It's easy to call the shots from the audience. TechCrunch is judging this by Disney over-romanticized standards - self fulfillment et al.
TechCrunch does not have access to the founders' cockpit view. What if the founders decide the company is about to become stagnated, overrun or just boring? If they can get a good price it's not worth the stay.
The funny thing is that the final paragraph could just as easily be interpreted as solid arguments for selling:
Facebook and Twitter hitting the geo space... real momentum and that intangible buzz...
So two juggernauts are entering the space, and they have a rare opportunity to actually monetize "intangible buzz" while people still don't know what FB and Twitter will do.
We're definitely in the realm of wild speculation, since it's impossible to judge accurately from out here. But I do agree that the whole notion of "destiny" isn't a good metric, regardless of the actual situation.
Maybe. My concern is, who knows how long it would take Yahoo to absorb Foursquare, how much Foursquare code would need to be refactored in order to play nice with Yahoo's, how long it'd take to sort out personnel issues, and so forth. It's easy to envision not hearing from the Foursquare team for a good 6-9 months post-acquisition, by which time they really would have lost ground to their bigger rivals purely from an innovation standpoint.
I think that that is proof that Foursquare should sell... to Facebook. Their valuation is still stomach-able enough if Facebook wants to use their current operating profit and cash reserves. It would immediately make Facebook the mobile leader, and take Foursquare to millions of users.
What's in it for Facebook? Foursquare functionality is easily copied. The brand isn't terribly strong. $100M+ is hard to stomach when I don't see any clear benefit to Facebook.
Yahoo! is another story, as they've taken a portfolio approach. I imagine Foursquare looks pretty good as a member of that portfolio.
TechCrunch does not have access to the founders' cockpit view. What if the founders decide the company is about to become stagnated, overrun or just boring? If they can get a good price it's not worth the stay.