Dennis Crowley: "The craziest ideas you have are probably the best ones"

My name is Dennis Crowley and I am the co-founder and executive chair of Foursquare, which is a location intelligence company. I gave a talk today and it was about the eight-year journey of building Foursquare and kind of all of the high points and low points of that. And you know, we used this example of you know, everyone thinks that start-ups are a rocket ship ride and you just get on and it's just a rocket ship and it's amazing and it's so much fun but that's really not how it is. It's actually more of this roller coaster where some days are good and some days are bad and some weeks are good and some weeks are bad and some years are good and some years are bad. It's just this crazy cycle of emotions. What I did during the talk today was draw out this hype cycle of Foursquare, what we've been through over eight years, and talk about the different lessons that we've learned at various stages, the times that we've been really challenged to give up on something or be distracted by something or to do something different and how we resisted the urge to do that and then ultimately how the big vision for the company is starting to be realized now but only after seven or eight years of really, really hard work and challenging times. So say that I'm an out-tourer and I'm in the roller coaster and I'm at one of the loads, what would be advice you would give to an out-tourer in that situation? Yeah, yes. At the end of the talk I went over four pieces of advice that I always try to give to people when I talk to them. One of them is don't let people tell you that you have bad ideas or that your ideas are too crazy to exist or that your ideas are stupid and no one will care. I heard that a lot through my career and it just turned out that we were thinking about things a little differently than other people were and with a lot of things that we've worked on we've been very early in terms of early to the technology curve but the world has always tended to catch up with us. So you can't let people tell you that your ideas are kind of bad, you have to go out and build those things. Another piece of advice was sometimes the craziest ideas you have are probably the best ones because they're crazy to people. No one's ever heard them before, no one thinks they can work, no one's used an app that does exactly the thing that you're describing or no one has seen a company that solves the problems that you're solving. So I think that's a good one. And another one was just don't be distracted by what everyone else is doing. We've always had a pretty clear vision of the types of things that we wanted to build and the types of problems that the company was destined to solve and there was a hundred different ways to be distracted along the way and we didn't let ourselves get distracted, we just kept building the thing that we wanted to build. And it's easy to say this in hindsight that we did the right things along the way but those were all very challenging moments and very challenging times and we always stuck with the things that we thought were the right things to do and the things that were right for the company and it's kind of worked out for us. So in your talk you mentioned a bit about how coursework is involved in this company. Tell a bit about what's next on the B2C side but also on the B2B side. The big narrative from the talk today is everyone thinks of us as a consumer app company because we've made these two consumer apps, the Foursquare City Guide and Swarm Check-in Game and there's millions of people around the world that use them today or maybe they used them in the past or whatever but people always think like oh, Foursquare is the apps. And there's not a high level of awareness for all the other stuff that we've built. Those apps throw off a tremendous amount of data and in order to keep the company going and to keep us investing in the fun stuff on the consumer side, we built advertising technologies, we built place analytics technologies, we're building attribution dashboards for advertisers, we build financial prediction tools for hedge funds, we build heat maps for urban planners, for city usage. So we built this entire enterprise business that kind of exists in the background. Most people don't even know about it because they're so focused on the consumer apps but we're paying the bills because of the success that we've had with the enterprise business. And a big part of that is licensing the data and licensing the technology to some of the companies around. Twitter and Uber and Snapchat and Apple and Pinterest and Microsoft and Samsung, they're all customers of our data and that's amazing. So if there's people in this room that don't use the Foursquare app, it's fine because there's so many other apps that are using our technology that we're able to help them build amazing things and collectively we're all learning about all the amazing things spread all around the world.