YouSaid · the spoken record

Dennis Crowley

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74
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2016-10-31
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2016-10-31
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1
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  1. “Actually, make money Right, right. Was that hard? I mean, because you do get on this rocket ship, this kind of thing, which you were one of the people who did, is that difficult to shift that from a mental point of view as an entrepreneur?”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Well, we made some changes to the way that we think about the company in general. I think in the past it had been valued as a runaway rocket ship consumer internet brand that has a native advertising business. And as we started to, as a business started to mature and we saw how we were going to make money through data licensing and some advertising technology and a lot through the place analytics and the foot traffic stuff that we've been talking about, we realized that we needed to make some changes to the way that we thought about the company and the way that we had structured some things. Right.”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “And so I brought Jeff in in 2014 as our COO, and we worked together for, gosh, probably, you know, what, a year and change before I was like, listen, I'm thinking about making a change here. And I think you're the guy that should lead the business going forward. And I'd be lying if I said when I interviewed you back in the day, I don't know if we had this conversation, interviewed you back in the day, I was thinking, could this guy be in this role if I ever didn't want it in the future? And that was one of the things I was thinking about. And so, you know, we talked a lot and we found a way to make it work. And, you know, I think the business is in a great position.”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Just to be honest, it's an exhausting job. And it got to the point where the business had matured to such a point to a certain point. We were entering this world of, hey, these enterprise and advertising products are really taking off. And we should make some organizational changes and make sure that the company has a CEO that knows that space inside and out. And that is in the right spot to take the company to where it needs to be.”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Sure, when you tweet, you can add a location, one of our 106 million locations to your tweet, like, hey, I'm finally back on the treadmill here at the gym, and we'll tag that photo with the equinox in Columbus Circle or whatever it is, but you don't have to type it. We know that that photo was taken.”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “We're lucky that we have a ton of them. I mean, among the bigger ones would be Microsoft and Twitter, where we power the global location platform, but Pinterest and Samsung are big customers, Apple, Uber certainly.”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Well, you know, it's just an example of remind you as you walk into a store that you've saved coupon at and things like that, enabling these experiences that are smart based on where you're going in the real world. So that's where a lot of the...”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Yeah, yeah. I mean, people love getting deals, and it's like a payoff. Strief Well, it's not group ball, right? But it is. In Foursquare's DNA, how do we help people save money? How do you make free stuff rain from the sky for people that are checking into these places? And now we're getting better at them.”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “This has a big week. We just hit 10 billion check ins, which is amazing. That's a ton of data. You know, it's powering all the stuff that we're talking about that we can do, which is a lot of fun. In addition, iOS 10 just came out, so we launched a new version of the Foursquare City Guide app, which is Coincidentally, Foursquare 10.0, just continuing to make it simpler and prettier and faster and sleeker. And then we just launched a new version of the Swarm check-in app that enables people to get discounts on things in the real world. When you check into a place on Swarm, you earn these virtual coins. And now we're allowing people to spend those coins to get real things, like a free cup of coffee, a discount on a shirt at Uniclo, for example. And so I'd like to see us continue to do that and get more merchants involved in that program.”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Yeah, I mean, the city guide is very much occupying the same space as Yale, but that's only one of our products. But they have several thousand people who dial the pizzeria and the bar and try to get them to pay each month. Our ratings are really neutral. We recommend the great bon mi sandwich shop or the great ramen place. We're not biased in any way. But at the aggregate, that data is now powering Apple Maps or Uber pickups or better widgets in Samsung phones around the world or Microsoft is using it to make Cortana smarter. So we're kind of helping the little guys, but we're charging the big Fortune 500 company.”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “By constantly working hard to find the great place that they haven't tried that's authentic and different wherever they are around the world. And that's an exchange. And in return, at the aggregate anonymous level, we're learning what are the most popular places in any category in 200 countries, in any neighborhood. And so I think it like LinkedIn or these other crowdsourced plays, it's a sort of symbiotic relationship between the consumer and the enterprise. It's almost a Robin Hood thing in that unlike Yelp, you know.”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “You know, the engagement of swarm users in particular, as well as FourCar users, is what builds our map. So two million people last year helped edit our database of those 100 million businesses. This place closed, this place moved, the phone number changed. I mean, we're a 200-person company. And so to have two million editors exploring the world the way Google bots explore the web, that's a really powerful thing. And that comes from our community. An analogy would be more like a LinkedIn where it's the users creating this sort of graph of their backgrounds and their interests. And then a lot of the revenue is enterprise customers who want access to that kind of data or that recruiting tools. So the consumer apps are the foundation of everything. We're sort of a crowdsourced community the way Wikipedia or Ways or Dark Sky might be. We depend on our users and we deliver great value back to them.”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “At company meetings a lot, like what we'll do is we have this image that we show, and it's like a pyramid. Bottom of the pyramid, it's the consumer apps, the Foursquare app. Fourscore app and the SWARM app. And both of those apps are generating signals about where people go and what's interesting and whether they're actually open, you're using it, checking in, or whether it's in the background, you're just carrying the phone around with you. In the middle layer of that is all the things that we can end up doing with that data, all the enterprise products and advertising products that we built on top of it. And then on the top is like, okay, if we're generating revenue from all the amazing things that we've done off of this, you know, foundation of the consumer apps, how do we reinvest that to build other amazing consumer experiences or other amazing enterprises experiences? And so that's kind of the way that we think about it. The consumer apps are driving all of the data that is performing so well for the company.”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “And that's in the back in 2009. And I think we've taken that and we're still doing that. But now a lot of the revenue is coming for using our technology and our platform to do that through much bigger brands and partners and enabling them to use the location intelligence. So understanding the shape, how the phones see the world for 106 million businesses so that your iPhone or your Android can understand you moved in and out of something and build a personalized experience for you, whether it's advertising or content or analytics. And so I think it's an evolution growing up that what we built the technology to understand how phones see the world may be more valuable in an economic sense than just the apps themselves.”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Think being a location intelligence company is an even bigger ambition than the companies ever had before in that we built this technology that understands the real world. And when you walk around with a phone in your pocket, it can enable this connection between digital experiences and the real world experiences. You mentioned Pokemon Go, but we've been doing this for a while. We now understand if the phone in your purse or in your back pocket moves through an organic juice place in the morning and onto the gym or through Burger King and onto the donut store. We get to know people and we want technology to be smart about the things you care about. And that connecting the best experiences in the world that happen in the real world and the 90% of the economy that happens not in e-commerce but in the real world with digital. And so that's why we're powering better pickup locations for Uber, why we're making Apple Maps smarter, why we're helping Tencent build better experience.”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Also, we're doing lots with data licensing. There's this amazing map of the world and information of more than 100 million places in the world, and we're able to license that data to developers and to analysts and to all sorts of other enterprises.”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “I mean, I think our answers are going to be similar, which is great. No, we talk about where a location intelligence company. We have these two consumer apps that generate lots of data out in the SWARM app and the Foursquare app. Foursquare, the city guide, and SWARM, the check-in game. And they both generate a tremendous amount of data about what's happening in the real world, where are people going in the real world. We also have a developer ecosystem, about 100,000 people building on top of our platform. And this is Uber and Twitter and Apple and Pinterest and Microsoft and others. And we're getting signals back from them as well, which allows us to make this amazing map of the world. And so what do we do with all this data and map of the world? Well, we use it to make advertising products. We use it to do analytics about the types of people that are going to certain places. We use that for marketing purposes. We're able to sell that to folks that are interested in those types of analytics.”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Is make sure that the business reflects all the amazing things that we can do with our data and all the things that we're doing now with location intelligence and advertising. You're using that term location.”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Like 10 years later, yeah, right, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, and before that, people were doing location-based games, and I'm hoping there's going to be a lot more of them now. Actually, it's fun to talk about how Foursquare gets to power that stuff. But yeah, I mean, it's funny that we put the check-in in Foursquare because we wanted the signal of where people were going so that we could give them personalized recommendations and tell them about the places they should go to. The thing that was unexpected is that that part of the story got lost and all people cared about was the game. I was like, well, we didn't really want to make a game. We have this game people love playing it, but it's all about the data. And then I think what happened is people started, you know, like a game can only be fun for so long. That's true, as you see with Pokemon Go and others. We had to find a way to say, okay, listen, it is now about discovery, right? It's about finding amazing places in the world, which we still do. And then I think, you know, one of the things that we've done over the last couple years.”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “That created that for Foursquare the fervor. Well, remember, we had, it was the check in, but we had the badges, and the badges were fun and snarky and the mayor stuff. No one had ever made a location-based kind of fun hipster snarky game about places. And it's funny that...”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “But I mean, remember, there wasn't a lot of stuff going on then. It was like one app a month. So if you launch an app, like TechCrunch would write about you for a month, and that was great. It's a lot different now. But I also think we made something that was new and novel and clever. And I know people did. They loved it.”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Two years. That's a long time. Okay, all Yeah, when we were at Google, I think one of the big things that we realized, one of the big eye-opening opportunities was, you know, we could run these queries on the Dodgeball data set and I could run queries that would say, you know, show me all the places that are in my neighborhood, the East Village, that people check in on Saturday and Sunday between 11 o'clock and 1 o'clock and sort them by popularity and highlight the ones that my friends have been to and remove the ones that I've already been to. I've already checked into. And there would be your list of the best brunch places to go to. And I was like, this is like this magical, evolving personalized city guide someone should make this thing. And, you know, we try to convince Google to do it and they weren't interested at the time. And so when we left Google, I kind of took about a year off not really doing much. And then we decided, actually, let's go build that thing. The world needs that thing. Let's build it.”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Right, exactly, which then you ordered Google for the shortest time ever. Two years, that's a long time. Okay, all right. It probably seemed like a long time. And then you moved on to Foursquare, which was a variation on the idea, correct?”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Yeah, dodgeball was our grad school thesis project out of the ITP program at NYU. And it was, if you remember Friendster, it was like kind of Friendster but for cell phones. And the idea is anytime that you went out with your friends, you would check in via text message and you would say you send a text message and you'd just say I'm at magician, literally at sign the magician or the library or this restaurant, whatever. And it would broadcast that message to all of your friends that were in that city. And what would happen a lot of times is people would show up, people would get the message and show up, and you hanging out with one person would turn into five people showing up and they would all check in, then ten people would be there, then 20 people would show up, and it was a lot of fun back in 2005, 2006.”

    2016-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Dennis Crowley and Jeff Glueck, co-founder and CEO, Foursquare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT