After 12 years, I’m stepping back from Foursquare…

Much love to those who helped us build this place — employees, investors, partners, superusers & fans!

My daughter and I at Foursquare HQ NYC. This is the tree my grandma gave Foursquare 11 years ago (!!) as an office-warming gift after signing our first lease at 36 Cooper Square. We took it home so we could water it :)

Let me just unpack this “inventing the future” stuff for a minute (which has always been core to Foursquare’s internal narrative, but maybe less so to people outside the company). When Naveen and I started tinkering on Foursquare, the iPhone was a little more than a year old. The app store was maybe six months old. Developers only just got access to the GPS chipset. Building a tech startup in NYC (instead of SF) was still a crazy idea. We had a hunch that a “better version of Dodgeball” would work well in a world where smartphones and social networks were now mainstream — GPS would make check-ins easier, badges and mayorships would make check-ins fun. And, more importantly, we knew that if we were able to build a machine that generated lots of check-ins, we’d be able to use that data to make a living, breathing map of the world. And it worked! When we started to hit 1M check-ins a month, we started sketching how we’d build a version of Foursquare that didn’t require a check-in button… it would just “know” where your phone was. This was *outright impossible* back in 2010 — GPS accuracy, battery consumption, background processes running on iOS — but we kept telling our team, “the goal isn’t to make an awesome check-in button… the goal is to create software that can learn from the places you’ve been, no check-in required”. This was our vision — our North Star — and we focused and built our company around making that vision come alive. When another company would outright copy something we built, I’d tell our team, “They can copy what we’ve done.. but not what we’re gonna do next.” Long story short, that vision to “make a check-in button you never have to press” turned into the story of how we created Pilgrim and the Pilgrim SDK — the contextual-aware, “snap-to-place” engine that powers many of Foursquare’s products today. (and btw, it’s named “Pilgrim” for the religious pilgrimage we went through as a company trying to make it work or die trying). We went through a period where people thought we were nuts for thinking this big — “that’s a job for Google, or Apple, or maybe Facebook… not a tiny-startup like Foursquare”. But our team rose to the challenge, spent *years* on R&D to make it work (thank you for your patience, investors!), and we (yes, Foursquare!) were the ones to build it. And then make it better, and faster, and more accurate. And then turn it into an SDK. And inspire folks to build on top of these tools we had created. It took the better part of a decade, but we had successfully created the thing we had no business making. It worked. It changed what was possible on mobile phones. And it changed what Foursquare was capable of building from a platform, dev tools, advertising, and analytics perspective. Pilgrim is one of the many reasons Foursquare is still here in 2021, able to call ourselves the world’s leading location technology platform. So that’s what I mean by “inventing the future.”

PEOPLE OF FOURSQUARE! I want you to know that the most important thing to me as we’ve built this company over the years has been that we do so in such a way that lets each and every one of you someday look back on your time here at Foursquare and think, ‘You know what? That was the best job I ever had.’ And I want you to feel this way not because the job was easy, and because the job was fun, but because Foursquare has *always* been full of genuinely good people who cared about the work they were doing because they believed in the vision behind it.”

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I like to build things (Founder @Foursquare 📱, @StockadeFC ⚽️, Dodgeball 📟). Husband to @Chelsa & dad to 👧🏼❄️ & 👶🏼🚀 I enjoy snowboards, soccer & hot dogs

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Dennis Crowley

I like to build things (Founder @Foursquare 📱, @StockadeFC ⚽️, Dodgeball 📟). Husband to @Chelsa & dad to 👧🏼❄️ & 👶🏼🚀 I enjoy snowboards, soccer & hot dogs