Technology in service of humanity: Jack Dangermond on purpose-driven leadership

Hello, everybody.

I'm good. It's Friday. It's a wonderful day. I'm very happy, actually.

Well, I actually started in a laboratory when I was at Harvard. It was called a lab for computer map making and spatial analysis. And it was one of the origin parts for my work, my life actually. When I left that lab, I started doing consulting work, services work, making maps for people, using computers, and then doing analytics using computers. These were origin components of what later became known as a geographic information system, which is sort of like a financial information system or a personnel record keeping system, but it's much broader in a sense because it's everything geographic. So about 10 years into it, people began to be curious about the software we were using, and we sold it a few times, which was in some ways a kind of disaster because, you know, software as a product didn't really exist in the '70s or early '80s. So with a group of users who had acquired that tool, we began to craft a product, which was first called ArcInfo and later became ArcGIS, started on mainframes and many computers, and then went to workstations. And then I first encountered PCs with Bill and his work with DOS, and then later with Windows. And we loaded our tools, refactored our tools, and in many cases rewrote our tools to operate in the Microsoft environment. And this became quite popular. I mean, millions of users now use on the Windows environment our software, it's called ArcGIS. And later it has migrated over to the cloud as server technology. And we have SaaS offerings, platform as a service offering for developers or the development community. So we have millions of users basically, that make maps every day. They make actually billions of maps every day on the web, and they use them for just about everything. So all of this is built, you know, on geography, the science of our world. So people have studied geography in classes, and they kind of know it a little bit, place names and boundaries, but actually geography is a science that represents or abstracts everything. All of the scientific ologies, like geology or climatology or sociology or economics, I think of them as layers in a geographic setting. And people use maps to communicate everything geography. So we love maps. Everybody uses it almost like a language today to understand patterns of COVID, or understand where assets are or buildings are. Or even in 3D environments, it's 3D living digital twins. These are all maps built from geographic information systems. So this evolution of my life has been growing a company little by little, staying current with what's happening in technology, and listening very carefully to what our users want, and evolving that so that it is responsive to taking care of their geographic information needs. And you might think of this as a little narrow niche. No, it turns out to be everyone is operating in a spatial environment, in a geographic environment, and they love maps. They can communicate their information through maps, they can look at analytics, looking at relationships between things on maps. And so this just turned out to be first an adventure for me as a student, and then trying to promote this in the world has led to a company that was self-sustaining. Today we're several billion, and we keep investing about a third of our revenue into R&D. So the product just gets better and better. It stays current with latest technologies. It runs completely on the Azure and Windows environment. We support basically every kind of technology that Microsoft has. We integrate with a new fabric, we integrate with everything from SQL Server to all the different 365 apps. And we're a kind of geography foundation on which so many Microsoft products run.

Well, like I mentioned, we spend about a third of our overall gross revenue on innovation, software development. And it keeps pushing the envelope. So every year there's new innovations in the Microsoft domain that we try to take advantage of. And these especially happened with Azure in sort of the evolution of Azure as a platform. Today, Azure, I mean, we spend ourselves $50 million on Azure for our PaaS and SaaS services. But also our customers are many, many more times that. They're moving their enterprise software for GIS data management into Azure. And it's just exploding in terms of the actual economic footprint of bringing geography into the Microsoft world. But other innovations, whether it's mobile, Windows Mobile, or whether it's the integration of iPhones and Android devices into the Microsoft ecosystem, we try to take advantage of client-server like, or mobile device or device-to-cloud innovations that are occurring. And then of course, everybody today is talking about AI, and we ourselves are using the science side of AI, so-called geo-AI to pull features off of images and videos, put them right into the database, increasingly in real time. Then we're also leveraging things like Copilot and ChatGPT to make our software more easily and accessible from the IT people, for GIS people, but also from citizens. I mean, people are talking to our software now, and having it make maps for them, or do various kinds of analytics or answer questions. And part of this has to do with agentify, building agents on top of, or with, our software so that you can, like, 'What's the weather gonna be like tomorrow?' It comes back with a weather map that shows it. So this is transforming our customers. I mean, we have just about every large city in the world in an ArcGIS environment. I mean, we're not exclusive, but it certainly plays a major part in the geospatial enabling of cities, smart cities, digital twins of cities. Also just about every utility company uses our platform to manage their networks. This is electrical companies, water companies, gas companies, telecommunication companies. They're all geographic. And so innovation that happens can transform those organizations to get them to become more future-leaning, smarter, and all of it's being empowered by the whole architecture that Microsoft is pushing with the smarter and also integrated. I mean, I'm so excited about Fabric, and being a part of Fabric, because we have been embedded, thanks to the collaboration that we have with Microsoft, as a geospatial analytics part of the Fabric platform. And our mapping tools, like web mapping tools, will allow our customers, our joint customers to really take any kind of data in these data lake environments, visualize them, analyze them geospatially, and make a map. That's, for me, that's really exciting. I mean, it's so expansive too, everything I've worked on. And so our partnership with Microsoft is really amazing. I mean, for all of those people that sell Microsoft products, it's exciting, because our users who are everywhere are loading their data into cloud environments, and connecting them with devices and desktops and browsers. It really promises to be a kind of innovative transformation for organizations. And so people ask me often, 'Well, what is your market segment?' Actually, our market segment is everybody, every organization needs to better understand their information. And maps are a fundamental language for understanding, and understanding precedes action. So by being able to organize geospatially content, and visualize it, and analyze it, it creates a foundation for transforming organizations, making them smarter. I mean, everybody's buzzing about AI. I like AI, and I like Satya and his comments about it's beautiful. I love that. But geospatial AI, this is the combination of everything integrated into smarter platforms, and then being able to communicate it to everyone through this powerful, intuitive mapping language really promises to address so many of the big challenges that we're facing today, from climate change to overpopulation or resource challenges. It integrates science into everything.

Well, my enthusiasm is quite natural. Yeah, I mean, I had that enthusiasm when I was a student at Harvard. It was really, I sort of like saw the future, and just, it's taken enormous amount of work to build that future with taking, my colleagues have done an amazing job of engineering tools that actually allow it to be able to scale and become the platform that it is today. And I appreciate also the relationship with Microsoft, because it's been, you know, we leverage all of your stuff, and also our users use both the Microsoft platform and its innovation and ourself kind of together. It's evolving together. And people like to talk about enthusiasm. For me, I see it as being able to apply engineering and great technology to make the place, you know, make our place, make the world a better place. It's like I see purposeful activities by our users. They're all playing very hard, trying to make their organizations better, and this joint work has been helping them realize all of that.

Well, I don't exactly know how to answer your question. I can say a few attributes, maybe Bayo, that would help. First I went to design school. So, you know, even the theme of your talk here integrates the word design, and design looks to the idea of, there's some artistry into it, but really it's looking at what's needed and wanted, and transforming that into solutions that really matter. So we learn that as architects, or landscape architects, or urban designers, or engineers, this is foundational to what we got trained in. And in design school, you know, you work like 24 hours a day. People don't sleep in design school, that's what it's about. And that's kind of basic, you know, pushup training to prepare you for a life of meaning. That's what designers are really about and good ones, great architects, great engineers, great solution providers, really have that as a basic philosophy. And I find that it brings great meaning to life when you can actually create something out of nothing, can see what's needed and wanted and do something important. My second response would be my parents. They were both servants, basically. My mother was a housekeeper, my father was a gardener, and they immigrated, you know, from Europe, Holland as children. And they never really had an opportunity to get a great education, but they were always in service to people. And growing up in a service family, I got it in my DNA. And they as servants started a little business, it was a nursery business. And some of the people that they worked for said, 'You know, Pete and Alice, you should really try to get your kids to get an education.' And so the way they did that is they started a nursery. We all grew up in the nursery, growing things and selling things, being entrepreneurial. So I've got it in my DNA from my parents. And they put us through school, my brothers and I, and my sister. So living a life in service is really exciting. And if you can put the whole technology thing together with innovation, with being in service, then you've got a solution for not only a great company or a great way of living, but also a good life. Because you always see through design and solution creation purpose. A purposeful life is what everybody desperately wants. And interesting for me is geography. This science of our world provides the framework for me to play in, and get other people collaborating and working together on creating a future that is sustainable. Right now we're challenged with huge problems around the world. I mean, climate change, for gosh sakes, it's not a political thing, it's a reality. And how do we address that, and how do we address congestion in cities, and lack of housing and economic development? All these, and loss of biodiversity? These are big challenges that we hear about. But this technology provides us practical means for actually integrating information of all types, approaching problem solving holistically. So designing things holistically, we sometimes talk about. This is exciting. And so I noticed that people that get into my field, these GIS professionals, they get into it. It's like a religion. They start to realize how they can really make progress in their work. So I'm pretty excited about this, as you can tell, but I've always had this natural excitement that comes out of my work, and I don't think it's unique to me, but I do think that there are some ingredients that you can look to. My success is living a purposeful life, and going for it at 100%. I mean, that's another thing that I often talk about is people play at life. You know, sometimes they work hard so they can go to the beach. I'm not interested in going to the beach. I'm interested in playing at 100%. And I encourage the people around me to do the same thing. It's very motivating, actually. Not many people get a chance to play at 100%, but if you work at it, and you create it, you set it up right, you set your own framework for living a purposeful life. That, to me, is part of my success.