Keeping Foursquare 'good': In 15 months, the startup’s grown from 250,000 to 8 million members; it's Chrysanthe Tenentes' job to listen to all of them
Chrysanthe Tenentes. Photo by Audrey Evans.
9:32 am Apr. 21, 2011
For the past 15 months, Chrysanthe Tenentes has been part of the team working on one of New York’s most prominent and buzzed-about start-ups: the mobile-social application Foursquare. In January of last year, when she joined, there were about 250,000 Foursquare users. Today, there are more than eight million. It's her job to listen to all of them.
Foursquare’s early adopters were a relatively small but fiercely loyal group that offered private information to help build mostly user-generated content—restaurant locations and “tips” for meals or activities. In exchange, they got a robust application that helped them connect with friends and colleagues, learn about new places to eat or shop or visit, and generally do what the web does (facilitate exploration), but individualized for a certain city or town or place, with data that comes from the user's own digital network.
Today, Foursquare's eight million users speak different languages and are spread out all over the world. Now, businesses from restaurants to media companies to TV and movie studios are counting on Foursquare to help them collect information, woo loyal customers and, eventually, gather their own communities.
Foursquare is growing up, beyond its parochial beginnings but also beyond the honeymoon period of what could feel at times like a giant, fun, good-natured game; it's a bigger company with ambitious business plans.
31-year-old Tenentes is called the Community Manager. It's a title that has a lot of cachet among young techies, and typically the Community Manager's job is to act as a conduit between a new generation of consumers on social networks and giant, amorphous corporations. Sometimes the title is synonymous with the honcho salesperson whose main responsibility is to scale up the size of the user base, with little regard to the spirit of the thing at its roots.
Part of Tenentes’ job is keeping that from happening at Foursquare, ever.
For Foursquare, its community, and the ability to make them feel heard, cared for, and protected, is also an important part of the business. In a way, Tenentes’ job at Foursquare is to Not Be Evil, even as the company gets more serious.
Tenentes addresses users' privacy concerns, user-experience problems, and feature requests; there are all kinds of technical, emotional, and psychological issues among Foursquare’s users, who number roughtly the size of New York City's entire population: “How come my location isn’t always accurate?”; “How long until I become mayor?”; “How do I find friends?”;“How do I delete friends?”
And they aren’t always so polite and patient either ("Foursquare sucks").
“When people hate on Foursquare and they direct it at me, it definitely feels like a personal attack,” Tenentes said on a recent overcast day, sitting in a small conference room in Foursquare’s Cooper Square office, just a few floors from the Village Voice. She wore her long, wavy brown hair loose, falling over a stylish eggplant-colored blouse, a green cardigan, and fitted jeans (she often blogs about fashion and design on her Tumblr), and had left a desk behind that was littered with cans of seltzer and Post-It notes marked with reminders of appointments and meetings.
“I’ve definitely had moments where I’ve melted down because of my inbox,” which is typically stacked with correspondence to Foursquare’s engineers for technical difficulties (“It won’t sign me in on my BlackBerry!”), the marketing manager for gameplans on Tweet language and blog posts explaining new partnerships (“Check-in to a "Real Housewives"-approved restaurant and get a Bravo badge!”) and the small team she has assembled during the past 15 months to communicate feature requests (Pictures! Comments! International phone number compliance!) and help answer users’ questions.
Sometimes that involves one-on-one service. This past March at South by Southwest, the yearly part-conference, part-Burning Man for techies across the country, she gave actor and Foursquare investor Ashton Kutcher an in-person tutorial on the application’s new features, which were launched in time for the festival in Austin, Texas. “He gave me a high-five,” she said.
“I want to help everyone,” Tenentes said. “I would love to be able to give people a direct answer,” which she tended to do at first. If a user reported a problem with the service? “I would just literally say it out loud and someone would answer me,” Tenentes said, and an engineer would take it from there.
Her co-workers, who at the beginning numbered about half a dozen, were gathered around a single long table in their Cooper Square office, which they shared with other startups. Now Foursquare owns an entire floor, and the team has grown to more than 50 people.
“We have project managers and team leads and we have different teamlets,” Tenentes said.
“A lot of folks in the office are so bogged down with ‘big picture’ problems (future direction of product, strategy, etc.) that she's our eyes and ears for what's happening to new users, what's happening abroad, what's happening with our best and most passionate users,” Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley wrote in an email while on a plane to San Fransisco last week. “There's something about the level of empathy she's able to share with users around the world that makes her very good at representing our 8 million-plus user community internally. Sometimes it feels almost like she's their ‘elected representative’ and the community expresses their big asks through her.”
In other words, Tenentes voices the concerns of Foursquare’s 8 million users to its busy founders, engineers, and marketers. She is also a human core for to a technical platform that uses a bunch of bits and code to not only connect people to places, but connect people to people—in the real world, offline, away from screens.
“She loves to bring people together just to bring them together—she never would expect anything in return,” said Dorothy McGivney, a friend of Tenentes and publisher of travel site Jauntsetter. McGivney and Tenentes run the North Brooklyn Breakfast Meetup, which brings together entrepreneurs and techies largely from Williamsburg and Greenpoint for a Friday morning meal, who then offer quick demos of their products. The founders of text message-meetup application GroupMe and sustainable fashion designer Bright Young Things, are just a couple who have presented their businesses to the group for their questions and ideas.
Tenentes also joined Brooklyn Based, a newsletter and events service, in 2008 and quickly became managing editor, organizing events like a bridal fashion show and food crawls for Brownstoners and Williamsburgers.
“You can tell she gets so much joy of seeing people in her life connect and that in itself is reward enough for her making these introductions, connections,” McGivney said. “It's all very natural for her.”
McGivney said part of their goal with the breakfast meetup is to get tech entrepreneurs away from the glow of their laptops and be able to wave at peers as they walk down Bedford Avenue.
All of this work with inherently neighborly pursuits is part of the spirit Foursquare wants to keep, even as it aggressively seeks to grow and monetize.
Foursquare is not at the 500-million-member Facebook or Twitter with its 200 million registerd accounts level, of course. But if their plan succeeds, and they get really, really big, keeping the real-life, personalized feel of the company is important.
