Leveling Up at Foursquare.
It’s been just about seven years since we sat down and wrote the first lines of PHP that would power Foursquare. In that time, we’ve grown from “crazy idea” to prototype, prototype to project, project to company, and from company to successful business — a successful business with both predictable and scalable revenue growth.
Along the way, we’ve built *a lot* of amazing products and technology: apps used by millions of people around the world, an API used by more than 100,000 developers, geofences for more than 65 million places across the globe, Pilgrim technology that understands how phones move in and out of those spaces, and B2B solutions like our geo-based programmatic platform, Pinpoint, and Place Insights, our foot-traffic analytics tool. The company has grown into something so much bigger and broader than we ever imagined in 2009.
Today, I’m excited to share some leadership team changes that have been in the works for a while. With our business maturing and with our enterprise solutions (Places API, Place Insights) and as programmatic advertising platform (Pinpoint) fueling our revenue growth, I felt like now is the right time to put our strongest executives in the company’s top leadership positions. I’ve asked our COO Jeff Glueck to step into the role of CEO, and I’ve tapped our CRO Steven Rosenblatt to be President, acting as Jeff’s co-pilot. Jeff and Steven have helped to build Foursquare into the business it’s become, defining new products and building strong teams. They are brilliant, experienced leaders who have grown companies like ours before — Jeff was formerly the CEO of Skyfire and CMO of Travelocity, and Steven helped to grow Apple’s iAds to a $100M business. Steven and Jeff know what they’re doing and totally understand the value of Foursquare’s technology and data. Our new executive team is the strongest we’ve had in place in the history of the company. That’s a huge deal.
Meanwhile, I will be stepping up into the role of Executive Chairman. This new role will allow me to focus full-time on vision and innovation, long-term strategy and creating new consumer products. If this sounds more like my job from 2010 than my job from 2015… well, that’s the point. It frees up my time from operational and management duties and allows me get back to the “let’s just make something awesome that people love” spirit that got us here. There are a lot of things I still want to build at Foursquare. And there are a lot of things that should exist in the world that only Foursquare can build — for both consumers and app developers. My new job is to make sure those things get built as projects, and that the best of them get pushed into the real world as products.
Foursquare is in great hands with both Jeff and Steven at the helm and our company is fantastically set up for success. We just raised a $45M financing (!!!) that will allow us to grow the company and continue to build the location intelligence tools that have proven so successful over the past 18 months. I am incredibly proud of the team that’s helped us get here, and I’m so excited about what’s to come in 2016 and beyond.
