it’s hard to believe that now, three years later, instead of one hundred beta testers, the company has over a hundred incredibly talented employees helping us realize that vision. and they’re building amazing things.

in that time, i’ve worn a ton of hats: from product to engineering, from funding rounds to roadshows, from recruiting to evangelizing. but, after three years, i feel i’ve done all i can do and i’m moving on. dennis and i have been discussing timing for a while, and we decided that now, on this anniversary, it feels right to begin the transition. so this will be my last month working at foursquare. over the course of the next few weeks, i’m going to be taking a step back as my final projects near their release.

i’ve always been here for the company and i always will be. i look quietly around the office every once in a while as the team works (not. creepy. at. all.) and i can’t tell you how proud i am of everyone. we’ve brought together an incredibly special group – one that’s going to go down in history – and they’re going to keep making us all proud.

going forward, i’m going to continue to be connected to the company: i’m on the board, i’ll still be advising, and i’m obviously going to be the single most vocal user. but the spring is time for things that are new, and i realize that i have a desire to do something new as well. i’m not sure about my exact next steps, but i’ll probably get back to what i love most – being an entrepreneur, learning and building new things.

three years ago, we took an idea and threw it into the world. i’m going to miss the crazy intensity that is foursquare, but am excited to see where it all goes from here.

we were two people when we first landed here in may 2009. we’re now 100. it’s become standing-room-only in this office, so we have to move to bigger digs. i’m really going to miss this space and being in the east village a lot. we’ve all been looking back on how the office changed and how we’ve changed (we were so young back then!).

as it always does, new york changed a lot too and it got me thinking about a before-and-after of the neighborhood:

then: the scratcher was like our living room. now: the scratcher is still our living room, but it can’t fit all of us.

then: the cooper square hotel had just opened. now: as of a few weeks ago, it became the standard east village.

then: the 185-year-old 35 cooper square, home of the asian pub, was a favorite hang across the street from the office. now: the 35 cooper asian pub has closed and was demolished in winter 2011 after a long battle with the landmarks commission.

then: the cooper union got a new identity by way of a new academic building, 41 cooper square, which had just finished construction. now: the cooper union undergoing a bit of an identity crisis as it figures out finances and ponders whether to start charging students tuition for the first time in its history.

then: the street in front of the office was ripped open and under construction, for god knows what. now: the street in front of the office is ripped open and under construction, for god knows what.

mari’s got a great set of photos that has as selection of a few of the best memories from the last couple of years: it’s titled “36 cooper”, appropriately.

to soho!

it’s been talked about quite a bit before [1] and a conversation with fred recently brought it back up: i like to see coding as being a bit like art. it’s one of those skills for which you should at least learn the basics. you may not get very good at it, and that’s fine, but in learning how to do it, you’ll get three things:

- it’ll make you appreciate how it’s done and how an engineer’s mind works;
- it’ll give you a different perspective on whatever it is you do during your day job;
- it’ll give you the ability to make something out of nothing – like painting on a blank white canvas!;

the follow-up i tell people is that they should “learn by doing” [2]. that is, to pick a small project of some sort and to see it through to the finish. the smaller and easier, the better, as you’ll be able to realize a working product you can hold, appreciate and show your friends. it almost doesn’t matter what language or platform you pick, as long as you pick something that you can finish and that you dreamt
up.

over the last couple of sundays, i’ve started to make stuff on the side again. i take a sunday here and there to try to learn something new. sometimes these projects are foursquare-related and, sometimes, they are things i’ve seen others do and was curious to learn. nearly everything i do on a day-to-day basis exists in the digital world, so i’ve started seeking old-school, slowed-down, hand-made experiences that we haven’t done in a while.

recently, jealous that mari can paint so well, i decided to try my hand at learning to paint. i decided to take my own advice. i’m aiming to learn and to make something that i can hang on a wall: be it a painting or some other sort of programmatic art. i’m trying to bring my knowledge of code to art and to programatically create art from data. my first project is one i’ve been thinking about for a while: i’m trying to visualize what i know of my dna. i hope to hang this on a wall someday soon.

last week, my buddy steve shared a quote with me:

“building software is the last thing we do by hand.”

it’s a clever way of looking at how art has progressed.

it’s the last art that will allow us to make something out of nothing.

—
notes:

1. pg, hackers & painters.
2. i watched the eames documentary last weekend and i noticed they talk a lot about this ‘learn-by-doing’ philosophy. it’s a great doc, you should put it on your list for 2011.

i will always remember this as one of the greatest moments in my life. we talked for a while – about travel, about gadgets (we compared notes on our favorites and the crazy watches we both like to wear), about the “other” steve and about apple history. i obviously wasn’t around for the early days of apple, but from what i know from stories i’ve read, he seemed to be every bit the man he was back then. he had such love for technology and such energy for telling stories. i imagined him as the same energetic guy he was back in the late 1960s, before all we know of him came around.

he reminded me a lot of my dad and his non-stop energy for all-things-technical. my dad too was a tinkerer and an engineer at heart, even way back when he lived in india. legendary in the family are stories of how he built, from scratch, toys like smoke alarms and short wave transistor radios. (one story tells of how he and his brother would use their radio to listen to chinese broadcasts from home during the sino-indian war).

i’ve been slowly working my way through the steve jobs biography and i couldn’t help but get caught up in the romanticism of the 60s. i imagined what it would have been like to have been around in “silicon valley” back in those days. the jobs biography mentions how baby steve was adopted from michigan to california. it briefly mentions the idea that if he hadn’t moved to california, how different the last three decades would’ve been. there were so many smart, like-minded guys all living in close proximity and dreaming about the future – and more importantly, working together in small ways to build that future.

it then got me thinking about this idea of the “being in the right place at the right time”. i wondered what my dad would’ve done if he’d grown up in california in the 60s instead of india. i couldn’t help, as i read the book, but draw parallels and to imagine my dad as one of the engineers and hackers living in those times.

no matter whether you believe in fate or free will, they both affect many paths in life: from the college we go to, to where we live, to the jobs we take and to the people we run into and with whom we become friends and lovers. but i think the most powerful of these factors is location – where we are now and where we choose to live. i think that location, more than anything else, is a powerful determinant of which path one will take in life.

i sometimes think about this, having made the move from india to america so long ago. i want to say my family thought about moving to other places in the world: dubai, singapore, london. but the usa was the path we chose. from india to connecticut, to massachusetts and then on to new york. and if you want to get really local: from my uptown, big company life to my downtown, startup life. and i think about where my path is going in future.

rewind it back to 2004. i was working at sony, leading a small team that was working on building a music platform and an app store for mobile phones. as a part of my job, i got to travel quite a bit. i particularly spent a lot of time in asia. as one usually does, i would turn to my friends for recommendations for places to which i should go. over time, i started creating crude hacks so that i could keep lists of such things, either in raw form or somehow backed with geocodes and metadata. the latter was especially useful in asia where the languages made it very hard to find your way around and to find your way back to your favorite shops.

in 2006, inspired by one of my most favorite sites at the time, del.icio.us, i decided to start hacking on a “delicious for places”. in fact, the first pass at trying to invent something to remember places saw me trying to tag places and metadata on top of delicious. at the time, i really liked the idea of using delicious like a datastore that could be used to store all sorts of data and then queried based on tags. (think: memcache). then i morphed this system to its own backend and gave it a name: placefuse. (uhh, don’t ask. i was young and poor and the domain was available). and just like with delicious, you could tag all your favorite places. you could then query your history using tags – these would automatically create lists of places. and then, depending on which interface you were using – web or mobile or smartphone – these queries would automatically render the appropriate views (kml if you were coming from a maps app, xhtml if you were on mobile web, …). there were a couple of reserved tags, including one called “go”, which is sort of a precursor to the idea of a to-do list. if i hadn’t yet been to a place, i couldn’t tag it with one of the standard tags, so it would get marked “go” so it could be called upon when i felt like trying something new.

in 2007, i left sony with a big desire to start anew. i knew i wanted to start up something to solve this local discovery problem. and i knew i wanted to build it on mobile – it’s the platform with which i was most familiar, having worked on it since leaving college. in may of that year, i started working with some friends on their local startup (socialight) in an unassuming office in union square. while working on this project, i spent nights and weekends continuing to iterate on small projects and hacks on the side.

it was in this office space that i ended up meeting dennis. we started sharing our ideas and thinking and, after a while, collaborating on an idea that would bring all this together. these collaborations became foursquare. but that’s a story for another time.

this time around, we’re doing something that’s long been a wish of mine: to do a truly global hackathon. it’ll starts in tokyo when the sun rises on saturday morning and finish in san francisco where the sun sets on sunday evening. forty-eight hours, non-stop.

we’re hosting it in four official cities (tokyo, paris, nyc, sf) and then in more than 100 (!) unofficial, user-organized cities around the world

the official wiki/start page is here: https://github.com/foursquare/hackathon/wiki/Foursquare-Global-Hackathon

i think there’s something really interesting here. it’s part an experiment in how such an event can work: will people collaborate across the world on the same project? how will people talk to each other and keep up with remote locations? …

lots of credit to the platform and marketing team at foursquare for putting this one together!

with the recommendation of mari and a few others, i picked up a panasonic gf1, which packs the basic sorts of SLR features in a compact frame. i made a goal to carry the camera around everywhere, both here in nyc as well as when i travel. (i envisioned i’d be like bill cunningham: going around the city with it always by my side). i carry my iphone4 with me everywhere and use that quite a bit to take pictures and to tell a story. but i wanted something a little more powerful that i could use to learn more about photography and to get me to take better pictures.

i took a lot of photos over the last few months, but i never really shared most of them anywhere.

so, last night, i decided to choose a few of them, do a little postprocessing (learning new skills!) where necessary and i have started publishing them on tumblr. it took a little while for me to decide which platform i wanted to use to post my photos (flickr? 500px? tumblr? roll my own?) but in the end i decided to stick with tumblr (more on that hard decision in a future post). my tumblr used to be a rehashing of other people’s posts and random commentary sprinkled here-and-there of things i found interesting. too often, it felt like i was posting things there for postings-sake, instead of learning something and making something. so i’ve decided instead to make it all about original posts: photo posts.

follow ∞ – my photo blog.

A great, chill city with an eye for design and cycling. We stayed in a hip loft hotel in Islands Brygge, which I imagine is their version of a SoHo/Williamsburg–that is, after all the artists moved out and hip people moved in. Like Tokyo, it’s definitely one of those “We have to go back, Kate!”-type places.

Follow https://foursquare.com/naveen/list/copenhagen

I’m dreaming of a day when I will be able to more closely embed such a list on my blog. It could be a great hack day project (our hackathon is coming up in two weeks)

MoMA’s ‘Talk to Me’ is a look at how people interact and communicate with objects. It reminds me of something a little like MoMA’s curators putting together an ITP show.

I am particularly excited about this because I’m sort of in the show. I didn’t fully know it at the time I signed up, I got to play a role in one of area/code’s games at the exhibit: Helix. Loose attempt at explaining all this: area/code used SNP data and traits from my DNA (via 23andme) to create a card game that I could play against another person. Each person’s deck of cards fits some profile of their DNA. Each card has sides with one of four colors and the player’s job is to create a chain (strand) with the cards. The person to collect the most cards (ie, the most strands) at the end of the game wins the game.

Be sure to catch the project there – Talk to Me.