$4.6M of Foursquare's latest funding to go into executives' pockets

After the popular check-in service Foursquare finally closed its second round of funding in June after much speculation in the press, the company announced it had secured $20 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others. According to a recent SEC filing, the company’s top executives are taking a $4,636,688 cut out of the total – which, to be exact, is four dollars shy of $20 million.

The filing says the $4.6 million is to be “used for payments to any of the persons required to be named as executive officers, directors or promoters.” The filing lists three people that match those criteria: Dennis Crowley (pictured), co-founder and CEO of Foursquare, co-founder Naveen Selvadurai and board member Albert Wenger. However, since Wenger is a venture capitalist with Union Square Ventures that has put money into Foursquare, it’s unlikely he would take a share of this, even though he’s listed as a possible recipient in the filing.

After the founders take their cut, the company is left with roughly $15.4 million to spend on building their operations. According to a blog post Crowley wrote in June after closing the second round funding, the company intends to use the money to hire new people, mostly engineers, to develop its products further, as well as getting new office space. There has also been some speculation that the funding gives Foursquare an opportunity for making acquisitions, specifically that Foursquare would be interested in acquiring Thing Labs, which is known for Brizzly, a third-party Twitter and Facebook client. The two companies denied this rumor.

[Photo: Guido van Nispen]

  • Haggie

    The mob calls that skimming and usually whack their “executives” for that type of behaviour…

  • http://twitter.com/jpdavy Joseph Davy

    Wouldn't surprise me if Wenger took cash out, obviously this would enable him to protect his downside (a pretty typical VC move).

  • http://www.delardogallery.com/ NewsGallery

    Via NewsGallery: WHAT IS FOURSQUARE? Is it all tech talk–a startup make believe made to sound bigger than it actually is for marketing purposes? :http://bit.ly/foursquar4

blog comments powered by Disqus