 At South by Southwest 2009, Foursquare introduced the world to the check-in, a way to quickly share your location with friends. Five years later, it has 5 billion check-ins and counting, giving it one of the world's most powerful databases about where and what to eat or do in any given neighborhood. But users were confused. Was Foursquare meant to replace Yelp or help them find their friends? The company never caught on with the mainstream, struggled to raise funding, and watched its user base quickly fall behind younger services like Instagram. Eventually, they came to a striking conclusion. If the company wanted to survive, it needed to make its riskiest decision yet, killing off the check-in and splitting its app in two. Over the last couple of years, it's like, what story is the most important story in Foursquare? Is it like check into places because you tell Foursquare great things and then we can kind of give you amazing personalized local search results? Or is it come in, search and discover, find great places, and then check into those places? People always think, oh, Foursquare, that's the check-in app. Oh, Foursquare, that's the thing where you check in and get badges. And I think if that's your perception of what we're doing, you're missing 90% of the vision and 90% of really what the company is here to do. We looked at this and looked at the session analysis and saw that only one in 20 sessions had both social and discovery at the same kind of app open. So what that says to me is that 19 out of 20 times when someone used Foursquare that had the business up front and the party in the back either went to business or went to a party, but not both. We did this exercise where we brought kind of 10 different people from around the company together, kind of posed to them. We call it the Lego block challenge or something like that, which was actually a really important point to make. We said, all right, let's kind of catalog all the Lego pieces that we have as a service and as a company. Obviously we have our 40 million plus users. We have our POI database of 60 million plus places. We have 40 million plus tips, 150 million plus photos. I'm just rambling off PR staff. But these are all the Lego blocks. How do we take all of those different Lego pieces and assemble them in a way that really makes sense for the things that we can do with phones in 2014? We've been working on just reimagining Foursquare as if it was created today and what that would look like. And for us that means two different experiences. It means one that's focused on where your friends are right now and how to keep up with them. And it's another about where to go next and how to find a great place to go that's totally different from any local search experience right now. By splitting them into two, we give people really clear messages to come up to. Again, you have Swarm, which is your social heat map. Like if what you want to know is where your friends are, you should download Swarm and you'll be able to meet up with them at fantastic moments when you might not have seen them otherwise. And if what you're looking for is recommendations, then Foursquare is the app for you. And I think in the past that's been hard for us because they are two very different use cases, but they've been stuck together. Breaking the app in two wasn't exactly how the company's leadership envisioned Foursquare's future, but as teams started working on the two apps, one for check-ins and one for discovery, the dichotomy felt increasingly obvious. The first app, called Swarm, is a dead simple location sharing app that is one key wrinkle. Unlike people discovery apps of the past, Swarm only shares your general location with friends. When you first open the app, you see a list of friends who are nearby, followed by friends who are in the neighborhood, and then in the same city as you. It's like Find My Friends, but a lot less creepy. And if you want friends to know exactly where you are, you can always check in just like you used to. Swarm is a lot like Facebook's recently launched Nearby Friends feature, but inside its own app with its own friends list just of people you trust. It sounds a lot like some of the friend finding apps that have launched in the last few years. Google Latitude, Sonar, Highlight, Banjo, Social Radar. None of these apps ever hit the mainstream and frankly neither did Foursquare check-ins. But Foursquare thinks it's figured out why. Being able to say, hey, you know what, people don't want to have their face on a map. They don't want to be like precision pointed a lat long so someone can like go find them in the middle of a park. Or like Find My Friends on your iPhone is great if you have like a spouse who like is like total transparency, right? Like you can track where they are, are they at the gym, are they shopping? And you maybe do that with one person in the world. But they want people to be kind of immediately aware of where they are so their friends can know like, hey, if I go to the Williamsburg and I get on the train, here are my 10 friends who are in Williamsburg. A lot of the stuff that we were inspired by is like early instant messaging clients. You know, to be able to look and see like these people are online, these people are offline, this person is active, this person is not. Like what does that version of a buddy list look like when it's on your mobile phone and it has some element of location and it makes it easy to connect with people and just kind of easy to know of people's awareness and availability. It remains to be seen whether people really do want to know who's around, a trend tech investors and early adopters love to push but which the mainstream has ignored. But swarm is only half the equation for the new Foursquare. At that, it's the much smaller half. The most important part of Foursquare's future is a new version of its discovery and recommendation service. While the company won't yet divulge how the new app looks, one thing is clear. Foursquare aims to take Yelp head on in its hopes to be the undisputed king of local search. People have been telling me for years like there's no way that's going to work. It's impossible to do. If someone's going to do it, Google would have done it already. And I'm like, no, I think we can do this in a different way. It's always been really hard to tease those experiences out of Foursquare because like you have to check into the places and you have to look at the screen and you have to get the tip. And I'm thinking was always like, let's just get a ton of knowledge about the world, about where people go, get a ton of these tips. And then when we can tell when someone just walks into the place, we can just pop up that message and the phone will buzz and they'll just look at it. Now that's what we wanted to do in 2009. Just took us five years to get to where we are. Yelp can't do what we do. Like Yelp doesn't need to be able to personalize for you because when you search for pizza on Yelp, it shows you the top 10 pizza places. It's not tailored to you. But when you're on Foursquare and you search for pizza, we know if you like a greasy slice or the most artisanal, perfect pizza in New York. If people weren't afraid, we would have done this a long time ago, right? And not afraid in an irrational way, afraid in like, this is like a somewhat risky thing to do. It is riskier than the current path we're going down. Ultimately, I think like the winner in the local search space, it's all about who has the best data. And we're at the point now, it's like, God, the company has succeeded to the point. Like we've built all this great stuff. The phones have matured. Like we have the flexibility and the freedom to kind of rethink this entire space. And we came up with this idea of like, hey, we should do two apps, one for check-in, one for search. And we, you know, you have to sit on it for like a week or two weeks, you know, and during those two weeks, like this is kind of crazy, right? But then it's like, no, this makes perfect sense. This is what like we really can do it now because of all the things that we've done in the past. This makes a lot of sense.
 At South by Southwest 2009, Foursquare introduced the world to the check-in, a way to quickly
 share your location with friends.
 Five years later, it has 5 billion check-ins and counting, giving it one of the world's
 most powerful databases about where and what to eat or do in any given neighborhood.
 But users were confused.
 Was Foursquare meant to replace Yelp or help them find their friends?
 The company never caught on with the mainstream, struggled to raise funding, and watched its
 user base quickly fall behind younger services like Instagram.
 Eventually, they came to a striking conclusion.
 If the company wanted to survive, it needed to make its riskiest decision yet, killing
 off the check-in and splitting its app in two.
 Over the last couple of years, it's like, what story is the most important story in
 Foursquare?
 Is it like check into places because you tell Foursquare great things and then we can kind
 of give you amazing personalized local search results?
 Or is it come in, search and discover, find great places, and then check into those places?
 People always think, oh, Foursquare, that's the check-in app.
 Oh, Foursquare, that's the thing where you check in and get badges.
 And I think if that's your perception of what we're doing, you're missing 90% of the vision
 and 90% of really what the company is here to do.
 We looked at this and looked at the session analysis and saw that only one in 20 sessions
 had both social and discovery at the same kind of app open.
 So what that says to me is that 19 out of 20 times when someone used Foursquare that
 had the business up front and the party in the back either went to business or went to
 a party, but not both.
 We did this exercise where we brought kind of 10 different people from around the company
 together, kind of posed to them.
 We call it the Lego block challenge or something like that, which was actually a really important
 point to make.
 We said, all right, let's kind of catalog all the Lego pieces that we have as a service
 and as a company.
 Obviously we have our 40 million plus users.
 We have our POI database of 60 million plus places.
 We have 40 million plus tips, 150 million plus photos.
 I'm just rambling off PR staff.
 But these are all the Lego blocks.
 How do we take all of those different Lego pieces and assemble them in a way that really
 makes sense for the things that we can do with phones in 2014?
 We've been working on just reimagining Foursquare as if it was created today and what that would
 look like.
 And for us that means two different experiences.
 It means one that's focused on where your friends are right now and how to keep up with
 them.
 And it's another about where to go next and how to find a great place to go that's totally
 different from any local search experience right now.
 By splitting them into two, we give people really clear messages to come up to.
 Again, you have Swarm, which is your social heat map.
 Like if what you want to know is where your friends are, you should download Swarm and
 you'll be able to meet up with them at fantastic moments when you might not have seen them
 otherwise.
 And if what you're looking for is recommendations, then Foursquare is the app for you.
 And I think in the past that's been hard for us because they are two very different use
 cases, but they've been stuck together.
 Breaking the app in two wasn't exactly how the company's leadership envisioned Foursquare's
 future, but as teams started working on the two apps, one for check-ins and one for discovery,
 the dichotomy felt increasingly obvious.
 The first app, called Swarm, is a dead simple location sharing app that is one key wrinkle.
 Unlike people discovery apps of the past, Swarm only shares your general location with
 friends.
 When you first open the app, you see a list of friends who are nearby, followed by friends
 who are in the neighborhood, and then in the same city as you.
 It's like Find My Friends, but a lot less creepy.
 And if you want friends to know exactly where you are, you can always check in just like
 you used to.
 Swarm is a lot like Facebook's recently launched Nearby Friends feature, but inside its own
 app with its own friends list just of people you trust.
 It sounds a lot like some of the friend finding apps that have launched in the last few years.
 Google Latitude, Sonar, Highlight, Banjo, Social Radar.
 None of these apps ever hit the mainstream and frankly neither did Foursquare check-ins.
 But Foursquare thinks it's figured out why.
 Being able to say, hey, you know what, people don't want to have their face on a map.
 They don't want to be like precision pointed a lat long so someone can like go find them
 in the middle of a park.
 Or like Find My Friends on your iPhone is great if you have like a spouse who like is
 like total transparency, right?
 Like you can track where they are, are they at the gym, are they shopping?
 And you maybe do that with one person in the world.
 But they want people to be kind of immediately aware of where they are so their friends can
 know like, hey, if I go to the Williamsburg and I get on the train, here are my 10 friends
 who are in Williamsburg.
 A lot of the stuff that we were inspired by is like early instant messaging clients.
 You know, to be able to look and see like these people are online, these people are
 offline, this person is active, this person is not.
 Like what does that version of a buddy list look like when it's on your mobile phone and
 it has some element of location and it makes it easy to connect with people and just kind
 of easy to know of people's awareness and availability.
 It remains to be seen whether people really do want to know who's around, a trend tech
 investors and early adopters love to push but which the mainstream has ignored.
 But swarm is only half the equation for the new Foursquare.
 At that, it's the much smaller half.
 The most important part of Foursquare's future is a new version of its discovery and recommendation
 service.
 While the company won't yet divulge how the new app looks, one thing is clear.
 Foursquare aims to take Yelp head on in its hopes to be the undisputed king of local search.
 People have been telling me for years like there's no way that's going to work.
 It's impossible to do.
 If someone's going to do it, Google would have done it already.
 And I'm like, no, I think we can do this in a different way.
 It's always been really hard to tease those experiences out of Foursquare because like
 you have to check into the places and you have to look at the screen and you have to
 get the tip.
 And I'm thinking was always like, let's just get a ton of knowledge about the world, about
 where people go, get a ton of these tips.
 And then when we can tell when someone just walks into the place, we can just pop up that
 message and the phone will buzz and they'll just look at it.
 Now that's what we wanted to do in 2009.
 Just took us five years to get to where we are.
 Yelp can't do what we do.
 Like Yelp doesn't need to be able to personalize for you because when you search for pizza
 on Yelp, it shows you the top 10 pizza places.
 It's not tailored to you.
 But when you're on Foursquare and you search for pizza, we know if you like a greasy slice
 or the most artisanal, perfect pizza in New York.
 If people weren't afraid, we would have done this a long time ago, right?
 And not afraid in an irrational way, afraid in like, this is like a somewhat risky thing
 to do.
 It is riskier than the current path we're going down.
 Ultimately, I think like the winner in the local search space, it's all about who has
 the best data.
 And we're at the point now, it's like, God, the company has succeeded to the point.
 Like we've built all this great stuff.
 The phones have matured.
 Like we have the flexibility and the freedom to kind of rethink this entire space.
 And we came up with this idea of like, hey, we should do two apps, one for check-in, one
 for search.
 And we, you know, you have to sit on it for like a week or two weeks, you know, and during
 those two weeks, like this is kind of crazy, right?
 But then it's like, no, this makes perfect sense.
 This is what like we really can do it now because of all the things that we've done
 in the past.
 This makes a lot of sense.