Image via CrunchBaseDennis 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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