{"id":43184,"date":"2023-10-20T15:26:44","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:26:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/google-mapping-a-way-to-the-top-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:26:44","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:26:44","slug":"google-mapping-a-way-to-the-top-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/google-mapping-a-way-to-the-top-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Mapping a way to the top – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Lars<\/div>\n

\"LarsLars Rasmussen confesses that he doesn\u2019t have much of a sense of direction. But that didn\u2019t stop him creating Google Maps, one of the world\u2019s leading tech success stories of the past decade.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In a recent trip back to Australia, where Google Maps was born, Rasmussen, now a top engineer at Facebook, chatted to StartupSmart about innovation, entrepreneurship and failure.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cOnce you get a taste of entrepreneurship, it\u2019s a bug that\u2019s hard to get rid of,\u201d he says. \u201cDon\u2019t tell Mark (Zuckerberg) this, but I almost had more fun when we were a struggling start-up.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I like about Facebook is it is a young and fresh company that has an entrepreneurial attitude.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Danish-born Rasmussen co-founded Where 2 Technologies with his brother Jens in 2003. It was subsequently bought by Google. The rest, as they say, is mapping history.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Here are some of his pearls of wisdom.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lars on\u2026<\/h2>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2026Australia\u2019s start-up scene<\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/h3>\n

\u201cI first met Rebekah [Campbell, founder of Posse, an online platform for bands to connect with their fans] at Tech23 last year and I thought it was a great idea for a business.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rebekah is really onto something here. If she pulls it off, it will be a worldwide big deal. I thought I could add value so I was offered a seat on the board. Facebook allows you to have one board position elsewhere and I thought I\u2019d choose Posse as I\u2019ve never done anything like it before.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Google and other companies are looking for talented start-ups and they don\u2019t care where they are. What\u2019s great about Australia is that there\u2019s now a critical mass of people who want to do something new. It\u2019s not just one crazy person who wants to do things differently.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2026Inspiration<\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cI got laid off from a start-up in Silicon Valley in the tech wreck days. Luckily my brother Jens was laid off three months before me, so he had time to polish the idea.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When I got the predictable redundancy pink slip he called me to talk about an idea in mapping. Maps were ugly back then and no one was doing anything with them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Everyone said there was no money in maps, that people wouldn\u2019t use it. But we realise if we were innovative, made them look good and let people interact with the maps, it would be interesting.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

While people in California said that there was nothing in this, we had some friends in Australia who said \u2018that\u2019s cool\u2019. So we decided to start a new life in Sydney and work on the idea.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2026Money woes<\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cThere were a number of times that I thought the idea would die, but we kept going. There were two or three times when I was almost certain it was all over.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We couldn\u2019t get people interested in the prototype, but then we nearly got capital from Sequoia, one of the biggest VC firms in the US. That was a big deal because if you backing from them, you were pretty much guaranteed to make it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The trouble was that they were very skittish in the days following the tech wreck and they pulled out on the day we were meant to sign the deal.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

On the day, Yahoo brought out a new mapping application and I thought \u2018shit\u2019. There was nothing wrong with us, it was just over.<\/p>\n

I got a phone call from the VC that started, \u2018Lars, we need to talk\u2019. I never want to have one of those conversations again.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lars Rasmussen confesses that he doesn\u2019t have much of a sense of direction. But that didn\u2019t stop him creating Google<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":59931,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43184"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43184\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}