Speaker 2
So let's unpack that for one second. If you've never heard of four-square, which is possible, this was an app. You would tell people what you were doing. You would check in. Yeah.
Speaker 1
It was. It started with the thesis of, let's make software that makes cities easier to use. Yeah. And the idea is if you got people to check in to lots of places, we would learn about the places that you went to, learn about what you like, what your friends like, and we'd help you find great places. You'd create a city guide. Yeah.
Speaker 2
It's like a living, breathing city guide based on what you and your friends like to do. So we can talk about how that evolved. Sure. That at some point, that sort of had stalled out, and you guys went to a B2B where you took, basically said, we have a lot of data here that's really interesting. Yeah. What can we do with that?
Speaker 1
At the start, it was more like, at that time, considering the size of the company and what we needed to do in order to build the technology that we were building, we realized like, listen, you need to be Twitter scale, Snapchat scale, Instagram scale, to really make money off of advertising in the app, and that we just weren't going to hit that scale. Right.
Speaker 2
So you guys reach that conclusion, say, someone else should be running the company, we can talk about how that works. Sure, sure. And so for the last three years as executive chairman, you're still working there full time. What does the job entail today? Yeah. It's
Speaker 1
like executive chairman, executive means it can work all the day, right? And so I work on four-square labs, such as our skunk works, R&D group. And our group is a task is to make interesting things with four-square data and technology, things that no other company could make because they don't have access to tools. And really things that no other company would make because they don't have our spirit of this, making things that make cities easier to use. And so I spend a lot of time doing that. I do some stuff like this, like evangelism for the company. And then just like, I'm like the chief connector of dots at four-square. So I listen to what people are happy about or angsty about, and I try to fix those things by bringing people together.