Don't let anyone tell you your ideas are stupid or the thing you feel most passionate about 'won't work' - it's happened to me time and time again, and we find that if you push at what you think is interesting hard enough, you're probably right.
Dennis Crowley
Foursquare makes maps special. We take maps that are blank and put dots on them to help you figure out what to do.
One of the biggest hurdles about Foursquare is you need to remember to use it.
Every check-in should mean something. Foursquare should get smarter every time that you continue to check in. We should be able to offer special deals that you may be interested in, and we should be able to offer recommendations for the type of things you should do next.
Asking Siri where the nearest sushi bar is - that's not interesting. What's interesting is asking your phone where one of your friends have last had dinner in the neighborhood, or having it recommend a cool paella place in Barcelona because it knows you eat paella all the time at home.
Whatever way that we have in our head that we expect people to use a software, they'll find other interesting ways to use it that we didn't expect.
People share everything on Facebook. That can be a very good thing or a very noisy thing. With Foursquare, people know that they're getting information specifically about a place, advice about where they are and what they could be doing. It's a very filtered view of the world.
We've got over 1 million merchants who have claimed their businesses on Foursquare, running specials and doing other things. What we want to do is take these tools used by the 50-100 national retailers and make them accessible to our 1 million merchants. Then you've got something really powerful.
I feel lucky because earlier in my career, I found what I liked to do; it's build software that you see your friends using on the street, and they like it.
I used to snowboard 30 days a year. Now it's down to eight.
People used to pooh-pooh the idea of a check-in, saying that this wasn't interesting. But when you have 3 billion of those data points, you can take any latitude and longitude anywhere in the world, and I'll tell you what is interesting now, 20 minutes from now, and 6 hours from now.
I learned early on not to feel badly about reaching out for help, and not to feel embarrassed about saying that you're in over your head.
Forget about where you want to be and go out and build stuff. Dodgeball came from being bored at work... things happen because you make them happen. Stop sketching, and start building.
My buddies are like, 'You live the most amazing life!' Well, I'm working like a dog. I come home most nights and pass out on the couch.
My mindset is of the person who is still unsure whether they have enough money in their ATM to go to another bar. I lived that way when I was unemployed, when I was a snowboard instructor, and when I was at NYU. A lot of my personality is stuck in those five years, and I don't know if that's ever gonna change.
I keep a notebook in my pocket, and I write down all the stuff we could ever do with Foursquare.
The best version of Foursquare is the one you don't think about using.
It's difficult to build services that are supposed to scale to, you know, 30, 50, 100 million users right off the bat because they got to be kind of tailored down; by definition, they have to be a little bit generic to speak to that large of an audience.
Between the three, Facebook is literally everyone I've ever shaken hands with at a conference or kissed on the cheek at Easter. Twitter seems to be everyone I am entertained by or I wish to meet some day. Foursquare seems to be everyone I run into on a regular basis. All three of those social graphs are powerful in their own.
It's very clear to users, more clear than in other apps, that Foursquare is an app for search and discovery, and we're very good at delivering you a social map that will show you friends' faces on the map and things that you might like.
The misconception about Foursquare is that it's just hipsters in New York and San Francisco checking in at bars. It's happening all over the world. I've seen huge growth in Europe, Japan, South America.
I'm obsessed with the idea of social TV.
Facebook is about sharing experiences that you've had. Foursquare is more about the present tense and the future tense.
If we all went to Google right now, or went to Yelp right now, we'd all get the same results, and that seems really, really broken to me. Foursquare should understand the neighborhoods I've spent a lot of time in, and the restaurants that I went to once but never went back to.
I use Facebook all the time. I'm not a believer that they're going to do everything on the Internet better than anyone else.
You know when people leave a job, and they say they didn't know what they came away with after two years? That's how I felt when I first left Google.
I didn't really start building my own stuff until I was 24, 25 or so, and even then, I ran into a lot of resistance from, like, older folks, like my bosses at other companies or people in the industry that were like, 'Oh that's an interesting idea, but it will never work.' And, I don't know, I kind of believed everything that they told me.
I can think of the number of people who were like, 'I will never get a cellphone because I don't want people calling me all the time. And I will never get on Facebook because I don't want to share that stuff with people. And Twitter, that's not for me.' And this is just the natural progression of things.
