By Chris Forrester
Dara Panahy, Partner, Millbank LLP, interviewed Matt Desch, CEO at Iridium at the SmallSat Symposium, held at Mountain View, on February 4. Desch admitted – with a smile on his face – that he is very old and was familiar with what was now best called 1G and 2G. “I was the 6th CEO at Iridium, and despite the bankruptcy I knew that this was a segment that would not easily be commoditised.”
Desch explained that Iridium was very much looking to the future, and was not especially fazed by the newcomers such as AST SpaceMobile or Starlink.
He reminisced about the early days at Iridium. “My goal initially was survival, cash-flow, and establishing a solid business model. Our satellites were limited in life and one of my main worries was keeping them in orbit until they could be replaced in a timely manner.”
“One of the initial challenges was to keep our staff. I promised them that we were going to grow and we have built a team that does work together. We built respect for each other, with good communications between each other. Some of the board wanted to cash in, some had quite different views as to their ambitions. We needed to paint a clear picture as to our aims and ambitions, and how we would achieve our future. Getting the right people to share that process was key.”
He explained the problems which happened when a Russian satellite crashed into one of the Iridium fleet. “It was on the nightly news although at the time it was the first time anything like this had happened. But it led to the industry coming up with solutions to minimise the problems happening again.”
“We invented an aircraft tracking and controlling business and is now generating millions of dollars. Iridium has always been constrained, by spectrum, by money, but it made us very creative.”
“I am proud of the direction we have followed. We knew what we were good at. I have had to explain our role in direct-to-device, and am a firm believer that there will be successful players and we will be one of them. We are in almost every aircraft cockpit. I am not interested in investing a lot of money in order to just expand revenues by a percentage point or two.”
“We have 2.5 million subs. Almost 1000 staff. D2D is going to be a huge business for us. Starlink and AST are great regional and country-by-country systems, but although we started with a Qualcomm proprietary solution but we have now pivoted to a standard-based solution. I firmly believe it’s going to be a huge business for us in standards and hope that the phone systems will have something that [enables them] to work everywhere, and this includes Iot.”
