Niantic celebrates its 5th anniversary and looks back on Pokemon GO

Niantic as a company is just 5 years old, but they've had quite the run so far. Not many other companies out there can claim to making a worldwide phenomenon like Pokemon GO! In a note released on Niantic's blog, CEO John Hanke looked back on those 5 years, along with the launch of Pokemon GO. You can check out a snippet of the blog below, but make sure to click over for the full piece.

So much has changed. We’ve grown up a lot. Yet when I look back on the last five years and everything we’ve done to get to this moment, it strikes me that the Niantic we know today, however different it might look, has kept much of its DNA. What remains at the heart of why we do what we do is our belief that technology—augmented reality, specifically—can make a profound positive impact on the world. We create moments and memories, augmenting the world around us in ways that encourage exploration, exercise, and social interaction. Our journey has been made up of small moments of joy—setting up our first office, our lasagna feast celebrating our first $1M in revenue—to bigger ones—10,000 Ingress Agents descending on Odaiba, servers struggling as millions began to play Pokémon GO, Justin Beiber sightings, crashing cellular networks in Chicago, celebratory raids snatched from the jaws of defeat, beautiful new offices, and more GO Fests culminating in our most widely attended GO Fest ever this summer, adapted on the fly to respond to a world turned upside down.