The Next Web NYC - Dennis Crowley, Foursquare

wie Like, Comment and Subscribe for daily news. or swarm. Ladies and gentlemen, it's the co-founder of Foursquare, David Crowley. Hi. How is everyone? Hey, thanks. So hey, my name is Dennis. I'm the co-founder of Foursquare. Does anyone know Foursquare? Does anyone not know Foursquare? Anyone check in today? That's good. Thank you for all the check-ins. I appreciate it. Well, this is nice. It presses all the way. So hey, my name is Dennis. You probably know Foursquare for the two apps that we've created. I'm sure there's people here that have one point, that use them now, that use them every day, that have used them in the past. We have the Foursquare app, which helps you find amazing places to go and do anywhere in the world. Very proud of it. We have the Swarm app, which is based off of check-in. And games and competing with your friends and going to the most interesting places. And both these apps do really well for us. We've been talking about these apps forever. The story kind of behind the story is that all the apps and all the work that we've done generates a tremendous amount of data for the company. And the things I want to talk about today are what are we doing with the data? How do we figure out that we have all this data? And how do we figure out what to actually do with it? But this is what every single city in the world looks like to us every single day. New York, Tokyo, Istanbul, London. This is like a 24-hour clock. I think the time got chopped off at the top. But the different colors correspond to the types of places that people are going to. But every day we're getting this insight as to where people go. Where were they before? Where are they going to go next? Where were they yesterday? Which places are trending now? Which places were trending a week ago? It's a really fantastic data set. And there's a ton of people that are using this and contributing to it. We have more than 10 billion check-ins overall since we started the company. There's more than 100 million in the database, and people throughout the world have told us about them. When we started, we had none, zero, and now there's more than 100 million. It's great. About 50 million people every month use the products that we create, and if you look at all the API developers and people building on top of the platform, there's more than a billion calls every single day. So this stuff is really getting some momentum. We're powering the biggest names in technology, which we're very, very proud of. Just yesterday, we announced, hey, Snapchat's now working with us. They're working in this they're using our data in order to power next generation geo filters and geo targeted geo filters that you'll end up seeing. And so this is just like a continuous trend for Foursquare. We make these apps. The apps are great. We generate tons of data. We're doing cool stuff with the data, including powering all these other companies to do amazing things. If you tweeted from here and you tagged it as being at the conference or being here at the Ferry Building, that's all Foursquare data. If you're doing the same thing within Pinterest, if you're using Apple Maps abroad, all powered by Foursquare data. Really interesting. So we've been doing this for a long time, since 2009, for eight years. And sometimes, like, I've never had a job for eight years. This is the longest I've ever been in one job. That's kind of nuts. But it's funny because anytime I talk to people about the company, you know, this is the way that everyone thinks that startup goes. You're like, oh, you start and then you launch and then you're at the top of the world and it's awesome and everything's great. And this is like never the way that it works. And for the people that are in this room, you probably know that this chart is bullshit. Like, in fact, like this is what the journey looks like. The craziest, worst roller coaster you've ever been on, where the mornings are great and the afternoons are awful. Or this week is great and last week was awful. Or this quarter is great and last quarter was awful. Or the whole year was awful or great. You know, like this is the ride that you sign up to be on as an entrepreneur. And not a lot of people talk about it. All right. So that's why I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about here. There's this chart. And you guys know Gartner, the consulting company? They have this thing called the hype cycle. And this is kind of how, like, their lay of the land. Like, what happens to different technologies. And I kind of think it happens to startups too, right? So this is their different sections. Like, the latest one charts all this crazy tech. Smart dust. I don't even know what that is. 4D printing. I don't even know what that is. Super early. And then later on, you know, as things start to become more mainstream or as expectations start to even out, you kind of get later on in the hype cycle. So we took a look at, like, how does this apply to our story? And, you know, my opinion is it kind of maps pretty well to it, right? So if you look at this chart, you know, you've got the chart. You've got the things that Gartner talks about. The technology trigger. What was the piece of technology that came out that allowed, you know, the company to exist? The peak of inflated expectations. When everyone thinks they're going to change the world, except for you, when you're still trying to figure out how you're actually going to do it. The trial of disillusionment where you're like, holy cow, we're not quite there yet, and we were overhyped for a while. Like, what do we do now? The slope of enlightenment when you're actually trying to figure out and you figure out, like, the thing that you're supposed to do next. And then this idea of the plateau of productivity. Now, this is not my thing. This is Gartner's thing. And they've been pitching this stuff for years. Like, our curve kind of looks like this, but kind of not. It kind of looks more like this. Okay? And so it's kind of the same curve, but just like in a different timeline over eight years. So I'm going to walk you through the different stages of this and how it related to the Foursquare story. So chapter one, and I think there's five chapters, and let's hope we get through them all, is this idea of like resurrecting a good idea. The technology trigger. I had a company before this that was called Dodgeball. We made friend finders for mobile phones. It was the future back in 2004. We had sold it to Google in 2005. We were so excited. We were toasting our Budweisers and posting it on Flickr. And then two years later, we ended up leaving. Right? We ended up leaving Google. This is like the best possible outcome we could have for two kids from NYU, and we weren't able to make it work there. And people were telling us, like, this idea doesn't work. It's, you know, like, it's not a good idea. It's not going to go anywhere. And when, you know, Google ultimately decided to turn it off, we were like, no, this is a good idea. We want to build this thing. If they're going to make us turn it off, we're going to go and make a new one. And so that's ended up being what Foursquare was. Right? And so Foursquare, you know, it worked because of the iPhone. It worked because of GPS. It worked because everyone already knew how to use things like Facebook and Twitter. Like, this is the first version we launched with in 2009. Everyone loved the badges. They're designed to make you feel like this guy. You know, this was the original thinking. And this thing, like, you know, in hindsight, to no surprise, it took off. Like, we were the darling of South by Southwest 2009. Like, we are the breakout app. Everything is amazing. You know? We had a master plan. And, you know, this was the master plan. It was a piece of paper hanging in our conference room. Like, these are the fantasy use cases. You've got to help people find the best ramen nearby. Where are all my friends going to eat the best ramen? Where are all the, who are my friends that are experts in ramen? Like, the whole thing was designed about helping people find amazing places. Right? And so, you know, we knew that if we got all these people checking into places, we'd get a ton of data. We got a ton of data. We could use it to make recommendations. And then we could use the recommendations to, you know, kind of turn into visits. And then people would want more check-ins. Right? This is kind of the life cycle that we wanted. Now, what happened was this idea of the check-in wars. Right? People were like, Foursquare is the next Twitter. Foursquare is the next Facebook. I'm like, we are? Because we're not ready for that. You know? And then everyone started copying us. So Facebook's like, well, check-ins are a thing. Well, I guess we're going to have check-ins in our app. There was another 200 apps that come up being like, we're going to do check-ins too. You know, Facebook was copying us. So, you know, this is their places icon. Like, four. Square. Right? A little nod to us. I'm like, come on, guys. You know, then there was the whole thing of like, Foursquare for whatever. You know, people talk about, oh, I'm the Uber for hot dogs. Well, we were like, we were Foursquare for TV. We're Foursquare for movie. Foursquare for books. You know, all these companies trying to get in this space. And of course, at the time, we're like, listen, the vision was not to build a check-in button. The vision was to get all this data so we could make amazing products that help people figure out where to go in the world. Like, build software that learns from the places you've been and then help people use that data to navigate the world. That's what we were trying to do. And so, if you remember, from the early days of Foursquare, you'd go places and it would pop up. Hey, Dennis, you have to go here because the hot dogs are so good and we know you love hot dogs. You have to go here because the bourbon, you know, cocktail is so great and we know that's a thing that you like. Like, that's the thing that we've been trying to do since the very beginning. So, you know, we knew early on that, like, we weren't going to get people always doing, you know, checking in everywhere that they went. It's just like a crazy idea to think, like, every time anyone in the world goes any place, they will take their phone out of their pocket and press the button that we made for them. Like, we knew that. So the challenge was like, listen, we're going to have to build a check-in button that you never have to press. What does that look like? I don't know. No one's ever made this. The technology doesn't exist. We're going to have to go and do it. And we knew that was a challenge for us. This is going back 2010, right? So this is like chapter three. Where do we go from, like, we've kind of been through the flats, we're trying to figure out what to do, you know, we know we need this technology. And this is the transition from being like a social media company to a technology company. So this is the moment, right? October 2011, the iPhone 4S comes out. Anyone have a 4S? Yes, right? 4S comes out and they're talking about there's geofences. Apple built geofencing into iOS 5. And we're like, this is it. This is the technology we've been waiting for. This is the thing that's going to enable us to do all the things that we wanted to do to make these consumer apps so easy to use. When you go someplace, it will pop up. And just tell you, like, we know that you're there, right? We know what you're supposed to be doing. The problem was when this stuff came out, and we were so psyched to dive into it and play around with it, it didn't work, right? Like, Apple had designed this stuff where you would set a reminder when you go, you know, when you're home, it tells you to not forget your keys or it tells you to pick up the laundry. It wasn't designed to, you know, help developers like us go out and help people find awesome hot dogs and burger places and bourbon cocktails. And so we had this moment of, like, shit. If it's not going to work, like, we're going to have to build this ourselves. Like, we're not this social media company that's just building these apps that people use with. We have to be a technology company. We've got to build stuff that no other company is doing. We have to do the thing that Google's not going to make for us. We have to make the software that Apple's not going to make for us. We have to do the thing that Facebook will never do or, you know, build out the vision that Facebook doesn't have. And that was, like, a big switching point for us. And so when it didn't work, you know, we went through this period, like, this really long... This low point of, like, we're going to have to build it ourselves. We've got to get serious here. We've got to raise money, hire more engineers. Like, we've got to be a technology company. And then about a year later, we're like, you know what? This is actually a lot harder than we thought. Did we really sign up for this? Like, we're competing with Google and Facebook and Apple. Like, we're just some little company based out in New York. Do we have a business doing this? You know, fast forward a year, and the board, the board of directors is asking me, like, Dennis, you've been pitching us this crazy vision of this check-in button you never have to press for years. Like... Is this thing going to work? And I'm like, it has to work. Like, someone's going to make this thing. I didn't think it was going to be us, but, like, we're the ones that have to make it, right? And then you get to later on that year. And this is tough. I mean, I don't know if people in this room have lived through this, but, like, you know, the company is kind of questioning the vision. You know, sometimes the investors are asking, like, hey, like, how much longer till it works? And I'm thinking, I hope it works. I hope we get there. But then August 2013, we end up hitting this point. The... Holy shit. It works. The slope of enlightenment. And I will tell you the exact moment because I blogged the shit out of it, right? This is a cupcake shop that's near us, that's near the office. I went out to get a coffee. I was using my Android test phone that's running this prototype of software that we call Pilgrim. I walk into the cupcake shop and it pops up. And this is the message that we programmed. Now, remember, the idea is to build something that can recognize, you know, are you inside of a butcher shop, a cupcake shop, a bake shop? Even if they're all in the same block, we're trying to figure out, like, okay, which place did you end up going to? And so, you know, here we figure out, like, I walk into this place. It tells me... Whoops. I'll go back. Please. Yeah. It tells me you should go find the dreaming princess. What's a dreaming princess? I go in the cupcake shop. I'm looking around. I'm looking around. Sure enough, there's a cake. And it's called the dreaming princess. This is something one of the users wrote about at one point. So I went and I bought the dreaming princess cake. And I took it back to the office. And it was delicious. And everyone said, where'd you get it? And I said, Foursquare told me to get it when I walked into the place. We built the thing. And it works. Now, what are we going to do? So that's where we take the step up. The holy shit, it works. This crazy idea that we've had forever, oh, my God, we can build something on it. So what do we build? We build everything, right? We started building stuff for watch. There's your Pebble. This is my Apple Watch, right? I don't know if you guys have the app on your, you know, on your phone or your watch, whatever. You walk around places. It tells you, like, go in here. Order this. Try this thing. It's awesome. This is the thing we wanted to build. You know, we started building ad products. That can target you based, that can help advertisers reach people depending on the types of places they go to or the types of places they want to go to. We started building dashboards, which are basically like Google Analytics for the real world. So businesses can understand how many people are coming into my store and how many people are leaving, right? Not just building stuff for consumers. Building stuff for enterprises. Building these big tools. We end up going splitting the app. We split the app into two pieces because the technology worked. We could go optimize both of these apps to do what they're supposed to do. Foursquare, get to work finding people great places. Swap. Form. Get to work helping people have a good time and earning coins and competing with their friends. We split that. You know, everyone thought it was crazy. Like, here's how it looks. We split the app here. Here's the amount of data that we're collecting about places. You know, people tell me all the time, how are you guys doing? You split the apps. I'm like, we're doing just fine. Thank you. And all of that data allows us to do stuff like this. This is, you know, from outer space. We are zooming in. Now, like every place in the world, those 100 million places I was telling you about, we have these shapes for them. You know, you can give me the proper name of any place in the world and I can draw a shape that corresponds to the Bluetooth, the Wi-Fi, the GPS, the GSM signals, you know, the time of day that people go there, time of week that people go there. This is all the stuff that we've been able to collect from people using the app. And it allows us to, like, gives us these superpowers that can do things that other companies can't do. And that's why we end up powering, you know, a lot of the geo features for a lot of these companies. So it's been very, very exciting. And then, you know, that frees me up to go work on other things, right? We launched this app. We launched this app called Marsbot. Marsbot is this app where it's like, what if you could build an app that you never had to use? Like, it's just the engine running in the background. And what we'll do is we'll constantly just ping you with recommendations. Oh, I saw that you went to that coffee shop yesterday. I have a better coffee shop for you to go to. Oh, I saw that you just landed in San Francisco. I got three places for you to go to. Like, this idea of, like, an app that you never have to use is kind of nuts. But, like, who else is going to build it? Like, we should build it. We're the ones with the crazy ideas. We should build this stuff. But it's one of these apps that, like... Like, you know, it should learn from the places you go and just tell you what to do. Like, software that tells you what to do. And when people are telling me, like, this is crazy. Like, it's never going to work. I'm like, but this is the vision for the company all along. Like, eight years ago, make a piece of software that learns from the places you've been and one that just tells you where to go. And so when I look at where we are today, we're, like, we're right on strategy. Like, it took a hell of a lot longer to get there than I thought. I thought this was, like, a four-year journey. And now we're, like, eight years into it and it's finally just working. But, you know, it's been kind of a nutty journey. So now we're on, like, chapter five where the stuff works. We've gotten through, like, the hype cycle. We've gone through the down period where we didn't think it would ever work and we didn't know what we were going to do. We had that epiphany. And now it's, like, what do we do? How do we put all this stuff to work? You know, this is the slide I showed you early on. Like, the amount of data that we're collecting every day. You know, you probably have some ideas in your head about how we put a lot of this stuff to work. You know, it's just fascinating data no matter who you are. Advertiser, marketer, retailer, developer. You know, there's amazing things. There's amazing things we can do with this. I'll give you two examples of it, right? So one of them is, you know, Chipotle goes through some hard times with the E. coli virus. People are watching the TV and people are speculating, what will this do for their quarterly earnings? And I'm like, well, I speculate. I can tell you what's going on because I know where the phones are going. And so we make a prediction. We make a prediction that they'll drop 30%. The stock will. The stock drops 29.7%, all based off of foot traffic. And then you get all these people that were never, ever paying attention to what we were doing as a company. Looking at us like, whoa, who are you guys? And what are you doing? And why are you in our, you know, financial services space making projections? You have no business as being in the space. I'm like, I know, but like, just look at what we got here. This is pretty interesting. Let's try to do it again. You know, Apple's talking about, what was this, iPhone 6 when it came out? People speculating. We think that maybe they will sell 13 to 15 million phones. No one knows until Apple releases the number. Like, well, actually, we know. I can tell you how many people are going in and out of the stores. We can. We can, you know, compare that to what the data has looked like in the past. And we can make a forecast for the future. We go out. We make a bold prediction. And we know it. Right? And so, again, people looking at us like, okay, how do we work with you guys? How can, you know, our hedge fund, how can our urban planning department, how can our marketing group, our advertising group, you know, how can our technology platform group, how do we end up working with Foursquare? And so we end up in a spot where it's like, this is not, you know, originally, you know, the company set up with this broad consumer vision. Changed the way people experience. The world. Collect all the data and give it back. And now we're seeing, like, there's a whole other chapter here. It's not just the consumer side. There's a big enterprise story. Enterprise story that's helping businesses succeed based off our foot traffic panel. And one that's, you know, to be honest, fueling all the R&D and all the great work we can do on the consumer side to build the apps that everyone uses here. So that's kind of the story of where we came from. And it's, like, there's, I hope it kind of came across as a little bit of a roller coaster. But, you know. It's, like, an idea that people thought was crazy turned into an app. It kind of accidentally became a startup that was tagged a social media company that made all these check-ins, created shapes, built an API. Turned itself into a technology company. Now into a data and enterprise company. And so when you hear us talk about ourselves in public, that's why we always say, like, location intelligence. Location intelligence for consumers. How are you going to find the next ramen place? Location intelligence for businesses. How do you figure out what the foot traffic patterns of your competitors are? And how do you create amazing marketing and advertising campaigns? How do you create amazing campaigns to reach those people? And, you know, just to go, I have a couple minutes left. And so what I wanted to do is, like, this is the chart that I showed you, the hype cycle. And really, oh, no, it didn't go back. Whoops. I'm going to do it again. So this, let me start that again. This is the chart that we showed you. And this is the old chart, not the first one. But, like, the way that it worked for us, these are a couple lessons that we kind of learned. Like, the epiphanies that we had as we were doing it. Okay. In the beginning, when we were rebuilding. In Foursquare, from the ashes of Dodgeball, people were being like, this is a crazy idea. This didn't work. You already sold this company. Why would you build it again? Google didn't even want it. And we were like, no, no, no. This is a good idea. There's something here. It's worth us trying to make it again. Like, that was the big lesson from the early days. And, I mean, we pitched this thing to 33 VCs that all told us no before we had one person tell us yes. And so there was so many people being like, this is never going to work. Keep focused on the one thing that you want to build. Right? We had this vision for software that helps you find these places. We knew that we would have to build a check -in button that you didn't have to press. Right? It was all these distractions. Google. Yelp. Facebook. A thousand other startups trying to copy us. Trying to put us out of business. Trying to make our lives miserable. And the one thing that we did is just kept focused. This is the reason the company was put on this planet is to make that thing, to make that piece of technology, to share it with developers, to build awesome stuff. Let's get to work doing that. And it's very difficult to keep focused when everyone is kind of nipping at your heels. In this stage, the ideas that people think are crazy or stupid and impossible are probably your best. You know, when people are telling me, like, Dennis, is this thing ever going to work? I'm like, it has to work. Like, someone has to build this thing. And it has to be our company that builds this because no one else is focused on it. Like, that's our big idea. We have to be the ones to execute it. People are telling us it's never going to work. It'll eat the battery. It's technically impossible. It'll never work in cities. And we're like, you know, I'm sorry. That's your. But we're going to build it anyway because the world needs this thing and we're going to make it. And, you know, if it doesn't work, we'll sink the ship trying to make it work. But luckily, it worked. Hey, when it works, God bless you if you make it this far. I don't have any advice for you. If you've made it this far, you don't need it. You're probably pretty psyched on yourself. But at the end, you know, not the end, but, like, once it starts working, you know, Foursquare is built on a lot of crazy ideas that, like, some were mine. Some were my co-founders. Some were early employees. You know, going. All these things are kind of crazy in some sense. We, you know, as a company, as we started maturing, we kind of gave people in the company the license to, like, go do your crazy thing. You want to make a crazy, you know, ad-serving technology based upon our play shapes? Go do that. I'm not going to stop you. That turns into pinpoint. That turns into attribution. That turns into place insights. The three big products that are fueling the enterprise. The first time someone pitches me and says, at Foursquare. In the lunchroom, in the cafeteria. And they're like, hey, I bet you we can predict Apple sales numbers. You know what? I'm like, you're crazy. We have no business doing that. But I'm like, you know what? If you think you can do it, go run with it. And so we created this culture at Foursquare that allows people to go flex those crazy ideas. And so, you know, in the journey of what we've been doing, remember, this is like an eight-year cycle. These, I think, are the most important lessons that we've come out with. And so kind of that's where we are today. And thank you very much for listening. Let me chat. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dennis. Sorry for calling you David. Up next, we have a little fireside chat. Max Chafkin, who is a Bloomberg tech reporter, is going to be interviewing our next guest. And our next guest.