John Hanke

John has spent the last several years working with his colleagues at Google to create innovative products to store, organize, and visualize information about the Earth. John began his business career in 1995 when he joined one of his business school classmates in starting a small company that went on to launch one of the world's first graphical, massively-multiplayer online games. After several start-ups and acquisitions, John and a group of former Silicon Graphics and Disney executives founded a new company, Keyhole, and created Earthviewer, the world's first online virtual globe. The team survived the dotcom bubble collapse and emerged to be acquired by Google in 2004 as Google Earth, an application that has now been downloaded by more than 500 million unique users around the world. John received his MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley in 1996 and holds a BA in Plan II from the University of Texas at Austin. He lives with his family in Oakland, CA.