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Comment by lawrence | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, this is an interesting topic. Why did Foursquare win? Was it anti-cheating provisions that were too strict in the early days? New York vs. Austin? Better PR? Simpler product? Dodgeball users as jumpstart? Who knows. One thing we do know was that it wasn't money.

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I think it's pretty clear that Dennis Crowley has been thinking about this problem space for more than a decade, and foursquare is the third (fourth?) iteration on his original vision.

Agree, but not sure what that has to do with execution. More passion? More expertise? You think that's why 4sq won?

I presume it means that, having seen things from the inside out, his team knows winning and losing things to spend time on.

Nearly every startup ends up with a list a mile long of potential features, ideas, refinements, communities, partners and revenue sources. Being able to pick out the right few to work on (and what to say no to) is maybe the most important skill a startup CEO can have.

A founder who has been around the same space for a long time can use past experience and intuition where a newly-minted CEO knows very little and is actually best off when they recognize that.

Why do you think money wasn't a factor? Foursquare raised significantly more than Gowalla (according to Crunchbase, $71m vs $10m), and as a result grew a much larger team and presumably spent a lot more on marketing.

Actually, until mid-2010, Gowalla raised more money, earlier, than foursquare did. By then, the "check-in wars" were pretty much over.

Per Crunchbase[1][2]:

In 2008, Gowalla raised $2m, foursquare raised nothing. In 2009, Gowalla raised $8.29m, foursquare raised $1.35m. In 2010, Gowalla raised nothing, foursquare raised $20m. But by the time this happened (June 2010), the "check-in wars" were over (e.g., see: http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/07/foursquare-gowalla-stats/).

[1] http://crunchbase.com/company/gowalla [2] http://crunchbase.com/company/foursquare

That's really interesting, I didn't know that.

To make it even more spicy, according to wikipedia, Gowalla actually launched 2 years prior to foursquare[1]. Dodgeball was founded in 2000.

[1]The article says 2009, wikipedia says 2007?

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