Foursquare opening a San Francisco office — for real this time

A few months ago, we reported that foursquare was set to open an office in San Francisco. It turned out that at the time it was nothing more than foursquare borrowing a few desks from Square for a few of their team members based on the West Coast. Today, however, they’ve announced that they’re opening a full-fledged office to help support their growing engineering needs and will begin hiring immediately.

There’s no doubt that, while NY’s Silicon Alley is a hotbed of internet startups, most of the engineering talent is still based in Silicon Valley where companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google are located. Foursquare has grown rapidly (they now have more than 4.5 million users) and they’re finding their biggest challenge is “hiring fast enough to support that surge,” they said in a blog post. “Despite growing from 5 employees to 35, we can’t expand as quickly as we want.”

An office in San Francisco — in a larger space borrowed from Square — will allow them to expand and recruit talent from Silicon Valley without forcing engineers to move cross-country. It’s a sign that foursquare has grown faster than they could have expected and is now in need of more engineering talent than is available in New York.

What do you think of the move?