After Years of Challenges, Foursquare Has Found its Purpose -- and Profits
In the spring of 2016, Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck went on CNBC to make a bold prediction: Chipotle comparable sales would fall by 29 percent in its first quarter. The network’s anchor seemed skeptical. The fast-food chain was reacting to some health scares at the time, but no one was predicting nearly as steep a drop in revenue. “What is the technology here? What have you got that enables you to do this?” the anchor asked.
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Glueck was basically fishing for this question. Foursquare had reinvented itself as a location intelligence company for business, but it was in the painstaking process of shaking off its image as a forgotten consumer app. Glueck had been making the rounds for less than a year, seeding the market with all kinds of predictions based on his company’s data -- how many new iPhones Apple would sell, or how well McDonald’s all-day breakfast launch was going. The Chipotle forecast was the boldest yet, and it held true. Two weeks after Glueck’s appearance on CNBC, the Mexican eatery reported sales had fallen 29.7 percent from a year earlier.
Boom. Foursquare for the win.
Glueck’s Nostradamus act was a long time in the making -- the result of a process that was set in motion four years earlier, in 2012, when Foursquare cofounder Dennis
