Noah Weiss: evaluation

Transcript context

…Looking back at Foursquare, do you think there was a path to building a massive consumer app type business or is that just never going to work out? I know they went in direction of B2B data business. I guess was there a path or was it just like, "No. That was never going to work out?" It's tricky. I mean I'm not going to do 30-minute post, because I probably bore everyone. But it's not about this. We've all thought about this a lot on the early team there. I think the biggest probably lesson learned, frankly, is that we were really close with the Instagram folks early on. They were big developers on our platform. They used the Foursquare API before they were bought by Facebook. I think in hindsight we were a little bit mistaken to believe that the idea that the atomic unit would be a person talking about a place that they're at and you have to have a physical place to tie it to versus a person sharing a moment or an experience that they're having in the world. Sometimes that might have a place connected to it. I think that one change in framer on what you would say a customer actually wanted to do, that probably was the thing that took this away on the social side. I think on the more local discovery side, it's actually what people wind up be using the product much more for over time getting personalized recommendations and getting tips when you go to a place and all the push notifications. Again, it was hard to stay ahead, I think specifically of Google, because they had billion plus Google Maps users distributed on Android and iOS. Even though they might only take a couple years, eventually they would wind up replicating a lot of the functionality and then I think it was hard to regain that momentum. Much of this stuff is luck and timing and just coincidences of history. I think there was a path. I think in the end we lost their social sales and then Google was able to catch up on the utility side. Now the company's built a really valuable B2B API company which offers a story. I mean Slack is in some ways a pivot, obviously, from a consumer company to a B2B company. But that that's my mini postmortem, what could have been with Foursquare. It's interesting how many consumer companies pivot to B2B because it turns out that's where the money ends up being.…

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