Dennis Crowley Quotes

I'm still a really shitty programmer, but I know enough to hack a prototype together.

My mindset is of the person who is still unsure whether they have enough money in their ATM to go to another bar. I lived that way when I was unemployed, when I was a snowboard instructor, and when I was at NYU. A lot of my personality is stuck in those five years, and I don't know if that's ever gonna change.

If we all went to Google right now, or went to Yelp right now, we'd all get the same results, and that seems really, really broken to me. Foursquare should understand the neighborhoods I've spent a lot of time in, and the restaurants that I went to once but never went back to.

Don't let people tell you your ideas won't work.

People used to pooh-pooh the idea of a check-in, saying that this wasn't interesting. But when you have 3 billion of those data points, you can take any latitude and longitude anywhere in the world, and I'll tell you what is interesting now, 20 minutes from now, and 6 hours from now.

People can copy what you've done, but they can't copy what you still want to do.

Between the three, Facebook is literally everyone I've ever shaken hands with at a conference or kissed on the cheek at Easter. Twitter seems to be everyone I am entertained by or I wish to meet some day. Foursquare seems to be everyone I run into on a regular basis. All three of those social graphs are powerful in their own.

Every check-in should mean something. Foursquare should get smarter every time that you continue to check in. We should be able to offer special deals that you may be interested in, and we should be able to offer recommendations for the type of things you should do next.

Whatever way that we have in our head that we expect people to use a software, they'll find other interesting ways to use it that we didn't expect.

Forget about where you want to be and go out and build stuff. Dodgeball came from being bored at work ... things happen because you make them happen. Stop sketching, and start building.

I'm obsessed with the idea of social TV.

The best version of Foursquare is the one you don't think about using.

If there's something you want to build, but the tech isn't there yet, just find the closest possible way to make it happen.

I keep a notebook in my pocket, and I write down all the stuff we could ever do with Foursquare.

You know when people leave a job, and they say they didn't know what they came away with after two years? That's how I felt when I first left Google.

Foursquare makes maps special. We take maps that are blank and put dots on them to help you figure out what to do.

The misconception about Foursquare is that it's just hipsters in New York and San Francisco checking in at bars. It's happening all over the world. I've seen huge growth in Europe, Japan, South America.

Don't let anyone tell you your ideas are stupid or the thing you feel most passionate about 'won't work' - it's happened to me time and time again, and we find that if you push at what you think is interesting hard enough, you're probably right.

It's difficult to build services that are supposed to scale to, you know, 30, 50, 100 million users right off the bat because they got to be kind of tailored down; by definition, they have to be a little bit generic to speak to that large of an audience.

I feel lucky because earlier in my career, I found what I liked to do; it's build software that you see your friends using on the street, and they like it.

One of the biggest hurdles about Foursquare is you need to remember to use it.

Build something that fixes something people are having a problem with, and you're lined up for great things.

What we're starting to see is that the best apps tend to be the simplest, the easiest to use and the fastest to use

Stop sketching. Start building.

I used to snowboard 30 days a year. Now it's down to eight.

People share everything on Facebook. That can be a very good thing or a very noisy thing. With Foursquare, people know that they're getting information specifically about a place, advice about where they are and what they could be doing. It's a very filtered view of the world.

It's very clear to users, more clear than in other apps, that Foursquare is an app for search and discovery, and we're very good at delivering you a social map that will show you friends' faces on the map and things that you might like.

Hire the best people you can find. This was kind of easy in the early days of foursquare - we hired our friends who were really passionate about the stuff they were building. We have a superstar team not just because their resumes are so strong, but because they've been passionate, thinking about and tinkering in this space forever. Those are the people you want to surround yourself with.