 I want to bring out our first guest. Please welcome the CEO of Foursquare, Dennis Crowley. How are you? I'm doing all right. Thanks for coming. You're very careful. It's like a... We try to make it kind of like difficult for people to get over. We've got... You've got to step over that thing, you've got to step up, and that arm is broken. Yeah, it's a little mini obstacle course for sure. We brought back the broken arm sofa just for you. Dennis, thank you for coming. Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. I'm excited to be here. Well, you know, it really is our pleasure to have you. You're here in New York. You're based in New York. Yeah, we're down in... We have offices down at Soho. Now would you say... Now I want to talk a little bit about... I want to get into the roots of Foursquare, but first I want to talk about the East Coast, West Coast startup battle. It's gotten very heated. Can you trash talk Silicon Valley at all for us right now and talk about how much better New York is for startups? I think I like the New York scene a lot, right? Because there's just a lot more people here. There's like eight million people here versus... I don't know how many people are in San Francisco, but... Fifteen. But yeah, considerably fewer there, right? And then on top of that, the thing I like about building a tech startup in New York is that tech is not the most important thing here. It's like fifth down on the list. They've got fashion and finance and media and publishing and advertising and pretty much everything else except for tech. Tech is way down at the bottom. And so when you meet people out and you ask them to beta test the things that you're building or get excited about the stuff you're building, they're just regular people. They're not early adopters. I think it makes it much easier to build things in this environment. You're not like, hey, I'm doing Foursquare. You can check in place. You become mayor place. They're like, oh, I'm using a different thing that does exactly that. Yeah, I have my own startup that does that. My startup is actually doing that. So I can't really test it. That is a thing, though. I mean, it is. You don't have a million different startups all doing, trying to do similar things here. It's like there's a few. I feel like New York startups, and maybe because we're sort of like a publishing, part of like a publishing startup, really, I am biased. But I feel like there's something a little bit more like the startups here are much more real. They're real things. They involve real world, either real world activities or they're things that you actually need for your life. Yeah, it's interesting. Versus like stuff like, hey, what if we had Yelp for shoes? I don't know. I mean, that's Yelp, isn't it? I don't really know. Well, there's like a smaller pool of them here. So like you look at the big ones. And we're one of the biggest ones here. And then you've got your Tumblers and your Etsy's and your Kickstarters and your Meetups. And it's just like a smaller pool to compare yourself with. And when you look at the big startups that are out west, it's not just the big tech companies. You've got your Googles and your Facebooks and your Twitters and your Apples. And it's just like a different breed of big tech company. Right. But I mean, Facebook and Twitter, they've kind of graduated to a different sphere of... They're not like a startup. Yeah, but when you think about it- And you're in that sphere too. Yeah, I mean like- You're not really even a startup. We're like 150 people, right? You're like 150 years old. Yeah, exactly, right? So like out west, I think that's still considered relatively small. But we're one of the bigger players in the New York tech scene, right? And so it's like a different distinction of scale, I guess. So to recap, the west coast startup scene, lame. East coast startup scene, awesome. Is that what I'm hearing? Can we quote you on that? I see. I don't want to poo-poo the west coast because we have an office out there. Yeah, shut it down. We've got like 35 guys in the office and out there. It's wasting your time. Yeah. So I actually want to talk about the beginnings of Foursquare. Foursquare was not Foursquare originally. Foursquare was like, if you go way back in the day, it's me building software for my friends that got laid off for my very first dot com job. Which was what? Well, actually my second job. So I worked at a company called Jupiter Research, in which I was the guy making PowerPoint slides. And then I worked at a- That was your job? I was pretty much- This awesome arrow. Pretty much, making slides for other people to give during presentations and things. And then I worked at a mobile product shop called Vindigo that was building city guides for PalmPilots. And I was at this company, Vindigo, I really got bit by the bug of, hey, you can make stuff. You can build stuff during the day. And you go out at night and you see people using the stuff that you were working on during the day. And they're using it on their PalmPilots. And that was kind of a big deal. I know PalmPilots is super old school. But I was like, oh my god, you build stuff during the day and you see people using it at night. That's incredibly rewarding. And so this idea of just building stuff that my friends would use and building stuff that I want to use, I just got really kind of bit by that bug. And so the first version of Dodgeball ended up coming out of that. We ended up- Can you explain Dodgeball a little bit for people who don't know what it is? Sure, yeah. Dodgeball is, I can't remember how we used to pitch it back in the day, but it was just like a basic friend finder for text messaging. And so this is before you had GPS and phones or color screens or apps in general. But anywhere that my friends in New York would go out, you would just send a text message to nyc at dodgeball.com and say, I'm at the magician. I'm at Tom and Jerry's. I'm at Central Park. And then that message would get rebroadcast to all of your friends. We had a poor man's little social network built into it. And it didn't work. It was SMS based. It was SMS, yeah. But it didn't work because no one really kind of knew what social networks were. This was back in 2001. People didn't know what social networks were. Text messaging barely worked. And we kept trying to resurrect the idea. We did it after Friendster kind of hit pseudo mass market. And it's like, oh, now we can explain it as it's like Friendster for cell phones. And then we tried to resurrect it again when we were at NYU and did it with then we ended up bringing it to Google. And I feel like now, a couple years later, some of those ideas are a little bit more in the right time, right place. The devices are more mature. Everyone here knows about apps on your phone. You all know that you have GPS. Everyone here has phones that can do these things. And so it's just a much larger audience. But you've been trying to do like, I mean, you've essentially been trying to do something like Foursquare, or been trying to do Foursquare for a very long time. Foursquare, when was the year Foursquare started? We started 2009. Right. And so way before that, though, you were kind of trying to find a way to say, pay I'm out of place. Yeah. Tell people about it. Yeah. I'd say it goes back to 2001 or so. Right. Which is insane. Yeah. I mean, but it barely worked. We had 15 people using it. You really, really want people to know where you are. Well, it's just like it makes meeting up with people easier and more fun. Right. So Foursquare was a few years ago, everybody talked about Foursquare as it was like, we're gamify everything. We're going to gamify our lives. Like Foursquare is one of these things where it's like, I get achievements for doing stuff that I'm doing anyhow. Yeah. I can become the mayor of somewhere. I can get badges for stuff. Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously, that stuff is all still baked into Foursquare. But it seems like the last couple of years, certainly the last year, things have been moving towards not just about, hey, I got an achievement, or I'm the mayor of something, but Foursquare is going to be an engine for finding things. Yeah, for discovery. Yeah, for discovery and getting recommendations. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about the shift, or if there is a shift, and what that means to you? You know, I don't really see it so much as a shift, right? So what we're trying to do, like the kind of essence of Foursquare, is how do you use software to encourage people to go out and to have experiences that they haven't had before, right? And a big part of that is like the recommendation engine that we've got, you know, a whole bunch of data scientists working, crunching the three billion check-ins to make these recommendations happen in real time. And there's another part of that. We weren't able to do that in the early days. We just didn't have the team and the talent. We weren't sophisticated enough to do that. In the early days, we were using like basic game mechanics, like the badges that probably most of the people in this room know about, where it's like, can we use software to encourage people to go to places that they haven't been to before? Like initially, it was, you know, I live in the East Village, and there's a bar that I always go to called 7B, and it was like, you know, this is just my default place. Like how do you make a piece of software that encourages me to go to some place I haven't been before, to bring my friends there, to go to another borough, to like travel uptown, to get a group of people together and do something none of us have done before? And can you make a game out of that? And can that, like, you know, if you make the game, if you design the game well enough, can it encourage people to do those types of things? Right. And a lot of that stuff works, like the game mechanics have worked pretty well in Foursquare. Like if you level up in coffee, it's like, hey, I'm a level six coffee person, because I've been to 30 different places in New York, people feel some kind of sense of accomplishment over that. Right. You know, like, hey, I unlocked the gym rat badge for going to the gym, you know, 10 times out of a 30 day period. Like, that's, it kind of works, right? Do you ever feel like, I'm going to get a little bit deep on you here. Let's do it. Do you ever feel like the idea of gamifying for adults, like going to a bar is very adult activity, right? Yeah. Do you ever feel that the, and I'm sure you have a wonderful response to this, but do you ever feel like in some way gamifying things that we normally do as a way of infantilizing us? Like, it kind of making us, like, I mean, I don't play, you know, in my daily life, I don't think of the things I do as an achievement that I need to unlock or a game that I have to play. Is there something about taking tasks or things that we do recreationally and turning them into a game that in some way diminishes their value or their importance? Or does that? I think there's a big difference between, like, trying to turn everything into a game and try to make everything playful, right? So I never, I don't ever think of Foursquare as a game, right? There, there's game mechanics in there, but I think of it as, like, you know, there's been all these just utilities, like things that will help you do stuff on the internet for a long time. And it's like, we should make those things more fun. They should be fun to use and fun to interact with. And so that's where a lot of the game mechanics come from. I want to make, you know, everyday interactions of, like, going to the same restaurant, like, commuting every day, traveling in between cities. I want to make that stuff feel playful and rewarding. Doesn't have to be a game, but I think there's, it's important to note the distinction. You think that it's, do you think as people, as humans, like, we need to be rewarded for doing, I mean, is that something that you think is baked into our DNA that we want to be rewarded or we need to be rewarded? You know, I don't think, rewards come in different sizes and shapes. Like, every time that you get a like on Instagram, like, that's like, that's being rewarded. That's like the little bit of a dopamine hit. Right. And I feel like, you know, that's a, that's a multiplayer version of it, right? Because like, you post something and then your friends interact with it and that's two players interacting. You know, the Foursquare stuff was designed to be more one player. Like, you do something in the real world and Foursquare rewards you for doing that. And so, you know, a badge, a mayor unlock, you know, you get a tip that tells you about something you should order at a restaurant. Like, those are all little dopamine hits in the same type of way that make people feel good. Like, hey, if I put data into the system, it's enhancing my experience of the real world. And so you feel like, and you, so you feel like there's a physiological, like, that there is, I mean, obviously there is, you're right about the dopamine hit. But you feel like that's actually fundamental to what you're doing, that you want people to feel this sense of, of, hey, I've, you know, this like visceral sense of, hey, I've got something or I accomplished something. Yeah. It doesn't need to be down to like the chemical level of it, but you know, this, you know, I always think of Foursquare as like, we should be able to make, you know, these little guides that live in your pocket, like a guide to the city that basically has all the knowledge that your friends have about all the places in the world. And that wherever you end up bringing your phone, that guide can come to life and say, hey, these are the things that you need to pay attention to. And so it doesn't have to be like one of those one player rewards, like a badge or a mayor mechanic, right? Those might happen all the time. But as long as, you know, I can be someplace I haven't been before and Foursquare can surface a little bit of information for me that helps me understand that place or make my, you know, my 15 or 20 minutes I spend in that place a little bit more interesting. I think that's really like, no one's really done stuff like that before. Right. And we're showing that when you do it, like it works, it works pretty well. So you talked about putting data into it, sort of incentivizing people to put data into Foursquare. We have a video, and I don't know if we can cue this up or not, but it's, you guys posted this thing, which is the map of check-ins during the hurricane. Do we have this up? So this is it. You can see the dates going by there. And you can see all this activity move, literally move out of the lower part of- Actually, I haven't seen this yet. This is kind of awesome. You haven't seen this? It's really crazy because you can see the migration. Play it again. Play it again. Can we run that one more time? It's like you can actually see people moving here away from the water. Here we go. Yeah. Maybe? It's like fading. They actually- You have that technology. Yeah, do we? Can we replay the video? Here we go. So you can see there's a lot of activity downtown. And then- Oh, that's rad. Right? How, I mean, it goes dark. Yeah. The way the power does in a way and the way people's ability to get down there. So this data is obviously very valuable. And I mean, you're using it for stuff that is like, hey, I love this bar or this restaurant. There was an article in the Believer, kind of a little bit of a mean-spirited Foursquare article where they said, they were kind of making fun of the idea that people say, it's like saying things like, people talk about mac and cheese in Williamsburg, which is very surface information. Do you see that data is valuable? I mean, what we just showed is important. That's like a life-threatening situation. You guys are collecting all this information. Are there other uses for that data? Are there other ways that you can utilize that data or that you can share that data? Well, I think everything that you see going on in Foursquare now, like in our Explore Recommendation Engine, that's all the magic that we're trying to deliver to people. We have all these folks that give us a little bit of information about what they do every day, like the types of coffee places they go to, the different places they go to in Williamsburg, different places they go to all over the world. And we take all those check-in data points, and we can really start making these recommendation engines that are personalized to people. For the history of local search on the internet, it's always been, like if everyone here goes to Google or Yelp right now and we search for sushi, we all get the same results. That's broken. That's so super broken, because we all have different tastes. Our friends have all been to different places. We all had different experiences. It's very clear that that stuff is going to change. You want that to be for a person, not just a generalized statement about... The big thing that we're able to do, that no one's been able to do before, is be able to have personalized local search results for every person, for any person, at any given point in time. So Foursquare search results are different depending on the intersection you're standing on, the day of the week it is, the time of the day it is. We can potentially get into things where it's like, is it colder than it normally is? Is it warmer than it normally is? Where do people normally go around these times? You look at those check-in points there. Sometimes people look at Foursquare and be like, oh, it's cute. It's about points and badges and stuff. That's great that people get that part of it. But that was four days of data up there, and that just shows how Foursquare in New York is a living, breathing type of organism. There's all sorts of interesting data that's being teased out of that. It's our responsibility to take all those data points and use it to help everyone in this room, everyone in New York, everyone in the world, use that to make better sense out of what's going on nearby. Interesting. So we have to wrap up. Unfortunately, there's a lot more I want to... There's a bunch of questions I didn't get to. Tell me about, do you see Foursquare as a company that IPOs? Are you a Facebook? Does this become a public company? Everyone asks us this all the time. When are you guys going to IPO? How soon is it going to be? I tell you, it's one of the last things that we think about. Our job is just to build the best products that we can right now. We've got just over 25 million users, almost three billion check-ins, and in order to compete in the scale which we're competing with, we're one of the... We're the smallest of the big companies right now. So we've got to grow our audience. We've got to grow the business. We've got to figure out how to work better as teams and everything. If we figure out all that stuff, then those are the questions that we've got to start thinking about. But for now, it's just, how do you build stuff that's better than the stuff we're launching today? How do you build stuff that just people love using every single day? Thank you very much for coming. Dennis Crowley, everybody. You've got to come back. There's a lot more we need to get to.