They also had, maybe, 10 users outside of our own network a year. Everyone else we’re using the traditional pre-google-maps map websites, in my country krak.dk.
I think what google did better was marketing. Then they mapped every WiFi network on the planet to make real life location tracking faster than using GPS.
What google did was make it into a mass product and they had the resources to apply it to a planet level. That is more than marketing. There are a whole lot of steps between tech demo/proof of concept to product. The most important of which is to actually have the foresight of what the product can be and a plan to get there.
But it wasn't useful to anyone who wasn't in the GIS/remote sensingspace. Firstly, the ArcGIS product was primarily client/server and secondly you had to understand what you wanted to see before you used it - it was (and is) literally as easy to get infra red satellite imagery as actual photos.
That's not just marketing - it made it usable for whole new markets.
With a corporate sponsor willing to sink billions of dollars into a project with potentially no upside?
I wouldn’t frame it as having potentially no upside. In public talks after Google found success as a public company, Larry Page has never hidden his desire to leverage Google’s strengths to improve the transportation industry, so the desire to invest in a venture that has nothing to do with Google’s vision of “organizing the world’s information” was always there. It turns out that transportation and search have a lot in common but it wasn’t immediately obvious back in 2009 how transportation could benefit from investments by an Internet search engine.
I remember attending a Google sponsored event where Google Street View—along with crowd-sourced data added by human users—was marketed as data that would lay the foundation for a self-driving car project. They would later screen a video of the panda-like prototype from the Google Self-Driving Car project, and how the SDC could use Street View data to safely drive people around town, to which there was a lot of applause by the audience.
google/apple were taking it to the next level (phone locaiton telemetry for traffic conditions)
and then tesla with not only location telemetry from their cars, but uploading images from customer cars.
Basically, he was one of the key founders of the project that made Google Maps what it is today (a crown jewel of Google with one of the best cartography datasets), vs what it was originally (better UI to third-party, licensed cartography data).
I remember about 12 years ago somebody from the GIS industry, scoffing at the notion that Google might even try to go do some mapping of their own. For him, maps was something Navteq and TeleAtlas knew how to do, and a search engine was deeply misguided if it thought it could venture into that space. That was honestly the prevailing wisdom at the time — it was going to be hard for web-based Google to even deal with the ugly real-world-ness of mapping.
Fast forward to today. Google Maps basically showed the GIS crowd how their work oughta have been done all this time. They invented street cars, street view, and actually made it work; and they used the data to produce accurate maps of the world.
So to your question, what led this guy to an astounding level of monetary reward was that he was part of a team that made a big, calculated bet with Maps and executed very, very well on it. That gave Page ample reason to compensate them well, and it gave him trust that they could handle more projects where they would show up incumbents (such as the traditional car manufacturers, whose inroads into self-driving tech had been very timid for decades).
And it's not clear that they are close to self driving cars, but they certainly contributed to upping the game of that whole industry.
So there's your recipe :) I'd bet that folks who came up with the key tech behind the iPhone are in similar positions at Apple, given how they turned the whole mobile phone business on its head (remember Nokia?).
EDIT: I don't mean the above to indicate that the reward was deserved in any way. Likely, a lot of what happened here is luck plus outstanding team work rather than individual lead performance. But to the question being asked, this is the kind of circumstance and outcome that seems to have supported, in one man's view at least (Page), that level of compensation. If you look at folks at Google who made/make big $, the story is often similar - they led products that were fledgling challengers into industry leaders within a few years (Chrome, Android...).