SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
779: Foursquare CEO on Transition From Consumer Social Network to B2B Enterprise Data Company
11 Sep 2017
Chapter 1: What led Foursquare to transition from a consumer social network to a B2B enterprise data company?
The CEO of Foursquare, transitioning it from a, again, hot consumer kind of social network into what it is today, enterprise kind of B2B. They are truly, really the Switzerland of location check-in data. And most importantly, they are adding so much utility value to that location data.
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk.
Chapter 2: How has Foursquare's technology evolved to support enterprise needs?
Five and six million. He is hell bent on global domination.
Chapter 3: What is the significance of the Pilgrim SDK in Foursquare's business model?
We just broke our 100,000 unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.
Chapter 4: How does Foursquare ensure effective user engagement through notifications?
Many of you listening right now don't have time to listen to every B2B SaaS CEO that I've interviewed. If you want to get access to the database I've created,
Chapter 5: What challenges did Foursquare face when implementing a paid model for developers?
with year-over-year growth rates, customer accounts, margins, and many, many other data metrics and data points, you can go to getlatka.com. Here's the thing, though.
Chapter 6: How does Foursquare predict consumer behavior trends for major brands?
This database, I keep it to myself. It's so freaking valuable. And to preserve the quality of the data and make sure that the people that have access to it have a true advantage.
Chapter 7: What role does location intelligence play in Foursquare's services?
I'm only letting 10 companies on each month. So we're full this month, but you can go to get latke.com to get on the waiting list for next month.
Chapter 8: How does Foursquare differentiate itself from competitors like Google and Facebook?
And look, there's big people on the waiting list. I mean, the biggest VCs you've ever heard of, you've probably heard of them. They're big private equity, billions and billions under management. So it's an impressive waiting list. Go get on now at get latke.com. This is episode 779. Coming up tomorrow morning, I talk to Brandon Bruce, founder of Cirrus Insights.
He has 2X'd his annual recurring revenue in the last 12 months, going from $6 million in annual recurring revenue to $12 million in annual recurring revenue. So the big question is, how'd he do it? Hello, everyone. Good morning. My guest today is Jeff Glick. He became CEO of Foursquare in January of 2016 after 18 months as COO of the company.
Prior, he was CEO of Skyfire Labs, co-founder of Site59.com and CMO of Travelocity. If you've seen Little Travel Gnome, take your anger out on him. It's not me, right? Previously, he was strategy consultant at Monitor Company and served as a White House president. fellow in the Clinton administration.
He holds a master's degree from Oxford as a Marshall Scholar and a bachelor's degree from Harvard College. Jeff, are you ready to take us to the top?
Absolutely, glad to be on your podcast.
Thanks for coming on. So first question I've got for you, back in 2013, you know, everyone, you know, Fourscore was hot, everyone knew it. It had a, you know, it was reported that it raised money at a valuation of about 650 million. Recently in January of 2016, which I believe was around kind of when you came in, an additional 45 million was raised at a much lower valuation.
Ignoring the numbers, walk us through why that happened as it relates to being and moving away from being kind of a hot social network towards or more towards a kind of enterprise data company?
Yeah, absolutely. I joined Foursquare now three years ago. And when I joined, the company was in an evolution. The hot social network of 2011, 2012 had slowed, but we still had over 50 million people in over 160 countries using the apps. But we had developed this incredible technology, which I think we'll talk about, called Pilgrim.
And we saw, when I joined, a way to turn that into a very powerful enterprise business. So, you know, the company's early valuation was very much based on that kind of crazy question, would this be the next Facebook? Would this be the next, you know, Twitter of the day? And that was never a sort of realistic thing in the cards. It was never Dennis Crowley, our founder's ambition.
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