![]() I like to de-stress with a walk in the woods or by going for a hike in the Swiss Alps with my family. Petr Pridal: Leading a company which is expanding year after year is a big responsibility, and of course there is some stress connected to this role. How do you deal with Stress and Anxiety? How do you project yourself and MapTiler in the future? It’s absolutely crucial to an international team such as ours and has allowed us to keep moving forward and continue growing. We can’t stress enough how remote work, as a part of our company culture, is beneficial for the smooth operations of our whole team. During such challenging times, we realized that opportunities to be an empathetic team player could be valuable in building long-term trust and strong partnerships. ![]() We faced the dilemma of cutting clients off versus providing our services free of charge, or with deferred payments. ![]() Petr Pridal: Some customers faced severe budget cuts due to the crisis. Did you have to make Difficult Choices and what are the Lessons Learned? MapTiler supported this project almost free of charge. It had an incredible reach, with up to 30 million people viewing the map daily. For example, we partnered with the Berliner Morgenpost, a German daily newspaper, to support a map showing the spread of COVID-19 around the world. We also realized that we needed to do our part in supporting the fight against the pandemic and wanted to support the public interest. Many customers were conducting development operations and integrating new products, while operations were slowed. On the contrary, during this period, we on-boarded some large clients. Petr Pridal: We were fortunate that the coronavirus pandemic did not affect us as much as other industries. How the Coronavirus Pandemic affects your Business and how are you Coping? We pride ourselves on being very flexible, open to changes, and always welcome suggestions on how to improve our processes from both internal and external sources. We’re also proud to be a part of the open-source community, which encourages innovation and giving back. Of course, we always offer help and support to each other, which is one of our core values. We hire innovative people, and when they’re given a task, it’s up to them to use their creativity and abilities to come up with solutions. Petr Pridal: We are very open-minded and hands-off when it comes to leading our team. These clients include well-known global brands and institutions, including NASA, SIEMENS, IBM and Cisco. Fifty million view them directly from our servers, and the rest run on our clients’ servers. Today, 200 million people interact with our maps every month. We used this tool extensively ourselves, and also offered it to the open-source community. We named the company after our most important product, MapTiler. However, due to legal obstacles, they could not hire me as a self-employed person, so I founded a company with the help of my friend and great colleague Václav Klusák.Īfter years of work on various contracted projects, we decided to offer our software and map services as a boxed product to companies and developers around the world. Petr Pridal: In 2008, after several years of working as a freelancer, I was offered a collaborative opportunity with a consortium of Swiss libraries – led by the Zentralbibliothek in cooperation with ETH Zürich. Tell us about you, your Career, how you Founded or Joined MapTiler ![]() Our team members are based in different European countries, so it was great to see them after a few months of purely remote work and on-line meetings. Petr Pridal: We’re doing very well, thanks. First of all, how are you and your Family doing in these COVID-19 times?
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