Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley stepping down from full-time function

Foursquare founder and former CEO Dennis Crowley is stepping down from his full-time function on the firm, he wrote in a Medium post on Monday. He’ll stay on the board of administrators.

“What started around my kitchen table in the East Village back in early 2009 has grown to nearly 400 people working around the world in 2021,” Crowley wrote. “What started as a quest to ‘build a Marauders Map’ and to ‘turn the real world into a game’ and ‘build a hipster version of Clippy’ has turned into one of the world’s leading location technology platforms, powering location services for thousands of apps and top brands around the world.”

Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai launched Foursquare in 2009 as a smartphone app that permit folks use their then-fledgling iPhones with built-in GPS to examine in at their bodily places. It gamified the gathering of location information, letting folks earn badges for a sure variety of check-ins (what number of locations had been you “mayor” of?). Venues supplied rewards to entice prospects to examine in.

But Foursquare did away with the check-ins in 2014, and launched its Swarm app, which was a lot much less well-liked (no extra mayors!) and have become a means for customers to examine in with associates and create “lifelogs.” Foursquare’s principal enterprise pivoted away from client tech towards a B-to-B mannequin — think about that it was sitting on an enormous trove of consumer information — and supplied its location know-how through its Pilgrim SDK to different corporations. It claimed Uber, Twitter, Snapchat, WeChat, and Apple Maps amongst its clientele.

Crowley says within the Medium publish (and has stated in quite a few interviews) that the purpose of Foursquare “was never to build an awesome check-in button,” however somewhat to invent “the future of location tech.” Foursquare “did over $100M+ in revenue in 2020, and we’ll do *well over* $100M+ in revenue in 2021,” in response to the publish.

He says he’s departing the corporate he cofounded to spend time together with his household and since he has “lots of things I still want to build — many of which don’t fit neatly into the Foursquare of 2021.”