Gadgetory

I want to bring out our first guest please welcome the CEO foursquare Dennis Crowley all right copy all right you're very careful it's like we try to make it kind of like a difficult for people to get over we've got you got to step over that thing you get a step up and that arm is broken yeah a little mini of course officially brought back the broken arm sofa just for you uh Dennis thank you for coming yeah thanks for having me in the film site to be here well uh you know it's it really is our pleasure to have you and you're here in New York you're based in New York yeah we're down and uh we have offices done it so and now would you say not want to talk a little bit about I want to get into the roots of foursquare but yeah but first I want to talk about the East Coast West Coast startup battle and you know it's got very heated can you trash-talked Silicon Valley at all there r us right now and can't talk about how much better New York is for startups I'd oh I think I like the new york seen a lot right because there's just a lot more people here it's like 8 million people here versus I don't know any people in San Francisco 15-20 it considerably fewer the right and then on top of that like there I like about building a tech startup in New York is that you know tech is not the most important thing here it's like fifth down in the list we've got like you know fashion and finance and media and publishing and advertising and pretty much everything else except for tech and tech is like way down at the bottom and so when you meet people out and you ask them to beta test those things you're building will get excited about the stuff you're building I they're just regular people yeah like they're not early adopters and its really i think it makes it much easier to kind of build things in this body you're not like hey I'm doing foursquare you can check in place you become mayor place so like oh I'm using a different thing that does exactly I don't start up the day yeah I know my start was actually do yeah so I can't really test it that is the thing though I mean it is you don't have like a million different startups all doing trying to do similar things here it's like there's a few I feel York sir epson and maybe you know because we're we're sort of like a publishing part of like a publishing startup really I am biased but I like there's something a little bit more like the startups here are much more real like they're real things like they involve real world either real world activities yeah are there things you actually need for your life yeah it's vs like stuff like hey what if we had Yelp for shoes yeah i mean that's Yelp is it it I don't really do well there's like no there's like a smaller pool of them here so like you look at the big ones and you know where one of the biggest ones here and then you've got you know your your tumblers and your etsy s and your Kickstarter's and your meetups and it's just like a smaller pool to compare yourself with and when you look at like the big startups that are out west you know it's like it's just a big tech companies you've got your Google's and your Facebook's and your twitter is your apples it's just like a different breed of big tech company right no but I mean they've but Facebook and Twitter they've kind of graduated to a different sphere of their not like a startup yeah but we think upon your in that sphere too yeah I mean like we're not really even a startup we're like 150 people right let's over 50 years old yeah exactly right so like how Wes that's I think it's still considered relatively small right where one of the bigger players in the in the new york tech scene right and so it's just it's like a different you know distinction of scale I guess so to recap the west coast startup scene lame East Coast art scene awesome is that I'm hearing sorry I quote you on that I see I don't want to I don't pooh-pooh the west coast cuz we have an office out there yeah yeah so I actually talked about that the the beginnings of foursquare forsberg was not foursquare originally fourth quarter was like you know if you go way back in the day it's um you know it's me building software from my friends I've got laid off from my very first calm job which was what well actually my second job so I worked at a company called Jupiter research which I was the guy like making PowerPoint slides and then I worked at that was your job you were just I was pretty much awesome era pretty much like making slides for other people to give during presentations and things and I worked at a mobile like product shop called Vindico that was building City guys for Palm Pilots and that was at this company of indigo I really got bit by the bug of hey you can make stuff during the day and you go out at night and you see people using the stuff that you you know that you were working on during the day and they're using it on their palm pilots and like that was kind of a big deal I know Palm Pilot like super old school but but I mean I was like oh my god like you build stuff during the day and you see stuff you see people using it at night like that's incredibly rewarding and so this idea of just building stuff that my friends would use and building stuff that I want to use I just got really kind of bit by that bug right and you know so the first version the dodge ball ended up coming out of that we ended up can you explain dodgeball hello sherry I don't know what it is yeah dodgeball is um you know we I can remember how we used to pitch it back in the day but it was just like a basic friend finder for text messaging and so you know this is before we had GPS and phones or color screens or apps in general but you know anywhere that my my friends in New York would go out you just send a text message to like NYC at dodgeball calm and say I'm at the you know the magician I'm at Tom and Jerry's I'm at Central Park and then that message will get rebroadcast through all of your friends right yeah we had like a like a poor man's little social network built into it and I could it didn't work was SMS page it was SMS yeah but didn't work because I no one really kind of knew what social networks were this back my 2001 people to know what social networks were like text messaging barely worked and we kept trying to like resurrect the idea we did it after friendster kind of hit pseudo mass-market it's like oh now we can explain it as it's like friendster for cell phones and then we try to resurrect it again when we're NYU and did it with them you know then we ended up bringing it to google and you know i feel like now you know a couple years later some of those ideas are a little bit more in the right time right place right the device is a more mature like everyone here knows about apps on your phone you all know that you have gps like everyone here has phones that can do these things and so like we're just you know it's just a much larger audience dude you've been so you've been trying to do like I mean you've essentially been trying to do something like Foursquare or been trying to do for square for a very long time for spare was that what is the year for foursquare started we started 2009 right and even so be way before that though you were kind of trying to find a way to say pan out of place yeah cuz i'll be all about it yeah I say you could it goes back to I 2001 or so right which has which is insane yeah it mean but it barely worked wait 15 people usually really really want people to know where you are well it's just like it makes meeting up with people easier and more fun and right so so so foursquare was a few years ago everybody talked about foursquare it was like we're game gamma phi everything we're going to gamify our lives like four squares one of these things where it's like I get achievements for doing stuff that I'm doing anyhow yeah I can become the mayor of somewhere and get bad just for stuff yeah I mean obviously that stuff is all still baked into foursquare but it seems like the last you know couple of years sir than the last year things have been moving towards not just about hey I got an achievement or I'm the mayor of something but foursquare is going to be an engine for finding things yeah for discovery and for discovery and getting recommendations yeah can you talk a little bit about the shift or if there is a shift and what that means to you you know I don't I don't really see it so much as a as a ship right so you know what we're trying to do like the kind of essence of foursquare is how do you use software to encourage people to go out and have experiences that they haven't had before right and a big part of that is like the recommendation engine that we've got you know a whole bunch of data scientists working crunching the three billion check-ins to make these recommendations happen in real time and there's another part of that the part we weren't able to do that in the early days we just didn't have the team of the town or just we weren't sophisticated enough to do that in the early days we were using like basic game mechanics like the badges that probably most of the people in this room know about where it's like can we use software to encourage people to you know go to places that they haven't been to before like initially it was you know I live in the east village and there's a bar that I always go to called 7b and it was like you know this is just my default place like how do you make a piece of software that encourages me to go to some place I haven't been before to bring my friends there to go to another borough to like travel uptown to get a group two people together and do something none of us have done before and can you make a game out of that and can that like you know if you make the game if you design a game well enough can it encourage people to do those types of things right we're finding that a lot of that stuff works like the game mechanics have worked pretty well on foursquare like if you level up in coffee it's like am a level 6 coffee person cuz i've been to 30 different places in New York people feel some kind of sense of accomplishment over that right now aki i walked the gym rat badge for going to the gym you know ten times out of a 30 day period like that's it kind of works right do you ever feel like I'm gonna get a little bit deep on you here let's do you ever feel like the idea of gamifying for adults who'd like going to a bar is very adult activity right yeah do you ever feel that the sure you have a wonderful responses did you ever feel like in some way gamifying things that we normally do is a way of infantilizing us like it kind of making us like I mean I don't play you know in my daily life I don't think of the things I do as an achievement that I need to unlock or yeah game that I have to play is there something about taking tasks or things that we do recreationally and turning them into a game that in some way diminishes their their value or their importance or does that I think is a big difference between like trying to turn everything into a game and try to make everything playful right so I never I don't ever think of foursquare as a game right there there's game mechanics in there but I think of it as like you know there's been all these just utilities like things that will help you do stuff on the internet for a long time and it's like we should make those things more fun they should be fun to use and fun to interact with and so that's where a lot of the game mechanics come from I want to make you know everyday interactions if I going to the same restaurant by commuting every day traveling in between cities I want to make that stuff feel playful and rewarding doesn't have to be a game but I think there's it's important to note the distinction you you think that it's do you think as people as humans like we need to be rewarded for doing I mean is that something that you think is baked into our DNA that we want to be rewarded or we need to be rewarded you know I don't think rewards come in different sizes and shapes like every time you get a like on Instagram like that's like that's being rewarded that's like the little bit of a dopamine hit right and I feel like it's like you know that's that's a multiplayer version of it right because you post something and then your friends interact with it and that's two players interacting you know the Foursquare stuff was designed to be more one player like you do something in the real world and Foursquare rewards you for doing that and so you know the badge am Aaron walk you know you get a tip that tells you about something you should order at a restaurant like those are all little dopamine hits in the same type of way that make people feel good like hey if I put data into the system I'm it's enhancing my experience of the of the real world and so you feel like and you so you feel like there's a physiological like that there is I mean obviously there is you're right about the dopamine hip yeah but you feel like that's actually fundamental to what you're doing that you want people to feel this sense of hey I've you know this like visceral sense of hey I've got something or I accomplished something yeah it doesn't need to be down to like the chemical level of it but you know this um you know I always think of four squares like we should be able to make you know these little guides that live in your pocket like a guide to the city that basically has all the that your friends have about all the places in the world and that wherever you end up bringing your phone that guide can come to life and say hey these are the things that you need to pay attention to and so it doesn't have to be like a one of those one player rewards like a badge or mayor mayor mechanic right those might happen all the time but as long as you know I can be someplace I haven't been before and Foursquare can surface a little bit of information for me that helps me understand that place or make mine you know my 15 or 20 minutes I spend in that place a little bit more interesting again that's really like no one's really done stuff like that before right we're showing that when you do it like it works it works pretty well so you so you talked about putting data into it kind of it's sort of incentivizing people to put data into foursquare yeah we have a video and I don't know if we can cue this up or not but it's you guys posted this thing which is the map of guest check-ins direct the hurricane do we have this up so this is it you can see the dates going by there and you can see all this activity move literally move out of the the lower part of actually I haven't seen this yet this is kind of Awesome you haven't seen this it's really crazy cuz you can see them migrate she could play it again play again we run that one more time it's that you can actually see people moving here away from the water here we go yeah Amy seems like fading they actually have that technology yeah do we can't we replay the video here we go so you can see this a lot of activity downtown and then a thread right how I mean it goes dark yeah well the way the power does and the way people's ability to get down there so so this data is obviously very valuable and I mean you're using it for stuff that is like hey I love this bar or this restaurant there was an article in the believer kind of a little bit of a mean-spirited foursquare article they said they're kind of making fun of the idea that people say it's it's like saying things like people talk about mac and cheese in williamsburg it's just very surface information yeah do you see that date is valuable I mean what you just shut what we just showed is important okay that's like a lot you know life-threatening situation you guys are collecting all this information yeah are there other uses for that data are there other ways that you can utilize that data that you can share that data I think everything that you see going on in foursquare now like an hour explorer recommendation engine that's it's like the the you know that's the you know all the magic that we're trying to deliver to people like we we have all these folks that give us you know a little bit of information about what they do every day at the types of coffee places they go to the different places to go to in williamsburg please they go to all over the world and we take all those check and data points and we can really we can start making these recommendation engines that are personalized to people like four for the history of local search on the internet it's always been like if everyone here goes to you know google or yelp right now and we search for sushi we all get the same results like that is that's broken that's so super broken because we all have different tastes our friends have all been in different places we all had different experiences like it's just it's very clear clear that that stuff is going to change you want you want that to be for a person not yeah well you just a generalized yeah the big thing that we're able to do that no one's been able to do before is be able to have personalized local search results for every person for any person at any given point in time right so Foursquare search results are different depending on the intersection you're standing on the the day the day of the week it is the time of the day it is like we can potentially get into things where it's like you know is it colder than it normally is is it warmer than a no noise where would where do people normally go around these times and so you know you look at those check-in points there and you know sometimes people look at Foursquare be like oh it's cute it's about points and badges and stuff and like that's great that like you know people get that part of it but mean that was four days it data up there and that just shows like how Foursquare foursquare in New York is like a living breathing type of organism there's all sorts of interesting data that's being teased out of that and it's are responsible to take all those data points and use it to help everyone in this room and everyone in New York evelin the world use that to make better sense out of what's going on nearby interesting so I we have to wrap up and fortunately there's a lot more I want it there's a bunch of questions I didn't get to but tell me about do you see Foursquare as a company that I POS like are you gonna are you if I mean are you a facebook is this does this become a public company is that your everyone asks us this all the time like what when you guys going to IPO how soon is going to be it's like one of the last things that we think about right so our job is just to build the best products that we can right now we've got just over 25 million users almost 3 billion check-ins and to compete in the scale which we're competing with like we're one of the like we're the smallest of the big companies right now right and so we've got to grow our audience we've got to grow the business we're going to figure out how to work better as teams and everything and so if we figure out all that stuff than those are the questions that we've got to start thinking about but for now it's just you know how do you build stuff that's better than the stuff we're launching today and how do you build stuff that just people love using every single day well thank you very much for coming that's prolly Rebecca you got to come back there's a lot more wheat aggressive