Dennis Crowley, the founder and former CEO of Foursquare, announced his departure from the firm in a Medium article on Monday. He’ll continue to serve on the board of directors.
Crowley wrote, “What began around my kitchen table in the East Village in early 2009 has expanded to approximately 400 people working throughout the world in 2021.” “What began as a desire to ‘build a Marauders Map,’ ‘turn the real world into a game,’ and ‘build a hipster version of Clippy,’ has evolved into one of the world’s leading location technology platforms, powering location services for thousands of apps and top brands worldwide.”
Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai founded Foursquare in 2009 as a smartphone app that allowed individuals to check in at their physical locations using their then-new iPhones with built-in GPS. It made collecting location data fun by awarding badges for completing a set number of check-ins (how many places did you “mayor”?). Customers were enticed to check in by offering incentives.
However, in 2014, Foursquare ditched check-ins in favor of its Swarm app, which was far less popular (no more mayors!). Users could check in with friends and create “lifelogs” with the app. Foursquare’s core business shifted away from consumer tech and toward a B-to-B strategy, allowing other companies to use its location technology via its Pilgrim SDK. Its clients included Uber, Twitter, Snapchat, WeChat, and Apple Maps.
The aim of Foursquare, according to Crowley’s Medium post (and countless interviews), was “never to design a great check-in button,” but rather to “imagine the future of location software.”
According to the tweet, Foursquare “did over $100M+ in sales in 2020, and we’ll do *far over* $100M+ in revenue in 2021.”
He’s leaving the firm he cofounded to spend more time with his family and because he has “a lot of things I still want to develop — many of which don’t fit cleanly into the Foursquare of 2021,” he adds.
“Foursquare hasn’t just found its way … it leads the way. My goal, I used to say, was to make the word “Foursquare” synonymous with “contextual aware computing innovation”… In a blog post, Crowley says, “We’ve built the tools and frameworks that can make that happen in 2021.”
“Also, 12 years is a significant amount of time. I still want to build a lot of things, many of which don’t fit cleanly into the Foursquare of 2021 (and, hey, fellow founder, that’s fine!),” he says. He’ll also spend some much-needed quality time with his family. During the Web 2.0 era, Crowley was a well-known startup founder. He was able to draw tens of millions of users to his platform. During the early years of the company, he was clearly a terrific product CEO. The company is now generating revenue as well. So it’ll be intriguing to see what he comes up with nex.
