This is a story of the first years of Mapquest, told in order to illustrate a point about the power and weakness of ideas. Retelling any event is risky because memory is imperfect and always colored by the brush of personal bias, so with apologies to those who remember things differently…
The idea
In early 1995 Mosaic and Netscape (created by Marc Andreesen and others) were the most popular browsers, Yahoo was still the hobby of two Stanford grad students, and many businesses were unsure about whether to get a domain name or not. The company I worked for, GeoSystems Global Corp., was a cartography company that had a small group of software developers that among other things built very cool trip routing and CD-ROM mapping applications for companies like AAA, National Geographic and Comptons Encyclopedia. I was an enthusiastic proponent of the new world wide web and so with a little persuading, I got permission to build a prototype to demonstrate the feasibility of using a web browser to display and manipulate maps. Travis and I built it by hacking one of our CD-ROM mapping applications to snapshot thousands of GIF image tiles at three different “elevations”. Then we wrote a quick CGI application to navigate the map. Later on, more people joined the team and we ripped code out of our other applications to make the first map servers and web front end software. A big part of the project was back end work - map data licenses and data processing. Our secret code name was Project Bandwagon and with much effort from a group of talented and commited technical and business people, we eventually launched as mapquest.com on Feb 5, 1996 (see the launch T-shirt below). The company renamed itself to Mapquest a year or two later.
The environment
Early on, there were mixed feelings about the project within the company. Some complained that the web was a huge step backward for users. Our CD-ROM products were way more interactive; you could right mouse click, drag and drop, shift select and change all sorts of layer parameters, so why would anyone want to use a poky 28k or 56k modem with a buggy web browser to do the same thing you could do with a cheap CD? Others maintained, myself included, that there was no business model. I wanted to somehow find a way charge money for each map (we eventually made money with advertising and business services). Others felt we were out of our core business which was publishing and IT services.
But our leaders made some unconventional decisions that paid off handsomely in the long run. The site generated a lot of buzz and was on Netscape’s What’s Cool page for ages. Our traffic grew day by day and our servers didn’t catch up for at least a year. We kept adding equipment until the corner of the office was uncomfortably hot. One day, Brian tripped over an extension chord and the whole site went down for about an hour. I distinctly remember the day we generated 1000 maps per minute; we were all standing around the monitor looking at the summarizer log file as it scrolled down the screen waiting for the number to creep past the magic number. The log also showed our queue wait time which indicated that our servers weren’t handling the load very well.
The competition
There were competitors in 1995 and 1996 but they never amounted to anything significant. One company, a private firm that published both paper maps and a very popular mapping CD-ROM application, demonstrated an interactive map on their web site. This company could have easily created something like Mapquest but they never did. I guess they were making too much money with paper and CD-ROMs to try something new. There was another company that created a download application (presaging Google Earth?) that let you add points, modify layers and annotate your maps. At first I was quite concerned that they would be a big competitor, but they quickly dropped off of the radar. I think the download-install process was too big of a barrier for consumers (I’d love to know what happened to them).
Later on, more serious competitors appeared, including Microsoft and Vicinity (later bought by Microsoft), but by that time we were already established as the place to go for maps and driving directions. Yahoo Maps and Google Maps came even later.
Why a good idea isn’t good enough
Those early competitors had the right technology and plenty of people with good ideas, but they never made it. So what was it about our group that allowed us to be the ones to create Mapquest? I think the answer is a familiar one - it was a critical confluence of factors. In this case those factors were:
* We took technical risk
* We took business risk
* We had good timing
* We were a venture backed company
The right conditions
Afterward, I worked at a number of internet startups. Some were spectacular failures, others did ok, but none were like Mapquest. The experience left me with an appreciation for how difficult it is to create the right conditions for commercially successful innovations.
Marc Andreesen and Fred Wilson have recently written some interesting notes on the investment logic of venture capitalists; how most startups fail and the ones that succeed pay for the ones that don’t. I think the story of Mapquest and its early competitors is a graphic illustration of that principal.
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