uberlife’s Real Champions interview series has seen us getting face-to-face and hanging out with inspiring individuals from tech, media, music, design and fashion to to learn a bit about them, their motivations and how they have achieved such awesome things.

First up is one of our favourite people in the world, Dennis Crowley, who we caught up with at Le Web last month - the co-founder of foursquare, and a majorly humble guy who first founded dodgeball, one of the first mobile social service in the US, which was acquired by Google in 2005.  

foursquare has reached 15,000,000 users in less than 3 years - a service that combines social networks, location awareness and game mechanics to encourage people explore the world around them.

uberlife (Sanchita):  Who’s the most inspiring person or people that you’ve hung out with in the last 12 months, how have they inspired you and in what way?

Dennis:  I’ve always been inspired by my Dad, who was also an entrepreneur, and I think a lot of the stuff that we are doing now, like generally doing your own thing, starting your own business, I think I learned a lot of that from him. More recently I think the team that we’ve assembled at foursquare is really inspiring in a sense, it sounds like a corny answer but we’ve assembled this great team of almost 100 people that are all really excited by what we’re doing and everyone’s pushing so hard in the same direction.

Sanchita: I hear one of your criteria for hiring is that they have to have been on foursquare for a certain amount of time or have a certain amount of check-ins, is that true?

Dennis: Yea in the early days we wanted potential hires to be fanatic foursquare users because they‘d have to really be into the product. But now we almost like it if the candidate doesn’t like foursquare for some reason because we want people who can come in and find better ways to do things for us. Maybe they would use it more if it were like this or that, and these kind of people are pushing us to evolve and improve foursquare in different ways.

We’ve done a great job with the early adopter crowd, we have 15 million users so not quite mainstream but on the way, and therefore we still need a little help with tweaking the product to get it there.

Sanchita: Ok, so if you could hangout anywhere in the world where would it be and what would you be doing?

Dennis: I’d probably be snowboarding in Canada, I love working for foursquare but I love the idea of snowboarding in Canada just as much if not more!

Sanchita: We spend so much of our time on online social networks, where do you see the value of offline networking, going to events like Le Web, meeting new people and engaging with your fans and peers in person?

Dennis: We come to stuff like this to promote what we’re doing in Europe, right now we’ve got some business development in London and we’re excited about working with some companies in Europe who like our product and vision. It’s also great to come and connect with other entrepreneurs in different start-ups spaces and cultures, like London, Berlin, Paris etc.

It seems like everyone happens to be at LeWeb right now, and a lot of these contacts turn in to interesting opportunities for us, maybe not next week, but a couple of months down the road. For example I cant even tell you how many people I’ve been in touch with from last year because they’re doing stuff which builds off the foursquare API or they have a business contact they want to introduce us to. This whole event is just great for connecting with people.

Sanchita: Looking back at the last 12 months what has been your highest moment and your lowest  moment?

Dennis: From a business perspective it’s touch to pick one highest moment for the year. Anyone who’s created or worked in a startup will know that it can be a roller-coaster life day to day - like Monday can be really lousy and then all of a sudden Tuesday is fine so the whole thing is a lot of up and downs. That said, probably one of the best moments was going to SXSW in Austin, Texas, and seeing just how much foursquare has grown in the last year. In terms of bad moments…

Sanchita:  Any head in the hands moments in the last 12 months??

Dennis: Oh, like three of them every day! Like when we are trying to hire someone and we can’t get them or we want something to launch and the date slips a bit or sometimes we’ve done an interview and the person didn’t get the message we wanted them to get from it etc. These moments happen all the time, literally every day.

For those people who think that our journey is and has been a rocket ship ride with rainbows and unicorns everywhere should know that it’s actually really hard. People have arguments from pushing back and forth from each other with product decisions, as the company gets bigger it breaks and we have to fix it, so it’s an ever-present work in progress, it’s a lot of work.

Sanchita: And what is it in you that helps you get over these never-ending challenges?

Dennis: It’s probably that if I wasn’t doing this I have no idea what I would be doing. The reason that I actually started foursquare was that there wasn’t another company out there that I wanted to work for, and if foursquare went away today there still isn’t another company I’d like to work for. We have these ideas and visions that we don’t see in other companies, so the opportunity that we have at foursquare is such a great one.

Considering the 15 million users and that we have this platform that people listen to, we find it super motivating and rewarding. Just today riding in a cab with these Russian guys and telling them I worked at foursquare and their reaction, like, “oh we love foursquare” is awesome and a great reward for all the hard work.

Sanchita: Thanks so much for hanging out with uberlife.

Dennis: Thanks so much, it was fun.