Living

Editor’s note: Joe Kraus is a partner at Google Ventures, focusing on mobile, gaming, and local services. In 1993, he co-founded Excite.com, an early Internet search engine. He also co-founded JotSpot in 2004, a wiki company acquired by Google in 2006. Follow him on his blog, JoeKraus.com, and on Twitter: @jkraus. One thing I can hear with some regularity from a small founding team is something like “we don’t think we need a marketing person” or “we’re not going to hire a product manager”. Those aren’t the only positions I hear that statement for. I hear it for PR, marketing, HR and sometimes BD. What I think is going on here, and what my guidance in general is, “If you don’t think you need a position and that position has a well-known title (like product manager, product marketer, etc), it’s far more likely that you’ve just never seen or worked with *greatness* at that position.” I have my own example that I remember vividly. When I was co-founding Excite (how could that have been ...

These days it seems like we're constantly seeing gorgeous images of the Earth from space. It wasn't always that way. On July 23rd 1972, NASA launched ERTS-1 satellite into space to observe the planet. We've never seen ourselves the same since. ERTS-1—Landsat 1—was the first of seven satellites in the Landsat program, which has continuously recorded our planet for the last forty years. According to NASA's, the program was inspired by the ominous photographs taken by astronauts from space that showed us the first images of Earth from without. Can you blame us for wanting more? Can you imagine what it was like to see the Earth from space for the first time? The same curiosity that sent us out into space to try to learn more about distant galaxies suddenly left us with an unquenchable urge to stare back at ourselves. Landsat 1 beamed data back to Earth for six years, and was instrumental in halting—or at least slowing down—the ecological disaster in the Amazon by giving us...