AIM INTERVIEWS

Who are you?

Dennis Crowley. Founder of a bunch of stuff, including Foursquare (location tech company), Dodgeball (pre-Foursquare, early mobile social app), and Hopscotch (the thing I'm working on now), which is like an audio-first companion for cities, emceed by an AI-powered radio DJ (!!). I'm also a dad to three little kids, and the founder/chairman of a semi-pro soccer team called Kingston Stockade FC up in the Hudson Valley area of NY.

You co-founded Foursquare in 2009, one of the first location social networks on the new iPhone App Store and an evolution of your prior company Dodgeball. Was there any inspiration? Any particular reason you found the iPhone compelling at the time?

Dodgeball was directly inspired by the Marauders Map in the Harry Potter books -- "how do I make one of these for NYC?"
Foursquare was like a sequel to Dodgeball, but we built it around this idea of "let's turn life into a game" inspired by things like Legend of Zelda and the mini-games built into the Nike+ running app at the time (2008).
Both Dodgeball and Foursquare (and now Hopscotch) were designed around "recently possible tech + newly ubiquitous devices" ... with Dodgeball it was maps + flip phones. With Foursquare it was big data systems + the iPhone. With Hopscotch, it's AI + Airpods.

Foursquare check-ins and competing for mayorships became a huge social phenomenon in the 2010s. Considering Yelp and Gowalla had similar features, do you think being based in NYC during the heyday of 2010s Internet culture was a big factor in Foursquare's success? Was there anything surprising about the growth that came from this?

I think some of it was being in NYC (huge density and diversity of users and access to lots of journalists/media/investors), but a big part of it was "it was our original idea". I feel like we were really innovating and others were copying what we were doing. We used to say "Sure, Facebook (etc) can copy what we've already done, but they don't know what we're going to do next."

I also think Foursquare was a stronger product / tech platform because it was built in NYC. NYC is a hard city to design location based software for -- huge density of people/places/things, tightly packed streets with businesses on top of businesses, giant buildings made of brick / glass / steel that make it hard for GPS to work accurately. We had to work around all of these types of challenges to make Foursquare work as well as it did (not just the app, but the tech platform that powered it).

What are some consumer products or categories you think are under explored given today's recently possible tech?

I think we are long overdue for a reinvention of social software. Not "social media" (which I feel like is a wasteland of toxicity) but "social software" -- software that works on your behalf to help connect you to people + experiences IRL. Everything I've ever worked on has been adjacent to this "software to connect you to IRL" space. The universe took a hard turn towards toxic and extractive internet products with Instagram, Snap, endlessly scrolling algo feeds, and we're long overdue for a correction. There's a whole generation of internet users who have never experienced "products designed to bring you joy", and I'm hoping this new crop of tools and new crop of builders brings us back there.

Are there any people or projects you particularly admire today?

I am in awe at the speed and scale at which Anthropic is operating at right now.

There's a few kid-focused products that make me think "oh gosh, I wish I made that" .... Yoto and TinCan come to mind. They are both brilliant examples of "tech that is good for kids".

If you had unlimited resources (time, money, etc.), how would you spend your time?

Probably traveling more. I have 3 little kids and they're juuuuussstt at the age where we can travel with all 3 of them.

What's a message you have for the world?

I've always told people "if there's something in the world that you wish existed, your job is to go and make that thing". And I think with a lot of the AI tools available today (Claude Code etc) it's easier than ever to get started and get to something shippable and shareable.