After 12 years, I’m stepping back from Foursquare…
After 12+ years of Foursquare, it’s time for me to move on. It’s been quite a run, if I do say so myself — 7 years as CEO and 5 years running the Foursquare Labs R&D group (while moonlighting as Executive Chairman). As of today, I’m stepping out of my full time role but will continue to serve on the Board of Directors as Co-Chair.
What started around my kitchen tabl e in the East Village back in early 2009 has grown to nearly 400 people working around the world in 2021. What started as a quest to “build a Marauders Map” and to “turn the real world into a game” and “build a hipster version of Clippy” has turned into one of the world’s leading location technology platforms, powering location services for thousands of apps and top brands around the world. We started the company to have a shot at inventing the future of location tech… and inventing the future of location tech is exactly what we did.
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.”
