineering.

Dan completed his PhD in aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University, where he also received a master of science. He graduated from the University of Michigan with a bachelor of science in aerospace engineering. During this time, he completed four tours as a cooperative education student at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.