The point of Foursquare is to encourage people to get out and do more. Yet the guy who’s leading the company’s software development doesn’t much leave the office. In fact, Naveen Selvadurai spends most of his waking hours in a six-block radius.
The 28-year-old co-founder of Foursquare, a closely watched startup that lets 1 million enthusiastic users “check in” at locations via smartphone during their daily perambulations, spends the majority of his time elbow-to-elbow with co-founder Dennis Crowley in a cramped one-room office in Manhattan’s East Village.
When Selvadurai’s not there, he’s either home at his apartment blocks away or catching a meal nearby. Pretty much everything that matters to him these days is within a five-minute walk. “Right now I’m working about 16, maybe 18 hours a day,” Selvadurai says. “I work all day, grab dinner, go home, and work some more. I hardly ever take a subway anymore.” He adds: “Lately I’ve been thinking about getting a scooter.”
Getting Around
The more peripatetic devotees of the Foursquare game that runs on Apple’s iPhone and other devices have made Selvadurai’s and Crowley’s company a sought-after commodity in tech circles. On Apr. 21, Foursquare expected to sign up the millionth user of its location-based software, which lets fans check in at bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and train stations, competing for the free meals and other perks merchants dole out to virtual “mayors” in the game who frequent their establishments the most.
Foursquare takes advantage of the GPS chips inside smartphones to let users broadcast where they are and find out where other users are congregating. “I live in the East Village, which has so much rich history and so much to do, and I realized that I’d seen maybe 5 percent of it,” Selvadurai says. “I was looking for a way to get…