Foursquare opens San Francisco office to poach engineers

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As if the Silicon Valley recruiting market weren’t cutthroat enough, there’s a new power player in town.

Time for companies to batten down the hatches and their engineers. Hot New York City start-up Foursquare is officially checking into San Francisco, opening an official West Coast office to compete for software developers.

Foursquare’s head of public relations, Erin Gleason, tweeted: ‘Hide yo developers, SF!’

Foursquare, which has four employees -- including Tristan Walker -- who have been squatting in a San Francisco office including, announced the move in a ‘We’re heading west!’ blog post. The announcement makes San Francisco Mayor and Lt. Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom, who declared Foursquare a San Francisco start-up at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference back in September, look clairvoyant.

‘In the past year, we had a major growth spurt: from about 100,000 to over 4.5 million users; from a single phone platform to six; from 50-person foursquare flashmobs to 1,000 person epic swarms; and we now have thousands of developers building on the foursquare API. The biggest challenge: hiring fast enough to support that surge,’ according to the blog post. ‘Despite growing from 5 employees to 35, we can’t expand as quickly as we want. So, to help attract the best talent in the world, we decided it’s time to open an outpost in San Francisco.’

Ready or not, here they come.

Related:

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-- Jessica Guynn