Just two weeks after Foursquare split up its flagship application, the company itself is making significant changes. Chief operating officer Evan Cohen and business development head Holger Luedorf are leaving the company after four years, Recode reports.
The move comes at a crucial time for the company, given doubts about Foursquare's popularity with users and the major repositioning it's doing as a result. Its most significant move to date was to split its famed check-in service into a separate app it calls Swarm, which not only checks users into particular locations, but broadcasts their "ambient location" to help friends meet up whenever they happen to find themselves in the same general location.
Foursquare's primary app, still called Foursquare, now serves primarily as a Yelp-like location-recommendation service, one that will also offer fine-grained suggestions such as what to order at restaurants based on feedback from other users.
The company is tight-lipped about user numbers. While Foursquare says it has 50 million downloads, it’s unclear how many of those people use the service regularly. The two key executive departures suggest user growth and revenue may be stagnating.
Foursquare is not concerned, however. In an interview with Recode, CEO Dennis Crowley said, “We’re really excited about the direction and the momentum that we have right now, and Foursquare would not have gotten here without the contributions that Evan has made.” He also added that the executives’ simultaneous departures were just a coincidence.
A Foursquare spokesman told ReadWrite that Cohen and Luedorf, who had both been at Foursquare for more than four years, were ready to start working at smaller companies.
Former Matrix Partners entrepreneur-in-residence Jeffrey Glueck will replace Cohen as COO, and Mike Harkey, who has been part of the business development team for two years, will take over for Luedorf.
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