Rasmussen Brothers
Lars and Jens Rasmussen are Danish software engineers who co-founded the Sydney startup Where 2 Technologies, sold it to Google in 2004, and went on to build Google Maps (2005) and Google Wave (2009). They are frequently cited as a model of a tight engineering pair shipping two influential products in a decade.
Lars Rasmussen and Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen are Danish brothers and software engineers best known for co-creating Google Maps and Google Wave. They grew up in Denmark; Lars holds a PhD in theoretical computer science from UC Berkeley, while Jens trained as a software engineer and worked at Digital Equipment Corporation before the brothers co-founded the Sydney startup Where 2 Technologies in 2003. Where 2 was building a downloadable desktop mapping application when Google acquired it in October 2004. The team rebuilt the product as a web-based service, and Google Maps launched in February 2005, popularising the slippy map interface — draggable tiles loaded asynchronously over AJAX — that became the standard for online cartography. The brothers also co-founded the Google Sydney engineering office, which grew into one of Google's largest international centres. After Maps, Lars and Jens led the Google Wave project, unveiling it at Google I/O in May 2009 as a re-imagining of email and real-time collaboration. When Google wound the project down in 2010, Lars left for Facebook, where he led the Facebook Graph Search team, before later co-founding the professional-network startup Weave. Jens continued to work in collaboration software and on later Google products. The brothers are frequently cited in tech journalism — notably by Steven Levy — as examples of how a tight engineering pair can ship two influential products within a single decade.