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Networking in a Shared Office Space: The Story of the Foursquare Co-Founders

January 18, 2012     No comments

Mashable.com reports: Today, Foursquare is a successful social networking community with over 15 million members worldwide, and the company has 100+ employees developing innovative new products that help make the “real world” easier to use. But how did it all get started?

Back in 2007, co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai were working at different companies in a shared office space. There in that environment, they became friends, started chatting, and realized that they had similar ideas that they could combine into a single app. They developed the earliest versions of Foursquare in mid-2008, and launched thir product at the SXSW conference in 2009.

Entrepreneurship can be a long, difficult, lonely road, and having a co-founder can be the key to success for many startups. But finding that complementary person or people to partner with can be difficult. If you haven’t already met them in business school or through some random twist of fate, where do you turn?

Therein lies yet another benefit of working in a shared office space: the potential for networking. Because shared office spaces typically attract freelancers and independent workers, small startups are more likely to find like-minded individuals to partner with in that environment. The massive success enjoyed by Foursquare and its founders is a prime example of this.