Not to be a hater or be a potential-Twitter-doubter, and my thoughts about the product aside, what do these guys need $20 million for? The only exit for a company like FourSquare is a buyout, and is someone really going to pay $30m or $40m for FourSquare?
marc andreessen did a talk a few months ago at Stanford (get it at ecorner.stanford.edu) where he talks about how the mobile app market looks a lot like the early days of boxed software - a million half-decent attempts but nothing really amazing.
and then came microsoft.
the world of mobile apps seems at present to be an arms race and most of that $20m is likely going to be spent on the guns and bombs of the tech world: great engineers.
The last time this company was acquired, it was called Dodgeball. Google bought the talent, canned the project, and then the founders quit and reimplemented it under a different name (Foursquare.) I'd be wary of buying the company for the engineers after an outcome like that.
Maybe you wouldn't worry if you were buying the product to develop it and were not planning on throwing it in the closet to wither. I think Dennis was under the impression that they would continue developing the project, not just paying for his talent.
The foursquare guys really do believe in the idea. If I had what I thought to be a great idea, and someone canned it and told me to do some other work, I would quit and start over too.
Right, it would have to be a few hundred million for the VCs to make anything back. This product is either going to have to get a much larger userbase, become ridiculously compelling, or develop some sauce that's worth buying.
There were rumors of Yahoo eying the purchase of Foursquare a few months back for $100 million. Even though this never happened and was merely a rumor, I do believe someone might be interested in paying $30-40 mil for it.
