The area to watch right now if you want central location, access to Bart, and an up coming startup scene is around Civic Center, between 6th and 10th and market / mission. It's still VERY sketchy there, but not for long - Twitter is coming soon, and this should start to gentrify / startupify things. Lots of classic, old SF office buildings there too.
There is already plenty of "legitimate" foot traffic there in the daytime from all the government and government-affiliated offices. That doesn't seem to have helped.
The homeless and addicts congregate there because of a combination of housing policy and placement of social services. As long as those remain, I'm not sure if all the startups of the Bay could displace them.
Note: I'm not advocating removing housing/services for the homeless, but rather that forcibly moving a bunch of startups there will just mean you'll add a lot of startups into the mix of sketchiness. It won't get rid of the sketchiness.
You might be right. But dropping one giant startup in there will almost certainly mean new coffee shops, restaurants, and more courage for other startups to move in.
I hope you're right, but I think that'd be more likely to happen if Twitter didn't already provide all the coffee and food that their people might want. There really isn't a reason to leave the office during the day.
Yeah, this is an interesting topic. Why did Foursquare win? Was it anti-cheating provisions that were too strict in the early days? New York vs. Austin? Better PR? Simpler product? Dodgeball users as jumpstart? Who knows. One thing we do know was that it wasn't money.
I think it's pretty clear that Dennis Crowley has been thinking about this problem space for more than a decade, and foursquare is the third (fourth?) iteration on his original vision.
I presume it means that, having seen things from the inside out, his team knows winning and losing things to spend time on.
Nearly every startup ends up with a list a mile long of potential features, ideas, refinements, communities, partners and revenue sources. Being able to pick out the right few to work on (and what to say no to) is maybe the most important skill a startup CEO can have.
A founder who has been around the same space for a long time can use past experience and intuition where a newly-minted CEO knows very little and is actually best off when they recognize that.
Why do you think money wasn't a factor? Foursquare raised significantly more than Gowalla (according to Crunchbase, $71m vs $10m), and as a result grew a much larger team and presumably spent a lot more on marketing.
Actually, until mid-2010, Gowalla raised more money, earlier, than foursquare did. By then, the "check-in wars" were pretty much over.
Per Crunchbase[1][2]:
In 2008, Gowalla raised $2m, foursquare raised nothing.
In 2009, Gowalla raised $8.29m, foursquare raised $1.35m.
In 2010, Gowalla raised nothing, foursquare raised $20m. But by the time this happened (June 2010), the "check-in wars" were over (e.g., see: http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/07/foursquare-gowalla-stats/).
pattern recognition? My favorite investors were entrepreneurs once, but those that can at least identify attributes of companies that tend to wine can add value.
There is nothing wrong with a little swagger, or confidence. However, adopting "no assholes" isn't quite enough: a non-asshole can still let their ego get in the way of their work and their team. For example, by refusing to admit fault.
I'm not sure about that. Many startups are either creating markets, or going after brand new markets. Expanding / educating the market is more important than destroying your competitor in these cases. I find it ridiculous when two tiny startups in a market that the mainstream doesn't even know exists start bashing each other. That energy is better spent expending the market.
It probably comes down to personality type as to whether you are comfortable with this sort of message wrapped in self promotion. I thought it was an effective piece, but it would have been more effective if someone else had written it about him.
And by the way, don't hate me because I'm beautiful.
