Listen Here
Chatting with Myles Sutherland is always a good conversation. In spite of his quiet, mellow demeanor, his passion for the geospatial field shines through with ease. He gets excited talking about his company, GeoCam, how he and his co-founders started it, what problems they wanted to solve, and how they overcame challenges to see their idea through to fruition.
I really enjoyed Myles’ reflections about how his experiences as a New Zealand youth with parents who were teachers planted the seed for his love of geography. His high school had a GIS program, which allowed him to learn and develop his interest in cartography and coding from an early age. As he moved to university, his interests in the geospatial sciences continued. He is an avid outdoorsman, enjoying activities such as hiking, surfing, and skiing, which coalesced well with his interests in GPS and mapping through college and beyond. Those interests led him to work for Trimble which ultimately set him on a path to the United States and eventually to work at Esri.
During his time at Esri, he worked in several areas and was instrumental in helping develop the StartUp Program. Myles’ efforts along with others helped build the program from its infancy and put it on a trajectory to what it is today. I thought it was a really interesting area of our discussion to learn how influential being a part of that program was for encouraging Myles to start his own company. He learned from the Esri partners he encountered who were going through the StartUp program and studied things that seemed to work for them, as well as what didn’t. The idea of entrepreneurship has always interested me, so I found it really fascinating to delve into what the motivators were for Myles and the GeoCam crew.
It has been really fun to watch GeoCam grow as a business and to see the team explore new use cases for their technology. When I first met Myles, he and the team were using their camera technology to map inside of buildings. Now customers are using their cameras across a variety of industries and they are mapping a plethora of assets, everything from utilities to public works to construction. Myles and the GeoCam team spent a few years at the Esri UC in the StartUp Zone, a part of the very same program he helped to build when he worked here. Seeing GeoCam with a booth on the main Expo floor this year felt like it might have been a full-circle moment for the team. It surely had to be one for Myles.
Commenting is not enabled for this article.