Loic Le Meur inter­views a refresh­ingly mod­est Den­nis Crow­ley, Co-Founder of foursquare. Here are some highlights:

A year ago, foursquare counted 4 peo­ple. Today, they’re still only 40, despite their strong growth (over 4 mil­lion users).

We brought Dodge­Ball to Google and ended up work­ing on some other stuff. So after Den­nis left Google, he res­ur­rected with Naveen some of the orig­i­nal ideas and crammed every­thing together in time for a launch timed for SXSW in March 2009.

Sixty per­cent are US, 40% inter­na­tional users.

Mer­chants invented dis­counts. First one was a mer­chant at dis­count who dis­played a foursquare logo on a flyer, offer­ing a dis­count to users who checked in with the service.

Raised $20M Series B from Andreesen Horowitz in June 2010.

“The most frus­trat­ing thing for me was hav­ing all these ideas for Dodge­Ball and not being able to exe­cute.” This explains a lot of why foursquare turned down poten­tial acqui­si­tions ear­lier this year at a val­u­a­tion of about $140M.

“While other plat­forms are offer­ing check in ser­vices, what keeps us unique is that we’re try­ing to make the world a more fun to place to live in through mobile tech­nol­ogy. We’re still at the plumb­ing stage, try­ing to roll out the tools that will allow us to build the best prod­uct we can.”

Ende­mol part­ner­ship — a lot of media com­pa­nies have approached foursquare to cre­ate a show around it. The con­cept has not been rolled out yet, so they’re not sure exactly what’s going to come out of it.

“Before expand­ing inter­na­tion­ally, we felt like we had to make the com­pany and its prod­ucts work well first. We’re almost at that point.”

den­nis crow­ley, foursqaure, loic le meur, leweb, leweb10