Perhaps the largest and busiest startup in the whole of New York is Foursquare. Founded three years ago back in 2009 by Naveen Selvadurai and Dennis Crowley, the location check-in mobile app has so far earned around $70 million, in part thanks to smart mobile advertising, and is now focusing on revenue for the first time.
The company has never been overly focused on revenue raising before, but just recently hired its first ever Vice President of Sales in the form of Rob Wilk and a Chief Revenue Officer in former iAds head Steven Rosenblatt. At the moment Rosenblatt has ten people working with him in sales strategy, account management and sales support, and he is still in the process of hiring more.
“We’ve received tons of inbound from agencies, we just didn’t have the bandwidth or the team to handle it before,” Rosenblatt told Business Insider. While business development has been run by Holger Luedorf for a number of years now, this will be the very first time that the startup has instated a sales team. Rosenblatt notes that they waited until the company had enough user data before they began to focus on revenue.
With 2.5 billion check-ins, five million of which happen every day, and a total of 20 million users, Foursquare is undeniably one of the largest mobile-first firms. Their new office is situated on the tenth floor of 568 Broadway, a residence its 135 employees also share with the likes of Thrillist, ZocDoc and Equinox. The team moved in back in February but now they are fully up and running and completely furnished, with each and every room decorated in the manner of a check-in. There is a Herbivore room which is decked out with earthy materials including but not limited to plants, gymnastic rings, tons of games, picnic tables, a mini ampitheater, loads of food, a Swarm room which looks rather like a bee hive, and even a weekly keg. Anyone who thinks that sounds like a fun place to work might just be in luck as well, given that the company is in the midst of hiring on both coasts.