AllThingsD » Dennis Crowley

Ah, So That's What You're Supposed to Do With Foursquare!

Peter Kafka — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 21:04:44 +0000

“Web company has a video.” I know. But this one, posted this week by Foursquare, is worth thinking about for a second. It’s directed at new users, but anyone who visits the homepage and isn’t logged in will see it.

“Save money and unlock rewards” based on stuff you and your friends like. Now that sounds like a pretty interesting service.

And one that makes a whole lot more sense than “You’re supposed to ‘check in’ when you go some place. And also you might get a ‘badge’ or something,” which is where Fourquare has been for most of the past three years.

Of course, during that time Foursquare has racked up plenty of gaudy growth statistics, and big piles of VC money, and seems to have fended off would-be competitors from Gowalla to Facebook to Google. So you could argue that they’ve been communicating just fine, thank you very much.

But even though everyone you know knows about Foursquare, 15 million users — and a much smaller, and undisclosed, number of active users — isn’t close to a full-on mainstream service. So this kind of messaging is important as the company tries to grow into something much bigger.

Also important: Actually delivering on the promise of the video above. The idea is that you give Foursquare lots of data about what you like and what you do, and it offers up value to you in return, in the form of suggestions, or deals, etc.

We’re starting to see glimpses of that now, but my sense is that this is still more aspirational than anything else, and that Foursquare’s management and backers agree. Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, in a meta post where he comments about someone else’s comment about his video, hints that there’s much more to come. Fun to watch.

Foursquare's Version of the Talent Acquisition: Summer Interns

Liz Gannes — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 11:00:51 +0000

Foursquare, which just got its 10 millionth registered user and raised $50 million, has started inspiring an active ecosystem of developers, some of them indie projects (e.g. 4squareand7yearsago) and some of them companies (e.g. Sonar.me).

Now Foursquare has done something pretty interesting with a couple of its developers: Hired them for gigs as summer interns. CEO Dennis Crowley said as much during a chat on Thursday at his company’s newly opened San Francisco office.

Pierre Valade, who built an app called Agora that helps users find Twitter accounts to follow based on mutual Foursquare interests, joined the Foursquare product team as a summer intern in June. And Max Stoller, who created a tool called Don’t Eat At — it texts participating Foursquare users when they check in at New York restaurants with health code violations — started (also in June) as a summer intern on the Foursquare platform team.

Foursquare hasn’t yet made any acquisitions, talent or otherwise, Crowley said. It also doesn’t necessarily have a grand agenda for giving internships to developers.

Both Agora and Don’t Eat At, which are really more hacks than apps, are still live online.

Being a third-party developer on a social Web platform is tricky; sometimes the API that feeds you turns around and copies you, bans you or buys your competitors (sorry to bash on Twitter, but … yes). Other times you create an immense business (Hey Zynga, how ’bout that S-1 filing already!). And other times you get a summer job.

Foursquare Gets $50M to "Make the World Easier to Use"

Liz Gannes — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 20:51:26 +0000

Foursquare has raised $50 million, mostly from its existing investors, the company announced today.

The round was expected, and comes in a week when Foursquare hit a significant milestone of 10 million registered users.

It was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures as well as new investor Spark Capital (the picture here is from Spark Capital partner Bijan Sabet’s blog).

TechCrunch reports the valuation as $600 million.

Foursquare is often maligned for not being a serious company, so for the occasion of the funding founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Seldurai wrote on their blog a sort of long-form mission statement about their future:

Foursquare is not just about the check-in, or recommendations, or points, or badges. It’s about making the world easier to use. It’s about discovering new places, connecting with friends, and forging new relationships with the places you visit. It’s finding new ways to layer technology on the real world. All of our employees believe strongly in this vision, and we’re incredibly lucky to have investors and a board that feel the same way.

Foursquare had raised a $20 million round about a year ago and angel funding in the fall of 2009.

Metamarkets Raises $6 Million To Help Big Web Publishers Corral Big Data

Peter Kafka — Tue, 31 May 2011 11:00:57 +0000

Big web publishers sell lots and lots of ads, and that generates lots and lots of data. It’d be pretty useful to keep track of all that information.

That’s the basic premise behind Metamarkets, a 2-year old startup that just raised another $6 million.

This was an inside round, with most of the folks who invested $2.5 million a year ago re-upping: Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Ventures led the round, and previous investors including Village Ventures, True Ventures, Omnicom vet Jerry Neumann and Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley chipped in.

CEO David Soloff says Metamarkets now has 3 paying clients, and is recording between 3 and 5 billion “events” — ad impressions bought and sold – per day. Metamarkets stores and analyzes all of that data — it’s up to 500 terabytes so far — and the publishers are supposed to use it to help them figure out how much to price their inventory in real-time. It’s also supposed to let them predict what kind of business they’ll be able to do in the future.

Originally, the company thought it would also compile that data to create the equivalent of stock index, which buyers and sellers could use to gauge the state of the ad market.

The idea: If you were buying inventory from, say, Google, it’d be good to know how the rest of the market was performing. But for now Soloff says they’re busy with the proprietary products they’re selling directly to ad sellers.

Metamarkets will use the money to build out its 14-person engineering team. But the company’s existing workforce is already doing something right: I’m told that Twitter, among other potential acquirers, did some tire-kicking before the company closed this round. Soloff wouldn’t comment on that line of questioning; I’ve asked Twitter but don’t expect to hear much from them, either.

This Week in Goal Setting: Foursquare Aspires to Be "Clippy in Your Pocket"

Liz Gannes — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 18:42:29 +0000

The next version of Foursquare is about making check-ins “faster and lighter,” said CEO Dennis Crowley in an on-stage interview with me last night for Girls in Tech in San Francisco. Crowley called his company’s current apps “clunky and heavy,” and said he is testing new versions that will be out later this quarter that should reduce the time it takes to check in from something like 20 seconds to five seconds.

After that, the company will build versions of its apps that include “passive check-ins” that detect where a regular user is and prompt him or her to check in, Crowley said. He also plans to add a sort of Facebook news feed for Foursquare that better filters relevant information rather than just blasting notifications.

Foursquare is ultimately about offline discovery and exploration, said Crowley. He said his goal is for the app to be a sort of personalized helper with personality, like Microsoft’s much-hated and now-discontinued Clippy office assistant, which tried to anticipate what help users might need with a document.

But instead of lamely asking if a user wants help formatting a list, Foursquare’s “Clippy in your pocket” would know who a user’s friends are, what venues they like, what’s going on in their calendars, where they are, if they are walking fast or slow.

This Clippy, Crowley said, would be “the master of the sensors,” combining all that information to make relevant and serendipitous recommendations.

Some things Foursquare doesn’t want to do, Crowley said, are enable mobile payments, help users check into TV shows, and create content. Everything on Foursquare should involve actions tied to space by latitude and longitude, he said.

Crowley offered some stats about Foursquare: It has 8.5 million registered users. They each have an average of five to eight friends on the service (whereas Facebook is for “everyone you’ve ever made eye contact with in your entire life,” Crowley joked).

Foursquare’s main demographic is ages 24-27, though the service is now seeing pockets of users who are parents of new kids and college students. The company is just starting to analyze data to identify its strongest drivers of growth.

Foursquare has 300,000 merchants registered on its platform and 10,000 developers using its API. It employs 56 people and is hiring as many engineers as it can find, Crowley said, noting that part of the reason he’s in California is to find a larger office space for his growing team in San Francisco.

Here’s a video of the talk taken from the audience by Daniel Odio of AppMakr (he also took the photo above). When Girls in Tech puts out their professional version later this week I’ll add it as well.

Dennis Crowley CEO of Foursquare at Girls In Tech from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.

Pretty Flipboard Fundraising at an Even Prettier $200 Million Valuation

Kara Swisher — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:15:12 +0000

Flipboard, the high-profile and highly designed social media reading app for the Apple iPad, is out raising another round of funding at an eye-popping $200 million valuation, according to numerous sources close to the situation.

The Palo Alto, CA, company declined to comment on its new funding efforts, which sources said had recently accelerated.

While that valuation might change, several sources considering the investment said it is unlikely to go down in the current frothy financing market in Silicon Valley, especially given Flipboard’s splashy profile and top-drawer pedigree.

Co-founded by longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike McCue and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard launched to much attention in July.

That included $10.5 million in venture funding from Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angel investors, such as Twitter Co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook Co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, the ubiquitous Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

At the time, it was unclear what Flipboard’s valuation was. But now, said several sources, it’s clocking in at a hefty $200 million, which is perhaps no surprise at a time of increasingly lofty investments in tech start-ups.

Suddenly, Foursquare’s $95 million valuation seems like a bargain! (Sorry, Dennis Crowley, for comparing you to the Kool-Aid pitcher dude.)

In any case, the elegant Flipboard–which McCue recently told me in an onstage interview at the South by Southwest conference in Austin had zero revenues thus far–has changed the game on the consumption of social media.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In this offering, there are pull quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of linked-out content. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on Twitter or Facebook.

Flipboard has since added a number of features and will be launching its new iPhone app later this year.

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

It will be interesting to see who will jump into this leader in a nascent market, besides its current investors. Sources said one likely target group for Flipboard could be a large traditional media company.

Until the financial dust settles, here is the video of an onstage interview by the Digital Solution’s Katherine Boehret with McCue at the All Things Digital event, D: Dive Into Mobile, in December:

[ See post to watch video ]

(Full disclosure: ATD is part of Flipboard’s publisher beta program.)

Viral Video: Foursquare's Dennis Crowley Is Character Approved

Kara Swisher — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 07:05:55 +0000

Recently, Foursquare was selected for an “award,” as part of an advertising campaign for USA Networks, whose motto is “Characters Welcome.”

On its Web site, “USA Network’s Character Approved: Honoring 12 Cultural Trailblazers” is described as “innovators in their field who influence our opinions, our style, and our view of the world.”

Now, a commercial featuring co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai is in heavy rotation on the cable television channel–what can BoomTown say, except, “NCIS” rocks, and thus, I have had to endure the ad 67 times so far!

In fact, it’s actually kind of sweet and awkward, as the pair try to explain the social geo-location service to the masses.

Enjoy:

Report From Austin: The Social Fragmentation of SXSW

Liz Gannes — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 22:59:33 +0000

Austin’s annual South By Southwest Interactive conference is bigger and glitzier than ever. Physically and virtually–even though it seems more fragmented this year.

But that’s not to say that it’s not full of lines and crowds as usual at SXSW.

Organizers of event, which started Friday and runs through Tuesday, said they expect a 30 to 40 percent increase in attendance from 2010′s 14,000 attendees.

SXSW has in recent years acquired a reputation as an ideal environment for launching social technology products, because it’s such a concentrated hotbed of socializing by people with smartphones.

But, honestly, it’s such a concentrated hotbed of socializing, these apps seem barely necessary.

Just walk around the streets and you’ll find relevant people and friends. In fact, schedule planning and friend finding are so fragmented across all these different apps, they’re almost superfluous.

On the plus side for attendees (and opportunistic locals), the various check-in and group messaging apps are so eager to get brand recognition that they’re offering free rides to downtown Austin from the airport (Fast Society), free grilled cheese sandwiches (GroupMe), free tickets to see Big Boi (Foursquare) and free beer (everyone).

This could just be me trying to rationalizing a Zen attitude for my own personal aimless wandering, but I think there’s a larger theme about the fragmentation of SXSW as both a business and social event.

Physically, this year there are more conference locations than ever, with panels and speeches across the river and down at a conference center near University of Texas Austin. (Plus the regenerating line around the block at Apple’s pop-up iPad 2 store, which is a sort of satellite event of its own.)

There’s also no one 2011 focal point that everyone’s buzzing about, like last year’s interview with Twitter’s then-CEO Evan Williams. The introductory keynote on Saturday by SCVNGR’s Seth Priebatsch about how a game layer can improve the world was entertaining, but hardly filled the room.

This sort of destabilization has unintended benefits. For instance, this morning a panel on social TV with participants from Twitter, Next New Networks and “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” attracted an audience far beyond the capacity of its allotted room. Would-be audience members–including experts on the topic from NBC and the New York Times–who had trekked way across town first thing in the morning set up their own ad-hoc panel next door. (Here’s a write-up and the #rebeltv hashtag conversation.)

Embedded below is a gallery of some moments from the first days of SXSW Interactive 2011, including a mobile photobooth for Instagram pictures called Instaprint, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley playing an actual game of Foursquare and Ditto CEO Jyri Engeström at the rocking steampunk/burlesque launch party co-hosted by his venture firm.

Checking In With Foursquare's Dennis Crowley at Mobile World Congress (Video)

Ina Fried — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 23:00:32 +0000

Although tens of thousands of people have checked in to Mobile World Congress in recent years using Foursquare, this is the first time that Dennis Crowley has done so.

However, the youthful chief executive said that as a big mobile geek, he’s excited to see what all the phone makers have in store.

“This is like the South by Southwest of mobile,” Crowley said, referring to Austin’s annual tech and culture festival.

He’s also eager to meet with carriers and phone makers to convince them to more deeply integrate Foursquare into their devices and services.

People mistakenly think of Foursquare as just a game where people boast to their friends about all the places they have been, Crowley said, but what underlies that is a hugely powerful database of places filled with all kinds of recommendations and other inside information.

Over time, Crowley hopes Foursquare will be able to tap the aggregate data and serve it up in useful ways, as well as help individuals get personalized recommendations based on their past check-ins.

One way Mobilized tries to get a sense for the strength of the different mobile platforms is by asking time-crunched developers how they are allocating resources. Crowley said Foursquare, which now has about 50 employees, has three developers on iPhone and two each on Android and BlackBerry. The company used outside partners to create its Nokia and Windows Phone 7 apps.

As for Crowley, he’s been splitting his time between an Android device and his beloved iPhone. His well-worn phone is covered front and back with various stickers–all the easier to pick out his device, he says. But Crowley doesn’t have the iPhone 4, instead sticking with the 3GS. Crowley said his colleagues all upgrade to the latest and greatest and someone needs to make sure the service still works on older gear.

“I like to keep it one generation behind,” he said. “Someone’s got to take one for the team.”

I pressed him on the potential for dangers with all this checking-in, including concerns about physical safety. Without trying to dismiss the issue, Crowley noted that he’s been checking in with his location as long as anyone–since 2000–and has yet to have anything bad happen. The worst thing that’s happened to him, he said, is people showing up to parties uninvited.

For more from Crowley, check out the video we did in the lobby of his Barcelona hotel.

[ See post to watch video ]

BoomTown Did Not Call Groupon's Andrew Mason a Corporate D-Bag!

Kara Swisher — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 14:15:42 +0000

Oh, to be misquoted!

Last week, a lot of folks on Twitter and elsewhere thought I had called Groupon co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason a “corporate douche bag” onstage in an interview gone badly awry.

While such a comment is not beyond me, the fact of the matter is that he called himself that.

At the DLD conference put on by Burda Media in Munich, Germany, I interviewed Mason, along with Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley, about local online markets that they both now dominate online.

During the session, I pressed Mason about his aborted acquisition negotiations with Google, as well as future IPO plans for the Chicago-based social buying service.

When he demurred, I let it go, but then the ever-voluable Mason decided to explain himself.

“I used to watch people doing like what I just did on TV and be like, ‘What a corporate douche bag, I’m never going to be like that.’ And here I’m doing it. You made me do it!”

I didn’t, but thanks for the credit, Andrew!

After I pressed him on the Google talks, he tried the kiss-and-not-tell excuse.

“It’s very personal between the companies. You’re exploring each other and then everybody wants us to do that out in the open. We don’t have all the answers yet. We’re figuring things out. “

Thus, putting words in his mouth, I concluded:

“Sorry to put words in your mouth, but you’re basically saying ‘We’re a fucked-up group of people behind the scenes, but please invest in our IPO.’”

Mason’s answer: “Yes!”

I’m glad I cleared that up!

In any case, here’s the full video of one of the more enjoyable interviews I have done in awhile:

Groupon's Andrew Mason Explains Why He Is Coy on Google Acquisition–He Doesn't Kiss and Tell

Tricia Duryee — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 15:56:37 +0000

Groupon’s Andrew Mason opened up today for the first time to BoomTown’s Kara Swisher at the DLD conference in Munich, Germany, on why he refuses to talk about rejecting Google’s $6 billion takeover offer (while also managing not to confirm that one ever existed).

After a few painful non-answers to placate the crowd, he announced unexpectedly: “I’d like to explain why I’m not answering the questions.”

Mason said he’s been there himself, and it’s not easy. “When you are in the room doing negotiations, we don’t know anything. This could be a total disaster–do we love each other, or not? It’s personal between the companies…and then everyone wants you to do it in the open, even though we are figuring things out. It’s not respectful for the people involved to talk about it.”

Swisher: “So, what you are telling me is you don’t kiss and tell?”

Mason: “Yeah.”

However, Mason was willing to gab about the meetings he’s had with bankers to discuss taking the company public. “We are talking to bankers, and we are learning, and we don’t know what we are going to do. We haven’t made a decision…It’s something many companies eventually do, so it’s reasonable for it to be on the table.”

Mason argues that while the details of acquisitions and IPOs appear so juicy for the business community, in reality “they are so uninteresting,” especially compared to what Groupon could be in five years.

He was willing to theorize about that, too, explaining that he wanted to be the same thing for local that Amazon has become for products. “There’s an opportunity for offline transactions to be online. It won’t be easy, but I want to become a company where my kids won’t imagine a world without.”

Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, who was on the stage at the same time, chimed in on why he turned down buyout offers from companies like Yahoo and Facebook. “There’s so many things we haven’t done yet, and so many opportunities for the products we are building and the data set we are gathering….We are 10 percent of where the roadmap ends.”

At one point, the two celebrated their successes in local with the “geekiest high-five ever.”

Crowley, who said Foursquare raised $20 million in venture capital after turning down the buyout offers, said it’s a gamble. “The investors have been completely supportive. They want us to shoot the moon. Someone told me that when the [negotiations were] going down, every day you’ll think about it, which is true. We rolled the dice.”

From U.S. to Germany to China–BoomTown Goes Around the (Digital) World in a Week

Kara Swisher — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 01:22:34 +0000

It’s a big, wide and very digital world out there and that’s why I’m headed around the globe–quite literally–for the next week.

First stop, due east of San Francisco, where I arrived today in Munich, Germany, to moderate several sessions for Hubert Burda Media’s annual DLD conference.

That includes interviewing a whole lot of players I see all the time in Silicon Valley, including investor Reid Hoffman, Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer and Google sales majordomo Nikesh Arora, as well as the two hottest start-up leaders on the Web, Groupon’s Andrew Mason and Dennis Crowley of Foursquare.

And while there are even more U.S. techies here–many on their way to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland–I like DLD because it gives me a chance to meet a lot of European entrepreneurs and also grok a different and global perspective on tech, media and more.

It starts Sunday.

Then, from here, even farther east. I head for Hong Kong, where I’ll be meeting my All Things Digital other half, Walt Mossberg and ATD’s secret brain Lia Lorenzano to meet with our Dow Jones partners and scope out a possible AsiaD conference in China in the fall.

We’ve had our international aspirations before that did not pan out–see one of the many videos I did for a possible EuroD in 2007, while we visited Dublin, Ireland–so nothing’s certain.

But we’re hoping we can pull off some kind of international conference in 2011, one of the many parts of the expansion of our D offerings, including more events and many additions to our reporting staff on the ATD Web site this fall.

I will be posting videos from both places, including another episode of “Where in the World Are Walt & Kara?”

Until then, enjoy this one from Dublin Castle in 2007:

[ See post to watch video ]

A Few Holiday Photos From Tech's Cool Kids: What They Did on Winter Vacation

Drake Martinet — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 15:00:19 +0000

For many in tech, 2010 was the year of photo sharing.

With higher-resolution cameras in our smartphones, everyone seemed to be adding social photo posting to their apps.

Hi-res photos hit Facebook, pictures came to Foursquare, and phones filled with apps to crop, stretch, filter, sketch and generally punch up our often marginal photography.

So, in honor of a big year of sharing photos with friends, here is a quick gallery of shots from the holidays, gathered with care from the walls and feeds of a few of tech’s most social shutterbugs.

The Men and No Women of Web 2.0 Boards (BoomTown's Talking to You: Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Foursquare)

Kara Swisher — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 22:44:05 +0000

In one memorable episode of the famous old short films “The Little Rascals,” after not getting invited to a party, the Our Gang little dudes decided to form their own group, comically called “The He-Man Woman-Haters Club.”

In other words: No girls allowed!

While it was wink-wink cute when Spanky, Alfalfa and Buckwheat huffed and puffed about keeping out Darla–which they never ever could do–back in the last century, it’s not quite as adorkable when it comes to the boards of all the major Web 2.0 hotshots these days.

That would be Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Foursquare, none of which have any women as directors.

As in zero.

What’s most remarkable is that most of these start-ups are run by what I consider enlightened and open-minded entrepreneurs, mostly young enough to be part of a generation more inclined to value equality and diversity in the workplace.

In addition, each of these companies has a massive base of women consumers, in some cases well over 50 percent of its audience.

Thus, it would seem logical that in casting about for those to help guide these companies, one or two women leaders might slip in.

To be fair, it’s not for lack of trying, but of completion, as was the case with Twitter’s recent addition of three new board members.

They were longtime Silicon Valley exec Peter Currie, Flipboard CEO and co-founder Mike McCue and former DoubleClick leader David Rosenblatt.

All are deeply qualified for the Twitter board, which is obviously prepping for its next stage of growth and maturity.

But in its search, the San Francisco microblogging site did not manage to cast the net quite wide enough.

While sources said at least one prominent online woman exec was considered, there were some legitimate issues with her appointment, and it was not completed.

Still, one might imagine Twitter could have tried harder to find other workable choices.

Currently, the Twitter board is made up of the new trio, as well as Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, CEO Dick Costolo and co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey.

Things are not any better over at Facebook, which has several prominent women execs running the show, most especially its high-profile COO Sheryl Sandberg.

But, inexplicably, though she does attend board meetings, she is not yet a director of Facebook, nor is any other woman.

In fact, here is Sandberg on topic at a recent TED event for women, in an eloquent speech titled “Why We Have So Few Women Leaders”:

Instead, the Facebook board is all men, all the time, composed of CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, prominent techie and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, investor Peter Thiel, Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer and Washington Post head Don Graham.

It is no better at three of the most prominent recent Web 2.0 start-ups, which one source attributes to the lack of woman VCs, who are often the first board members after major investment rounds.

At Zynga, the hot social gaming company in San Francisco, it continues, with an all-male board, despite a very heavily female audience for its casual social games.

That would be co-founder and CEO Mark Pincus, COO Owen Van Natta, investor Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins, investor Reid Hoffman and Brad Feld of the Foundry Group.

The same is true at woman-targeted–spas, spas and more spas–social buying site Groupon, which has an unusually large board for a start-up and made up of–as per usual–all men.

The list: Co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason, Accel Partners’ Kevin Efrusy, former AT&T President and COO John Walter, New Enterprise Associates’ Harry Weller and Peter Barris, former AOL exec Ted Leonsis, 37Signals co-founder Jason Fried and early investors Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell.

And, much smaller, is Foursquare’s board, which is the trio of co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley, co-founder Naveen Selvadurai and Union Square Ventures’ Albert Wenger.

New investors–Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures’ Bryce Roberts–have observer status and both are, needless to say, dudes.

There is no question it is tough to make sure there is a good balance of qualified women leaders to men in tech–it is an issue we wrestle with every single year for the program of speakers at our own All Things Digital conference, although we are most excellent on this issue on our Web site and conference staff.

But it can be done, especially at public tech companies. Google has two women on its board of nine directors; Yahoo has three of 10; even Oracle has two of a dozen.

But a grand total of zero at the leading companies of Web 2.0 is not just a coincidence.

It’s a shame.

Tomorrow, BoomTown will post a list of great women who would be superb directors for any of these companies, but until then, let’s not follow in Spanky’s steps:

D: Dive Into Mobile: The Full Interview Video of Foursquare's Dennis Crowley

Kara Swisher — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:05:57 +0000

As promised, All Things Digital will be publishing the full videos of the interviews we did last week at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference in San Francisco.

The first extension of the event, it produced some very newsy sessions. We’ll be posting them all this week and next.

Today, we check in–ha, ha, get it?–with Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley (pictured here).

The co-founder and CEO of the popular social geolocation service was actually quite up-front about a wide range of topics, from acquisition interest to Foursquare’s recent funding to an analysis of the increasing competition for the innovative mobile service.

Crowley also talked a lot about where Foursquare is heading as a business.

And he took it well when BoomTown compared his hairdo to Justin Bieber’s.

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

Next up: Spotify’s Daniel Ek!

Forget Goopon–Why a Groupon-Foursquare Combo Makes More Sense

Liz Gannes — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 15:09:52 +0000

As major Web players look to make a play in local, Groupon and Foursquare have both walked away from lucrative acquisition deals.

But now, as these young start-ups go it alone, would it make sense for the two to combine their forces and become the next major Web powerhouse?

The joint company would have an enviable head start on all things local and social, a combination current leaders Google and Facebook have yet to crack.

To be clear, it’s just a scenario. But in case any investment bankers out there are left without a new project after these acquisition talks fell apart, here’s something to explore.

Groupon has a working business model, local merchant relationships and an ample waitlist, and a salesforce numbering in the thousands.

Meanwhile, Foursquare represents the areas where Groupon needs to grow. Foursquare has innovated around GPS and the mobile application experience, which is obviously where local is headed. Foursquare also has insight into incentivizing users to connect to merchants and each other on a daily basis rather than for a one-time deal. It could provide the tools to help users and merchants have a lasting, mutually beneficial relationship.

Put more simply, Groupon excels at recruiting customers, while Foursquare’s emerging strength is loyalty and retention.

Still, Groupon currently has far more value than Foursquare, so a merger of equals is unrealistic. Groupon has more than 20 million subscribers and a $2 billion revenue run rate. Before Groupon walked away from recent talks, Google wanted to buy the company for $6 billion, an almost unimaginable valuation for a two-year-old company.

Foursquare, which was courted by Facebook and Yahoo before taking funding from Andreessen Horowitz, has five million users and its own experience striking merchant deals and branding relationships, if on a much smaller scale. For years now co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley has been passionate about social location-sharing and multiple start-ups, and is still waiting for, and provoking, the market to catch up to his vision of mapping people’s real-world experiences.

At the very least, a Foursquare-Groupon partnership seems likely. Speaking about Groupon at our recent D: Dive Into Mobile event in San Francisco, Crowley said, “There are lessons we can learn from them and ways we can work together.”

He elaborated, as you can see below in a video of the interview: “We could easily pull Groupon deals into Foursquare and make them sweeter based on the stats behind them.”

Crowley also seems less fierce about staying independent than Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, having reiterated at D: Dive that what matters most to him is to see his products built and used.

In addition to ample doses of irreverence and floppy hairdos, the two CEOs have in common the outside-of-Silicon-Valley factor. Foursquare is the pride of New York, while Groupon is Chicago’s most influential Internet start-up ever.

Put together, perhaps the pair could take on those geeky Californians and show everyone how social commerce is really done.

So, Fourpon? Groupsquare? What do you think?

Dennis Crowley on the Difference Detween Dodgeball and Foursquare (Video)

John Paczkowski — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 21:01:33 +0000

If Dodgeball was, as founder Dennis Crowley claims, the perfect storm of bad timing, then his latest venture, Foursquare, is a sunny day. In the video below, Crowley talks about the mechanics of merchant relationships, valuations and frothiness, and the difference between Dodgeball and Foursquare.

[ See post to watch video ]

Foursquare in Five Years

John Paczkowski — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 17:40:27 +0000

What’s the future look like for Foursquare? Founder Dennis Crowley isn’t quite sure, though he’s confident the company will grow far beyond where it is today.

“We’re not raising money, though people have approached us,” Crowley said at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference. “We have enough money to go through till the end of next year. The point is not to become profitable now, but to grow.”

Where will Foursquare be five years from now? Is there an IPO or acquisition in its future? Said Crowley, “I have a solid idea of what the product will look like after two years. No idea if we’ll be sold or independent in five years. The most frustrating experience for me was having a lot of things we wanted to build with Dodgeball and not being able to do them. Now we’re actually getting them done.”

Dennis Crowley Live at Dive Into Mobile

Liz Gannes — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 16:14:44 +0000

With only nine Foursquare members currently checked in to our D:Dive Into Mobile conference, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley may be a little out of his usual element of adoring fans. But fresh from modeling Gap’s new chunky cardigan in bus stop ads, Crowley is here to answer tough questions from All Things Digital chief Kara Swisher. Crowley’s Foursquare now has 4.5 million users, a whopping 35 employees and $20 million in funding, and it recently opened a San Francisco office.

9:15 am: Kara: I gave you a hard time earlier this year.

Dennis: I noticed.

Kara: I called you the Hamlet of Web 2.0, because you didn’t know what you wanted to do. When you were raising funding, what was happening in your mind?

Dennis: We were focused on the product.

9:16 am: We knew what we wanted the product to do, and I think we were figuring out what we wanted the company to be. We were choosing between funding and aligning with a bigger company.

Kara asks specifically about Yahoo and Facebook, and Dennis replies very non-specifically: “We talked to those company about hey, it would be interesting to work together.”

9:18 am: Dennis: Dodgeball was the perfect storm of bad timing. In the N.Y. Google office, right after the IPO. I think we’d be smarter about structuring the deal now.

Kara: What’s the difference between Dodgeball and Foursquare? Didn’t you just sell the same company to Google and are now starting it again?

Dennis: Dodgeball was just dots on a map. After Google I worked at a company called Area Code, and (Foursquare co-founder) Naveen (Selvadurai) was working at a company called Socialight, building social guides. We brought a little of both into Foursquare.

Kara: You should do it again, and the next one should be called Tetherball.

Dennis: Actually, I wanted to name Dodgeball “Foursquare” back in the day, but some guy owned the domain.

9:21 am: Dennis says Foursquare gets people to try new experiences and go to the gym more. “Our ultimate focus is about becoming the best social utility possible that overlaps with the real world. We’re not trying to build this amazing game.”

We didn’t think the mayor thing would blow up into what it is now. One of the things we’re most excited about tweaking is we’re getting really good at game mechanics and we want to overhaul them.

9:24 am: Kara asks about improving incentives, and Crowley replies he wants to build a couponing engine that’s like a rewards engine on top of the stats.

“Everyone’s gotten a buyback from a bartender”–Foursquare wants to bring that online. (Crowley always seems to be assuming his NYC party scene is the model for the rest of the world.)

9:26 am: Dennis, on making merchant relationships scalable: Foursquare now has a self-service system. Eventually all businesses will have TV screens that will integrate with Foursquare.

Also, developers are extending what Foursquare can do–for instance cab-sharing apps use Foursquare info to know who’s checked into nearby locations and may want to share a cab.

9:29 am: What about competition? Dennis: It’s all about evangelism. The check-in itself isn’t interesting; it’s all about after the check-in. What is on the screen that you show, the deals, learning about what friends are ordering. He is most excited about recommendations, games and incentives.

Dennis: We’re not raising money, though people have approached us. We have enough money to go through till the end of next year. The point is not to become profitable now, but to grow. When we figure out what is actually working on the local merchant front, then we’ll pull that lever. (Hmm…Groupon didn’t take quite so long to figure that one out!)

We don’t want to charge local merchants for a product that isn’t ready yet.

9:32 am: Our business model is to create and sell tools to local merchants. Along the way we figured out other ways to make money, like getting brands involved to help explore the world through their lens.

Some more rapid-fire topics:

Longer-term goals: We’re so focused on what happens before the end of the quarter.

Facebook: We knew Facebook was going to do location for a long time. The question for us is how do we make our product as special as possible.

Groupon: There are lessons we can learn from them and ways we can work together. We could easily pull Groupon deals into Foursquare and make them sweeter based on the stats behind them.

Valuations and frothiness: Ours was around $100 million. For us the goal is to build products, not an amazing company; hopefully that will come out of it.

All start-ups have the same problems: We want to move faster, hire faster, revise the road map faster.

9:38 am: Foursquare will have 40 people by Monday; we’re putting the pieces together. Crowley says he’s still focused on product and evangelism. I’m a lousy engineer, he says, but I’ve always been hands-on, and it’s been hard for me to delegate, but I am trying to do so with the team we have now.

Dennis: I have a solid idea of what the product will look like after two years. No idea if we’ll be sold or independent in five years. The most frustrating experience for me was having a lot of things we wanted to build with Dodgeball, and it was so frustrating not to be able to, and now we’re actually getting them done.

“I think location is underhyped. People don’t understand how the stuff that we’re building will help change the way people experience physical space.”

9:41 am: Audience question about passive check-ins. “Ultimately that’s the way this stuff goes. It just doesn’t work very well. GPS isn’t smart enough to snap you to the right place at the right time.”

It’s also a matter of battery life. GPS and batteries need to be fixed before we can do that stuff.

Audience question about “off-the-grid check-ins.” Crowley says they’re below 20 percent of all check-ins, though he doesn’t know the number. He personally does it to leave breadcrumbs at all the places he’s been to, but when he doesn’t want people to come up to him when he’s having dinner with his girlfriend, for instance.

Also, he adds, about 20 percent of check-ins go to other networks like Facebook or Twitter. The Foursquare social graph is “much much tighter” and gets the majority of check-ins.

Question about devices. We haven’t built for iPad yet. Crowley just bought an Android phone. Ultimately, wants to treat all devices the same.

“Everyone thinks we’re a 200-person company, but there’s just not enough engineers to do all the stuff we want to do.”

9:48 am: By the way, there are now 17 people checked in to D:Dive Into Mobile on Foursquare. Guess seeing Crowley in person was a good reminder!

Can You Hear Me Now? D: Dive Into Mobile Debuts Tonight!

Kara Swisher — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 15:00:47 +0000

Tonight, All Things Digital will debut its first extension of the D: All Things Digital conference, with D: Dive Into Mobile.

The original nickname for the event was “mini-d,” since it is shorter than big-D, focused on one key topic and has a more intimate audience.

But the speakers Walt Mossberg and I have assembled are anything but small on the critical topic of mobile–beginning with tonight’s opening session with Google Android kingpin Andy Rubin.

There is a lot to talk, about from monetization of the ever-popular operating system to its rivalry with the Apple iPhone to its relationship with wireless carriers.

D: Dive Into Mobile continues all day Tuesday, with speakers that include: Dan Hesse, President and CEO of Sprint Nextel; Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of Research in Motion; Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard; Joe Belfiore, Vice President of Windows Phone Program Management at Microsoft; Jon Rubinstein of Palm, now owned by Hewlett-Packard; Foursquare CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley; Google Ad Products Management head Susan Wojcicki; AT&T Emerging Devices President Glenn Lurie; and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek.

D: Dive Into Mobile is being held at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco and, as usual, we’ll be liveblogging the whole thing and also posting highlight videos.

Along with Mossberg and me, Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret and MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka will be conducting the interviews.

For more information, click here for D: Dive Into Mobile news and more.

Spotify's Daniel Ek Splashes Down at D: Dive Into Mobile

Kara Swisher — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 20:58:15 +0000

Next week, we’ll be putting on our first brand extension of the highly successful D: All Things Digital conference with D: Dive Into Mobile.

And we’ve just added an exciting new speaker to the already top-drawer list: Daniel Ek, co-founder and CEO of Spotify.

For those living under a rock, Ek (pictured here with co-founder Martin Lorentzon) leads one of the most exciting music services on the Web right now.

In fact, the Swedish entrepreneur is shaking up how and where people listen to and consume music.

As MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka–who will be interviewing Ek onstage–recently wrote of Spotify’s efforts to bring its hugely popular (and legal) streaming offering to the U.S. market:

In Europe, where Spotify has been a very big success, listeners can stream an unlimited amount of music, on demand, without ever paying a cent. But in the U.S., rival streaming services like Rhapsody, MOG and Napster generally only offer a very brief trial period of a few days before requiring that a pay wall go up.

For the past two years, Spotify has insisted that free, unlimited streaming is the only way the service will work, because that’s Spotify’s most effective marketing technique. Subscribers who do pay up get benefits like ad-free music, and the ability to port their songs to mobile devices like iPhones.

But the labels, most notably Warner Music Group, have insisted that unlimited free streams only serve to strip away their product’s remaining value–if you can listen for free on Spotify, why would you ever buy another CD or iTunes single?

The whole mobile music space is a riveting one to dive into, of course, and we think Ek is the perfect person to help us do so.

Ek will appear Tuesday morning, December 6, but D: Dive Into Mobile opens on Monday, December 6, with an evening onstage interview with Google Android majordomo Andy Rubin.

The new conference represents the very first brand extension of our D: All Things Digital conference, now in its ninth year of grilling the big names in tech and media to sold-out analog audiences and scores more on the Web.

And, as always, there will be no PowerPoints, no panels and definitely no pontificating.

What there will be are unrehearsed, unscripted and unexpected interviews with top players, taking a big-picture view of the broader digital landscape.

But, unlike big D, D: Dive Into Mobile is topic-focused, drilling down deeply into the ubiquity of mobile technology and devices, and its implications for brands, organizations and consumers worldwide.

Offering a more intimate and focused conference setting, D: Dive Into Mobile will feature other industry heavyweights, including: Dan Hesse, President and CEO of Sprint Nextel; Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of Research in Motion; Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard; Joe Belfiore, Vice President of Windows Phone Program Management at Microsoft; Jon Rubinstein of Palm, now owned by Hewlett-Packard; Foursquare CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley; Google Ad Products Management head Susan Wojcicki; and AT&T Emerging Devices President Glenn Lurie.

D: Dive Into Mobile will be held at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco and, as usual, we’ll be liveblogging the whole thing and also posting highlight videos.

Along with Walt Mossberg, Kafka and I, Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret will be conducting the interviews.

You can sign up here for D: Dive Into Mobile.

Everything Will Be Social–And That Includes Sweating

Liz Gannes — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 22:44:20 +0000

The prevailing opinion among tech entrepreneurs seems to be that everything, online and off, would be improved by a social component. For some sectors, what it means to “get social” is quite obvious: Yelp is made more interesting by learning what restaurants your friends recommend; millions of people love the shared experience of social games like FarmVille; Quora’s encyclopedia of knowledge is more valuable because it’s backed up by the social reputation of users’ real names.

But motivating people to be healthy and athletic is one of the most interesting and novel extensions of the digital social identity I’ve seen. Specifically, new features offered by the mobile GPS-tracking app RunKeeper, as well as its competitor Nike+, allow users to tell their Facebook friends when they are starting a run. If users comment on that status post, the encouragement is automatically sent from Facebook to the app and spoken out over the headphones of the runner.

RunKeeper, which makes both iPhone and Android apps, even allows users to automatically transmit their location to a live online map they can share with friends. (You’re right, that’s exactly like inviting people to stalk you.)

On a related note, BoomTown’s Kara Swisher recently wrote about how Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley set up his phone to automatically do a check-in at every mile marker as he ran the New York Marathon.

Since I think this idea of monitoring oneself and sharing personal data with the larger community is particularly interesting, I wanted to note that RunKeeper (actually its parent company, FitnessKeeper) announced today it had raised $1.11 million in funding led by new investor O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and including LaunchCapital and the company’s existing angel investors. Boston-based FitnessKeeper is still quite small, with nine people and $1.51 million total raised.

Nike+ screenshot via AppJudgment.

The Anti-EBay? Yardsellr Closes $5 Million Series A Round

Kara Swisher — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 15:00:07 +0000

Yardsellr is announcing today that it has closed a $5 million Series A funding round led by Accel Partners.

Harrison Metal, which is run by investor Michael Dearing and gave the social listings and transactions site seed financing last year, also participated in the round.

Yardsellr says it uses “social plumbing to power all interactions between buyers and sellers, although users create listings and consummate transactions.”

Welcome to eBay, Facebook-style!

Online shopping with a social element is starting to boom, at least in terms of financings.

Earlier today, Svpply–a social retail discovery site stocked with stuff you and your friends think are cool–got a $550,000 seed round investment led by Spark Capital and Founder Collective, along with high-profile angels like Ron Conway, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley and former Myspace co-President Jason Hirschhorn.

And Topguest, a check-in loyalty service that was founded just five months ago, announced last week that it nabbed $2 million in Series A funding, as well as nabbing well-known Facebook investor Peter Thiel as an adviser.

Yardsellr takes yet another social tack, organizing the Internet shopping experience around “Blocks”–using the traditional neighborhood yard sale as an analog inspiration for innovation.

Blocks are micro-communities of people interested in the same products, determined via social networking, specifically following them on Twitter or liking them on Facebook.

Founder Daniel Leffel said in an email that it was better to organize this way “instead of categories, because categories organize products while Blocks organize people.”

Then, he said, when sellers list items, for free, they go out into the feeds of members who have joined the relevant blocks. Sellers can then buy additional traffic to their listings.

Yardsellr also handles payments for sales, with the buyer paying a small transaction fee.

That’s opposite from eBay, where Leffel once worked. Several former eBay execs are also working at the start-up.

Google's Android Kingpin Andy Rubin Will Open D: Dive Into Mobile (Plus, One More Surprise!)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 14:01:02 +0000

While everyone is considering whether to brine or deep-fry the turkey this week, All Things Digital HQ will be busy with our preparations for D: Dive Into Mobile.

That includes setting the program, which takes place in two weeks and will open with an evening interview with Google’s Andy Rubin (pictured here).

As the search giant’s mobile chief and principal force and creator of its Android operating system, Rubin is responsible for the ongoing development of the major rival to the Apple iPhone.

Many have challenged Android, including a recent jab from Apple CEO Steve Jobs, questioning its overall experience and whether or not it’s actually open.

Nonetheless, Rubin and Android have proven to be a disruptive and fast-growing force in the mobile space, aiming for dominance akin to Microsoft’s on the desktop.

Ironic? Yes.

Rubin started as an engineer at Apple and later worked at General Magic, where he participated in developing Magic Cap, an operating system and interface for handheld devices. When Magic Cap failed, Rubin joined Artemis Research, founded by Steve Perlman, which became WebTV and was eventually acquired by Microsoft.

After several years, Rubin left to found another smartphone effort called Danger, which was also acquired by Microsoft, in 2008.

Disillusionment with his ouster as CEO of Danger motivated him to found Android, which was later acquired by Google.

Now, it seems Rubin is poised to make good on his first efforts at making a truly smart smartphone ubiquitous.

And he is only one of many of the industry heavyweight speakers at D: Dive Into Mobile, among them: Dan Hesse, president and CEO of Sprint Nextel; Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of Research in Motion; Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard; Joe Belfiore, vice president of Windows Phone Program Management at Microsoft; Jon Rubinstein of Palm, now owned by Hewlett-Packard; Foursquare CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley; Google advertising czar Susan Wojcicki; and Glenn Lurie, president of Emerging Devices for AT&T.

Plus, there is also one more big speaker we’ll be announcing soon, so stay tuned.

D: Dive Into Mobile will be held at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco on December 6 and 7.

It represents the very first brand extension of our flagship D: All Things Digital conference, now in its ninth year of grilling the big names in tech and media to sold-out analog audiences and scores more on the Web.

And, as always, there will be no PowerPoints, no panels and definitely no pontificating. What there will be are unrehearsed, unscripted and unexpected interviews, where real news is often broken.

Along with Walt Mossberg and me, Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret and MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka will be conducting the interviews.

As usual, we’ll be liveblogging the whole thing and also posting highlight videos.

But there’s nothing like being there, so you can sign up for the D: Dive Into Mobile conference here.

Svpply Is a Social Shopping Site With a Funny Name, Good Buzz and a New Funding Round

Peter Kafka — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 12:00:21 +0000

One thing the first Web boom got right: Amazon, eBay and the other big e-commerce sites that made it really easy to buy stuff on the Internet.

But those sites are efficient places to get the things you know you want. They’re not good at finding cool stuff you didn’t know you wanted. The way that catalogs used to do, or that your friends still do.

This is the problem that Svpply is supposed to solve: It’s a social, online retail “discovery” site stocked with stuff you and your friends think are cool. Simple, right?

That’s the pitch, at least. And it’s been enough to get the year-old company a $550,000 seed-round investment led by Spark Capital and Founder Collective, along with high-profile angels like Ron Conway, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley and former Myspace co-President Jason Hirschhorn.

One reason the company gets a warm reception: It boasts Founder Collective’s Zach Klein as a co-founder. Klein, who helped start College Humor and later Vimeo, still has a day job as chief product officer at Boxee. But last spring he connected with Ben Pieratt, a Boston-based designer who started Svpply in late 2009.

If you take a look at Svpply (you pronounce it “Supply,” but the V is supposed to make it look Roman and/or cool), you’ll figure it out right away.

But in case you don’t click over: Using a browser-based “bookmarklet” (a la Instapaper), you tag images of stuff you own or like, along with a link that tells people where to buy it. And you look at images that your friends, or people you’d like to be your friends, have tagged, too. Apps for Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android platform are on the way.

When you do head over to Svpply, you’ll find that both the images and the stuff they depict are probably better-looking than you are. And while the company’s founders won’t come out and say it, that’s sort of intentional. Svpply is supposed to exude the same sort of digital cool, and attract the same kind of early adopters, that social Web hits like Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare did.

And like those networks, Svpply is based around the activity feed/stream concept–you can follow a few people or a lot of people. And if you don’t have anything cool to add yourself, that’s okay too.

The main thing is that everything there is supposed to be interesting and, well, cool. Anyone can set up shop at Svpply and show off their stuff, but if no one likes it, no one likes it. As Pieratt puts it: “People are very sensitive to being sold to.”

Of course, the reason people are funding Svpply is because it has such obvious potential for selling–by designers, by brands, by retailers, etc.

Which may be why it’s not the only start-up taking this approach. Poke around and you’ll see several sites doing something similar: Pinterest, Wanelo, etc.

One particularly notable competitor: Fancy, a project from ThingD, the semi-mysterious “Facebook of Stuff” that has super-high profile backers like Allen & Co. and is generating a lot of attention from Silicon Valley’s deal guys.