From Social App to Data Giant: Foursquare's Evolution | Gary Little from Foursquare

The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck

In this episode, we sit down with Gary Little, CEO of Foursquare, to discuss Foursquare's remarkable evolution from a social app to a leader in location intelligence. Gary discusses how Foursquare uses smartphone ubiquity to create a global map through crowdsourcing, covering 190 countries and over 200 million points of interest. Learn about the challenges of managing complex, real-time datasets and how Foursquare employs machine learning and knowledge graphs to analyze foot traffic and device movements. The conversation also covers the critical role of privacy and data security in location tracking, especially in light of recent regulatory changes. Gary explains Foursquare's platform strategy, drawing parallels with Amazon's AWS, to enable customers to process and utilize location data for their applications. Foursquare Website - https://location.foursquare.com Twitter - https://twitter.com/Foursquare Gary Little (CEO) LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-little-0670ba4 Twitter - https://twitter.com/garylittlefsq FIRSTMARK Website - https://firstmark.com Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap Matt Turck (Managing Director) LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck (00:00) Intro

(01:10) Brief history of Foursquare

(03:07) What makes Foursquare's location data unique?

(05:17) Foursquare Platform. What is it?

(08:07) A glimpse into the future of Foursquare

(10:00) More customers want to process the data themselves. Why?

(13:42) Data privacy of today vs 10 years ago. What has changed?

(16:41) Foursquare Graph: what does it do?

(19:17) How is Foursquare utilizing AI?

(22:17) How will AR/VR influence location intelligence?