The Foursquare Announcement

As Robert Burns said so eloquently, "the best laid plans of mice and men go often askew" (that's the english translation). And so it was with Foursquare's planned announcement of their first round of financing which was originally going to be tomorrow.

But when you do a financing, a company usually files a form D with the SEC, and when Foursquare did that late last friday afternoon, PaidContent picked it up and ran this post. And so the news broke over a long holiday weekend. You can see all of the coverage here.

The way the company handled it is instructive. They realized that once the news was out, it was out. They got on the phone with all of the bloggers who wanted to write and gave them the news and the bloggers posted. And the company posted a small blurb on their blog acknowledging the news.

But they also decided to g ahead with their plan to post a longer explanation of why they raised the money and what they plan to do with it. And they decided to wait until everyone was back from the long weekend to do that. That post is up now.

If you are a foursquare user or you want to understand this sector and the company better, go give it a read.

I'll also note that Union Square Ventures also posted about our investment in Foursquare, as we always do when we make a new investment. In that post, we outline why we made the investment and what our expectations are for it.

So that's the story of the Foursquare investment announcement. Not exactly as it was planned. But I think it got the job done anyway. Well done everyone.

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Comments (Archived):

  1. David Gillespie

    Well and truly ready to try this out when it hits Toronto.I wonder if there might be a nice tie-in with http://Ifeellondon.com?

    1. fredwilson

      I’ll check out I feel london. Hadn’t seen that before now

  2. kenberger

    I’m super-psyched to see they grabbed the foursquare.com domain before the media crush.

    1. fredwilson

      yeah, that was a big part of why they delayed announcing it

      1. Dan Entin

        Hope the price tag of the domain didn’t eat in to the funding amount too much. 🙂

        1. fredwilson

          I didn’t. But it was more than dennis would have spent out of his own pocket

  3. Dave Murrow

    So wait, a blog post about a planned blog post that was aimed at other bloggers in a planned blogger PR campaign to post about the deal? Gotcha!