Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: Niantic’s founding CEO John Hanke on his changing role, and Netflix’s new Playground app.

Niantic Spatial, the company best known for having made Pokémon Go, brought on former IBM executive Inhi Cho Suh as its new CEO at the end of last month. Suh is succeeding Niantic’s founding CEO John Hanke, who is now taking on the executive chairman role.

Niantic has changed a lot since Pokémon Go launched a decade ago. The company built a few would-be successors to the game that didn’t quite catch on, leading to closures and layoffs. At the same time, it also kept working on perfecting the spatial mapping technology that powered its games, including by incorporating Gaussian splats. A year ago, Niantic sold its gaming business, renamed itself to Niantic Spatial, and refocussed entirely on mapping and geospatial AI.

I had a chance to sit down with Hanke a few days before the leadership change announcement and talk about the reasons behind it, the Pokémon Go sale and his thoughts on AR, VR, and AI.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you decide to leave the CEO post now?

For me, the Niantic journey started as a skunk works [project] inside of Google in 2011. We spun out of Google in 2015, and we completed the transaction in 2025. As we were contemplating that transaction and decided that we wanted to form this entity, I was thinking about who should run it.