Facebook said the deal was a talent acquisition — meaning it didn’t commit to continuing Strobe’s products and didn’t buy its technology — and that it looked forward to Jolley and some others from Strobe joining its mobile engineering team.

Strobe had launched a developer preview only two months ago as a way to simultaneously build and launch Web and native apps for Android and iOS.

Jolley wrote in a blog post today, “Strobe was founded on the belief that HTML5 can transform the way average people use their mobile phones through apps that are available everywhere, anytime, on any device. Now we’re joining the talented people at Facebook to help develop innovative mobile experiences for their users around the world.”

The 18-month-old Strobe was backed with $2.5 million by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. It was competitive with Sencha, which by contrast has raised something like $30 million.

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:

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.

But Wilson doesn’t use the word “bubble” anywhere in the post he wrote this morning. Instead he refers to “storm clouds” in two markets: One for tech start-up financing, and one for tech workers themselves (courtesy Google, Facebook, et al).

These are ominous clouds! A few excerpts from his post:

• “The competition for “hot” deals is making people crazy and I am seeing many more unnatural acts from investors happening.”
• “We are also seeing large deals ($5mm to $15mm) getting done in a few days with little or no due diligence. Investors are showing up at the first meeting with term sheets. I have never seen phases like this end nicely.”
• “I think both of these situations are unsustainable. And anything that is unsustainable will eventually stop happening.”

On Twitter, I summarized Wilson’s post this way: “@fredwilson says yes, it’s bubbletime.” And then I heard immediately from Betaworks’ Andrew Weissman and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures’ Bryce Roberts, both of whom have invested with Wilson in the past: They don’t think Wilson means there’s a bubble.

And neither does Wilson himself:

Why does it matter if we describe something as a “bubble” instead of “troubling”? I’m not sure that it does for the layperson. But I think it’s very meaningful for professional investors like Wilson. For one thing, if they think it’s a bubble, then their own investors might wonder why they’re continuing to make bets.

It’s also worth noting that even if we are in a bubble, it’s nothing like the housing bubble, or the 2000-era Web bubble (when Wilson was making VC investments via Flatiron Partners): The scale isn’t remotely similar, and the general public has very little stake in the outcome.

But it’s Wilson’s post, so he gets the last word here. Here’s his response to an email I sent asking him for additional input (I’ve added a punctuation mark or two):

I don’t think it’s helpful to use the bubble framework. There is a supply demand imbalance in hot deals and sw engineers, particularly in Silicon Valley. That is driving up prices but also leading to some odd behavior. I just think it’s healthy to talk about it calmly and rationally.

[Image credit: Joi Ito]

After a very long and decidedly strange funding journey, Foursquare has finally officially landed a new round of $20 million in venture funding, with Silicon Valley’s Andreessen Horowitz leading the new investment.

BoomTown reported last week that the new deal, which puts Foursquare at $95 million pre-money valuation, was in the bag.

Interestingly, it is only the second round for the New York-based social location start-up and includes its current investors, Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

Ironically, Andreessen Horowitz had walked away from earlier investment talks because of the excessive hype and indecision around the race to fund Foursquare.

But in an interview this afternoon with me, partner Ben Horowitz said that once Foursquare became firmer in its determination to build the company rather than selling it, his firm was all in.

“Basically, Foursquare made an important decision on the future of their company to build it into a really significant, independent business,” said Horowitz. “It’s a big step and we’re thrilled to back them in doing that.”

Indeed, the wrapping-up of what has been a very convoluted funding process comes after a series of missteps and switchbacks over what’s next for Foursquare, which allows users to “check in” from various places.

Among the twists: Serious but failed acquisition talks with both Facebook and Yahoo (YHOO), as well as a messy beauty pageant of other big VC firms, mostly in Silicon Valley, including Khosla Ventures, Accel Partners and Institutional Venture Partners.

The overhyped interest is because Foursquare and many others like it have seen strong growth and much innovation, although it is not clear yet if that will translate into solid businesses.

Still, Foursquare hit one million users in April and is now approaching 1.8 million, adding about 15,000 users per day. It uses a variety of game techniques and other features, such as the awarding of digital badges, to hold user interest.

And though small, it is trying to work with major brands, most notably Starbucks (SBUX), on a variety of marketing deals.

That requires money, especially given increased competition as everyone girds to race ahead first.

Foursquare’s original $1.35 million funding was raised from Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, as well as some well-known angel investors, such as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Kevin Rose of Digg and Ron Conway.

Foursquare’s current investors also recently gave it a bridge investment.

Thus, Foursquare needed bigger funding, a process that soon became unusually complicated, in part because of indecision by CEO Dennis Crowley and in part because of some very public deal-making.

In fact, that’s what initially scotched very advanced funding talks between Foursquare and Andreessen Horowitz. The high-profile Silicon Valley firm–helmed by Internet icon Marc Andreessen and his longtime business partner, Horowitz–smacked Foursquare hard after those discussions and talks with other firms were leaked to the media.

In an exclusive interview with me in April, Horowitz took the unusual step of talking publicly about VC frustrations that are typical in deals around hot companies.

At the time, Horowitz acted as if he were checking out of Foursquare.

“We withdrew our funding offer to Foursquare and we are out,” he said in an interview with BoomTown then. “This is playing out too much in public and clearly someone has an interesting agenda here, so this is not something we want to participate in.”

At the same time, Horowitz left the door open. “If the process was changed, we still like the company,” he said then. “But since it has been long and undefined, it is prone to manipulation.”

That sentiment obviously changed, said Horowitz.

“A lot of the problems we were worried about were the result of their ambivalence on what to do, and so we were almost a distraction until they could decide,” he said. “Since they got clarity, it has been a very efficient process.”

Horowitz will become a Foursquare board observer and what he characterizes as a “CEO coach” to Crowley.

But he stressed that so far, the leadership of Foursquare was doing very well.

“I think they are clearly best of breed and very far of ahead of everyone else in what is a very complex business to get right,” Horowitz said. “There are definitely competitors large and small, but this company has a lot of experience and data atop a big vision.”

We’ll see, of course! And as hard a time as I have given him, Crowley–who sold his last company, Dodgeball, to Google (GOOG), which ended not so well–is definitely on another roll.

Until then, here are the blog posts by Horowitz and Crowley on the deal:

Why Andreessen Horowitz Invested in Foursquare

They say he’s a grinder
fly ass rhyma’
With a CEO’s mind bra’
–Kinfolk Kia Shine

Today we are extremely excited to announce that we are investing in Foursquare, a service that mixes social, locative, and gaming elements to encourage people to explore cities in which they live.

Here are the three reasons we invested.

1. A great Founder/CEO: Dennis Crowley

We prefer founding CEOs. In particular, we think the keeper of the product vision should run the company whenever possible because the toughest and most important decisions in technology companies are always about product strategy.

The only thing better than the CEO being the keeper of the vision is the CEO being the creator of the vision. In Foursquare’s case, Dennis not only created the vision for the company, but for the entire product category. Beyond that, he is very clearly the thought leader in the market. This is not at all surprising as he has been working on the problem for a decade and has highly refined his thinking through that period.

As importantly, Dennis embodies the kind of leadership that I described in Notes on Leadership. He’s the kind of leader that great technical minds will be excited to follow: visionary, righteous, and competent. I am really excited to work with Dennis to help him on his path from being a great leader to a great Chief Executive of an incredibly important company.

2. A killer product

When you look at the numbers, you’ll see that Foursquare is growing faster than Twitter did at this stage. In particular, their growth has been explosive over the past few months–they just hit 1 million users in April and now they’re approaching 1.8 million, adding around 15,000 users per day. It’s easy to see that people absolutely love the product. Less obvious to the competitors and pundits are the reasons why people love the product so much. I often hear people attribute Foursquare’s success entirely to check-ins or other easy-to-understand product features. It reminds me of the early days of Zynga when people thought the secret sauce behind Mafia Wars and Farmville were that those games were web-based.

It turns out Zynga games are wildly successful because Zynga has mastered the art of connecting friends via games–and they work incredibly hard behind the scenes to deliver what at face value looks very easy. How many times have you heard someone say, “I could have built Farmville in a weekend”?

Foursquare is very similar in that a lot of hard work behind the scenes goes into delivering a product that users love. Dennis and team have identified over a dozen different dimensions of the Foursquare product that must interact with each other in precisely optimal ways to achieve user delight. Years and years of research and sweat equity went into cracking the code, and the results are magical.

3. A gigantic market

At a macro level, over 4.6B people have mobile phones and there are 1.7B people on the Internet. Already, over 200M people worldwide have smart phones and that number is headed north fast. Foursquare might not win the entire smart phone market (some people don’t even like to leave their house), but it will capture a huge portion of it because it’s incredibly fun and addicting.

As importantly, we are very excited about Foursquare’s ability to make money in a way where all parties win: users, merchants, venue owners, brand advertisers, and more. In fact, users have been so excited about the product that they’ve actually been signing up local businesses to run promotions for Foursquare’s mayors and active users. This natural enthusiasm is happening even before Foursquare has added specific product features to help businesses run campaigns. As a result, major brands such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Zagat, Bravo TV, Starbucks, C-SPAN, Marc Jacobs and over 10,000 businesses are currently working with Foursquare to build customer loyalty and drive traffic. Not many companies have their users turn into their sales force, and it’s definitely a good sign that this is happening around Foursquare.

We are excited to be on this journey with our good friends at Foursquare.

We’re just getting started…

Hey all–

It’s been quite the year for foursquare. Last year at this time, Naveen and I–tired of working around my kitchen table–borrowed a desk from our friends at Curbed.com and Hard Candy Shell. Two months later we brought on our first hire (Harry!) and a few weeks after closed on our first round of financing: $1.35m from Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and a handful of angels. Back then, our office looked like this.

Fast forward a year: We’re now 27 people strong. We can’t fit any more desks or chairs in our office so we’re borrowing cubes from our neighbors downstairs. We’re about to hit 1.8 million users and we’re seeing Super Swarms happen all over the world (Indonesia, you crazy!). In short, it’s been an amazing year for foursquare. A huge thank you to anyone that’s ever unlocked a Newbie badge!

And with that, we’re excited to announce that we’ve raised another round of capital. Today we closed on a $20m Series B round with Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and our newest partner, Andreessen Horowitz. We’re thrilled to have the continued support of our original investors and additional support and expertise from the team at Andreessen Horowitz.

The two big names behind Andreessen Horowitz–Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz–are each legends in Silicon Valley. They know better than anyone how to transform startups into successful organizations. As we continue to rapidly expand to take advantage of the opportunities in front of us, Ben and Marc’s expertise in growing companies will be invaluable.

With this new round of financing, our main priority will be to expand our organization to supplement the amazing core team we’ve assembled already (know any great engineers? send them our way!). We’re hoping to build a world-class engineering organization, based primarily in our headquarters in the New York City to help us develop the next generation of mobile + social + local products that will excite our users and provide unique value for local merchants. The new investment capital will also help fund the infrastructure needed to house our team (we’re finally getting a new office!) and support our growing audience of nearly 2m users.

It’s been a crazy year for us and we’re expecting the next 12 months to be even more of an adventure. Look forward to more great product from us soon…we’re really just getting started.

–@dens and the rest of team foursquare

According to numerous sources close to the situation, Foursquare is in the final stages of striking a funding deal with the very venture firm–Andreessen Horowitz–that had publicly dissed the hot social location site and walked away from earlier talks.

The deal is likely to be completed and announced by early next week, at a valuation of about $80 million, barring unusual hiccups.

“Light at the end of a very long and very twisty tunnel,” joked one source familiar with the situation.

Indeed, the wrapping-up of what has been a very convoluted funding process comes after a series of missteps and switchbacks over what’s next for the start-up, which allows users to “check in” from various places.

The last curve came with serious talks for Foursquare to be acquired by Facebook, which came very close to happening–“one inch to the end zone,” as one person close to the situation described it.

But those discussions broke off largely due to price, strategy and control issues, sources said.

In addition, Foursquare had recently been in serious acquisition talks with Yahoo (YHOO) as well, along with endless rounds of chatter with a variety of prominent Silicon Valley VCs–including Khosla Ventures, Accel Partners and Institutional Venture Partners–over the last several months.

The overhyped interest is because Foursquare and many others like it have seen strong growth and much innovation, although it is not clear yet if that will translate into solid businesses. Still, many location-based companies are girding up with investments in order to race ahead.

That has also been the case with Foursquare, except its funding process has been unusually complicated, in part due to indecision and in part due to some very noisy deal-making.

In fact, that’s what initially scotched very advanced funding talks between Foursquare and Andreessen Horowitz.

But after discussions with Andreessen Horowitz and other firms were leaked to the media, the high-flying New York-based Foursquare was smacked back hard by the higher-profile Silicon Valley firm, which is helmed by Internet icon Marc Andreessen and his longtime partner, Ben Horowitz.

In an exclusive interview with BoomTown in April, Horowitz took the unusual step of talking publicly about VC frustrations that are typical in deals around hot companies.

At the time, Horowitz acted as if he were checking out of Foursquare:

“We withdrew our funding offer to Foursquare and we are out,” said Horowitz in an interview with BoomTown. “This is playing out too much in public and clearly someone has an interesting agenda here, so this is not something we want to participate in.”

In addition–after making an offer three weeks ago at valuations lower than have been reported, though he would not specify the exact number–Horowitz said he felt the company had conducted a “process that is very long and undefined.”

A company run by VC-pampered young geek dudes centered on game-playing was playing silly, immature deal games? This comes as a complete shock to…well, no one!

At the same time, Horowitz left the door open. “If the process was changed, we still like the company,” he said then. “But since it has been long and undefined, it is prone to manipulation.”

That sentiment obviously changed recently, as TechCrunch reported two weeks ago.

And indeed, it looks like Horowitz finally won that contest of hardball with Foursquare CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley.

But it was a very close call, said many, who noted that Foursquare thought acquisition talks with Facebook were almost in the bag, something many sources said Crowley had wanted most of all.

And in fact, Facebook would have been a natural fit for Foursquare, on paper. The only fit, really: Facebook’s users already get the status-update concept, as well as the game-play part of the service.

And as MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka previously wrote:

“[Facebook] has something Foursquare won’t be able to boast of for a very long time: A sales team to match the location service up with big brands and a self-service ad platform that local businesses can plug into.”

Nonetheless, sources close to the company said Foursquare is now saying it wants more independence and more cash over stock in any deal with the social networking giant.

Dictating terms to the powerful Facebook seems unlikely to be effective. And sources familiar with Facebook’s thinking said the company simply felt it could do its own location service better, as well as federate many others in the arena.

Could that change? Sure, because when it comes to Foursquare, it seems like a wacky turn could be just around the corner!

Still, sources said that while the term sheet Foursquare has from Andreessen Horowitz is not quite done, it is nearly complete, with some remaining back and forth about the exact valuation for the social location start-up, the funding number and other small issues.

A spokeswoman for the firm declined comment.

Foursquare’s current investors–who recently gave it a bridge investment–will also participate in the new round.

Foursquare’s original $1.35 million funding was raised from Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, as well as some well-known angel investors.

And then, after all the papers are signed, hopefully, we’ll all see what Foursquare can do with a new pile of money.

Of course, that is the greatest unknown of all.

Memo to Dennis Crowley: BoomTown has not forgotten you!

In fact, I have been tracking the popular social location service he helms the way Elmer Fudd chases Bugs Bunny, since my last update in April.

That was in the midst of a flurry of talks the New York-based start-up was engaged in with a series of Silicon Valley venture firms; it was also entertaining a serious $120 million acquisition offer from Yahoo (YHOO).

But because Foursquare had gotten so much media attention as the next big thing, the situation quickly became complicated and confused.

So much so, in fact, that one firm, Andreessen Horowitz, said publicly that it had pulled out of the funding talks due to the confusion and, well, hype, around Foursquare.

Things then quickly settled down, as the company and its investors went quiet.

Actually, not as quiet as they thought, said a range of sources close to the situation, with some under-the-radar activity of late from the innovative company.

Here’s the deal right now:

The current plan is for Foursquare’s original investors to do a “bridge” investment for a smaller sum, because the original $1.35 million raised from Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, as well as some well-known angel investors, has been spent.

The valuation for the king of “check in,” said several people, is hovering at about $80 million.

Meanwhile, talks with new VCs have been tabled for now, said several sources, as several firms, such as Accel Partners, have decided not to move forward at this point.

But that could change quickly. In particular, Khosla Ventures’ Gideon Yu has reportedly been keen to invest, along with other firms.

While many in Silicon Valley feel Crowley mucked up the first round of talks, that will not matter if investors feel the company is on a strong growth path.

Also in the mix: Foursquare’s talks with social networking giant Facebook about a possible acquisition or investment.

Those discussions, said several sources, have gone from nonserious to serious, but have also not been conclusive.

Facebook execs have been trying to sort out their location strategy, which might involve more federation than the backing of one single service.

Interestingly, Foursquare CEO and founder Crowley has been burning up the tech conference circuit of late, dropping vague hints and making leading jokes about what’s next, even as he touts his company’s growth in an increasingly competitive space.

At the Mashable Media Summit in New York this past week, for example, he noted that Foursquare had almost 1.6 million users and is growing fast.

Crowley noted that more partnerships and features are coming, as the company tries to figure out a reliable monetization plan.

But this does not mean it is profitable and, thus, all that growth needs investments, which Crowley coyly referenced in his interview.

But the peek-a-boo is unnecessary, since what Foursquare needs to do is obvious, sometimes painfully so.

But, as always, it’s also entertaining.

Speaking of which, here is Crowley talking about Foursquare in a backstage interview at the Mashable event, as well as some Bugs and Elmer.

But, be vewy, vewy quiet–he’s hunting wabbits:

No, Facebook is not in serious talks to buy Foursquare. Yet.

No, Microsoft is not poised to snap up the social location start-up, beyond a cursory should-we-look query to itself. Yet.

No, there is no longer a crazy bidding war going on among major venture players in Silicon Valley, all waiting with bated breath for Foursquare founder and CEO Dennis Crowley to make a decision about which of them he will deign to take a big pile of money from.

In fact, Andreessen Horowitz partner Ben Horowitz was entirely correct when he told BoomTown in an interview earlier this week that his firm was dropping out of the race to fund the company:

“This is playing out too much in public and clearly someone has an interesting agenda here, so this is not something we want to participate in.”

Interesting indeed, although cloddish is probably a better word for what the simple process of deciding on funding versus selling has turned into.

New York-based Foursquare, which hit one million users yesterday and is unprofitable, lets its users “check in” from a variety of locations.

It’s an innovative and entertaining concept and a lot of fun, unless you are among those trying to do a deal with Foursquare.

From VCs to Facebook to Yahoo (YHOO)–the only serious bid to acquire Foursquare so far–sources close to every single player mentioned in the hubbub around the start-up expressed stupefaction about the confusion Crowley’s endless Hamlet act has resulted in.

And, in no small measure, annoyance too.

“It’s hard to make rivals all agree on one thing,” said one person close to the situation. “But this just became a pig pile.”

Indeed, that was the impetus for Horowitz speaking on the record about the experience of dealing with Foursquare, a move that was unprecedented.

“If the process was changed, we still like the company,” said Horowitz. “But since it has been long and undefined, it is prone to manipulation.”

While some have suggested that this was just sour grapes on the part of Andreessen Horowitz because Foursquare decided to pass on a lower funding offer it made, others involved–including rival VCs–applauded the move.

“Foursquare is being just as vague and unclear to us, which I think means they don’t know what they want,” said one VC, who has been considering funding it. “No one minds losing out to someone else, as much as feeling like you’re being played.”

The game got another boost today by rumors that Facebook is intently interested in buying Foursquare and delayed its announcement of location features at its f8 conference Wednesday because the social networking site did not want to scotch the impending deal.

Actually, no.

What is true is that Crowley has been to visit Facebook execs, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and there were only cursory discussions about a range of possible ways to work together, including a plan to federate third-party location services at the social networking giant.

Also, why not meet?

“It’s was a free look,” said one person with knowledge of the chitchat, the kind that happen all the time between Facebook and companies. “You always say yes when people want to talk, because you can learn a lot.”

As to a purchase: Unlikely at the price of $100 million-plus that Yahoo offered, if ever.

“Yahoo needs a solution in the mobile location and local space, because they have nothing,” said another source of the build-or-buy decision. “Facebook has all the tools it needs, as well as 500 million users used to updating their statuses, so what Foursquare is doing is not hard to replicate.”

As for Microsoft (MSFT), sources said, it, as well as companies like Nokia (NOK), simply have had their interest piqued by all the noise surrounding Foursquare.

That is also typical around hot start-ups, and perhaps more so with Microsoft, since it recently signed a deal with Foursquare to integrate its customer data with the Bing search service’s map apps.

So what’s left? Well, Silicon Valley VCs, of course, who are always interested in a deal.

Despite negligible revenue, Foursquare raised $1.35 million last August, valuing it at $6 million.

Foursquare’s current VCs include O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures, as well as a spate of well-known angel investors.

New VC valuations have hovered from $50 million to $80 million.

But both Accel Partners and Redpoint Ventures, sources said, do not have active talks going on with Foursquare.

One wild card: Free-spending Russian moneybags Digital Sky Technologies, which has already sunk copious funds into Facebook and games powerhouse Zynga.

For certain, after Andreessen Horowitz pulled out, the last one standing seems to be Gideon Yu of Khosla Ventures.

And while the eager firm has made an offer, sources said, it has yet to hear back from Foursquare, which is taking its sweet time mulling things over, which can’t make Yu happy either.

In other words, mangling the old Eagles song, “Hotel California”: You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave.

So while Crowley searches for the most lucrative exit, let’s enjoy the Eagles classic in this video:

EAGLES – HOTEL CALIFORNIA
Uploaded by hushhush112. – Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.

Much to the chagrin of valuation-hyping Silicon Valley VCs, Yahoo is still in the running to acquire Foursquare, the hot social geolocation start-up, much longer than expected.

Foursquare’s board met last week about the possible acquisition deal. But, so far, it’s turned it down flat.

Nonetheless, (YHOO) is still interested, sources said.

Yahoo declined to comment, and I have an email into Foursquare, which has yet to respond.

But sources close to the situation said that Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley is holding his cards very close to the vest about whether Foursquare will reconsider the offer–which could reportedly go up to $125 million to $150 million in cash–from the Internet giant.

Crowley’s alternatives are two powerful venture firms–Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures–which had put lucrative funding deals on the table, trying to entice Foursquare to remain independent and turbocharge its fast-growing status-update service.

Other big firms have dropped out of the race, although sources said more are now sniffing around, including free-spending Russian moneybags, Digital Sky Technologies. It has already sunk copious funds into social networking giant Facebook, game powerhouse Zynga and, today, social buying site Groupon.

The VC selling point is freedom, the ability to sell for more later and perhaps a more modest payout for talent, including Crowley, by buying some of their common shares. Their valuation is hovering around $80 million.

Crowley (pictured here) controls a large chunk of the shares of the start-up and has so far turned down the $100 million offer from Yahoo, despite the fact that Foursquare is still small (about one million users) and unprofitable.

But it has grown dramatically and raised $1.35 million last August, valuing it at $6 million. Funds came from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures, as well as a spate of well-known angel investors.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz hopes to best all VC offers after having recently made some significant noise about starting to engage in aggressive M&A to attract talent and inject innovation into the company.

She has mentioned mobile start-ups specifically, and Foursquare is indeed among the hottest in the space, offering its growing base of users an ability to “check in” from a variety of places.

But the location-based services arena is heating up, with multiple competitors to Foursquare, such as Gowalla, as well as recent efforts by Facebook and Twitter to enter the space in a big way.

In fact, Wednesday at its F8 developers event, some expect Facebook to talk about its own version of Foursquare.

Still, Crowley may welcome the challenge after selling a similar location service called Dodgeball to Google (GOOG) in 2005 and ending up with very little. He left the search giant on bad terms two years later, and Dodgeball was closed down by Google in early 2009.

At the time, Crowley called the experience of being at a large company “incredibly frustrating.”

Which is why it will be interesting to see the choice he makes in what one person close to the situation called: “A very deft Hamlet act.”

Until he does, this is a perfect time for my Foursquare version of the indecisive Prince of Denmark’s most famous soliloquy–with apologies to Shakespeare–redone for a New York-based hipster Web 2.0 dude:

Dennis Crowley Does Hamlet:

To sell, or not to sell, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous Facebook,
Or to take arms against a sea of Twitters,
And by opposing end them? To die, sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we become Digg with
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That over-hotness is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be avoid’d. To die, to become Friendster;
To sleep, perchance to be crammed down:
Ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what hotter start-ups may come,
When we have shuffled off this overhyped coil,
Must give us pause to check in constantly:
there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long it takes for funding;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of bloggers,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despis’d love by Andreessen and Yu,
the law’s delay,
The stalker ways of those scary Russian investors,
and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy lowball offers,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin of no profits?
Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a Yahoo life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d acquisition, from whose bourn
No Flickr returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to VCs that we know naught of?
Thus overvaluation does make greedy piggies of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of Pets.com;
And Web 1.0 enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And as was predicted by Economics 101.

You have to give Yahoo an A for effort, if perhaps the ultimate grade in its ongoing quest to buy hot mobile social network Foursquare is an F.

While Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley–who controls a large chunk of the shares of the start-up–has so far turned down several $100 million-plus offers from Yahoo, sources said the company’s newish head of mergers and acquisitions, Andrew Siegel, is back in New York today still trying to convince him to sell.

So far, especially because the effort has dragged on for a while and Yahoo (YHOO) has not made an overwhelmingly massive show of financial might, Crowley appears to have develop a case of cold feet about marrying the Internet giant.

Sources said Foursquare has so far turned down Yahoo flat.

Meanwhile, two powerful venture firms–Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures–are putting lucrative new funding deals on the table, trying to entice Foursquare to remain independent and turbocharge its fast-growing status-update service.

Other big firms have dropped out of the race, although sources said more are now sniffing around, including free-spending Russian moneybags, Digital Sky Technologies, which has already sunk copious funds into social networking giant Facebook and games powerhouse Zynga.

Their selling point is freedom, the ability to sell for more later and perhaps a more modest payout for talent, including Crowley, by buying some of their common shares. Their valuation is hovering around $100 million.

“Why sell now, when they are on a roll no one is going to catch them for a year at least,” said one person involved in talks with Foursquare. “There is a lot of benefit in waiting to cash in totally.”

Foursquare has grown dramatically, from 50,000 users less than a year ago to closing in on one million soon.

Despite negligible revenue, Foursquare raised $1.35 million last August, valuing it at $6 million.

Foursquare’s VCs include O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures, as well as a spate of well-known angel investors.

The choice for Crowley: Take the big pile of money from Yahoo–which is offering all cash, giving Crowley a huge windfall–and run, or double down with VCs.

“Yahoo should just pay a huge premium and scare away the VCs to become relevant among the cool kids again,” said one person close to the situation. “”In my mind, it’s a litmus test for Yahoo.”

Yahoo is well known in the tech space for hemming and hawing over acquisitions. Dithering over price and copyright issues, it famously lost a nearly completed purchase of YouTube to Google (GOOG), which swooped in with a bigger and cleaner offer almost overnight.

A similar scenario played out when Yahoo tried to buy Facebook when it was very small. Facebook not only remained independent but is considered to have surpassed the once mighty company in innovation and consumer appeal.

In addition, as many big companies have, Yahoo has bungled purchases of hot start-ups before, such as Flickr, the pioneering online photo service.

But CEO Carol Bartz has recently made some significant noise about Yahoo starting to engage in some aggressive M&A to attract talent and inject innovation into the company.

Internally, sources said she has told staff that Yahoo has to start engaging externally and with force.

She has mentioned mobile start-ups specifically, and Foursquare is indeed among the hottest in the space, offering its growing base of users an ability to “check in” from a variety of places.

The location-based services arena is heating up, with multiple competitors to Foursquare, such as Gowalla, as well as recent efforts by Facebook and Twitter to enter the space in a big way.

Still, Foursquare is the start-up of the moment among the digerati, striking deals with a wide range of partners, as well as tech giants like Microsoft (MSFT).

Thus, it has attracted a lot of look-sees, from AOL (AOL), Twitter and Google, although none have made a serious effort to buy Foursquare.

Even Facebook has contemplated the start-up, although it is more likely to try replicating its own version of Foursquare, which is could announce at its F8 developers event next week.

Twitter also indicated at its own conference this past week that it will continue to offer similar location features.

The challenge for Foursquare’s Crowley is in the timing, and deciding if he can look such a large gift horse in the mouth.

He sold a similar location service called Dodgeball to Google in 2005, but left the search giant on bad terms two years later. Dodgeball was closed down by Google in early 2009.

At the time, Crowley called the experience of being at a large company “incredibly frustrating,” while Google sources said Crowley was a bit of a frustration to them.

Translation: No tears were shed on either side by his leaving.

In any case, he rebounded with Foursquare and is now being pursued again in the throw-caution-to-the-wind manner some entrepreneurs enjoy.

“It’s an insane offer, in a lot ways, but big enough that we all have to take it seriously,” said one person close to Foursquare.

Insane is what some think Yahoo has to be.

“Yahoo needs to kneecap everyone near Foursquare,” said one with knowledge of the situation. “This is a strategic purchase, not one based on any metric of revenue or users, so it’s just as crazy at $100 million as at $150 million.”

Well, a little crazier, but you get the point.

Yahoo declined to comment, and I have an email into Foursquare, which has yet to respond.

Silicon Alley Insider first wrote about Yahoo’s interest in Foursquare about two weeks ago.

Sources tell me that the mobile social network, which lets you tell your friends where you are, is lining up a new round of financing to bolster the $1.35 million it raised last August. CEO Dennis Crowley declined to comment.

I don’t know how much the year-old company intends to raise or the valuation it’s looking for. But speculating about both is a fun pastime for venture capitalists, who agree on one thing: The company won’t have any problem attracting suitors.

“Everybody and their mother is humping their leg,” says a VC who readily admits to Foursquare infatuation. So many investors are besotted that the chatter can get feverish. Another VC passes along a rumor that an investor offered to buy into the company at a $100 million valuation.

A more reasonable guess: New York-based Foursquare will wind up bringing in a West Coast-based VC, who will lead a round in the $10 million range that will value the company at something like $40 million. Foursquare’s first round valued the company at more than $6 million.

So what’s the appeal? Like plenty of other social media start-ups, Foursquare has minimal revenue. But it has a great story, which contains plenty of allusions to Twitter.

Like Twitter, Foursquare was founded by an entrepreneur who already built a start-up and sold it to Google (GOOG). And like Twitter, Foursquare launched at South by Southwest to some fanfare, and has seen its user base increase at breathtaking velocity.

When Crowley raised his first round of financing from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures in August, Foursquare had some 50,000 users. That total is now approaching 600,000, boosted by a burst of 100,000 sign-ups over the last 10 days.

And while Foursquare, like Twitter, doesn’t have real revenue to speak of, it does have a notion of how to get some. It is working on tie-ups with local merchants, who can reward users who “check in” at restaurants, bars, etc.–and by doing so, provide free advertising for those establishments.

Foursquare still doesn’t do anything for me, but the service is doing just fine without buy-in from a middle-aged dude who doesn’t go out at night. And because Foursquare is a fun, buzzy story to write about, it gets written about a lot.

The real question for Foursquare: How will the start-up keep Twitter and Facebook from rolling over it? Twitter added its location feature this month, and Facebook is reportedly adding its own in April.

Both these companies have plenty on their plate, so it’s possible they won’t spend much effort chasing Foursquare’s niche. Still, it’s hard to see room for three social networks that let you broadcast your whereabouts to your pals. But that’s not dissuading guys who can write big checks.

And many also had this reaction: Why, exactly, should I care about Foursquare?

The first reaction makes sense. Foursquare is just a few months old, but it has received an extraordinary amount of buzz and press since its debut at South by Southwest in March. That seemed to reach a fever pitch this summer when Twitter investor Fred Wilson started blogging about it.

And sure enough, Wilson’s Union Square Ventures did indeed end up betting on the company. The $1.35 million round was actually led by O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and by all accounts investors were clamoring to throw money at the revenue-free start-up, which may have all of 50,000 users. I know of at least one high-profile VC firm that wanted into the deal but got shut out.

But the befuddled reaction some people have to Foursquare also makes sense. Foursquare is a “location-based” app for your iPhone (or Android-based phone, or even your BlackBerry) that sort of combines elements of Twitter and Yelp and “social” Web/mobile games like Zynga’s Mafia Wars. But even if you’ve used it, it’s not exactly clear what you’re supposed to do with it. You tell your pals that you’re visiting this bar or that restaurant and then…what?

At least, that was my reaction when I played with Foursquare at South by Southwest in Austin: I couldn’t figure out how it was more useful than Twitter at broadcasting my location and/or finding my friends.

And once I got back to Brooklyn, there didn’t seem to be any point to the service at all for me. No point in telling anyone where I am because it’s almost always the same place: My apartment in Brooklyn. Nothing to see here.

But my nightlife problems aside, there are a bunch of people who think co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai are on to something. Even if they’re not sure exactly what it may be.

A more cynical take: Crowley sold Dodgeball, his last buzzy mobile start-up, to Google in 2005. And even if Crowley was unhappy about the way things turned out after that–he left in 2007, and Google (GOOG) pulled the plug on Dodgeball (along with a host of other nonstarters) this year–it’s always good to bet on a guy who’s already had one successful exit.

But why not listen to Dennis Crowley explain what he’s up to in his own words? Here’s an interview I taped with him last month, a couple days before he closed his funding round.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090908/what-exactly-is-foursquare-and-why-are-investors-clamoring-for-it/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080408/former-yahoo-exec-to-openx-openx-to-la/ http://allthingsd.com/20080408/former-yahoo-exec-to-openx-openx-to-la/#comments Wed, 09 Apr 2008 05:55:18 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080408/former-yahoo-exec-to-openx-openx-to-la/

Former Yahoo Senior Vice President Tim Cadogan will take the CEO job at OpenX, the popular open-source ad server start-up, backed by Index Ventures, Accel Partners and others.

As part of the change, the company will move from its London HQ to Los Angeles. OpenX has about 30 employees, including 10 developers in Poland, but not all will be moving West.

Cadogan was with Yahoo (YHOO) for five years, in its search unit and later as SVP for ad products, including playing an important role in the launch of its Panama ad search product. Previously, he was an early member of the GoTo.com team and went to Yahoo just before it acquired Overture.

Cadogan will now run OpenX (which recently changed its name from OpenAds), which makes the leading open-source ad serving software, catering to about 30,000 Web publishers on 100,000 Web sites in more than 100 countries.

Until now, OpenX has been helmed by James Bilefield, another former Yahoo exec, who was also VP of Global Business Development and GM of European operations for Skype.

OpenX has raised about $21 million in funding since 2007. Besides Index and Accel, other investors include First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Former AOL head Jon Miller also recently joined its board as chairman.

“With open-source software, there is a lot of potential for business disruption and to open up the market,” said Cadogan in an interview with BoomTown from London. “You have not really seen open-source models really applied to the ad space until now…but there is a big business in giving publishers a really robust offering and a platform where they can also share what they build.”

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