Swapnil Bhartiya: Today, most location APIs don’t serve developers anymore. They serve advertisers. They track your end users, lock you into opaque pricing, and treat Maps as an ad product. Acadia Maps built the opposite. Clean APIs, transparent pricing, human support, and zero tracking. And now they are bringing two Linode veterans to scale that mission. And today we have with us Rick Myers, head of support and success, and Rob Hugo, head of growth at CDMAPs. Rob, Rick, it’s great to have you both on the show after a long time.

Rick Myers: Great to see you again, Swap.

Rob Yoegel: Yeah, great to see you Swap. And thanks for having us. Appreciate it.

Swapnil Bhartiya: It’s my pleasure and honor, of course. There is so much to talk about. There’s so much to talk about. Your own journey, what you folks have been doing. Rick, we used to talk about the whole gold standard you folks set up there. And of course, Rob, you did a lot of great, all the case studies and all the excellent stories that were there. So I am kind of confused where to start with Stadia, with your journey. So I would actually start kind of mix of both, which is more or less like what you folks have been up to till this point and why you chose Stadia Maps.

Rob Yoegel: Sure.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Yeah.

Rick Myers: I’ll go first, Swap. After the Linode acquisition, I stayed with Akamai for a few years, and I worked in support and success and left about a year ago, a little bit more than a year ago now. And I took a little time off to kind of figure out what I wanted to do. You and I just, we probably remember I had been there almost 15 years, so I really wanted to explore what the next thing was for me. And Luke, one of the Stadia Maps co founders, reached out because Stadia Maps is a customer of Linode and Akamai, and we used to work pretty closely together and mentioned, you know, hey, can we get on a call? Can we chat? Can we talk? And it didn’t take very long for him to convince me with just the values that Stadia has and their mission and the fit from what my experience was with what they wanted to do, that this sounded like it could be the next best step for me.

Rob Yoegel: Yeah. Very similar journey as Rick’s. Very similar journey to Rick’s. The timeframe is a little bit compressed. I only spent about 5 years at Linode and Akamai, but was introduced to Stadia Maps while I was there. They were actually when I was the senior director of marketing at Linode, I was responsible for telling our customer stories in our Craft of Code series, which you’re very familiar with Swap and Luke was. Luke and Ian were the first story that I was asked to tell, the first craft of code that we ever did at Linode. So that’s when I was first introduced to Luke and Ian. As I mentioned, I spent about five years total at Linode and Akamai. When I left Akamai, I went into health tech. I was a marketer, senior marketer in the health tech industry for about a year and a half. And again, very similar to Rick. Luke phoned me up and asked me to consider helping Stadia Maps in a growth capacity that includes creating content, creating wonderful stories of Stadia Maps customers and just lead the primarily organic growth channels that we have right now at Stadia Maps.

Swapnil Bhartiya: And that’s where I’m at when it comes to map. What was the original vision of creating maps? What is the idea? The idea is, hey, I know people want to go from A to B. How do we monetize it? How can we track them, how we can spy on them? Or the whole idea was how to simplify so they don’t have to open a map. They get real time data to traffic all the things. So if I asked you, how would you define stadia map today?

Rick Myers: Great question. The maps world, if you look into like the digital mapping world and the locations industry is really big, like there’s a lot of people in it and they do, they roughly fit into a couple of different categories. But what was missing, at least from my perspective from the outside looking in when I joined Stadia was a platform, so a location services platform that gave developers choice and gave them a good experience to do all the things that they would need to do from a locations perspective. So maps, routing, even stuff like time zones and elevation, these are things that you can piece together across the Internet across providers, but it’s really hard to find in a platform. And then when you find it in a platform, they’re focused on, when you find it in a platform, they’re focused on selling you ads or selling things or selling your private, selling your data. And there’s, there’s an open, there’s a big, there’s a big open opportunity there for a maps locations provider who doesn’t care, who doesn’t care to sell your your sell you up the river in terms of your privacy or data, et cetera, et cetera. The other really cool thing is it’s a, we used to have a lot of this and we have less of this now, which is the for developers, by developers platform. You see less of that and you’re seeing even less of it now. Agentic AI is taking over and it’s much more accessible to create these things, which on one hand is really good. And on the other hand, when you’re trying to build something that is secure, respectful of your users, has great user experience and really good at what it does, you want to use those tools, but you also want the backing of a company that’s been there for 10 years and has been doing this for 10 years professionally to run your business on top of.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Very well said, Rob. Do you want to add anything to that?

Rob Yoegel: Anything I would add would just be seconding what Rick said. You know, there are providers out there that do one or two things you know extremely well. When you look at Stadia Maps, we do a lot of things well. We have a platform where depending on what your location needs are, you could very likely find it on our platform. So I think that that’s first and foremost, I think the whole concept that Rick mentioned of support, which is why, you know, I’m sure one of the biggest reasons why Rick joined the company, because it has, you know, very similar, very similar thoughts and beliefs around how support should be handled that Linode did. So I think that that’s super important. And then I think when you get to the bigger providers and you start thinking about the sharing of consumer data and the how those companies and how those location API platforms make money, you know, that’s something that’s not been part of Stadia Maps since its founding. It’s not in our DNA and, and you know, it’s super exciting to be, you know, to be in that and be part of that journey as we try to scale, you know, Stadia Maps.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Now when we look at maps, it’s not as crowded space as, you know, the other spaces are, but at the same time it is crowded in a way what maps can do, but it is market is mostly dominated by two big players. It all depends. Mostly. I mean, we use maps mostly when we drive around and most of the times you also a lot of automakers actually just sticking to one, which is some are building their own in this space. Can you talk about the market of Stadia Maps who is actually using? Because in front we see infotainment system, we see the map that Ford or whatever car offered behind the scene, it could be whatever API there. So can you talk about the market that is there for Stadia Maps right now?

Rick Myers: Yeah, we don’t. So we don’t have a mapping product and that’s on purpose. You can’t go to download the Stadia Maps app and navigate from one place to another. It’s not our bread and butter. Our bread and butter is providing the infrastructure for other people to build that and that world. One of the other things, like bouncing back to what you were saying a few minutes ago Swap about why this was interesting to me and Rob personally, maps are fascinating and incredible and location stuff is really, really interesting. I would challenge you and your listeners and watchers to just one day count how many times you look at a map in a day. You probably think it’s one, it’s like 20. It’s so many more. And there’s many more opportunities to provide those services for developers, to empower them to do very specific things or very wide ranging of things. So on Stadia Maps, you could build a mapping application. We have lots of customers that build a mapping application, but you can also build a specific mapping application for something like golf carts in your community or for trucking to figure out very specific logistics problems, or hospitality to figure out how to navigate around a hotel complex or something like that. That’s just one segment of what Stadia Maps does, which is the mapping, which is our mapping product set. Even in that product line, there’s a million problems to solve and we try to be the best at giving developers the tools to be able to solve them. For all these problems, we have even thought of Swap.

Rob Yoegel: I think when you, when you talk about who is using Stadia Maps, I think again, let’s go back to the Linode days. Linode customers were a wide range of users. From homebound developers who are just working on their own, not homebound, I’m sorry, from developers working on their individual projects that they wanted to do, maybe outside of work, you know, to, you know, we called them hobbyists and enthusiasts, right? All the way through to, you know, enterprise businesses. You know, there, there’s so much greenfield from a location API platform like Stadia Maps, where you could be a hobbyist developer working on a side project, you could be working for a large organization. And, you know, we used to call it Linode. You know, it used to be like, take Linode to work where you signed up as a, as a hobbyist enthusiast to try the platform. And then when you realized it could do all the things that some of the, you know, larger players use that you’re spending tons of to do, then you take that and start using it on a project at work. Maybe it’s a smaller project, maybe it’s a bigger project. So I think the range of customers could go from anywhere from the hobbyist enthusiast to a startup, you know, all the way through to an enterprise business who wants to do something at scale, but doesn’t want to pay the exorbitant costs that are associated with some location API platforms. As well as the data issues that we, you know, the data and the customer data issues that we talked about earlier.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Talk a bit about the whole map market that a lot of people are not aware of and what Stadia Maps does behind the scene, how we generate maps, how every mapping company or every location services company generates this map.

Rick Myers: How we generate maps, how every mapping company or every location services company generates this map is really generates our map tiles, generates our location data, generates our address data, our address databases, all that stuff is a really fascinating problem and it’s actually kind of the secret sauce of any location services company. So the world has many open data sets that lots of people are aware of. There are closed data sets that are proprietary data sets and our special sauce or kind of our magic is taking all of those and putting them together and providing simplified, deduplicated, accurate location information to our customers and on the behalf of their customers as well. In terms of AI, I think the place where that’s happening the most in the like, and this isn’t specific to Stadia Maps, but more to the industry is where we’re seeing that is around missing data or incorrect data sources. So AI is being used more in like the raw data sources than it is being used in like the APIs that we’re providing to customers. There’s, it’s an incredible, I mean it’s one of the world’s biggest data sets. It’s one of the world’s biggest data problems and it’s constantly moving, whether it’s address data or if you just think about new construction or stuff gets torn down, stuff that’s there yesterday and not there tomorrow, that’s a really hard problem. And things like satellite imagery can help there things like all of the community driven stuff that we use people using people to do that is the traditional way. But there’s also AI empowered or AI enabled stuff coming to market or coming to fruition that is making the raw data sources more accurate, which in turn lets us give our users better APIs, more accurate APIs in the long run.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you also talk about, of course there’s OpenStreetMaps also. Is there, what is the, what is the role of openness, open source, open ecosystem for Stadia Maps?

Rick Myers: Yeah, we contribute a bunch to, we can contribute back to our data sources and to the data providers like OpenStreetMap, OpenAddresses, a bunch of other open source projects and open data projects. So that’s where we contribute the most. We also provide some open source APIs and SDKs that folks can use and learn from. They can be used with Stadia Maps or in some cases without. We’re also part of a couple of consortiums and working groups that provide standards and libraries for using Maps on the web and in mobile. MapLibre is the big one that one of our co founders actually helped co found and sits on the board and they provide, like I said, open standards as well as help define open standards as well as some open libraries that lots and lots of people use with and without Stadia Maps tile data and location data.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent, thank you. Now let’s talk about how are you Rick and of course you are going to further help Stadia Maps. What is going to be your roles at the company?

Rick Myers: Yeah, one of the really cool things like Rob was saying a bit ago is we walked into something that is going really well. So it’s already a value at Stadia Maps. In line with that, our developer first methodology and mindset to provide human powered, great, fast, accurate support. And we’ve been doing that. Stadia Maps has been doing that, was doing that long before I showed up. What I want to help is to scale that. So as we grow the business and as we get more customers and we get more products in our product line, obviously support scales with that and scaling support, while keeping the spirit of support and the core values that we have set at both at a support level is also as well as at a Stadia Maps level. That’s what I hope to really help with. In addition to that, I would love to. What Rob and I are both doing is just helping grow the business as a whole. So not only are we taking some of what we learned at Linode and elsewhere to help just grow a startup. Right? Because that’s something that we’ve done before. But we’re also trying to at the same time learn the lessons of what we got right. But I think most importantly for both Rob and I, what we got wrong about scaling and apply those lessons at the same time and hopefully we can do both and it doesn’t get out of whack.

Swapnil Bhartiya: You mentioned Rick, you know, the things that you learned at Linode. Can you talk about what are some of the lessons that you learned at Linode that you feel can be incorporated or brought to Stadia Maps at the same time? This can be tricky, some mistakes that you made at Linode, but you’re like, hey, I want to not repeat them.

Rob Yoegel: I was going to say one area that really quickly comes to mind, and I think it’s really the kind of one of the core things, one of the core reasons why I wanted to be part of Stadia Maps is just the knowledge across teams. Even though Stadia Maps is a super small team, one of the things that I loved working with, doing at Linode was working with the success and the support team on discovering customers who we could tell stories about, working on the product team, working with the product team to understand our product better so we can put better technical documentation out and better content out there that’s accurate and discoverable. So really just working across teams. I hate to use the political term, but working across the aisle, you know, when you think of somebody in marketing or somebody in growth, you know, it’s, you know, you sit in your little silo and you sit in your little bubble and, you know, I’d never want to do that inside of our organization. In my career, I’ve sometimes been stuck in those areas. But, you know, now I feel like I have, you know, the ears of our co founders, have support and success, have product engineering. You know, there are so many ways to collaborate inside of Stadia Maps. And I think that, you know, from a lessons learned at Linode, the reason why we were successful at Linode, at least in the five years that I was there, and maybe the two plus years I was there before the acquisition, was just because of that, because of the collaboration that we had inside the organization.

Rick Myers: One of the things that gets really hard as you scale and then, and this is obvious, but it gets harder to communicate, it gets harder to stay in touch. And I mean that from two angles. And one is internally and one is externally. I think that Linode Akamai to this day does an awesome job knowing their customer and being very personable and close to the customer. Being able to reach a real human is. It was important a few years ago. It was important many years ago. We’re replacing people with. We’re replacing humans with computers. And it’s even more important now because people don’t love that within reason. So staying close to the customer obviously becomes a harder problem as you scale. And I really want to drive that home because I think it’s one of the things, one of the really special parts of Stadia that we can have. We’re empowered right now to have a great relationship with our customers, and I never want to lose that one on one connection. On the same token, internally, as you scale, it gets harder to stay a small company, metaphorically. Right. And I think that we learned a lot of lessons growing so rapidly at Linode, where we saw things break, right? And we saw, oh, well, that used to happen just because we knew that, because that person was in the room, right. Or because we said that in a Slack channel, or because, you know, we saw somebody buy a water cooler. And remote work has changed that, obviously, and things are different. But I think that when you scale an organization from 10 to 150 or whatever, like, you see those things break. And I make no promises that we’ll do it better the second time, but I will make promises that we will at least go into those problems with a little bit more information than we did the first time.

Swapnil Bhartiya: When it comes to this specific market, talk about the role of developers that you folks see and how you would. As you also said, developers, they don’t like marketing. How are you going to attract developers, show the value of Stadia Maps to them and engage with them in both capacities, whether offering better support or growing the market.

Rob Yoegel: I think from a growth standpoint, it’s going to come down to technical documentation. I think that that was a very important area of interest at Linode. People trusted our technical documentation to get started. So I think that there’s one area, I think the second piece of it, again, as Rick mentioned, is the human support element that somebody can get an answer. And Rick knows how to scale organizations. So when we grow from X to Y or X to X times two, we can still offer that human support. On the AI front, I’m a huge believer in the work that I’m doing behind the scenes with Claude, and so forth. I’m a huge believer in human in the loop. I don’t think that that’s ever going to go away. I think anybody who pushes an AI agenda on you that doesn’t mention human in the loop is not telling the whole story. There has to be human in the loop. And if that’s from a developer working with Claude to drive their next project to a growth marketer using Claude to do X, Y and Z to somebody in the support success area of using AI, the human in the loop is going to be critical. We can do things a lot faster and a lot more efficient with AI, but we’re not being replaced. We need a human. You need somebody to validate and verify, you know, the accuracy of any output.

Rick Myers: I totally agree. I was having this conversation with a couple of friends this weekend, actually. One of the. I love the personal software revolution that’s happening right now. I think it’s incredible. And I love that everyone can create tools that didn’t exist yesterday without an incredible amount of friction. Whether that’s for personal use or professional use, that’s kind of the difference. So we want to be there for users. And I think every, I think everyone to maybe think about operating this way is I think we need to be there for users who maybe have never written code before, right? Like, who have never but have a great idea and they want to do something. And we’re seeing that already in the support organization. We’re seeing people who are coming in, they’re like, I just have this idea, like, how do I do this thing? And that’s one of those things that if a customer goes and asks that of four providers and three of them just have a chatbot response that are like, you just use this API. I think that those providers are going to lose. And I think the people who are going to win are the people that have people on the other end to say, good idea. You should think about this, you should think about this and you should think about this. I’m not saying I’m completely writing off AI support or AI support engines, or AI assisted support. I’m not. But I do agree with Rob that there’s something really magical in having a human on the other line. And then I think on the other side of the coin, there are professionals who are using our tools, our platform, and we have to be ready for them in all the ways that Rob was describing. Having an MCP server, having great documentation, having machine readable documentation, having all those things available to us because the gamut of customers who are using Stadia Maps has grown with AI, which is a really cool problem to try to solve from a support perspective and from Rob’s perspective as well, and from a product perspective too.

Rob Yoegel: Yeah. And I would also add to that community, right. I think just at its core and foundation, you know, with us, you know, really foundationally being around, you know, built around open source, you know, I think there’s a tremendous opportunity for Stadia Maps to drive more community involvement either to be a leader in that or just to be involved in it. When I say, you know, be a leader in it, you know, do we create our own community, you know, do we go off and do something on our own or do we just participate more and be more active? I think there’s a lot there. Luke and Ian are brilliant people, they’re brilliant men and they’re just so smart when it comes to the location ecosystem. So, you know, we need to get them and they want to be more involved in the community. But for the last, you know, 10 plus years, they’ve been just running a business right, and they haven’t been able to do that. And I know, you know, they’re both very interested. Ian’s already doing a lot more blog posts on StadiaApps.com and Luke’s talking to me very often about how he can be more forward and be more out there in the community. So I think that that’s another opportunity that we bring. Kind of taking off some of the growth initiatives and the support and success initiatives off of two co founders and doing it that way.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Rob mentioned that you also want to increase community engagement. Of course, you folks recently joined, so I will not ask you to share the whole. But what ideas that you have that, you know, whether it comes from all the Linode days through Akamai Journey or what you have seen, because this is a different market. This is not a market where you can get everybody involved. You know, it’s only very specific market targeting, very specific audience. So what is your, both of you, what is your vision to get more developers community engagement?

Rob Yoegel: I think the first one that comes to mind for me is developer advocates. Advocates who are out there using Stadia Maps in the wild and having them create content, speak on our behalf and just be more public. And I’m not talking about paid influencer marketing. You know, there’s, we did some of that at Linode as well. People can see right through some of that. So, you know, if I had to list things, developer advocacy would be much higher on the list than, you know, some paid influencer marketing campaign. And I think that that developer advocate piece extends into something I mentioned before, which is something more founder led, something that allows us to put Ian and Luke out there as subject matter experts. So I think there’s tons that we can do organically ground up around developer advocacy. I would probably say that would be one area. And then as I mentioned also earlier, I think just purely from a content perspective, discoverability perspective, you know, in answer engines and so forth, just making sure that we’re there, right? Just making, getting more mentions, getting more citations, you know, in the next three to six months, if not, you know, sooner, you know, those are some initiatives that I’d love to, you know, get off the ground.

Rick Myers: Maybe repeating what you were saying, Rob, putting it a different way. My thought has always been the companies that I want to use are the companies that are part of the conversation, right? They’re relevant and they’re not companies who are just like, here, come buy our stuff. It’s here, let me help you succeed in what you’re trying to do. And I think that it’s very obvious. You can see the companies that do that and you can see the companies that don’t do that. And some of the things that Rob mentioned are part of just being relevant and being part of the conversation. We want to put out great developer documentation and not just about Stadia Maps, but about location services, about maps. Like maps are complicated, right? Geocoding is complicated. I think we have a blog post coming up fairly soon about reverse geocoding, about how they work, what they are. We don’t really care necessarily that someone comes to Stadia Maps, reads our docs and signs up as much as someone comes to Stadia Maps, reads our docs, continues to explore the ecosystem, figures out what they’re trying to do and then when they need to buy, they say, you know who was helpful? Stadia Maps. And that, that’s kind of our playbook. And it’s more genuine. And that real connection with customers where you actually care about the company and the company cares about you. And again, you know, these companies, you have them, I’m not going to say them out loud, but you know them, everybody knows them. We want to be that company because we think that that is long term success. Not the flash in the pan, which by the way is how Stadia Maps has operated up until we’ve shown up. Like Stadia Maps is in it for the long game. Like there’s no get a bunch of money, sell, go public, get acquired plan here. It’s to build the location services platform that is here for a long time and helps customers achieve their goals for a long time. There’s no escape hatch or plan to get out. We’re just trying to build a good company that does good stuff for customers.

Rob Yoegel: And have fun doing it right. Have fun while we’re doing it. I mean there’s definitely this. Again, back to the Linode days. I joined Linode in 2019. Rick was there way before me. But there’s this concept of just having some fun doing it right. The outcomes were different. You know, Linode was acquired. There’s nothing like that on the roadmap for Stadia Maps, but we want to just have fun doing it. It’s one of the reasons why I chose to join, you know, and to join Stadia Maps. Rick’s there. Rick, I know Rick. I like Rick. I work well with Rick. I knew Luke and Ian, you know, they’re good people. So I want to be at this point in my career, I want to be surrounded by people I want to be working with every day and see every day.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Rick, Rob, thank you so much for joining and sharing your story and Stadia Maps story. I remember I talked to the founders a couple of years ago. You folks are doing a great work. This space, you know, that’s what open source is all about. So thank you for not only sharing those stories but also reconnecting, which also means we’ll talk a lot as new things happen in Stadia Maps. So I would love to have you folks back on the show, but I really, really, really appreciate your time. Thank you.

Rob Yoegel: Thanks, Swap.

Rick Myers: Thanks, Swap. Hope to talk to you soon.