Google's Last Dodgeball Employee Leaving To Join Foursquare
Google (GOOG) engineer Harry Heymann, who was the last employee running its Dodgeball mobile service, is leaving to join Dodgeball cofounder Dennis Crowley's new startup, Foursquare. — Today is Heymann's last day at Google …
Context & Ripple Effects
Dodgeball was the mobile social service Google acquired out from under cofounder Dennis Crowley, and Harry Heymann stayed behind to run it — eventually as the last employee still on the project, per his own account in a January 2008 farewell post from inside the company. Crowley, meanwhile, rebuilt around the idea with Foursquare.
With Heymann's departure today, the loop closes: the final keeper of the acquired product leaves to join the founder's new version of it. For Google, the move is a visible marker of how acqui-hires can strand products once their teams disperse; for Foursquare, it reunites the last Dodgeball operator with the product's originator while the company is still small.
First-order effects
- Foursquare gains an experienced mobile engineer with direct operational history on the original Dodgeball service — institutional memory of exactly how the concept fared inside a large acquirer.
- Google is left running Dodgeball with no dedicated staff attached to it, making an already-neglected acquired product effectively orphaned.
Second-order effects
- The departure sets a template for other engineers sitting on under-resourced acquired products inside Google: following the founder to a startup becomes a credible alternative to waiting for internal prioritization.
- Every future Google acqui-hire pitch now carries this counterexample — sellers can point to Dodgeball's fate and price in the risk that the product, not just the people, gets shelved.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the acqui-hire market reprices itself: buyers acquire talent but increasingly seed the founder-led successor company in the same category, which should make early-stage founders more selective about selling.
- Mobile social services look set to consolidate around small founder-led teams iterating quickly rather than features maintained inside portals — with Dodgeball-versus-Foursquare as the reference case.
The trend: Acqui-hired products and their remaining stewards are drifting back toward founder-led successors, turning big-company acquisitions into unintentional funding rounds for the next startup in the same category.