Charismatic CEO is big reason why Foursquare is toast of the NY tech scene, despite little revenue
■ BY EDMUND LEE elee@adage.comSOCIAL MOGUL An internet entreprenuer who isn’t an engineer but a storyteller.
ON A BRIGHT Wednesday afternoon in
June, Dennis Crowley, co-founder and
CEO of Foursquare, hailed a cab across
the street from his downtown
Manhattan office. Inside, he pulled out a
deck of Foursquare stickers and quickly
slapped one on the vinyl wall that sepa-
rates the driver from the passenger,
guerrilla-marketing style. Does he do
that in every cab ride? “Only if I happen
to have stickers,” he said, “which I usu-
ally try to have on me.”
It’s all part of Mr. Crowley’s quest
to promote the story of Foursquare, his
2-year-old startup that now employs
75 people in two offices and lists more
than 500,000 merchants and 2,500
brands. In the two years since he
co-founded the company, more than
10 million people have used the service
to mark their presences on venues
across the globe with the declarative
“check-in,” which joins “friend” and
“follow” in the latest media lexicon.
Mr. Crowley rarely misses an opportunity, no matter how minor, to market
his brand. Last winter he starred in a Gap
ad along with co-founder Naveen
City cool: the Spy Magazine
founders. “We’ve arrived”
was the underlying sentiment.
But unlike that earlier
experiment, Foursquare is a
well-funded enterprise with
$71.4 million in backing, a
$600 million valuation and
early-adopting brands such
as Pepsi, MTV and
American Express as partners. Topflight investors are hoping to get in on
its next round of funding. International
users are clamoring for more venues to
check into. The company can’t hire
engineers fast enough. Oh, and one
other vital fact: Foursquare has little
revenue to speak of.
that it was “doing
more advanced
things online than
journalism.”
The entrepreneur
put that on display
one afternoon in his office, talking about
his company: “The reason for
Foursquare is, ‘Why do people check in?
What do you offer on that screen after-
ward? Do you offer a game? Do you
offer specials, or some kind of tips, or
some other surfacing information? It’s
designed around that let’s-make-the-
real-world-easier-to-use idea,” he said.
Foursquare is decidedly analog—Time
Out New York, the weekly city listings
magazine.
“I’d basically be ripping out little
squares from it and stick them in my wallet—the places I want to go and try out,”
he says. “And then I thought, ‘I just wish
there were an easier way to do this.’ But
also to know if my friends had been there
or if they were out there right now.”
WHY DO PEOPLE CHECK IN?
So why do advertisers, investors and an
ever-growing horde of users continue to
maintain faith in Foursquare?It has
much to do with Mr. Crowley, part of
this late generation of entrepreneurs—
showmen and polymaths, geeky ringleaders. But unlike other internet-celebrity founder-CEOs, Mr. Crowley
isn’t a master of computer science or
technology. His particular talent lies in
his awareness of something his more
highly remunerated contemporaries are
often criticized for lacking: how media
works.
“I’m not an engineer,” he says. “I tell
the story. That’s what I do.”
His early boss in the ad business
agrees. “He comes from a marketing-
journalism background, and he knows
how to tell a story, and killer products tell
a great story,” Michael Duda, the ad exec
and entrepreneur, said.
Mr. Crowley interned for Mr. Duda
at Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners as a
journalism undergrad at Syracuse
University. He later switched to the
advertising department when he saw
‘INTENSELY SOCIAL ICON’
Mr. Crowley, 35, a few inches shy of
6 feet, is partial to T-shirts and jeans, and
his floppy haircut drapes over a sweetly
gnomish face, lending an air of friendli-
ness. According to friends (and
Foursquare), he likes to go out. He also
enjoys the fried pork chop at Brooklyn
eatery Buttermilk Channel and skeeball
at Ace Bar. He does a summer share with
friends in Montauk, where he surfs, but
he stopped recently after encountering a
shark. He plays pick-up-league soccer
and has taken to training for a triathlon.
He has 539 friends on Foursquare. He’s
an “intensely social icon,” according to
Frank Lantz, a professor and entrepre-
neur with whom Mr. Crowley had
worked. “It’s, ‘Hey, what’s going on
tonight? I don’t know; let’s check in with
Dens.’ Crowley was always well-provi-
sioned for social events.”
Before Mr. Crowley started
Foursquare, before he was a celebrity
entrepreneur, he was a New Yorker
who liked going to new places. As he
tells it, the original inspiration behind
DODGEBALL
Mr. Crowley grew up in leafy Medway,
Mass., an hour outside Boston, and,
after graduating from Syracuse, came to
New York to feed off its can-do-noth-ing-wrong tech boom of the late ’90s,
only to see it implode a few years later.
He considered applying to business
schools until a friend invited him to
New York University’s Interactive
Telecommunication Program’s biannual art show, where he saw, among
other projects, “this woman who had
three robots following one another. … I
was like, ‘This is the place I need to be.’”
But after two weeks, he almost
dropped out, thinking it was “too arty.”
His parents insisted he stay, and a few
months later he met Alex Rainert, a fellow student with whom he would later
construct a thesis project. That turned
into Dodgeball, a texting-based version
of Foursquare that was eventually sold
to, then shuttered by, Google.
According to those who know him,
Google’s summary dismissal of what
was a heartfelt media enterprise was
painful for Mr. Crowley. “It was one of
those things you could see really upset
him,” a friend said. Dodgeball never hit
more than 75,000 users, and Google
chose not to supply engineering
FOURSQUARE’S
BADGES:
500 K
MERCHANTS
listed by Foursquare
and 2,500 brands
10 MIL
PEOPLE
use Foursquare to
“check in”
$71.4 M
BACKING
Foursquare is
well-funded, with a
$600 million
valuation
resources to the project. Frustrated,
Messrs. Crowley and Rainert left after
two years, both with a bit of a financial
cushion. People familiar with the deal
say Google spent in the high seven figures for Dodgeball, not uncommon at
the time. Mr. Crowley began consulting
for other startups and settled into a
$1.1 million co-op on the Lower East
Side.
Patrick Keane, an internet executive
who had known Mr. Crowley when they
both worked at Jupiter Communications
and later at Google, said Mr. Crowley is
not the type to retreat. “You could sense
his frustration,” he remarked about
working at Google. “But he’s not going
to sit in a corner and say, ‘Woe is me.’”
Despite never fitting in at Google’s
engineering-dominated culture, Mr.
Crowley took some lessons from the
search titan—as well as a few engi-
neers—and incorporated them into the
foundations of Foursquare. Clay Shirky,
the internet guru and Mr. Crowley’s for-
mer professor at NYU, said Mr. Crowley
isn’t someone who loves tech for tech’s
sake. “He avoids the trap that a lot of
techies fall into, which is to assume that
because the tech is interesting to them
that it’ll be valuable to users,” he said.
Major advertisers appreciate this
approach. Pepsi signed on when
Foursquare debuted at South by
Southwest Interactive two years ago—a
partnership dictated by the product.
“Foursquare is one of those really
strange partners where they would say
to me, ‘Shiv, this doesn’t fit into the DNA
of Foursquare—it would work better this
way,’” said Shiv Singh, PepsiCo’s global
head of digital. “That sort of purity of
product purpose you don’t see so much.”
Mr. Singh was further impressed that
Foursquare’s recommendations meant
Pepsi would be spending less with them.
“You see with each new version they
release, they make it easier for users to
explore cities,” said David Wolf,
American Express’ VP of global market-
ing. “As long as they keep doing that, it’s
going to be pretty easy to then have the
marketing solutions tied to that product
as opposed to going at it from the other
way around.”
Still, Foursquare eventually has to
start making some money, and Mr.
Crowley sees an opportunity in offering
data to merchants about who’s checking
in to their stores and buying their prod-
ucts. For the moment, however, he’s
more concerned with scaling the enter-
prise, as they say. Mr. Keane agrees with
the strategy. “They have to move past
being an app just for young, hip kids and
more of a mainstream product,” he said.
The abiding premise of Foursquare is
that it attempts to bridge the random
and easy connections that define online
behavior to the weighty, real connections that occur offline. It is that flesh-y
interaction that drives Mr. Crowley.
Foursquare is on the cusp of scale,
which also presumes some financial
windfall. A reported $100 million offer
last year from Yahoo now seems paltry.
“The exit isn’t supposed to be the end
of this story,” he says. “The goal is to
change how people think and how they
connect to real spaces. That’s the stuff we
get excited about.”
