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A deep dive on search: Google Maps
Bret Taylor is most known for his startup successes; FriendFeed which sold to Facebook for $50M in 2009 and Quip, to Salesforce for $750M in 2016. Less talked about, is Taylor’s early work on a product that made $0 in 2003. He was a young PM at Google, and the product happened to be a little thing called Google Maps.
In 2003, Taylor had an idea simmering in his head that users could search by location. The problem was that Google had no maps; therefore, the feature had no legs. There seemed a clear opportunity in mapping, and big players like Yahoo!, were placing their bets. Larry Page and Megan Smith (Google’s VP of Business Development)agreed it was time for Google to make a push in the space.
Around the same time, Sequoia Capital, one of Google’s investors, was eyeing a potential startup based in Australia called Where 2 Technologies. The company was founded by two Danish brothers, Lars and Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen, who wanted to build dynamic maps that let users zoom and move around. Sequoia ultimately declined to invest in the startup after news broke of Yahoo!’s plans for scaling its mapping ambitions. But after hearing about Larry’s plans to enter the space as well, Sequoia gave a tip to the Google team about a potential acquisition worth looking at.
Google bought Where 2 in October of 2004, and quickly closed two more acquisitions in succession. One was Keyhole, a geospatial data visualization company, and the other was ZipDash, a real-time traffic data provider. Combined, the acquisitions became Google Maps, and Bret Taylor became its first product manager.
In a matter of months, Google Maps publicly launched in February of 2005. Taylor admits the product fared okay for about a year, contrary to the common narrative that the product was an overnight success. Over time, progress compounded; by 2006, Google Maps overtook MapQuest and Yahoo! in the race to becoming the largest mapping provider. It was the same year that Google opened its maps API to developers, enabling massively popular location-based products like Airbnb, Uber, and Zillow.
