Nico Belmonte to join as GM Maps
By: Peter Sirota
We are thrilled to welcome Nico Belmonte as a General Manager for Maps, owning maps service and map design at Mapbox. Nico’s vision defined how Mapbox tools were used at the core of Uber’s live location strategy, with a focus on autonomous maps.
When Nico was 11 years old, he thought he was going to buy his first computer. It turned out he was going to build it. He recalls the story in detail.
“I didn’t know anything about computers and my stepdad told me, ‘I’m going to buy you your first computer.’ This was maybe 11 years old. And so I was really excited. So I went to this place, and when I got there on the table were all the computer parts but they were not assembled, they were all laid out on the table. Then my stepdad taught me what each part of the computer was and how it worked while we assembled it together. I really appreciated that.”
Nico is a world-class leader and design visionary. At Uber Nico managed a 50-person team of designers, engineers, and visualization specialists. As the team lead, Nico launched Kepler.gl. His Mapbox collaborations include Kepler.gl, deck.gl, and the Custom Layers API.
As GM of Maps, Nico will lead a team charged with continuing to evolve the living map at the core of the Mapbox platform.
The quotes below are from an interview, vignettes of Nico’s talent and interests — a builder at heart, possessed of a world-class ability to develop both the whole product and its building block-parts with equal skill.
On the Uber ❤️ Mapbox history
“I started playing around with the idea of having overlays on top of Mapbox’s base map that would also leverage this technology called WebGL, which MapboxGL used under the hood. This was the start of a suite of visualization products we built on top of Mapbox (deck.gl, kepler.gl, avs.auto). We had a really interesting set of challenges at Uber related to data. Our core data is geospatial and location data, and it’s also real time. The volume is huge. Uber operates in about 500–600 plus cities at this point. We capture the positions for every moving vehicle, so it’s a lot of data to manage. We had very different use cases for mapping. We had systems for real-time visualization of vehicles’ positions, we had aggregated data to understand supply and demand, we had historical data throughout trips at different moments like morning and evening to understand commute patterns, etc. We also used Mapbox for troubleshooting dispatching and routing algorithms. Also we ended up using Mapbox for a lot of the self-driving car visualization. I think that Mapbox was a great foundation for a lot of the other building blocks we put together with it. It worked seamlessly with other components that we were developing. Mapbox was very developer friendly and was really state of the art when we discovered it. So we ended up choosing Mapbox.”
On live location
“At Uber live location was fundamental. Elastic trip pricing was based of in-the-moment supply-demand states. Live location is also an instant feedback loop for decision making based on your current scenario. For autonomous driving this meant having a vehicle build a plan for driving as its perception system captured actors on the road. From taking business decisions on things like driver incentives or marketing campaigns all the way to autonomy engineering, live location was at the core of the products we’ve built in the Visualization team.”
On Uber’s data visualization
“We really stretched and used the Mapbox products in many different ways. Got in lots of learnings from that. We’ve also built many permutations of tools that do just spatial analysis for a big variety of customers — software and autonomy engineering, policy, data science, design, etc.”
On privacy
“It was really amazing to hear about Mapbox’s take on privacy. Mapbox here does a really good job at making sure that everything is anonymized from the capturing stage. I think that that philosophy really paid off, especially, for example, in all of the GDPR efforts, where employees are spending millions of dollars to anonymize their data and Mapbox has gotten it right from the very beginning. This is a reflection, probably, of the culture and mindset within the company. I think that the open and transparent culture really resonated with me.”
On Mapbox’s building blocks
“Mapbox maps are pretty much everywhere, right? They’re on mobile phones. They’re on cars. They’re on desktop computers. I think that whatever incremental impact you make within the mapping products, it really gets amplified to what customers are using the product, so doing my job well in this role would be better understanding the customers using these products and finding opportunities to enter new markets. It will also involve product ideation: being able to predict that developing a set of features can unlock a lot more value for new businesses. And also being more strategic and bold in terms of understanding where we should be going next beyond incremental product improvements.”
Watch Nico at LOCATE 2018:
Uber’s head of visualization joins Mapbox was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.