In 2005 Dennis Crowley sold Dodgeball, his first location based startup, to Google. At the time, Dodgeball had just 30,000 users.
Crowley and Google parted ways in 2007, a decision he explained simply.
It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us – especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space. And while it was a tough decision (and really disappointing) to walk away from dodgeball, I’m actually looking forward to getting to work on other projects again.
In January 2009 Google shut down Dodgeball. In March of that same year, Crowley and co-founder Naveen Selvadurai launched Foursquare.
Today Crowley tweeted that his new startup, Foursquare, is adding 25,000 users every day.
Foursquare has been having technical problems recently; its website went down several times in the past week because too many users were checking in.
But if the company can manage its growth, things are looking very promising.
With mobile and Android exlpoding, Google probably wishes it had shown Crowley a little more love when it had the chance.
