Andrea Krupa 0:00

Everything is ultimately your responsibility at the end of the day. I think that's true for any CEO, but especially when you are the CEO and you are the board and you are the owner.

Angela Robertson 0:11

Welcome back to the Stormy Stories show. I'm your host, Angela Robertson, CEO of Ace Tech. We are a nonprofit membership society for tech CEOs and founders based here in beautiful British Columbia. And we exist so that every tech CEO and their company can thrive. I am thrilled to be joined today by Andrea Krupa, who is the CEO of Photosat. Andrea and I go way back, but for those listeners who don't know about Photosat, it is an incredible Vancouver-based geospatial technology company, transforming how mining, exploration, and infrastructure organizations use satellite-derived data to make better decisions. Since joining Photosat in 2015, Andrea has helped scale the company into a leader, a global leader in satellite surveying, remote sensing, and geospatial intelligence, supporting projects around the globe with engineering grade data and insights. Welcome to the Stormy Stories show, Andrea.

Andrea Krupa 1:17

Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Angela Robertson 1:21

Oh, the pleasure is all mine. I'm so delighted that you can join us today and tell our listeners a little bit about your background translating into this very technical CEO role because you have a unique set of skills incoming from counseling psychology. And now you lead a highly technical geospatial technology company. How has that unconventional path shaped your leadership style?

Andrea Krupa 1:48

Yeah, I think unconventional is a good word for it to describe it. Because I, yeah, I did start in engineering. I studied engineering for my first three years of uh university and actually ended up getting a degree in recreational therapy, specializing in adolescent mental health and adventure therapy. So I was a guide with Outward Bound Canada for nearly a decade, leading groups in the mountains and learning a lot about how people react under stress. Um, you know, one of the one of the tenets of outward bound is intentionally putting people in situations where there's natural consequences to decisions or lack of decisions, like putting on your coat or making a fire, things like that. So I ended up, that's where I got my degree in, and then I ended up actually getting my master's in counseling psychology. So I got my master's in counseling psychology still really focused on group dynamics. That's kind of what got me really interested, is not just how things work, which is kind of what got me into engineering in the first place, was I like systems. I like knowing how things break apart and go back together. Got into recreational therapy and psychology because I like how the brain works, because that's just an exceptionally complicated system, really. And then found like a real deep passion in how people work when they're working together or not working together. So it's it's it is an unconventional way to get to leading a technology company for sure, but it all kind of fits together in terms of what my brain finds interesting. So I ended up Fetterset was actually founded by my father in 1993. And in about 2015, he asked me, I had my own company at the time. I founded uh Hemisphere Adventure, which was doing sort of two things. I did family therapy, which is a very interesting system, families, and I was doing uh leadership development and executive coaching, as well as helping teams create healthier dynamics. So working with, you know, electronic arts and the national or NCAR and RCAN. So kind of both on the corporate side and on the family system side. And then I I got asked to come into Photosat to help with some kind of cultural challenges we were having in the company at the time around really how the different departments and people were working with each other and working across departments. And so I think one of the things that happens when you come into a family business is often you stay for a very long time. And that's kind of what happened. Yeah, it wasn't my intention when I came in, but I really fell in love with the company and what we do and the fact that I got to do both that technical systems because we do like deep tech.

Angela Robertson 4:36

Yes.

Andrea Krupa 4:37

And also the how the people work and how they work together and the industries and those pieces.

Angela Robertson 4:43

Uh tell me, when you were coming in in 2015 and there were those cultural challenges, where in your first sort of gut did you see those coming from? Was this like a a pivot point for Photostat and like trying to grow and still keep culture? Or what did you kind of identify as the the root of those challenges?

Andrea Krupa 5:04

I mean, I think that the time I implemented something called the Rocket model, which is, I think I facilitated 215 sessions over three months. So team sessions, executive sessions, one-on-one, conflict resolution, like you name it. I was kind of in the trenches in terms of how things were were happening, building the context of, you know, what teams were doing, what they weren't doing. I think part of the challenge at the time was, you know, my my father, who recently passed, was a really, really technically brilliant man, like just phenomenal brain in that way. Maybe a bit of a micromanager who liked to do everything himself, as a lot of technical founders are and do. And so, you know, probably didn't have the mechanisms in place at the time to give people the autonomy to build high-performing teams independent of him. And I think sometimes when that happens, you get more conflict because there's there's a bit of a bottleneck in the culture in terms of what's able to happen and what's not able to happen. And who can speak up about, hey, this person might not be the best cultural fit, or the way that we're approaching this might not be the best because not because he was a scary man in any stretch, but just because you're not necessarily given that autonomy. And so I think there was definitely a leadership shift that had to happen. The development of a strong leadership executive team kind of came in after that point as well. And some expectations in terms of like this is the culture of the company and these are the these are the values. And if if you don't fit those values, you you actually don't get to, you know, ride on this bus.

Angela Robertson 6:56

Yeah, you're not on the team, right? Yeah. It's the embrace of the values together. I think you hit on something that's going to resonate a lot with a lot of our listeners, which is that, you know, when you are a passionate founder and you're building, you know, you you envision yourself being able to give up these pieces readily. You're like, oh, I just wish I could give up this hat. But it's harder in the moment because you feel so close to those problems. And the person next to you, you might be able to say, Hey, Joe, you know, you could put that hat on somebody else. We know that team member, but when you're living it day to day, it's scary and it's tricky. And so sometimes coming in with that outside perspective makes all the difference to be able to make those shifts, right?

Andrea Krupa 7:39

Yeah. Well, and I think you also have an incredible sense of responsibility.

Angela Robertson 7:43

Yes. Right.

Andrea Krupa 7:45

Everything is ultimately your responsibility at the end of the day. I think I think that's the true for any CEO. But especially when you are the CEO and you are the board and you are the owner. Because Photostrap, Photosat was always bootstrapped. So we didn't have investors or you know, large boards, anything like that. It was, it really was Jerry. Right. Making all the decisions, having everything come down to him at the end of the day. And so it is difficult to let that go or to open that up, or you can feel a bit risky.

Angela Robertson 8:19

Yeah, exactly. So Photosat is helping organizations make critical decisions using satellite-driven data. What trends do you think are driving the growing demand for remote surveying and geospatial intelligence?

Andrea Krupa 8:32

Yeah, so I mean, I think that there's trends depend on what part of the world you're in and what it is that you're doing. And so Photosat, we work in about 34 different countries and doing a whole bunch of different things in the mining space and monitoring of, say, tailings dams or hydro dams or even route selection for railroad or pipelines. So there's a bunch of different things that we're doing. And the demand is coming from a few different places, right? There's the general mining demand, which I think we are all aware of, where we need more resources to create the data centers that we're all trying to do. Right. I was in a full day summit yesterday where it was all on different industries and the applications of AI. We all we're all using AI now, language models, whatever it is. And we don't necessarily piece that together with the massive amount of data center that that requires and the massive amount of, you know, copper and cobalt, all the things that we need to be able to do that. So, so that's a big driver for why mining is so important and why there is so much influence and impact right now on getting more resources responsibly out of the ground. There's something that we say in the mining industry that basically, if it's not grown, it's mined. So everything you have, if it's not grown, it's mined. And then when you think about all of the resources and electricity it takes to kind of run our world, especially where our world is going, that's all mined. Everything that we're doing there. So that's gonna be a huge driver in globally, in terms of the need for the mining industry to be able to do things responsibly. And now when you're looking at geospatial data, all mining requires geospatial data, right? When you start at exploration, so say you like don't know where you want to stake your claim, you're you're looking for, okay, what's the best region? The world is a really big place, right? Even if you're looking at, say, the Arabian Shield or if you're looking at the Andes, where we know there's a lot of copper deposits, you're looking at hundreds and hundreds of square kilometers. And so to try and do that with someone walking around or looking at, you know, even flying a drone or an airplane, like that can be really challenging. So the ability to do that from satellites allows us to cover a huge amount of actual physical land in a fairly short amount of time in a completely safe way. Right. We don't have to have people actually, you know, riding mules through the Andes to get the data when they don't really know where they're trying to go, right? You you can get this huge amount of economies of scale by doing things from space, as well as a significant increase in the safety of what you're doing. The all the demand kind of filters in together. You know, we talk about market dynamics, right? Like, you know, you and I have talked about market dynamics many times and all the different impacts of them. When you're looking at mining, you have market dynamics of every region as well, right? You have market dynamics in terms of is there a significant armed conflict nearby? Is it a region where, you know, miners are going missing or being kidnapped and held ransom, like you know, some of the work that the miners are doing in West Africa? Like there's a lot of different market dynamics, and mining always needs geospatial data. People always need to know what's going on on the sites. They always need to know how much material is being moved. There's things that the engineers need every day, every week to keep things flowing so that we can meet this massive global demand that we have. And geospatial data is really one of the best ways to do that.

Angela Robertson 12:23

Yeah, clearly. And I think what's also really important that you shared in all of that is just connecting that notion. I think, especially in the age of AI, it's easy for us to disconnect the amount of access of data that we have to like how it actually comes to us, how it's delivered to us, right? So similarly, you know, knowing that, you know, whatever is not grown, it's mind, it's also on the data side, you know, whatever isn't already readily available to us from history has to go out and be brought to us in real time, right? So I think it's really important that what you've just shared about the pathway that it takes and to illuminate and help people understand, you know, there's a lot of stuff that's happening behind the scenes to actually get you some of this data in real time, so to speak. It's it's not as simple as you would first see.

Andrea Krupa 13:19

Well, and I think we've gone away from the world of like, you know, where we used to just Google everything and we'd get kind of search results and and we'd see, well, what the answer to our question was. Whereas now we're, you know, prompting large language models. And I think the concept of how much energy that's really taking every time we do it to figure out, you know, what the best monkey bar set for my eight-year-old is is is huge. And we kind of lose, I think we I think is there's a disconnect that we have. And not, I mean, I don't think that's unreasonable that we have the disconnect. Not we're not all in the mining space and we don't all make data centers and really see what that is. But I think that that drives a huge industry of power and mining and things that we don't necessarily relate.

Angela Robertson 14:10

I agree. And also I think it's kind of dovetailing into the fact that people assume that more data automatically leads to better decisions, right? But what have you learned about turning complex data into actionable insights and distilling that down?

Andrea Krupa 14:29

So, I mean, more data, if it is high quality data, can for sure lead to better decisions. More data that's not high quality data does not lead to better decisions. I mean, if you think about training models, if you are training models on inaccurate data or biased data or, you know, let's just say bad data, you are not gonna get good results. It's not gonna happen. And we and we've seen that, right? We've seen situations where, you know, that people have used large language models that have come out and been biased towards certain cultures or ethnicities because the training data was all from one culture and didn't include anyone from a different culture or ethnicity, right? So we we see these things happening. So it's more data, unless it's vetted data, is not is not always helpful. If it is verified, validated data, then yes, it can make your model significantly better to have to have more data. So I think that's that's often an area where I get into a lot of discussions, is one of the things you see a lot or I see a lot in my industry is right now, everybody's got an AI model doing something, right? Like everybody's saying, Oh, yeah, no, we can find your deposit using AI. And they'll have case studies or they'll, you know, say, oh, well, we're 95, 96% accuracy. And it's like, great. Accuracy on what? How are you measuring your accuracy of the results you're getting from the models that you have? They're like, well, we we, you know, well, we ran it against a data set. And then you go into this question of was that data set used for training a model? Because if you train a model on a data set, and then you take that data set and run it back into your model, which is what people do, you would hope that it is very accurate because you have just trained your model on that data set. And and so many people, that's what they're doing. They're doing in-sample testing.

Angela Robertson 16:39

Yes.

Andrea Krupa 16:40

Where I don't care how much data you put in your data set, if you're testing on the data you train your model on, you don't know how accurate your model is.

Angela Robertson 16:52

No.

Andrea Krupa 16:52

So when we're looking at, um it's amazing how much I see that that actually happening. So when we're looking at, you know, the accuracy of, and we don't we use convolutional neural networks. So we do use kind of algorithms that we're training on models, but everything we do has a has a QC on it. But the other thing is everything we do has an out-of-sample testing. So everything that we have developed, we get third-party data often from clients. So say they're looking for the bathymetry, which is like the surface of the ground underwater. So they'll often get data with bathymetry boats. And so we'll we'll get the satellite to pass over the same day the boat is getting the information of the surface of the ground underneath, of ground under the water. And we'll do this a few times. So we'll get a data set for that specific pond where we have all that bathymetry data from the boat. And then we'll get them to collect a bunch of data that we don't have information on, right? And not give it to us. We'll say, okay, collect a bunch of data, give it to us, collect a bunch of data, keep it for yourself. We're gonna train a model, and then we're gonna give you our results for the dates that you have. And so then they'll verify and they'll validate and they'll say, yeah, this is the accuracy of that, or like, no, this isn't accurate at all, right? So the data that you're getting out of these models, like I said, it's it's not always accurate. It's often not accurate. And if you can't verify that or validate that separately, then I would say more data is kind of useless to you. It's noise, right? It's noise. Yeah. And it's a lot of noise.

Angela Robertson 18:41

Like it's a convincing amount of noise. It is, it is. I also want to call out because I think right now this comes into where you started at Photosat was really in head of marketing. And I think we can all agree that the world of marketing right now is a lot of noise and a lot of sifting through noise. And then you wore a few hats on your path to becoming CEO. Yeah. What leadership lessons have you learned while growing through those different roles within the company to be where you are now?

Andrea Krupa 19:12

I think for me, probably one of the biggest leadership lessons is that it's okay to ask a whole bunch of really dumb questions. Because I mean, and they could, some of them were dumb for sure. Like people who are like, there's no such thing as a dumb question. It's like, no, there are. You can still ask them though. It's fine. Because I'm not a geospatial expert, right? I'm not an engineer. I I studied it, but I'm not an engineer. I'm, you know, I couldn't, you know, in 2014 when we started doing convolutional neural networks, so right before I joined the company, and I came in, they were talking about machine learning and convolutional neural networks and how they were using this and building blocks from scratch. And I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about. And I feel like that's just in our RD, my constant state, where it's like, I got, I got nothing. I'm gonna ask all of the basic questions, speak to me like I'm for, and and then learning. So it's I think it's humility and then it's also this curiosity. Like, just because I don't know doesn't mean I can't know, and it doesn't mean that I have to be an expert at it.

Angela Robertson 20:17

Well, and sometimes I think asking those questions even prompts people to look at something that they're so deep on in a bit of a different way, too, right? And in the absence of that question, you miss an opportunity to potentially, yeah, go on a tangent, but that might take you to a better place eventually. So I think that's a very important part.

Andrea Krupa 20:37

And and sometimes, you know, you can ask questions that you know the answer of. And I think a lot I see a lot of leaders do that, asking questions they know the answer of, because then I think maybe they get to feel smart that they know the answer. But see that a lot. Right. But knowing a question that you really don't know the answer to makes it so that someone has to take a step back and find a way to explain it. And and then you can kind of poke around and see are there holes in this? Like, are there underlying assumptions that because I don't know the answer, I don't actually have. I don't have an underlying assumption for what it should look like or how it should work or what we should do. Um, so yeah, I think I think asking questions in a way that is really genuinely curious about what the answer is and and why. Um yeah, because I think for what I mean for me, one of the possible skills that I have is people to understand the underlying assumptions that they're making. Whether or not I understand why they're making it or what it means, but is that what is the underlying assumption? And if that assumption is wrong, the whole thing falls apart on, or if it's right, the whole thing can be built on. So and then Figuring out okay, what do we need to test to validate this underlying assumption that we have?

Angela Robertson 22:05

Yeah, you're you're eliminating noise. We need more noise eliminators like you in our world right now, Andre. Every growing company faces unexpected challenges, right? Um, what has been one of the stormiest moments in your leadership journey and what did it teach you?

Andrea Krupa 22:26

I mean, we've we had a really stormy time not that long ago. And it was it was it was kind of this perfect storm of a bunch of different things that came together. And I think we've all done this. We've hired someone that maybe wasn't the best fit and not noticed for a little while that that was going on. And I think, you know, for me, I I tend to be very glass half full optimistic, give people the benefit of the doubt all of the time. And even though I ask a lot of questions, I also assume that people know the answers if it's their if it's their their realm. So we got into a situation where things were really not going very well from the revenue perspective for for a fairly short period of time. But when you're a bootstrapped company, it does it doesn't take long for things to get scary. And so we got into a a situation where things w weren't going very well. There was kind of some market dynamics issues that could be pointed to as to maybe the the why that was happening. And then at the same time, I very, very suddenly lost my father. You know, you and I had a conversation about this, I believe, at the time, where it was it was very sudden where where he he passed away. So then that was, I think obviously and rightfully so very distracting, right? He was kite boarding and he had a heart attack. So it's not it's not like it was something that we saw coming by any stretch information. Yeah. So yeah, so then I I was sort of brought out of pretty much brought out of the company almost for a month. He was in Mexico at the time. I had to go to Mexico help figure out how to get his remains back to Canada, you know, get my mom back to Canada, all all of these things that were going on while the company was was really quite tanking. And I didn't really, I kind of knew, but I didn't really know because my brain just wasn't just wasn't there. And then there were a few other things going on personally with my family and my, you know, kids and just there was it was just in my own health, like there was just kind of this perfect storm of everything going wrong. And so I got out of it-ish, where about kind of about three weeks later I get back to the office and I'm like, oh, things are real bad. Like, not just a little bad, like real bad. And had a meeting with the with the executive team, and I'd say the majority, kind of five of the six executive team members, were like raising alarm bells, didn't really want to put too much on me when I was dealing with the family grief, but they were like, something is wrong, something is wrong. The one who who wasn't was really just not a great fit at the time for the organization, and ended up removing that person, jumping back into a functional role. So I took back over the functional role of the of the company and spent, I don't know, 90 hours a week for four or five weeks, just with my head in spreadsheets, figuring out what's going on in strategy, in execution. Like, you know how we talk about working on the business and not in the business. Like I was like planting individual grass seeds. I was so in the business of what was happening. And I think that kind of that's you know, that's what it takes sometimes, and that's what we have to do sometimes. And that's also why we can't be doing it all the time. We can't be in the business all the time because then when something does go wrong, you don't have the capacity and the resources and the kind of clearness of your plate to dive headfirst into the actual like swamp of what it is. So that really reinforced to me the like, okay, I can do this, but if I'm doing this all the time, if I'm maxed out all the time, then I don't have any capacity for when things really hit the fan in a whole bunch of different realms.

Angela Robertson 26:27

Completely, right? It's that whole notion of maybe this sounds a bit trite, but you know, making sure that your own cup is full before you pour from it into other places because you really can't pour from an empty cup. And, you know, and the reality with business that I think we all, if we are entrepreneurs and we have that optimism, is we forget that we are just continually going to have problems down the way, right? And sometimes they're going to be like more fun problems to solve, but oftentimes they're problems we can't anticipate necessarily. And so being able to have that bandwidth to be able to pull back and dive in, and then hopefully, it sounds like maybe you're still in the midst of this, but is there a path where you're going to be the opposite problem?

Andrea Krupa 27:18

Whereas we got ourselves out of it so successfully, we have more work than we've ever worked. Oh my gosh, that's a great problem. It's a great so now we're in this like, okay, this is a great problem to have, right? Like I can I can solve this problem. That's what I mean. Like it was not we can't do those things forever. And I think if we do have the ability to dive in, I mean, most of us are in the roles that we're in because we like challenge, right? Like personally, I love solving a problem. I think I am a probably far better wartime CEO than peacetime CEO because I can just like hyperfixate on the minutiae of a problem and is scoping it. And then all of the the way my brain works is I think about, you know, I don't have like one possible solution. My brain is like, I have a hundred solutions and I'm just gonna test each one and put all of the time in the world into this. And and and I have a really great team, right? That we're able to sort of like, we'd be like, okay, let's tie this and let's roll with that. And and so now, yeah, now we're on the opposite end where we just have, you know, two back-to-back record-breaking months. So we've kind of completely pulled ourselves out of the the like swamp we were in. And yeah, now we've got the other problem, which is easier. It's easier to deal with.

Angela Robertson 28:40

But kudos to you and your team. That's a very quick turnaround, and that's huge. I I did not know that yet because I hadn't spoken to you recently. So well done. That's an amazing achievement.

Andrea Krupa 28:52

Yeah. And then as a CEO, like I'm just I'm paranoid that it's not staying, but it's fine. It's okay.

Angela Robertson 28:58

That's sometimes where we're at, right? That's sometimes where we can't help ourselves. But to your point, having a really great team, continuing to be curious, I think that instills in the folks around us, you know, the recipes for success to get you through those storms too.

Andrea Krupa 29:15

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Angela Robertson 29:17

Well, Andrea, I am so grateful to you for coming on to the Stormy Stories show, for sharing your learnings, for being brave and vulnerable. And, you know, I have all the time in the world for you. And I really hope our listeners took a few things away about your journey and the amazing work you and the Photosat team have done. And uh I can't wait till the next time we get to chat. Yeah, thank you very much. It was a lot of fun. At Ace Tech, we believe one of the most valuable resources a leader can access is another leader's experience. That's why I created the Stormy Stories show to bring you honest conversations about the moments that test us, shape us, and ultimately make us better CEOs and founders. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.