Foursquare Raised $411 Million, Then Sold for Nothing to Shareholders, and Its Founder Blames the Banker CEO

Foursquare, the check-in app that helped define New York's startup scene, is gone, and the people who built it got nothing. The company raised more than $411 million over its life, yet its sale to advertising company Infillion appears to have paid its shareholders zero. Co-founder Dennis Crowley is now saying so in public, and he is pointing at the leadership that ran the company for its last six years.

The story started in 2009 around Crowley's kitchen table in the East Village. It ended about a month ago, when Infillion acquired Foursquare on undisclosed terms.

The paperwork that said zero

Nobody announced a price. Crowley pieced the outcome together from an early angel investor's deal documents, and in a long farewell post he quotes what he found around page 50: each share of preferred stock was "cancelled and extinguished, without any conversion thereof or payment of any cash or other property or consideration therefor, and ceased to exist."

His reading is blunt: "a $0 outcome for equity holders, $0 for preferred, $0 for common."

He says nobody expected a giant exit. There was a large stack of capital to repay before common stock saw a cent, and many employees' vested options and RSUs had already expired. "But seeing it go to zero is hard to accept," he writes. "I was heartbroken by this ending."

He also addressed the roughly 1,600 people who worked there over 17 years: "I am sorry the Foursquare story ended in such a way that makes it seem like our collective efforts were worth… nothing?"

From $100 million years to nothing

The zero is striking because Foursquare was not a failed app that never found revenue. After pivoting from consumers to enterprise location data, it publicly touted more than $100 million in revenue in 2019, 2020 and 2021.

In 2019, fresh off acquiring Placed, Foursquare raised money from a private equity firm. Nineteen months later, in January 2021, the banker who had led that raise became CEO. Crowley's verdict on what followed: "Leadership was unable to preserve the value it inherited or create new value during those six years."

He says dozens of current and former employees reached out to share their frustration, and that Glassdoor holds "40 pages" of criticism. The consumer app, the thing most people remember, was shut down in 2024.

His own share of the blame

Crowley does not let himself off. He ran Foursquare as CEO for its first seven years before stepping aside in 2016, kept a day-to-day role in the R&D Lab until 2021, and chaired or co-chaired the board for all 17 years. He raised the equity and the debt, and he says his own decisions are why the company needed that 2019 private equity money.

"I could have pushed harder as a board member," he writes, while noting he held one of seven seats. He calls falling in love with the company maybe the biggest mistake of his career, and says he stayed longer than he should have. He still claims its consumer ideas went on to shape features in Google Maps and Snapchat.

Learning it from an email

What seems to sting most is how staff found out. Current employees had an in-person all hands, yet learned their shares were worthless from an email sent by Foursquare's legal team. Former employees got an email from Carta, with the details buried in a 125-page PDF.

"No single individual stood up to own (or even acknowledge) the outcome," Crowley writes. Startups that end badly usually leave something behind, whether code, data or customers, and sometimes those leftovers get shopped around. At Foursquare, the people who did the work were left with a PDF.

"You all deserved better," he wrote.

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