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Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah and we're here today talking about

the evolution of cartography, how mapmaking is fundamentally changing in the age of autonomous

vehicles with way low, COO and head of product of DeepMap, which creates HD Maps for Autonomous

Vehicles, and David Rumsey, map collector of one of the

largest private paper map collections in the world now at Stanford and of the largest online

digital map collection. We talk about how the tools we use have changed from sextants to measure the

stars to computer vision and LIDAR, as well as how we think about what maps actually do

and are used for. Maps have really evolved from incredibly primitive technology, right? Like sextants

and stars, really, to now, I guess, satellite and camera and laser and LIDAR and beyond. So has the nature of mapping itself fundamentally

changed or do we use maps differently now or is it the same just more than it has been in the

past? Well, I see I never referred to Sextons as primitive. They were, you know, the LIDAR of the day.

I mean, Sextence opened up the whole world and created the ability to make scale maps

and to map essentially beyond where you were.

When would you say the beginning of sort of the golden era of mapping was?

Well, it was really around the time of Columbus, because

the whole discovery of North and South America produced a phenomenal amount of desire to map it,

to possess it. One of our favorite globes is the, it's called the Earth Apple, which was

by Martin Behame, the year Columbus discovered America,

...