Meet the Mapmakers: Mike Pegg on finding his way to Google Maps

Editor's note: Meet the Mapmakers is a series highlighting the people who shape Google Maps Platform. Tune in as our Mapmakers offer their unique perspectives on the platform’s present and future, and share stories about their personal journeys.

My mom was an educator. In our house, she made sure we had the most deluxe National Geographic subscriptions, and she would buy the big atlases including the supplemental maps and the globes. I would collect road maps from the tourist bureaus and the nicest free paper maps you could get your hands on in my hometown of Blenheim, Ontario, Canada. From a young age, maps sparked my imagination and fed a deep curiosity about the world beyond my doorstep.

Discovering Google Maps

In April 2005, I was working as a Business Development Manager for a compression software startup (later acquired by RIM/Blackberry) in Waterloo. One day during lunch, I stumbled upon the recently launched Google Maps. At the time, MapQuest was the go-to map with its static state digital maps. But with Google Maps, you could actually grab and move the map around on the screen. It had satellite imagery for almost everywhere in the world, and you could zoom in to see places in ways you never could before. It felt absolutely groundbreaking.

That same night, I went home and started a new blog on Blogger just to share how excited I was about my discovery. I named the blog Google Maps Mania. Over the next few weeks, I started sharing other cool things I found. I discovered Google Sightseeing, where people explored imagery on Google Maps and pointed out landmarks. Then, I found Memory Maps, where folks uploaded Google Maps satellite screenshots to Flickr and shared memories tied to those places.

From hacks to platform

About two weeks after I started the blog, I saw a post from a developer named Paul Rademacher talking about something he had built over a weekend. He was apartment hunting in San Francisco and was frustrated that Craigslist didn’t offer any way to see listings on a map. He had seen Google Maps and figured out where the map tiles were being served from in the web app. So he redirected those tiles into a site he built, combining them with housing listings from Craigslist. He called it Housing Maps. 

A few days later, another developer, Adrian Holovaty, saw what Paul had done and applied the same approach to publicly accessible crime data in Chicago on chicagocrime.org. He visualized crime rates based on location, helping people understand relative safety by neighborhood in a way that hadn’t been done before, despite the data always being available.

That’s when the lightbulb went off for me. I remember thinking, this is going to be big. I started writing more regularly and sharing these Google Maps developer projects as fast as they were popping up. All these grassroots mashups caught Google’s attention, too. They said, We should make this easier. We should build mapping tools and put them in the hands of developers who are already doing this.

 At the time, there was no Google Maps API. Paul had literally viewed the source code of Maps to reverse-engineer where the map tiles were coming from. (Fun fact: he later went on to become a Google Maps product manager.)  That early wave of experimentation helped spark the creation of the Google Maps Platform—and it all started with developers like Paul and Adrian solving real-world problems in creative ways.

Pretty soon, developers were emailing me directly: “Hey, I built something—would you take a look?” My blog became the go-to place to discover new Google Maps hacks before the API even existed. Sometimes I’d write about something, and the developer wouldn’t even know until they came back from a weekend trip and found their server (often just on a PC in their apartment closet) had crashed from the influx of traffic.

Geo Developer Day

In 2006, I got a call from Bill Kilday, an executive for Google Maps. He told me that they were hosting the inaugural Geo Developer Day at the Googleplex in Mountain View. They wanted to bring together the developers building with Google Maps and Earth. Would I come and speak about what I was seeing?

I told him, “I’d love to—but this isn’t my day job.”  Bill responded, “No problem. We’ll fly you and your family down.”

So we went. It was surreal—being at Google, surrounded by people who were equally excited about Google Maps. I even got to meet Google’s CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, who read my blog and asked if I wanted to have lunch. Eric, Larry, and Sergey kicked off the event, and it was clear that what the community was doing really mattered to Google.

Landing at Google

At Geo Developer Day, someone from the Google mobile team asked for my resume. A few months later, I joined Google’s mobile partnerships team in Waterloo. Then, the head of Google Maps marketing found out I was at Google and said, “Wait—you’re on the mobile team? You should be marketing the Maps API.” I agreed. 

The switch to Maps marketing wasn’t easy, even though I already worked at Google. My final interview was with the late Michael T. Jones, then CTO of Google Earth and Geo. He was at an airport when he called me and said, “Hey Mike, someone told me that I had to interview you. I thought that's strange because it's not just that you're a good person for this job —you're the only person in the world that should do this job. So I’m going to hang up, make that recommendation, and hopefully we’ll see you over here soon.”

That’s how I finally found my way to the Google Maps team.

From hacks to entire industries

Before Paul built Housing Maps, it wasn’t common for people to go online and look at houses on a map—which feels wild to say now. But these early developers were building prototypes of what would eventually become entire categories: real estate, transportation, travel, sustainability, and more.

So much of what we now take for granted—on-demand rides, delivery apps, exercise trackers, vacation planning tools—wasn’t a thing yet. Back then, it was just individual developers, playing around, creating the first versions of what are now essential parts of our lives.  

The geo data was already out there—it had been on the web for years—but it was hard to use. A lot of it lived in static tables or was buried in text files. But then came Google Maps. And suddenly, developers had a way to light that data up on a map and make it much more useful and accessible for everyone.

Looking ahead

I’ve been thinking a lot about the early days, when everything felt like the Wild West of map hacking. Today, it feels like we’re at a similar inflection point with AI and geospatial data. Developers are experimenting and trying lots of new things, with an increased focus on quality and accuracy of the underlying data being used. It feels very similar to how things started out all those years ago. 

What started with road maps and atlases in my childhood bedroom turned into a lifelong journey I never could have imagined. Being part of this community—from the first mashups to a global platform—has been one of the greatest honors of my life. And now, watching a new generation of developers light up the map in innovative, ground-breaking ways, I feel the same excitement I did back in 2005. The tools have evolved, but the spirit of exploration and using maps to solve real world problems remains, and that’s what will continue to move our world forward.