Jack Dangermond

My parents were immigrants who started a nursery as a way to get us kids through school. I learned around the dinner table about customer service and cash flow and paying bills.

I am not that good a manager for me to be comfortable borrowing someone else's money.

Someone once told me be interested, not interesting - that really clicked for me.

One thing that has made us so successful is that we've never taken outside investment. That means we can concentrate on what our customers want - not what the stockholders or the VCs want.

Once you digitize data, you can actually analyze patterns and relationships in geographic space - relationships between certain health patterns and air or water pollution, between plants and climate, soils, landscape.

My parents had no money, but they had strong values that I've carried throughout my life - things like not going into debt, never borrowing money, never leveraging, paying your bills on time, keeping your agreements, selling customers the right things, treating employees right, and growing things.

ArcGIS includes a Living Atlas of the World. It's like a large living library of geographic information.

We have a rich and vibrant partner ecosystem with several thousand formal business partners. Some of them are very large companies that we collaborate with in many ways.

Google has been an amazing benefit for our business. People understand the whole world of mapping and want to do more than not get lost. They want to do spatial analytics. It's been fantastic for us.

Something like 80 per cent of business decisions have a location element. In fact, it's probably higher than that.

It takes a while for executives to understand that every company is a spatial company, fundamentally: where are our assets, where are our customers, where are our sales. But when they get it, they light up and say, 'I want to get the geographic advantage.'

Cartography and geographic thinking are cool.