Corner Office: Dennis Crowley

I'm an engineering intern at Foursquare. The culture Dennis describes is accurate.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I saw that some comments about wanting to work for Foursquare, and I just thought I'd leave a reminder that we're hiring =) <a href="https://foursquare.com/jobs/" rel="nofollow">https://foursquare.com/jobs/</a>

Q. Other things you’ve learned?<p>A. The importance of overcommunicating.<p>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 <i>hated</i> 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.

I find it somewhat sloppy when journalists simply publish the Q&#38;A transcript of an interview.<p>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]:<p><i>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.</i><p>This is how an in-person interview is meant to be conveyed to the reader… not as a transcript.<p>1: <a href="http://www.wired.com/business/2012/06/ff_dorsey/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/business/2012/06/ff_dorsey/</a>

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.

Wow, I want to work at Foursquare!<p>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.

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.

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.

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.

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