5 ms·

Corner Office: Dennis Crowley

132 points by topherjaynes 14y ago

SeanDav 14y ago
Wow, I want to work at Foursquare! These are such great ideas. I get jealous when I see articles like this as I have never had the privilege of working in such an environment. Of course as the company gets bigger it is going to be tough stopping fiefdoms and silos but they are surely on the right track.
- harryh 14y ago
  Are you a programmer? Have a resume I can look at? harryh [at] foursquare.com
alpine 14y ago
One of the smartest interview pieces I've read in a long time. I don't think you can ever over-estimate the benefit of forcing seemingly non-functionally aligned people to sit next to each other. Forcing your enterprise to build social connections is analogous to neurons forming new paths as a novel skill is mastered.
nrmehta 14y ago
From my experience, his tips are very practical. In particular, if any of you end are founders / leaders or end up being founders / leaders, I can't overemphasize how important it is to communicate and repeat your message, strategy, goals, etc. As an organization gets larger, unless you're bored of your message yourself, it probably hasn't sunk in for others.
JeanTouman 14y ago
Foursquare is not useful though. I don't know anyone who really uses it actively.
- rdl 14y ago
  The core checkin functionality is "fun", but not useless, and has a really awesome side effect: Foursquare explore. Seeing where my friends have checked in is a better way to find new restaurants and other businesses than anything else right now. Yelp should be useful for this, but for a variety of reasons, is not.
maayank 14y ago
In moments like that I really wish there was a comment from a throwaway account of someone working in Foursquare telling how it looks from the side of the employees.
- kmfrk 14y ago
  Better than nothing: http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/foursquare-Reviews-E492487.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/foursquare-Reviews-E492487.....
- potatolicious 14y ago
  Foursquare is small enough (like many other startups) that any reasonably detailed description will probably not be very anonymous at all.
- harryh 14y ago
  Hi, I'm the VP Eng @ foursquare. I'm sure my perspective is a bit different from shaufler (one of our eng interns who also commented in this thread), but I'll say that the NYTimes piece is pretty accurate. Dens is indeed quite humble, he holds open office hours every week (I've started doing the same), regularly has coffee with random employees, and he tries hard to communicate what's going well or not at our weekly company meetings. I'm also happy to answer any questions anyone might have about foursquare culture.
- coops 14y ago
  i'm a site reliability engineer at foursquare sf, and i think it's very accurate. dennis travels to our office frequently and takes the time to meet with each of us individually, even those of us who work very far away from feature-land. when we're meeting i feel super comfortable saying "this sucks and we ought to fix it." mostly we discuss organizational issues; i generally air technical issues in similar meetings with harry (our eng lead, posted above,) because making engineering work is harry's whole job. i've worked at high-profile startups with founders who are very media-visible before and dennis is pretty special in my opinion. he seems to genuinely believe that all of us employees are important to making foursquare the best product it can be.
jetsnoc 14y ago
Snippets are such a simple but powerful idea. Has anyone open sourced a project or created a SaaS tool for this idea? I would love to implement this within my organization.
- brianmwang 14y ago
  You may want to look into iDoneThis: https://idonethis.com/ https://idonethis.com/ Disclaimer: I'm friends with the founders.
- tomjen3 14y ago
  When you have 5 employees, maybe. If they are good at being really condensed and writing clearly. When you have 20? 100? 1000? The number of snippets one has to read goes up linearly as the company expands for each employee. That means that waste goes up geometrically for the entire company. And forcing each employee to read from a few select people will never scale either. Soon you will want to add the head of research and then the head of HR (or just the HR guy, if you only have one) so that you can tap into everybodies network for recruits.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- joshu 14y ago
  For a small company: create alias for everyone. Everyone emails on Friday. For a large company: create team alias, email it on Fridays. Not that hard.
  - nigelk 14y ago
    Snippets at Google had one other really useful tool when you're a large company. You could subscribe to a keyword, and pick up any snippets that mentioned it. As someone who was running a service that could get in the way of engineers doing their job, this was a great way to get honest, grassroots info.
    - 14y ago
mgkimsal 14y ago
Q. Other things you’ve learned? A. The importance of overcommunicating. Funny... I've had a friend who's been marked down at multiple companies for 'overcommunicating' - things like reiterating the todo list from a meeting out to everyone, and including people who couldn't be there but would be impacted, emailing a group with a question and to make sure everyone understands what the impact of XYZ will be. Most people hated it. Well, I was fine with it - I think there should be more of it, and I don't think most people really grok that in knowledge work, that's all you've got - communication. Making assumptions or ignoring/forgetting to notify some parties of XYZ have huge ramifications.
- GlenAnderson 14y ago
  What's worse, in my experience, is when people are unable to provide the necessary information, even when questioned directly, because they don't understand or appreciate the assumptions they've been making.
- itcmcgrath 14y ago
  There is overcommunicating and then there is noise. Getting the difference right is what successful overcommunication is about
  - mgkimsal 14y ago
    One can possibly indicate in this case it was 'noise', but constructive feedback on things like "we don't need to know about X, but we do need to know about Y" would be helpful. "Quit sending so many emails!" is about all he'd generally get. In at least one case, I suspect it was more about control of information than anything else - when too much info gets to too many people, it's harder to claim plausible deniability.
    - efsavage 14y ago
      "Quit sending so many emails!" means he was sending too many emails to people who didn't want them. If every message had value to everyone receiving them, nobody would complain. An unattainable standard. without erring on the side of not sending useful stuff, but you have a decent margin where people will ignore your noise because your signal is valuable. Nobody complains about spam for things they end up buying. CC'ing a group "just to keep everyone in the loop" is overcommunication. Pulling out the details that are useful for the whole group, if any, and then sending followups with additional details to a subset of people is the effective way to do it. It's a lot of work and it's why so many people who effortlessly handle in-person communication have trouble with written/broadcast patterns, they just aren't used to putting the extra work in.
shaufler 14y ago
I'm an engineering intern at Foursquare. The culture Dennis describes is accurate. Dennis holds weekly office hours where anyone at the company can meet up with him and ask questions or voice concerns. In my first month, I met with him a couple times and asked him questions about how he raised capital, his relationships with investors, and his experience with startups. After our first meeting, he let me know that I could grab coffee with him anytime. Foursquare really seems like a small startup despite there being 120 employees. In response to some questions below about how snippets work, it is not necessary to read the entire company's snippets. It is a Twitter model where you subscribe to people's feeds. I'm following the exec team, my manager and other guys on the web-client team, and a couple of my other friends. I saw that some comments about wanting to work for Foursquare, and I just thought I'd leave a reminder that we're hiring =) https://foursquare.com/jobs/ https://foursquare.com/jobs/
SeoxyS 14y ago
I find it somewhat sloppy when journalists simply publish the Q&A transcript of an interview. What I'm going to miss the most when real journalists aren't around anymore are the long-form articles and profiles that obviously took care and several interviews to craft. For example, the recently HN-featured profile of Jack Dorsey by Wired's Steven Levy[1]: But our discussion is sidetracked when the proprietor, Vincent Fung, starts a long and complicated explanation of the various tea options. Dorsey—like Jobs—is interested in Eastern thought, and after listening to a detailed rundown of the exotic choices, he approves Fung’s suggestion to try a dark and musty chunk of Pu-erh tea from China’s Yunnan Province. A few minutes later, Fung appears at the booth with a deep wooden tray and begins a carefully choreographed ceremony, pouring a continuous stream of hot water over tiny cups. Then he pours water on top of a lid that partially covers the bowl containing densely packed cakes of tea. Dorsey watches the ritual and appreciatively touches his finger to a worn corner of the tray. This is how an in-person interview is meant to be conveyed to the reader… not as a transcript. 1: http://www.wired.com/business/2012/06/ff_dorsey/ http://www.wired.com/business/2012/06/ff_dorsey/
- drusenko 14y ago
  You are absolutely correct, but the one thing you've failed to mention is that Steven Levy is one of the best technology writers of all time. I got to see this process first-hand when he covered Weebly for Newsweek. (http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2007/05/20/meet-the-next-billionaires.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2007/05/20/meet-the-ne...). It was an absolutely incredible experience. You met with the guy a few times, talked with him pretty openly about what you're doing, and he magically weaved a captivating story line out of it -- making everything sound way more interesting than you could ever hope to make yourself sound. I'm sure there are a decreasing number of long-form journalists who take the time to research their story, but it's also worth noting that there just aren't that many journalists as talented as Steven Levy.
- topherjaynes 14y ago
  The transcript of questions is the format of this weekly column in the Sunday Business Section and has been so since 2009. http://projects.nytimes.com/corner-office/ http://projects.nytimes.com/corner-office/ Look back through the older ones and it's actually a really good format for this sort of "what have you learned" from CEO's.

132 points by topherjaynes 14y ago

Wow, I want to work at Foursquare! These are such great ideas. I get jealous when I see articles like this as I have never had the privilege of working in such an environment. Of course as the company gets bigger it is going to be tough stopping fiefdoms and silos but they are surely on the right track.

harryh 14y ago
Are you a programmer? Have a resume I can look at? harryh [at] foursquare.com

alpine 14y ago

One of the smartest interview pieces I've read in a long time. I don't think you can ever over-estimate the benefit of forcing seemingly non-functionally aligned people to sit next to each other. Forcing your enterprise to build social connections is analogous to neurons forming new paths as a novel skill is mastered.

nrmehta 14y ago

From my experience, his tips are very practical. In particular, if any of you end are founders / leaders or end up being founders / leaders, I can't overemphasize how important it is to communicate and repeat your message, strategy, goals, etc. As an organization gets larger, unless you're bored of your message yourself, it probably hasn't sunk in for others.

JeanTouman 14y ago

Foursquare is not useful though. I don't know anyone who really uses it actively.

rdl 14y ago
The core checkin functionality is "fun", but not useless, and has a really awesome side effect: Foursquare explore. Seeing where my friends have checked in is a better way to find new restaurants and other businesses than anything else right now. Yelp should be useful for this, but for a variety of reasons, is not.

maayank 14y ago

In moments like that I really wish there was a comment from a throwaway account of someone working in Foursquare telling how it looks from the side of the employees.

kmfrk 14y ago
Better than nothing: http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/foursquare-Reviews-E492487.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/foursquare-Reviews-E492487.....
potatolicious 14y ago
Foursquare is small enough (like many other startups) that any reasonably detailed description will probably not be very anonymous at all.
harryh 14y ago
Hi, I'm the VP Eng @ foursquare. I'm sure my perspective is a bit different from shaufler (one of our eng interns who also commented in this thread), but I'll say that the NYTimes piece is pretty accurate. Dens is indeed quite humble, he holds open office hours every week (I've started doing the same), regularly has coffee with random employees, and he tries hard to communicate what's going well or not at our weekly company meetings. I'm also happy to answer any questions anyone might have about foursquare culture.
coops 14y ago
i'm a site reliability engineer at foursquare sf, and i think it's very accurate. dennis travels to our office frequently and takes the time to meet with each of us individually, even those of us who work very far away from feature-land. when we're meeting i feel super comfortable saying "this sucks and we ought to fix it." mostly we discuss organizational issues; i generally air technical issues in similar meetings with harry (our eng lead, posted above,) because making engineering work is harry's whole job. i've worked at high-profile startups with founders who are very media-visible before and dennis is pretty special in my opinion. he seems to genuinely believe that all of us employees are important to making foursquare the best product it can be.

jetsnoc 14y ago

Snippets are such a simple but powerful idea. Has anyone open sourced a project or created a SaaS tool for this idea? I would love to implement this within my organization.

brianmwang 14y ago
You may want to look into iDoneThis: https://idonethis.com/ https://idonethis.com/ Disclaimer: I'm friends with the founders.
tomjen3 14y ago
When you have 5 employees, maybe. If they are good at being really condensed and writing clearly. When you have 20? 100? 1000? The number of snippets one has to read goes up linearly as the company expands for each employee. That means that waste goes up geometrically for the entire company. And forcing each employee to read from a few select people will never scale either. Soon you will want to add the head of research and then the head of HR (or just the HR guy, if you only have one) so that you can tap into everybodies network for recruits.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
joshu 14y ago
For a small company: create alias for everyone. Everyone emails on Friday. For a large company: create team alias, email it on Fridays. Not that hard.
- nigelk 14y ago
  Snippets at Google had one other really useful tool when you're a large company. You could subscribe to a keyword, and pick up any snippets that mentioned it. As someone who was running a service that could get in the way of engineers doing their job, this was a great way to get honest, grassroots info.
  - 14y ago

mgkimsal 14y ago

Q. Other things you’ve learned? A. The importance of overcommunicating. Funny... I've had a friend who's been marked down at multiple companies for 'overcommunicating' - things like reiterating the todo list from a meeting out to everyone, and including people who couldn't be there but would be impacted, emailing a group with a question and to make sure everyone understands what the impact of XYZ will be. Most people hated it. Well, I was fine with it - I think there should be more of it, and I don't think most people really grok that in knowledge work, that's all you've got - communication. Making assumptions or ignoring/forgetting to notify some parties of XYZ have huge ramifications.

GlenAnderson 14y ago
What's worse, in my experience, is when people are unable to provide the necessary information, even when questioned directly, because they don't understand or appreciate the assumptions they've been making.
itcmcgrath 14y ago
There is overcommunicating and then there is noise. Getting the difference right is what successful overcommunication is about
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  One can possibly indicate in this case it was 'noise', but constructive feedback on things like "we don't need to know about X, but we do need to know about Y" would be helpful. "Quit sending so many emails!" is about all he'd generally get. In at least one case, I suspect it was more about control of information than anything else - when too much info gets to too many people, it's harder to claim plausible deniability.
  - efsavage 14y ago
    "Quit sending so many emails!" means he was sending too many emails to people who didn't want them. If every message had value to everyone receiving them, nobody would complain. An unattainable standard. without erring on the side of not sending useful stuff, but you have a decent margin where people will ignore your noise because your signal is valuable. Nobody complains about spam for things they end up buying. CC'ing a group "just to keep everyone in the loop" is overcommunication. Pulling out the details that are useful for the whole group, if any, and then sending followups with additional details to a subset of people is the effective way to do it. It's a lot of work and it's why so many people who effortlessly handle in-person communication have trouble with written/broadcast patterns, they just aren't used to putting the extra work in.

shaufler 14y ago

I'm an engineering intern at Foursquare. The culture Dennis describes is accurate. Dennis holds weekly office hours where anyone at the company can meet up with him and ask questions or voice concerns. In my first month, I met with him a couple times and asked him questions about how he raised capital, his relationships with investors, and his experience with startups. After our first meeting, he let me know that I could grab coffee with him anytime. Foursquare really seems like a small startup despite there being 120 employees. In response to some questions below about how snippets work, it is not necessary to read the entire company's snippets. It is a Twitter model where you subscribe to people's feeds. I'm following the exec team, my manager and other guys on the web-client team, and a couple of my other friends. I saw that some comments about wanting to work for Foursquare, and I just thought I'd leave a reminder that we're hiring =) https://foursquare.com/jobs/ https://foursquare.com/jobs/

SeoxyS 14y ago

I find it somewhat sloppy when journalists simply publish the Q&A transcript of an interview. What I'm going to miss the most when real journalists aren't around anymore are the long-form articles and profiles that obviously took care and several interviews to craft. For example, the recently HN-featured profile of Jack Dorsey by Wired's Steven Levy[1]: But our discussion is sidetracked when the proprietor, Vincent Fung, starts a long and complicated explanation of the various tea options. Dorsey—like Jobs—is interested in Eastern thought, and after listening to a detailed rundown of the exotic choices, he approves Fung’s suggestion to try a dark and musty chunk of Pu-erh tea from China’s Yunnan Province. A few minutes later, Fung appears at the booth with a deep wooden tray and begins a carefully choreographed ceremony, pouring a continuous stream of hot water over tiny cups. Then he pours water on top of a lid that partially covers the bowl containing densely packed cakes of tea. Dorsey watches the ritual and appreciatively touches his finger to a worn corner of the tray. This is how an in-person interview is meant to be conveyed to the reader… not as a transcript. 1: http://www.wired.com/business/2012/06/ff_dorsey/ http://www.wired.com/business/2012/06/ff_dorsey/

drusenko 14y ago
You are absolutely correct, but the one thing you've failed to mention is that Steven Levy is one of the best technology writers of all time. I got to see this process first-hand when he covered Weebly for Newsweek. (http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2007/05/20/meet-the-next-billionaires.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2007/05/20/meet-the-ne...). It was an absolutely incredible experience. You met with the guy a few times, talked with him pretty openly about what you're doing, and he magically weaved a captivating story line out of it -- making everything sound way more interesting than you could ever hope to make yourself sound. I'm sure there are a decreasing number of long-form journalists who take the time to research their story, but it's also worth noting that there just aren't that many journalists as talented as Steven Levy.
topherjaynes 14y ago
The transcript of questions is the format of this weekly column in the Sunday Business Section and has been so since 2009. http://projects.nytimes.com/corner-office/ http://projects.nytimes.com/corner-office/ Look back through the older ones and it's actually a really good format for this sort of "what have you learned" from CEO's.