I'm very late in the game in coming across this article, but thank you for sharing your story here. It was definitely a shame to see what happened to Descartes, and I worry that something similar is happening to Planet. I was one of their early Science Ambassadors back in the early days when it was about 30 employees, and then eventually got hired to work there as the head of science strategy, so all in all I was in the orbit of the company for about 7 years. By the time I quit, it was about 1200 people and there was a lot of resentment from long-time Planeteers about the direction the company was headed---no doubt due to pressures from the investors. Now, a year and a half after I left and multiple rounds of layoffs later, things seem to be in even more of a tailspin. It breaks my heart, because the company seemed to really believe in its mission in the early days (it's what got me to leave my academic career working on Mars to go into industry working on Earth!), and I think some of the OG Planeteers that are still there still believe in it too.

Venture capital kills good ideas, because even if they're good, if they can't provide crazy returns on ridiculous timescales, then they don't care. I think it will be the death of a lot of EO/space-related companies in the end.