Check In, Flame Out: How To Save Foursquare

This hasn’t been a great year for Foursquare. “Check-ins are no longer what they used to be,” as Ingrid Lunden observed last month. There seems to be a general consensus that “Foursquare keeps resembling Yelp more and more…” but that comparison isn’t necessarily flattering, especially since there’s little doubt that Yelp has much greater public mindshare.
Then former Square COO and current Khosla Ventures partner Keith Rabois attacked them publicly (click through for the article’s amusing corrections, if nothing else!) prompting some bizarre musing from Michael Lazerow on when it’s OK for someone like Rabois to bash a founder.
(My answer, for what it’s worth: whenever he freaking feels like it. He’s not the Pope. He’s not the President. He’s just a venture capitalist. If you’re worried about public criticism hurting a company, then it’s built on apparent rather than real value and it deserves all the criticism it can get.)