

Foursquare Closes $50M at a $600M Valuation - acak
http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/24/foursquare-closes-50m-at-a-600m-valuation/

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jmjerlecki
I love in all of these posts they claim Foursquare has 10 million users. There
is no way the amount of active users is anywhere close to that. So many people
I know sign up, check in once or twice, and never use it again.

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MatthewB
Good point. I like to talk trash about Facebook's PR but one thing they
consistently do correctly is report total user numbers only when they are
confirmed active users.

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hvs
Facebook only reports "active" users because it is possible for them to do it
in a positive light. If they had the same sort of usage that Foursquare
undoubtedly has, they would be counting all users that signed up as well.

That said, I still give Facebook credit for doing it.

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andrewljohnson
Fundamentally, because Facebook counts it, that's what they seek. That's
probably part of the recipe.

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namank
I honestly don't get why 4sq is worth 600M. As far as I know, their biggest
asset is their user's location data; which is all in the past!!

At least Facebook has 'friendships' that can be leveraged as value creating
entities for which users go visit the site. 4sq is not even that. I use the
app to check in to places, rarely every visiting the site.

Someone please explain to me how is 4sq worth $600M?

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harryh
Local advertising is a market worth many many many billions of dollars. In the
future foursquare will provide more and better ways for local merchants to
acquire new customers and treat their already loyal customers better. We'll
charge for some of this. We think it will be a profitable endeavor.

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yid
Have you dealt with the issue that checkins are almost impossible to verify in
their current form?

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acgourley
"So a $50 million deal at any price wouldn’t lose money unless Foursquare
winds up being worth less than $70 million."

I'm just in awe this was written.

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alain94040
You just discovered one of the great secrets of VC preference and crazy
valuations. If the startup guarantees to pay me back my investement plus some,
then I don't care to announce that I invest at a valuation of $10B. In
agreeing to such a high (and flashy) valuation, I give up on extra upside, but
if my goal is 2X, then I don't actually care.

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revorad
I don't think any VC's goal is 2X, especially not for one of the most
promising startups.

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harryh
The two best things about working at foursquare:

1) It's our job to invent the future. We copy no one; other folks copy us.
Every single day we're try to build new tools that change the way folks relate
and interact with the cities they live in. It's super hard, and we don't get
it right all the time but we keep pushing forward and we feel like we're on to
something good.

2) We have the best engineering team of our size at any startup in the
country. Everyone on the team is just incredibly sharp, hard working, and
passionate about what we're doing.

Want to find out more? Check out <http://foursquare.jobs> for open positions
in both NY & SF or send me an e-mail (contact info is in my HN profile). I'm
more than happy to answer questions here as well.

-harryh, engineering lead @ foursquare

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chailatte
I have nothing against Foursquare, but this 'We copy no one' is a blatant lie.

explore = copying yelp

specials 2.0 = copying groupon

Foursquare's vision appears to be looking backward. Dennis Crowley's been
thinking about this space for 10 years?

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harryh
explore = Personalized recommendations just for you based on where you + your
friends have been in the past. Lots more powerful than a generic suggestion.
Think "You've been to Aquagrill a lot, maybe you'd also like Lure Fishbar down
the street cause it's pretty similar." LOTS of work to be done on explore for
those with a background in search quality, machine learning, statistics, or
infrastructure.

specials 2.0 = much more flexible than a one sized fits all groupon. Venue
owners can create specials around frequency of visits, checking in with a
bunch of other folks (friends or non friends), being the mayor, and many other
criterion. We're also, as you may have seen with our recent AmEx announcement
trying to integrate our merchant tools with 3rd parties to provide value to
both users and merchants on the foursquare platform.

We've got lots more coming down the pipe as well.

"We copy no one" might be a bit overstated[1] but it really is how we try to
think about things. Not everything we do is revolutionary, a lot is
evolutionary as well. That's just the nature of building a real product. It
can't _all_ be mind blowing (but we try!).

Even if we don't succeed 100% of the time at making things totally new and
awesome, I think having that as a conscious goal is a good trait to have in a
company.

-harryh

1\. I'll admit to being overly dramatic at times. Sorry about that.

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harryh
Really? Someone is down voting this?

 _sadface_

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yid
Sounds a bit like hubris perhaps...

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ChaseB
I'm more interested in <http://www.fivestarscard.com/>, which I think is a YC
alum. Their customer retention model is much more intriguing to me.

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ignifero
Good news, guys, you can sell your foursquare accounts for $60 each.

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lycos1
We're definitely in a bubble with these valuations!

