A Relentless Quest for Maps

Ladies and gentleman, come with me and prepare to rewind your clocks: I want to take you back to the year 1967. This was the year that the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Rupert Murdoch got married for only the second time.¹ It was also the year that marked the formation of a tiny new organization — an organization that became one ingredient in a momentous Map Happening.

Let me recount the story.

At that time there existed a large and successful company in Chicago by the name of R.R. Donnelley. Originally founded in 1864 by its namesake, Richard Robert Donnelley, R.R. Donnelley became a global printing behemoth. By 1967 it had become famous for printing the first telephone directories (in 1874!), the marketing material for the Ford Model-T, the Sears Catalog and LIFE Magazine.

To support its printing empire Donnelley had purchased a number of large and very expensive color printing presses and they were always looking for ways to recoup their investment. The company was already printing tons of phone books and magazines but it still had capacity on its presses going to waste. So what did it do? Donnelly made a proposition to the oil companies to create and print road maps. One of those companies was Shell Oil.

At the time Shell already had a large network of stations across the US and Donnelley thought they could give them an edge. The pitch went something like this:

“How about we design and print some beautiful road maps on our super high quality presses and you give them away at your gas stations as a promotional product?”

The offering was well received. But it didn’t stop there. Pretty soon Donnelley was producing all manor of custom maps for travel publications, for text books, for encyclopedias and for atlases. The business became big enough that in 1967 Donnelley formed a new division: Donnelley Cartographic Services.

1967: Donnelley Cartographic Services

Donnelley wanted this new organization to be close to one of its printing plants, so it got headquartered in the glorious city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Lancaster is in a mostly rural area populated by the Amish and has been made famous by one of Peter Weir‘s most successful films (well worth a watch BTW):

As the years progressed Donnelley Cartographic Services became the biggest custom mapping organization on the planet.

But in 1990 along came another opportunity.

A small software startup in McClean, Virginia needed some state highway maps as well as some funding for a trip planning product it was hoping to develop. That company was Spatial Data Sciences (SDS) and was headed by one Dr. Barry Glick. SDS pitched both Rand McNally and Donnelley on the concept. Rand didn’t bite but Donnelley did. The project started as a joint venture but only a year later Donnelley decided to take full control and buy out SDS’s share. Donnelley was now firmly in the mapping software business.

But just four years later, in 1994, Donnelley decided to refocus on its printing business. Glick and others convinced management that the organization could be grown much more quickly as an independent company with VC funding. As a result the cartographic services division and the recently formed geospatial software division was spun off, birthing an entirely new organization: GeoSystems Global Corporation. Glick was named the founding CEO.

1994: GeoSystems Global Corporation

GeoSystems was a pioneer. It developed interactive mapping applications for the first generation of electronic yellow pages, travel guides, CD-ROM based street atlas products, driving direction kiosks for car rental companies and web sites for real estate organizations. Its list of clients was impressive:

• Nearly all of the largest US phone companies — NYNEX, Bell South, Bell Atlantic, Ameritech and Pacific Bell
• Many of the largest automobile associations: AAA in the US and the Automobile Association (AA) in the UK
• Hertz and later AVIS
• Moore Real Estate: with GeoSystems’ expertise Moore became the most innovative player in the US real estate market with their launch of the world’s first website for home search: CyberHomes.com

GeoSystems even had Apple as a customer: GeoSystems developed the Fodor’s 94 Travel Manager for the Apple Newton and Apple published it as part of a suite of apps.

But let’s all remember what times were like in those days …

I realize many a reader will be a young whippersnapper whose brain is unaccustomed to being deprived of a Wi-Fi enabled screen. But even if you’re an old crinkly like me your brain may still need a Biden prompt to remember what life was like.

By now we’re in the year 1995 when America Online (AOL) was all the rage and the most popular web sites were the likes of Yahoo!, GeoCities, Netscape:

The Moon Shot Idea

So the bright minds at GeoSystems ² made note of all of this hype and decided to go for a moon shot: what if they developed a consumer website focused on mapping and funded it through advertising?

But the question was: what to call it? The original idea for a name was “webmapper”, but a company in the website management business trademarked the name just before the planned launch. A frantic internal competition ensued to come up with a new name. The winning name was nailed by an employee’s wife ³.

It’s a name some of you may of heard of. It was:

Yes, dear reader, MapQuest.

And so on February 5, 1996 the site was launched. It looked something like this ⁴:

Q: so what happened after the launch? A: all hell broke loose.

Remember where the company was located: Lancaster, Pennsylvania. A town with a population of about 50,000 and most famous for the Amish, who eschew modern things like electricity and who still use horse and buggies instead of cars:

It ain’t exactly the Valley.

Word about MapQuest spread quickly on the social media conduits of the day (i.e. people talked to each other). Within a few days traffic to the site skyrocketed and there was a mad, crazy scramble to add more capacity. One of the larger rooms in the office rapidly became swamped with folding tables, stacked servers and a rat’s nest of cables.

And then Lancaster’s entire internet capacity was mostly sucked into serving MapQuest. The team did everything it could to keep the site up.

And this was all with just a very basic product at launch: MapQuest didn’t even provide directions. It only did one thing: it rendered a static map for an address — and only if that address was in the US.

Things moved rapidly from there:

• GeoSystems opened an office in Denver and relocated MapQuest servers there
• MapQuest launched turn-by-turn directions for the US, resulting in another huge bump in traffic
• MapQuest launched B2B offerings — so businesses could embed MapQuest maps & directions in their own site
• MapQuest expanded internationally, providing coverage in Canada and western Europe

The site became so popular it was rare not to see someone carrying their MapQuest printout when boarding a plane:

Even cartoonists of the day picked up on MapQuest’s popularity:

A year after launch things moved at an even more rapid pace. In July 1997 raised $12M in a Series C and in 1998 a few of the founding members of MapQuest left for other endeavors. The most impactful change came in August 1998 when Mike Mulligan, formally a senior VP at American Express, was installed as CEO.

Then things started moving at warp speed.

By the late 1990s the ‘dot com’ boom was in full swing. Everyone was anxious to ride the wave. In 1995 Netscape had gone public. Then in 1996 so did Yahoo. In 1997 it was Amazon. 1998 saw IPOs from the likes of GeoCities, InfoSpace & Inktomi. ⁵ But by 1998 there were already murmurings of a possible dot-com bubble burst, so time was of the essence.

So Mulligan quickly took the company down a path to an IPO.

May 1999: The IPO

The company knew it wasn’t going to get the valuation it needed with the name “GeoSystems Global Corporation”. It had to leverage the mindshare the MapQuest brand had achieved. Originally the thought was simply to rename the company MapQuest. But at the time companies were doing everything they could to leverage their internet prowess. By simply adding “.com” to your name you could get a huge lift in value (sound familiar?) — so that made the decision easy. In February 1999 GeoSystems Global Corporation became MapQuest.com, Inc.

Mulligan also knew a leading ‘dot com’ headquartered in sleepy Lancaster, PA wasn’t going to cut it. Instead the HQ was quickly relocated to a swanky office on Park Avenue in Manhattan.

By January 1999 MapQuest had grown to 222 employees (46 in sales!) and had an impressive list of customers, including:

• Yahoo! (MapQuest powered Yahoo!Maps) ⁶
• Other search engines of the time: Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Ask Jeeves
• Elon Musk’s Zip2
• AAA, Avis, Hertz, Budget
• Travelocity, American Express, Galileo
• National Geographic
• FedEx, Blockbuster, Borders, Home Depot, Sears
• Marriott, Hilton
• Ticketmaster

Revenues were ~$25M but at the time only about 30% (or ~$8M) was coming from MapQuest’s internet business, i.e. advertising on the MapQuest site and MapQuest B2B web services. The rest was coming from the legacy custom print map business, formerly Donnelley Cartographic Services. Of course the pitch to investors was the growth potential of the internet business was going to far outpace the legacy business.

When discussing potential valuations I remember the internal discussions well. Very conservatively we thought the company was worth $40M. If we were hugely optimistic and MapQuest hit a home run the company might be worth $400M.

MapQuest went public on May 4, 1999 and the stock popped 49% on the first day. This company, with about $8M in internet related revenue, was now worth $800M.

But that promise to investors about the potential growth of the internet business was not a pipe dream. By the end of 1999 MapQuest had about 2,500 customers. Many of those were businesses that just wanted a store locator on their web site. The big sites like Yahoo! used MapQuest to add maps to their search results and to power their own map offerings.

For advertising revenue MapQuest had an edge: it could drive the value of an ad in a way nobody else could: MapQuest knew where you were going. So MapQuest was the first site to offer ‘geocentric’ ads. Hotels, airlines and fast food chains loved it.

In the months following the IPO MapQuest continued to soar and expand. MapQuest now offered its services in five languages and 78 countries and became the first mapping website to offer satellite imagery. It was by far the most popular mapping site on the web — in November 1998 Media Metrix had ranked MapQuest as the 34th most visited web site in the world and MapQuest was the number one travel web site. It also won awards from PC Magazine and Yahoo!Internet Life.

A Potential Acquisition Target

All this hype and activity started to attract the attention of the big boys. Having just suffered going through the due diligence of an IPO, MapQuest was now a ‘cleaner’ company and therefore easier to acquire.

One of the companies MapQuest was courting at the time was America Online (AOL). MapQuest was hoping to ‘map enable’ AOL’s many properties. By then AOL was at its zenith. It had bought its largest competitor, CompuServe. It had bought the popular instant messaging site ICQ. And it had bought Netscape. And it was hungry to continue its expansion. AOL was particularly interested in gaining access to large volumes of web pages where it could place local advertising.

Shortly after MapQuest went public, Mike Mulligan overheard his assistant trying to arrange a meeting between him and Paul DeBenedictis of AOL. DeBenedictis was head of AOL Digital Cities, a site that provided local content and event information for cities across the US. Paul was in the process of identifying companies that could provide AOL with a substantial amount of local advertising inventory.

Mike interrupted his assistant and asked to speak to Paul directly. They quickly managed to agree on a much earlier meeting date. It was lucky for MapQuest that they did.  In the meeting with Paul, it turned out AOL had just started to think about acquisition candidates to add traffic to their AOL Digital Cities effort.  With a favorable meeting early in the process MapQuest got to the head of the queue for acquisition discussions. Had the meeting not happened so early it may have been a different story.

Truth be told, AOL’s interest in MapQuest wasn’t really about the maps. They also didn’t care about MapQuest’s B2B business. They just wanted one thing: ad inventory.

But even with this lucky break the deal almost didn’t happen.

The potential acquisition went south in due diligence. AOL wasn’t happy with MapQuest’s data contract with NavTech (now HERE). They decided to pause discussion and asked MapQuest’s permission to conduct contract discussions directly with NavTech. MapQuest consented. They negotiated a new deal with NavTech and came back months later to renew acquisition discussions. By this time MapQuest’s stock price had risen and MapQuest ended up with a substantially more favorable deal as a result.

Concurrent with the MapQuest acquisition discussions, AOL was pursuing a different and much bigger mega-acquisition: Time Warner. But it wasn’t long before the Time Warner negotiations broke down. It was during this lull that the Mapquest deal was brought back to the table and was subsequently approved by the AOL Board.

Had the Time Warner deal not fallen off the MapQuest acquisition would probably never have been considered.

December 1999: Acquisition Announced

Finally on 22 December 1999 the deal was announced. AOL agreed to purchase MapQuest in a stock deal that was worth about $1.1B. Not bad for a company that at the time had revenues of around $35M.

But that valuation didn’t last long. AOL’s stock had peaked about 10 days earlier. Less than a month later, on 10 January 2000, AOL announced its much more outrageous acquisition: it was going to buy Time Warner for $183,000,000,000 (yes, that’s 183 with a ‘B’). But within a day of the announcement AOL’s shares tanked 11%, taking the value of the still-to-close MapQuest acquisition with it. By 18 January 2000 the value of MapQuest deal had shrunk to about $785 million.

Many MapQuest employees weren’t happy about AOL, particularly those who’d put their hearts and all their energy into developing the internet side of the business. The idea of being acquired by AOL was abhorrent. To them it would almost have been like being acquired by an organization like DJT today. AOL? They don’t understand the internet! All they did was fill your mailbox with AOL CDs.

But eventually the deal closed in the second quarter of 2000. MapQuest was now the property of Big, Bad AOL.

2000: The Slow Demise Post Acquisition

At first things looked pretty rosy. AOL had a humungous amount of users. At that time four in every five Americans on the web touched an AOL property. And AOL was able to direct a ton more users to MapQuest. Traffic went further through the roof. So AOL got what it wanted: a huge number of page views on which to display ads.

But soon there were signs that utopia was going to be elusive.

On January 11, 2001 AOL’s acquisition of Time Warner closed, one year after the deal was announced. Civil war between AOL and Time Warner executives quickly broke out. A day after the close AOL stock traded at $47.45 — down from an all time high of $94.19 on 15 December 1999.

Things were not looking good. A company-wide hiring freeze was implemented, affecting AOL Time Warner and all its properties, including MapQuest.

By this time yours truly had a new manager as Mike Mulligan had helicoptered into the sunset. In fact I had several managers within the first year post acquisition — actually seven — yes — seven. I had been told: if you want to advance your career you should relocate to AOL’s HQ in Dulles, Virginia. ‘Yes, sir’ I said. Then, the night before I was due to move my family from Lancaster to Virginia, I got a call from my then boss: AOL was going to close the MapQuest office in Lancaster the next day and lay off all staff. 😱

I relocated the next day as planned, arriving at the new house with the movers and all the moving boxes. Out of the blue I get another call from an executive assistant to a senior AOL VP. She gave me a somewhat disturbing message: “Err, you know we’ve just had a big re-org and I know you’ve just moved your house and family to Virginia, but we don’t know what your role will be or who your next boss will be. But please don’t worry.” 😱😱

Hmm. Very encouraging.

The new management seemed to have very little interest in anything to do with MapQuest, particularly as it related to product road map and strategy. And with the layoffs and hiring freeze there weren’t enough resources to do anything substantial even if there was a good plan.

I tried to make matters clear and pleaded with the powers that be: MapQuest was a site built on map data but it didn’t make maps. In fact 98% of the map data was licensed from third parties^.7 I knew MapQuest had to build a moat around the product otherwise someone else could swoop in, license the same data and build a better product.

And you won’t win any prizes for guessing who did.

On 8 February 2005 a new site launched. Unlike MapQuest it had big ‘slippy’ maps — maps that you could pan just by clicking and dragging. It also had a brand:

Google.

I think you’ll agree: the rest is history.

MapQuest Today

Somewhat surprisingly, it still exists.

It’s now owned by System1, an internet advertising company. All of MapQuest’s IP and mapping know how has been pretty much discarded. It now seems to rely mostly on technology from Mapbox.

What a sad way to have to end a story about a truly great company.

But it truly was a ‘Map Happening’ that rocked our world.

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References, Acknowledgments, Further Reading and Viewing:

• Many thanks to Perry Evans, Barry Glick, Mike Mulligan, Michael Nappi and Paul Ross, without whom the juicy details of this post would not have been possible.
• Security and Exchange Commission: S-1 prospectus for MapQuest IPO.
• Chicagology: RR Donnelley: a short history on how R.R. Donnelley came to be.
• Articles on the GeoSystem’s Apple Newton product for Fodors:

• “MapQuest Investors Eye AOL Warily“: by Ariana Eunjung Cha, then at the Washington Post, January 19, 2000.
• “Big, Bad AOL“: by Gary Rivlin, formerly a writer for the Industry Standard. The article won a Loeb award as the best business article appearing in a magazine that year.
• Post MapQuest IPO interview with Mike Mulligan on CNBC:

Other Articles in This Series

• Part 1 — The First Map
• Part 2 — The Birth of Coordinates
• Part 3 — Road Maps!
• Part 4 — The Epic Quest for Longitude
• Part 5 — The Dawn of Tube Maps
• Part 6 — The Advent of Computer Based Mapping
• Part 7 — Those Views from Above…
• Part 8 — Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
• Part 9 — A Curious Phenomenon Called ‘Etak’

Footnotes

1. He’s now up to number five. Full chronology: [1] Patricia Booker – 1956; [2] Anna Torv – 1967; [3] Wendi Deng – 1999; [4] Jerri Hall – 2016; [5] Elena Zhukova – 2024. ↩︎
2. Some of the key bright minds involved with the initial development, launch and success of MapQuest.com in February 1996 (apologies if I missed any one): Perry Evans, Chris Fanjoy, Barry Glick, Simon Greenman, Harry Grout, Marshall Matthews, Paul Metzger, Michael Nappi, Bob Rudi, Travis Shirk, Joan Silver, Mike Swartz. ↩︎
3. The wife of Perry Evans. ↩︎
4. I don’t have a screenshot from launch. This one is about 18 months after the original launch. If any of my ex-colleagues have one from the launch please share and I’ll add it to this post. ↩︎
5. As did ARM Holdings! ↩︎
6. What about Google? Well it didn’t even get founded until September 1998. At this time it was only 3 months old. ↩︎
7. NavTech (now HERE), Etak and GDT (now TomTom), A.N.D (now Geojunxion) and others. ↩︎