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Jack Dangermond
Jack Dangermond
President and Co-Founder, Esri (Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc.)
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How Mapping Could Help With Climate Change

📅 Jun 21, 2026 Forbes 26 MIN 33 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
Jack Dangermond, president of Esri and a pioneer of Geographic Information Systems Technology, sits down with Senior Editor ...

What Jack Dangermond said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

Jack Dangermond, president and co-founder of Esri, discussed his journey from immigrant parents who started a nursery to his studies in landscape architecture and geography, leading to research at Harvard in computer map making. He explained how Esri transitioned from a services company to a product company after customers requested software, leading to the development of GIS. Dangermond described GIS as a digital geography that abstracts the world into layers for analytics, used by millions of customers who create 4 to 5 billion maps daily. He emphasized the responsibility of serving users in mission-critical roles and highlighted current focuses on expanding geographic literacy and integrating AI. He predicted a future where the world becomes a digital twin with a 'nervous system for the planet,' enabling bottom-up solutions to climate change. He cited a survey where 53% of young people doubt humanity's future, underscoring the urgency.

Key takeaways

  1. Esri's customer base makes 4 to 5 billion maps a day.
  2. 53% of young people surveyed said humanity won't work out, highlighting climate urgency.
  3. Esri transitioned from services to product company after seven customers offered $5,000 each for software support.

Numbers and commitments

FigureWhat it refers toTypeAt
4 to 5 billion maps made daily by Esri customers metric 9:52
53% young people who doubt humanity's future metric 18:41
17,000 attendees at upcoming user conference metric 5:40
$5,000 annual payment per customer for software support price 5:40
20 million users collecting field data metric 18:41

Chapters

  1. 0:00Early life and inspiration
  2. 4:23Path to GIS development
  3. 5:38Transition to product company
  4. 9:30GIS as infrastructure
  5. 13:03Responsibility of serving users
  6. 14:19Current innovations and AI
  7. 18:41Satellite data and digital twin
  8. 23:55American innovation and future

Questions asked in this interview

6
  1. 0:08So, I would love to just start off with a little bit of your story and what got you interested in maps and geography, or how did you kind of fall into that?
  2. 5:40Would you do that if we paid you a little bit of money?" Like they said each of us—there was I think seven of them—would pay $5,000 a year if you compile the software and you provided tech support. Which is this a 10?
  3. 12:41How does that impact the way you think about your work?
  4. 14:04What improvement or what new feature?
  5. 18:10How has that impacted our understanding of the world and the map products that you and your customers build?
  6. 23:28And then what can we do to protect it, keep it going so that generation that we hopefully have 250 more years?
Alex 0:08 ↗
Jack, it's great to be here with you today in the HP Garage, which a lot of people call the birthplace of Silicon Valley, an important icon in American innovation. And it's appropriate that we're here because garage is where you keep your car, and your work has been all about making sure that we can get around. So, I would love to just start off with a little bit of your story and what got you interested in maps and geography, or how did you kind of fall into that?
Jack Dangermond 0:37 ↗
It's a long story, really.
Alex 0:39 ↗
Well, we got time.
Jack Dangermond 0:41 ↗
I mean, I lucked out in my life, actually, in many aspects. I suppose like other people, I'm standing on shoulders of a lot of people. They really affected me at an early age. My parents were immigrants from Holland, and my mother was a maid, my father was a gardener. And they were innovative, and they influenced me. They started a little nursery because they were told as immigrants, "Get your kids through college." So, they didn't have any money, so they started a little nursery.
Alex 1:15 ↗
Okay.
Jack Dangermond 1:16 ↗
And we all grew up in the nursery creating plants, selling plants, serving different customers. It was really mind-boggling, actually, as an environment for understanding our whole nursery.
Alex 1:30 ↗
Right.
Jack Dangermond 1:31 ↗
Anyway, short story, I went to college. I studied landscape architecture out of a nursery unit—plants, all those sort of things—and then got interested in geography, and then got interested in computers, and then got interested in city planning, and then got interested in computers and system thinking. I got lucky. I got into Harvard University, where I did research in a lab for computer map making and spatial analysis. And it just like blew my mind.
Alex 2:04 ↗
Right.
Jack Dangermond 2:04 ↗
Because all those pieces of my life of studying landscape or studying geography or studying systematic ways to think or do design, it all sort of came together with this idea of fusing geography, the science of our world, with design, with computers. And this was back in the '60s, so you know, the world was—
Alex 2:29 ↗
Tubes and—
Jack Dangermond 2:29 ↗
Well, no. Yeah, okay. Well, there was big computers, you know. It was after that.
Alex 2:35 ↗
Yeah.
Jack Dangermond 2:35 ↗
But we would work all night in the computer environment and make these interesting maps and then study design. So, this combination of the environmental movement, which was starting really in the '60s, Silent Spring, that kind of thing, and urban design, my interest in landscape design, my interest in computers, really kind of wired me to this idea of... Well, actually, my wife and I were spending, just before graduation, a few hours together thinking, "What should we do when we graduate?" And I think what occurred to us is this notion of—we didn't know exactly where to work, but the notion was we would like to spend our life working on the application of systems thinking and rational thinking to creating a better environmental setting, doing urban planning or design work. And so, we got out and there actually wasn't a place outside of the academy to work. So, we went back to California and just started doing little projects, you know, like mapping air pollution in Southern California or helping a company find the right location for something using maps and geography. And we started a company out of that. I've been doing project work, what I'd call work for hire. And we did that for about 10 years, starting with little projects and bigger projects and bigger projects, applying computerized geography and computer map making to solving problems.
Alex 4:23 ↗
And that eventually led to development of GIS, and I was wondering if you could explain, you know, to folks who maybe not know exactly what GIS is and how it gets used.
Jack Dangermond 4:34 ↗
Yeah, I'm telling a long story here, and I'm sorry, Alex, to bore you with it, but—

16 more exchanges in this transcript

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Cite this transcript

APA, MLA, BibTeX
APA

Dangermond, J. (2026, June 21). How Mapping Could Help With Climate Change [Interview transcript]. Forbes. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1321478/

MLA

Jack Dangermond. "How Mapping Could Help With Climate Change." Forbes, 21 Jun. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1321478/.

BibTeX 
@misc{dangermond2026_1321478,
  author       = {Jack Dangermond},
  title        = {How Mapping Could Help With Climate Change},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, Forbes. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {jun},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1321478/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}