Dennis Crowley: Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Foursquare
Passion and dream when mixed together, results in great combinations, and when you meet with people with similar interest, the resultant is a success story. Crowley Dennis got lucky when he met his partner Naveen Selvadurai and both co-founded Foursquare. Foursquare is a local search-and-discovery mobile app, which became popular in no time, due to some of its unique features like Tips and Tastes. It offers awards to its old users and calls them Superusers.
Crowley was born on 19 June 1976, in Medway, Massachusetts, where he attended the Xaverian Brothers High School. After completing his school education, he went to Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, where he received a B.A. degree, in 1998. As soon as Crowley graduated, he started working with Jupiter Communications, and later, in 2000, became the product developer at Vindigo a mobile app development company.
After working for two years with the company, Crowley left his job, in order to complete his higher education, and in 2004, he received an M.P.S. master’s degree from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. During his time at the NYU, he started working on his graduate thesis project, Dodgeball, along with one of his fellow student, named Alex Rainert, in 2003.
Dodgeball was a location-based social networking software, that enabled its users to enter their location and find out the locations of the friends as well as interesting venues nearby. The project later became Crowley’s first startup and earned popularity. In fact, only after two years of its inception, Google acquired Dodgeball in 2005, and Crowley started working with the company. But the company shut down all the operations of Dodgeball in 2007, and Crowley left Google.
In the same year, Crowley joined another tech company named, Area/Code. This was the place where he met his future business partner Naveen Selvadurai. Naveen belongs to the Indian descent and has got a master’s degree in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. After working with tech giants like Lucent, Sony, Nokia and Sun Microsystems, he was working with a startup company in the same office space as Crowley was.
The two met and shared a common interest, ‘location-based services’. Naveen had experience with iPhone stuff and was interested in hacking city apps. On the other hand, Crowley was working on mobile apps and has just sold his own location-based service to Google. After discussing ideas, the two came to the conclusion that they must build another location-based service similar to Dodgeball.
The two started working on the idea, Naveen working on the iPhone stuff, and Crowley handling all the website’s work. As a result, after working for a few months they developed FourSquare, in late 2008, and launched the service at the SXSW in 2009. The service was launched in 100 metro cities worldwide.
The service not only allowed to put the check-ins to find out nearby friends but also suggested the users of the nearby interesting places. The service provided a new feature a personalised list for the users titled To-dos.
In the span of 4 years, the company had registered over 7 million users, and by the mid of 2011, it was expected that the company would pass 750 million check-ins. In fact, the then President Barak Obama also registered to the service in 2011, in order to take tips from the White House staff from the locations he had visited.
The main reason behind the success of the app was the gamification it rendered. The gamification in the app helped it become more interesting and encouraged more user engagement. In the year of 2010, there were news making rounds that the major tech giants like Yahoo!, Facebook and Microsoft were rivalling to acquire Foursquare for a rumoured $100-150 million. The app offers services for both enterprises and consumers.
Crowley worked as the CEO of the company for a long period of 7 years, and later, became the Executive Chairman of the company.
Crowley was named in the list of Fortune Magazine’s “40 Under 40” for two consecutive years in 2010 and 2011, and further was named in the list of Vanity Fair’s “New Establishment” in 2011 and 2012. He was also named one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35 by MIT Technology Review TR35.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.