December 21, 2020 / Chris

Inside Geocaching HQ transcript (episode 47): 20 years of geocaching with HQ co-founders Jeremy Irish and Bryan Roth

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0:00:14.4 Chris Ronan: Hello everybody, this is Inside Geocaching HQ from Seattle. I am Chris Ronan, Rock Chalk is my Geocaching user name. Thank you for downloading our podcast. This episode is a good one, I so enjoyed the conversation that you are about to hear with Jeremy Irish and Bryan Roth, who along with Elias Alvord are the co-founders of Geocaching HQ. Bryan is HQ’s President, Jeremy is the Senior Vice President, and the guy who launched geocaching.com. This year, of course, is the 20th anniversary of Geocaching, it was a challenging year to say the least for everyone, but we hope that you might get a smile from listening to these two guys share some fun stories from the past 20 years and look ahead to the future of our great game. So here they are, Jeremy Irish, and Bryan Roth.

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0:01:14.0 CR: Alright. Well, this is very exciting. This is the first time we’ve had Bryan and Jeremy on the HQ podcast. And of course, the reason the 20th anniversary of Geocaching this year, which unfortunately, as we all know, the year has been messy, and some of the celebrations that we had hoped for have not happened, but we’re hoping that they will happen in the future. But still it is an opportunity to look back at what has happened over these past 20 years and to think about what will come in the future, and so I appreciate both of you guys doing this. Jeremy, you and I have talked before on the podcast just about how you launched the website and then just in very general terms about how you got together with working at the same company like you did with Bryan and Elias. But I’m just one thing I’ve kind of wondered about over time is, why did you reach out to them specifically?

0:02:08.1 Jeremy Irish: Well, at the time, the three of us were working really closely together at Savvy Shopper, and I got to know Elias and Bryan really well. I started out as their client, or they were my client or the company I was working for. So I just had a really strong relationship with the two of them. And I think a lot of businesses that get started, it really comes down to knowing and trusting the people that you start the company with, and that’s how they become successful, because they pick up on the places where you don’t have that capability. So it was like, I realized at that time that Elias had a really strong networking background, a really smart person I could bounce technical questions and ideas and stuff like that with, and he had the technical chops to be able to put together a system that would even support geocaching. ‘Cause the first time I was running the site, it was in my spare bedroom in Bellevue, so with very low bandwidth. And I was like, “How do I take this site that was just slashdotted and put it on a better computer and get that out on to the internet, so it won’t break?”

0:03:17.8 JI: And that’s some stuff that I just had no idea how to do. And then on Bryan’s side, he was done, he had the legal chops, which is awesome, the operations chops, things that I really didn’t understand, or just things that weren’t in my wheelhouse of experience, he was able to take on that stuff. And I’m also not necessarily a people person, and Bryan definitely is. So there was that social part of it too, that really enamored me to have Bryan join up and start this company, which really was initially just running a hobby site, so there wasn’t really a lot of strategery going on to figure out how we’re gonna run a company, and you know what this thing is going to be. There was no business plan put together for the company, it was really just, “Hey, I’m kind of scared. This is getting a little bit bigger than I expected it to be, and I really need help. And you guys are awesome, so would you like to join? I know it’s kind of a dumb idea, that’s kind of what people are thinking.” And they’re like, “What is this silly idea? This won’t… ” I’m like, “I don’t even know it’s not really about making money, it’s just about creating something fun. Would you like to be involved in with this?”

0:04:33.7 JI: And initially it was a smaller project and there was a lot of light touches that would happen while I was programming the site, but as the company and as the game started getting bigger and bigger, you could see those challenges coming out at us and to have those two strong partners involved in it really rounded us out and made it so I honestly continued doing it because it’s a lot of work when you’re working on this hobby site and the excitement that you get from people going out and finding geocaches and getting active in it, and then that community being built, there’s a lot of excitement around it, but there’s also a lot of low points where you’re just like, “Why am I doing this? I’m spending all my weekends working on this and my evenings, and I also have to do another job.” And I know that there’s a lot of great feeling around the game itself, but it takes a toll on your social life and your personal life, and to have two partners who are saying like, “Hey, it’s worth it. How can I help?”

0:05:39.1 JI: And them pitching in and working through it made it what it is today. So I always joke like, I wanna quit every so often, and then Bryan and Elias will talk me off the ledge. Not so much today, but in the early days, there’s a lot of moments where you’re just like, “I’m done.” And they’re like,” No, no, no, just chill, it’s just like a bad day.” So that’s kind of why it started that way, and I think I’ve learned over time that companies that are very successful have more than two partners, and I think that really has to do with tie-breaking, there’s always… If there’s two people that are not connecting on a topic or something, there’s always a tie-breaker, there’s always a Switzerland that can come in and help that conversation and turn that conversation to a positive way.

0:06:28.0 CR: I don’t know what the exact stats are, but I can’t imagine that a whole lot of partnerships last 20 or more years for a variety of reasons, just the business maybe doesn’t go the right way, but then also personalities not meshing together the way that you would like. How has it worked with you guys to keep this going for this long and to still have this strong partnership after such a long amount of time?

0:06:52.5 Bryan Roth: From my perspective, I think that it’s sort of fluctuated over the years. There were times where the three of us wouldn’t exactly get along on a specific topic, but there was always this underlying sense of mutual respect. Like I’ve always said when Jeremy approached me, when Jeremy and Elias approached me and asked me to join, help them start this company to support a hobby, I just remember it wasn’t so much about what we were going to be doing, I was just excited to work with the two of them because I knew who they were, we were already friends, we had worked together for a while, I knew what some of their strengths were, and personality-wise, we already clicked, and so it felt like this opportunity to start something cool with friends. And as Jeremy mentioned, it didn’t feel like there was a whole lot of potential. It was like, “Oh, here’s this hobby, it’s after recreation and technology, two things that we’re all kind of passionate about, and we’re friends, and between the three of us, we can each do different things, so we could probably do the basics to get this thing up and running. Like what do you say?” And I was like, “Oh cool, I’m gonna get to work with my friends and I have this little side project and we’ll see what it becomes.” Here we are 20 years later.

0:08:08.9 BR: And a question like, “How did we make it?” I think foundationally, the fact that we were friends, the fact that we had respect for each other and everybody sort of brought a different set of talents to the company and to into the partnership, really went a long way. And so two things that I would say is, one, if it was, if the question that we faced related to a topic where there were some expertise, I think that we were really good about deferring to the resident expert on that topic. And the second thing is, I always knew that if Jeremy and Elias agreed on something and I found myself at odds with that, I really needed to reconsider my opinion because I had a lot of faith in what the two of them thought and how they looked at things. And so we could always have good conversations where I was able to bring like, “Hey, here’s how I’m thinking about it.” And if they would say, “Well, here’s another way to think about it, and by the way, we’re both aligned on this.” Or, “Here’s three different ways to think about it.” There was always this sense of, “Well, let’s try and figure it out together,” as opposed to, “Well, you have to do it this way because I said so.” That was never really the thing.

0:09:22.3 BR: And so one of the other things is, especially in the early days when we were all working for the same company, that company Savvy Shopper went out of business, then we all went to work for a promotional marketing company, which was Sunrise, but we would meet in the mornings pretty frequently at 6:00 AM before work, and we would go out wakeboarding or water skiing or whatever the three of us. And so we would start the day by playing together and we would water ski or wake board for a little while, and then we’d just sit and float in the boat and just kinda talk about like, “Hey, what’s going on today? What are the challenges? How are things going?” I think it allowed us to really build a strong relationship in the early days based on friendship and business that has allowed us to kind of navigate both the common and rough waters that we’ve seen over the years.

0:10:16.7 JI: Yeah, I think we’ve been fortunate that we haven’t seen a lot of adversity in the company either. We always have had a back-up plan in the early days, so it was more like all the interesting things that came at us were a less big challenging like doom and gloom kind of things, and more just really super weird problems.

0:10:38.5 BR: Opportunities.

0:10:38.7 JI: Yeah, they became opportunities, but when the National Park Service found a geocache on the property and they’re telling us they banned it in all national parks, we were like, “Okay, well, here’s a challenge, but it’s a surmountable challenge.” It’s not like none of the particular challenges were like the doom and gloom type of challenges, and they’re always interesting. So I think we always had an interesting problem to address. And for me, that makes me happy for some reason. I like, I used to have a fire bucket, for example, on my desk for a long time with pens and stuff, ’cause I was always feeling like that we were doing fire drills. And there was a moment where I decided to retire that fire can, because I felt like we were at the point now where we were beyond doing the fire drills, but sometimes I’d still miss the fire drill, they just kept you on your toes.

0:11:34.4 BR: I think a number of the challenges that we had in the early days, like the one Jeremy described with the national parks, really related to the fact that here was this totally new hobby and people didn’t know what to make of it. So when it came to the national parks, they’re like, “Oh, people are leaving things in the park over a period of 24 hours, that’s against our rules, we need to shut it down.” And in a similar sense, when we first went to get business insurance, for the most part nobody would insure us because they said, “We don’t understand what you’re doing, what kind of liability does this present, etcetera.” And we’d explain to them, “Here’s all the work that we’ve done to present the company in the right way,” but it took sort of a very special partnership with an insurance agent that we met who went out and did a really good job of kind of explaining what it was that we were doing so that we could actually get our first policy.

0:12:31.4 BR: But we dealt with that along the way in different forms, and I think it’s interesting to be here 20 years later when if something happens in a park, we’ll often hear from somebody, and they’ll say, “Oh, we know what geocaching is. It looks like this person didn’t follow your guidelines, and the cache looks like something dangerous. Can you please do a better job of explaining to people that, what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate?” Versus where it was 15, 18 years ago, where it’s like, “Hey, we had to close off the street because somebody placed a cache that looked inappropriate, and we’re gonna have to shut you guys down.” And I was like, “Wait a second. That’s not exactly what’s happening.” So I think there were a variety of things like that over the years that we had to deal with fires. I remember that fire bucket. It’s funny. As you mentioned that it’s something I haven’t thought about in years, but I do remember.

0:13:28.5 CR: Isn’t it amazing too, given that early adversity with the national park system, but now there’s a Find Your Park’s Geo Tour with geocaches at national parks all over the US.

0:13:40.8 JI: Oh, yeah, I went geocaching at Rockwood Park in Oregon outside… Oh, I think it’s outside Portland. And it was just really cool to be able to go on this hike and seeing geocaches that were placed by the local parks, and in a relationship with the local geocachers to do to cache and trash out of them at that park. So it’s like all these little decisions that we made in the early days to try to make this game family-friendly and open and available and not secret, that was really important to us to have that vision, and that created a lot of challenges in that we had to work with a lot of different parks and a lot of landowners and stuff like that. So we took the hard route and really the long-term vision of it as opposed to making it some secret society game that’s violating a lot of rules and laws to play the game. And I think as a result of that, we see the results of that effort. Parks that encourage geocaches, they even place their own and they host the geocachers. And as a result, those caches are better maintained, they’re in better places, and they’re just more enjoyable overall.

0:14:56.0 CR: Along those lines, hindsight being 20/20 now you can… Sometimes business owners can look back and say, “Here are moments where we made a very important decision. Maybe we didn’t know it at the time, but in retrospect, this was really important.” You’ve mentioned a couple of things just there, but are there other things that come to mind for either of you where you look back and you realize either for the game or for the business, this was a fork in the road, or this was a very important thing where in retrospect, that was a really good decision that we made that led us down a better path?

0:15:33.1 JI: Well, I’ll say the accidental one was the reviewers, the volunteers that are involved with geocaching. Initially, the reason why I asked the first volunteer to help was because I was just overwhelmed with reviewing geocaches. I didn’t really have any forethought as to what volunteering for geocaching would look like. Today, now there’s a community of volunteers around the world that review caches. They know their local laws. They give a lot of good positive scrutiny to the geocaches that are placed. And at the time, we could have gone in a direction where we reviewed them all internally or created some kind of rule system or an AI algorithm or something like that, that decides whether or not these are okay or rely on the community to report them. Deciding to have folks and trusting them with the ability to go in and edit any geocache, that was a big deal, and entrusting in the community that you’ve never actually met in real life to be active in that. I think that was a big one. As a result, now we have this community of volunteers around the world that make this geocaching game better.

0:16:48.1 BR: I think another example would be, in the early days, we started to see people who were suggesting either in the forms or elsewhere, like, “Hey, when you go out geocaching, bring a trash bag and pick up the cans along the way.” And when we heard that, we said, Oh, wow, this is a really good idea.” And so many of the good ideas have come from the community, of course, and paying attention to what they’re doing. But we said, “How can we come up with a program to encourage this?” And the beginning of Cache In and Trash Out and having an international Cache In Trash Out Day, those were early decisions that just felt like, “Oh, this makes sense. Sure, if we encourage people to pick up trash while they’re geocaching, then we’ll have a positive impact on the game board and the world.” And if you consider now so many years later, with thousands of Cache In Trash Out events and people going out and just making this part of their geocaching routine, the environmental impact that this global community has had as a result of us sort of just adopting something that we thought was cool because the community was doing it, that’s like the pebble in the pond kind of thing, where it’s seemingly insignificant, but over time has become really significant. And now it’s something that the community celebrates. There’s a couple of times a year where we’re encouraging events. And it’s just one of those smaller ideas that has become really impactful in a positive way.

0:18:20.8 CR: Well, on the flip side of things, in 20 years, a few mistakes will be made here and there. Jeremy, you always had the “make better mistakes tomorrow” mantra. I think there was even a sign in your office to that effect. I don’t know how specific you wanna get, but are there things where you look back and you think, “Wow, I cannot believe we did that.”

0:18:41.0 JI: Well, I’d say personally, I get bored easily. When new releases come out, I’m ready for the next one. So even before anybody sees like a new feature or something like that, I’m ready to go and do something else. Personally, I spend time focusing on other location-based game ideas, but we would spend some resources on that and it just wouldn’t pan out because geocaching just had such a gravitational pull to the company, and there are so many things that we can do to make it better that it just kept pulling me back to geocaching. So I think that was part of it, like I get distracted. I can get distracted easily. I have a T-shirt that says squirrel on it, ’cause it’s like the movie Up with the dog. It’s like, “Squirrel!” So I’m always looking on to something else, so my distractions can sometimes have the better of me. That’s one part of it. There are geocaching types in the past that we tried out and they just didn’t work because they would kind of overtake the website. I think a lot of times those mistakes would lead to other ideas within the game that would be positive.

0:19:45.9 JI: So for example, I love Wherigo, and I would say Wherigo is one of those things that never really took off, but it’s on this runway where it never has to. People can continue to use Wherigo, but Wherigo was something that I had grand visions of that didn’t quite come to pass. And a lot of it was the difficulty of making these cartridges and games and stuff like that, but what it’s led to is the Adventures Project, which is kind of a low-fly version of Wherigo, where it’s more about the content than it is about the feature set. And I think as we continue to build for Adventures, it gets more Wherigo-like. So I think it was like a vision that was way ahead of its time. It still has potential today, which excites me. And the idea of using other types of technology to get people outside is always something that is back of mind for me, and that’s the thing that I think geocaching does a great job of, is using tech, which normally brings you inside and encourages you to go outdoors and find something physical.

0:20:49.6 BR: Yeah, I think to be fair, if we look back, there’s a lot of things that could be characterized as mistakes, but it could also be characterized as learning opportunities. There’s no 20-year-old company that hasn’t made mistakes, and I think that we’ve had our fair share of decisions that we made with the information that we had on hand, that when more information was gathered, we realized, “Oh, that wasn’t the best path.” And so we’ve shut down some projects. We’ve built some things that we actually didn’t even bring to market, but all in all, we’ve learned from those. And I think that it really helps to inform how we act today. It’s like the phrase, “We stand on the shoulders of giants.” We kind of stand on the shoulders of those decisions that we’ve made in the past, right or wrong, and even some of the right ones turned out to subsequently be not an ideal situation or add additional complexities that we weren’t necessarily prepared to deal with.

0:21:50.8 BR: By and large, Jeremy talks about it, squirrel, and sort of the propensity to be excited about different things, I don’t think it could fairly be characterized as a mistake or a disadvantage. In fact, that’s how we come up with a lot of the great ideas, and you have to make mistakes in order to learn, in order to progress. And so I look back and I think if we’re being fair with ourselves, there hasn’t been one really big mistake that we’re like, “Oh man, we never should have done that.” There have been things that we’ve done where it’s like, “Alright, well, we probably shouldn’t have spent that money on that project, but we needed to try to sort of learn what we needed to learn from that project.” And so given where we are today and the opportunities that we have ahead of us as a company and again in the community, it’s been this sort of organic development of as a group, as a founders group with Jeremy, Elias and myself, and then as a company, it’s really just trying to continually move the game, company and community forward by making the best possible decisions that are aligned with our values, which are getting people off of their couches, getting them outside, giving them fun things to do.

0:23:08.4 BR: And I think as long as we look at the opportunities through the lens of a solid set of values and what we’re trying to accomplish, the odds are, we’re still aiming in the right path. We’re not gonna track directly on where we’re supposed to be. We’re tacking back and forth and learning the lessons along the way. And I think we’re fortunate in the fact that we haven’t made a “big mistake” that has drastically affected the community or the game or the company. And hopefully we can keep tacking in the right direction and not get too far off course. But to be fair, having Jeremy and Elias involved, having a really good senior leadership team and all of the lackeys at HQ, I think everybody understands what’s at stake. And so there’s so much thought and care that goes into the decision-making and trying to get things right that I don’t think we really expose ourselves to a lot of risk of making a massive mistake. Not that it’s impossible, but we’re really doing our best to make sure that it’s highly improbable.

0:24:16.5 JI: I’ll give you a good funny mistake though. In the early days, we decided to do an anniversary calendar, and we spent… We got a design firm, and we did these amazing photos for the 12 months. We even did one which took all the different photos that were on the geocaching site and made a geocaching logo as with the smaller images.

0:24:39.8 BR: Like a photo mosaic.

0:24:40.5 JI: Like a mosaic, yeah, but it was all really tiny images with the right color, so it would make it look like the geocaching logo, and we… I think we had 20,000 calendars or something. It was a ridiculous amount of calendars, and we could not get rid of these calendars. We had so many of them, and at the time, buying that many calendars was a big financial deal. So I don’t know. We probably still have calendars around today, but we were starting to give them away with… When people would buy something on the shop site, we would just throw a couple of calendars in the box just to get rid of them ’cause those things are time-limited. [chuckle] So they could be collectors items now, but they were like a lot of time. We also had antenna balls. We had those forever, and then people started manufacturing vehicles without antennas. So yeah, we have a ton of those, but they’re cute.

0:25:31.5 BR: I have one of those calendars left that was saved by my mother-in-law, and she’s like, “Oh, do you still need this?” I’m like, “I haven’t seen one of these in 10 years or whatever.” And then those antenna balls were really cool. There were the signal heads, but yeah, then cars without antennas. Thankfully small mistakes or whatever you wanna call them.

0:25:52.5 JI: Yeah, I’d say signal was probably my favorite, not mistake, success. It was just just a funny idea that now we have mascot costumes in multiple countries now to travel around when we have events.

0:26:06.1 CR: And I think probably on our last conversation, you and I, Jeremy, talked about signal, or maybe we didn’t. I’d have to go back and look, but maybe just briefly, since you mentioned it, for people that might not be familiar how Signal came to be.

0:26:22.8 JI: We tried to find a mascot for the game, and we wanted to find a mascot that… Usually when you create a mascot, it’s kind of the product with a face. So we didn’t wanna do a GPS device ’cause I realized that at some point… Even then, we knew that GPS technology would be like a clock, so it would be in everything. So you wouldn’t really be buying a GPS. You would just have a device that has GPS functionality in it. We came up with the idea of using a frog because it’s kind of… It’s nation-wide. It’s international, so there’s frogs everywhere around the world. It means nature, and then we stuck a antenna on its head to represent the technology side. So Signal basically knows where he is and where he can go, but he doesn’t really understand the technology. So we always… We had rules like he doesn’t talk, he only points. He doesn’t use a device, he’ll gesture at a GPS device, but he won’t use the GPS device ’cause he has a GPS, just silly things like that. We created these arbitrary rules that I think are still followed today.

0:27:30.1 CR: I was gonna say, I learned a few new things just now. [chuckle]

0:27:33.7 BR: And now we go to international mega events, and there’s full groups of Signals dressed in all different costumes. And people have them attached to their backpacks and trackables, and it’s really phenomenal what… That small decision in the early days has become this kind of sub-culture within the global community. It’s both fascinating and just super cool.

0:28:00.6 JI: Yeah, the character itself was based on an initial T-shirt design that one of our first hires, Coco, designed for us. Originally, Signal was just a head with an antenna. I was gonna use it in another… Talk about squirrel projects, but I was gonna use it in another project that showed you presence. So I hired somebody in Eastern Europe to design little icons, and it was just a little frog head with an antenna on it. And then she took the antenna head and turned it into Signal, which then turned into the character. And then she was the designer for the Signal character for quite a while before the company took it on.

0:28:41.5 BR: In the first image of Signal’s head, we had on… I think there were two lunch boxes, and they used to be worn in Elias’s basement where we had our first office. I wonder if he still has it.

0:28:56.4 JI: It was a product called Ground Control that never really went anywhere, but that’s where the original Signal came from. That was gonna be the icon for it.

0:29:04.9 CR: Oh, there needs to be a Signal lunch box, I think. I see a new product for the shop. I wonder if you guys could talk about how the company and especially the founders have tried to balance the needs of the company and the game and the community. Bryan, you and I have talked in the past, I think, on the podcast about Geocaching HQ as a company, and it needs to be profitable in order to do the things that it wants to do for the game and for the community. But gosh, there’s I’m sure a million decisions that you all have had to make over the course of 20 years to try to balance those needs. And I’m wondering what your philosophy has been, the three of you, and if that philosophy has evolved over the years that you’ve worked together.

0:29:52.2 BR: I mean, it feels like we always started out with… When Jeremy built the first version of the website, the game was in existence in a slightly different form, the great American GPS Stash hunt. And so I think we’ve always approached it like, we don’t own the game of geocaching, just like nobody owns the game of baseball or football. Instead, we get to participate in this global community. We have a specific role. The community volunteers have a specific role. Cache hiders, moderators, cache finders, coin manufacturers, vendors, everybody sort of participates in different ways, and we’ve always felt like we earned the right to be the global headquarters for the game through dedicated service to the community, by giving the community the right features, by showing respect for the game, by not trying to take advantage of it and really just by contributing. And so we’ve always felt like it is in the interest of the global community and the game to have a company that has resources to go and build enhancements on the game and provide support and provide teams that could be responsive to questions from new users or landowners or law enforcement.

0:31:11.9 BR: And so we always knew that we had to generate revenue, and in the really early days, the three of us were working for free. We weren’t getting paid anything for a number of years while we were doing this. And I remember there was a time where Jeremy came to us, and he’s like, “Look, I’m spending all my nights and weekends on this project. We either need to try and sell it to somebody or we need to try and find a way to make money so that I don’t have to do this other job and so that I can focus on this exclusively.” And that was really… We had to go beyond just T-shirts, and that was when we came up with the concept of a premium membership, charter membership in the early day, which was, “Hey, community. Here’s what we’re trying to do. If you can help support us, well, then we’re gonna give you access to advanced features and functionality, none of which are actually built yet, but we’re going to build them. And it’s going to enable us to continue to support the game and enhance the game.”

0:32:09.5 BR: And that sort of bargain between us and the community has lasted now for 20 years where there are people around the world who choose to pay us $30 a year or €30 a year, and we take that money and we’ve got 85 employees in the Seattle area, engineers and community engagement and marketing and finance and all that, a company whose primary goal is to support the community that effectively supports us, and I think that that’s something that’s been consistent for all of these years. And it seems to have worked out. It’s worked out well for us as a company. I think the ability to do this as a job is a dream job. I can’t imagine doing anything that’s more fun and more exciting than supporting this global community and trying to get people outside, because we know that being in nature is good for people. It’s good for the world. So we feel like we’re doing this good mission. It is our occupation, so this is something that helps me pay for food and pay for my home and things like that, and so on a personal level it works, on a company level it works. And I think that the global community gets the benefit of all of the work that we’re doing to try and make for a better game and a stronger community and just support everybody out there and getting outside and having a better life.

0:33:37.6 JI: Yeah, I think a strong company makes for a strong game. And without getting revenue, we can’t hire employees and compete with companies and hire developers if we didn’t have the money to do that. You look at it, if this was a non-profit, I think you’d see a lot less features, a lot less effort in the business. That’s just how I think it would end up for profit. Like the NFL, if you were to look at them, for football, it’d be a different kind of football game. I remember at the beginning of geocaching, when I was… Before I came up with like, “Hey, we need to make money on this because I’m spending all of my personal time working on it, and it’s kind of taking over my whole life. I need help, and the only way to do that is to hire,” I looked at ways to raise money, and one was a donation concept. So at the time you could click a button and donate money to the site, nothing like there are today. But nobody would click on it. I think everybody thought that everybody else was supporting the game. And there needed to be a way to make that happen.

0:34:42.2 JI: And a membership made the most sense. Advertising didn’t. We learned even today with the recent… What’s the documentary that came out? Social Climber?

0:34:54.7 S?: Social Climber, yeah.

0:34:56.5 JI: They talk about if you’re trying to support the experience on advertising, then your content that you’re selling is your customers. And I didn’t really think that that would be the best for the game to try to motivate us to sell our customers to other people. It made more sense to say, “This is an adventure we’re all involved in. So there should be an Adventures Club of people that are supporting it. As that membership increases, then the funds increase, and that’ll allow us to create more and more functionalities.” So as more people play and the game gets more complicated, there are complicated solutions to complicated problems, and you need to have funds to do that. You need to have a strong company that can exist and can continue to exist to support that growing population of geocachers. Initially it was just like, “Oh my goodness, we need money because I can’t do this anymore on my own, we need to hire people or get to a reasonable lifestyle.”

0:35:58.8 JI: To now, we have a strong business that’s self-healing, that have people in the company that love the game that are paid adequately. And considering that we haven’t been greedy as business owners, put that money back into the company and build that business and that’s what we did for a very long time. We didn’t even change our salary for the longest time until basically our accountant said, “You have to because you need to be taxed more.” [chuckle] “Really? Okay, well, I guess we need to start paying ourselves more.” But we wanted to take that and put it back into the company and hire people. And for the longest time, we had people at the company that were paid much higher than we were because we wanted to have the top talent to be able to make the right features and content to make this game better.

0:36:45.8 CR: I wonder if you guys could share any of your favorite memories of your time with the community over the last 20 years. I was thinking, Jeremy, you said earlier on that you don’t consider yourself a people person, and yet you have attended so many mega events and probably maybe become more of it, or challenged yourself to be more of a people person over the years. And then Bryan, I’ve seen you at all of the events that we’ve attended together over the years, and clearly you love that aspect of it. But for both of you, could you talk about that part of your role at HQ? Because I don’t imagine it was something that you could have imagined when this whole thing first started, that you would have these opportunities to engage with people from all over the world through your job.

0:37:33.0 BR: I’ll say that I think Jeremy has become much more of a people person over the years as a result of geocaching, whether he feels sort of forced into it or has come to embrace it. But you’re right, for me, it’s really one of the coolest aspects of not just the job, but being a part of the community. And I think anybody who is a part of the geocaching community who has attended an event and interacted with other community members comes to realize just how special the people are. The game is the game, but when you combine it with this global community of sort of welcoming, friendly people who wanna talk to you, who wanna share their hobby with you, whether you’re brand new or whether you’re truly engaged, you kinda realize how special it is. So for me, I love to go to events.

0:38:25.9 BR: I love to get to talk to people and find out, how did they learn about the game? What do they take from the game? What do they enjoy about it? What do they wanna see from us? What kind of ideas do they have? But just, we’ve built so many friendships over the years that not just us from HQ building friendships, but look around at the geocachers. This group has become sort of worldly and interconnected. A geocacher in New York can have friends in Spain and Switzerland and France and Germany, and it’s not just like colleagues but true friends where we care about each other. And these days when we can’t see each other, we’re interacting on social media and asking, “How’s your family? What are you doing? Have you found any cool caches?” And so it’s truly created this community from what was just about nothing to begin with. And it’s not just any community, it’s a special community because it crosses political, social, religious, it crosses all those lines and brings everybody together specifically in the spirit of this game, and I think it’s an honor for us to be a part of it.

0:39:36.4 BR: Some of my favorite memories would be everything from the first event that we had at our Ninth and Lenora office, where we got some geocaching cookies, and we invited the local community and people came in. And it was kind of our first non-elitist basement office, and we had, I don’t know, 40 or 50 geocachers just stop by and we got to meet them and like, “Hey, here’s our little HQ.” And I think there were eight or nine of us in the whole company, all the way up to… I know Jeremy and I attended the Prague Giga where they launched the European Maze exhibit, and there were thousands and thousands of people there. And just to look around and see all these people smiling and getting out and interacting and playing, it was really special to see this is what… Not just us, but the whole community has co-created over so many years. Those things for me helped me to understand just the importance of what not only we’ve done, but the community has done, and what has been created that brings so much benefit to so many people all over the world.

0:40:44.9 JI: Now that you’ve heard from the extrovert, [laughter] we’ll talk about the introvert. Originally, I just built it and then we started the company. I built it in a bedroom, so I was not interacting with anybody. And I always expected the game to be something where you would just sort of see people in the logs, and you’d start seeing those local logs and maybe exchanging emails and stuff like that. So I never really thought that at the beginning that there would be events, and there would be communities that would come together in real space and do these events. So two things I like about it. One is, as an introvert, it’s really hard to strike up a conversation, but the conversation has already been started when you go to a geocaching event, so it’s pretty easy to have a conversation. The other side of that is when you go to an event with 1,000 people, even 100 people, and they all wanna talk to you, it’s really hard. It’s kind of like, if you’ve ever been married, you go to a wedding, or you’re part of that wedding, it’s kind of a whirlwind of discussions and you kind of at the end of the day, you’re exhausted because you get to talk with so many people, and it’s not a negative or a positive thing, it’s just how it is.

0:41:57.1 JI: And you have lots of positive conversations and great experiences doing that, but it can be pretty tiring to go through there, especially for an introvert it’s a draining experience. But I am grateful for the opportunity to be able to go and meet with all of these people, and it’s a reassuring and heartwarming thing to see all these people that play the game and appreciate it. And I don’t… I have the humility to understand that I’m not the direct reason why, ’cause it’s so many people involved with geocaching that makes this thing work. There’s the people that place the geocaches and the creative geocaches I could never do, to the type of people that maintain these geocaches, and the people that volunteer to review geocaches, and then the people that build all the software for it. There’s all these people that make this game work. What I prefer actually is to be anonymous in going to a geocaching event. I think the first 15 minutes to 30 minutes when I go to a geocaching event, I don’t say anything. I just kinda walk around.

0:42:57.4 JI: I go and sign up, but then at some point I put my name down or somebody asks where I’m from or something, and then the cat’s out of the bag and it becomes a different experience. But I’ve had the best experiences, especially individual experiences with geocachers around the world. And I’m so grateful to have the opportunity to have the opportunity to be able to travel to these events and then meet people from different cultures and backgrounds, and be able to see places I’ve never experienced before. Just some highlights, I went to Copenhagen, one of my first trips, and met with a retired police officer detective that drove me around the city and showed me all the interesting spots. I’ve been to Germany multiple times, going to different lost places.

0:43:40.8 JI: I’ve been in old, abandoned World War II tunnels with geocachers, and they all know the best places to go. So I feel like I’ve gotten a highlight reel of geocaching around the world. Geocaches in Finland that are electronic, and there’s so many electronics geocachers, like one where you open it and the Christmas tree lights turn on on an entire tree, things like that, that just blow my mind. And the fact that I get the opportunity to be the person that gets taken on some of those trips is so rewarding. I can deal with giving out tags at a Geocaching event to 1,000 people. That’s totally worth it to me, but I do like the individual experiences that I have with individual people, and those are the ones I experience one-on-one or with small groups.

0:44:29.6 CR: When you think about the future, maybe the next 20 years of geocaching, both the game and the company, what comes to mind for both of you?

0:44:41.7 BR: If we look back 20 years ago and you had asked us that question, I don’t think that we could have predicted where we are today and sort of what has been built and the impact and the ecosystem, and basically what the community has come to represent and the game has come to represent. I think, likewise, 20 years from now is a really, really long time. And so coming up with any sort of specifics, Jeremy might have some really creative ideas, but for me, it comes down to really almost like big kind of principles. As a company, I don’t think that our mission will change. I think inspiring and enabling adventure, exploration, and community, I think is really core to who we are as a company and what we’re trying to do, as well as who we are collectively as a community. I think that we can expect technology to continue changing as it always does, and as a company we’re not planning to stand still. We are planning to take advantage of new technology as it comes, and when it makes sense to do so, to extend and enhance the game of geocaching and what it means to people around the world. And I think the third thing is, we recognize that geocaching is good for people, to the extent that we can keep focused on getting people outside and inspiring them to do it in new and different ways, I think that’s what you could expect to see 20 years from now in some form, but the specifics I’ll… I can’t begin to speculate, but maybe Jeremy’s got some ideas.

0:46:19.9 JI: Well, the goal of the company is to have an adventure at every location, so it’s one of those lofty goals that you can continue to strive for til the end of time. You might not necessarily have an adventure at every location, so you’ll always have something to look forward to. Also, just considering that when we started the company, I was 28. Now I’m gonna be 48, so I don’t know if I’m 68 years old, what that’s gonna look like. But I think the important thing is we’ve set the company in the direction and we’ve been very serious about not changing that direction. Now our goal is to get people to go outside using technology, create adventure. We want people to move more today than ever. People are on their phones and they’re into their social media and the Oculus now and other VR applications where people are putting on and closing off the world and creating these other adventures in these alternate realities. And although I do actually enjoy it personally, to be able to do that kind of escapism, it’s not what humans are meant to do all the time, so as much as I like the book Ready Player One and the movie, I don’t really wanna get into this VR environment where we all live in single wide trailers stacked on top of each other.

0:47:41.1 JI: That’s what I want to continue to strive for, is see what kind of technologies are out there that’s available that we can use as a part of our tool chest to allow people to create engaging outdoor adventures and get people moving and active in the real world. And what we’ve seen with this pandemic is that it is healthy to get outside. As it’s been getting colder and people are starting to move indoors, we’re now seeing that the pandemic… People are getting sicker. That just shows how important the outside is and how encouraging people to be active and outdoors, it just makes for a better life. I just remember that first time I went geocaching and I had moved out to the Pacific Northwest, and I was basically on a mountain that had been completely cut down by timber. And all the timber was gone, so it was mostly stumps, and I would not have seen that environment and kind of have a more appreciation for the outdoors by seeing that and being exposed to that. And I think that’ll continue to be an issue moving forward, is making sure that we have a healthy world. And by doing that, we need to experience that world and not have our heads down in our phones and not have VR helmet on and escape that reality and appreciate what’s outside, ’cause there’s nothing that can substitute a walk in the woods.

0:49:01.4 BR: Yeah, I’ll credit Jeremy with the phrase, but we want people to be exposed. We wanna enable people and inspire them to be exposed to actual reality as opposed to virtual reality.

0:49:15.8 JI: IRL, in real life.

[music]

0:49:19.2 BR: How about that? Jeremy Irish and Bryan Roth, two of the co-founders of Geocaching HQ. I look forward to picking up our conversation in person at the 20th anniversary celebration. Do you have something that you would like to have us cover on the podcast in the new year? Send an email. Podcast@geocaching.com is the address. We always appreciate when you share your ideas, and we wanna wish you all the very best in 2021. I know I speak for all of my fellow HQ lackeys when I say we deeply appreciate your support this year. It is truly wonderful to see how Geocaching has played such an uplifting role in so many of our lives, especially during these past several months. Have a safe new year from me and everyone at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

Episode 47: 20 years of geocaching with HQ co-founders Jeremy Irish and Bryan Roth

Besides being the 20th anniversary of geocaching, 2020 also marks 20 years of the partnership between Geocaching HQ’s three co-founders. In this Inside HQ podcast, Jeremy Irish and Bryan Roth share stories from HQ’s early days, talk about what makes the game and community so special, and look ahead to the future.

You can listen to the episode via this page, or on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. If you use an aggregator to subscribe to podcasts, you can access the RSS feed here.

A full transcript is available here.

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast

Episode 47: 20 years of geocaching with HQ co-founders Jeremy Irish and Bryan Roth

00:00 / 50:16

Episode 25: Jeremy Irish, Geocaching HQ co-founder

Jeremy Irish launched Geocaching.com on September 2, 2000. He co-founded Geocaching HQ, along with Bryan Roth and Elias Alvord.

In this episode, Jeremy shares memories of the early days of Geocaching HQ, as well as what he’s up to today.

You can listen to the episode via this page, or on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or Stitcher. If you use an aggregator to subscribe to podcasts, you can access the RSS feed here.

A full transcript is available here.

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast

Episode 25: Jeremy Irish, Geocaching HQ co-founder

00:00
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35:49

June 3, 2019 / Chris

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 25): Jeremy Irish

[music]

00:12 Chris Ronan: Hi there! This is Inside Geocaching HQ. I am Chris Ronan, geocaching username Rock Chalk. Hope you’re in the right place, but even if you’re not, stick around, sit right back, and you’ll hear a tale. A tale of the beginnings of geocaching.com. Jeremy Irish joins me for a conversation. Jeremy is one of Geocaching HQ’s co-founders, currently a senior vice president here. He started geocaching.com, so he’s kind of a big deal. He has a lot of great stories, and you’ll hear many of them today. I’ve looked forward to having him on our podcast for a long time, and he really delivered. I hope you enjoy this talk as much as I did. This is me and Jeremy Irish talking, what else, geocaching.

[music]

01:04 CR: Well, Jeremy, thank you for doing this. You’ve never struck me as somebody who’s a look-back kind of a guy, you’re look forward kind of a guy, aren’t you?

01:10 Jeremy Irish: That’s pretty true, yeah.

01:12 CR: You don’t really… You don’t really seem to revel in talking about the glory days and all that stuff.

01:15 JI: I get bored really quickly.

01:17 CR: You get bored. [laughter] So we appreciate you humoring us and talking a little bit about stuff here as we’ve got this big anniversary coming up next year, 20 years since the website started, since geocaching started. When you think back to 20 years ago today, it’d be 1999, you were still a little ways off from hearing about this game. What kind of stuff were you doing back then?

01:41 JI: Oh geez, let me see. Well, I was originally from the East Coast, so I grew up in Virginia. I was working for General Electric; actually, I was a webmaster when that was a term. And I was on the East Coast, and I was really just bored of being on the East Coast, and I’d lived there my whole life, and I always said it was like one of those flavor ices, once you suck all the… All the really sweetness out of it, then all you’re left with is a little bit like an ice cube.

02:05 CR: Yeah, right.

02:07 JI: I was really thinking about where I wanted to go next. And I had joined the Air Force, and I traveled to South Korea, and then I actually did my training in California, and went down to Texas. So I ended up back in Maryland, just close to my home, and really got that travel lust, so decided to go out to the Pacific Northwest. And I was a webmaster for GE, so I was basically one of the first web developers out there, so I was trying to figure the thing out. And I was looking online for tech jobs… And this was in ’98. And I found out that Microsoft was out in the Pacific Northwest, out in Seattle, and I got a job offer to come out, so that fall of ’98 I came out to Bellevue, where Microsoft is, and I started working for them as a contractor. So that’s what I was doing originally.

03:00 JI: I did that for a year. I was building internal websites and doing work for them, and it was coming up on one year of my contract, and at that point they give you a couple of months off before you can do contract with Microsoft again. So there was a company that wanted to do some contracting work for the same company I was working for, and I started working at Savvy Shopper, and Savvy Shopper was online… They called it Bricks to Mortar. No, Bricks to Clicks was what they called it. So it was basically taking on a physical store and then putting it online where that was kind of new and fancy. So I worked on the e-commerce platform shopping cart application for this men’s online retailer, and that’s where I met Bryan and Elias, so we were all working for this company together. So that was the beginning of the three of us meeting and working together as co-workers instead of as entrepreneurs or partners in that. And we were working for an entrepreneur, so it was our first experience working together, which allowed us to have a really strong relationship before we started geocaching.

04:08 CR: So May 3rd, 2000, Dave Ulmer hides the first stash, as it was called then. Mike Teague is the first person to find it. People are hiding stashes and posting the coordinates online. Mike Teague is documenting them on his personal home page, and some time around July 2000 you stumble on that home page. What was it that piqued your interest about what you were seeing?

04:33 JI: At Savvy Shopper, we had moved to a new location, and we had a lot… I had 20 employees, something like that, I don’t exactly know how many. But we had this warehouse, and one of the guys who worked at the company, he brought in a Garmin eTrex, it was one of those yellow eTrex units, into the office and he was showing it around. And I knew about GPS before, but I thought about it in car navigation stuff, so I didn’t know a lot about the technology. And when I saw this handheld, it was… I don’t know, two AA batteries and you could walk around with this thing. And I went outside with it, ’cause I’m still a gadget geek, so I went outside and I turned it on. And the original eTrexes, and you can probably see the pictures online, they would show this little guy, and he’s this little pixelated guy, and there were, I think, four satellites up above him that were digital. And every time you connected to a satellite there was this little lightning symbol that went to each one of them. And then once you connected to three of them, then you could start getting your location.

05:31 JI: And there were no maps, it was just this screen, this blank screen. When you connected to it and you were walking around, the little guy started walking too, and you would notice that it would draw a track behind you. And I was like, this is like a video game, there’s this… It’s like Tron in a way, or Snake, one of the original games. I was like, well, there must be games related to GPS, because this looks like a game. So I did some searching online, and I came across the Great American GPS Stash Hunt, and the newsgroup as well that was talking about it, and realized there was this game that had just started.

06:12 JI: So I ended up on, I think… I forget the website, I think it maybe was Matt Stum, he was the one who coined the name geocaching. And saw that there were a bunch of caches listed. Mike Teague’s website actually was the first one I went to. And I saw that there was like a couple, maybe one or two in the state of Washington, I don’t recall exactly. But there was one and I was able to plot it by going to RAI and looking at a topographic map, ’cause I knew it was in Washington State, but I had no idea where it was. I immediately went out and then I bought my own GPS that weekend. I went to a marine supply store since I don’t even think RAI had it.

06:46 JI: I bought one of these things, it was like 115 bucks, so it was a big purchase, but I was excited. I was like, “I’m gonna find this container. This is really cool.” So I went and I looked at the topographic maps and kinda got a general idea of where this area was, but I didn’t have much more information, other than this map and my GPS. So I basically put the GPS on. It gave me a distance and direction and I just started driving.

07:08 JI: So I went with another co-worker of mine and my puppy. I had a beagle puppy. So I was like, “I’m gonna take my puppy out for a walk.” So he and I and the puppy went down and drove along this old logging trail, ended up at this… We just parked on the side of the road and then just started hiking and we found a trail that led us up through… It was kind of a deforested area. So there’s a lot of logging in the Pacific Northwest. So I was in this area that they do logging. So it was like a lot of stumps and following up the trail, and I realized a few things. I didn’t have any water with me, so I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t have water for me. I didn’t have snacks. I didn’t backpack. I just… We just started walking like it was no big deal.

07:51 CR: Like you’re playing a video game.

07:51 JI: Like I was playing a video game, yeah. I didn’t think about it. I was just following the arrow, and just like, “Okay, let’s do this.” So, we’re hiking up. Of course, my friend, he was a former army, he actually had an IV in his backpack, so he was prepared. I was totally not prepared.

08:05 CR: Wow.

08:05 JI: But he still didn’t have water, but he had a water filtration system. So there was a point like along the trail where we don’t have any water and we have to find some old murky swamp that we have to get some water out of just so we can continue on, because we’re all totally unprepared for this, but over-prepared in one way and under-prepared in the other. So, it was really hilarious. There was bugs and I… In the Pacific Northwest, I’m not used to seeing a lot of bugs, like in East Coast all the time. So I didn’t have any bug spray either. So it was miserable. The whole experience was miserable getting to the top of this mountain.

08:37 JI: But once we got to the top, and there was this just a stumpy area, and I noticed that we were getting close, within 20 feet, looked around and I found this container. And it had a notebook in it. It a had a disposable camera. It had a Sunny Delight drink in it, which… This is one of the reasons why we have no food in caches because you don’t put a Sunny Delight drink. I know that it’s not really orange juice, but it’s not really drinkable after it’s been out there for that long.

09:06 JI: So yeah, so I was so excited about it and all those problems that I had along the way and that we had getting there, didn’t really matter ’cause we found this thing that somebody had posted online in these coordinates and all we did was follow the coordinates to this location. So, I was pretty elated and from then on, and I’ve heard this quote before, but it’s not an adventure until something goes wrong. That’s kind of how it was. So it became a story, and at the time it was miserable and stuff, but that excitement of finding it, called the eureka moment that you get when you find it. I was like, “I need to find more of these. I got my fix. I need to do this again.”

09:43 JI: So as we’re coming back down the mountain and at this point I think I’m carrying my puppy, ’cause the puppy’s exhausted. I get to the car. I get to my Saturn, which of course I’m driving a Saturn on logging trails, so don’t do that either. I get in the car and I’m like, “Well, I want this to be something bigger than just a few. What can I do to make this thing more accessible and people are more prepared, and I can explain this better and there needs to be a community around this. And how am I gonna do this? I wanna do this, I wanna support it.” so driving…

10:15 CR: You were thinking that then?

10:17 JI: Well, yeah, ’cause I was like, “Well, if we can get a lot of people to do this then there will be more for me to do, ’cause I can’t hide them and find them.” It’s like I don’t… I need some serious memory loss to do that. So I need a community of people to go out there and place these things so I can place them. So, it was really like selfish reasons, originally, for creating this was, “Hey, if I help with this, then I’ll be able to do this more often.” So coming back, I was like, “Well, I have dev skills. I have some web skills. So what if I could create a website to do this?” So, I looked around to see if is anybody else doing this? And people were more just placing them, posting them to the news group. Mike Teague was documenting those locations, some people was writing bits of code they could put it in a postal code or something like that and it would return like a list or you put your coordinates in and it’ll sort by distance, so you can at least know which ones are near you, that sort of thing.

11:11 JI: So, I kinda took about a lot of those ideas, and I had to learn about great circle calculations to figure out how to do a distance calculation between two points on the planet and how do I code that? How do I create a database for this? All these things, which got me excited because it sort of touched on my interest in technology, but also really encouraged me to go outside, which is something that I hadn’t done since I was in the Boy Scouts, when I was more of a kid. When I became an adult it was more a sedentary existence where I was traveling from the office to home and home to the office. Being a video game, I’d say addict, I also played lots of video games. So it was more like video game indoors.

11:53 JI: So my thought was, “Well, this touches… This will get me healthy. This will hit my tech interest here and my gadget… My interest for gadgets. So, why don’t combine those two?” And then maybe other people will do that too, and they’ll get excited and they’ll place these things. So it was like the symbiotic relationship that I wanted to have with other people in doing this.

12:14 JI: So, eventually I built something that made sense, it worked. And actually just one tidbit is I was looking for something that would relate to technology and nature, and I found… I was on the Ansel Adams website and the Ansel Adams website had a lot of really good black and white photography ’cause that’s what Adam, what he’s known about. So I thought, well, I’ll just basically copy Ansel Adams’ [chuckle] website in some ways. So a lot of that initial website was based on that website, and using some color versus black and white imagery, and trying to put some pictures of the outdoors to get people excited about it and stuff like that.

12:56 JI: So I built this website, and I reached out to Mike Teague and said, “Hey, I’ve got this website. Can you give me some feedback?” And he gave me a little feedback, and some back and forth, and I continued to build the website. And then I think it was September… Was it first?

13:12 CR: Second.

13:12 JI: Second, okay, it was September 2nd of 2000, his website went down for maintenance or something. His provider, his ISP shut down his site. And people were like, “Well, I wanna go and find out where these geocaches are,” and they weren’t geocaches, but the stashes. And Mike Teague said, “Well, go over to geocaching.com. Jeremy’s been working on this. You can go there and check it out.” So that’s really where we consider the first launch of geocaching. It had been up before then, but at that time it was all hand-entered for me, people would email me locations and information, and then I would put them in the database. So the earliest geocaches don’t even have usernames associated with the caches.

13:56 JI: But at the time of the launch, there were 75 caches that I documented and entered into the system, and then over time those people… As we created accounts and that sort of thing, people would adopt those. But some people who just left the activity don’t, so sometimes you’ll see some and they’re associated with one of my old accounts because could never find the owner for those.

14:15 CR: And it’s not long before word really gets out about this. Slashdot did something in September 2000, then you mentioned New York Times article, which I believe was in October, and then CNN did something in December. Was that an exciting time? Was it overwhelming? Was it a mix of the two?

14:33 JI: Well, at that time, I had just created the website on my own, and I’d been working on it, and I was actually running it out of my bedroom. So I had, I think, an ISDN connection or something like that, a low internet connection. So it wasn’t in a server room, and it wasn’t… It didn’t have any capacity at all. So when you get slashdotted, when it was a thing, it brought the server to its knees, and nobody could interact with it, so it shut it down. We got slashdotted, so that was scary. And then I was starting to get some inquiries like, “Oh, I saw this Slashdot article or Slashdot post. I’d like to write an article about this, New York Times, and don’t let anybody scoop me. I want to talk about this, I wanna be the first whatever,” I’m like, “Well, you are the New York Times, so yeah, of course.” So that was crazy.

15:21 JI: And then CNN picked up on the New York Times, and over the course of… I think it was the holidays, they would just repeatedly play me awkwardly walking on the beach, [chuckle] talking about geocaching. And they picked the beach, I think, ’cause maybe pirates, I’m not really sure.

15:37 CR: Oh, we gotta find that. I need to find that clip.

15:38 JI: Yeah, but you can’t really… You can’t be cool when you’re walking in the sand, it just doesn’t… [laughter]

15:43 CR: No, no.

15:44 JI: It doesn’t work that way. So yeah, so I was like… That was weird ’cause I’d never done any kind of interviews with that and… Like that, and I didn’t know where it was going, but I knew that I didn’t wanna do this alone, so at that point I reached out to Bryan and Elias and said, “Hey, you guys are… You fill the areas that I can’t do.” Elias was really… A lot of the back-end work that keeps the site running, or that kept the site running back then, I was the designer and developer, and then Bryan really had a lot of business acumen. And being a lawyer doesn’t help either. It does help, sorry.

[laughter]

16:24 JI: That’s my subconscious talking about lawyers but…

16:26 CR: We won’t let Bryan hear that part.

16:27 JI: No, no, he’s heard all the lawyer jokes, so… [chuckle]

16:30 CR: No doubt, no doubt.

16:30 JI: So it’s fine. And having somebody with a lot of business experience. And so the three of us really worked well together, and I said, “Well, it’s great,” ’cause having three is really great for running a business because there’s always a tie-breaker. Either you all agree, or one person disagrees, or two people disagrees, but there’s always gonna be a decision that gets made. So I didn’t realize at the time, I just thought these are two people that really… I really respect, and I’ve worked with them, and I understand them, and they’re excited for this, but they don’t know where it’s going either. It’s gonna be this side project that we’ll work on. It’ll be fun, but we’re not gonna spend… I even remember writing an email to them at one point… I was thinking it was 2001, and saying, “I don’t think this thing will ever make money, so we need to figure out a way for it to support itself. Because if it can’t support itself, I can’t spend all of my nonworking time working on this.” I’m kind of getting ahead, but that was… Having two partners was definitely key to being successful in this.

17:32 CR: The company has around 75 employees now, but it didn’t… Just as you alluded to, it didn’t just take off like a rocket, right?

17:38 JI: No. [chuckle]

17:39 CR: It was five years, for instance, before Bryan became a full-time employee. During the early days, as you said, it was you and all of you guys, doing this as you were doing your regular jobs, and then as time went on you were able to devote your focus to geocaching. But it wasn’t like that right off the bat.

17:58 JI: No, no, it… So yeah, after the… We were selling Travel Bugs, I think, in 2001, and we were selling t-shirts. So originally we started the company by using shared server space and selling t-shirts. We were working with this company that basically acquired the assets and us. And they were a… They do imprinting, they do silk screening, and embroidery, and that sort of thing. So I was building e-commerce sites for them, and that was my full-time job for… I think it was two or three years that I was doing that. And my side gig was doing geocaching, and that was more of a passion project ’cause I really didn’t… I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t know if it was gonna be sustainable on its own. So yeah, we sold 144 t-shirts originally, that was our original geocaching logo, which is definitely more complex than today’s logo. That ended up keeping the server costs and buying more shirts. So we keep… With that profit we get more shirts and then we buy more shirts, and…

19:00 JI: In 2001, we came up with this idea… I came up with this idea for Travel Bugs and that would help fund as well. I remember just sitting and watching TV, and then just peeling stickers of activation codes and tracking codes and we were completely disorganized with it, so I’d have to find the tracking number of the Travel Bug on this list, and then stick it on the envelope, and then ship them out. So we’re all doing this by hand. So any of the ones you see, there’re literally imprinted or numerical, those are like the original Travel Bugs that were out there that we had. And we had to figure out how to source it, who’s gonna print Travel Bugs.

19:36 CR: When Nate was on the show a while back, we had a fun conversation with him and Bryan about the big machine you guys had, the…

19:43 JI: Oh yeah, it would go…

[vocalization]

19:44 CR: It shook the building and… [laughter]

19:46 JI: Yeah, I know, yeah, that was for the Jeep promotion originally, ’cause we were trying to do alphanumeric codes ’cause the original numeric codes were easily breakable and for this we wanted to have something a little bit harder. So we had to figure out how to program this thing, which used to print or stamp dog tags. So it was a dog tag stamper. Yeah, and that thing… [chuckle] It was so loud, yeah, so we all had to wear headphones or just deal with it. But that was all part of it…

20:14 CR: Right.

20:14 JI: The experience.

20:15 CR: The game of geocaching is unique for a lot of reasons, and I think one of the most important is that the community invented the game. The community creates the content. And for that reason, you and Bryan and Elias and this company have always had a unique relationship with the community. Could you talk about that a bit?

20:36 JI: Obviously, starting this thing out, I realized that I needed to have a bunch of people that will participate in this thing so I could participate in it as well. So… And I hadn’t run communities before, so this is all new to me. But creating the forum, that was one of the first… Well, actually, the mailing list, we had a geocaching mailing list that we started with first and that was just like… In this community, I need to encourage people to do this. And people… And I remember the first person in California to place a cache was like, “Well if I place one of these things, will anybody actually find it?” We had this… We kept saying, “If you hide it, they will come. We just say, “If you hide it they will come.” People will hide it and they say, “Oh wow, somebody logged my cache and I got an email,” and you’re like, “Yep, alright well, thank you.”

21:18 CR: Tell your friends. [chuckle]

21:18 JI: And tell your friends, yeah, literally, tell your friends. Key things I was thinking about when the geocaching activity started, one of them was… ‘Cause there was some counter-culture, “Let’s go to abandoned buildings and take pictures,” kind of thing, “let’s go trespass.” And people would… And I think there’s still websites out there that do that. It’s like, “Oh hey, I went into Disney property, I went to this old ride and I snuck in, I took all these photos,” and they uploaded it, and then it’s basically encouraging people to go and… The pictures are great, but encouraging people to go trespassing in these locations, I was like, “Well we can’t be committing crimes. We need to be above board. This needs to be a public website. We need to work with people if people are trespassing or littering or they’re doing something that they’re not supposed to do.”

22:01 JI: And then the other big thing was family-friendly was important. And being family-friendly meant that if I ever had kids, and now I have three, and I go to a geocache, I’m not going to expect something that I shouldn’t or go to a place that I wouldn’t wanna bring my kids. Keep that above board. And then the third one, commercialization.

22:22 JI: Okay, so no solicitation. And over the years, this has been a controversial one. There’s always exceptions to the rule, and that’s why we always call them guidelines instead of rules, because there has to be some allowances to creativity. But we didn’t want people to be actively using these to get you to go and buy ice cream or put coupons in them, or create little contests and stuff like that unless if we manage it in some way that is better for the community. And we’ve experimented with ideas in doing promotions over the years and the end result is like any kind of activity that we incorporate or advertise and incorporate into the game. It’s something that enhances the game, it doesn’t detract from it. So that was probably the three core pillars, I guess, that we had considered originally when starting the website.

23:08 CR: You briefly mentioned it earlier, but maybe talk a little bit more about Travel Bugs because that’s become such a big part of the game and it’s something that you came up with. What was the impetus for that?

23:19 JI: Well, originally, I would go to geocaches and people would put objects in Ziploc bags and they would have a piece of paper in it and it would say, “Hey, if you found this, send me an email, let me know that you found it and where you found it.” And this is… And some of them are like, “And this is from such-and-such a location, I’m trying to get to this location.” So that was happening naturally. People were just wanting to put them in caches and just see where they went. So it was like putting a message in a bottle, and then seeing where it floats to based on people moving it. Also, at the same time, there was an activity called Where’s George. And Where’s George is when you take… Every dollar bill has its own serial numbers, so you would enter the serial number of a bill into this website, and then you could write a message like when you found it, and then they would spend the bill, and then they would write or stamp a Where’s George stamp on there to say, “Go to wheresgeorge.com and enter in this code and tell me where it’s been.”

24:16 JI: I was like, “Well I can combine the idea that here, somebody has a goal with this object that they put in a cash container with this idea where you take a serial number, a unique identifier, and then you can go to a website and find out where it’s been. If you combine those two, and then somehow integrate it to the game, and then charge for the tags, this would be a funding opportunity for us to get more functionality, maybe hire some people, maybe not do this as my side gig anymore, so I can focus on this more.”

24:43 JI: So that’s basically the idea, how it got started originally, just finding how to source it and get the first ones printed and that sort of thing. That took some… A little bit of time, but that was the idea. And then, of course, you’re bitten by the Travel Bug, the idea that this thing is vicariously moving… You are vicariously living through the bugs that are moving around. Hopefully, people post photos of them and you’ll get emails about these adventures these little bugs go on. So that was the basic idea.

25:10 CR: I could spend all day asking you about lots of other projects, but are there things that… Moments that are top of mind for you? I mean when… And the rare times that you do think back, because I know you like to look forward, but if you are just reminiscing, are there certain projects that come to mind or certain moments in the history that are particularly memorable for you?

25:31 JI: So I think the Jeep one was really cool just because I love Jeeps, and I finally bought a Jeep after all these years in 2014, I think, or something like that. I finally bought a Jeep. This promotion really hit just some buttons for me, the happy buttons. The idea of finding out there are brands that really integrate with the game. The fact that we had these little diecast metal Jeeps that… Just fun things like, how do we print them, and how do we get them out to the world so people can move them around? Do we ship them? I remember packaging them were fun ’cause we’d get… We just had shipments of these little diecast metal Jeeps that would arrive and I think it was the yellow Jeep originally, which then we did locationless caches around and one of them was the find yellow jeep. So it was kind of a fun mix of the two projects. And then releasing them out, and then seeing the photography that people would submit, because there was a sweepstakes, but there was also a photography… There was an essay and a photography portion of it, and then people would choose like the best pictures; somebody won a Jeep at the end of the promotion, which is pretty awesome, along with the sweepstakes and that sort of thing.

26:35 JI: So that was cool, just because it combined Jeep, this amazing brand experience with geocaching. Never thought I had the opportunity to do something like that. And then just the promotion itself was very unique and seeing the creative user content that people are creating out there with the photography, or even like geocaches. So that’s the Jeep promotion. The things that have stood out to me over the years is traveling. The first time I was able to travel, I was flown to Denmark to speak at an event and I’d never done that before. So I got to go to Copenhagen, and then met up with the folks that had sponsored me to come out, drove on a Segway; it was the first time I was on a Segway, and then got to see Copenhagen, got to fly to a new… Or was it… Yeah, fly to a new country.

27:27 JI: And then I went to Aarhus and met now our first employee’s husband in Aarhus, Denmark and that was where I did my speaking event. So just being able to travel outside the United States and have my experience, first experience talking about geocaching. And then just all the events I’ve gone to; to GeoWoodstock where I used to get in line and serve, what was it, Caesar salad; I did that like a couple of years. It was fun just to be in line to be able to… It’s hard to meet 500 geocachers in an event. So the best way to do that is serve them food, ’cause everybody’s coming to the same location. [chuckle] So it was like, “Hey, here’s some Caesar salad. Nice to meet you.”

[laughter]

28:06 JI: And then we don’t have a lot of time, so move along, and then we’ll talk to the next person because you’re limited with your time. So there’s… I went down to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest and Richard Garriott has a geocache there where you end up at a tower that he created, really cool. You end up walking along this trail with all of this like Halloween-themed stuff along the way after solving all these puzzles, and even meeting Richard Garriott, which as a videogame geek guy, grew up with Ultima series of games. So I played all the Ultima single player games as the avatar to the Ultima online experience. So meetings like… So, childhood hero, also now, tourist astronaut, really cool.

28:49 CR: Yeah, very cool. Yeah.

28:50 JI: Got to meet some really cool people. They don’t have to be celebrities, [chuckle] like meet geocachers that are gadget cachers that create these amazing experiences. I could go on on all the really cool experiences that I’ve done because of this game.

29:06 CR: So there was a lot of excitement fairly recently, it’s been a couple of years, but about the return of the… There was the APE cache that was found in Washington and now there’s two active APE caches. And you actually were… You hid that Washington, you and John Stanley, right, were the ones that actually hid it. How about that promotion? That was something that is part of geocaching lore and people love talking about the APE cache and I just kinda wonder when you think back to working with 20th Century Fox on that whole thing.

29:32 JI: It was interesting at the time. It’s outlived the movie. Nobody watches the movie after they go and find one of these geocaches. They basically approached us and said, “We wanna do something with you for this movie coming out,” and they had this concept of this alternate history of evolution where there’s these apes that have been evolved, just like man has been evolved and there’s this evidence out there. So there’s this organization that’s going to release this proof. So each location, they basically asked, “How do we do this?” It was a collaborative experience. So coming up with the idea where we get excitement around Project APE with the entire world, but at the same time, there’s only 12, and then I think 13 locations that you could place them, that a lot of people are not gonna be able to play this game. So how are you gonna live vicariously through the people who are finding it? How do you get that excitement around it and try to mitigate some of the disappointment?

30:31 JI: So we picked all the locations and we found local geocachers that would place it for us. I had that all coordinated. And then there’s so much trust in there, too. This is like if I’m sending a prop from the movie in this big container to somebody I’ve never met and that person actually placed the container and didn’t take the prop from the movie, that’s pretty impressive. So it’s like this absolute trust that happened. We had very trustworthy amazing geocachers that worked on it. And then this idea that throughout the week, we would sort of slowly reduce the radius of where the geocache is so they could find it. That was a lot of fun, just trying to schedule that even personally, like sending out a message so people are ready for this thing. And then I think it was every Friday, releasing it, and then seeing how quickly people would find it.

31:17 JI: I used to say that we could get a geocacher to somewhere faster than the US government could. [laughter] ‘Cause you’d just post a coordinate of a new geocache and send out an instant email that says, “Hey everybody, there’s a geocache there, go find it,” and it would be found within less than an hour.

31:32 CR: That’s true.

31:32 JI: It would be found anywhere in the world, more or less. So anyway, that was really exciting. And geocaches were found within an hour. Once people found out it was in Washington State or something, people are waiting for that message to go out, where multiple people would show up at the same time. And nobody ever fought over a geocache as far as I knew. But just the fact that it lived on beyond the promotion and has become legendary, and the fact that now there’s the trifecta that you can find the three geocaches in the Pacific Northwest and a lot of people will travel here, and then the interest in going to Brazil to find a geocache that’s out there, and the fact that that thing still exists today is pretty impressive.

32:16 CR: Yeah, I mean I never would’ve… I don’t know if I ever would have gone to Brazil if it wasn’t for that cache.

[chuckle]

32:21 JI: So yeah, it’s awesome that this has created that. I wanted to feel like Indiana Jones every time I found a geocache. But you literally can go to Brazil and find a geocache now and it feels like that kind of adventure. So, yeah, and then the fact that I think it was really well introduced back into the game, getting that geocache back to make that trifecta happen, having that community involvement for it. Honestly, in the past, I would have shut down those geocaches if I hadn’t… At that time, I used to have regrets not shutting them down because they were such a pain. People would constantly wanna have the old geocaches returned to those locations with a new container and we had to create rules around it and it was frustrating because I wanted to capture the original experience, but replacing the container just wasn’t… It didn’t seem right to me. So, being the bad guy often throughout the game has not been the most comfortable part of the experience, but I think it’s helped the game.

33:24 CR: A couple of years ago, after many years as the company president, you shifted gears, you moved into a senior VP role, what made you wanna do that?

33:32 JI: Yeah, it’s been about two years now. I had a lot of life changes and realized… I joke when I was… I became 42, that’s the answer to life, the universe and everything, if you know Douglas Adams books. So that was my year of living uncomfortably, is how I themed it. And I just got to thinking about what’s important and how much energy and time that I put into the game. And I love all the energy and time I put in the game, but really, I think as a result, a lot of my personal side suffered.

34:04 JI: So I kinda went through some changes there and I was still president and working through it and that sort of thing. But there was a point where I thought, “Well, my passion, it is about… Passion is building something.” And you’re right, I’m more of a forward thinker. I like to break things because I think breaking things make things change over time and you can’t just do the same thing. So, I came to the realization that I wanted to do something else. I wanted to do something within the company, but I didn’t wanna manage the company. I think I manage okay, but I’m better at building product and coming up with new ideas and it was keeping me from doing that.

34:42 JI: So it’s been over two years now. Bryan, Elias and I talked and I thought, “Well, I think the best thing to do is me to step down, and then look at other concepts around geocaching and location-based games in general. So why don’t I take this time and focus on figuring out new ideas, playing around with those ideas, and if those ideas take off and there’s some spark of… Something fits within the game, then we’ll go for it.”

[music]

35:12 CR: So there you have it, Jeremy Irish. I learned a lot during that talk. I heard several fun stories that I had not heard before, hope you did, too. If you have an idea for our podcast, something you’d like to hear us talk about, you can send an email to podcast@geocaching.com. That is podcast@geocaching.com. We would love to hear your ideas. Hard to top this talk with Jeremy, but we will try. So, hey, thanks for downloading our podcast. Please tell your friends. And from all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

July 11, 2010 / Eric Schudiske /

Groundspeak’s Lost & Found Celebration – Geocaching.com’s Lost & Found Video

Geocachers from around the world celebrated ten years of geocaching at Groundspeak Headquarters in Seattle, Washington on July 4th, 2010. The Lost & Found Celebration brought together thousands of geocachers, dozens of Lackeys, Groundspeak’s mascot Signal the Frog, the Bubbleman, a dunk tank and The Founders of Geocaching.com.

Geocachers were also able to explore the Fremont neighborhood and earn a trackable HQ tag by completing a scavenger hunt.

Groundspeak CEO, President and Co-Founder Jeremy Irish gets dunked.

There’s more celebrating to come. Stay tuned for additional plans to commemorate ten years of geocaching.

Tell us, how have you celebrated a decade of geocaching?

You can see even more geocaching adventures by watching our Lost & Found video series here.

Official Blog

Tag: Jeremy Irish

Inside Geocaching HQ transcript (episode 47): 20 years of geocaching with HQ co-founders Jeremy Irish and Bryan Roth

Episode 47: 20 years of geocaching with HQ co-founders Jeremy Irish and Bryan Roth

Episode 25: Jeremy Irish, Geocaching HQ co-founder

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 25): Jeremy Irish

Groundspeak’s Lost & Found Celebration – Geocaching.com’s Lost & Found Video

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