Esri: The Private Company Whose Maps 'Run the World'

Jack Dangermond founded Esri over 50 years ago and has grown it into a giant private company that provides software to global corporations, governments and NGOs. At its heart, it's a map-making company. Customers pull data into Esri software to create maps that help inform all sorts of decisions. As Jack tells Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt, "Our customers run the world ... and they do it through maps." But Esri's mission runs deeper than this. "We look at issues of a social nature or an environmental nature, and try to build some of the parameters of that kind of thinking into the basic tools. So when our users buy those tools, they wind up doing usually a lot more than their basic mission. ... They do things more efficiently. They do things more sustainably, ... So we can't actually control them or tell them what to do. But we can introduce to them this geographic way of thinking and acting that ultimately drives better action and behavior on their part."