The last 10 years have seen any number of tech companies come and go, and yet location data and recommendation platform Foursquare still stands strong among New York's best and brightest, raising a $33 million Series F funding round as recently as October of this year. Senior Vice President of Engineering Matt Kamen has been with the company since its early years, and now leads his team with dedication and purpose.
Built In NYC spoke with Matt about life at Foursquare, his rise through the ranks and some of the toughest technical challenges his team is poised to face in the year ahead.
Tell me about your education and work background, including what ultimately drew you to Foursquare, and what the process was like of joining the team.
I have a BA in psychology, but that’s a bit of a technicality with a long story about monkeys behind it. I got into tech pretty late; I didn’t write my first line of code until my senior year of college when I took “Intro to Computer Science.” I got hooked very quickly.
I took a little over a year off after college to play music in a band, which gave me some time to read a lot of CS books and work on side projects. When the band didn’t quite work out as planned I entered the “workforce” and was fortunate enough to get a great job in engineering at Goldman Sachs. I really look back with such gratitude for that position; I couldn’t have been luckier for the teammates I had and the learning opportunity afforded to me in that environment. My role grew steadily over my seven years at GS, all focused on web infrastructure and search technologies.
I did, however, have an entrepreneurial itch and a desire to work at a company of a different scale. I’d heard of Foursquare through a friend and thought it was an amazing idea and that the company was in an exciting phase of its growth. So, I wrote a cold email introducing myself. I think I was the only person who’d ever done that, so it took a few weeks for someone to notice and write me back. I interviewed in February 2011 [then] joined the company in April 2011 as a software engineer. At the time, there were no teams, just engineering. We formed teams pretty soon after, as we were scaling and needed specialization. Anyway, the rest is a lot of history.
You have been with Foursquare for some years, and have transitioned through several roles during your tenure. Tell me about the process of rising through the ranks at Foursquare. What did transitions look like, how did the company support you, and how did you know you were ready for the next step?
In truth, the engineering organization stayed flatter than I’d hoped for longer than I’d hoped. But looking back, I think that was a really good thing for me. I had a long time to gain deeper technical expertise, to learn how to be influential without title and to think abstractly about the skills and discipline of management, all of which I think have been valuable to me.
When a management position did find me, it was nothing I’d ever expected. Growth here has never been simple or linear. I think that’s actually true of most of my position changes in my time here, and one of the major lessons I’ve learned and often share. This has forced me to stretch a ton, sometimes uncomfortably, in my role changes here, but I’ve had excellent support from managers, peers and coaches in all my role changes.
Tell me about a leader you have worked with who inspired your own leadership style. How did they influence your own leadership style?
I learned a lot from my first (and long-time) manager at Foursquare. I aspire to do 1:1s the way he did them with me, and I’m still working on it. He had an amazing ability to create such a safe space in a 1:1 that I could be completely honest about my challenges and, frankly, failings. He would listen patiently as I would talk, think out loud and vent about all the things you’d never want your manager to judge you on. And despite all of that, whether he was letting me fail or just knew that I was handling legitimately hard situations about as well as could be, I knew it never eroded his confidence in me. It was an unbelievable managerial style and a great gift for me in my growth.
I’d love to hear about some of the projects your team is currently working on. What is your favorite current project and why? What challenges have you faced and how did the team overcome them?
Wow, that’s a hard question; we’ve got so many exciting things going on. The business has really grown and broadened. We’ve got major innovations going on across everything from our infrastructure to our core technology to all our varied products. I’m also really excited by the R&D that goes into making our core Pilgrim technology better (Pilgrim being Foursquare’s core location awareness software). We pioneered that technology, which is still an unsolved problem in the industry, and have some super exciting projects going on now to push that forward. We’re pushing the boundaries of what you can do with modern mobile phone sensor arrays, experimenting with new ML techniques, and significantly growing our data scale. That’s all really challenging, which is what makes it so exciting.
Tell me about what’s coming for the team in 2019. What excites you about the coming year both at Foursquare and in the tech world in general?
We’re growing and maturing in every way. We’re pulling off a pretty major cloud migration and retooling a lot of systems along the way; we’re gonna see some pretty significant breakthroughs in our core technology. We’re hiring as quickly as we can and investing in training our teams (did I mention we’re hiring?); we’re launching new products and forging new partnerships. It’s going to be an action-packed year, as they’ve all been really, but I think we’re also gonna feel like we’ve hit a nice good stride as a business.
