Rand McNally

I can't get enough of this, man.

This, you know, such a Rand McNally nerd.

josh really am

yeah i need to get situated on the uh ref army locator i'd like to you know get my hands a little dirty and uh mess around on the locator and see where folks are listening from i

Chris stepped away just as the online mapping world took off, and what came next was anything but a straight line.

Venture capital, a return to mapping at Rand McNally, and eventually a move to Raleigh-Durham that changed the direction of his work entirely.

There, Chris took a few hundred meetings before building anything, launched the region's first accelerator, The Startup Factory, and eventually built the ecosystem development practice at Techstars, work that's taken him to roughly 100 cities from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Lima, Peru.

He's written two books for founders and community builders starting something new, and he co-founded Raleigh-Durham Startup Week, a free, volunteer-driven founder festival, two accomplishments he said he's prouder of than just about anything he's done.

I appreciate it.

Switching gears, you spent four years at 77 Capital.

You eventually come back to Maps, joining Rand McNally in 1999 to run its internet business, which began what I might describe as a little bit of a restless decade of leadership and operational roles that fortunately bring you to Raleigh-Durham.

When you get there, you spent six months taking a few hundred meetings with all sorts of people across the startup community.

But that being said, even if somehow the Board of Geographic Names in the next few weeks jumps through the procedural hoops and somehow that survives review under the Administrative Procedure Act, under which the courts review the rationality of administrative decisions and whether or not the administrative decisions took into account all the factors that Congress requires to be taken into account in accordance with an administrative decision.

Even assuming that, he still can't rename, he can't tell us what to call Lake Ontario, okay? And he can't tell what Rand McNally puts in his, he can't tell Rand McNally to put Lake America on its maps.

Unfortunately, and this goes back to the corruption issue that we just talked about, Google and Apple have both renamed on their maps Lake Ontario to Lake America, even though they're not required to by law and would never be required to be by law.

And even though the executive order doesn't actually, as I mentioned, rename legally the lake, it only directs the agency to do it.

You know what's coming up in September, listeners, so maybe you can guess.

Yes, we, we found someone who lives in Rand McNally.

Yes.

[laughs] They will let us know about how dangerous hamburgers are in Rand McNally.

Mm-hmm.

So.

And what is scary is when people start to fall in line, right? This is the Mark Carney speech about putting the sign in the window.

So I encourage Rand McNally or the Atlas people, you know, do, look, you can always defend yourself.

What was this executive order? Executive order Lake Ontario.

Google Maps changes Lake Ontario to Lake America following Trump's executive order.