The Walk That Changed the Geosphere
by James Roland
Jeremy Irish hadn’t been outside for almost three years when he decided to go for a walk. His short little hike turned into a worldwide treasure-hunt, known as geocaching, and a small company called Groundspeak, where Jeremy and 12 employees built and maintain the Geocaching website for over 30,000 members.
Irish grew up in Virginia, which is where he returned after a stint in the U.S. Air Force. He wrote computer code for General Electric, but soon tired of the east coast, which he compares to the flavored ice of a snow-cone… once you suck out all the flavor, all you’ve got is boring ice.
Lured by the mentorship of the Microsoft ‘gurus,’ Irish moved with his fiancé to Washington State in 1998 and soon found himself working for a dot com company that was doomed to fail: it sold clothing to men.
After about two years of hard work, Irish realized that his daily schedule of driving straight from his garage at home to the garage at work, and then back again at the end of the night, meant he only smelled fresh air on the weekends and, even then, hardly ever passed the boundaries of his own neighborhood.
“Normally,” Irish said. “I’d be inside playing video games, getting pastier and weaker by the minute.”
The fateful hike came in the year 2000. An avid GPS user named David Ulmer hid a can of beans in a bucket outside of Portland, Oregon and posted the coordinates online. Mike Teague found it and, in turn, posted about the find. About this time Irish was in the middle of his rat-race commutes, and happened to find Teague’s post. Irish logged on and found the coordinates for another box hidden near his home. He grabbed a bottle of water, a good pair of shoes, and headed for the door.
“It was one of the worst hikes I’ve ever had,” Irish said. The trail led him up an enormous hill that had been clear-cut. He quickly drained his single bottle of water, and the direct sunlight burned the skin on his face and neck. Irish topped the hill, exhausted and fed up. So, he was surprised when the discovery of a hidden 3×5 card box, containing a disturbingly old bottle of Sunny Delight and a few other random items, completely changed his disposition.
“I was delighted. I was amazed to find this thing,” Irish said.
He also saw the writing on the wall and contacted Mike Teague. Together they created the first iteration of geocaching.com which was, and still is, a website where users can post coordinates of caches they’ve hidden and collect coordinates for caches they want to go find. A few months after they started, Teague had severe technical trouble with his ISP (Internet Service Provider) and Irish officially took over.
Two years later, Irish began to sell t-shirts and paid subscriptions on the website and was finally able to quit his job and work full time for his own company, Groundspeak.
Groundspeak is based in Seattle, Washington and now employs 12 people in a small office where they are often visited by geocachers who drop in to chat and bring the team donuts from a bakery across the street.
Irish takes these unannounced visits in stride, with a laid-back attitude that is reflected in the Groundspeak office itself: Irish has kept the building relatively free of doors, reducing the Dilbert-like claustrophobia in most workplaces.
Irish seems nonplussed by the success of geocaching. What started out with a simple hike through the woods has spread around the earth, but instead of milking the success by over-merchandising and charging for services, www.geocaching.com offers limited items for sale and access to most of the website’s features for free.
Irish lets internet users determine his success, a strategy that has worked for geocaching, and he hopes will work for Groundspeak’s newest endeavor: an untitled game that blends the use of cell phone GPS technology with the old, text-based adventure games of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Irish is excited about his newest project and the future of online games.
“Instead of worrying about 3-D graphics,” he said, “You have to worry about looking both ways before crossing the street.”
Much like geocaching, which came online with no advertising or fanfare to speak of, Irish plans to soft-launch his next site and let word-of-mouth spread. It’s hard to say if this new site will see the world-wide acceptance that geocaching experienced, but Irish shrugs off the stress and expectation.
“If you hide it,” he said, “they will come.”
