Co-founded with Chris Saad. The question that started the project: "how do I find the best driving roads in Australia?"
Data foundation
OpenStreetMap aggregates essentially every road on Earth into a single open dataset, distributed as binary extracts. That's the raw material. The catch is that OSM is shaped for cartographers, not drivers. A road in OSM isn't "the road called Old Pacific Highway from A to B". It's a long collection of short geometric ways, often split at every intersection, sometimes doubled up as two-way pairs, edited by hundreds of different mappers over a decade. The first job was turning the soup back into roads.
Approach
The reassembly was deliberately simple. Two ways with the same name whose endpoints sit close to each other are probably the same road, so glue them together. Repeat across the whole region. The result is a clean list of real named roads rather than OSM fragments.
Scoring used two signals and ignored everything else:
- Windiness per kilometre. Walk the coordinate list, sum the turning angle at every triple, divide by total length. A straight road accumulates nearly nothing. A mountain road accumulates a lot.
- Surface quality. Drop unpaved, gravel, dirt and anything OSM tagged as a poor surface.
No speed limit weighting, no traffic data, no reviews. Just geometry and surface, under the assumption that the world's best driving roads would surface from those two signals. Tested against a region with strong existing opinions, the output matched the roads enthusiasts already considered great.
Product
With the data layer working, the rest of Drive followed. iOS app, route building, drive-day organising, convoy tracking, accurate route sharing. The pipeline ended up covering 40+ regions globally — Australia, most of Europe, North America, large parts of South America. Adding a new region was a config entry rather than a code change.
Engagement
Co-Founder and CTO. Built the road-extraction and scoring pipeline, the API serving the iOS app, the AWS infrastructure, and most of the early product. Active build wound down at the end of 2023.