Geocode Earth

7 years ago today we officially incorporated Geocode Earth after scrambling to set up infrastructure, rewrite code, and email the remaining customers who hadn't yet migrated off Mapzen before they fully shut down. We knew a good amount about geocoding software, a little about what customers might actually want out of geocoding, and almost nothing about actually running a business. I remember stressing out deeply, procrastinating for at least a week before sending our first customer their first invoice (they paid immediately no hesitation or questions), panic calling my CPA cousin with basic accounting questions (he wisely chose not to give any substantial answers or advice), and writing bad marketing copy on a Bootstrap website template at 2AM (both the copy and cookie cutter website are thankfully long gone and improved). But seven years later, we've had seven straight years of significant revenue growth, a bootstrapped company we still own outright and no one can suddenly shut down. We still keep innovating on state of the art geocoding and help improve the world of open data and open source. We still get feedback all the time about how much people loved the work we all did at Mapzen, and it's been amazing to keep building on that foundation and watch the other ex-Mapzen people do the same across more companies big and small than I can name now. It's cheesy but I'm grateful for everything we've learned, proud of the solid, stable, ethical company we've built, and happy for all the people we've helped, whether they're customers, competitors, friends, acquaintances, or people on GitHub we've never even met. Most of all I'm thankful for all the people that have helped _us_. To name a few, there's: - Bibiana Kamler McHugh, who didn't hesitate to act on behalf of TriMet to sign a massive consulting contract with us, basically covering our first year of business - Andrew Johnson, who was our first SaaS customer and pre-paid for a year's worth of geocoding from a company that was days old - Randy Meech who, as he loves to point out, never stopped talking about the Mapzen shut down and helped direct the Mapzen hype towards all the people continuing the vision And of course Peter Johnson who somehow decided starting a company with me was a great idea, even when he had a brand new mortgage and his first kid due in a month. We're still not done and even though the geospatial, business, and especially open source landscape has changed completely since we started, I expect you'll be seeing us around for another seven years at least.

To celebrate the release of?DuckDB v1.1.0?we’re now?publishing regular updates?of the?WhosOnFirst Gazetteer?in?GeoParquet?format. Blog post: https://lnkd.in/ezGsxdBT