What's Your Problem?

Will Marshall is the co-founder and CEO of Planet, a private company with a fleet of tiny satellites that takes photos of the entire Earth every day. Will’s problem: How do you turn all those images into useful data?

In today’s episode we talk about shooting smartphones into space, turning a million-dollar antenna into a thousand-dollar paperclip, and how to count every tree in the Amazon.

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Joy and Raft Hollingsworth run The Hollingsworth Cannabis Company. Their problem: How do you help more Black people get into the legal weed industry?

They faced this problem from the very beginning as they tried to start a marijuana farm from scratch in rural Washington. The Hollingsworths lived their entire lives in downtown Seattle and didn’t know anything about farming.

It's a story that includes a paper bag full of cash, dinner with Anthony Bourdain, and hundreds of millions of dollars in weed taxes.

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Noubar Afeyan is the co-founder of Moderna and the founder of Flagship Pioneering. His problem: How do you turn the chaotic hero's journey of entrepreneurship into a repeatable, systematic process?

Noubar created Flagship Pioneering to solve the problems he saw with entrepreneurship. Flagship's mission: To create new companies in a systematic, repeatable way. On today's show, Noubar explains how that system led to the creation of Moderna, a company that developed a COVID vaccine and saved millions of lives.

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Rafael Ilishayev is the co-founder of the instant delivery company Gopuff. His problem: How do you deliver everything from bananas to hot coffee in around 30 minutes -- and still make a profit?

On today's show, Jacob Goldstein surprises Rafael with a live Gopuff order. And they discuss the problems the company is working on in real time as they wait to see if the order will arrive on time and in good shape.

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Luis von Ahn is the founder and CEO of the language app DuoLingo. His problem: How do you teach people to speak a language -- really speak it -- using only an iPhone app?

On the surface, DuoLingo looks warm and fuzzy. Underneath the hood, it's a serious tech company built on artificial intelligence. But the best machine learning in the world still isn't good enough to really teach people how to fluently speak in a new language. Luis is trying to change that.

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Aicha Evans is the CEO of Zoox. Her problem: Designing a car that knows what to do when it pulls up to a 4-way stop.

AI is transforming the way cars work. But AI still struggles with predicting the behavior of human drivers. To build a car that can truly drive itself, Aicha and the rest of the industry will have to solve this problem. How do you teach self-driving cars to understand people?

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Keenan Wyrobek is the co-founder of Zipline. His problem: How do you fill the skies with delivery drones and keep them from crashing into each other?

Zipline’s drones already make hundreds of deliveries a day in Ghana and Rwanda. But to expand to the U.S. he has to solve a fundamental problem. Americans’ love of freedom and the open skies makes it hard to build a drone business here.

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Ramon van Meer is the CEO of Alpha Paw. His problem: How do you grow a niche business (ramps for weiner dogs!) when a pandemic blows up your supply chain and Apple ruins your targeted ads?

Ramon has sold over $30 million worth of dog ramps. That’s a lot of dog ramps. But in order to do so he has to deal with some of the biggest companies on earth. On today’s show, we talk about how he has built his company on top of the tech giants – and how they threaten his very existence.

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Former Planet Money host Jacob Goldstein talks to entrepreneurs and engineers about how they'll change the world -- once they solve a few problems. Coming March 17th.

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