Foursquare Lands $20 Million Series B Round

Last week at the MOB Conference in New York city, I met with Syracuse University grad Dennis Crowley of Foursquare. Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last three months, you have most certainly seen Dennis’s picture in a business magazine or publication. Foursquare, which really had its coming-out party at SXSW, is a fascinating company which was birthed by Crowley and his team, who also was responsible for Dodgeball, which was purchased by Google.

Here is something his most recent blog post:

Hey all - It’s been quite the year for foursquare. Last year at this time, Naveen and I - tired of working around my kitchen table - borrowed a desk from our friends at Curbed.com and Hard Candy Shell. Two months later we brought on our first hire (Harry!) and a few weeks after closed on our first round of financing: $1.35m from Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and a handful of angels. Back then, our office looked like this.Fast forward a year: We’re now 27 people strong. We can’t fit any more desks or chairs in our office so we’re borrowing cubes from our neighbors downstairs. We’re about to hit 1.8 million users and we’re seeing Super Swarms happen all over the world (Indonesia, you crazy!). In short, it’s been an amazing year for foursquare. A huge thank you to anyone that’s ever unlocked a Newbie badge!And with that, we’re excited to announce that we’ve raised another round of capital. Today we closed on a $20m Series B round with Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and our newest partner, Andreessen Horowitz. We’re thrilled to have the continued support of our original investors and additional support and expertise from the team at Andreessen Horowitz. The two big names behind Andreessen Horowitz - Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz - are each legends in Silicon Valley. They know better than anyone how to transform startups into successful organizations. As we continue to rapidly expand to take advantage of the opportunities in front of us, Ben and Marc’s expertise in growing companies will be invaluable. With this new round of financing, our main priority will be to expand our organization to supplement the amazing core team we’ve assembled already (know any great engineers? send them our way!). We’re hoping to build a world-class engineering organization, based primarily in our headquarters in the New York City to help us develop the next generation of mobile + social + local products that will excite our users and provide unique value for local merchants. The new investment capital will also help fund the infrastructure needed to house our team (we’re finally getting a new office!) and support our growing audience of nearly 2m users.It’s been a crazy year for us and we’re expecting the next 12 months to be even more of an adventure. Look forward to more great product from us soon… we’re really just getting started.- @dens and the rest of team foursquar

Congratulations to Dennis and the rest of the team!

Restarting America's Innovation Engine

Thanks to Amy Schmitz for passing on this interesting article, How to Restart America’s Innovation Engine, from Daily Finance.

William Sahlman a professor at Harvard is interviewed on entrepreneurship and capital in the article by Peter Cohan. While Sahlman is one of the guru’s of entrepreneurship education, I’m not sure I would agree with him that most talented management teams have no trouble getting capital. I've seen too many great teams with outstanding ideas go no where with VC's because they weren't in that particular hot space.

However, I do agree with him that VC’s provide a very important source of capital to the entrepreneurial marketplace, and that they “spearhead innovation” throughout the economy. I also enjoyed the praises that Professor Sahlman heaped on the angel investors, one of the least recognized and yet most important pieces of the financing continuum for entrepreneurs.

Reading from a Foggy Day in Nova Scotia

While stuck in the Halifax airport thanks to fog, I’ve been catching up on my reading, and a some stories caught my eye while drinking coffee and eating cheesecake.

First, in the current issue of Entrepreneur magazine, take a look at The Next Mission: Autonomy by Jennifer Lawler. Great story about Syracuse University’s Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities(EBV) program which includes information about John Raftery and Brian Inglesias…two wonderful grads of the program. Mike Haynie, the father of the program and national director of EBV describes the intersection of entrepreneurship and the military in his comment in the article: "At its core, entrepreneurship is about the ability to create and grow a sustainable venture in a resource-constrained environment. This is a skill learned well by all military folks, and they recognize that skill as a competitive advantage in a startup environment."

Another interesting article is in the current issue of Forbes, Salvation at the Call Center. This article talks about an entrepreneurial success story that also includes a bit of social good work as well. I also liked the article, Files Without Borders, describing the journey of the tech company Dropbox. Given that I am working here in an airport, using Dropbox, had I known about it, it might have been a good idea for me to be a customer.

And finally, for those of us still brave enough to invest in the stock market, read David Randall’s article, Your Own Worst Enemy, based on the research of UC Berkley professor Terrance Odean. If you read it, you might never invest in anything other than index funds again. But, knowing how entrepreneurs are, you know you are smarter than the market so you’ll probably invest anyway.

ESPN and Corporate Innovation

Sometimes, even big companies can be entrepreneurial. One of my favorite websites is ESPN.com and along with their TV channels, are the go-to place for folks like me who love sports. Thanks to Sean Branagan, take a look at the article: ESPN bypasses corporate red tape with iPad and Xbox360.

I particularly love the line, “Put simply, ESPN's techies have no interest in wasting months and years creating proprietary IP that they could theoretically sell to others in the future. Instead, they're interested in serving the fan, and serving the fan involves using whatever tools are readily available in order to push the envelope faster than the competition.” For ESPN, it’s all about serving their core customer…the fan. They aren’t taking their eye of the ball, and they are remembering that it all begins and ends with getting content to the fan, and making their experience…FUN!

Playing Catch-Up

I’ve been traveling a bit of late, which is the reason that I haven’t been blogging. I was in Lausanne, Switzerland for the Babson conference on entrepreneurship and I’ll be speaking at the MOB Conference in New York City later this week at a gathering of media folks.
But while I was traveling (which is another word for stuck in an airport and on an airplane dealing with terrible service from United Airlines), I had the chance to read quite a bit. So here are a selection of articles that deal with entrepreneurship and a variety of other topics that you might enjoy:
An Animated Salesperson: Inc Magazine
Animating a Blockbuster: How Pixar Built Toy Story 3 : Wired Magazine
Building an Ice Hotel: Wired Magazine
Waste Management in Space: Wired Magazine
Summer Labor or Unpaid Employee: Fortune