Posts from dennis crowley

Video Of The Week

Saturday is always a tough day for me to blog. The weeks are long and I am often spent by friday afternoon. The weekend is a time for me to rejuvenate and restore. I often find the weekends bring out the best blog posts but saturday morning is always hard. In the past, I've punted by running a video on saturday morning. I think I am going to make that a more regular event. When I've got something to say, I will blog. When I don't, I'll run the most interesting video I've seen in the past week.

Today, I'm running a twenty minute conversation between two of my favorite people in Tech, @om and @dens. This talk is mostly about Foursquare, but they do touch on the future of maps, location services, UIs, and stuff like that. I enjoyed it and I hope you do too.

#mobile

Long Roadmaps

I interviewed Dennis Crowley yesterday at the NYU Entrepreneurs Festival. I tweeted out the livestream so I'm sure some people were able to catch it live. I hope they put the video up soon because Dennis was great and I think people will get a lot of value out of his thoughts on entrepreneurship, startups, and building a product and a company.

But this post is about something Dennis said about product roadmaps that really struck me. Dennis said that all the way back to Dodgeball, the predecessor company to Foursquare, he and Alex had a roadmap for the product that was years ahead of what they could actually build. When Dennis and Naveen decided to start building Foursquare, Dennis pulled out that roadmap and updated it to reflect the power of modern smartphones. And that roadmap goes way out, well beyond what Foursquare is today or what it will be in a year from now.

So when I asked Dennis about the moment when the Foursquare team watched the Facebook Places announcement, he said "I got up and told the team that any company can copy what we have built, but we just have to go on and build the things we want to build because nobody else has that roadmap."

That is the power of a visionary founder leading a team to build the things that are only in his or her mind. I recall Mark Pincus, in the early days of Zynga, tell me about a game he wants to build someday. Zynga still has not released that game. When Jack Dorsey came back to Twitter, he said he was finally going to build Twitter 1.0. Think about that. And think about what Twitter 5.0 is in Jack's mind.

The best founders have these long roadmaps.  If they can stay engaged in their companies, they can realize them over extended periods of time. There are so many reasons why this doesn't always happen. Founders leave. Companies are sold. But when it all comes together, the result is magical.

#Web/Tech

Feature Friday: Foursquare Radar

A few weeks ago I ran into Dennis Crowley in the USV offices. He whipped out his iPhone like the excited kid he still is and showed me Radar running on his phone. He was running a pre-release of iOS5 and a pre-release of the new Foursquare app. His phone alerted him, just like getting a text message, that he was at USV and he ought to check in there.

I said, “Dennis, this is the feature we’ve all been waiting for. This is what I’ve wanted Foursquare to do since the day I put it on my phone.”

There are features and then there are game changing features. Foursquare’s Radar is a game changing feature. Radar will prompt me to checkin more frequently, to use lists more actively, and to find people and places I need to know about while I’m out and about. Radar is one more bit of the big Foursquare vision being rolled out.

Here’s Foursquare’s post about Radar and another with answers to some frequently asked questions. It’s interesting to see that Radar is leveraging some new technology in iOS5 to make it work without draining the battery:

Radar uses a very battery-friendly location-finding mode that is totally new to iOS 5, the same one Appleā€™s own Reminders app uses.

Now, can we get Radar on Android and Blackberry please??

#Web/Tech