• Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley said the company's acquisition paid $0 to equity holders.
• "I am sorry the Foursquare story ended in such a way," he wrote to employees.
• Crowley said the company decayed after a private equity investment.

Foursquare's acquisition left its cofounder sad and angry.

Dennis Crowley helped launch the location technology company in 2009. Seventeen years later, Foursquare was acquired by Infillion. Crowley wrote on Substack that one point of the acquisition left him "heartbroken."

Foursquare's acquisition earned equity holders exactly $0, Crowley wrote, with no money offered for preferred or common stock.

"To our ~1600 former employees over 17 years, I am sorry the Foursquare story ended in such a way that makes it seem like our collective efforts were worth… nothing?" Crowley wrote.

Crowley left the CEO role in 2016, though he continued to lead Foursquare's research and development lab through 2021. After that, Crowley kept a seat on the board.

Foursquare raised capital from The Raine Group, a private equity firm, in 2019. Less than two years later, Gary Little became CEO. Little was one of The Raine Group's managing directors.

"Leadership was unable to preserve the value it inherited or create new value during those six years," Crowley wrote.

Foursquare employees reached out to Crowley to express their frustrations with leadership, he wrote. He cited the company's Glassdoor reviews, which rate it 2.1 stars out of 5. The Raine Group did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Crowley also wrote that the $0 equity outcome was buried in a 125-page PDF for Foursquare's legal team. "No single individual stood up to own (or even acknowledge) the outcome," he wrote.

Calynn Krieger, an executive vice president of marketing for Infillion, told Business Insider in an email that Foursquare had "remarkable technology and a talented team."

"We have nothing to say about Foursquare's former leadership, but we're glad the business and its value continue, and we're committed to creating even more of it," Krieger said.

The lesson Crowley learned

Crowley took responsibility for his role in the lead-up to Foursquare's $0 outcome for equity holders. His decisions as CEO led to the need for a private equity investment, Crowley wrote, and he said he wished he were louder on the board.

His takeaway: "Maybe the biggest mistake I've made in my career is falling in love with this company."

Crowley was too loyal to "making it work," he wrote, and stayed longer than he should have. "Watching the company slowly decay has been a grind on my soul," he wrote.

In a footnote, Crowley gave founders a piece of advice.

"It's okay to fall in love with the company you're building, but don't deny yourself the ability to get closure and move on just because the company itself hasn't yet experienced an exit or ending," he wrote.

• Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue isn't a fan of the Netflix documentary about his company's hack by OpenAI's AI agents.
• Netflix released a short documentary called "AI Gone Wild" in October.
• Delangue, who was interviewed for the project, called the result "super disappointing."

Clément Delangue isn't wild about Netflix's new documentary.

Delangue cofounded Hugging Face, an AI startup acquired by Nvidia for almost $13 billion in September. Two months prior, Hugging Face became the face of AI risk when rogue OpenAI agents hacked the business.

The hacking saga sparked a Netflix documentary titled "AI Gone Wild." On Tuesday, Delangue criticized the so-called "instadoc" in a lengthy X post.

"Super disappointing, as they went for maximum anthropomorphism of the technology and full doomer mode," Delangue wrote.

Delangue sat for an interview in the documentary, along with a METR researcher, the director of the AI Futures Project, and two tech journalists.

In the X post, Delangue wrote that he spent over two hours trying to correct what he described as the documentary's mistakes. He wanted to explain that AI agents were "technological systems, not aliens."

"It looks like the drive to scare people for maximum views was too strong," Delangue wrote.

Delangue listed some things the Netflix documentary omitted: the lack of agent containment, how safeguards for OpenAI's closed model blocked Hugging Face's defense, how Hugging Face defended itself with an open model, and "that we still lack a lot of information and transparency including full agent traces and that companies need to remain accountable for what their agents do."

Netflix did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Some techies responded to Delangue's post with their own criticism of the documentary. Alex Imas, Google DeepMind's director of AGI economics, called Delangue's post "important reading."

Brigitte Tousignant, Hugging Face's head of communications, posted on X that the documentary widened the gap between the public's understanding of AI and how it actually works.

Tousignant wrote to Netflix: "If you can't tell this story responsibly in 26 minutes, maybe 26 minutes isn't enough."

Despite his criticism, Delangue suggested a way to frame the project to make it an enjoyable watch: "It ends up being a fun sci-fi movie though!"