Foursquare executives pocket $4.6M for themselves from funding
After the popular check-in service Foursquare finally closed its second round of funding in June after much speculation in the press, the company announced it had secured $20 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others. According to a recent SEC filing, the top executives are taking a $4,636,688 cut out of the total – which, to be exact, is four dollars shy of $20 million.
The filing deems the $4.6 million to be “used for payments to any of the persons required to be named as executive officers, directors or promoters.” The filing lists three people that match these criteria: Dennis Crowley (pictured), co-founder and CEO of Foursquare, co-founder Naveen Selvadurai and board member Albert Wenger. However, since Wenger is a venture capitalist with Union Square Ventures that has put money into Foursquare, it’s unlikely he would take a share of this, even though he is listed as a possible recipient in the filing.
After the founders take their cut, the company is left with roughly $15.4 million to spend on building their operations. According to a blog post Crowley wrote in June after closing the second round funding, the company intends to use the money to hire new people, mostly engineers, to develop its products further, as well as getting new office space. There has also been some speculation that the funding gives Foursquare an opportunity for making acquisitions, specifically that Foursquare would be interested in acquiring Thing Labs, who is known for Brizzly, a third-part Twitter and Facebook client. (The companies denied this rumor.)
In any case, Foursquare is growing rapidly and it will be interesting to see how the company will differentiate itself from the competition in the hot – and increasingly crowded – location space.
[Photo: Guido van Nispen]
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Companies: Andreessen Horowitz, Facebook, Foursquare, Thing Labs, Twitter
People: Albert Wenger, Dennis Crowley, Naveen Selvadurai
About the Author, JP Manninen
JP (jp@venturebeat.com) is a Finnish tech journalist working on a series of stories on location-based services for VentureBeat. Back home, JP works for the Finnish newspaper Kaleva and specifically their technology-related news service called HighTech Forum. Currently he is taking part in the InJo Fellowship Program at Stanford University. JP lives in San Francisco and likes to ride bikes.
