There's a great, deep story by Austin Carr in Fast Company today giving a broad overview of where Foursquare is headed, as a product and as a company. I was quoted a few times in the piece, and spent a good bit of time talking to Austin, and I thought it might make sense to explain the non-obvious parts of my perspective on Foursquare.
It makes sense to start at the end:
Crowley is a rare breed of founder obsessed with the problem he's trying to solve. "The thing I fear, which would be devastating for the industry, let alone Dennis, is that he gets rushed and Foursquare can't monetize, they can't raise [another round], and they have to sell to Facebook or Google or whoever," Dash says. "And then at 40, Dennis has to start over. Because he'll do it again—there's no question. But then the world will have to wait another goddamn 10 years for this thing."This articulates what may be the two most important points underpinning my opinion of Foursquare:
- There's undoubtedly going to be a location layer to the Internet. It's too powerful of an idea, and too valuable of a technology, for it not to come into existence in the next few years.
- Dennis Crowley has incontrovertibly been obsessed with this idea for over a decade.
Now, simply being a person obsessed with a particular class of problem doesn't always mean that someone will be the one who brings it to large-scale adoption — just ask Nikola Tesla. But my bet is that Foursquare cracks the code on this before anyone else. To understand why, let's take a look at what Foursquare really does today. (...)
They've simply done more work, at a deeper level, to really understand the problems around location and location-enabled apps. Astoundingly, for all the public paranoia about online tracking, Foursquare's never made any mistakes that have caused a panic about the way they collect and share data. And its team is respected by other startups and media companies as being authoritative on nearly every important aspect of location-based technology on the Internet. Perhaps most importantly, its position as a neutral third party offers all of these partners an option which doesn't empower the competitors they actually fear.
The truth is, aside from simple mapping apps, nobody has truly built a large-scale consumer technology business around the potential of location. As I noted when discussing the importance of public traffic data, there is enormous value to be created by understanding how people move around: Both Bill Gates and Jack Dorsey's first companies were based on data about how people move around through cities. If Foursquare's given enough time to keep iterating on the incredible success it's had as a platform, and its first few steps toward driving revenue through ads make it stable enough financially, there's no reason it can't be the company that taps into the value of being the location layer of the Internet.
They've simply done more work, at a deeper level, to really understand the problems around location and location-enabled apps. Astoundingly, for all the public paranoia about online tracking, Foursquare's never made any mistakes that have caused a panic about the way they collect and share data. And its team is respected by other startups and media companies as being authoritative on nearly every important aspect of location-based technology on the Internet. Perhaps most importantly, its position as a neutral third party offers all of these partners an option which doesn't empower the competitors they actually fear.
The truth is, aside from simple mapping apps, nobody has truly built a large-scale consumer technology business around the potential of location. As I noted when discussing the importance of public traffic data, there is enormous value to be created by understanding how people move around: Both Bill Gates and Jack Dorsey's first companies were based on data about how people move around through cities. If Foursquare's given enough time to keep iterating on the incredible success it's had as a platform, and its first few steps toward driving revenue through ads make it stable enough financially, there's no reason it can't be the company that taps into the value of being the location layer of the Internet.
by Anil Dash | Read more:
Image: uncredited
