Foursquare wants more B2B play amid CEO shuffle
If a "state of flux" were an actual location, that's where Foursquare would likely be checked into right now.
The geo-locating discovery app is moving in a number of new directions, both in terms of leadership and its actual business.
At the top, co-founder Dennis Crowley announced via Medium that he would be stepping down as chief executive officer and into the role of executive chairman.
Crowley will be replaced by Foursquare's chief operating officer Jeff Glueck. Chief revenue officer Steven Rosenblatt has been tapped as president and what Crowley described as "Jeff's co-pilot."
But all of this is to take Foursquare in not so much of a different direction but a wider one as the primarily consumer-focused social media brand ramps up efforts to entertain enterprise clientele.
Rosenblatt, especially, will be tasked with overseeing Foursquare's enterprise department covering both analytics and developer tools on top of strategic partnerships and business development.
In Thursday's letter, Crowley highlighted some of Foursquare's dedicated B2B solutions, including a geo-based programmatic platform Pinpoint and the foot-traffic analytics tool Place Insights.
"With our business maturing and with our enterprise solutions (Places API, Place Insights) and as programmatic advertising platform (Pinpoint) fueling our revenue growth, I felt like now is the right time to put our strongest executives in the company's top leadership positions," Crowley continued.
Somewhat acknowledging that new leadership alone won't achieve all of Foursquare's new goals, Crowley briefly noted the San Francisco-based company recently raised $45 million in a new round of venture capital funding to fuel its B2B play.
In his own Medium post, Glueck backed up Crowley's enterprise notes, elaborating on more ambitious plans to cater to developers, marketers and analysts as well as consumers.
"We are now a fast-growing location intelligence company, making consumer experiences richer and informing business solutions," Glueck touted, citing Apple, Twitter and Pinterest as some of its more famous customers along with a pool of more than 100,000 developers using Foursquare data on their apps.
Without providing specific dollar results, Glueck also revealed Place Insights and the Places tools for developers grew revenues by 170 percent and 160 percent respectively in 2015.
Glueck said the fresh flush of Series E funding be directed toward growing its location intelligence platform and its workforce, including 30 new positions across sales and engineering, among other departments.