The last Friday of September was my last day at Overstory:

If you follow me here, it's probably because you've at some point listened to my podcast Minds Behind Maps or come across one of my videos. Those are most of the public presence I show online, but in reality the smaller part of what my awake, working brain has spent its time on over the last 3 years.

The podcast started in April 2021, as a covid-my-god-I'm-so-bored-project and has been going on since. At the time, I was working as a Remote Sensing engineer at Iceye (a Finnish company building the first small radar imaging satellite constellation), which I left a few months later to join Overstory.

Working at private companies means it's a bit hard to show exactly what I've done there, so here's my LinkedIn experience instead if you'd like to know a bit more:

I'm thankful to have been a part of the journey for those 3 years. Working at a startup figuring itself out, finding product-market fit while not running out of money, not collapsing in the process and trying to scale engineering, altogether is a complex task.

I joined Overstory because I felt like the Earth Observation industry -this whole industry of sending satellites up into space and strapping big giant lenses or radar arrays onto them- felt like one big house of cards: A lot of money has been going in on one end with no one really knowing if any of it is going to be financially viable on the other side. Public programs like Landsat & Copernicus are providing us with free, open data at the moment (but it wasn't always the case, and it might not always be) leading to huge impact & value. The commercial side though, nobody knows if it will turn out to be economically viable.

Out of all the companies trying to convince people satellite images are worth their price, Overstory was started by a data scientist who saw a specific problem (monitoring vegetation around power lines) and saw satellite images simply as a tool to fix that specific problem, nothing else. A tool for the job. I liked that, I liked that Overstory doesn't go to geospatial conferences but ones where electric utilities go, where people don't care one bit about satellite images, but only about their problem being solved.

That being said, start-ups being start-ups, fast paced and uncertain and ever changing, I've decided that it was time for me to go try out something else.

So what's next?

I left as much because I felt it was time for me to go and because I got an offer I got really excited about.

A year ago I wrote about how much I had enjoyed my time at SatCamp, a conference in Colorado, in the US, focused on meeting people in the geospatial industry while spending a lot of time outdoors and valuing face to face time with people.

I wasn't planning on going this year, spending a lot of time figuring out what my next thing would be. Turns out I did end up going, and meeting (part of) the new team I joined:

What the heck is Fused, Max?

I'm glad you asked. Because my job is all about giving you as simple of an answer as possible.

I've been a geospatial data scientist for the last 5+ years, so I have a lot of opinions & ideas on how to approach this
I'm joining as developer advocate: My job is to be an internal data scientist, a user of the tools and provide feedback on how to make it better, easier, more practical. I'll also be helping to flesh out the docs, how we communicate what we do, and why it matters

In a nutshell, it's trying to solve a big pain point in a lot of (geospatial, but not only) data science workflows: running stuff & iterating on it is a mess when you get to lots of data. We're building tooling around serverless compute to make it a whole lot easier to run python code from your local machine to scaling up in the cloud.

The team is purposefully small, moves fast and is opinionated while open to a lot of feedback. That's my kind of stuff
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Like always, my favourite way to understand something is to have a long conversation about it, so I had Sina, the co-founder & CEO of Fused, on the podcast:

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The podcast isn't going anywhere, quite the opposite

While I try to shout as loud as I can from all the rooftops of the world about the podcast & videos I make, I also try to keep my job separate from it, and it from my job. I work in the geospatial industry and I talk about it very publicly -sharing opinions and points of view- which at times can be tricky. I'd still like to try to continue in that direction.

I do want to mention that the podcast is not my main source of income, it doesn't bring in enough. Maybe one day, but I also like having a foot in the industry, actually building stuff, and not just talking about it. Again, at least for now. So, day job it is.

This won't be the first time I'll have my boss on the podcast by the way.

I'll be working 3 days per week on Fused. I already was working 4 days / week at Overstory, this is getting 1 more day. All this time will go towards 3 main things:

• Running Minds Behind Maps. All the same work I already do: finding guests, preparing interviews, editing episodes.
• Making more videos for a broad audience. As much as I love in depth conversations, I also think there's a real need to bring the rest of the world with us in our conversations of mapping the world. This is what my eponym Youtube channel is about
• Doing small consulting gigs. I've talked to 75+ people on the podcast and worked in the satellite image industry for 5 years + at this point. I've gotten to talk to a lot of people, build a bunch of stuff and had a few opportunities to help out some of said companies figure out their strategy as compared to the rest of the industry. So far I had to turn down some of those offers, but I'd like to explore this a bit more

I deeply believe we need more efforts into explaining a lot of what this industry does. The podcast & videos are my efforts in solving some of that. I gave a talk at SatCamp a few weeks ago, which summarises why I feel this way:

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If you work in the geospatial field and would like to work together, let me know, reach out! My Twitter DMs are open, you can reach me on LinkedIn, answer this email or reach out on the podcast contact form.

Sneak Peek of what's coming

I've written in the past about how I want more of the internet to be paid by the people who find value in it rather than advertising. Ads can be helpful, insightful and informative, but they can also be all over the place and intrusive. It's still a far pipe dream that has brittle legs, but I want to keep trying. That's why I have a Patreon, where you can financially support the work I do

But also, you get a preview of the next big video project I've been working on. It's the biggest video I've worked on so far, but it needs a bit more time in the oven:

Until next time,
Maxime

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