John Hanke (born 1967) is an American technology executive. Hanke led

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

's Geo product division, which includes Google Earth,

Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...

, StreetView, SketchUp, and

Panoramio Panoramio was a geo-located tagging, photo sharing mashup active between 2005 and 2016. Photos uploaded to the site were accessible as a layer in Google Earth and Google Maps. The site's goal was to allow Google Earth users to learn more about ...

. He is founder and CEO of Niantic, Inc., a software company spun out of

and the creator of ''

Pokémon Go ''Pokémon Go'' (stylized as ''Pokémon GO'') is a 2016 augmented reality (AR) mobile game, part of the ''Pokémon'' franchise, developed and published by Niantic in collaboration with Nintendo and The Pokémon Company for iOS and Android ...

''.

Early life and startups

Born in 1967, Hanke was raised in the small central Texas town of Cross Plains and graduated from Cross Plains High School in 1985. He attended the

University of Texas, Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1989. In his first post-college role, he spent four years with the

United States Foreign Service The United States Foreign Service is the primary personnel system used by the diplomatic service of the United States federal government, under the aegis of the United States Department of State. It consists of over 13,000 professionals carry ...

Washington, DC ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan ...

, and overseas in

Myanmar Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John Wells explai ...

working on foreign policy issues. He moved across the country to attend the

Haas School of Business The Walter A. Haas School of Business, also known as Berkeley Haas, is the business school of the University of California, Berkeley, a public research university in Berkeley, California. It was the first business school at a public university i ...

at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. He joined Steve Sellers and his video game design startup Archetype Interactive, which was developing

Meridian 59 ''Meridian 59'' was a 1996 video game developed by Archetype Interactive and published by The 3DO Company. It was the first 3D graphical massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) and one of the longest running original online role-p ...

, one of the first commercial

massively multiplayer online role-playing game A massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) is a video game that combines aspects of a role-playing video game and a massively multiplayer online game. As in role-playing games (RPGs), the player assumes the role of a Player charac ...

s (MMORPG). They sold the firm to

The 3DO Company The 3DO Company (formerly THDO on the NASDAQ stock exchange), also known as 3DO, was an American video game company. It was founded in 1991 by Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins, in a partnership with seven other companies. After 3DO's flagsh ...

on the day he graduated from Berkeley with an MBA. Hanke and Sellers created another entertainment startup, The Big Network, which was acquired in 2000 by

eUniverse Intermix Media, Inc. ( AMX symbol: MIX; formerly eUniverse) is an American Internet marketing company that owned the MySpace social network. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles, California and is a subsidiary of Fox Interactive Media, In ...

for $17.1 million.

Keyhole

Hanke became the co-founder and CEO of geospatial data visualization firm

Keyhole A lock is a mechanical or electronic fastening device that is released by a physical object (such as a key, keycard, fingerprint, RFID card, security token or coin), by supplying secret information (such as a number or letter permutation or pas ...

in 2001. Early funding was provided by the corporate venture group within

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professiona ...

, the

CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

's venture capital firm

In-Q-Tel In-Q-Tel (IQT), formerly Peleus and In-Q-It, is an American not-for-profit venture capital firm based in Arlington, Virginia. It invests in high-tech companies to keep the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with ...

, and the technology company

NVIDIA Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

. The startup was able to garner significant attention from its mapping technology use early in the

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. Keyhole's mapping technology was also noted by Google co-founder

Sergey Brin Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (russian: link=no, Сергей Михайлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist, and internet entrepreneur, who co-founded Google with Larry Page. Brin was th ...

, and Google acquired Keyhole in 2004 in a deal worth $35 million in stock.

Google

Hanke joined Google as a part of Keyhole's acquisition, and he became the vice president of product management for Google's Geo division. During this period, he oversaw the transformation of Keyhole's technology into Google Earth and

in 2005. He also negotiated an agreement with Apple to include Google Maps on the iPhone. Other products followed, including StreetView, SketchUp, and

. His team would later found Niantic.

Niantic

In 2010, Hanke was given resources to staff an augmented reality gaming unit within Google and the new internal startup was dubbed Niantic Labs. Returning to his gaming roots, the company crafted an augmented reality location-based multiplayer game called ''

Ingress Ingress may refer to: Science and technology * Ingress (signal leakage), the passage of an outside signal into a coaxial cable * Ingress filtering, a computer network packet filtering technique * Ingress protection rating, a protection level that ...

''. The game had a million players within a year of its 2013 release, and seven million by 2015. Hanke led Niantic's split from Google in late 2015 and raised $30 million from Google, Nintendo and Pokémon. He stayed as the company's CEO and guided the firm through the release of ''

'' in July 2016, which generated over $4.2 billion in revenue.

References

External links