Foursquare's Founder on Making the Internet Fun Again + His New App — With Dennis Crowley

0:00The co-founder and former CEO of Foursquare joins us to talk about his new project, how to make the internet fun again, and his thoughts on the latest tech news from AI to mixed reality. You don't want to miss this one. All that and more coming up right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation with the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you today. We have a legendary New York founder and also someone who's going to introduce a new product that he's working on, which is very exciting for us here today. I won't take up any more time in the intro.

0:30Dennis Crowley, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me on the pod. Really excited to be here. Yeah, thanks for being here. Let's just kind of talk about the state of Foursquare because I think the meme is that it was big for a number of years. It's like 15 years old at this point. Now it's two apps. There's Foursquare City Reviews, I think, and then there's the Swarm app where you can check in. And I think there's a view that it had its moment. Now it's kind of dormant. It's moved into ad tech, right? There's been some location services that Foursquare has provided, but I think it's kind of murky after that.

1:01So I checked the App Store today. Both those apps have updated within the past three months, so it's still active. But tell us a little bit about the Foursquare story arc and where we are today. Yeah, I mean, we started Foursquare in 2009, and now it's 2024. So that's like, is that like 15 years? I mean, I can't do that. Yeah. And, you know, I was CEO of the company for six years. I no longer work there. It's not my day job, but, you know, I remain on the board. and I'm an active participant in board discussions and strategy discussions. But I think the story of the company often gets framed through the apps.

1:37Like, yeah, we still have these two apps that are still in the store. There's still millions of people that use them, but it's obviously not what it was back in 2012, 2013. But that's fine. The company's business is not based around the consumer apps. The company's business is based around this idea of location technology, location intelligence, developer tools, business analytics. We were doing a lot in the location advertising space. And as that space started to dismantle a bit, we've started to focus more on location analytics and location tools and technologies for third parties. And so it's a good, stable, successful business.

2:21Company does well north of$100 million a year in revenue, 300 plus employees you know maybe closing in a 400 place you know offices around the country um so i mean it's a good stable solid business um just a lot different than the foursquare that many people know from you know call it 12 15 years ago yeah i think that would surprise a lot of people 100 million in revenue a year north yeah well north of that so but i don't know what i'm how I could say, hey, so I'm going to do this thing about it. Right, but that's very big. And it was also like, I was going on your LinkedIn and you kind of like give you the description of Foursquare and you say back in 2009, Foursquare made the check-in mainstream.

3:00And today those 13 plus billion check-ins are the foundation of our powerful proprietary Pilgrim technology that helps make sense of where phones go for more than 150 ,000 partners, including Uber, Tencent, Apple, Samsung, and Twitter. So basically, from my understanding is Foursquare knows where people are because they've been checking in and you can sort of match like the Wi-Fi signal and the cell phone location. And so they've been like there's been almost this human reinforcement, right, like where the technology thinks you are. And that's become a valuable service to these companies to figure out where people are.

3:34Yeah, I think like the original kind of big thing that we did was made this crowdsource map of the world, like the same way that Wikipedia is a crowdsource encyclopedia. We made the original crowdsource map of the world based upon people checking into places and adding photos and updating things and a whole community of super users that were tweaking things and updating the hours and updating location if it moves. And that worked really well when there were whatever, 50 million people using the app. And it turns out that that still works pretty well when there's millions of people using the app.

4:06We don't need tens of millions of people using it regularly in order to maintain that data set. um and you know like now we we routinely do partnerships with um with third-party sources so that like you know we take our crowdsource map of the world and then we bring other people's data on top of it and other people's data on top of that and helps us really like clean and normalize things and it just turns out that it's like a really amazing data set and then on top of that like we used all that data to make this you know amazing technology which originally used to be called the Pilgrim SDK. Now it's called the Movement SDK.

4:39And this is like a little piece of software, like an engine that you can put on your iPhone or Android device. And it makes your device kind of conscious of where it is, right? Am I moving? Am I stopped? Okay, I'm stopped. Am I in a coffee shop? Oh, I'm in a coffee shop called Starbucks. Have I ever been here before? I've been here lots of times. Am I familiar with this neighborhood? I know this neighborhood really well, right? So just giving that kind of essence of contextual awareness to different apps is a superpower. And you can build really cool next generation services on top of that. And so that's like a really amazing developer tool that, you know, give people access to.

5:16And then, you know, on top of that, there's this kind of this broad understanding the company has like, well, how are the phones moving through the world? And are they going to Home Depot's? Or are they going to Chipotle's? Or are they going to malls? Or are they going to golf courses? And, you know, that's just like a like an extra layer of intelligence that the platform has and we can turn that into different types of insights and analytic tools um that are interesting to a number of other partners and customers of the company foursquare dominated internet culture for a while right like the idea of being a mayor of like a foursquare place like i had my first tech story that i got published or one of my first ones was about this uh plugin called couch cachet that you know made you seem You remember that?

6:00It made you seem like you had a cool life by like picking, you picked like a different type of night that you wanted to have an artsy night or, you know, binge drinking night and would like post your four square check-ins through the night to your Twitter followers to show like you were, you were actually having a good time. Like this was like a huge part of internet culture. And it also seems in some ways like that era of the, like it was a more fun era of the internet has passed. Yeah. And obviously, like the user numbers, like you've said, we've moved from like maybe 50 to in the 10s. It does seem like that that peak has we've moved beyond it.

6:34So you were front and center. You are front and center. I mean, what do you think caused that shift from that, like more fun and more consumer oriented Internet to whatever we have today? That's a great question. Actually, it's a great discussion too. I mean, there was a period, call it 2009, 2010, when we started, and a lot of these other things got started where you're really just making apps for your friends. And that is super fun. And it's like, may the most fun app survive, right? Like that's how it worked. And as things are starting to grow, you start to get into this race where it's like, okay, all right, Facebook was the biggest thing and then it was Twitter.

7:13and then it's like, well, Instagram's growing, it's Snapchat's growing. Okay, how are we going to monetize these things? Well, it's going to be advertising, all right? Well, it's going to be advertising. We got to get as many users as possible. Just get the numbers up regardless of what you're doing. And so, you know, then you take these products that are kind of niche and small, maybe a couple million users, and you start to, you know, make product changes that make it interesting and accessible and attractive to, you know, tens of millions of users. and in doing so like i think part of the original product loses some of its soul right like an example just from foursquare is like you know we used to have this inherent bias built in that like independent coffee shops and independent restaurants always trump um chains right but then you know a big chain of coffee shops or big chain of like taco places but then as you start to do these like advertising deals with them it's like well you can't really talk trash about the big chains, if they're the ones that are helping to pay the company's bills, then you kind of run into this weird thing.

8:16Well, what are we going to do from a search result perspective? It's the company's opinion that the local tarqueria is always better than the big chain. Well, but the big chain is not happy about being... You run into those types of issues. And then you start to get into the weighting of feeds, the algorithmic feeds, right? And this is like a well-documented a thing where I think a lot of people felt that social media started to feel less fun and less relevant less personal when it was just you showing off what you were doing all your friends all your friends responding to it so like now you're seeing a bunch of strangers and now you're seeing a bunch of brands and now you're seeing a bunch of influencers and it's all just kind of like performance art and you know it's just like the the the structure and the incentive and the meaning and the why for a lot of the stuff as has just changed over time and then there's like a whole generation I think of like you know consumers or users of internet products internet culture that this is all that they know right like they only know algorithmic feeds they only know the for you feeds and this idea of like software that's fun and playful like it's just not their experience of the internet like social media makes you feel bad about yourself and it's you know you're always watching your light count right and like you describe the the period before that stuff was the norm to people and it's totally foreign like they don't remember that they never participated in that and um you know that's kind of the period of the internet that i grew up in right like wicker and dodgeball and delicious and friendster and foursquare and you know early twitter right Before the stuff just got huge and turned into a part of the mass culture machine, these were toys.

10:02Chris Dixon has that great quote, the next big thing starts off looking like a toy. We made the toys. There's a lot of us that made toys beginning on, and then those things grew up to be these big platforms that just change over time. And anyway, so like when I think about building stuff again, I think about it less from like, how do we build the biggest thing possible? And we're like, well, how do you make something just like super fun for people? How do you get people back to this point where like they're using something because they want to use it? Not because it's designed to be addictive, you know, not because we're, you know, engineering dopamine hits into it, but just because like it's like a fun, enjoyable social experience.

10:43Right. And that like brings me to a question, which is, can we change a variable today to get us back to the time where things were fun? Like, is there something that we can change? Is it obviously the pursuit of scale, I think will always be baked in, but is it like a different form of venture capital? Because there's a push and pull here, right? Like if, if we end up having like fun products that take off again, like that's still going to be a good business. Maybe it's not like, you know, massive Twitter business, but it's still something that's going to be worth something to people. So there's got to be people want the Internet to be fun.

11:16There's got to be a void. So I'm just curious if you think there's a way to get us back there. And if so, what do we change? Well, I don't think it's like a variable, but like, you know, I feel like I'm old enough to have remembered a time where I'm like, Yahoo, what could ever be better than Yahoo? and then be like Alta Vista, what could ever be better than Alta Vista, right? For search engines. Right. And then it's like MySpace, who could ever be MySpace, right? Like these things that seem like impossible to deconstruct, like they eventually come tumbling down and then new stuff emerges in its place.

11:53And, you know, even rewind like three years ago, like how the heck is Google going to come apart? And then you start to see like, oh, maybe we're kind of done with search and we're just always using bots and we're always using LLs, right? And so you can start to see, like, maybe there is a changing of the guard that's happening. It's not a variable that you flip or change. Like, well, let's just do this instead of that. But it's just like, you know, maybe the incumbents, this is the part where, like, they just can't move quick enough to keep up with new and emerging technologies. And they'll steadily be, you know, up-and-coming companies, product services that continue to challenge these things that just seemed like indestructible a couple of years ago.

12:37But even if that, so technology shift might be one way to do it, but even if the technology shifts, like you still end up with that pressure that you talked about to scale, right? Like we're seeing even in the AI situation where you have these companies like OpenAI, which have like billions of dollars put into them at an$89 billion valuation. And those pressures to get big and do it in those ways that make things less fun will inherently come to them. And in fact, their mission of like developing AI responsibly, you know, sort of gets tested when they have all that money put into them. So just to put a finer point on it, do you think there's a way of funding tech companies, you know, that can help them retain some of that original character that we talked about that just doesn't put these expectations to scale on them?

13:25Or is it just a fact of the internet economy that if you don't scale, you will shrink? Yeah. Well, this is also a kind of, this is a tricky question because like, you know, there's a difference between building like, Hey, I'm going to build a consumer service and I'm going to, you know, try to do something on the internet in a new way. And I'm going to get a small team of engineers and maybe I raise a little bit money or maybe we just bootstrap it, whatever. Like that, that's one thing. And that's what a lot of us think of when we think about like, oh internet companies internet startups and then you've got this whole other thing where it's like if you're doing you know um a lot of this ai work and you're you you need dedicated hardware and you need specific chipsets like you know you need to raise a huge war chest in order to have access to the server farms that can do the stuff that you need to right there's all these arguments around like hey it's going to be really hard to unseat companies like google and open a open ai and Microsoft and Facebook for exam meta, just because they have all this infrastructure already.

14:27And it may be the case that he or she who has the best infrastructure is the one that ends up winning this round, right? And who knows? But when you're talking about fundraising in general, A, to build something like Foursquare, like we built 15 years ago, it's a totally different model. You would need a smaller team. the tools are much better cheaper easier right you could probably do with five people what we were doing with 10 people back then right to build like a cutting edge uh you know ai company totally different ballgame totally different model totally different cost structure so you know i think venture is always um you know venture exists for a reason to help those companies that need that capital to do those things get what they need in order to scale up right but then you know it's a totally different issue of like, hey, can you still do things, smaller things on the side?

15:18And can those still be relevant, big? Can they still scale? I think that's the thing that still remains to be seen. Yeah. And there's one more point about this, which I'm curious to get your take on, which is that, yeah, you have the VCs pushing for scale, but you also have big tech that's copying and sort of, if you have a good idea and it takes some momentum as a standalone product, it's almost like a sure thing that especially if you're a consumer that a Facebook or a Google will eventually just copy that and then it goes from okay we're scaling we're gaining momentum to all of a sudden oh my goodness like Mark Zuckerberg is going to cut off my growth and then that sort of changes the nature of these things for instance you know you talk about like like checking in like didn't you guys have a situation where all of a sudden like Google starts to make reviews and check-ins part of maps and they just have a much bigger install base so how how big of a factor is big tech in terms of you know what's happened to the consumer internet well i think it's it's less about um i certainly remember the time where it's like gosh we're going to get cut off from the feeds right they'll throttle the feeds in such a way and i think that's less of a growth thing now than it was but like this idea of like hey, can a bigger company be inspired by the work that a smaller startup does and just say, hey, I want this to be in my app and therefore I will make your app less relevant or less special.

16:44Probably the most well-known version of this is Instagram reaching into Snapchat and taking the stories format and saying like, well, this is a brand new format. We would like this format in our app. Does that undercut their growth? Does it commoditize the category and the products a little bit? I think that type of stuff happens all the time. It's probably the most well-known or maybe surgical, perfectly executed version of that. But yeah, I mean, how many breakout apps do you see these days? Maybe it's like one or two a year, really, right? I mean, I'm not as into the scene as I was before, but it used to be like, hey, there's a new thing to play with every month.

17:33Every month, right. And there still is new stuff to play with every day, every month. How much of this stuff really has sticking power? And if something really does get sticking power, does the thing that make it interesting and novel just get sucked into some other product in a way that hinders it or makes it less special? I think that's still a real thing. um that said like you know it's not stopping people that i know from continuing to build things like people aren't like oh shucks it's not even worth doing a startup because facebook's just gonna copy it like yeah no people are you know like there's a certain class of people they're just like you know i like to build things i need to i have an idea i cannot sleep at night until i see this thing exist i will go make this thing that is the thing that makes me happy is building this thing and you know that's i think that's how new stuff gets pushed in the world is people just brute force through all of these you know um hypothetical reasons not to do it last question about this there was a meme that went around a couple weeks ago about how like basically consumer vc is done for what do you think about that um i don't think it's done for like i mean i get i see i see deals all the time people are always pitching me stuff people are still fundraising there's still funds that do this you know um people going out raising 50 million dollars to build a consumer app that doesn't have like runaway traction yeah sure those days are long gone um does that mean that there will never be another head consumer not app like absolutely not are people much more wary to take a bet on one yeah absolutely so um but you know it's just people being more selective there's probably a lot less money to go around and there's a you know people are much uh more cautious about where they place their bets but i don't think it's totally gone right okay let's talk about a bet that you're making and let's just go full circle here because a couple weeks ago uh you threaded i love your threads feed by the way it's great um appreciate that yeah no it's real fun i feel like are you more active there than you were on twitter I'm done with Twitter.

19:42I gave up on it a couple months ago. Yeah, so I do enjoy the stuff that you put out there. Great video of, we all talk about it, of Steve Jobs calling virtual reality like headphones for video. But more to the point, you said, I'm working on a new project. It's an app. I'm walking around NYC today testing it. And one of those, and it's one of the things that just pushed me, made me LOL. well, that is a great feeling as a builder. That is all. And then you gave like the threads hashtag, make the internet fun again. So, you know, we've been, we spent like 20 minutes are talking about how could the internet be fun?

20:19Do people want to build consumer apps? How do you scale them? You have like, by nature of what you're building an answer here. So actually for listeners, I have no idea what Dennis is building. And I think you're going to talk about in public for either the first time or one of the first times now. But what I've heard is that you might have gotten like a band of like the old Foursquare folks back together and are trying to build something not exactly the same, but in that nature. So how do those rumors compare to reality and what's going on? Well, first of all, I just I like to build things, right?

20:54Like I since leaving Foursquare, I've tried to do less building and more like, you know, So it's more company building than product building and advising, right? Because that's kind of what I was doing for a while. But I do like to build stuff. And my last gig at Foursquare was running the R &D lab there. The mandate was take the tools and technology, take all the stuff we've made at Foursquare over the years, and make cool stuff with it. Build cool things. and we we had made like my favorite thing at foursquare i think we ever made was this project called um uh um mars bot for airpods and it was like a city guide for airpods and you would just walk around it would tell you stuff about the city and you know like we we were working on in 2019 i wrote a big blog post about it we were set to launch it at south by southwest in 2020 and then covet right and that's like well that i mean no one's walking around no one's doing anything that project just kind of went back on the shelf and then you know i ended up leaving the company like a year later and i think the project has been turned off and the app has been removed from the store and you know that's like the i i love that product and so um you know like one of the things i'm working on now is like a sequel to that basically it's like okay like this you put your airpods in you walk around it tells you interesting things that are happening about the city right that that old project that we had i mean it was back in 2019 you know we had whatever you know a couple thousand users of it um and you know we're starting to get interesting feedback it wasn't it didn't reach any scale right but like there was enough there to be like there's something really interesting here and that's what we're trying to do with this new version um the thing that we we have now yes there's like a it's like we're in the stage where it's not it's like not a company it's not a product it's like a it's a project right it's a project i'm working on with a couple you know a couple folks that worked at foursquare many many moons ago also and it's called right out called b-bot um which is like what my son uh used to instead of saying robot he would say b-bot and so it's like you know it has like a robot voice that talks to you but i know before we jumped on the pod um i was in the lower east side of new york and you know i walked all the way over here took me about a half an hour and as i'm walking through the lower east side and soho and um the west village it's popping up and it's telling me about like oh this place is interesting and this is this place is new and this is why this is something that's cool going on here um and so you know it's really an exploration of you know of um use like an audio first experience that's built around cities and so sometimes i think of it almost like a version of ways but for people that walk around right like what what's happening around me what should i be what should i know about what should i not know about what should i what should i stay away from what should i flock towards um and so like these are the things like i love this this space like this idea of like you build things for your friends in cities that help them have a better experience in the cities but are also just kind of like a little bit fun and a little bit weird and so you we have like 50 people testing it now.

24:06Most of them are in New York. The feedback is like, it kind of works, but it kind of doesn't. This thing's kind of funny. This thing's really annoying. This thing didn't work. Here's an unexpected bug. So we're in that point where we're at that stage where we're just trying to tune it so it works better. And then you can start to layer the fun and whimsical and weird stuff on top of it. And I feel like that's kind of like my my bread and butter that's the stuff that i love to do yeah so hearing you talk about it it's not like an audio tour it's like not like this is a history yeah go ahead yeah yeah i should have clarified that like it's it's um you know i always thought of like um audio as like poor man's augmented reality right everyone wants to wear the glasses and see this and see the post-it notes the virtual post-it notes like i've seen the glasses i've tried the glasses those glasses aren't happen at any time soon but if you want to play in that space like okay let's just play with audio like i'm wearing these things now i've been wearing them for the last like two hours um like this this works and like you know we were able to tune this enough where it's like you could be on a corner and it's like you'll look up and you're like you look up and it's like let me tell you about the thing you're looking at there's no camera in it you can just do that with the compass the accelerometer with motion with gps right like we're building the thing that we're building it's built on top of the forceware api and the sdk the movement the pilgrim sdk which is now called the movement sdk like it's it's like the same x stack and it's like the same vibe it's just like you know in a in a different state now um but yeah i mean that's like this is the stuff i kind of love build it yeah it sounds great so it will point out like if i'm getting it right historic places but also like cool buildings interesting architecture maybe event spaces or restaurants A little bit of anything.

25:54I think of it as a platform for contextual aware notifications. Cool. When people say notifications, you think of like, oh, I get push messages on my phone with the headlines in the New York Times. It's like, yeah. I feel like there's so much stuff on your phone that's meant to distract you, that's meant to command your attention. You know, like I get a notification. It's like, whoa, why don't you disappear into the phone for a couple minutes instead of being in the real world? And what I want to do is kind of build a notifications platform that is respectful of your attention. Like we're not here to distract you.

26:33We're not here to pull you into the Internet. We are here to augment your experience of the real world. um and like i feel like this is like this is what we were trying to do with foursquare in 2013 you know before things like instagram and snap got so big and people just got lost and endlessly scrolling you know feeds and dopamine hits of likes and and all it's like i have this whole thesis about like this this internet that that i wanted to exist 2009 10 11 12, 13, building Foursquare, building this tech, that internet never happened. It's over here in Bizarro World. And the internet we got is the one that's like, you can just sit and scroll forever.

27:19The algorithm will keep giving you stuff. Spend more time looking at the glass. Spend more time in the feed. Remove yourself from the real world. And it's just like, I get it. That's big. There's a huge ad model behind it. People are making tons of money off that. It's just never been the thing that I'm like passionate about. Like my whole career has been build software for the streets, right? Stuff that helps people pay attention to the real world. And like, I think what I'm trying to do now at this stage of my career is go back to that moment in time, like 2013, where I feel like Four Square had a lot of the stuff right.

27:54We just weren't big enough to make the thing happen. And I want to go back to that and like build the things that like I think should have existed or that should exist in the world. and it starts with this thing, you know, this Bebop thing that we're working on now. Yeah, and then so where does the information that it pulls from come from? A lot of it comes from Foursquare right now. Like the content isn't great. This is something I got to, I got to like, it's on my list of things to fix. I remember I was like sending some Slack messages before we jumped on the call. I was like, okay, we got a problem with content.

28:24I just took a long walk and the content's all screwed up and here's how to fix it. But it's a little bit of Foursquare stuff. It's a little bit of open AI, right? Hey, we found something interesting. give a prompt to open ai and then open ai is like let me tell you something magical about this place but like you know open ai has just got the wrong vibe it's not that it it does its job but like i don't i don't like the job that it's doing um and then some of it is user generated right just people are leaving content and then some of it is being imported from third parties like you send a little bot out on the internet like tell me what find the interesting things that are happening in this neighborhood and then bring them into our ecosystem so that we can relay them out to people So there could also be events like, hey, just so you know, there's going to be an open air concert going on in this field on Thursday?

29:09It can be anything. Yeah, it can be a little nugget of trivia. It could be a daily affirmation. It could be pointing out a street artist. It could be pointing out something's going to happen here in the future. Something happened here last night. Someone just walked by five minutes ago. um and so really just like think of it as like a a platform for delivering these types of like uh respectful notifications um you know and but you know in addition to building the platform we're also you know um you know selling content at the mobile yeah and so it's going to be audio format let's say i'm listening to a podcast will it kind of jump in and be like hey by the way or would i have to have like no audio on otherwise yeah if you're listening to a podcast it will pause it and then it will say its thing.

29:55And, you know, the thing is meant to be like 10 syllables. Like it's short, you know, it's not like, let me give you a 30 second monologue. It's like, here's one sentence, two sentences, we're done. I'm going to go back to your podcast. If you're listening to music, it will lower the volume a little bit. If you're on the phone or doing a video call, it won't interrupt you. It just kind of goes to sleep. You know, but it's meant to be, it's meant to be very light. Like you might go on a walk, you might hear nothing. You know, you might go on a walk, you might hear three things, right? But it's not, it's not meant to be overwhelming right like it's important like i think it's important to kind of note like we i feel like the world is trying to get into this this um this like agentic state right where it's like um there's there's software that is that is looking out and doing tasks for you on your behalf but that that like we don't live in that world we live in a world where these things dominate all of our attention right and all of the things that we address by name siri and google and alexa like they are series going off right those are our creatures that you rub the magic lamp hey siri and siri comes out it's like no no no we're not doing that we are doing the opposite this is like an angel or devil that sits on your shoulder and it taps you and it's like hey i i know you're walking somewhere really fast you got you're really busy you got shit going on let me just tell you about something i think you're gonna like right and so it's kind of flipping the agentic model around right i'm not asking the genie to come out of the lamp like this is the thing that is like proactively giving me a little nugget of info um that is supposed to make my day a little brighter or to make you smile right like that thing like i've been kind of under wraps about this but like when when i was walking down the street the other day and i passed a piece of content it literally made me like laugh out loud and i was like like we got it this is this is the thing right it's a moment where you're like okay this is not this this is a project but this will be a product and it will be a good product because it can make you do that thing like it can make you feel that way even when it's in this like really like basic shitty barely working state yeah all right two more questions for you about it then we can move on first of all we had talked about this before before you basically released it to a handful of people and then while you were testing it and you were very interested in getting some uh feedback from the testing so what have you learned so far yeah um well i wanted to um sorry we punted the date of the podcast because i wanted to like i just wanted some confidence that like a does it work at scale and 50 people is not scale but like okay you put on people's phones they're walking around they're hearing stuff like they're they don't hate it right they give me feedback it's like it's fine it's not great i'm like i can live with that feedback but technically it works um it works um it works well in some places it works okay in other places it's not crashing people's phones it's not making people sick it's not totally annoying people you know it's like okay we got it we got a good a good thing here um and then also like you know the first is like does it even work like can't can we get it to work and then the second thing is like Like, is it fun?

33:06Like, is it worth doing? Is it worth trying to do it at a larger scale? And, you know, yes, the feedback I've gotten from some people, well, from folks who are like, yeah, there's something here that, like, you know, you do it right, it could be delightful, which is really kind of where, you know, my eye bar for it. But then, you know, me walking down the street, having my own experience of like, okay, I get it. I had that moment. I have that confidence. but like i think in that in that um in that thread that you mentioned i should put that in the show notes because i think there's like a little mini thing there right like i mentioned like this idea of like like founder self-doubt like i build lots of stuff and people like seek my opinion out all the time for how to build stuff but like i am still like i don't know can i still do this and study good like should i be doing the list let's go get another job do something else but you know you have to i think sometimes you have to have that moment where you're like okay I, it gave me the, the boost of confidence that like, yeah, yeah, this is, this is the thing.

34:07This is what we do. Now we talk about it, then we build it and we keep doing it. You know, it's just, I just kind of needed that shot in the heart. We spoke for a good chunk of today also about the push to scale and how that can sort of make a fun product, not fun. Let's say it does, you know, get to this point, like, or how are you going to avoid those pitfalls that we discussed? I don't know. You know, like my job right now is like make a thing that works, make a thing that people like, make a field delightful and fun and then figure out how to turn it into a business. Right. Like what do I want to do?

34:42I can add in data business again. No, I am not hungry to do that at all. Could I make it a subscription project? Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, could, could there be, you know, some sponsored content in there, right? Where, you know, people are, are, you know, brands are creating content and scattering them around. Like it's kind of like the stuff we didn't really Foursquare. Sure. Right. Do I have to raise a hundred million dollars to build this thing? No. Can I make it work with a smaller, with a smaller team and kind of like a scrappier business model and maybe like some subscription and sponsorship revenue up front?

35:15Maybe, possibly. Right. So let's, let's just try that. And then, of course, I'm drinking the Web3 Kool-Aid a little bit. I don't want to say NFTs and crypto, but this idea that, hey, there's opportunity for people to own their content. There's opportunity for people to monetize on those platforms. Like I, I, um, like I'm hopeful about that stage of the internet and, you know, I want to build not, not just this. I mean, I have a couple of things I want to build, um, that, you know, I sit, but I hope we'll have the opportunity to participate in that ecosystem when, you know, my own products are mature and that ecosystem is, is mature.

36:00Okay. And is there a link or, I mean, I, if you give me a link, I'll link it in the show notes, but is there like a URL people can go to sign up to a wait list? No. Oh, okay. There's a URL, but it's like, you know, Google form, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I will give you the link, but it's not like, go to this website. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's a good idea though. I should do that. All right. Well, if you give us a link and you want people on the wait list, we will, we will link it. All right. Yeah, I will. I write the show. I'll do this and you can put it in the show notes. Okay, sweet.