Dennis Crowley
Founder of Foursquare
Dennis Crowley
Founder of Foursquare
New York City Metropolitan Area
Overview
Work Experience
Co-Founder / Co-Chair
2009 - Current
Foursquare is a location technology company dedicated to improving how people move through the real world. Back in 2009, Foursquare made the "check-in" mainstream. And today, those 13+ billion check-ins are the foundation of our powerful, proprietary Pilgrim technology that helps make sense of where phones go for the more than 150,000 partners who have registered to use our developer tools, including Uber, Tencent, Apple, Samsung, and Twitter. Foursquare powers location experiences for more than 1 billion people around the world. (Held CEO position from January 2009 -> January 2016. I also ran our internal R&D group known as Foursquare Labs from January 2016 -> June 2021. These days, while not in a full-time role, I remain as Co-Chair of the Board of Directors)
Co-Founder / Co-Chair
2018
Street FC is building the biggest soccer club in the world. Imagine 1M+ people all playing for the same club, all wearing the same crest, all around the world. Think: Soul Cycle for pickup soccer. We create technology and leverage data to host flashmob pickup soccer games in cities across the country. Games are fast (4 mins) and always on hard surfaces -- which means we play anywhere and everywhere.
Founding Member / Board Member
2024
Playing a role in helping to build a new Division 4 soccer league in the USA.
Founder / Chairman
2015
Kingston Stockade Football Club is a semi-pro soccer team based in Kingston, NY that represents the Hudson Valley in The League for Clubs (4th Division, US Soccer Pyramid). The team was started from scratch in the fall of 2015 and played its inaugural season in May 2016 at Dietz Stadium in Kingston. NY. http://stockadefc.com
Co-Founder
2021 - 2023
We were attempting to use computer vision to turn real world places into 3D playable game spaces, but ended up winding down the company in 2023.
Board Member
2017 - 2021
The National Premier Soccer League (NPSL) is a member-driven national men’s soccer league committed to the support of its teams on and off the field and growing the sport nationally. The NPSL operates with nearly 100 teams across the country and remains one of the fastest-growing soccer leagues in the America. (Stockade FC plays in the North Atlantic Conference of the NPSL)
Making Games
2007 - 2008
Take the ITP @ NYU class "Big Games" (taught by Frank Lantz) and cross it with the mad-scientist-ness of Kevin Slavin and you get area/code. We made computer games that leaked out into the real world. In my short stint here, I got to work on Conqwest, Sharkrunners, Parking Wars, and a wee bit of Drop7. This gig laid taught me the basics of "designing playfulness" which were then spun into early Foursquare prototypes.
Product Manager ("Dodgeball" mobile service)
2005 - 2007
Dodgeball was my grad school thesis project (ITP/NYU) which was acquired by Google in May 2005. While the Dodgeball service was never able to find a way to thrive at Google, our work there helped shape a lot of Google's early thinking about the intersection of mobile + social + location technology. When you *squint real hard* at the "social" parts of Google Maps, sometimes you can see little pieces of Dodgeball's DNA :)
Founder
2004 - 2007
Location based social software for mobile devices. Dodgeball was acquired by Google in May 2005. See: http://www.cnet.com/news/dodgeball-a-eulogy/ https://medium.com/rick-webb/from-the-archives-soliloquy-for-dodgeball-ed8121dee285
Co-Creator
2004 - 2004
ConQwest was a "Big Game" played in 5 cities across the US. Five teams consisting of 20 high school students each raced around with cameraphones, shooting photos of semacodes (2D barcodes) to complete a city-wide treasure hunt. The game was sponsored by Qwest Wireless. See: http://denniscrowley.com/conqwest/