Andreu Orell

I see this old vid going viral, and as usual the kids are drawing the wrong conclusions, so gather 'round and learn something. Location wasn't silly or unimportant at the time: it was a core consumer app category, arguably more important than photo sharing. If you now assume you'll have a Google/Apple map full of rich location data, it's because of what that generation of apps built. Sam ultimately failed with Loopt because he made two big wrong-way bets: 1. He bet on carriers rather than Apple/Google being who controlled the mobile experience, spending years doing deals with Sprint, Boost, etc. Then the App Store launched (yes, there was no app store for a long time), and he was caught wrong-footed. 2. Loopt's UX concept was too early and wrong. Like Find My or Snap Map now, he assumed users would be constantly sharing their location as a key part of the social experience. But most phones didn't even have GPS, or if they did 3p apps couldn't access location in the background, so the experience sucked. Foursquare and Gowalla (acq. by Facebook) actually imposed work on the user, having them 'check in' to locations, and using 'game mechanics' (for a while the hottest UX paradigm) to want you to be the 'mayor' of your favorite bar. That eventually provided the rich data the social networks needed (and which Facebook and Google eventually rolled out to everyone). Why did Dennis Crowley at Foursquare get it right and Sam wrong? Because Crowley had created Dodgeball, an app that let you check in via text and he understood the right UX. As with Twitter, the initial UX concepts often appear in texting but eventually succeed as a standalone app (consider what that means for AI app Instinct now). Sam has a scene at the Loopt office in my memoir 'Chaos Monkeys' as he was assigned as our mentor during YC (my co-founders were too rattled by his intense style, and I'd go alone). He absolutely saved our ass by doing us a big favor once, something I'm still grateful for. After Loopt's failure, Sam was mostly known for racing his Nissan GT-R up and down El Camino and writing $5k checks as a Sequoia scout. Even some YC founders snickered at PG's characterization of him as a founder comparable to Jobs. Amnesiac tech loves retconning history, considering our present configuration of pixels and people as fated, created by providential men who arrived at the right time with the right idea and rode off into history. Those who lived through it realize that if we rolled the dice 100 times, in very few scenarios did we end up where we are today. The way to cure whatever belief you have in 'great man' theories is to meet the man before the world had deemed him great. There were a lot of Sams running around doing demos like this then. And BTW, that isn't a diner. That's Tres Amigos taqueria in Half Moon Bay. Scoble was the biggest consumer tech influencer of the time, and every consumer founder had to make their pilgrimage there to pitch him since he lived there.