Just start today. This is your daily message from Chad number 623 and this message is dedicated to Larry.

Larry started by walking the streets of his town snapping pictures. Twenty years later, you won’t believe where it ended. He stopped every few feet on the streets of Palo Alto. Took out his video camera. Pressed record. Drove a bit further and repeated. He did this down a few streets. He brought it back to work and gave the pictures to an employee and said, “What can you do with this?” Larry already had something in mind, but wasn’t sure how he would make it happen. But that was his start.

You may not remember what it was like 20 years ago, but most people still traveled with paper maps. A company called MapQuest had online maps that you could print out, but weren’t reliable. There were a few standalone GPS units from Garmin and TomTom, but the technology was basic.

What Larry had in mind was creating a digital twin of the entire physical world. Every street, every building, every corner of Earth––accessible from your phone. The technology didn’t exist. Some guys in Australia had created some software that was much better than MapQuest, so Larry bought Where 2 Technologies in 2004. In February 2005, this month, Google Maps was born twenty years ago.

The next  step was to get pictures of the entire world. He bought his first Street View camera. It was a monster––500 pounds of equipment that needed a forklift to mount on vans. By 2008, he’d developed new equipment that reduced to 75 pounds. But mapping the world meant literally every corner, so he had to get creative. He mounted cameras on:

• Snowmobiles for winter terrain
• Tricycles for narrow alleys
• Boats for waterways
• Cars for city streets
• Camels for deserts

But capturing images was just the beginning…the real challenge was stitching images into seamless panoramas and building detailed 3D visualizations. Then there were the obstacles of privacy concerns that erupted worldwide. So he built advanced face-blurring technology and implemented strict data collection policies.

Now a team of over 7,000 works on the 100 million daily map updates & billions of Street View images, 2 billion monthly users, and coverage in 250+ countries and territories. No one could have predicted that from those first pictures at a street corner in Palo Alto, California. He just started. You can too. You can start small. You can start where you are. You can start by making mistakes. That’s the best way to start learning. You can start with what you have. You can start despite all of your insecurities. Just start today.