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0:00:00.2 Chris Ronan: Hello everybody. This is Inside Geocaching HQ. It is the podcast about what is happening at HQ in Seattle. I am Chris Ronan, one of the 95 or so lackeys who have the great pleasure of serving the geocaching community. And we want to thank you for having a listen to our podcast. It has been a while, and I’m sorry for that. It’s been so nice to meet many of you out in the wild at geocaching events and to hear your great feedback about the HQ podcast. I think the wait is well worth it, though, because today I have a conversation with two of the co-founders of Geocaching HQ, Jeremy Irish and Bryan Roth. They, of course, have countless memories to share from their first 25 years of geocaching, as well as thoughts about where the game is going and where HQ is going. So let’s dig right into it. Me, Jeremy, and Bryan talking about 25 years of geocaching and beyond. Okay, so Bryan and Jeremy are here in the flesh at HQ. We are actually inside HQ for the HQ podcast, and it’s the 25th anniversary of geocaching, and there’s been so much celebration about it this year, and I thought it would be great to get you guys together.

0:01:42.7 Chris Ronan: I think we last did this about five years ago where we reminisce and maybe you tell some stories about it. So, okay, let’s go back. Let’s say it’s June of the year 2000. The game has just, the first geocache was just placed a month ago, and Jeremy, had you already started by now? Had you started playing by now?

0:02:08.3 Jeremy Irish: I think it was about that time. I went back and I actually logged that first cache, so if I looked up online, I could probably tell the date that I did it, but I found out about it from, what was it? I was researching because Michael Schmidt used to talk about that part.

0:02:25.8 Bryan Roth: Yeah, so we were working at a dot-com in the early, well, in the year 2000, and a friend of ours, one of our colleagues named Michael Schmidt, brought a Garmin eTrex into the office that I think he had gotten for his birthday or something like that, and he was showing it off, and I remember Jeremy sort of being fascinated with it and going outside, and you can see the little man walking with the breadcrumb trail, and then I think he went online thinking about what else can you do with this device?

0:03:00.7 Jeremy Irish: It was an animated character on the eTrex. I don’t know if they still have that. It would show when it connected to all the satellites, so I didn’t know anything about the technology and how it worked, and it was fascinating to me that you could actually identify your location based on satellites in space, and I didn’t know the technology, like how many satellites and why it was working. It was all new for me, so I went out and I bought my own GPS when I found out about this game that started called the Great American GPS Stash Hunt. And it was on a news group about GPS enthusiasts, basically, and that was when I found out that recently that selective availability had been turned off and that the technology went from about 300-foot accuracy to about 30-foot, so like a football field versus being something that’s within sight range, so discovering that this Dave Ulmer had placed a cache and another person, Mike Teague, had placed a geocache about, I guess, an hour and a half away from my house. I went out. I bought a GPS device.

0:04:06.1 Jeremy Irish: I had to find a place that would sell one, so it was like a marine store, and then I went to REI and actually found maps of the area just to get a general idea of the place, but there was no turn-by-turn direction, so it was basically following the arrow to the general place and then finding a way to get there, so that was really exciting because it was a treasure hunt. I didn’t know what I was going to find, and I didn’t know what the experience would be like, but I also wasn’t prepared for it. I had a Saturn at the time, and it was an old logging road with huge rocks, and I had brought my beagle, who was a puppy at the time, and she’s not used to long walks with me, so it was like me going on this trip unprepared and hiking this trail in the middle of nowhere. I should have told somebody where I was going, and it was a long, arduous hike to the top, and when I ended up in this bunch of field of stumps, behind one of the stumps was a container, and it had a logbook in it.

0:05:10.4 Jeremy Irish: It had a Sunny Delight drink in it, which no one would drink. That’s actually one of the reasons why one of the first rules is no food in caches, and I was elated. I thought it was great. I was so excited about it that when I was coming back down and I had plenty of time to think. I thought about all the ways that I want other people to play this game or create this game or create geocaches, not the game itself, and it was more of a selfish thing because I wanted to have those in the world so I could find more of them.

0:05:39.0 Bryan Roth: Yeah, and I remember the following week, Jeremy came back to the office and he was telling Elias and I and some other folks about this adventure. And he said, you know, I think I could build a website to make it easier for people to play and to make sure that people are prepared. And like, what a fun way to use technology to get people outside. And it was like, oh, well, that sounds cool. Like, you know, go do it. Let us know what you think, you know, let us know how it goes. And it wasn’t long after, like, we had a number of conversations over the following months about his conversations with Mike Teague, different things that he was adding sort of database driven. So zip code lookup and things like that. And then in September 2nd, September 3rd of 2000, when Mike Teague’s website went down, he basically told all the people that were using his website to go to geocaching.com, which Jeremy effectively had just launched.

0:06:41.2 Jeremy Irish: Yeah, that time, Mike Teague was documenting all the geocaches that were being posted to the news group or emailed to him. And I was taking those and putting them into the system to do tests. And I was learning about the great circle calculation and some of the nerdy stuff about calculating distance. So to make sure that it would work and how do I get a zip code database at the time and, you know, all those things that was exciting to me because I like building the tools. And when I posted all that, it didn’t even have an account system. So it was really just a listing service with a search. That’s when it was listed on September 2nd. And that’s the basics of it. It had all the information about what it was, but it didn’t have a lot of functionality to it.

0:07:26.0 Chris Ronan: Okay, so as you alluded to, you guys are all working together, the two of you and Elias, who is not here today, but shout out to Elias. So you guys are working together. Jeremy, how did you decide or, you know, because you’re doing most of the work, right? And at some point, there’s a decision made, you get together with these other guys. And I guess I’m just thinking about back in the late 90s, early 2000s, a lot of companies booming and busting the whole dot-com thing. I don’t know that you’re really envisioning we might still be doing this in 25 years. So there’s a certain amount of luck involved in picking the right or the right people coming together to work together like the three of you did. Was it just luck or did you guys see something in each other that you thought would you each had skills or personalities that would be able to mesh together and have some longevity?

0:08:24.1 Jeremy Irish: Yeah, there’s a few things that happened that made it work. And the first one is that we worked together for a while. So we knew each other very well. We knew our strengths and weaknesses. And we all had complementary skills that would work together. Bryan has a legal background, a lot of operations background experience. I’m a programmer, developer, and I could do the full stack. So I could do the web, I could do the back end, but I couldn’t do the back back end, like all the infrastructure work. And that’s where Elias came in. And Elias was doing that for the business that we were all working at. And I was doing the web stuff. And it made a lot of sense because I didn’t have that experience. He did. And also, we just really worked well together. Because it’s always good to throw tech ideas back and forth. And he was really like, he’s a fundamental knowledge of technology, while I’m sort of the all over the place technology guy, front end, but you know, it’s not that great. They even call it Jericode, which is still in the site today. And I have comments in there that says, you know, I don’t know how this works, but it works.

0:09:32.0 Chris Ronan: So I’m going to leave it here. And I’ll leave it for somebody else to fix later. So notes like that are still in there. And that’s how we gelled. So it was really a matter of, I need a lot of help here. And I know you guys are great. And we get along on a personal level, but we also have worked together at business level. And I think that having three people at the company really kept the company going and still keeps the company going. We still have board meetings and the three of us still talk about strategy and how to run the company to make sure that it still has the same kind of values that we had when we first started.

0:10:08.5 Bryan Roth: Yeah, I remember when Jeremy and Elias came over to my desk at the dot-com where we worked and they said, hey, you know, we were interested in starting a company and we think that, you know, this game could be really cool. There’s no money in it, but it’s a fun hobby and it looks like a good community and we have this complementary skill set. So, you know, Jeremy and I decided that we’re going to start a company and we want you to join us. And I remember just saying like, and I had known them because as Jeremy said, we worked together for quite some time at that point, and I knew that like these are smart guys and we got along personally. And, you know, in the evenings at the dot-com, we would stay late and play Tribes on, you know, a local area network and they were really good at it and I got killed all the time, but it was still super fun. And I was like, you know, I would love to just work with you guys because I saw how smart and talented they both were and I enjoyed working with them. I already had the experience of enjoying working with them. And then at that time, it was, this was in September of 2000. So the website had launched.

0:11:19.5 Bryan Roth: We were talking about forming a partnership. And this was around the time where the dot-coms were really starting to crash and burn. And, you know, as we were going through the process of figuring out like, okay, what happens next? We said, well, let’s start the company. I was able to put together the paperwork with the Secretary of State and, you know, file the Articles of Incorporation and things like that. And so on November 3rd of 2000, we officially became a company. It was Grounded Inc. That was the first name. And then…

0:11:55.9 Jeremy Irish: It was supposed to be kind of cheeky because we’re grounded because it’s like a tech company, but it’s related to GPS, but also it’s kind of naughty. I always thought geocaching was sort of like we’re asking for forgiveness, not permission at the beginning. Like, how do we become good as citizens? But at the same time, we’re kind of doing something that’s kind of in that gray area. We ultimately changed our name to Groundspeak, which is the idea. It’s like tech speak. So every place has a story. And we thought, well, maybe we’re going to work on other GPS-related games. And we didn’t want to like pigeonhole us into geocaching, but it turned out that geocaching is like so many things involved with geocaching that it made sense just to do geocaching.

0:12:40.1 Bryan Roth: Yeah, so that was our primary focus for so many years. I mean, we have had side projects like Waymarking and Where I Go was a side project that got rolled into geocaching, you know, for better or for worse.

0:12:52.6 Jeremy Irish: Benchmarking was another one.

0:12:55.1 Bryan Roth: Benchmarking was another.

0:12:55.8 Jeremy Irish: Database of benchmarks and people go out and find them.

0:12:58.9 Bryan Roth: And that’s gone now. We closed that down a couple of years ago because it was really minimal use and more of a distraction in terms of ongoing development here. But we formed the corporation and then the dot-com we were at crashed and burned. And one of the things that stood out to me at that time was that, you know, here we were, it was a retail men’s clothing, physical retail and then online retail. And when the company was going out of business, we had done all this online retail in the year 2000. And we had a big customer database and we had a history of orders and addresses and like a lot of information about the customers. But the privacy policy that we had for the company we worked at basically said, you know, we will never sell, we will never, you know, take advantage of the customers. And so at the end of the dot-com that, you know, the last days of its existence, we had a conversation with the CEO at the time and we said, look, this is a promise that we made to our customers that we wouldn’t sell this database. So as you look for other options for this business, selling the customer data or leveraging it in any way that’s not consistent with the promise that we made to the customers isn’t something we’re comfortable with.

0:14:17.1 Bryan Roth: And that was something that Jeremy, Elias and I were all really aligned with. And that just, not that I didn’t know it at the time, but that really solidified my understanding that like our values of serving the community, doing the right thing, you know, conducting business in an ethical, honest way, which is one of our guiding principles here at HQ, was something that I saw in my business partners. And, you know, if you go into the Wayback Machine, you know, you can see on the Savvy Shopper website is a letter that says, you know, dear customers, we’re shutting down and consistent with our promise to you, we are deleting the entire database of customer information. And we did.

0:15:01.2 Jeremy Irish: Yeah, we even have a philosophy here, which is that companies die by a thousand paper cuts. So every decision you make makes the culture in the company. And when we started it, we thought, would our, we didn’t think about culture because you don’t really think about culture, just like you don’t think about history until it happened. So with us, we’re like, okay, well, first we, you know, if we want something, the rest of the company should have something. It’s kind of like if you have candy, everybody else should have candy. But also like every decision we make is important. So make sure we rank the right ones. And that’s been really good. It’s kind of kept a really good culture. We’ve, you know, we’ve been best company.

0:15:41.0 Bryan Roth: Best place to work on, what is it, Outside Magazine for 14 years in a row?

0:15:46.1 Chris Ronan: I believe that’s right.

0:15:46.8 Bryan Roth: Something like that, 14 years in a row.

0:15:47.6 Jeremy Irish: Yeah, we’re really proud of that.

0:15:49.5 Bryan Roth: When the dot-com crashed, we all went to work for a promotional marketing company, and it was called Sunrise, and they did screen printing embroidery, among other things, and that’s where we printed the first geocaching t-shirts, which turned into our first revenue. But basically, Jeremy, Elias, and I had the experience of working together at two different companies. And so we’re on the employee side, and as an employee, you get to see, like, what do I like? What don’t I like? And so when we had the opportunity to build this company, we always kept that in mind. Like, first of all, we’re going to treat ourselves the same way that we treat everybody else in the company. And so let’s sort of live by the same rules. And we want to work in a place that’s fun to work. We want to work with people that are happy. We want to work in a place that takes good care of its employees. And as employees, as we got to the point where we were generating more revenue, it’s like, okay, well, now’s the time to have, you know, we should be paying for health insurance.

0:16:54.6 Bryan Roth: And so we said, all right, well, the three of us need health insurance. And we had a couple of employees at the time, like, they should have health insurance too. So we got a plan and everybody had health insurance. And then as the business became more successful, we were able to say, well, wouldn’t it be nice if we covered health insurance for not just our employees, but their spouses, significant others, dependents, and do the same for us. And I remember when we made that change and announced it, one of our employees who’s still here approaching over 20 years in about a couple of weeks from now, he came to me and he said, I can’t tell you how much this means to me and how much of a benefit it is for me to have the company take care of something that I don’t have to worry about now. And that was just an example of like, how can we do more of this? How can we be a better company? How can we take care of our employees? And that’s something that comes really from the shared values that myself, Jeremy, and Elias have. And when we talk about, you know, Jeremy mentioned that we have board meetings. We do it three times a year.

0:18:02.9 Bryan Roth: And even in our most recent meeting, you know, we’re having a discussion about a specific topic and somebody says, well, this is about the company. This is important for the company. This is important for the customers. Like, we have to do it this way. And it’s like, yep, we all agree we have to do it this way, which is, you know, what you see here today, 25 years later for Geocaching HQ/Groundspeak is not the product of a business plan. We didn’t sit down and write this all up and figure out how to do it. Instead, as Jeremy mentioned, this is the product of 10,000 individual decisions made over a long period of time with the best of intentions and a really solid set of values. And the reality is we didn’t get them all right. That is impossible. But we got enough of them right to be where we are today. It’s a benefit to us. It’s a benefit to the HQ lackeys and it’s a benefit to the community. We’re all really fortunate to have had this set of circumstances come together in the right way with the right people. And now, you know, there’s a global benefit for all of us. And that’s it’s something really special.

0:19:11.5 Jeremy Irish: It’s one of the benefits of having three founders is we always had a tiebreaker, too. So when we’re trying to make a decision, there’s usually two passionate people and one indifferent person on every decision. And that indifferent person would always break the tie. And I really appreciated that. I can see a lot of companies that start with three people that are successful. And I think that’s one of the big reasons because we all had like we come at at different ways. I like to break eggs to make an omelet. So I’m more of a, you know, this I’m going to break this because I think that maybe there’s something better to do.

0:19:45.9 Jeremy Irish: But then there’s somebody there to say, well, wait, you know, the omelet’s already been made. You know, like, do we really need to break more eggs? You know, is there something else we could do? Can we approve on what we have? And, you know, I’ll come around at some point. But, you know, some of the things are there’s stability. There’s, you know, let’s make change. And there there’s change that’s not necessary. That sort of thing. And that happens a lot within business because somebody might be really passionate about something and want to make a rash decision. And then you have two other people that are thinking about in a different way. And that’s been really good.

0:20:15.9 Chris Ronan: Yeah, a story I’ve told to people a lot over the years since I’ve worked here is that I was a heavy geocacher before I came here, and that if I would have come here, and I did think about this before I came here, I thought, God, if I get there and it’s all about the money and they’re jerks or whatever, I’m going to be not just upset but a little bit heartbroken about it because of how much I enjoyed the game. And so I’m not blowing smoke when I say that I’m happy that it wasn’t that way, but I’ve also wondered over time if that was, because I think it’s been a little bit more formalized at least in meetings I’ve. And just as you were saying, kind of the company guiding principles that you mentioned, Bryan, that there’s, you want to make decisions that are good for the community and the game and the business. But it sounds like that was not really formalized necessarily in the early. It just kind of happened, which is. I mean, because I think if there would have been a company, and it certainly could have happened, that would have said we’re going to build a website and we’re just going to try to bleed this thing dry like a venture capitalist or hedge fund owned it.

0:21:31.7 Jeremy Irish: It could have been a whole lot different. And I think I as a geocacher first am really glad that that didn’t happen. But it sounds like there was a little bit of, I don’t know if luck is the right word, but just kind of cosmic something that brought the right people together to where you guys were thinking about this stuff before it got formal.

0:21:51.3 Bryan Roth: It’s interesting to note that we started with three people, but we’ve had a lot of people join the company. Many have stayed and some have moved on. But over time, this isn’t just the product of Jeremy, Elias and I and our opinions and our thoughts and ideas. But this is, we’ve tried to create a culture where ideas are, you know, we want to hear the ideas. The best ideas can come from anywhere. And so if you look at where we are today, so much of the credit goes. A lot of the credit certainly goes to Jeremy, Elias and I, but so much of the credit goes to other lackeys who are here today or some lackeys who have moved on to other companies who have shown up with ideas or things that they’ve seen elsewhere like, hey, I see you doing this. Well, here’s what worked at this company that I used to work from. And so we’ve learned through sort of input from the team about other things for us to consider and making some of those decisions, again, aligned with the right values and sort of goals and perspective. We’ve been able to take this collective knowledge and this collective effort from all of the lackeys or from community volunteers or from cash hiders or the people you meet at events.

0:23:12.2 Bryan Roth: And so this game itself, what it is today, is really the product of a global community, certainly supported by this company and supported by Jeremy, Elias and I specifically. But this is a community game, and without all of those elements, who knows what it would look like? It wouldn’t look like it does today.

0:23:31.4 Jeremy Irish: We understand that we are a benevolent dictatorship as a company, like all companies are basically hopefully benevolent dictators. So we have to think of it as like we have full control over the site. We have full control over the accounts. We can create whatever rules we want, really can have any power, but you only hold power if people want to use your stuff or go to your website or give you feedback and stuff like that. So it’s really important to say, I know we are a dictatorship, but we’re a benevolent dictatorship, but we act as lackeys. So we’re the servants of the game. And that came up because people started calling us the powers that be within forums. And it was like we make all these declarations. We are in control of the game, and we had to respond to that. And the way we did that is say, no, we’re actually lackeys. We’re here to serve the community because if we don’t serve the community, the community will go away. And if it goes away, then there’s no more caches for us to find, and that’s sad.

0:24:33.9 Jeremy Irish: So why don’t we just look at this as a way to say, yes, we understand that we have the power, but we also serve the community. And that’s what made it work. We still have to create rules, and sometimes those rules are upsetting, but we try to use as much reasoning behind those rules because we don’t want to restrict. We want to get to yes. So we don’t want to say no for a geocache hide. We want to find ways to say yes. But sometimes just based on the experiences that we have, we have to turn down a geocache listing because of the guidelines that we have. That’s actually even like a term that we use instead of rules because they are guidelines. They are rails. But we can go off the rails sometimes when it makes sense to do that.

0:25:18.3 Bryan Roth: One of our guiding principles states that we have to earn the right to be the global headquarters for the game of geocaching through generous service to the community. And it’s really, it’s a guiding principle. Like, and it’s something for people to consider that this is not, we are not entitled to this. We have to earn it through service. And that’s why we’re the HQ lackeys. And that’s why we have the perspective on the game. We don’t own geocaching as a company, just like nobody owns baseball or football. There can be a major league. There can be an NFL. There could be a premier league in soccer, but nobody should be able to go to a group of people and say, oh no, you can’t play this game without a license fee. This game belongs to the community. And we are the company that earns the right to support it by playing the role that we do and having the community accept us as the global headquarters.

0:26:13.5 Jeremy Irish: Yeah, the early days of geocaching, and I’d say like early to mid stage of geocaching, we did consider raising money for the company. And we went out and we did sort of a drive around and met with a bunch of venture capitalists and considered what that might look like. And ultimately we decided that that wasn’t the way to go for a couple reasons. One is, I’ll just give my analogy. It’s kind of like if you lose control, it’s like your baby getting a brain transplant and then going around and pillaging, you know, because they don’t really understand the original. They were taught a certain way and now there’s somebody out there put like this other content into this child’s brain and now it’s just a tantrum baby.

0:27:04.0 Chris Ronan: I can’t get over the visual now.

0:27:07.3 Jeremy Irish: Well, I see it with technology companies get acquired and the technology is dissolved. I saw this with Google. Every time we found a technology that worked for us, Google would buy it and shut it down. And we were just like, what are they doing? And they’ll even bring it in-house. They’d use the technology for themselves that they wouldn’t share it with anyone else. And I was like, that’s a tantrum baby. I’m going to take the toys and I’m not going to share it with anyone else. And we were like, well, that’s dumb. We shouldn’t do that. And we also don’t want somebody to tell us what to do because they’re not going to have the same ethos. Maybe if we found somebody that had the right ethos, that would make sense. But we never did find that person. So we walked away. And the other one was, was it Hillel?

0:27:52.1 Bryan Roth: Hillel Cooperman.

0:27:54.9 Jeremy Irish: He had a talk about tiny but…

0:27:58.7 Bryan Roth: It was the runway speech.

0:28:00.3 Jeremy Irish: Well, yeah, but it was an event. It was like tiny but beautiful or something like that. It was talking about small companies that just work and they don’t need the funding. They could just make their own money. And yeah, you could tell me that one.

0:28:13.5 Bryan Roth: And so we went, somebody recommended that we go sit down with him. He’s a local entrepreneur in the Seattle area. And we said like, hey, this is who we are. Here’s what we’re doing with geocaching. We’re looking to potentially raise money so that we can accelerate our ability to serve the community. And he basically said, he’s like, right now you’re like an airplane and you’re moving down the runway and you don’t have to take off. You can keep moving down the runway as long as you’re continuing to be successful and you can keep moving forward. He said, the moment that you take money from outsiders is there’s an end of the runway and you’re going to have to take off because those investors are going to want a 10X return, a 20X return on their investment. And so you have to decide what kind of company you want to be. And like Jeremy was saying earlier, we believe that with our values and our perspective that we were good for the community. We were good for the game. We were going to continue to support it in the right way.

0:29:20.0 Bryan Roth: And the thought of introducing another variable in terms of another company or another individual to tell us or have some influence over what we do, introduced the risk that the community wouldn’t be served in the way that we felt that the community should be served. And so sitting down with Hillel Cooperman and hearing about the runway speech, we left that meeting and we were like, okay, we don’t have to take money. Let’s keep going down the runway and maybe we’ll change our mind somewhere down the road. But so long as the community is supporting us through premium memberships and buying merchandise, we’ll be okay. And so that speech was a pivotal moment for us sort of in the history of sort of who we became over time.

0:30:10.2 Jeremy Irish: And it was a hard, I think it was a hard decision. It wasn’t an easy decision because you also have the temptation of money. And a lot of these companies would say, you can take money off the table. We will invest in you and you can have a lot of money and you can still run the company and you can still have an upside. And you sit there and you go, well, that would be awesome. But then what’s the consequences of that? And it’s not totally noble in a way that we think about that and go, yeah, that would be great. But also we really like what we’re doing too. And you don’t want mom and dad to come in and tell you what to do. Right now we have our own playground and nobody’s telling us what to do. We make decisions on our own and we don’t have to have that outside influence. So I think at that point it was like the quality of life of creating a company is more important than getting a bunch of money and then walking away. Because what do you do next after that point? And I see serial entrepreneurs and they just keep going and you’re like, well, why don’t you just stop? Like you’re already success. You know, what are you reaching for at that point? And I think we’ve already like reached it and we just like it.

0:31:21.1 Bryan Roth: One of the things that we’ll talk about at HQ somewhat often is like, there’s a lot of ways to measure success in business. There’s people who will go out and do their IPOs or be a serial entrepreneur and, you know, get bought, you know, mergers and acquisitions and things like that. But one way to measure success is through impact. And when we look at the impact that we can have as a company and as a community on the lives of millions of people around the world, it’s a tremendous form of success. And when you couple that with being able to take good care of our employees, you know, pay ourselves a salary, make sure everybody is gainfully employed, you know, with health care and things like that, being able to create impact and have a effectively a lifestyle business is a really, you know, so it’s a very nice form of success. And some people will say, well, you didn’t do an IPO or you didn’t get bought, you know, that’s okay. If somebody else can go do that, we really, like Jeremy was saying, like, we actually like doing this. We enjoy it where we feel really fortunate to be involved in this game, in this company and in the community. And, you know, it’s a fantastic form of success.

0:32:37.3 Chris Ronan: I can’t see a serial entrepreneur being able to attend mega events either or block parties or things like that. I mean, gosh, again, going back 25 years and thinking about it then, I mean, you guys couldn’t have imagined that, that you’d be able to, that these events would be taking place all over the world and people are not just that you get. Jeremy, you’re talking about you went out and it was so cool to find this thing behind a stump, but this other aspect of this game that it brought people together. And just talk about that a little bit and what that means, because I think all of us here, that’s such an exciting part of what we do to know that the tools are lead to these interactions between people in this community that’s been built. It’s really amazing.

0:33:25.0 Bryan Roth: Yeah. I mean, the community itself is one of the best aspects of the game. You know, the game itself almost facilitates the creation of this global community that creates and shares and plays together. And when you look at all the things in this world that are set up to divide people from one another, seeing something like geocaching that’s bringing people together is super special. And, you know, this year being the 25th year, we have the most megas, gigas and block parties that we’ve ever had twice as many as we’ve ever had in any previous year. So last year, I think there was like 50, maybe 54 megas. I don’t recall exactly. But this year we’re at 138 already. And so if you know, if we had gone back 25 years and said like, hey, one day you’re going to be at an event and there’s going to be 5000 people who want to talk to you or take a picture with you or have, you know, have you signed something? It’s like, come on, you’re kidding. And one of the fun aspects of being here for as long as we have is, you know, we get new lackeys every now and then.

0:34:34.9 Bryan Roth: And when you get a newish lackey going out to their first mega and just getting to see sort of the experience through their eyes. I was in Hellendoorn in the Netherlands, I think it was three years ago for a mega. And there were a few new lackeys with us. And I remember before the mega started, we were sitting in this big parking lot awaiting sort of entrance. And each of these new lackeys was surrounded by like 20 to 30 people. There was these just little pods around the parking lot. And I looked around, you can see sort of the excitement in their eyes, but also like, what is my job that I’m standing here like people want to talk to me? And so it’s such an interesting aspect. You know, we’re normal people like everybody else. And so to be sort of put in this position where, you know, you go to an event and and people want to talk to you, people want to want to see you and spend time with you. And then as soon as you leave the event, nobody cares who you are. It’s like the it’s just a really fun aspect of it.

0:35:36.4 Bryan Roth: And so getting to see that through the eyes of newer lackeys as they have their first experiences like that. It’s a it’s a welcoming community. And I think somewhat in exchange for the work that we do to support the community, we get a lot of love back. And it’s really appreciated. I mean, you know, Chris and Jeremy, you certainly know, but it’s a it’s one of the one of the things that we probably could not have predicted. But it’s it’s it’s really just another special aspect of of what we get to do.

0:36:07.8 Jeremy Irish: Yeah, I’d say it was a surprise to me that we would have events. I always thought at the beginning that it’d be something where people would be passing in the night kind of thing where you’d see names in a logbook, but you wouldn’t know who they are. And then these events started cropping up. And in fact, I hosted an event that Bryan didn’t want to go to. And I was able to encourage him to go. And he met his future wife there. And they still they make coins and they celebrate that every five years.

0:36:34.2 Bryan Roth: Every five years. Yeah, 2026 will be 25 years. It’s crazy.

0:36:37.8 Chris Ronan: Yeah. And I’m an introvert. So when I was building this, I was building this in the house and I was not I’m not I wasn’t a social animal. I’m still really not that social. But then I started going to these events and I was the center of attention. And that was unusual and weird for me because it was just something I was doing in my house. I was interacting with people through forums. It’s a weird D-list celebrity experience. And but I really appreciate that. After I go to an event and I leave, I’m not being stopped on the street all the time. I can’t imagine being a celebrity, just seeing a little glimpse of that in the geocaching community. And I really haven’t gone to a lot of events. And it’s because I’m like neck deep in children at this point. And it’s really hard for me to take the moment and travel. I’d love to do that once they get out of the house, which is soon. But yeah, that was like, I think one of the biggest surprises for me was that we would have major events, mega events, giga events.

0:37:43.5 Chris Ronan: The size of these events would just increase and blow me away, especially when you go to the first event with 5,000 people in a crowd and they want you to stand on stage and talk about geocaching. I think at this point, I’ve gotten comfortable enough to talk on stage like that, but still it blows my mind every time.

0:38:02.1 Chris Ronan: And yet, I mean, you talked, I think you said talking about NFL or baseball or Premier League, what I mean, everybody knows what those things are. And yet with geocaching, I think there’s still, and I find this comforting to some degree, that there’s still plenty of people that still get to discover it, that it’s not a household name necessarily. And sometimes that surprises me. Like I was out geocaching a few months ago and I had a police encounter as I’ve had a few and they’ve all turned out to be fine. But most of the officers I’ve met over the years have said, oh, okay, I know what that is. But this one said, oh, what are you talking about? And I was actually at a mega event. I was like, really? Nobody told you there was going to be a mega event in this little town? So I got to open up the app and say, all of these dots are geocaches. And he’s like, oh my God, it’s so cool to see that reaction that somebody has where they say, wait, this is happening right under my nose and I don’t even know about it. And that’s pretty neat too, that the game still has room for growth and still has people that get to find out what it is.

0:39:14.5 Bryan Roth: In the early days, we used to say, not that early, sort of the maybe 10 years ago, we would say like, oh, this is the biggest hobby in the world that nobody knows about. And that’s changed over time, but you’re right. It’s still a lot of that where most people don’t know worldwide. And that’s opportunity. We talk about like geocaching is good for the world, getting people outside into nature, having adventure, exploration, community. How do we do more of it? And so one of the things that we’re focused on is working with the community to spread the word, to get more people outside, more people creating, sharing, and playing these types of adventures with one another. You’re saying you showed the police officer the map. That’s one of my favorite things to do when somebody doesn’t know geocaching. I’ll open the map and I’ll say like, look, this is all around us. And then you say, well, pick a city in the world. And it’s like, oh, well, Prague or Amsterdam or Cape Town, South Africa. And it’s like, oh, there’s geocaches there too.

0:40:16.0 Bryan Roth: And it’s like almost everywhere. And that’s a, you know, it’s a testament to the strength of the community and all of the effort that’s been put into creating these experiences that are shared with one another. And that’s, it’s really powerful.

0:40:31.3 Jeremy Irish: Yeah, at the same time, it’s herding cats, like with the community. So you can do as much as you can to encourage people to do certain things, but they’ll do what they want. And that’s always been challenging when we want to make the game move forward a little bit or be a little bit more welcoming or geocache quality is really important, but it’s really hard to legislate that in some way and create rules around that. Because one person’s, you know, micro is terrible for one person and then somebody else loves micros. And not everybody can create a gadget cache, but gadget caches are amazing. And they take a lot of energy and people are doing this out of the love of the game, which is fantastic. But we’re like, how do we do that? How do we, you know, archive caches that are going missing? How do we, you know, manage it when they get stolen? Or, you know, how do they get reported? And how do we create more caches in an area when somebody’s found them all? Like, what other games can we create in there? And that’s been always a challenge for us is how do we keep this more engaging, especially when people are so active, they start running out of geocaches.

0:41:40.8 Jeremy Irish: I introduced my electrician to geocaching about three years ago, and I think he’s found a geocache every single day since.

0:41:48.2 Chris Ronan: Wow.

0:41:49.3 Jeremy Irish: So he’s motivated by saying, I want to do a streak as long as possible, to the point that he saves geocaches around his house so he can, you know, do one when he doesn’t have enough time or if he’s sick or something like that, which is, you know, it just blows my mind.

0:42:04.1 Chris Ronan: And so you were talking about how events was not something you could have imagined in the early days. And I think there’s probably been a lot of things that you never could have, even gadget caches, who could have imagined that when you found that thing behind a stump? What are some of the things that come to mind for you guys over the years that have surprised you or, I mean, gosh, I’m just like the ape promotion, you know, you worked with a movie studio. I mean, just different things like that have come up over the years that you couldn’t have anticipated and it’s been a pleasant surprise, you know, good memories in that sense.

0:42:40.2 Bryan Roth: I mean, the fact that people are traveling to Brazil to find the particular geocache. I mean, you’ve gone, Chris. Jeremy, you haven’t gone. I haven’t gone to that one. I aspire to go to Brazil to find this cache. And I think people who are not geocachers would look at you and say, what? Like, why would you do something like that? But as geocachers, we understand like the, you know, the history and the lore and the, you know, just the special aspects of the game that have come up. All the different cache types, you know, earth caches becoming a thing with the GSA.

0:43:18.0 Jeremy Irish: Well, night caching was something that I never really thought about originally using fire tax, but now like creating all sorts of different technologies and lights to create an experience. That was something that I didn’t even think about. I didn’t even know a fire tag existed. That was one of them. And just the geocaches we get to go to, like when I was traveling more in the past, having the ability to go to another country and being able to see how they play geocaching, that was pretty impressive. I think, I’m trying to think of the country that had all the night caches. And there was one, it was like you open up the cache container and then these two beady eyes would light up and you’d hear like a howl in the distance. So it was like, it was triggering this event that would scare the crap out of you in the middle of the night. But we were with a bunch of people that knew what it was. So it wasn’t so scary that time. Just the ingenuity, I think it would be a big one. Even some of the stuff they would put in geocaches.

0:44:17.3 Jeremy Irish: I had a stress ball made out of chain mail that I found. I still have it that somebody made because they could make chain mail and they just made a ball and stuck it in the cache. So sometimes I get surprised just by even the items that I find.

0:44:29.6 Bryan Roth: Just the creativity that has been brought to this game through the global community is probably, I don’t know if it’s a huge surprise because you’re tapping into like the hive mind where like all of these people coming to this game with their own passion and ideas can create some really remarkable things. But the levels to which individuals and groups of individuals have gone to create these elaborate, extraordinary experiences to share with other people just for the benefit of giving, you know, just for the benefit of giving a gift or the spirit of sharing and the joy that that brings is such a remarkable aspect of the game itself.

0:45:16.7 Chris Ronan: One big aspect of the community is the community volunteer reviewers, translators, forum moderators, and what they bring to the community and what they’ve done for the game over time. And I know each of you has had an opportunity to interact with so many of those folks. Some of them have been volunteering for over 20 years in a couple of cases, which is incredible. Maybe touch on that aspect a little bit too.

0:45:43.9 Jeremy Irish: Well, I’ll talk, they’re ambassadors of the game in their own areas. So we don’t understand the culture of every place around the world. And the fact that we have somebody who is local and understands the rules and like how people act, like in the UK, pubs are places that people come together as their third place, you know, so they treat them a little bit different than we do here. It’s really cool. First, because we get the opportunity to hang out with them or talk to them. We’ve had, you know, reviewer events around the world that we get to meet the folks that are local. And also they just bring just a lot of feedback on making this game better. I’m blessed that I have the ability to talk to people like that. And I’m also blessed to be able to go to other countries and meet them and even get a feel for the geocaching experience in that town or community.

0:46:42.1 Bryan Roth: Yeah, when we talk about people giving back to this game in terms of creating caches or working for the company to create features and services and things like that, you can’t overstate the value of the effort and time that the global group of community volunteers have put in. You know, this game would not exist but for the effort that they’ve put in and they’re, you know, translating the website and the mobile apps into different languages so that the people in their country can participate. You know, that’s something that as a small bootstrap company without outside funding, it’s not practical for us to be able to do that. To have, as Jeremy said, the local knowledge to know like, hey, this cache can actually be placed in this park, or there’s a relationship that we have with a park manager that we’ve developed that has, you know, you have to fill out a form or there are special requirements. That local knowledge in being able to administer the game is invaluable. And so, in terms of a group of people that truly give back to this game and community, the community volunteers are second to none. And as Jeremy said, like, we’ve had the experience of meeting them from the early days to, you know, going to events now and we’ll have a meal together or we’ll get to talk to them or get on stage and try and answer some questions with them.

0:48:06.8 Bryan Roth: But it’s such a wonderful group of people who appreciate the game, they care about the game and the community, and they’re really willing to, you know, put their time into it. And for some people, it’s quite a bit of time just to review caches or help new geocachers in the area figure out the nuances of the game or how to get started or show up at an event and be a sounding board for people who have ideas or answer questions from people who don’t understand how certain things work. And, you know, you think about the fact that we’ve got about 95 lackeys at HQ, to do that on a global scale, it’s not scalable. We couldn’t possibly do that. And so to have the relationship that we do with this global group of volunteers, you know, they’re not volunteering for ground speak, they’re volunteering for the community, they’re volunteering for the game. And that’s something where our relationship is, how can we support them in bringing the effort that they do in support of this global game? And the relationship’s really been wonderful. And I’d say some of the greatest people that we’ve ever had the opportunity to meet are the geocaching volunteers, the community volunteers.

0:49:24.9 Chris Ronan: So what excites you guys about forward from here? What projects get you excited? I think, Jeremy, that’s something that you focus on quite a bit.

0:49:36.3 Jeremy Irish: Yeah, I always ask the question, if geocaching started today, what would we do differently? And I think, and also like look at the past and see what things that we have done that weren’t successful then, but might be successful now. One example is we launched, we soft launched it, which means we haven’t announced it in the forums, we haven’t announced it in an email on the website or anything like that for an application called LilyPad Chat. And it’s basically the idea that we had a long time ago called geocaching live, which before that was called track on fly. The idea of that people go out geocaching and they go and find a geocache, they come back home or they’re there and they log their caching experience, but it’s not necessarily a live experience, it’s a kind of a passive log. Like, so you don’t know when people are out geocaching and what they’re doing. And there’s that disconnect with community. I thought with track and fly and with geocaching live, it was, you get to see other people on the map out there geocaching, going after geocaches in their community, and then you could communicate back and forth with them.

0:50:45.9 Jeremy Irish: So we built LilyPad Chat as that idea. It could be extended to other things, but essentially it is while you’re out geocaching, you can open up this app and see if other people in the area are also playing. There’s always been the phone a friend. So if you go to a geocache and you can’t find it, you can always, you know, shoot a flare and say, hey, I can’t find this geocache, can you give me a hint? You know, where it might be, that sort of thing. So we’re playing around with that idea and bringing that kind of concept back, but also like how can we build the site in such a way that we have a verified find? Because everybody can say they’ve been to a geocache, but how can you actually prove it, at least to the best you can? And that’s where we’ve been playing around this idea of lodestone, which you’re starting to work on for the Adventure Lab product. But ultimately, the goal is to bring it to geocaching and the idea where you actually have time stamped logs where you can find a geocache, you can tap it, and it’ll actually show that you had been there.

0:51:47.6 Jeremy Irish: And there’s just all sorts of different cool things that you can do with a proven find that you can’t do with just logging a geocache.

0:51:57.4 Bryan Roth: Yeah. So for one example, with lodestone, you know, we’ve talked about like, what if we wanted to create some prizes for people who find particular caches? Well, if we said, you know, log this cache and first one to log it gets a prize, hypothetically, well, then it takes somebody sitting on their couch saying, great, I found the cache, I logged it, you know, I was first, give me my prize. And it’s like, well, how do we prove that? All right. Did they sign the logbook? Maybe, maybe not. But if we say, hey, you have to tap your phone on a secure NFC chip and we’re going to know for certain, well, then there’s some interesting opportunities to do, you know, maybe better prizes. Maybe there’s some sponsored contest that we can work on. You know, we just released the treasures feature set on geocaching. And right now you have to go out to complete collections of treasures. You have to find specific types of caches. What if we created at some point in the future, like really rare treasures that were hard to get, but we really needed you to not just log the cache, but we needed you to prove that you were there.

0:53:03.9 Bryan Roth: So this lodestone product that we’re working on now provides the opportunity to do that. So we just put some of these tags in shop geocaching. We will be selling those right now with Adventure Lab because Adventure Lab is restricted to mostly virtual content with the exception of events or sponsored adventures. We’ll be doing some experimentation using lodestone tags as a challenge type. So instead of going to a location and answering a question or a multiple choice question, you go to a location and you will tap your phone to prove that you were there. And that could advance the storyline, unlock the next stage, or at least give you credit for the stage that you’ve completed and just more opportunities to experiment and see what else we can bring to the game.

0:53:54.1 Jeremy Irish: Yeah. For example, and this is not something that we’re going to build immediately, but it’s something that I’ve been really excited about adding to the game is repeatability for finding geocaches. Once you find a geocache, you check it off the list and you don’t go back to it. But what if there were some reasons to go back? Like what if you could tap in and become the caretaker of the geocache and it’s like the more logs that you have for that geocache, the more “caretaker ownership” you have of that.

0:54:22.9 Bryan Roth: Like the mayor from Foursquare.

0:54:24.9 Jeremy Irish: Like Foursquare. Yeah. So you go there and you tap it and if somebody goes and taps it more than you on so many days, then they take over. So now you’ve got an experience where you’re going back and replaying or revisiting these geocaches. And what that does is it creates quality control on the geocaches because you’re scanning it, you know it was there, and it’s still there. So then people know that that was recently scanned as opposed to a cache that hasn’t been logged in a while because there’s not as many geocaches in an area and then it goes missing and nobody checks on it. So it’s just another avenue of, okay, now we have this game board with game pieces and these game pieces have some kind of proof to them. So what kind of fun stuff could you do about it? Could you be able to start putting digital treasures in a cache and taking them out and doing the same thing with trading? You know, those things we could do. But right now, if you log a geocache, you can just log it and there’s really no reason why anybody would log it and lie about it.

0:55:27.2 Jeremy Irish: But if we give people reasons for receiving treasures and some things, we might create an experience where people are just, you know, fake logging for that. And that’s always something that we’ve been challenged with is, you know, honesty when it comes to finding geocaches. It really doesn’t hurt anyone for somebody to log a geocache and say that they found it. But it does hurt if you create games around that, that other people are playing and you’re kind of ruining that game for other people.

0:55:54.7 Bryan Roth: Yeah, and I guess in general, we’re, the whole company, we’re always trying to think about how can we refresh the game board? How can we add more to geocaching while striking a balance between sort of not breaking too many of the historical eggs? You know, it’s really a balancing act. And I think that, you know, Jeremy said earlier that it’s, you know, who do we have to answer to? You know, we don’t have to answer to outside investors. We answer to ourselves. We answer to our colleagues here at HQ. But most of all, we answer to the community. And that’s something that’s just another special aspect of the game because it helps us to find the right balance between innovation and sort of preservation. And it’s a moving target.

0:56:45.4 Chris Ronan: I think we just saw a full circle here where early in the conversation Jeremy talks about he loves breaking eggs, then Bryan just said, we don’t have to break so many eggs. So you guys kind of balance each other out.

0:56:56.9 Bryan Roth: The funny part is like, you know, I’ll be the first to admit like there’s a time to break eggs and it’s one of the things that like, you know, we talked about Jeremy, Elias and I having sort of different personalities and bringing different things to the game. Like somebody has to speak up and say, hey, let’s challenge all of these, you know, preexisting things. Let’s think about what we might change. It’s something that Jeremy’s done really well. Sometimes it’s me saying, hey, I think we should do something different. One of the best parts about working as a close group is that I know that if I have an idea and Jeremy Elias don’t really like it, I need to kind of check myself. It’s probably not, you know, there’s probably something to their resistance. And I think likewise, it’s worked really well over 25 years that when, you know, Jeremy has an idea and it’s like, well, we’re a little skeptical about this. Like it forces us to think from different perspectives while at the same time getting the benefit of those perspectives. And that helps to unlock forward momentum for the company.

0:58:03.6 Jeremy Irish: I’ll give an example. I was anti-Geocoin. Like when we first released Travel Bugs, which is a tag you attach to an object and you give it a quest and you put it in a geocache and people put the code in and they see what the goal is and then they can log to pick it up and drop it off. That was the tag. And I would, I was very hesitant to create Geocoins because that would create confusion. You put a coin in the cache, is that a Travel Bug anymore? And when Mountain Bike created the first GeoCoin, I was putting codes in when he was just to try it out. And Bryan was like, we should do this. We should create Geocoins, you know, create Geocoins. People can mint them. We’ll put codes on them. And I was like, no, I just don’t want to do that. And then I finally gave in and we started selling them. And then it was for community like events and it just kind of took off. And I was surprised by that. Well, I wasn’t so much surprised by it, but I was surprised that there wasn’t any confusion and nobody really, you know, as long as it said trackable on geocaching.com and had a code, community members know what a GeoCoin is.

0:59:12.5 Jeremy Irish: They get to know what it is. They see these, they understand them. But that was one where I was like, I did, you know, I did not see that. That was my blind spot.

0:59:19.9 Chris Ronan: And recently I attended Mountain Bikes community celebration event in Idaho, which was a lot of it about celebrating the Geocoins. So there you go. It’s all another full circle there. Well, this has been great. I’ve taken up too much of your time. Hopefully we’ll do it again at the 30th. Time flies. We just did the 25th or the 20th, now 25th. It’s amazing how fast it goes.

0:59:42.5 Bryan Roth: Well, it’s always a treat to participate. It really is. And even a reminder of some of the old stories. It’s fun to relive some of the aspects. It’s funny, every now and then somebody will say something that triggers, you know, a story from 18, 20 years ago that we didn’t even think about. And like, there’s thousands and thousands of these stories and there’s just no way to like call them all up. So having an opportunity like this just to sit down and talk through it is really, really fun.

1:00:10.6 Jeremy Irish: I also think it’s funny that the 30th celebration means that the company will be older than I was when I started with Bryan and Elias. That’s pretty impressive.

1:00:25.3 Chris Ronan: That was Jeremy Irish and Bryan Roth, two of the co-founders of Geocaching HQ, along with Elias Alvord, who is always welcome to join us someday on the podcast. Hope you enjoyed that chat. If you ever have an idea for a topic for an episode of Inside HQ, you can send that straight to me. The address is podcast at geocaching.com. That is podcast at geocaching.com. Until next time, which I promise will not be too far away from me and Bryan and Jeremy and all the other lackeys at geocaching HQ, happy caching.