And it started getting some press. I went out to San Francisco to speak at a conference. Can you come to Google instead and just meet me here for lunch? It was super, super serendipitous. On reinventing Dodgeball as Foursquare in after quitting Google. Every day until the thing started getting a little stronger, and we launched in a couple other cities and it started getting some momentum. Merchants want the check-ins, merchants give discounts, this company will generate money, and more people will check in.
We ended up raising some money from Union Square Ventures. Suddenly we had a three-person team, and we just started growing from there. Contact us at letters time. By Sam Frizell. Related Stories. The 25 Defining Works of the Black Renaissance. How much longer until you move to San Francisco? It was us and Etsy and Tumblr, a small cohort of startups then that were trying to make it work. That started attracting more venture capitalists. And I think we owe a lot of credit to Google for opening that huge engineering office when we were working at Google.
Our first 20 hires, I think, all came from Google. They were all the people we used to sit at the lunch table with. Is it radically different than it was in the early days? DC: For sure. But the tech ecosystem here is still very healthy. They want to be able to contribute in a large way to a company that still only has employees, like us. FC: And is Foursquare as a product and a company meaningfully different than it would have been if it had moved out to San Francisco at the get-go?
It always felt like we were building for a really, really hard city without realizing it. I think that really gave us an edge, as we were forced to solve hard problems. FC: You talked about how you discovered the Foursquare was not about having a consumer product with a vast number of users, but you have continued to add new features to the apps. You experimented with a recommendations bot called Marsbot. We have the City Guide product and we have the Swarm product.
Because people like what they do and they do it really well. That said, we are always making new technology here and the technology is always getting better, mostly in service of a lot of our enterprise tools. And this is what I work on. They just need to kind of give people a glimpse into what the future could look like, when you build things off of our data and technology. But it worked. FC: As you mentioned, you sold Dodgeball to Google.
Can you compare and contrast between those two experiences? DC: Dodgeball was a great outcome for us at the time. Because we were NYU students and we really just needed to pay our rent and stop eating pizza all the time. But we just could not figure out how to exist and be productive in a large environment like that.
Some of them were our fault and some of them were just Google in Foursquare has been a super challenging journey for me. But at the same time, you have these moments. But this is what we do. We have this crazy technology. We have this super interesting data set. We have all the infrastructure we need to build this quirky stuff.
Events Innovation Festival. Follow us:. By Harry McCracken long Read. One app becomes two FC: Five years into Foursquare, you went through this change where you split off check-ins into Swarm. Fifty million users is enough FC: Foursquare and Swarm have 50 million users [on a rolling day timeframe]. Back to the lab FC: You talked about how you discovered the Foursquare was not about having a consumer product with a vast number of users, but you have continued to add new features to the apps.
News News Funny and adorable memes could be a secret weapon in dealing with stress News Job satisfaction among millennial and Gen Z workers just hit a new low point News Get to know the work of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, who was killed tragically on a film set. Design Co. When we first started Foursquare in early , there were no great location APIs to build off of trust us, we looked everywhere … and so we made our own. Since those early days, our place database has been and continues to be created and maintained by our user community.
And because of that, we always thought our crowd-sourced place database should be open to other developers to build on, if only to save them from the messy work of having to build their own. I look forward to sharing some of the other things the team here has been hard at work cooking up stay tuned!
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