Superlocal

Superlocal started from a design conviction: every map app felt identical, impersonal, and optimized for the average stranger instead of for me. I wanted a map that reflected my world: the places I'd actually been, the restaurants my friends loved, the neighborhoods I'd already seen. So I designed and built one.

The core product insight was a mechanic: a personalized map revealed by a fog-of-world overlay. You start looking at a muted, unknown world, and the map unlocks around you as you check in. Your activity trains the recommendations. The longer you use the app, the more the map becomes a portrait of you, not a scrape of TripAdvisor. A small design decision, a grayscale fog rendered at low opacity, turned into the feature people described when they told their friends about the app.

I designed the entire product end-to-end: the brand, every screen, the check-in flow, the fog rendering, the AI-powered natural language search, the onboarding, the notifications. The design system held up across five years of shipping, and the core metaphor of *your world, revealed* became the thing the company was known for.

Alongside the design work I raised $6M from General Catalyst, Slow Ventures, SV Angel, and other top investors, and led engineering across iOS, backend, and data. That included shipping an AI-powered place search that turned natural-language queries into relevant recommendations well before it became table stakes.

In 2025, Superlocal was acquired by Foursquare, where the team and technology now power the next generation of location discovery at scale.