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This week on SHIFT
Between four and five billion maps get made every day on one company's software, and most people have never heard of the company. Esri has spent 55 years turning the question where? into infrastructure. It’s the layer underneath UPS route planning, FEMA's hurricane response, and the COVID dashboard you refreshed through 2020.
Jack Dangermond, Esri's founder and president, started the company with his wife in Redlands, California after working in Harvard's computer mapping lab in the late 1960s, and he still runs it. He tells Jennifer how a company that insisted it wasn't a software company got talked into becoming one, why he now describes GIS as a global nervous system, and what actually worries him about the decade ahead.
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Three things to listen for
1. Eleven customers held a mirror up to the company.
Esri spent its first decade doing one-off projects: siting a power plant, planning a new town in the Venezuelan jungle, helping locate Nigeria's capital at Abuja. They did so by handing out homemade source code that customers complained was buggy and undocumented, and some of them came to California to say so, offering to subscribe if Esri would build a real product.
2. What a map is worth, in numbers.
Dangermond's examples are unusually concrete: UPS saved $400 million in a year by routing trucks better, and a Johns Hopkins student who stood up one of Esri's map servers ended up serving 1.3 trillion maps of COVID's spread. About a third of Esri's revenue goes straight back into R&D.
3. His biggest worry isn't technical.
Asked to name the great problem of the moment, Dangermond doesn't say compute or data quality. He says polarization and the lack of agreement about what's true, and he argues the fix is partly social: put people around a shared map and they start talking about the same patterns, whether it's crime, housing prices, or water.
When people get around a map, they tend to talk about things.
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