 So good afternoon. I'm Jennifer and I'm very pleased to be here with Eric Gundersen CEO of Mapbox For those of you who are not familiar with the company It's recently raised a hundred sixty four million dollars from Softbank it just made an acquisition of a company in Minsk it's Driving into some new areas such as autonomous cars And we're gonna hear all about that today but Let's start at the beginning Eric a big focus of the conference At slush is doing well by doing good Tell us how the company got started. Yeah, we I did not wake up one day and want to create a mapping company to To try to compete with Google or anything. It was it was much more organic. I was actually, you know, it's in Washington, DC Working with the UN World Bank doctors without borders literally on on the ground on projects whether we're doing some deforestation work in the Congo with the World Resources Institute health mapping in in Abuja in Nigeria The 20 2010 floods in Pakistan. So here you are trying to help whether it's UNHCR or different different aid agencies You know bring relief build up certain parts of the economy better and Every time we're working on a project We needed We need to use data better and if we use data better We could be smarter about how we're deploying the project and honestly a lot of that a lot of that data was geo So we started getting good at making maps, right? I mean we're a bunch of developers that that were basically running a consulting company It's pretty audacious to go up against Google Tom Tom here What is that journey been like long Like this is funny somebody somebody else was talking about this the other time It's like nothing nothing happens overnight and it all happens slower than than you imagine What I wanted to do was to have tools that would allow our team to do our job better Whether that's you know building like the Photoshop for maps and next thing you know It's like that didn't really matter because where we were working there was you know There was no map the map was blank So we had to get good at making the the lower-lying map part So it was like it was really really organic and one of the advantages One of the advantages we had was here We were a team Slowly getting to work on a problem and we got to be really meticulous in how we built and We didn't try to go out there and build everything all at once I was like first we're gonna build this design tool next we're gonna actually make a scalable like this at dot the dot and It allowed us to build product in a You know in a really incremental way and then we used it right because again We didn't take any outside funding until four years ago. This is important like we had we we built the product to be used by us on Projects so you know whatever we needed, you know We went and built it and then refactored it and and you do that for years You really start making something pretty hard The mapping product is open source like how why did you go that route? How how key is that to you know what you do and who the company is company culture? Yeah look I When when we were starting I mean I bought the domain name matbox.com in 2008 and At that point especially on the investor side. Nobody knew Like if you talk to anybody about open source their analogy was like, oh, you're the red hat of and it's like No, and oh wait, you're doing open source. So how are you gonna? How are you gonna make IP? How are you gonna make money like the back then there was a country there was almost like a inherent contradiction between You know in releasing code that's open source Investing in open data communities and building up proprietary check and I what we've been able to prove over the last couple years Is that open source? Technology development and being open by default Creates better product builds better culture helps with recruit like we have a better platform Because we open source core parts of it the code's actually better and none of what we've open sourced Compete in any way with this crazy proprietary API stack that we've been building up same thing on the open data So, you know every every time we identify a new street every time we identify You know that there's a restriction that you can't turn here with the data We we put that stuff back in open street map Well, we work with open addresses or we work with these open data communities wiki data and Investing and contributing back Actually makes the quality of the data better. You're working with the ground-truth community and you can integrate this into How you do business? Okay, so let's go back to what you mentioned a moment ago that you bootstrapped right until four years ago um What shaped that decision and What advice would you give to entrepreneurs in this room about how long do you wait? Before you go out and raise money from VCs Do you have any cautions about you know? taking Putting a limit on how much you take? How much you give away of your company and so forth? Yeah So at the just to be clear at the time so let me let me answer this question from my perspective in 2013 I had no idea what I was doing Right like I'm on the east coast. I mean Washington DC. This is Washington DC might be the capital But it is not the startup capital. Okay, and so you Having no idea how the venture scene works with the one exception that we saw a certain Venture-back startups in the open-source space and They basically overplayed their hand and they started messing with Some of the open-community dynamics and so actually at the in 2013 Myself and honestly the team in general didn't really understand how how venture worked and Honestly, we're we're a little like hesitant Like we had we had we had full control. We would go out we could get a project We'd make money on that project then we could build what we want We weren't sure what would what would change but the reality was 2013 here we were we had we were powering the maps for four square by then at their height ever know USA today You're we start having this level of traction and at the same time you're still figuring out how to make money So you're like still doing project work So your team your team was like the team was just spread thin and we wanted to go all in and that was it It was like this is our moment to get out of consulting. We hated consulting We knew we had built a great product. Let's take the chance. Okay, and what was your experience like with your first round? so I had a had a really supportive friend George William literally put me in the back of his His Prius and drove me up and down San Hill Road and walked me in to meet with people and it's incredibly fortunate experience But he's just like look he Eric doesn't want to raise he's skeptical about VCs Can you talk to him about how you work and it was like that was an amazing moment and here? I am Right I got pulled together a deck. I was like look here's how we built the mapping stack Here's how we're monetizing and they're like oh You you wait you make money wait. How are you funded and they're like, huh? Wait, are you profitable? And it's like wait as actually that's that's kind of how it works like to be bootstrapped you have to make money to make payroll and It in the end obviously that puts you in an amazing position in terms of dilution, right? I mean we were we were sitting in in a really powerful seat when we were raising because we were profitable because we were making money All that said we we got incredibly lucky So in the summer of 2013 ways got bought by Google for 1.1 billion We closed in September 2013 so you can you can imagine at that time we did I mean it was a series a it was It was a big series a back then it was like 10 million 10 million dollars. Yeah. Yeah for sure Now you've raised money from soft bank. Mm-hmm. What was your meeting like with my oh she's fun. Yeah They're The team over at at soft bank is just it's incredible. I mean my son has isn't just Everything basically everything you've been seeing him talk about and we that people have been reading. It's true This guy is looking X number of years out. He's seeing how the pieces sit together So when we sat down, you know, we weren't talking about maps We were talking about the future of how cities were going to be built and how people were gonna move around in them I mean look look at how he's thinking about ridesharing. Look at how he's thinking about on-demand logistics I mean look at I mean the conversation was like what he what is even a map for a robot look like, right? This is it was it was incredible. So I got to sat down back in Back in Tokyo in July and but also, you know, just you know over over a couple months got to meet with the the larger Larger bench from Rajiv to deep to the cost you have You know that and that's really important. I think I think here. It's you know for me. It wasn't just Working you're sitting down with my son and seeing this larger vision But when you take this amount of money You better put people next to you that have experience to be building a longer play and that's I really I really felt that in in his larger team. So let's talk about that longer play and and and where mapping is going because If I understand correctly, it's gonna kind of fade into the background It's still gonna be key, but it's not gonna be the end product, right? So what does that mean for the future of your business and how are you preparing for that different type of future? I mean, I think Locate I mean every Location is becoming more and more core to all of the apps we're developing, right? But that doesn't mean you're looking at a map to get around. I mean so often every time you pick up, you know A galaxy eight Phone right now. You get to see where you are. We're telling you that you're not you're not actually needing to look at the map or like the power of understanding the Estimated time of arrivals and what the real-time traffic environment is and the margins that a logistics company can make on that you know, I get to watch my groceries delivered on Instacart and I mean, that's that's my ETA, right? Or, you know lunch being delivered by DoorDash We're creating a level of efficiencies because these developers are taking our tech taking our APIs and integrating them into Their other processes and integrating them into their own proprietary algorithms So I get to put out the building blocks to let everybody everybody here build Build really cool stuff and then what's fun for me is I then get to go I live almost vicariously through other developers, right? I mean we're we're a platform We don't have an app. We make it really easy for people to then go build of their own app So do you see? Mapbox becoming a platform for a our services Autonomous vehicles What are some of the services that you? The majority all right, so right now. I mean the mark majority of the maps Are highly visual I mean we're known like a lot of designers love working with mapbox because you can tweak all the look And feel for example look at snapchat maps I mean the design that their team did using our platform is exquisite, right? I mean they snapchat built a bit moji world or the weather channel wants to show You know a storm front moving in at 60 frames a second people are doing really cool visuals the reality with a are Location matters even more it becomes like fundamental when you start showing micro context of what's going on You don't need to actually show a full map. You want to be able to just have enough orientation What that's orientation to affect like gameplay like if you're okay these zombies should only start coming up here when you enter a park or Whether it affects directions, right? I mean if you and I are sitting in the car and you're driving right now Happens to be back in my hometown. I get to say hey turn right up here. You know you're gonna drive for a mile I'll give you the bare minimum Directions that you need to get us there and you're gonna start having this micro context of in in context of AR I think AR Now is honestly is gonna be not just bigger than the browser. This is gonna be this can be bigger than mobile and We've been talking about this and that's that's saying a lot right because you're already in what like 300 million mobile phones Yeah, we have every month 300 million 350 million people are touching our API's and the important part about that is is what that means from the interaction, right? You that that that network of sensors, right? So we get anonymized aggregated data back and it's that data that starts going in and shows you new roads Shows you the traffic on the roads starts showing you the pulse of a of a city and you know today we're collecting over 200 million miles of Anonymous data that goes through a day back into the map and You start having this true network effect where every time a developer goes out with using map box All of their users benefit from the existing network and then start feeding back into it You just made an acquisition and Minsk tell us about that company. Why did you buy them? What do they bring to the table? Yeah, and I mean We right now we are very interested in scaling up on the deep learning side Shocking right because I'm not sure how many people people here have heard AI in the last the last day and a half But I feel it's about every 20 minutes But to do to do this right you need it like insane depth on the data science side and people really really good at math And so we were working with a team over in mince Belarus first met through some friends back in the open-source space Maps me was doing a lot of work with open-street map and you end up it's kind of cool Like you meet I think on the acquisition side It's not like you just like go cold buy a company like you you want to integrate a team You want that energy of a team and you want that expertise to grow so Yeah, we We brought on a team that we've been working with for about 18 months in mince and now we're rapidly scaling that and You know mince Belarus is just an amazing place to do Do business right now? You have a very very aggressive high educated developer group Are you opening an office on Helsinki as well? We are For slightly for slightly different reasons. I mean it's not you don't just go places looking for you know quote-unquote developers you go places looking for a kind of expertise and What's amazing about the the skill set in Helsinki? You have this history of companies of some of the biggest most powerful companies in the world and you have had You've had developers working at these companies for years doing really low-lying optimizations I mean last night, you know I'm looking at people's phones as they're showing me some of the shaders and the rendering tech They're doing that is like super low-level c++ optimization work And there there is a base of talent in this city for that and also a lot of people here have been thinking Thinking about a R and vr for a while in the video game space. So I'm really you know We we currently have four people here. We're now formalizing that the local government has made this super easy It's like when you walk into a new country, you got like you gotta get legal You gotta get to the taxes right that that and so it's been like super nice being welcomed here properly Talk a little bit about the kind of people that you've met here the developers that you've met here the energy Yeah The it's crazy. I've only seen like I feel like I've seen like a tenth of what I wanted to see There's a lot of builders here like people like the energy of when you walk by a table and you get to see an app people are building some pretty pretty awesome tech and The just the energy the last last two days has been been incredible What are you hoping to get out of the show? Like are you looking for specific kinds of technologies or to connect with a certain type of person? Yeah, the most important thing about coming to an event like this is Talking to people that are using your APIs and getting firsthand feedback And I was talking to a cool motorcycle app and turns out you know as a two-wheel App traffic is different road conditions can be different to like what kind of different routing profiles are there a lot of people are Doing more and more location-based video game development and hearing details about how they want The the actual data transfer to be super efficient and performant coming down and hearing certain feedback pieces on that It's just like you want I mean the goal here is to be close to the people that are building cool stuff Okay, you're gonna be around for the rest of the day Yeah, okay go and connect with him if you've got something great to show him And with that I'd like to ask our audience to give a nice round of applause to Eric