Jack Dangermond

My parents owned a plants nursery. We all grew up growing things and planting things and selling things, and I also managed landscape crews.

When I got into college, I found what ultimately became my life's work. I couldn't sleep at night, I was so excited about it. So I'm attracted to people who play at that level. They actually want to play in their professional life.

We shifted our philosophy from being a computer mapping group that would support planners to the idea of building actual software that would be well engineered. Because at that time, our software was not well-engineered at all; it was basically built with project funding and for project work, largely by ourselves.

There is the GIS world that is largely managing authoritative data sources, supporting geocentric workflows like fixing roads, making cities more livable through better planning, environmental management, forest management, drilling in the right location for oil, managing assets and utilities.

GIS is being influenced by and integrating with all kinds of new innovations such as faster computing, big data, the cloud, smart devices, and distributed processing.

Planning a garden, park, building, or city shouldn't be done in an office.

Our intention and aspiration is to continue building out thematic information about every subject - basemaps, imagery, demographics, landscape data, etc. - so anyone can use it to access thousands of authoritative maps.

Because we're in a small town and somewhat isolated from the fast lane of high tech, we've been able to grow and concentrate on our work instead of being distracted by the competition and getting caught up in the soap opera of Silicon Valley.

I went on to Harvard and got very interested in computers and studying the earth's landscape.

We aren't into the consumer space because that space is largely dominated by search and advertising, and it has a consumer face to it.

I don't understand why young entrepreneurs feel this pressure to take venture capital or go public. Don't get me wrong: Public companies are A-OK with me. I just think there is another way. Staying private is a lot more sane.

One of the things that's making ArcGIS come alive is apps. Apps are opening up the ArcGIS platform, making it available to everybody in your organization as well as to the public.