The Diamond brothers started their own company, called RS Metrics. Sure enough, the number of cars in a retailer’s parking lots seemed to accurately predict the company’s revenues. After a few months of scouring parking lots-at Home Depot, Lowe’s, McDonald’s, and, yes, Walmart-the brothers had a data set to back-test. Tom downloaded a mouse-click counter, which allowed him to count the cars in those photos by clicking on each one. Alex left DigitalGlobe and negotiated with the company to sell him three years’ worth of archival imagery. He asked his brother, “What if we could count the cars at every Walmart?”Īfter a week together in the Rockies, the brothers had a plan. After seeing the power of satellite imagery in his factory deal, Tom had a similar idea, but on a scale Walton could not have imagined. There is an old story about Sam Walton: In the early days of Walmart, its founder would monitor how stores were doing by counting the cars in the parking lot. Tom opened the annual reports of several publicly traded retailers. Alex pulled up more images taken by DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-1 satellite. But instead of jamming, they took out their laptops. When Tom arrived at Alex’s house, the brothers repaired to the back porch to admire the view of Mount Columbia in the distance. Tom thought, “There’s something here.” The number of cars in the parking lots suggested that Walmart stock was undervalued. His client was blown away applause erupted in the conference room. Trucks, employee vehicles, and stockpiles of raw materials were clearly visible on the factory site. Tom used the photos as part of a presentation on the factory. One of Tom’s clients had wanted to buy a factory in Malaysia, and needed proof that it was everything the seller had described.
Specifically, he couldn’t stop thinking about eight satellite photos Alex had sent him a few months earlier.
But Tom also wanted to talk with his brother about satellites.
The trip was partly about taking some time off and revisiting an old hobby: playing rock arrangements of classical-music standards with Alex, who can shred Schubert’s “Suleika II” on the electric guitar. The financial crisis had hurt Tom’s business, and he was ready for something new. He was heading from Chicago to Buena Vista, Colorado, to visit his brother, Alex, who worked for DigitalGlobe, a company that sells satellite imagery, mostly to the government. He had just left his job as a director at a consultancy that helped financial firms monitor their investments. O ne summer day in 2009, Tom Diamond packed his black Infiniti sedan with a week’s worth of clothes, his synthesizer, and his amp.
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