Foursquare's Founder on Making the Internet Fun Again + His New App — With Dennis Crowley

Dennis Crowley is the co-founder of Foursquare. He joins Big Technology Podcast to talk about what made the internet fun, why it's lost some of its magic, and how to restore it. He also introduces a new app, called BeeBot, that will deliver short, contextual audio messages to you as you walk around cities. Stay tuned for the second half where we discuss whether Web3 can still work, how AI changes things, and whether Crowley's buying a Vision Pro. Listen for a fun, energetic conversation about the web's evolution and where it might go from here. --- You can join the waitlist for BeeBot here. You can read Dennis's Thread on starting something new here. --- Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  The co-founder and former CEO of Foursquare joins us to talk about his new project, how to make the internet fun again, and his thoughts on the latest tech news from AI to mixed reality. You don't want to miss this one. All that and more coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience, and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons

• 0:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 1:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you today. We have a legendary New York founder and also someone who's going to introduce a new product that he's working on, which is very exciting for us here today. I won't take up any more time in the intro. Dennis Crowley, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me on the pod. Really excited to be here. Yeah, thanks for being here. Let's just kind of talk about the state of Foursquare, because I think the meme is that it, you know, it was big for a number of years. It's like 15 years old at this point. Now it's two apps. There's Foursquare City Reviews, I think, and then there's the Swarm app where you can check in. And I think there's a view that it had its moment. Now it's kind of dormant. It's moved into ad tech, right? There's been

• 1:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  some location services that Foursquare has provided, but I think it's kind of murky after that. So I checked the App Store today. Both those apps have updated within the past three months, so it's still active. But tell us a little bit about the Foursquare story arc and where we are today.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we started Foursquare in 2009 and now it's 2024. So that's like, is that like 15 years? I mean, I can't do that.

• 2:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  And, you know, I was CEO of the company for six years. I no longer work there, so my day job, but you know, I remain on the on the board. And I'm an active participant in board discussions and strategy discussions, right? But I think that the story of the company often gets framed through the apps. Like, yeah, we still have these two apps and still in the store. There's still millions of people that use them, but like, it's, you know, obviously not what it was back in like 2012, 2013. But I mean, that's, that's fine, right? Like, the company's business is not based around the consumer apps. The company's business is based around this idea of location technology, location intelligence, developer tools, you know, business analytics.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  We were, you know, we did, we were doing a lot in the, you know, location advertising space. And as that space started to, you know, dismantle a bit, we've, we've started to focus more on location analytics and location tools and technologies for, for third parties. And so like, you know, it's a, it's a good, stable, successful business. Company does well north of $100 million a year in revenue. 300 plus employees, you know, maybe closing in at 400 employees, you know, offices around the country. So I mean, it's a good, stable, solid business. Just a lot different than the Foursquare that many people know from, you know, call it 12, 15 years ago.

• 3:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I think that would surprise a lot of people. 100 million in revenue a year.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  North, yeah, well north of that. So, but I don't know what I'm, I guess, hey, so I'm going to just stick with that.

• 3:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's, that's very big. And it was also like, I was going on your LinkedIn and you kind of like give it a description of Foursquare. And you say, back in 2009, Foursquare made the check-in mainstream. And today, those 13-plus billion check-ins are the foundation of our powerful proprietary pilgrim technology that helps make sense of where phones go for more than 150,000 partners, including Uber, Tencent, Apple, Samsung, and Twitter. So basically, from my understanding, it's Foursquare knows where people are because they've been checking in and you can sort of match like the Wi-Fi signal and the cell phone location. And so they've been like, there's been almost this human reinforcement, right? Of like where the technology thinks you are. And that's become a valuable service to these companies to figure out where people are.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the original kind of big thing that we did was made this crowdsourced map of the world, like the same way that Wikipedia is a crowdsourced encyclopedia. Like, we made the original crowdsourced map of the world based upon people checking into places and adding photos and updating things and a whole community of super users that were tweaking things and updating the hours and updating location if it moves. And that worked really well when there were whatever, 50 million people using the app. And it turns out that that still works pretty well when there's millions of people using the app. But we don't need tens of millions of people using it regularly in order to maintain that dataset.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  And now, we routinely do partnerships with third-party sources, so that we take our crowdsourced map of the world and then we bring other people's data on top of it, and other people's data on top of that, and it helps us really clean and normalize things. And it just turns out that it's a really amazing dataset. And then on top of that, we used all that data to make this amazing technology, originally used to be called the Pilgrim SDK, now it's called the Movement SDK. And this is like a little piece of software, like an engine that you can put on your iPhone or Android device, and it makes your device conscious of where it is, right? Am I moving? Am I stopped? Okay, I'm stopped. Am I in a coffee shop? Oh, I'm in a coffee shop called Starbucks. Have I ever been here before? I've been here lots of times. Am

• 6:00Speaker 01

  I familiar with this neighborhood? I know this neighborhood really well. So just giving that essence of contextual awareness to different apps is a superpower. And you can build really cool next-generation services on top of that. And so that's like a really amazing developer tool that we give people access to. And then on top of that, there's this broad understanding the company has of like, well, how are the phones moving through the world? Going to Home Depots, or are they going to Chipotle's, or are they going to malls, or are they going to golf courses? And you know, that's just like a, like, an extra layer of intelligence that the platform has, and we can turn that into different types of insights and analytic tools that are interesting

• 6:45Speaker 01

  to a number of the partners and customers of the, of the company.

• 6:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Foursquare dominated internet culture for a while, right? Like, the idea of being a mayor of like a foursquare place. Like, I had, my first tech story that I got published, or one of my first ones, was about this plugin called Couch Cache that, you know, made you seem like, you remember that? It made you seem like you had a cool life by like picking, you picked like a different type of night that you wanted to have, an artsy night, or of, you know, binge, binge drinking night, and would like post your foursquare check-ins through the night to your Twitter followers to show like you were, you were actually having a good time. Like, this was like a huge part of internet culture. And it also seems, in some ways, like, that era of, like, it was a more fun era of the internet has passed.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  And obviously, like, the user numbers, like, you've said, we've moved from like maybe fifty to in the tens.

• 7:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  It, it does seem like that, that peak has, we've moved beyond it. So, you were front and center, you are front and center. I mean, what do you think caused that shift from that, like, more fun and more consumer-oriented internet to whatever we have today?

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Uh, that's a great question. Actually, it's a great, a great discussion, too. You know, I mean, there was, there was a period, call it, you know, 2009, 2010, we started, and a lot of these other things got started, where you're really just making apps for your friends. And that is super fun. And it's like, may the most fun app survive, right? Like, that's, that's, that's how it worked.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  And, you know, as things are starting to grow, you start to get into this race, where it's like, okay, already, you know, Facebook was the biggest thing, and then it was Twitter, and then it's like, well, Instagram's growing, and Snapchat's growing, okay, how are we going to monetize these things? Well, it's going to be advertising, all right? Well, if it's going to be advertising, we got to get as many users as possible. Just get the numbers up regardless of what you're doing. And so, you know, then you take these products that are kind of niche and small, maybe a couple million users, and you start to, you know, make product changes that make it interesting and accessible. And attractive to tens of millions of users. And in doing so, like, I think part of the in the original product, it loses some of its soul, right?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Like, an example of this from Foursquare is like, you know, we used to have this inherent bias built in that like independent coffee shops and independent restaurants always trump chains, right? But then, you know, a big chain of coffee shops or a big chain of taco places. But then as you start to do these like advertising deals with them, it's like, well, you can't really talk trash about the big chains if they're the ones that are that are, you know, helping to pay the company's bills. And you kind of run into this weird thing, well, what are we going to do from a search result perspective? It's the company's opinion that the local taqueria is always better than the the big chain. Well, but the big chain is not happy about being, you know, like you, you run into those types of issues. And then you start to get into the waiting of feeds, the algorithmic feeds, right?

• 9:36Speaker 01

  And, you know, this is like a well documented thing where I think a lot of people felt that social media started to feel less fun and less relevant, less personal. When it was just you showing off what you were doing, all your friends, all your friends responding to it. It's like now you're seeing a bunch of strangers and now you're seeing a bunch of brands and now you're seeing a bunch of influencers. And it's all just kind of like performance art. And, you know, it's just like the the, the structure and the incentive and the meaning and the why for a lot of the stuff has, has just changed over time. And then there's like a whole generation, I think of like, you know, consumers or users of internet products, internet culture, that this is all that they know, right? Like, they only know algorithmic feeds.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  They only know the for you feeds. And this idea of like software that's fun and playful, like, it's just not their experience of the internet. Like, social media makes you feel bad about yourself and it's, you know, you're always watching your like count, right? And that's like, you describe the the period before that stuff was the norm to people and it's totally foreign. Like, they don't remember that. They never participated in that. And you know, that's kind of the period in the internet that I grew up in, right? Like liquor and dodgeball and delicious and Friendster and Foursquare and, you know, early Twitter, right? Before this stuff just got huge and turned into like a part of like the mass culture machine.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  These were toys, you know, like Chris Dixon has that great quote, like the next big thing starts off looking like a toy. Like we made the toys. There's a lot of us that made toys beginning on. And then those things grew up to be these big platforms that like, you know, they just change over time. And anyway, so like when I think about building stuff again, I think about it less from like, uh, how do we build the biggest thing possible? And we're like, well, how do you make something just like super fun for people? How do you get people back to this point where like they're using something because they they want to use it, not because it's designed to be addictive, you know, not because we're, you know, engineering dopamine hits into it, but just cause like it's it's like a fun, enjoyable social experience.

• 11:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And that like brings me to a question, which is can we change a variable today to get us back to the time where things were fun? Like, is there something that we can change? Is it obviously the pursuit of scale, I think will always be baked in, but is it like a different form of venture capital? Because there's a push and pull here, right? Like if if we end up having like fun products that take off again, like that's still going to be a good business. Maybe it's not like, you know, massive Twitter business, but it's still something that's going to be worth something to people. So there's got to be, people want the internet to be fun. There's got to be a void. So I'm just curious if you, I'm, yeah, I'm curious if you think there's a way to get us back there. And if so, what do we change?

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think it's like a variable, but like, you know, I feel like I'm, I'm old enough to have remembered a time where I'm like Yahoo, what could ever be better than Yahoo? And then be like AltaVista, what could ever be better than AltaVista, right? For search engines.

• 12:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  And then it's like, MySpace, who could ever be MySpace, right? Like, these things that seem like impossible to deconstruct, like, they eventually come tumbling down and then new stuff emerges in its place. And, you know, even rewind back three years ago, like, how the heck is Google gonna come apart? And then you start to see, like, oh, maybe we're kind of done with search and we're just always using bots and we're always using L L Ns, right? And so you can start to see, like, maybe there is a changing of the guard that's happening. It's not a variable that you flip or change. Like, let's just do this instead of that. But it's just like, you know, maybe the incumbents, this is the part where like, they just, they can't move quick enough to keep up with new and emerging technologies.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  And they'll steadily be, you know, you know, up and coming companies, products, services that continue to challenge these things. It just seems like indestructible a couple of years ago.

• 13:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  But even if the, so, technology shift might be one way to do it, but even if the technology shifts, like, you still end up with that pressure that you talked about to scale, right? Like, we're seeing even in the A I situation, where you have these companies like OpenAI, which have like billions of dollars put into them, an eighty-nine billion dollar valuation. And those pressures to get big and do it in those ways that make things less fun will inherently come to them. And in fact, their mission of like, developing A I responsibly, you know, sort of gets tested when they have all that money put into them. So, just to put a finer point on it, do you think there's a way of funding tech companies, you know, that can help them retain some of that original

• 14:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  character that we talked about? That just doesn't put these expectations to scale on them? Or is it just a fact of the internet economy that if you don't scale, you will shrink?

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, this is also a kind of, this is a tricky question because like, you know, there's a difference between building, like, hey, I'm gonna build a consumer service and I'm gonna, you know, try to do something on the internet in a new way and I'm gonna get a small team of engineers and maybe I raise a little bit money or maybe we just bootstrap it, whatever. Like, that's one thing and that's what a lot of us think of when we think about like, oh, internet companies, internet startups. And then you've got this whole other thing where it's like, if you're doing You know, a lot of AI work and you're you you need dedicated hardware and you need specific chipsets like, you know, you need to raise a huge war chest in order to have access to the server farms that can do the stuff that you need to, right? As all these

• 15:15Speaker 01

  arguments are on like, hey, it's gonna be really hard to unseat companies like Google and OpenAI and Microsoft and and Facebook, for example, Meta, just because they like they have all this infrastructure already. And it may be the case that, you know, he or she who has the best infrastructure is the one that ends up winning this round, right? And who knows? But like, you know, when you're when you're talking about like fundraising in general, like, A, to build something like Foursquare, like we built 15 years ago, it's a totally different model. You would need a smaller team. The tools are much better, cheaper, easier, right? You could probably do with five people what we were doing with 10 people back then, right? To build like a cutting edge, you know, AI

• 16:00Speaker 01

  company, totally different ballgame, totally different model, totally different cost structure. So, you know, I think venture is always, you know, venture exists for a reason, to help those companies that need that capital to do those things, get what they need in order to scale up, right? But then, you know, it's a totally different issue of like, hey, can you still do things, smaller things on the side? And can those still be relevant, big? Can they still scale? I think that's that's the thing that still remains to be seen.

• 16:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. And there's one more point about this, which I'm curious to get your take on, which is that, yeah, you have the VCs pushing for scale, but you also have big tech that's copying and sort of if you if you have a good idea and it takes some momentum as a standalone product, it's almost like a sure thing that especially if you're a consumer, that a Facebook or a Google will eventually just copy that. And then it goes from, okay, we're scaling, we're gaining momentum to all of a sudden, oh, my goodness, like Mark Zuckerberg is going to cut off my growth. And then that sort of changes the nature of these things. For instance, you know, you talk about like, like checking in, like, didn't you guys have a situation where all of a sudden, like, Google starts to make reviews and check-ins part of Maps? And they just have a much bigger install

• 17:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  base. So how how big of a factor is big tech in terms of, you know, what's happened to the consumer internet?

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's it's less about, I certainly remember the time where it's like, gosh, we're gonna get cut off from the feeds, right? They'll throttle the feeds in such a way. And I think that's less of a of a growth thing now than it was. But like this idea of like, hey, can can a bigger company be inspired by the work that a smaller startup does and just say, hey, you know, I want this to to be in my app and and therefore I will make your app the less relevant or less less special. You know, probably the the most well-known version of this is, you know, Instagram, reaching into Snapchat and taking their, you know, the stories format and say like, well, this is a brand new format. We would like

• 18:00Speaker 01

  this format in our app. Like, does that undercut their growth? Does it commoditize the category and the products a little bit like that? You know, that's, I mean, it happens all the, I think that type of stuff happens all the time. It's probably like the the most well-known or maybe like surgical, perfectly executed version of that. But yeah, I mean, like, how many, how many breakout apps do you do you see these days? Maybe it's like one or two a year, really, right? I mean, I'm not as into the scene as I was before, but you know, it used to be like, hey, there's anything to play with every month.

• 18:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Every month, right.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  And, yeah, and and, you know, there still is new stuff to play with every day, every month. Like, how much of the stuff really has sticking power? And if something really does get sticking power, does does the thing that make it interesting and novel just get sucked into some other, some other product in a way that like, you know, hinders it or makes it less special? Like, I think, you know, that that is, that's still a real thing. That's not like, you know, it's not stopping people that I know from continuing to build things. Like, people aren't like, oh, shucks, it's not even worth doing a startup because Facebook is just gonna copy you. Like,

• 19:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  No, people are, you know, like, there's a certain class of people that are just like, you know, I like to build things. I need to, I have an idea. I cannot sleep at night until I see this thing exist. I will go make this thing. That is the thing that makes me happy is building this thing. And, you know, that's, I think that's how new stuff gets pushed in the world is people just brute force through all of these, you know, hypothetical reasons not to do it.

• 19:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Last question about this. There was a meme that went around a couple of weeks ago about how like, basically, consumer VC is done for. What do you think about that?

• 19:44Speaker 01

  I don't think it's done for. I mean, I see, I see deals all the time. People are always pitching me stuff. People are still fundraising, still funds that do this, you know? People going out raising $50 million to build a consumer app that doesn't have like runaway traction. Yeah, sure. Those days are long gone. Does that mean that there will never be another head consumer app? Like, absolutely not. Are people much more wary to take a bet on one? Yeah, absolutely so. But, you know, it's just people being more selective. There's probably a lot less money to go around and there's a, you know, people are much more cautious about where they place their bets, but I don't think it's totally gone.

• 20:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Okay, let's talk about a bet that you're making and let's just go full circle here because a couple of weeks ago, you threaded, I love your threads feed, by the way, it's great.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Appreciate that.

• 20:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, no, it's real fun. I feel, are you more active there than you were on Twitter?

• 20:43Speaker 01

  I'm done with Twitter. I, I, I gave up on it a couple of months ago.

• 20:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, so I, I do enjoy the stuff that you put out there. Great video of, we all talk about it, of Steve Jobs calling virtual reality like headphones for video. But, but more to the point, you said, I'm working on a new project. It's an app. I'm walking around NYC today testing it and one of those, and it's one of the things that just, just pushed me, made me lol. That is a great feeling as a builder. That is all. And then you gave like the threads hashtag, make the internet fun again. So, you know, we've been, we spent like 20 minutes talking about how could the internet be fun? Do people want to build consumer apps? How do you scale them? You have like, by nature of what you're building, an answer here.

• 21:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  So actually, for listeners, I have no idea what Dennis is building. And I think you're going to talk about it in public for either the first time or one of the first times now. But what I've heard is that you might have gotten like a band of like the old Foursquare folks back together and are trying to build something not exactly the same, but in that nature. So how do those rumors compare to reality and what's going on?

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Well, I'll call it that. First of all, I just, I like to build things, right? Like I, since leaving Foursquare, I've tried to do less building and more like, you know, more company building than product building and advising, right? Because that's kind of what I was doing for a while. But like, I do like to build stuff. And, um, you know, my last gig at Foursquare was running the R and D labs there. I just, you know, the mandate was take the tools and technology, take all the stuff we've made at Foursquare over the years and like make cool stuff with it. Like build cool things. And we had made, like my favorite thing at Foursquare I think we ever made was this project called, um, uh, um, Mars Bot for AirPods. And it was like a city guide for AirPods.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  And you would just walk around, it would tell you stuff about the city. And, you know, like we, we were working on it in 2019. I wrote a big blog post about it. We were set to launch it at South by Southwest in 2020 and then COVID. Right? And that's like, well, that, I mean, no one's walking around, no one's doing anything. That project just kind of went back on the shelf. And then, you know, I ended up leaving the company like a year later. And I think the project has been turned off and the app has been removed from the store. And, you know, that's like the, I, I love that product. And so, um, you know, like one of the things I'm working on now is like a sequel to that. Basically, it's like, okay, like this, you put your AirPods in, you walk around, it tells you interesting things that are happening about the city, right?

• 23:22Speaker 01

  That, that old project that we had, I mean, it was back in 2019. You know, we had whatever, you know, a couple thousand users of it. Um, and, you know, we were starting to get interesting feedback. It wasn't, it didn't reach any scale, right? But like, there was enough there to be like, there's something really interesting here. And that's what we're trying to do with this new version. Um, the thing that we have now, yes, there's like, it's like, we're in the stage where it's not. It's like not a company, it's not a product, it's like a, it's a project, right? It's a project I'm working on with a couple, you know, a couple of folks that worked at Foursquare many, many moons ago also. And it's called, right now it's called BeBot, um, which is like what my son, uh, used to, instead of saying robot, he would say BeBot. And so it's like, you know, it has like a robot voice that talks to you.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  But I know before we jumped on the pod, um, I was in the Lower East Side of New York and, you know, I walked all the way over here, took me about a half an hour. And as I'm walking through the Lower East Side in Soho and, um, the West Village, it's popping up and it's telling me about like, oh, this place is interesting and this is, this place is new and this is why this is something that's cool going on here. Um, and so, you know, it's really an exploration of, you know, of, um, use like an audio first experience that's built around cities. And so sometimes I think of it almost like a version of, of ways, but for people that walk around, right? Like what, what's happening around me? What should I be, what should I know about? What should I not know about? What should I, what should I stay away from? What should I flock towards?

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Um, and so like the, these are the things, like I, I love this, this space, like this idea of like, you build things for your friends in cities that help them have a better experience in the cities, but are also just kind of like a little bit fun and a little bit weird. And so, you know, we have like 50 people testing it now. Um, most of them are in, are in New York. Like the feedback is like, it kind of works, but it kind of doesn't. This thing's kind of funny. This thing's really annoying. This thing didn't work. Here's an unexpected bug. So we're in that point where like, we're at that stage where it's like, we're, we're just trying to tune it so it works better. And then you can start to layer like the fun and whimsical and weird stuff on top of it. And I feel like that's kind of like my, my bread and butter. And that's the stuff that I love to do.

• 25:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. So hearing you talk about it, it's not like an audio tour. It's like, not like a, this is a history.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Go ahead.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that I should have clarified that. Like it's, it's, um, you know, I always thought of like, um, Audio as like poor man's augmented reality, right?

• 25:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  I love that description.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Everyone wants to wear the glasses and see the posted notes, the virtual posted notes. Like, I've seen the glasses, I've tried the glasses, those glasses aren't happening anytime soon. But if you want to play in that space, like, okay, let's just play with audio. Like, I'm wearing these things now, I've been wearing them for the last like two hours. Like, this, this works. And like, you know, we were able to tune this enough where it's like you can be on a corner and it's like, you know, look up. And you're like, you look up and it's like, let me talk about the thing you're looking at. There's no camera in it, you can just do that with the compass, the accelerometer, with motion, with GPS. Right? Like, we're building, the thing that we're building, it's built on top of the foursquare API. And SDK, the movement, the Pilgrim SDK, which is now called the Movement SDK.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Like, it's, it's like the same X stack and it's like the same vibe. It's just like, you know, in a, in a different state now. But yeah, I mean, that's like, this is the stuff I kind of love, love building.

• 26:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it sounds great. So I will point out, like, if I'm getting it right, historic places, but also like cool buildings, interesting architecture, maybe event spaces or restaurants.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  A little bit of anything, like, I think of it as like a platform for contextual aware notifications.

• 27:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Cool.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Right? Like, um, you know, when people say notifications, you think of like, oh, I get push messages on my phone with like the headlines of the New York Times, right? And it's like, yeah, like that, that, I feel like there's so much stuff on your phone that's meant to distract you. That's meant to like, like, command your attention, you know, like, I get a notification, it's like, whoa, why don't you disappear into the phone for a couple of minutes instead of being in the real world? And what I want to do is kind of build a notifications platform that is respectful of your attention. Like, we're not here to distract you, we're not here to pull you into the internet. We are here to augment your experience of, of the real world.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  And I feel like this is like this is what we were trying to do with Foursquare in 2013. You know, before things like Instagram and Snap got so big and people just got lost and endlessly scrolling, you know, feeds and dopamine hits of likes and all. It's like I have this whole thesis about like this, this internet that, that I wanted to exist. 2009, 10, 11, 12, 13, building Foursquare, building this tech. Like that, that internet never happened. It's over here in Bizarro World. And like the internet we got is the one that's like, you can just sit and scroll forever. The algorithm will keep giving you stuff. Spend more time looking at the graph, the glass.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Spend more time in the feed, right? And remove yourself from the real world. And it's just like, I get it. That's big, there's a huge ad model behind it. People making tons of money off that. It's just like, it's just never been the thing that I'm like passionate about. Like, my whole career has been build software for the streets, right? Stuff that helps people pay attention to the real world. And like, I think what I'm trying to do now at this stage in my career is go back to that moment in time. Like 2013, I feel like Foursquare had a lot of the stuff right. We just, we just weren't big enough to make the thing happen. And I want to go back to that and like build the things that like I think should have existed or that should exist in the world. And it starts with this thing, you know, this D-Bot thing that we're working on now.

• 29:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And then so where does the information that it pulls from come from?

• 29:16Speaker 01

  A lot of it comes from Foursquare right now. Like the content isn't, isn't great. This is something I gotta, I gotta like, it's on my list of things to fix. I remember I was like sending some Slack messages before we jumped on the call. I was like, okay, we got a problem with content. I just took a long walk and the content's all screwed up and here's how to fix it. But it's a, it's a little bit of Foursquare stuff. It's a little bit of OpenAI, right? Hey, we found something interesting. Give, give a prompt to OpenAI and then OpenAI is like, let me tell you something magical about this place. But like, you know, OpenAI has just got the wrong vibe. It's not that, it, it does its job, but like, I don't, I don't like the job that it's doing. And then some of it is user generated, right? Just people are leaving content. And then some of it is being imported from third parties.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Like you send a little bot out in the internet, like tell me what, find the interesting things that are happening in this neighborhood and then bring them into our ecosystem so that we can relay them out to people.

• 30:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  So there could also be like events like, hey, there's, you know, just so you know, there's going to be an open air concert going on in this field on Thursday?

• 30:13Speaker 01

  It can be, it can be anything. Yeah, it can be a little nugget of trivia. It could be like a a daily affirmation. It could be pointing out a street artist. It could be pointing out like this, something's gonna happen here in the future. Something happened here last night. Someone just walked by five minutes ago. And so really, just like, think of it as like a platform for delivering these types of like respectful notifications, you know, and but, you know, in addition to building the platform, we're also, you know, you know, selling it with content at the mobile.

• 30:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And so it's gonna be audio format. Let's say I'm listening to a podcast. Will it kind of jump in and be like, hey, by the way, or would I have to have like no audio on otherwise?

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you're listening to a podcast, it will pause it and then it will say its thing. And you know, the thing is meant to be like 10 syllables. Like it's short, you know, it's not like, let me give you a 30 second monologue. It's like, here's one sentence, two sentences, we're done. I'm gonna go back to your podcast. If you're listening to music, it will lower the volume a little bit. If you're on the phone or doing a video call, it won't interrupt you. It just kind of goes to sleep.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  You know, but it's, it's meant to be, it's meant to be very light. Like you might go on a walk, you might hear nothing. You know, you might go on a walk, you might hear three things, right? But it's not, it's not meant to be overwhelming, right? Like, it's important. Like, I think it's important to kind of note, like, we, I feel like the world is trying to get into this, this,

• 31:37Speaker 01

  this like agentic state, right? Where it's like, um, there's, there's software that is, that is looking out and doing tasks for you on your behalf. But that, that, like, we don't live in that world. We live in a world where these things dominate all of our attention. Right? And all of the things that we address by name, Siri and Google and Alexa, like, they are, Siri's going off, right? Those are, are creatures that you rub the magic lamp, hey Siri, and Siri comes out. It's like, no, no, no, no, we're not doing that. We are doing the opposite. This is like an angel or devil that sits on your shoulder and it taps you. And it's like, hey, I, I know you're walking somewhere really fast. You got, you're really busy. You got shit going on. Let me just tell you about something I think you're gonna like, right?

• 32:21Speaker 01

  And so it's kind of flipping the agentic model around, right? I'm not asking the genie to come out of the lamp. Like, this is the thing that is like proactively giving me a little nugget of info that is supposed to make my day a little brighter or to make you smile, right? Like that, that thing, like, I've been kind of under wraps about this, but like, When I was walking down the street the other day and I passed a piece of content, it literally made me like laugh out loud and I was like, like we got it. This is, this is the thing, right? It's a moment where you're like, okay, this is not, this, this is a project, but this will be a product and it will be a good product because it can make you do that thing. Like it can make you feel that way, even when it's in this like really like basic shitty barely working state.

• 33:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. All right. Two more questions for you about it, then we can move on. First of all, we had talked about this before, before you basically released it to a handful of people. And then while you were testing it and you were very interested in getting some feedback from the testing. So what have you learned so far?

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, well, I wanted to, um, sorry, we punted the date of the podcast because I wanted to like, I just wanted some confidence that like, A, does it work at scale? And 50 people is not scale, but like, okay, you put on people's phones, they're walking around, they're hearing stuff like, they're, they don't hate it, right? They give me feedback. It's like, it's fine. It's not great. I'm like, I can live with that feedback, but technically it works. Um, it works, um, it works well in some places. It, it works okay in other places. It's not crashing people's phones. It's not making people sick. It's not totally annoying people. You know, it's like, okay, we got it. We got a good, a good thing here. Um, and then also like, you know, the first is like, does it even work? Like, can, can we get it to work?

• 34:06Speaker 01

  And then the second thing is like, like, is it, is it fun? Like, is it worth, is, is it, is it worth doing? Is it worth trying to do it at a larger scale? And, you know, yes, the feedback I've gotten from some people is, well, from folks who are like, yeah, there's something here that like, you know, you do it right, it could be delightful, which is really kind of where, you know, my eye bar for it. But then, you know, my, me walking down the street, having my own experience of like, okay, I get it. I had that moment. I have that confidence. But like, I think in that, in that, um, In that thread that you had mentioned, I should put that in the show notes because I think there's like a little many thing there.

• 34:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  But like I had mentioned, like this idea of like founder self doubt. Like I build lots of stuff and people like seek my opinion out all the time for how to build stuff. But like I am still like, I don't know, can I still do this and is that any good? Like, should I be doing this? Let's go get another job, do something else. But you know, you have to, I think sometimes you have to have that moment where you're like, okay, I, I, it gave me the, the boost of confidence that like, yeah, yeah, this is, this is the thing. This is what we do. Now we talk about it, then we build it and we keep doing it, you know, it's just, I just kind of needed that shot in the arm.

• 35:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  We spoke for a good chunk of today also about the push to scale and how that can sort of make a fun product, not fun. Let's say it does, you know, get to this point, like, how are you going to avoid those pitfalls that we discussed?

• 35:30Speaker 01

  I don't know, you know, like my, my job right now is like, make a thing that works, make a thing that people like, make it feel delightful and fun. Um, and then figure out how to turn it into, turn it into a business, right? Like, what do I want to do? Uh, I can add in data business again? No, I am not hungry to do that at all. Could I make it a subscription project, product? Absolutely. Um, you know, could, could there be, you know, some sponsored content in there, right? Where, you know, people are, are, you know, brands are creating content and scattering them around. Like, it's kind of like the stuff we did in really foursquare. Sure. Right? Do I have to raise a hundred million dollars to build this thing? No, can I make it work with a smaller, with a smaller team?

• 36:13Speaker 01

  And kind of like a scrappier business model and maybe like some subscription and sponsorship revenue upfront? Maybe, possibly, right? So let's, let's just try that. Um, and then of course, I mean, like I, I'm drinking like the, the web three Kool-Aid a little bit. I don't want to say like NFTs and crypto, but this idea that like, um, You know, hey, there's, there's opportunity for people to own their content. There's opportunity for people to monetize on those platforms. Like I, I, um, like I'm hopeful about that stage of the internet. And, you know, I want to build, not, not just this. I mean, I have a couple of things I want to build. Um, that, you know, I said, but I hope will have the opportunity to participate in that ecosystem.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  When, you know, my, my own products are mature and that ecosystem is, is mature.

• 37:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. And is there a link or, I mean, I, if you give me a link, I'll link it in the show notes. But is there like a URL people can go to sign up to a waitlist?

• 37:11Speaker 01

  No.

• 37:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  No.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  There's a URL, but it's like, you know, Google form, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I will give you the link, but I didn't, it's not like, go to this website.

• 37:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah, that's a good idea though. I should do that.

• 37:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right. Well, if you give us a link and you want people on the waitlist, we will, we will link it. All right.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I will. I write the show, I'll do this and you can put it in the show notes.

• 37:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, sweet. All right, well, we'll take a quick break and then we'll talk a little bit more about this web three thing. Cause we have differing opinions on that and we should tease that out. And then also maybe a little AI and VR and then we'll head out. All right, back right after this with Dennis Crowley. This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what App Point does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate.

• 38:14Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 38:46Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 39:31Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 39:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Dennis Crowley. He's the co-founder and former CEO of Foursquare, founder of BeBot. You heard it here first. All right, so let's talk about Web3. The thing about Web3 that always, outside of all the scam coins and all that stuff, Aaron Levy was here a couple of years ago talking about Web3. We did a Web3 episode. And his main criticism was that if you build for people with a financial stake in something, you're also gonna, you're gonna build something different than people who just want to use it as a user. And it's very difficult to build for those two different stakeholders in a way that's coherent. So you mentioned, I mean, in the first half, you were drinking the Web3 Kool-Aid. You're a builder of products, consumer products.

• 40:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  So how do you manage that tension?

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know, right? Because I've never built something in this space before. And I should know, like, I don't, I don't fashion myself like a web three innovator. You know, like, I don't expect to be the one that's inventing stuff in the space. I like to sit back and watch what other people are doing and then be like, hey, is that something that would be applicable to what we're doing? Maybe, right? Maybe in a year from now or two years from now or something. You know, I've worked on a bunch of projects over the last couple of years and, and, you know, some of them are like web three adjacent. But like, I never found like the real, like, it just, it never worked, never, it never worked in a way that wasn't forced. Right? And that's not to say that it can't work.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  It's just to say like, it just, it doesn't work right now. Right? And so I'm kind of like, I'm hopeful and like, I'm optimistic about like what people position as like the next phase of the internet. And then like, you know, I think I'm still wrapping wrapping my hand around all the nuances of it. But, you know, I'm more like a web three curious in a sense of like,

• 41:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  I see what's going on here. I appreciate the people that are building. It's something we recognize all the nonsense and scams that have happened. And I don't want to put all my chips in that pile, but like, I kind of cautiously look at that as like, that's a space I'd like to play in, like when and if that's mature enough to play in.

• 41:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Another thing that you talked about was that OpenAI had, just let's just shift to AI. I think that like, we could probably debate,

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  three, but it is interesting to hear your perspective on it. But on the AI front, you said OpenAI's vibe wasn't exactly what you were looking for. Now, maybe for that particular product, but what do you think about what can be built on top of these things? And why wasn't that vibe right for you?

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Well, when I say the vibe wasn't right, I mean, like the prompts, right?

• 42:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  We're doing some basic prompt engineering and, and, you know, I'm really like, the products I've built in the past have a lot of personality built into them, right? Foursquare was very snarky. Dodgeball had a real opinion about the world.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  And so I'm trying to like have OpenAI. I'm trying to define a personality so OpenAI can give me content that I feel like is like on-brand for this thing that we're making. I just haven't successfully done it yet. And so I don't mean OpenAI's vibe as a company is on. I mean, like, my prompt engineering is crappy and I'm just kind of like, I don't want to do any more prompt engineering. I'd rather spend my time doing other stuff. Right. You know, that said, like, you know, it's pretty clear, like, like, this set of tools that exist are pretty freaking powerful. And it's like, it really does foreshadow, I think, what the next stage of the internet is gonna, is gonna be. You know, I, I posted something on threads, like, I don't know, a week ago, about how, like,

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Siri is almost an advertisement for how bad all of this stuff was, or how hopeless it all was before LLMs existed. Right? If you try to use Siri now, like, after you've been using, like, ChatGPT all day, you're like, this is a baby's toy. You know, but it's like, I mean, you really want, like, I want the Siri that's connected to the thing that's really intelligent. You know what I just got? Um, gosh, I didn't know why I'd talk about this. Um, there's a, there's a toy called Curio that they're selling, like, you can buy it. And it's, it's a child, like a children's plush toy that has like a little device in it. And the device is like a, a local LLM, right? It's connected to the network. I don't know if it's local or not. Really? But like, you know, the, the kids can talk to it. Hey, how was your day?

• 44:04Speaker 01

  And things like, my day was great. How was yours? Oh, it was great. Can you tell me about electricity? Sure I can, you know, and I, I have this toy. I haven't given it to my kids yet. I, I took it out of the package, I set it up and I was testing it. And I was like, man, this is like the future of toys. Why would, why would you not want a toy that you can talk to? It's like straight out of Toy Story, right? Um, but just like that, just, you know, occasionally you're playing with this stuff.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  And you get a glimpse of like what the future is gonna be and you're like, that's kind of pretty cool. But then, of course, you get the glimpse of like, the future is awful with like, deep fakes and chat G P lying to you and just making shit up, right? Like, you know, the the future is is full of disaster and peril also. But I mean, it's hard to look at a lot of these tools and not be kind of inspired for where the sun is going.

• 44:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Do you so you said you have lots of people?

• 44:57Speaker 01

  I don't even know if I answered your question.

• 44:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, that was a good answer.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  What were you saying?

• 45:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  You said you had a lot of people that bring you um bring you deals and you've seen lots of consumer products. We're always like looking for like what type of products can exist with this stuff outside of like the chat G P T. Big models, are you seeing anything that's catching your attention outside of this toy?

• 45:17Speaker 01

  I I see, well, I see a lot of like consumer stuff. I see I see a lot of city guides, like I see every city guide product that's out there people bring it to me. And I I I just know the space really well. I'm a little bit jaded on the space. Like, I I see a lot of things that are very interesting, but like it's really hard to get like a breakout app in that. In that space, I definitely have seen people. Experimenting with like chatbots and L L M stuff with city guides, right? Which I think is is also interesting, but kind of hard to do.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  You know, I I'm I'm most interested in like folks that are kind of like reinventing a category. You know, like when we talked about the B bot stuff, and this might just be my own bias, but like I feel like we're we're doing this. We're we're kind of in a space where it's like, I'm not making something that looks like something else. We're making something totally random, right? And in that way, it's like it's weird and people don't really get it. And it's some people kind of think it's kind of stupid. That's great. That's that's like the space I I like to operate in.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  You know, but um, yeah, I mean, I haven't like I hadn't stopped where I've just been like, this is so good. Take take my money. I haven't seen anything like that recently.

• 46:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  You haven't seen that yet.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I I'm not seeing that. So there's tons of deals out there that I I don't see, right?

• 46:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, right.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  But I do, I see. Yeah, I I mean, I see a lot of consumer stuff and I I see I I have a full empathy for how hard it is to have like a breakout hit in that in that space. Because it's really hard to do. You know, any meaningful user acquisition.

• 46:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  So last question about the AI stuff. We just had Gruber on for a very long episode talking about like Apple and their pursuit of AI was a very interesting part of that conversation. And I'm curious, like, so you brought up Siri, how bad it is. Do you, let's say you put your like product hat on for Apple, like, what could they do with this stuff? Because they are going to do something. Apparently, it's coming at WWDC.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sure it's just like a, you know, a much more conversational version of Siri. You know, like my experience with Siri is it just like, it just doesn't, doesn't work a lot of times. And it like, it can't hold a conversation, loses the connection with the conversation. You know, it's just, it's just not, it's just not great. And I, and I think what we've seen is like, the beginning of what great looks like. You know, that toy I was talking about for my kids, I was like, this is, this is pretty cool, right? I'm conversing with the thing that's not a lie, right? In a way that is far superior than Alexa and, you know, Google Home and Siri.

• 47:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wait, what's this toy called? Curio?

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Uh, Curio, yeah, I think, what's the website? Heycurio.com?

• 47:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  I gotta get one of these.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's rad. Yeah. A buddy of mine showed me their Instagram and I went and ordered one. Cool. Let's see, where's?

• 48:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Heycurio.com.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  Oh, I just lost your window and I did that. Oh, here you are.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's what I would hope it would, it would be, you know, just like a version of Siri that works as well as ChatGPT does, but just can access all the stuff on my phone.

• 48:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, last question for you. You, and we mentioned in the first half, you put this video up on, on your feed of Steve Jobs talking about how, basically, headphones are amazing because it's like having a speaker there with you at all times, but we don't have, what do you call it? Video headphones or video, where you could put on headphones and all of a sudden and watch a video. And that's obviously what Apple has just created. Where do you, where do you, do you see this as something that really can develop into what they hope or not?

• 48:57Speaker 01

  I think everyone wants the Vision Pro to be the Augmented reality hardware of the future. You see all these people wearing it outside as if it's like

• 49:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  You have seen people outside with it, huh? That's becoming

• 49:09Speaker 01

  I haven't seen, I haven't seen, I've seen it on Instagram and I'm just like, yeah. I'm like, look at these people. Yeah.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  It's that, you know, I think people, people want that, right? That they, they want that future to exist. They want this to be the product. Like my, you know, the data point that I have on it is like, this is like, it's a, it's a really nice big screen that you wear on your face. You're watching, you know, Star Wars on your couch is the best screen. Holy cow, it's in 3D too. You know, like you're, you're working on your computer. Well, I have 50 monitors in front of me. I can do anything I want. You know, I, I saw something, someone had suggested like, hey, even if you look at the way it's priced, it's like a, a mid-tier, you know, really fancy screen. And you know what? I, I, I believe that's probably what it's going to be for the, you know, for the short term

• 50:00Speaker 01

  until it either gets smaller or lighter or cheaper or like really amazing games emerge for it.

• 50:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Did you buy one?

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, no.

• 50:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  I've played with it, I haven't

• 50:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  I feel like you would, you would be someone who would buy one.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  I think, I think there was a, a younger version of myself that was like really into it. But I also like, you know, I have two, two Oculus Quests, right? One for me, one for my wife. And it's like, I was an aspirational user. I'm like, we're going to use this all the time. We're going to go on date nights and BR during COVID, right? And we just, I mean, I've got three kids, right? Like they, I just don't, I, it's just not part of like our, our household or lifestyle. Although I can tell you the moment, hold on, the moment my, I was charging my Oculus once and my son, I think he was like four at the time. And he came, he came into the room and he saw it charging and he picked it up and he's like, Dad, what is this? It's a TV you put on your face.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  And he was just like, how, how have you been keeping this from me?

• 50:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, my God.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  I was like, did, did, did, did, yeah. It, it'd be wild to see what they are into. Yeah.

• 51:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 51:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. All right, Dennis, this is great. Thank you so much for joining.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is this is super fun. Thank you for having me on the show. And yeah, like I'll come back in the future. We'll talk about Biot and all the other stuff that it does and can do. So

• 51:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  That would be great. Hopefully I can get a chance to test it. So walking around New York will be cool. All right, man. Thanks again. Great seeing you. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening. We'll be back on Friday with a new show, Breaking Down the News. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 51:43Speaker 02

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