McClure & Crowley on Accidental Entrepreneurship at HiT Barcelona

Thanks to guest writer Emily Goligoski for this post.

In celebration of Día de L’Emprenedor (the Spanish celebration of entrepreneurship), startup advisor and Founders Fund manager Dave McClure spoke with foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley about his entrepreneurial beginnings at the HiT Barcelona innovation summit. Crowley told McClure (a self-described critic of check-ins for mainstream consumers) that he’s an accidental entrepreneur and “self-taught geek.” “I’ve found that it’s not about being a great coder but teaching yourself enough to make weekend projects work,” said Crowley, who says he learned basic programming through books when he couldn’t find already existing products he’d want to work on full-time. His two-person company Dodgeball grew to a Google acquisition before he enlisted the help of an engineer he’d poached from the company and 10 angel investors to grow Foursquare.

“The roadmap goes out further than we can build because we’ve gotten distracted by things like building relationships with local merchants,” said Crowley, who described himself as having a competitive advantage because of his past experience selling a company. But monetization has still—and understandably–been a major question for the VCs he’s met with, and his answer has been local advertising through incentivizing companies’ best regular customers with check-ins (or “poor man’s tweets”).

With 40 percent of the product’s activity taking place internationally, it’s surprising to hear that the startup hasn’t yet created specific gaming systems for languages other than English. “We don’t want to create more reasons for people everywhere to use their phones when they’re with friends,” Crowley said, but with the world’s most checked in location being in Japan, it’s seems that battle may be lost.

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5. Opinno at HIT Barcelona