Big Technology Podcast - Foursquare's Founder on Making the Internet Fun Again + His New App — With Dennis Crowley

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

Dennis Crowley is the co-founder of Foursquare. He joins Big Technology Podcast to talk about what made the internet fun, why it's lost some of its magic, and how to restore it. He also introduces a new app, called BeeBot, that will deliver short, contextual audio messages to you as you walk around cities. Stay tuned for the second half where we discuss whether Web3 can still work, how AI changes things, and whether Crowley's buying a Vision Pro. Listen for a fun, energetic conversation about the web's evolution and where it might go from here. --- You can join the waitlist for BeeBot here. You can read Dennis's Thread on starting something new here. ---

The co-founder and former CEO of Foursquare joins us to talk about his new project, how to make the internet fun again, and his thoughts on the latest tech news from AI to mixed reality. You don't want to miss this one, all that and more coming up right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation with the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you today. We have a legendary New York founder and also someone who's going to introduce a new product that he's working on, which is very exciting for us here today. I won't take up any more time in the intro.

Dennis Crowley, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me on the plot. Really excited to be here. Yeah, thanks for being here. Let's just kind of talk about the state of four square because I think the meme is that it, you know, it was big for a number of years. It's like 15 years old at this point.

Now it's two apps. There's four square city reviews, I think, and then there's the swarm app where you can check in. And I think there's a view that it had its moment. Now it's kind of dormant. It's moved into ad tech, right? There's been some location services that Foursquare has provided. But I think it's kind of murky after that.

So I checked the App Store today. Both those apps have updated within the past three months, so it's still active. But tell us a little bit about the Foursquare story arc and where we are today. Yeah. I mean, we started Foursquare in 2009 and now it's 2024. So that's like, is that like 15 years? I mean, I could do that. Yeah.

And, you know, I was CEO of the company for six years. I no longer work there. It's not my day job, but, you know, I remain on the board. And I'm an active participant in board discussions and strategy discussions, right? But I think the story of the company often gets framed through the apps. Like, yeah, we still have these two apps and still in the store. There's still millions of people that use them. But, like, it's, you know, obviously not what it was back in my 2012, 2012, 2013.

But, I mean, that's fine, right? Like, the company's business is not based around the consumer apps. So the company's business is based around this idea of, of location technology, location intelligence, developer tools, you know, business analytics. We were, you know, we were doing a lot in the, you know, location advertising space. And as that space started to, you know, dismantle a bit, we've started to focus more on location analytics and location tools and technologies for third parties. And so, like, you know, it's a good, stable, successful business. company does well north of $100 million a year in revenue, 300 plus employees, you know,

maybe closing in a 400 employees, you know, opposites around the country. So, I mean, it's a good, stable, solid business. Just a lot different than the Foursquare that many people know from, you know, call it 12, 15 years ago. Yeah, I think that would surprise a lot of people, 100 million in revenue a year. North, yeah, well north of that. But I don't know what I'm a How I could say, it's all going to this thing about it. That's very big. And it was also, like I was going on your LinkedIn and you kind of like give you the description of Foursquare.

And you say back in 2009, Foursquare made the check-in mainstream. And today those 13 plus billion check-ins are the foundation of our powerful proprietary pilgrim technology that helps make sense of where phones go for more than 150,000 partners, including Uber, 10 cent, Apple, Samsung, and Twitter. So basically, from my understanding, is four. Square knows where people are because they've been checking in and you can sort of match like the Wi-Fi signal and the cell phone location. And so they've been like there's been almost this human reinforcement, right, of like where

the technology thinks you are. And that's become a valuable service to these companies to figure out where people are. Yeah. I think like the original kind of big thing that we did was made this, you know, crowdsource map of the world. Like the same way that Wikipedia is a crowdsource and psychopedia, like we made maybe the original crowdsource map of the world based upon, you know, people checking in the places and adding photos and updating things and a whole community of super users that were,

you know, tweaking things and updating the hours and updating location if it moves. And, you know, that, that worked really well when there were whatever, you know, 50 million people using the app. And it turns out that that still works pretty well when there's millions of people using the app. But we don't need tens of millions of people using a regularly in order to maintain that data set. And, you know, like now we routinely do partnerships with third-party. resources so that like we take our crowdsource map of the world and then we bring other people's data on top of it and other people's data on top of that and helps us really like clean and normalize thing and it just turns out that it's like a really amazing data set and then on top

of that we used all that data to make this you know amazing technology originally used to be called the pilgrim SDK now it's called the movement SDK and this is like a little piece of software like an engine that you can put on your iPhone or Android device and it makes your device and it makes your device, you know, kind of conscious of where it is, right? Am I moving? Am I stopped? Okay, I'm stopped. Am I in a coffee shop? Oh, I'm in a coffee shop called Starbucks. Have I ever been here before? I've been here lots of times. Am I familiar with this neighborhood? I know this neighborhood really well, right? So just giving that kind of essence of contextual awareness to different apps is a superpower. And you can build really cool next generation services on top

of that. And so that's like a really amazing developer tool that, you know, give people access do. And then, you know, on top of that, there's just kind of this broad understanding that company has, like, well, how are the phones moving through the world? And are they going to Home Depot's or are they going to Chapolets or are they going to malls or are they going to golf courses? And, you know, that's just like an extra layer of intelligence that the platform has. And we can turn that into different types of insights and analytic tools that are interesting to a number of little partners and customers of the company. Four Square dominated internet culture for a while, right?

Like the idea of being a mayor of like a four square place. Like I had my first text story that I got published or one of my first ones was about this plug-in called Coucher that, you know, made you seem like, you remember that? It made you seem like you had a cool life by like picking. You picked like a different type of night that you wanted to have an artsy night or, you know, binge, binge drinking night and would like post your four-square check-ins through the night to your Twitter followers to show like you were, actually having good time. This was like a huge part of internet culture. And it also seems in some

ways like that era of the like it was a more fun era of the internet has passed. Yeah. And obviously like the user numbers like you've said we've moved from like maybe 50 to in the tens. It does seem like that that peak has we've moved beyond it. So you were front and center. You are front and center. I mean, what do you think caused that shift from that like more fun and more consumer oriented internet to whatever we have today? That's a great question. Actually, it's a great discussion, too. I mean, there was a period, call it 2009, 2010, we started, and a lot of these other things got started, where you're really just making apps for your friends. And that is super fun.

And it's like, made the most fun app survive, right? Like, that's how it worked. And, you know, as things are starting to grow, you start to get into this race where it's like, okay, all right, you know, Facebook was the biggest thing. and then it was Twitter, and then it's like, well, Instagram's growing, it's growing, okay, how are we going to monetize these things? Well, it's going to be advertising. Well, it's going to be advertising. We've got to get as many users as possible.

Just get the numbers up regardless of what you're doing. And so, you know, then you take these products that are kind of niche and small, maybe a couple million users, and you start to, you know, make product changes that make it interesting and accessible and attractive to, you know, tens of millions of users. And in doing so, I think part of the original product loses some of its soul, right? Like an example of this from Foursquare is like, you know, we used to have this inherent bias built in that like independent coffee shops and independent restaurants always trump chains, right? But then, you know, a big chain of coffee shops or big chain of like taco places. But then as you start to do these like advertising deals with them, it's like, well, you can't really talk trash about the big chains if they're the ones that are that are that,

are, you know, helping to pay the company's bills. And you kind of run into this sort of thing. Well, what are we going to do from a search result perspective? It's the company's opinion that the local talk area is always better than the big chain. Well, well, but the big chain is not happy about being, you know, like you run into those types of issues. And then you start to get into the weighting of feeds, the algorithmic feeds, right? And, you know, this is like a well documented thing where I think a lot of people felt

that social media started to feel less fun and less relevant, less personal. when it was just you showing off what you were doing, all your friends, all your friends responding to it. So, now you're seeing a bunch of strangers and now you're seeing a bunch of brands and now you're seeing a bunch of influencers. And it's all just kind of like performance art.

And, you know, it's just like the structure and the incentive and the meaning and the why for a lot of the stuff has just changed over time. And then there's like a whole generation, I think, of like,

you know, consumers or users of internet products, internet culture. that this is all that they know, right? Like, they only know algorithmic feeds. They only know the for you feeds. And this idea of, like, software that's fun and playful, like, it's just not their experience of the internet. Like, social media makes you feel bad about yourself, and it's, you know, you're always watching your light count, right?

And, like, you describe the period before that stuff was the norm to people, and it's totally foreign. Like, they don't remember that. They never participated in that. And, you know, that's kind of the period of the internet that I grew up in, right? Like, wicker and dodgeball and delicious and Friendster and Foursquare and, you know, early Twitter, right? Before this stuff just got huge and turned into, like, a part of, like, the mass culture machine, these were toys, you know? Like, Chris Dixon has that great quote. Like, the next big thing starts off looking like a toy.

Like, we made the toys. There's a lot of us that made toys beginning on. And then those things grew up to be these big platforms that, like, you know, they just change over time. And anyway, so like when I think about building stuff again, I think about it less from like a, how do we build the biggest thing possible? And we're like, well, how do you make something just like super fun for people? How do you get people back to this point where like they're using something because they want to use it? Not because it's designed to be addictive. You know, not because we're, you know, engineering dopamine hits into it, but just because,

like it's it's like a fun enjoyable social experience right and that like brings me to a question which is can we change a variable today to get us back to the time where things were fun like is there something that we can change is it obviously the pursuit of scale i think will always be baked in but is it like a different form of venture capital because there's a push and pull here right like if if we end up having like fun products that take off again like that's still going to be a good business. Maybe it's not like, you know, massive Twitter business, but it's still something that's going to be worth something to people. So there's got to be, people want the internet to be fun. There's got to be a void. So I'm just curious if you, there's, I'm, yeah, I'm curious

if you think there's a way to get us back there. And if so, what do we change? Well, I don't think it's like a variable, but like, you know, I feel like I'm, I'm old enough to have remembered a time where I'm like, Yahoo, what could ever be better than Yahoo? And then be like, Alta Vista, what could ever be better than Alta Vista, right, for search engines? Right. And then it's like, MySpace, who could ever be my space, right? Like, these things that seem like impossible to deconstruct, like they eventually come tumbling down and then new stuff emerges in its place.

And, you know, even rewind like three years ago, like, how the heck is Google going to come apart? And then you start to see, like, oh, maybe we're kind of done with search and we're just always using bots and we're always using LLLNs, right? And so you can start to see, like, maybe there is a changing of the guard that's happening. It's not a variable that you flip or change. I go, let's just do this instead of that. But it's just like, you know, maybe the incumbents, this is the part where, like, they just, they can't move quick enough to keep up with new and emerging technologies.

And they'll steadily be, you know, up-income companies, products, services that continue to challenge these things that just seemed like indestructible. a couple of years ago. But even if that, so technology shift might be one way to do it, but even if the technology shifts, like you still end up with that pressure that you talked about to scale, right? Like we're seeing even in the AI situation where you have these companies like OpenAI, which have like billions of dollars put into them, an $89 billion valuation, and those pressures to get big and do it in those ways that make things less fun will inherently come to them. And in fact, their mission of, like, developing AI responsibly, you know, sort of gets tested when they have all that money put into them.

So just to put a finer point on it, do you think there's a way of funding tech companies, you know, that can help them retain some of that original character that we talked about that just doesn't put these expectations to scale on them? Or is it just a fact of the internet economy that if you don't scale, you will shrink? Yeah. Well, this is also kind of, this is a tricky question because, like, you know, there's a difference between building like, hey, I'm going to build a consumer service and I'm going to, you know, try to do something on the internet in a new way. And I'm going to get a small team of engineers and maybe I raise a little bit money or maybe we just bootstrap it, whatever. Like that's one thing. And that's what a lot of us think of when we think about like, oh, internet companies, internet startups. And then you've got this whole other thing where it's like if you're doing, you know, a lot of this AI work and you need dedicated to hardware and you need specific chipsets, like, you know, you need to raise a huge war chest in order to have access to the server farms that can do the stuff that you need to, right? There's all these arguments around like, hey, it's going to be really hard to unseat companies like Google and OpenAI and Microsoft and Facebook, for example, meta, just because, like,

they have all this infrastructure already. And it may be the case that, you know, he or she has the best infrastructure is the one that ends up winning this round, right? And who knows? But, like, you know, when you're talking about like fundraising in general, like, A, to build something like four square, like we built 15 years ago, it's a totally different model. You would need a smaller team. The tools are much better, cheaper, easier, right? You could probably do with five people what we were doing with 10 people back then, right? To build like a cutting edge, you know, AI company, totally different ballgame, totally different model, totally different cost structure. So, you know, I think venture is always, you know, venture exists for a reason

to help those companies that need that capital to do those things get what they need in order to scale up, right? But then, you know, it's a totally different issue of like, hey, can you still do things, smaller things on the side? And can those still be relevant big? Can they still scale? I think that's the thing that still remains to be seen. Yeah. And there's one more point about this, which I'm curious to get your take on, which is that, yeah, you have the VCs pushing for scale, but you also have big tech that's copying and sort of if you, if you have a good idea and it takes some momentum as a standalone product, it's almost like a sure thing that, especially if you're a consumer, that a Facebook or a Google will eventually just copy

that. And then it goes from, okay, we're scaling, we're gaining momentum to all of a sudden, oh my goodness, like Mark Zuckerberg is going to cut off my growth. And then that sort of of changes the nature of these things. For instance, you talk about like checking in, like, didn't you guys have a situation where all of a sudden, like Google starts to make reviews and check-ins part of maps and they just have a much bigger install base. So how big of a factor is big tech in terms of, you know, what's happened to the consumer internet? Well, I think it's less about, I certainly remember the time where it's like, gosh, we're going to get cut off from the feeds, right? They'll throttle the feeds in such a way. And I think that's less of a growth thing.

now than it was. But like this idea of like, hey, can, um, can a bigger company be inspired by the work that a smaller startup does and just say, hey, you know, I want this to, uh, to be in my app and, and therefore I will make your app a less relevant or less special. You know, probably the, the most well-known version of this is, um, you know, Instagram, uh, reaching into Snapchat and taking their, you know, the stories format and saying like, well, this is a brand new format, we would like this format in our app. Does that undercut their growth? Does it commoditize the category and the products a little bit? Like that, you know, that's, I mean, happens all the, I think that type of stuff happens all the time. It's probably like the most

well-known or maybe like surgical, perfectly executed version of that. But yeah, I mean, like, how many, how many breakout apps do you see these days? Maybe it's like one or two a year, really, right? I mean, I'm not as into the scene as I was before, but, you know, it used to be like, hey, there's a new thing to play with every month. Every month, right. And yeah, and, and, you know, there still is new stuff to play with every day, every month, like how much this stuff really has sticking power? And if something really does get sticking power, does, does the thing that make it interesting and novel just get sucked into some other, some other product in a way that, like, you know, hinders it or makes it less special? Like, I think, you know, that that is,

That's still a real thing. That's not stopping people that I know from continuing to build things. People aren't like, oh, shucks, it's not even worth doing a startup because Facebook's just going to copy it. Like, no, people are, you know, like there's a certain class of people that are just like, you know, I like to build things. I need to, I have an idea. I cannot sleep at night until I see this thing exists.

I will go make this thing. That is the thing that makes me happy is building this thing. And, you know, I think that's how new stuff gets pushed in the world is people just brute force through all of these, you know, hypothetical reasons not to do it. Last question about this. There was a meme that went around a couple weeks ago about how, like, basically, consumer VC is done for. What do you think about that? I don't think it's done for. I mean, I see deals all the time.

People are always pitching me stuff. People are still fundraising. There's still funds that do this. you know people going out raising $50 million to build a consumer app that doesn't have like runaway traction yeah sure those days are long gone does that mean that there will never be another hit consumer not app like absolutely not are people much more wary to take a bet on one yeah absolutely so but you know it's just people being more selected there's probably a lot less money to go around and there's a you know people are much more cautious about where they place their bets, but I don't think it's totally gone.

Right. Okay, let's talk about a bet that you're making, and let's just go full circle here, because a couple weeks ago, you threaded. I love your threads feed, by the way. It's great. Appreciate that. Yeah, no, it's real fun. Are you more active there than you were on Twitter?

I'm done with Twitter. I gave up on it a couple months ago. Yeah, so I do enjoy the stuff that you put out there. Great video of, we all talk about it, of Steve. jobs calling virtual reality like headphones for video but but more to the point you said i'm working on a new project it's an app i'm walking around n yc today testing it and one of those uh and it's one of the things that uh just just push me made me uh l-o-l that is a great feeling as a builder that is all and then you gave like the threads hashtag make the internet fun again so you know we've

spent like 20 minutes they're talking about how could the internet be fun do people want to build Sumer apps. How do you scale them? You have like by nature of what you're building an answer here. So actually, for listeners, I have no idea what Dennis is building. And I think you're going to talk about it in public for either the first time or one of the first times now. But what I've heard is that you might have gotten like a band of like the old four square folks back together and are trying to build something not exactly the same, but in that nature. So how do those rumors compare to reality and what's going on? Well, I'll call it. First of all, like, I just, I like to build things, right? Like, I,

consistently before square, I've tried to do less building and more like, you know, like more company building than product building, uh, and advising, right? Because that's kind of what I was doing for a while. But like, I do like to build stuff. And, um, you know, my last gig at Foursquare was running the R&D lab there. I just, you know, the mandate was take the tools and technology, take all the stuff we've made at Foursquare over the years and like, make, cool stuff with it, like build cool things. And we had made, like my favorite thing at Foursquire, I think we ever made was this project called Mars Bot for AirPods and was like a city guide for AirPods. And you would just walk around and it would tell you stuff about the city. And,

you know, like we were working on in 2019. I wrote a big blog post about it. We were set to launch it at South by Southwest in 2020 and then COVID. And that's like, well, that, I mean, no one's walking around no one's doing anything. That project just kind of went back on the shelf. And then, you know, I ended up leaving the company like a year later. And I think the project has been turned off and the app has been removed from the store. And, you know, that's like the, I love that product. And so, you know, like one of the things I'm working on now is like a sequel to that basically. It's like, okay, like this, you put your AirPods in, you walk around. It tells you interesting things that are happening about the city, right? That old project that we had,

I mean, it was back in 2019, you know, we had whatever, you know, a couple thousand users of it. And, you know, we were starting to get interesting feedback. It wasn't, it didn't reach any scale, right? But like, there was enough there to be like, there's something really interesting here. And that's what we're trying to do with this new version. The thing that we have now, yes, there's like, it's like, we're in the stage where it's not, it's like not a company. It's not a product. It's like a, it's a project, right? It's a project I'm working on with a couple, you know, a couple folks that worked at Foursquare many moons ago also.

And it's called, right out called B-Bot, which is like what my son used to, instead of saying robot, he would say B-Bot. And so it's like, you know, it has like a robot voice that talks to you. But, you know, before we jumped on the pod, I was in the Lower East Side of New York, and, you know, I walked all the way over here, took me about a half an hour. And as I'm walking through the Lower East Side in Soho, and the West Village, it's popping up and it's telling me about, like, oh, this place is interesting and this is, this place is new, and this is why this is something that's cool going on here.

And so, you know, it's really an exploration of, you know, of use, like, an audio-first experience that's built around cities. And so sometimes I think of it almost like a version of ways, but for people that walk around, right, like, what's happening around me? What should I be, what should I know about? What should I not know about? What should I stay away from? What should I flocked towards?

And so, like, these are the things. Like, I love this space, like, this idea of, like, you build things for your friends in cities that help them have a better experience in the cities, but are also just kind of, like, a little bit fun and a little bit weird. And so, you know, we have, like, 50 people testing it now. Most of them are in New York. Like, the feedback is, like, it kind of works, but it kind of doesn't. This thing's kind of funny.

This thing's really annoying. this thing didn't work here's an unexpected bug so we're in that point where we're at that stage with like we're we're just trying to tune it so it works better and then you can start to layer like the fun and whimsical and weird stuff on top of it and I feel like that's kind of like my my bread and blood and that's the stuff that I love to do yeah so hearing you talk about it it's not like an audio tour it's like not like yeah yeah yeah yeah I should have clarified that like it's it's I always thought of like audio as like poor man's augmented reality

right everyone wants to wear the glasses and see the and see the posted notes the virtual posting notes like I've seen the glasses I've tried the glasses those glasses aren't happening any time scene but if you want to play in that space like okay let's play with audio like I'm wearing these things now I've been wearing them for the last like two hours

like this this works and like you know we were able to tune this enough where it's like you can be on a corner and it's like you look up and you're like you look up and it's like let me talk about the thing you're looking at there's no camera in it you can just do that with the compass the accelerometer with motion with GPS right like we're building the thing that we're building it's built on top of the four square API and the SDK the movement the pilgrim SDK which is now called the movement SDK like it's it's like the same X stack and it's like the same vibe It's just like, you know, in a different state.

But yeah, I mean, that's like, this is the stuff I kind of love build it. Yeah, it sounds great. So it will point out, like, if I'm getting it right, historic places, but also like cool buildings, interesting architecture, maybe event spaces or restaurants. A little bit of anything. Like, I think of it as like a platform for contextual aware notifications. Cool. Right?

Like, you know, when people say notifications, you think of like, oh, I get push messages on my phone with like the headlines in the New York Times, right? And it's like, yeah, like that, I feel like there's so much stuff on your phone that's meant to distract you, that's meant to like, like, command your attention. You know, like, I get a notification. It's like, whoa, why don't you disappear into the phone for a couple minutes instead of being in the real world? And what I want to do is kind of build a notifications platform that is respectful of your

attention. Like, we're not here to distract you. We're not here to pull you into the internet. we are here to augment your experience of the real world. And I feel like this is like this is what we were trying to do with Foursquare in 2013, you know, before things like Instagram and Snap got so big and people just got lost and endlessly scrolling, you know, feeds and dopamine hits of likes and all. It's like I have this whole thesis about like this internet that that I wanted to

exist, 2009, 10, 11, 12, 13, building, 4square building this tech, like that, that internet never happened. It's over here in Bizarro world. And like, the internet we got is the one that's like, you can just sit and scroll forever. The algorithm will keep giving you stuff. Spend more time looking at the glass. Spend more time in the feed, right? Remove yourself from the real world. And it's just like, I get it. That's big. Is a huge ad model behind it. People making tons of money off that. It's just like, it's just never been the thing that I'm, like, passionate about. Like, my whole career has been build software for the streets, right? Stuff that helps people pay attention to the real world. And, like, I think what I'm trying

to do now at the stage in my career is go back to that moment in time, like, 2013, where I feel like, Boursquare had a lot of the stuff right. We just, we just weren't big enough to make the thing happen. And I want to go back to that and, like, build the things that, like, I think should have existed or that should exist in the world. And it starts with this thing, you know, this bebop thing that we're going on now. Yeah. And then so where does the, uh, information that it pulls from come from? A lot of it comes from four square right now. Like the content isn't, isn't great. This is something I got to, I got like, it's on my list of things to fix. I remember I was like, like sending some Slack messages before we jumped on the call. I was like, okay,

we got a problem with content. I just took a long walk and the content's all screwed up and here's how to fix it. But it's a little bit of four square stuff. It's a little bit of open AI, right? Hey, we found something interesting. Give a prompt to Open AI. And then Open AI is like, let me tell me something magical about this place. But like, you know, open AI is just got the wrong vibe. It's not that it does its job, but like I don't like the job that it's doing. And then some of it is user generator, right? Just people are leaving content. And then some of it is being imported from third parties. Like you send a little bot out in the internet. It's like, tell me what, find the interesting things that are happening in this neighborhood and then bring them into our ecosystem so that we can

relay them out to people. So there could also be like events like hey there's you know just so you know there's going to be an open air concert going on in this field on Thursday. It can be it can be any wow. Yeah, it can be a little nugget of trivia. It could be like a daily affirmation. It could be pointing out a street artist. It could be pointing out like this something's going to happen here in the future. Something happened here last night. Someone just walked by five minutes ago. And so really just like think of it as like a platform for delivering these types of of like, uh, respectful notifications. Um, you know, and but, you know, in addition to building the platform, we're also, you know, um, you know, selling it with content at the mobile. Yeah. And so it's

going to be audio format. Let's say I'm listening to a podcast. Will it kind of jump in and be like, hey, by the way, or would I have to have like no audio on otherwise? Yeah. If you're listening to a podcast, it will pause it and then it will say it's saying it. And, you know, the thing is meant to be like 10 syllables. Like it's short. You know, it's not like, let me give you a 30 second monologue. It's like, here's one sentence, two sentences, we're done. I'm going to go back to your podcast. If you're listening to music, it will lower the volume a little bit. If you're on the phone or doing a video call, it won't interrupt you.

It just kind of goes to sleep. You know, but it's meant to be, it's meant to be very light. Like, you might go on a walk, you might hear nothing. You know, you might go on a walk, I may hear three things, right? But it's not, it's not meant to be overwhelming, right? Like, it's important, like, I think it's important to kind of note, like, we, I feel like the world is trying to get into this. this

this like agentic state right where it's like there's software that is that is looking out and doing tasks

for you on your behalf but that like we don't live in that world we live in a world with these things dominate all of our attention right and all of the things

that we address by name Siri and Google and Alexa like they are series going off right those are creatures that you rub

the magic lamp hey Siri and Siri comes out. It's like, no, no, no, we're not doing that. We're doing the opposite. This is like an angel or devil that sits on your shoulder and it taps you. And it's like, hey, I know you're walking somewhere really fast. You've got you really busy. You got shit going on. Let me just tell you about something I think you're going like, right? And so it's kind of flipping the agentic model around, right? I'm not asking the genie to come out of the lamp. Like, this is

the thing that is like proactively giving me a little nugget of info that is supposed to to make my day a little brighter or to make you smile right like that thing like i've been kind of under wraps about this but like when when i was walking down the street the other day and i passed a piece of content it literally made me like laugh out loud and i was like we got it this is this is a thing right it's a moment where you're like okay this is not this this is a project but this will be a product and it will be a good product because it can make you do that thing like it can make you feel that way even when it's in this like really like basic shitty barely working state yeah all right two more questions for you about it then we can move on first of all we had talked about this before

before you basically released it to a handful of people and then while you were testing it and you were very interested in getting some uh feedback from the testing so what have you learned so far yeah um well i wanted to um sorry we punted the day to the podcast because i wanted to like i just wanted some confidence that like, A, does it work at scale? And 50 people is not scale, but like, okay, you put on people's phones, they're walking around, they're hearing stuff, like, they don't hate it, right? They give me feedback. It's like, it's fine. It's not great. I'm like, I can live with that feedback. But technically it works. It works well in some places. It works okay in other places. It's not crashing people's phones. It's not making people sick. It's not

totally annoying people, you know, it's like, okay, we got a, we got a good thing here. And then also, like, you know, the first is like, does it even work? Like, can't, can we get it to work? And then the second thing is like, like, is it, is it fun? Like, is it worth, is it worth doing? Is it worth trying to do it at a larger scale? And, you know, yes, the feedback I've gotten from some people, well, from folks who are like, yeah, there's something here that like, you know, you do it right.

It could be delightful, which is really kind of where, you know, my eye bar for it. But then, you know, me walking down the street, having my own experience of like, okay, I get it. I had that moment. I have that confidence. But like, I think in that, in that thread that you have mentioned, I should put that in the show notes because I think there's like a little many thing there. But like I mentioned like this idea of like founder self-doubt. Like I build lots of stuff and people like sneak my opinion out all the time for how to build stuff. But like I am still like, I don't know.

can I still do this and it's any good? Like, should I be doing the list? Let's go get another job, do something else. But, you know, you have to, I think sometimes you have to have that moment where you're like, okay, it gave me the boost of confidence that like, yeah, yeah, this is the thing. This is what we do. Now we talk about it. Now we build it.

And we keep doing it. You know, it's kind of needed that shot in the heart. We spoke for a good chunk of today also about the push to scale and how that can sort of make a fun product not fun. Let's say it does, you know, get to the. this point like how are you going to avoid those pitfalls that we discussed i don't know you know like my my job right now is like make a thing that works make a thing that people like make a feel delightful and fun um and then figure out to turn into turn it into a business right like what do i

want to do uh i can add in data business again no i am not hungry to do i'll could i make in a subscription project product absolutely um you know could could there be you know sell sponsored content in there, right, where, you know, people are, are, you know, brands are creating content and gathering them around. Like, it's kind of like the stuff we didn't really for square. Sure, right? Do I have to raise $100 million to build this thing? No. Can I make it work with a smaller, with a smaller team and kind of like a scrappier business model and maybe like some subscription and sponsorship revenue up front? Maybe, possibly, right? So let's, let's just try that. And then, of course, I mean, like, I, I'm drinking like the, the,

the Web 3 COID a little bit. I don't want to say like NFTs and crypto, but this idea that like, you know, hey, there's, there's opportunity for people to own their content. There's opportunity for people to monetize on those platforms. Like I, I, like, I'm hopeful about that stage of the internet. And, you know, I want to build not just this. I mean, I have a couple of things I want to build that, you know, I sit, but I hope will have the opportunity to participate in that ecosystem when, you know, my own products are mature

and that ecosystem is mature. Okay. And is there a link or, I mean, if you give me a link, I'll link it in the show notes, but is there like a URL people can go to sign up to a wait list? No. Oh, okay. There's a URL, but it's like, you know, Google form, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I will give you the link to it.

Great. But it's not like, go to this website. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's a good idea, though. I should do that. All right. Well, if you give us a link and you want people on the wait list, we will link it.

All right. Yeah, I will. I'll write this show. I'll do this and you can put it in this Jones. Okay, sweet. All right, well, we'll take a quick break and then we'll talk a little bit more about this Web 3 thing because we have differing opinions on that and we should tease that out. And then also maybe a little AI and VR and then we'll head out.

All right, back right after this with Dennis Carly. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about the Hustle Daily show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Dennis Crowley.

He's the co-founder and former CEO of Foursquare, founder of B-Bee. bot you heard of here first all right so let's talk about about web three the thing about web three that that always outside of all the scam coins and all that stuff and Aaron levy was here a couple years ago talking about web three we did a web three episode and his main criticism was that if you build for people with a financial stake in something you're also going to you're going to build something different than people who just want to use it as a user and it's very difficult to build for those two different stakeholders in a way that's coherent. So you mentioned, I mean, in the first half, you were drinking the Web3 Kool-Aid.

You're a builder of products, consumer products. So how do you manage that tension? Yeah, I don't know, right? Because I've never built something in the space before. And I should know, like, I don't fashion myself like a Web3 innovator. You know, like I don't expect to be the one that's inventing stuff in the space. I like to sit back and watch what other people are doing and then be like, hey, is that something that would be applicable

to what we're doing? Maybe, right? Maybe in a year from now or two years from now or something. You know, I've worked on a bunch of projects over the last couple years, and, you know, some of them are, like, went three adjacent. But, like, I never found, like, the real, like, it just never worked. It never worked in a way that wasn't forced, right? And that's not to say that it can't work.

It's just to say, like, it doesn't work right now. Right. And so I can kind of like, I'm hopeful and like, I'm optimistic about like what people position as like the next phase of the internet. And then like, you know, I think I'm still wrapping wrapping my end around all the nuances of it. But, you know, I'm more like web three curious in a sense of like, yeah, I see what's going on here. I appreciate the people that are building. They suddenly recognize all the nonsense and scams that have happened. And I don't want to put all my chips in that pile, but like I kind of cautiously look at that as like, that's a space I'd like to play in, like when and if that's mature enough to playing. Another thing that you talked about was that Open AI had, let's just shift to AI. I think that like we could probably debate, like three, but it is interesting to hear your perspective on it. But on the AI front, you said OpenA's vibe wasn't exactly what you were looking for. Now maybe for that particular product, but what do you think about what can be built on top

of these things and why wasn't that vibe right for you? Well, when I say the vibe wasn't right, I mean like the prompts, right? We're doing some basic prompt engineering and, you know, I'm really like, the products I've built in the past have a lot of personality built into them, right? force school was very snarky. Dodgeball had a real opinion about the world. And so I'm trying to like have open AI. I'm trying to define a personality so open eye can give me content that I feel like is like on brand for this thing that we're making. I just haven't successfully done it. And so I don't mean open AI's vibe as the company is often. I mean like my prompt engineering is crappy and I'm just kind of like I don't want to do any more prompt engineering. I'd rather spend my time

doing other stuff. You know, that said, like, you know, it's pretty clear, like, this set of tools that exist are pretty freaking powerful, and it's like, it really does foreshadow, I think, what the next stage or the internet is going to, is going to be. You know, I posted something on threads, like, I don't know, a week ago about how, like, theory is almost an advertisement for how bad all of this stuff was or how hopeless it all was before LLMs existed, right? If you try to use Siri now, like after you've been using, like, chat GTP all day, you're

like, this is a baby's toy, you know, but it's like, I mean, you really want, like, I want the Siri that's connected to the thing that's really intelligent. You know what I just got, gosh, I didn't know a lot to talk about this. There's a, there's a toy called Curio that they're selling, like you can buy it. And it's a child, like a children's plush toy that has like a little device in it. And the device is like a local LLM, right? It's connected to the network. I don't know it was local or not.

Really? But like, you know, the kids can talk to it. Hey, how's your day? And it's like, my day was great. How was yours? Oh, it was great. Can you tell me about electricity? Sure, I can.

You know, and I have this toy. I haven't given it to my kids yet. I took it out of the package and I set it up and I was testing it. And I was like, man, this is like the future of toys. Why would you not want a toy that you can talk to you? It's like straight out a toy story, right? But just like that, just, you know, occasionally you're playing with this stuff and you get a glimpse of like what the future is going to be. And you're like, that's kind of pretty cool.

But then, of course, you get the glimpse of like the future is awful with like deep fakes and chatchiti lying to you and just making shit up. Right. Like, you know, the future is full of disaster and peril also. But, I mean, it's hard to look at a lot of these tools and not be kind of inspired. for where this stuff is going. Do you, so you said you have lots of people. I don't even know if I answered your question. No, that was a good answer.

You said you had a lot of people that bring you, bring you deals and you've seen lots of consumer products. We're always like looking for like what type of products can exist with this stuff outside of like the chat GPT big models. Are you seeing anything that's catching your attention outside of this toy? I see, well, I see a lot of like consumer stuff. I see, I see a lot of city guides. Like I see every city guide product that's out there people bring it to me.

And I just know the space really well. I'm a little bit jaded on the space. I see a lot of things that are very interesting, but it's really hard to get like a breakout app in that space. I definitely have seen people experimenting with like chatbots and LLM stuff with city guides, right, which I think is also interesting, but kind of hard to do. You know, I'm most interested in like folks that are kind of like reinventing a category. you know like when we talked about the B-Bot stuff and this might just be my own bias but like I feel like we're we're doing this we're we're kind of in the space where it's like I'm not making something that looks like something else we're making something totally random right and in that way it's like it's weird and people don't really get it and it's some people kind of think it's kind of stupid and that's great that's that's like the space I like to operate in um you know but um yeah I mean I haven't like I hadn't stop where I've just been like this is so good take take my money

I haven't seen anything like that recently. You haven't seen that yet. Well, I mean, I'm not seeing that. So there's tons of deals out there that I don't see, right? Right, right. That's a good data point, though. I do. I see, yeah, I mean, I see a lot of consumer stuff. And I see, I have a full empathy for how hard it is to have like a breakout hit in that space.

Because you really hard to do, you know, any meaningful user acquisition. So last question about the AI stuff. We just had Gruber on for a very long episode talking about, like Apple and their pursuit of AI was a very interesting part of that conversation. And I'm curious, like, so you brought up Siri and how bad it is. Do you, let's say you put your like product head on for Apple. Like, what could they do with this stuff? Because they are going to do something.

Apparently it's coming at WWDC. Yeah, I'm sure it's just like a, you know, a much more conversational version of Siri. You know, like my experience with Siri is it just like, it just doesn't work. a lot of times and it like it can hold a conversation that loses the connection with the conversation you know just it's just not it's just not great and I and I think what we've seen is like the beginning of what great looks like you know that toy I was talking about from my kids I was like this is this is pretty cool right I'm conversing with the thing that's not a lie right yeah in a way that is far superior than Alexa and you know Google home and Siri

Wait, what's this toy called? Curio? Curio, yeah, I think it's, what's the website? Hey, curio.com. I got to get one of these. It's, it's rad, yeah. A buddy of mine showed me their Instagram, and I went and ordered one. Cool.

Let's see, where's. Hey, curio.com. I just lost your window and I did that. Oh, here you are. Yeah, so let go ahead. Yeah, so that's what I would hope it would be, you know, just like a version of Siri. that works as well as chat gtp does but just can access all those stuff on my phone okay uh last question for you um you and we mentioned in the first half you put this uh video up on on your feed

of steve jobs talking about how basically headphones are amazing because it's like having a speaker there with you at all times but we don't have what do you call it video headphones or video or you could put on headphones and all of a sudden and watch a video and that's obviously what apple has just created. Where do you see this as something that really can develop into what they hope or not? I think everyone wants the Vision Pro to be the augmented reality hardware of the future. You see all these people wearing it outside. You have seen people outside with it, huh?

That's becoming... I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it on Instagram and I'm just like, yeah, I'm like, look at these people. Yeah. Yeah. It's that, you know, I think people want that, right? They want that future to exist. They want this to be the product. Like my, you know, the data point that I have on it is like this is like it's a, it's a really nice big screen that you wear on your face. You're watching, you know, Star Wars on your couch is the best screen. Holy cow, it's in 3D too. You know, like you're working on your computer. Well, I have 50 monitors in front me. I can do anything I want. you know I saw something someone had suggested like hey even if you look at the way it's price it's like a mid-tier you know really fancy screen and you know what I believe that's probably what it's going to be for the you know for the short term until it either gets

smaller or lighter or cheaper or like really amazing games emerge for it um did you buy one but yeah no okay I feel like you would you would be someone who would buy one I think there was a younger version of myself that was, like, really into it. But I also, like, you know, I have two of the Oculus Quest, right? One for me, one for my wife. And it's like, I was an aspirational user. I'm like, we're going to use us all the time. We're going to go on date nights and VR during COVID, right?

And we just, I mean, I got three kids, right? Like, they, I just don't, I mean, it's not part of, like, our household and our lifestyle. Although I can tell you, the moment, hold on, the moment my, I was charged. my Oculus once and my son I think he was like four at the time and he came he came into the room and he saw it charging and he picked it up and he's like dad what is this it's a tv you put on your face and he was like how how have you been keeping this from me oh my god it's like do do do do do yeah it's going to see what they are into yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah all right dennis this is great thank you so much for joining yeah this is this was super fun thank you for having me at the

show and yeah like I'll come back in the future we'll talk about B-Bod and all the other stuff that it does and can do so that would be great hopefully I can get a chance to test it so walking around New York will be cool all right man thanks again I'll see a bit great see you all right everybody thanks for listening we'll be back on Friday with a new show breaking down the news we'll see you next time on big technology podcast Thank you.