Meet the California Man Behind Pokémon Go

BERKELEY, CA — When you think of Pokémon, the company that springs to mind is Nintendo. However, the new Pokémon Go game was developed by Niantic Inc., in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its founder and CEO: John Hanke, a 1996 graduate of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

Back when he was in grad school, Hanke was interested in video games, and, specifically, massive multiplayer gaming. He started his first company with another student. They actually sold the company on the day he graduated.

From there, several more companies were launched. Hanke moved into the area of geo-location and mapping. One startup, Keyhole, caught the attention of Google. Google purchased the company, rolling the technology into Google Maps and Google Earth.

Hanke became a Google VP, eventually overseeing more than 1,000 employees.

Then, he began looking at what was next. Hanke recognized a hankering to get back to his roots of product innovation.

"I had been leading the geo component of Google for about seven years, and I was really just interested in what we could do with our mapping technology in the mobile space," Hanke said in a video profile posted online in 2014. "Everything that we are doing at Niantic is based around this idea of location services on your mobile phone."

Niantic Labs started inside Google in 2010. It was spun out as its own company, Niantic Inc., last October.

"I took (a) hiatus from games for a long time, but with the latest stuff that I've been working on for the past few years, I took the work that I've been doing in mapping and combined it with games and now we're doing these real-world geo-location oriented games," Hanke told students last year at Haas.

Hanke was interested in getting people out of their apartments and homes and out into the real world, interacting with other people instead of using avatars to virtually interact. Niantic's Ingress game gained millions of followers, most notably in the U.S., Europe and Japan.

His next step, as a parent, was to get his kids outside to play. Because of the success of Ingress in Japan, Hanke met the gaming giants of that nation, including the head of The Pokémon Company. Kids love Pokémon, and millenials grew up playing it. A deal was struck. Building upon the technology honed for Ingress, Pokémon Go was born.

Pokémon Go was released on July 6. Apple confirms that it broke a record for most downloads by an app in its first week. Although it's a free download, the game generates multiple streams of income. According to CNN Money, Niantic has already netted more than $35 million in revenue.

Pokémon Go image credit: Niantic, Inc.

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