In moments like that I really wish there was a comment from a throwaway account of someone working in Foursquare telling how it looks from the side of the employees.
Hi, I'm the VP Eng @ foursquare. I'm sure my perspective is a bit different from shaufler (one of our eng interns who also commented in this thread), but I'll say that the NYTimes piece is pretty accurate. Dens is indeed quite humble, he holds open office hours every week (I've started doing the same), regularly has coffee with random employees, and he tries hard to communicate what's going well or not at our weekly company meetings.
I'm also happy to answer any questions anyone might have about foursquare culture.
i'm a site reliability engineer at foursquare sf, and i think it's very accurate. dennis travels to our office frequently and takes the time to meet with each of us individually, even those of us who work very far away from feature-land. when we're meeting i feel super comfortable saying "this sucks and we ought to fix it." mostly we discuss organizational issues; i generally air technical issues in similar meetings with harry (our eng lead, posted above,) because making engineering work is harry's whole job.
i've worked at high-profile startups with founders who are very media-visible before and dennis is pretty special in my opinion. he seems to genuinely believe that all of us employees are important to making foursquare the best product it can be.
If only "this sucks and we ought to fix it" were not so pervasively condemned in US business culture, it would be much more pleasant to work in; and there are a lot of things which wouldn't be so broken.
I have talked to a fair number of Foursquare employees, and know a few others from outside Foursquare. It really seems like one of the less dysfunctional tech companies, and a bit smaller than I thought.
The only negative anyone ever mentioned isn't really a secret, and some people consider it a positive. They have always been pretty open about not wanting to sell the company, which might be great (Facebook was the same way), and is fine if you already have money, but reduces the chances your equity will be worth $100k to $1mm or so; it may increase the expected value (due to a lower probability but huge success event). It does mean the company is less likely to get bought by a company which marginalizes the product and team, too.
