You Have To Be A Little Wild

Image via WikipediaYou have to be a little wild to be doing the tech entrepreneur thing.

For one, the risks are high. All else equal you will more likely fail than succeed. The success stories make it to the press. The sob stories? There's not enough newsprint on the planet. And it is not one risk, one hump you get over. There are risks after risks after risks. Every step of the way. It is roller coaster. If you are not going to enjoy the ride, the solace of some day reaching the destination might be false. You might never get there. The journey is where it is at. The journey itself is the reward. If you don't think so, get into another line of work.

You have to be able to look at the establishment and look the other way. You have to be able to look at the status quo and sneer. You have to jolt. You have to give them the finger.

As For Quora: Blogging Still Rules

This is Fred Wilson at Quora. And this is Fred Wilson's blog. Some of you might have visited. I visit near daily. The days I miss - rare - I catch up later.

Now that I am active at Quora, I don't feel like, thank God Fred Wilson is on Quora, now I no longer have to visit his blog.

Charlie O'Donnell At His Inspiring Best

Should FourSquare Be Scared Of Facebook?

Facebook's recent poaching of a major FourSquare engineer gave me a moment for pause, the backdrop being Facebook's aggressively going after Google. Microsoft never went after IBM like that. FourSquare is no Google. It is still a very small company. And Facebook Places has been decently successful.

Models Naveen, Dennis

Click

FoodSpotting Is The Next FourSquare

I am very proud of this blog post of mine: Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter. It is one of my popular posts. It keeps getting page hits from showing up on search results.

What I missed out on was FourSquare. I erred in thinking Google Wave was the next big thing after Twitter. (Whatever Happened To Google Wave?, Craig Newmark, Dennis Crowley, Jennifer 8 Lee: Koreatown)

I was there in the hall when FourSquare presented at the NY Tech MeetUp, and I totally did not see the promise that day. The idea of checking in felt just so lame. And over time I have realized that checking in is so fundamental to the mobile web.

I was not the first person to say FourSquare is the next Twitter.

I erred again in thinking maybe Venmo is the next big thing after FourSquare. (Could 2011 Be Venmo's Year?)

I have not done a background check on this yet, and maybe someone else has said it already, but I am today saying it loud and clear, I think FoodSpotting is the next FourSquare. (Soraya Darabi)

Calling FoodSpotting the next FourSquare totally fits into my original fractals talk. The math just feels right. FoodSpotting has hinted at going into other verticals as well, and I can't wait to see what those might be.

I think I am one of the very first to state it so very explicitly, although others have said FoodSpotting is like FourSquare. There is a check in feel to how the app works.

Tweet 1
Tweet 2

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I Was In Chicago? Facebook Places Messing Up

I wanted to set the record straight. I have not been in Chicago this past day. I have been happily camped out in New York City. Although there is a check in on my behalf that shows I was in Chicago. I think I just got my personal introduction to Facebook places.

Dennis Crowley, Facebook, And The Location Ecosystem
Facebook Doing Location Is Like Google Doing Social, Almost

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Dennis Crowley, Facebook, And The Location Ecosystem

Image via CrunchBase

TechCrunch: Foursquare’s Crowley: The Giants Are “Generic,” We Are Fun. I Wonder Who He’s Referring To…: Crowley discussed the opportunity for places, outlined his plan for the next iteration of Foursquare and knocked Google for its social awkwardness. .... Crowley’s painting the picture of Facebook as a generic-borderline-boring service, versus Foursquare, the hip, edgy, playful alternative .... Facebook is so huge (500 million large versus Foursquare’s 2.8 million) that its check-in service has to be simple and minimal to accommodate such a huge and diverse group— anything too quirky or outlandish runs the risk of alienating factions. While Foursquare cannot dream to compete with Facebook’s installed base, the startup can certainly differentiate itself by offering a creative, more dynamic product that is less utilitarian and more personality-driven ...... he does believe that Facebook has a major role to play in the location ecosystem. Facebook can aggregate check-ins from different services and introduce new users (millions upon millions of them) to the world of check-ins. Thus, if Facebook stays in its corner, the relationship could be a very symbiotic one for Foursquare, which saw a record number of sign-ups on Thursday. ...... when it comes to creating the most engaging, valuable location experience, Crowley is ready for a fight. ..... We’ve been thinking for awhile, what’s act two for us? And act two is OK let’s take all this information about what people are doing, what people want to do, and let’s build this back into the app in a way that’s manageable for people and easy to share.” ..... Our social graph is more representative of the people that you meet in the real world ..... Facebook is literally everyone I’ve ever shaken hands with at a conference or kissed on the cheek at Easter. Twitter seems to be everyone I am entertained by or I wish to meet some day. Foursquare seems to be everyone I run into on a regular basis.

Not surprisingly, Dennis Crowley is on the spot on Facebook's entry into his space. He is not threatened. He should not be. Instead he seems all set to ride the Facebook wave.

Facebook Doing Location Is Like Google Doing Social, Almost
This Is Not Happening: King Dennis

I might be one of the first to talk publicly in terms of a FourSquare IPO. I am a fan of the company. When FourSquare goes IPO in a few years, New York City will have finally arrived on the tech scene. You don't get credit for other forms of exits, not in my book, not for a city this big and glamorous.

If search is the starting point of your big screen web experience, and I love Google like some people love Apple, then Google is your company. For many people social is that experience.

The thing is FourSquare is not a big screen web company. Location is such an obvious starting point when you are out and about that the simple nugget is a genius idea. I almost feel stupid saying that. Because, I mean, what is so revolutionary about location? There have been places since times immemorial. There are so many places mentioned in the Bible, for example. Jesus was checking in.

You could argue there is only re-invention, there is no invention. Einstein was not the first to ponder about time, but it is like he added a whole new dimension to the world of physics. Suddenly we started thinking about time just like we had been thinking about space.

(Sweet disclaimer: I have never thought of Dennis (@dens) and Naveen (@naveen) as Einsteins. They are both smart guys, but genius is a whole different ballgame.)

Dennis is a born entrepreneur. How do you know that? You just have to look at his hair. The same applies to his Michael Jackson co-founder.

How My Grandfather Became Mayor The First Time

In The News

New York Times: Roommates Who Click:theirs was a match made on URoomSurf.com, a Web site that does for dormitory life what eHarmony and Match.com have long done for romance .... “My sister woke up her first night of college and drunk people were poking her, asking where her roommate was.... “The ones who choose their own roommate tend to stay together

BBC: Swedish Rape Warrant For Wikileaks' Assange Cancelled: Mr Assange, said the appearance of the allegations "at this moment is deeply disturbing"..... The current whereabouts of Mr Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, are unclear.... there were two separate allegations against Mr Assange, one of rape and the other of molestation

New York Times: Facebook Feels Unfriendly Toward Film It Inspired: the filmmakers, who portray Facebook as founded on a series of betrayals, then fueled by the unappeasable craving of almost everyone for “friends” — the Facebook term for those who connect on its online pages — that they will never really have..... “It’s crazy because all of a sudden Mark becomes this person who created Facebook to get girls or to gain power,” said Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder who left in 2007 to join the Obama presidential campaign. “That’s not what was going on. It was a little more boring and quotidian than that.” .... “it’s a sign of Facebook’s impact that we’re the subject of a movie — even one that’s fiction.” .... Ben Mezrich’s book, “The Accidental Billionaires,” and on the legal protection provided to free speech .... “The Social Network” appears to be mostly about emptiness.... much of the film, including many of the details of Mr. Zuckerberg’s personal life, are made up and “horrifically unfair.”

TechCrunch: Facebook Kept Thousands Of Check-Ins On Lockdown For Months. Impressive

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An Offer To FourSquare

FourSquare: $20 Million At $95 Million Valuation

To: Dennis Crowley, Naveen Selvadurai, Fred Wilson
Sent: July 4 @ 4:16 PM (email)

Hello Dennis, Naveen, Fred.

I believe I have an offer for you that you can't refuse.

Towards Threaded Conversations On Twitter
Farmville Farmer's Market: My Idea

I am really, really good at the vision thing, vision and group dynamics, but right now I want to talk about the vision part. You have done well at scaling and monetization, but your weakness so far has been in the features department. In a recent quote in a news article Dennis has expressed a hunger for "engineers." That tells me he is bursting at the seams in terms of where he wants to take FourSquare. Naveen was throwing lops of mud on the location space wall even before he ever met Dennis. Fred is a rare visionary VC. I think you guys are swell, but I think I can help.

Price Tag: $6,000
Duration: 4 weeks
Output: An average of three posts per week at my blog, Netizen

There will be no need to worry about the public nature of my work because when you walk into a Walmart store you have seen their entire business model and so far noone has been able to copy the most successful business in the history of humanity.

I will mostly be scouring the web, thinking, and I will need to spend 30 minutes each with the five key people on the team, and perhaps an hour each with the two founders, that perhaps during the third week.

I think my work will help speed up the burn rate for the $20 million you just raised, and that is what you want. FourSquare as a company is in that sweet spot where it does not have to worry about how it will raise its next round of funding. Burn the 20 million fast and go on to raise 30 million at a 300 million valuation or something. That speed is one of the things you need to do to cement the lead you have.

I hope this makes sense and sounds like a good investment.

Looking forward to it.

Paramendra.

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FourSquare: $20 Million At $95 Million Valuation

Image via Wikipedia

There has been tremendous buzz today about FourSquare's new round of funding. This process has gone for a few, long months now. It has been one drawn out process. There has been drama. There has been intrigue. The sweet spot for me was when after months of talk Yahoo might buy FourSquare, FourSquare instead went ahead and stole a key talent from Yahoo. That's the way you do it.

Selling FourSquare Would Be A Mistake, Partnering Would Be Genius

When there was talk it might get bought, I strongly argued selling FourSquare would be a mistake. I was not saying, do the right thing, don't go after the money. What I was saying was, think about money, big money, do not sell.

I am not the first person to draw FourSquare-Twitter parallels. But I sure am one who gets the parallel. The two have had similar trajectories. At first sight a tweet feels as lightweight as checking in. What the.

Twitter had enormous buzz. It scaled but not as well as I would have liked. It made monetization moves, but much too late for my tastes. And it has done a lousy job of adding new features. FourSquare has scaled well. What is the FourSquare version of the fail whale? I don't know it. And FourSquare has been very impressive in the monetization department. But FourSquare has not impressed me in the features department. And I have to say that out loud because, unlike Twitter, FourSquare has competition. I hope this new round of funding allows FourSquare to cement its lead. I wish Dennis (@dens) and Naveen (@naveen) all the best.

Like Andy Grove said, only the paranoid survive. Checking in is the starting piont of the FourSquare experience. Companies for which that is not true - Yahoo, Facebook, Google, Twitter - are not serious threats, although all of them could use that key feature. Checking in in the mobile space is like the inbox in the email space, it is basic. But that check in as the starting point space has a few different players, and checking in is an activity that leaves much room for imagination. Could FourSquare ride that imagination wave? If it does, it goes IPO in a few years. If it doesn't, it should then go ahead and sell off. I am betting it will ride the wave. We shall see.

FourSquare has a shot at going IPO before MeetUp.com, a more senior tech company in town, senior in terms of years. Unless we get a few solid IPOs, New York City has not really arrived on the tech scene. Until then we should brag about our subway instead.

Ben Horowitz: Why Andreessen Horowitz Invested In FourSquare

Dennis not only created the vision for the company, but for the entire product category. Beyond that, he is very clearly the thought leader in the market. This is not at all surprising as he has been working on the problem for a decade and has highly refined his thinking through that period. ...... . He’s the kind of leader that great technical minds will be excited to follow: visionary, righteous, and competent. I am really excited to work with Dennis to help him on his path from being a great leader to a great Chief Executive of an incredibly important company. ...... at Foursquare is growing faster than Twitter did at this stage. ......Dennis and team have identified over a dozen different dimensions of the Foursquare product that must interact with each other in precisely optimal ways to achieve user delight. Years and years of research and sweat equity went into cracking the code, and the results are magical. ....... over 4.6B people have mobile phones and there are 1.7B people on the Internet. Already, over 200M people worldwide have smart phones and that number is headed north fast. ...... , major brands such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Zagat, Bravo TV, Starbucks, C-SPAN, Marc Jacobs and over 10,000 businesses are currently working with Foursquare to build customer loyalty and drive traffic. Not many companies have their users turn into their sales force, and it’s definitely a good sign that this is happening around Foursquare.

This Is Not Happening: King Dennis
The FourSquare Appeal For Me
FourSquare Must Cut A Deal With Yahoo
FourSquare Office, Dropio Technology
4:16 PM @ FourSquare
Selling FourSquare Would Be A Mistake, Partnering Would Be Genius
The Foursquare Rap: Badges Like Us
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Dennis Crowley: I Underestimated Him

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Happy Social Media Day.


OLPC Tablet

This Is Not Happening: King Dennis

Wired

The FourSquare Appeal For Me
FourSquare Must Cut A Deal With Yahoo
FourSquare Office, Dropio Technology
4:16 PM @ FourSquare
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The FourSquare Appeal For Me

(1) Cutting Edge

FourSquare is on the cutting edge. (Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter) I would add FourSquare at the end if I were doing this blog post today.

2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments

(2) New York City

I love this city like no other geographical location on earth. FourSquare is the hottest technology company in town, and it is one of the hottest tech companies out there, period. They are a hometown gig. That is illustrious. I take unabashed hometown pride in FourSquare.

Silicon Valley Vs. New York City
Dennis, Fred, Scott: Tweet Boom Tweet Boom
Silicon City
New York City: Transformed Forever?

(3) Mobile

The mobile web is bigger and growing faster than the old web. There location is key. Location is the starting point of the FourSquare experience, and that is so in sync with the mobile web.

The iPhone, Nexus One, Or Droid?

(4) My People

This is key. I am a Third World guy. This is existential to me. This is spiritual. This is religious. This is fundamental. I was born in India, grew up in Nepal next door. I was in my 20s when I landed in America. I have to move towards one world. The First World, Third World dichotomy is a little too much for me. It makes me uncomfortable. My startup that I have put to rest after a rough 2009 wanted to bring a ton of new people online. But I perhaps made the mistake of thinking in terms of the old web. Mobile is perhaps the way to go. Four billion of the six billion plus people already can access mobile phones. And so perhaps software is where it is at. How simple can you make it? If they can do voice over their mobile phones, could they do a mightily stripped down version of FourSquare? Before, way before, a full web experience? Could they check in as a way to protest and tell the world that they are protesting? Checking in even the illiterates could do.

This is the number one reason I want to work for FourSquare: 4:16 PM @ FourSquare.

FourSquare Must Cut A Deal With Yahoo
Digital Dumbo: Here I Come
FourSquare Office, Dropio Technology

The First Major Revolution Of The 21st Century...

FourSquare Must Cut A Deal With Yahoo

Carol Bartz wanting to buy Yahoo is no longer a rumor, this TechCrunch post makes it more than official.

TechCrunch: Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz On Foursquare: It Depends On How Much Money They Want The topic on everyone’s lips was Yahoo’s rumored talks with Foursquare ..... Bartz’s response: “It depends how much money they want.”

Selling FourSquare would be a mistake, a huge mistake, a fatal mistake, taking $10 million at a $80 million valuation from a VC firm would be a good move, but the best move at this point would be to take $10 million from Yahoo upfront and then $10 million annually thereafter to be reevaluated in two years to add location to as many Yahoo properties as possible. Just like Twitter took $25 million each from Google and Microsoft to let them offer tweets as search results so as to be able to claim they also now do real time search, FourSquare should also make money by letting Yahoo be able to say Yahoo now does location in a big way.

Take $10 million right away, and then another $10 million for the first year, and turn the various Yahoo properties into a major project. Expand the team. Get a new office space. I recommend Dumbo. (Digital Dumbo: Here I Come) If not Dumbo, then Williamsburg. Actually, Williamsburg would be far better. Cooper Union is too cooper.

If FourSquare can cut a deal like this with Yahoo, it can cut a deal like this with many other major web properties. It could fund its growth with all that money. You go to VCs, you get diluted. You make money like this, you don't get diluted.

Hire me to work through some of these deals: 4:16 PM @ FourSquare.

Yahoo would be a great first customer for FourSquare. You have to understand, Yahoo used to be Google, it was hot. It was so hot, selling to Yahoo was the first exit strategy the two Google founders thought of. It was Yahoo that refused. We already have a search engine, they said. Over the past decade Yahoo has tried to regain some of that lost glory. In FourSquare they see a chance of that happening. Yahoo mistakenly thinks buying FourSquare will do it for them. It won't. Instead if they cut a deal with FourSquare, that will cost them much less money, as less as one fifth, and could actually do the trick of making Yahoo a hip company all over again.

Yahoo is going through an identity crisis of sorts, and cutting a sound deal with FourSquare might just be that thing it needs.

FourSquare needs the money to grow. Yahoo needs location. Cut the deal. How will FourSquare add location to the Yahoo properties? That is a whole another blog post, or preferably a job.

TechCrunch: Don't Sell Out FourSquare. Not Now. Not To Yahoo
Business Insider: Yahoo Considers Buying FourSquare For $100 Million
The Fabulous Life Of Dennis Crowley, The Most Wanted Man In Silicon Valley

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4:16 PM @ FourSquare

Not Union Square Ventures

I am in a job mood and I have decided to show up at the FourSquare office later today. 4:16 PM sounds like a good time to show up.

FourSquare HQ
36 Cooper Sq
at E 6th St
New York, NY 10003

• Marketing Director
• Business Development Director
• Jobs: Everything Else .... Dying to join foursquare and a rock star in an area not listed above? Send your resume to jobs@foursquare.com anyways with a note on how you can help!

I am not a developer/coder although I think you should check out my LinkedIn page to see all the languages I have picked up along the way, only two of which I was ever formally taught. Some of my strengths I have talked about here: Union Square Ventures Job Opening: I Am Applying. Fred Wilson thinks I am "overqualified" for Union Square Ventures, or at least for the two open positions, so I must be just right for FourSquare, I figured, the hottest tech company in town.

I Have Been Quoted In Fast Company
2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments
Selling FourSquare Would Be A Mistake, Partnering Would Be Genius
Dennis, Fred, Scott: Tweet Boom Tweet Boom
4/16: I Found Myself A Party: Tonight's Gonna Be A Good Night
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The iPhone, Nexus One, Or Droid?
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Location! Location! Location!
Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever
Craig Newmark, Dennis Crowley, Jennifer 8 Lee: Koreatown
Dennis Crowley: I Underestimated Him

What can I do for FourSquare?

• I see FourSquare going IPO, (Selling FourSquare Would Be A Mistake, Partnering Would Be Genius) and I see the intermediate steps. I see FourSquare in the big scheme of things: Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter.
• I am outstanding when it comes to group dynamics. 
• I am not a coder, but I could pick up some of the language fast, enough to be able to deal with coders. Teams of coders need big picture people like me. 
• I would be good at tactics, strategies, negotiations, deals.  FourSquare needs this more than most things right now to grow to new heights. 
• I have a thing for digital fights. "I believe in being nice, but that does not apply to my enemies." Larry Ellison. Sometimes you need that, like when Yelp decided to copy FourSquare. I liked how Dennis came swinging back. 
• Reference: Fred Wilson. 

I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla
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2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments

I am not suggesting all four spaces carry equal weight; they don't. Location carries more weight than all the rest put together. 2010 is location's year. By now that is conventional wisdom. I can see why, and I buy into it. But these strike me as spaces to watch for this year. One of the other three might claim 2011 as their year. And I am open to adding other spaces to the list if I can find them, read up on them, imagine them. This list of four is by far not exhaustive. Charlie (@ceonyc) had a blog post a few weeks back (my comment) that ranked high on my vision grid, and he talked about some spaces he would like to see action in as an early stage investor. And he does not even touch upon these four spaces. So what you are looking for impacts what you see. There's plenty of exciting stuff happening in many directions. The 2010s will be what the 1990s should have been but weren't. We will dream big again, only this time there will be less fluff. Real businesses will get built. Old industries will get reinvented. New industries will see light of day. These are exciting times.

(1) Location

I'd be rooting for FourSquare even if it were half the size of Gowalla, but it makes it easier to root for because it is crushing the competition. But like the Google and Amazon people will tell you, don't spend too much time looking in the rear view mirror. Focus on customer feedback more. Grow.

Selling FourSquare Would Be A Mistake, Partnering Would Be Genius

The mobile web is bigger and is growing faster than the old web. Location is key to the mobile web. FourSquare has itself a sweet, sweet spot. All the best to Dennis (@dens) and Naveen. (@naveen)

(2) Random Connections

Chatroulette Is For Real

We could have had Mark Zuckerberg, but instead we lost him to the Valley. We should try better with Andrey. We want people all over the world to be able to meet random New Yorkers. There's the fun in sharing.

(3) The Inbox

ReadWriteWeb: Gmail Becomes an App Platform: Google Adds OAuth to IMAP ....Syphir, which lets you apply all kinds of complex rules to your incoming mail and then lets you get iPhone push notification for your smartly filtered mail.
Rapportive - an incredible GMail contacts plug-in.
Your Inbox as Platform: Google Calendar More Closely Integrated With Gmail

Everything is email, if you think about it. When I first started blogging, I was like, great, I no longer need to flood people's inboxes. All I have to do is send them a link to a blog post. Facebook is email. People who don't know you don't email you, and people who email you are only one click away if you want to know the latest in their lives. No need to call them up, or ask them. Twitter is the ultimate email. Eric Schmidt even called it that, but he was a little miserly in the description. A poor man's email? I am poor, everyone is poor by Eric's standards, but hey! FourSquare is email. I am emailing you my location.

Don't give up on email. Email is here to stay. There is so much that can be done with the inbox. I am glad some startups are looking into it.

For now all I want is about four different inboxes. Inbox 1, emails only from individuals whose addresses I have saved. Inbox 2: emails from those people that are going out to more than me. Inbox 3: emails from mailing lists I have subscribed to. Inbox 4: everyone else.

(4) Frictionless Payments

Venmo is my FourSquare in this space. I take hometown pride in Venmo. But then supporting FourSquare and Venmo is like supporting Obama. (Jupiter And Obama) It helped that the guy was outstanding. I get the impression Venmo is also a leader in this crowded space. It was listed in Time magazine as one of the top 50 sites of 2009, along with Drop.io, another hometown goodie. (@lessin)

It is like this, there was barter trade back in the days. Then they had coins, some coins were as big as cart wheels. Then paper money. Then plastic. Then PayPal. We are about to hit the next phase. That is where Venmo comes in.

In my homevillage in Nepal growing up, I saw rice used as currency. Farm workers got paid in rice. Vegetable vendors would give you vegetables for rice. And it was pretty smooth, as in frictionless, enough to give Kortina a run for his money. (@kortina)

What I am telling you, Kortina, is rice as currency is pretty cutting edge, and there was major trust involved.

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Selling FourSquare Would Be A Mistake, Partnering Would Be Genius

Dennis, Fred, Scott: Tweet Boom Tweet Boom
4/16: I Found Myself A Party: Tonight's Gonna Be A Good Night
If The Tweet Is The Atom, What Is Location?
Location! Location! Location!
Craig Newmark, Dennis Crowley, Jennifer 8 Lee: Koreatown

First there was talk that Vinod Khosla wants to pump 10 million dollars and above into FourSquare at a 80 million dollar valuation. Vinod Khosla, mind you, raised half of all money all VCs raised last year. He is a top dog in the game. (I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla, Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising)

Then there was talk Yahoo wants to buy FourSquare for over 100 million dollars, some figures put it at 125 million. More recently there have been reports other big fishes are also looking, namely Microsoft and Facebook. These stories are relevant whether they are true or not. It is entirely possible the different players are exploring their options. Feelers might have been sent out. Formal talks might or might not have happened.

I think selling FourSquare would be a mistake. Selling Hotmail was not a mistake. Sabeer Bhatia sold it to Microsoft for 400 million. But Hotmail was pretty much a finished product. FourSquare is nowhere close to being a finished product. I could argue it has not even started to start. And if it is about money, waiting a few years makes money sense too. Sell for more in a few years if you really, really want to sell it. But I am going to argue against that as well.

For me it is not about price. I am not saying don't sell to Yahoo for 125 million, but if they give you 200 million, then maybe. I am saying don't sell it, period. Google buying Facebook would have made no sense. Facebook could not have digested Twitter and instead would have ended up with constipation.

I can't think of one company that could buy and digest FourSquare and do the location space justice. Facebook could not do it, Twitter could not do it, and I am not even thinking about any other name.

The mobile web is bigger than the old web and also is growing faster. With the mobile web, location is key. Where you are when you are playing with your smartphone is so very important. And for FourSquare location is not an afterthought, location is the beginning point, and that makes all the difference.

FourSquare should be flattered by all the attention. Things have not always looked this rosy for FourSquare or its two founders. So they should take all this attention as ways to boost their self-esteem.

But flat out saying no might also be a bad move to make. The attitude should be, selling to you would be injustice to the location space, but let's work together, let's see if we can add the location feature to your many web properties wherever they make sense, and pay us for that instead. I think that would be the smart thing to do.

FourSquare has only a million users. That is nothing. The FourSquare team knows better than to wallow in all of the buzz. It is always safer to stay focused on the fundamentals of the business. Buzz comes and goes, ask Twitter. Twitter is in a better shape as a business today than ever before, but it does not have the buzz it had a year back.

FourSquare should use all this offer talk to expand its user base. Google expanded its user base dramatically by becoming the search engine for web properties like Yahoo and AOL. FourSquare should make similar moves. Create location space where it does not exist, and inhabit that space. It makes a ton of sense to talk to the big dogs in town. Cut deals.

2010 is location's year and FourSquare has the clear lead in that space. I see FourSquare never getting sold. Just like I never saw Facebook or Twitter getting sold. FourSquare has IPO potential, not now, I don't know when precisely, but it has IPO potential. If I had my way, Twitter would go for an IPO this year, before Facebook. (Twitter Should Go For A Netscape-Like IPO) I can see FourSquare going IPO somewhere in the mid 10s.

FourSquare is a business. For a business it is about money. The big money is in going IPO. FourSquare has reached that rare threshold for a tech company that it will never have any problems raising money ever again. That gives the FourSquare team the luxury of superb execution.

FourSquare will not get bought. FourSquare will buy. It could makes its first major acquisition later this year or early next. Stay tuned.

Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter

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Dennis, Fred, Scott: Tweet Boom Tweet Boom

Image via CrunchBase

New York Magazine: Tweet Tweet Boom Boom

Dennis Crowley

“Those are Botanicalls. When they need to be watered, they send you a message on Twitter that says, ‘Water me, please.’ I have it hooked up with one of my plants at home.”

“There was a girl who had a project that was just three robots following each other around. I said, ‘I need to be here playing with this stuff. This is where I belong.’ ”

“See that foosball table? That was my first project at ITP. I put sensors in the goals. When you started playing, you swiped your NYU I.D. on the table and your stats got shown on the screens behind it. If you scored a goal, it would show.”

“I wanted to make the foosball table smarter. My professor”—Internet-culture guru Clay Shirky—“said to go analyze a source of social data. I had all the data from the foosball table, and I started thinking, What do friendship circles look like? Who are the outliers? Who doesn’t connect to other folks? I was trying to wrap my head around it. To make a foosball table smarter isn’t that different from ‘Let’s make a city smarter.’ ”

“It was just after their IPO. The New York office had just opened. A couple weeks into it, we were like, ‘Where are those engineers?’ We were hoping to have more of a team, but it was hard to get engineers.”

“The stuff is, first and foremost, meant for our friends. The same thing happened with Dodgeball. We were just building tools that were making New York more efficient for twenty of our closest friends. A lot of the ideas we shoot within Foursquare are also themes that I think already existed in Dodgeball. We’re just bringing them back to life in new ways, with smarter phones. At the time, Dodgeball was a New York application. It was meant for people to start off with 25 friends who could easily jump to five places in one night, which is definitely an urban type of experience. Foursquare has been changed so that it rewards a one-player experience—it gets more interesting as you add friends to it, but it’s definitely a better one-player experience. And it’s designed to work in New York, and then we kind of tweak it so it works everywhere else. I think it works best in really dense urban areas. New York’s been critiqued for a long time,” he continues. “The critique is that you can’t do stuff like this here, but I think part of the reason that our product is interesting and special is because it came out of New York. It was designed to solve problems in that context, and those solutions tend to work in other parts of the world pretty well. I think the product is better because we’re based here.”

“Usually what will happen is a user becomes the mayor somewhere and asks the manager, ‘What do I get for free?’ ” says Crowley. “The manager at first is usually like, ‘What are you talking about?’ They’ve never heard of Foursquare. Eventually, the manager will break down. It’s an opportunity for us to start turning users not just into evangelists but also salespeople. So the venues win—anytime someone checks in, it’s like a mini-ad. With the stats tools, you can find out who the most valuable users are to local businesses, like who’s sending their check-ins to Twitter. Maybe the owner wants to reach out to that person.”

“We have all these companies calling us, and it’s a little bit problematic—we have so much inbound business development that we can’t capture it all. Foursquare could eventually turn into not just an app that tells you how many bars your friends went to the night before but a more ambitious project about social relations. You build a game of it. The first person to do ten crazy things wins. It expands it beyond consumption. Maybe you get badges for meeting people or bringing people together.” So on Foursquare, based on the bands you saw in one week, maybe you met more people, and so maybe your happiness and your productivity is higher. So check-in is just the first part of this story.”

“There’s enough of a unique user experience within Foursquare that I don’t think someone can come along and replace it. It’s a different type of sharing. When Facebook changed its status updates, it didn’t kill Twitter. It might make us a little more focused.”

“We’re trying to figure out what the best thing is for us going forward. We’re raising financing and meeting with tons of different companies. Don’t read into it too much. It’s a business that can be a real business.”

“We could make it work as a stand-alone business, or it might turn out that there are other companies that would find us valuable. The future is rosy.”

Fred Wilson

“They’ve taken the Silicon Valley culture and infected hundreds of engineers with it, and those engineers are not likely to want to go work for Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs. It’s not in their DNA. That’s not what they’re going to do. They’re more likely to go into one of our start-ups.”

“I think it’s partially the Wall Street mentality. This is a very merchant town, a very commercial town. My partners and I make a decent living, but we manage $275 million. I have friends who are my same age who are partners at Goldman Sachs, or who are running their own hedge funds, who make ten to a hundred times more money than I make. I’m not upset about it, because I love what I do. But in New York, it’s about making money.”

“We have a two-year program here, and we try like hell to hire women into that program. We tell the world we’ve got this opening, and anybody who’s interested can apply, and it’s 90 percent men who even bother to apply. I mean, I don’t know what the problem is.”

Scott Heiferman

“Start-up culture is about really changing the world. I know that’s a cliché. But Si Newhouse never wanted to change the world.”

“Here we were schlepping around, protecting the power of gatekeepers and publishers and Barry Diller. Fuck that. We really have to look at ourselves—the Internet is reinventing and rejiggering everything. We need to see ourselves as making a new New York.”

“In Silicon Valley, when an Apple or a Google happens, it inspires tons of people to not just be entrepreneurs or founders of start-ups. It encourages people to just work in the industry because they know if you’re an engineer for a company that does really well, then you do well. New York does not have its great success stories that become the stuff of legend and lore and myth.”

“Madison Avenue ain’t gonna be the heart of New York anymore. Wall Street’s not going to be the heart of New York anymore. Media’s not going to be the heart of New York anymore. New York is actually really hot. We’re inventing the shit that the world is using! This is a first. The fact is that New York didn’t create any great companies in the first tech boom. The closest thing was DoubleClick—but that was about making what old advertisers need.”

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