Never Lost Again

The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality

Bill Kilday

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780062673053
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Storia aziendale
• Index: Business

As enlightening as The Facebook Effect, Elon Musk, and Chaos Monkeys —the compelling, behind-the-scenes story of the creation of one of the most essential applications ever devised, and the rag-tag team that built it and changed how we navigate the world

Never Lost Again chronicles the evolution of mapping technology—the "overnight success twenty years in the making." Bill Kilday takes us behind the scenes of the tech's development, and introduces to the team that gave us not only Google Maps but Google Earth, and most recently, Pokémon GO.

He takes us back to the beginning to Keyhole—a cash-strapped startup mapping company started by a small-town Texas boy named John Hanke, that nearly folded when the tech bubble burst. While a contract with the CIA kept them afloat, the company's big break came with the first invasion of Iraq; CNN used their technology to cover the war and made it famous. Then Google came on the scene, buying the company and relaunching the software as Google Maps and Google Earth. Eventually, Hanke's original company was spun back out of Google, and is now responsible for Pokémon GO and the upcoming Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.

Kilday, the marketing director for Keyhole and Google Maps, was there from the earliest days, and offers a personal look behind the scenes at the tech and the minds developing it. But this book isn't only a look back at the past; it is also a glimpse of what's to come. Kilday reveals how emerging map-based technologies including virtual reality and driverless cars are going to upend our lives once again.

Never Lost Again shows ushow our worldview changed dramatically as a result of vision, imagination, and implementation. It's a crazy story. And it all started with a really good map.

Chapter 1
The Superman Thing

On an unseasonably warm day in the spring of 1999, I got a call at work from an old college friend, John Hanke. I was working as the marketing director for the Austin American-Statesman website. “Hey, dude, I’m in Austin,” he said. “I’ve got something to show you. Can I come by your house?” At the time, John was working for a new start-up in Silicon Valley, but didn’t want to tell me about the project on the phone. I pressed him for more details, but he insisted on coming by that night. “It’s really something you need to see in person.”

John and I had been friends for fifteen years, having met the Sunday before the first day of classes our freshman year at the University of Texas in 1985. I was assigned a room in Jester Residence Hall. The residential hall occupied a full city block; at the time, it was the largest dormitory in North America, with 3,200 students, and had its own zip code. Its generic rooms and endless fluorescent-lit hallways were almost prisonlike and not exactly hospitable for freshmen away from home for the first time. That evening I signed up on the sheet outside my RA’s door to go to dinner with a group of girls from Kinsolving, the all-female dorm on the other side of campus.

It is worth noting that only undergrads with nowhere else to eat signed up for such an outing. The dorm’s cafeterias were closed on Sunday evenings, and we were left to our own devices to find sustenance. For many freshmen, this meant dinner at their fraternity or sorority house, assuming of course that you had the means to join a fraternity or a sorority. And even if you weren’t in the Greek system, you should at least be able to find a friend and order pizza together.

Signing up on that RA’s list was taking a risk in a way, socially speaking. It was essentially adding your name to a list that could have been entitled “List of Students with No Money or Friends.” My roommate, Kevin Brown from San Marcos, Texas, was an accomplished trumpet player, had joined the Longhorn Band, and was already busy with his new friends from the band. After seeing five other students on the list, I added my name.

I was concerned as my floormates gathered outside my RA’s door at the appointed time: a foreign exchange electrical engineering major from Korea; a burly kid from Harlingen; me, a pimply-faced, six-foot-three-inch string bean. And this quiet, serious kid who lived eight doors down from my room and whom I hadn’t quite figured out. He was a Texas-tan, good-looking guy with a medium build, and appeared to be working on his non-ironic mustache. Maybe a West Texas version of Charlie Sheen. Through the open door of his room, I had noticed a funny-looking personal computer. He was the only student on our hall with his own computer.

I seriously considered ditching dinner, but I had been the one to recruit the kid from down the hall, so I was stuck. Surveying our crew that night, I was worried about our floor’s ability to represent. You see, I knew what awaited us on the other side of campus: Kinsolving was home to six hundred freshman coeds, and I had gotten a job as the cafeteria’s salad bar guy there.

Somewhere along that hot summer night’s long trek across the forty-acre campus from Jester to Kinsolving, I found myself walking with the reserved young man with the mustache.

“So, what’s your major?” I asked.

“I’m Plan 2.”

“You’re Plan 2!?”

“Why is that so surprising to you?”

“Oh no, it’s just that I saw one of those T-shirts on campus earlier this week. You know, the one that reads, I haven’t declared a major, but I Plan 2. I thought it was genius.”

“Yeah, they gave us those at our orientation, but I haven’t worn mine,” he said with a laugh.

“Why not?” I asked, half expecting him to say it was the wrong size or color.

“It’s a little showy, don’t you think?”

For most in the program, this showy shirt was worn proudly on campus because it meant that you were a cut above, part of a select academic pedigree worthy of a more rigorous and independent curriculum that the university crafted for the valedictorians and National Merit Scholarship finalists in the crowd. It was common knowledge that many of these students could have gone to Princeton, Harvard, or Stanford, but had decided on the unique interdisciplinary program of UT’s Plan 2.

I had obviously underestimated this guy.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“A little town out in West Texas. How about you?”

“Houston,” I replied. “Austin must be a change?”

“Well, Jester is about three times as big as my hometown,” he shared.

“Ha!” I guffawed in amazement and then said to the students walking a few paces in front of us, “Hey, guys, our dorm is three times as big as this guy’s hometown!” John didn’t seem to find the humor in this.

I remember almost nothing of the girls we ended up having dinner with at Conans Pizza that night; the boys stuck to one end of the table and the girls to the other. I do remember talking with John more, making plans to attend the mass at the University Catholic Center later that night after discovering we were both guilty Catholics, and even ribbing him about the mustache.

“How long have you been working on that thing, John?”

“I’ve had it about a year,” he admitted. “It helps when I go try to buy beer.”

“I would have guessed about two weeks!” I said with a laugh.

He had taken a bite of pizza, so he smiled and, as a college male signal of friendship, shot me the finger.

Beer or no beer, when I saw John on the way to class the next day, the mustache was gone—but not forgotten, because it was forever immortalized on his student ID, which you basically needed to pull out four times a day for four years. It was an endless source of entertainment for me and embarrassment for him (though I’m pretty sure he still has it).

John was from Cross Plains, Texas (population 893), and it seemed to me that his hometown was something he did not want to dwell on. It’s not that he was embarrassed by his rural roots—quite the contrary. He didn’t hide his background: His father, Joe, was a small-scale cattle rancher and town postmaster; his mother, Era Lee, was active in the Catholic church and the local Chamber of Commerce. Cross Plains represented a point of pride for John—and it was something he protected. I learned quickly that it was okay for John to tell someone about the one-stoplight town, the Friday-night social scene centered around the Dairy Queen, 4-H livestock shows, and the 2A football team, but it was not okay for anyone else to talk or joke about it. Curiously, the town’s most notable inhabitant had been Robert E. Howard, an author who out of the desolation of West Texas somehow created the fantastic new worlds of the Conan the Barbarian book series in the 1920s and 1930s.

By contrast, I had grown up in Houston in what, by almost all accounts, would be considered a decidedly middle-class and unremarkable upbringing, save for a few details: I was the youngest of eight kids and have six older sisters. I was a surprise kid, with seven years between me and the sibling above me. My father, an affable Bostonian ad man for the oil business, passed away in 1983 when I was a junior in high school. All of this made me a hardworking kid with multiple odd jobs in order to make my way through UT. But to John, I was from the big city; Houston was downright cosmopolitan by comparison to Cross Plains. We quickly discovered that we shared a variety of interests—from politics (both progressive) to sports (we attended UT football games together) to live music to our Catholic upbringings.

By the end of our first semester, John and I were close friends. So much so that over winter break, John, my roommate Kevin Brown, and I took a road trip to go skiing in Winter Park, Colorado. It was a first for John and me.

On the way to Colorado, we spent the night in Cross Plains, about a half hour north of Abilene, playing basketball with his friends at the high school, hitting the local Dairy Queen, and meeting his parents and his older sister, Paula. While it is common for parents to be proud of their overachieving children, in the case of Joe and Era Lee Hanke, their pride in John, who was adopted, was palpable. They were so pleased that he had brought his college friends home for a visit. His father measured Kevin and me up, speaking with a thick drawl. “You boys ever been out this way before?” His neck was weathered from years working Red Angus cattle and other livestock under the West Texas sun.

I got the sense that John’s parents—and many others in the town, for that matter—were perplexed by John’s ambition and drive: the high school valedictorian of his class of twenty-two teenagers; the student body president; the National Merit finalist. He began coding his own shareware games and selling them through personal computer magazines. Under the mentorship of his math teacher, John participated in a computer programming competition at Baylor University; his team placed third in the state. To his family and friends, he was almost otherworldly.

His high school English teacher, a salt-of-the-earth ranch woman named Clara Nell Spencer, first noted the spark in John. Mrs. Spencer reached out to her sister, who was a guidance counselor at Westlake High School in Austin. Together, the sisters conspired and helped John apply to UT.

John seemed embarrassed by it all. The next morning we got up early. Joe checked the car’s oil and tire pressure. He unfolded the gas-station map on the hood of the car and pointed out the best route. As we said goodbye to his parents, I had a hunch that they weren’t expecting him to marry his high school sweetheart and to take over the family farm. Joe and Era Lee were more than okay with this. They—and many others in the town—looked forward to seeing where their favorite son might end up.

Two days later we were on the slopes. It was brutally cold—with a windchill of seventeen below zero. Since neither of us had the money for ski lessons, we relied on Kevin, who was a veteran skier, for instructions. On our first chairlift ride, I stumbled through the line, planting my ski pole as the chair swung through, snapping the pole in two. I cautiously skied off at the top of the mountain, with my broken pole, and waited for my next set of instructions.

John, on the other hand, skied right past Kevin and me, already a bit out of control. Since this was our first trip up the mountain, Kevin had not given us any important ski tips, including how to stop. Kevin and I stood there. First with curiosity, then amazement, then in horror as John pointed his skis straight down the mountain.

“Turn, turn, turn!” Kevin shouted as John picked up speed. It looked like he was at least “trying” to turn. But instead of turning, he lifted one ski and then the other, all the while pointing straight down the mountain. His spectacular run concluded not merely with a fall, but with an explosion of snow, skis, poles, and limbs. It took me about ten minutes of careful maneuvering to cover what John had “skied” in the space of seventeen seconds.

“Dude, what took you so long?” he asked.

This was John. He was willing to take risks—and it would serve him well. I came to know him as an intense, hardworking, and ambitious guy. Somehow out of Cross Plains, he adapted this tenacious approach to life and work. Maybe it was the hardscrabble ranching way of life? Or maybe it was some of the feelings that came with being adopted? I like to think that I have been a good friend to him over the years because I wasn’t quite so intense and ambitious....

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• Where Are We Going?
• Chapter 1: The Superman Thing
• Chapter 2: Powers of Ten
• Chapter 3: The Green Folder
• Chapter 4: Out of Gas
• Chapter 5: Situation Room
• Chapter 6: Behind the Curtain
• Chapter 7: Series B or Series G?
• Recalculating
• Chapter 8: Feeling Lucky
• Chapter 9: Table for 33
• Chapter 10: A Friendly Wager in Building 41
• Chapter 11: Launching Google Maps Mania
• Chapter 12: Sparking a New Industry
• Chapter 13: Hello, Google Earth
• Chapter 14: Dashboard for the Planet
• Chapter 15: You: A Blue Dot
• Chapter 16: Okay, Google, Where Am I?
• Chapter 17: Street Cred
• Chapter 18: 4,000 Lattes
• Chapter 19: Google’s New Eye in the Sky
• Chapter 20: Project Ground Truth
• Chapter 21: Moonshot Complete. Now on to Mars.
• Epilogue
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher