How Yahoo! helped create Google Maps

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 02 July 2009 09:13

Your IT - Home IT

Lars Rasmussen, software engineering manager at Google and one of the original creators of Google Maps, and more recently Google Wave, has given a blow-by-blow account of how a small Sydney software start-up came to provide the technology underpinning Google Maps.

Rasmussen, his brother Jens and a small team, through their company Where 2 Technologies had been developing their mapping application, then desktop  software because they did not believe the Web powerful enough to support their vision and were close to securing venture finance from Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley's largest venture capital firms.

"They were interested, and we showed our demo in five separate meetings to their 12 partners," Rasmussen said, delivering the Warren Centre's 2009 Innovation Lecture. "They moved fast with a verbal offer to invest. We hired an attorney on contingency fees and negotiated a term sheet. We were in seventh heaven."

Then, on the day Rasmussen and his partners were due to sign the term sheet, Yahoo! launched a major overhaul of its mapping site. "We thought it minor compared to our technology, but it was enough that Sequoia concluded that our window of opportunity would close," Rasmussen recalled. Again Sequoia moved fast, but this time to retract its offer.

Bowed but unbeaten the Rasmussens persevered. "Three days of soul searching after our knock-back from Sequoia, we placed phone calls to our three strongest supporters...[including] one Ram Shriram...a famous angel investor and a founding board member at Google," Rasmussen said. "Sequoia had introduced us to him, and at the time Sequoia was keen, Ram was going to co-invest in our company, sit on our board, and work part-time on the business side."

Shriram secured a meeting with Google co-founder Larry Page. "Larry liked our maps-as-a-platform thinking, and thought our technology impressive. He brought in some corporate development folks to take a closer look, and we repeated the demo to them."

Page's comments provide to be pivotal. "Larry's parting words, though, were that Google was really a Web company. Could we not do something in the Web browser instead of a desktop application, he asked?"

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