Waze

Episode 17 covers Google's acquisition of Waze. Community Showcase first: listener Brian Sanders and Nexcast, a next-generation podcasting client adding interactivity to the flat one-way medium (the building process covered in the Building Nexcast podcast; "if anybody out there is building a social navigation app, please ping us"). Waze primer: a social navigation app whose magical insight is that other drivers passively generate data (slow speeds = traffic), like Google had done since 2009 from Android — but Waze also plugs you into a social network (Facebook, contacts) to actively report red-light cameras, police, accidents, giving a real-time incident map. Before Waze, all of navigation was top-down — TomTom/Garmin canonical datasets; even Google bought data until Android. Waze's insight: people driving around should be sending back real-time data.

Waze is the show's first Israeli acquisition. Founded 2006 by five co-founders — Ehud Shabtai (main founder/CTO), Amir and Gili Shinar, Uri Levin, Arie Gillion. Shabtai was given a portable GPS unit, wrote software for sharing speed-camera locations in Israel, and it took off — until the device maker sent a cease-and-desist (they'd integrate it, but he had to stop). Rather than hand it over: "screw you — I'll take your mapping data out and crowdsource my own." He started Free Map Israel to replace top-down map data with a crowdsourced, living, social dataset. In 2008 the project became Waze, and critically, the map-data terms changed from open to Waze-owned: Waze now owned and could commercialize all user-generated mapping data.

Financing: March 2008 Series A of $12 million led by Blue Run Ventures with Magma and Vertex (Israeli firms). The A-round's valuation mattered later — CEO Noam Bardin (joined 2009) wrote post-acquisition on LinkedIn: "One of Waze's mistakes was the valuation of its Series A which significantly diluted the founders. Perhaps, had we held control of the company, as the Founders of Facebook, Google, Oracle or Microsoft had, Waze might still be an independent company today." Growth: December 2010, 2 million users and 250+ million kilometers logged (huge versus the non-live data other mapping companies used); then a $25 million Series B at a $95 million valuation from the same investors plus Qualcomm, and a first US office — a little storefront in Palo Alto (the hosts' aside on the mind-jarring delight of seeing startup logos in real storefronts on Palo Alto and Mountain View streets — Ben's was Meebo).