Foursquare's Dennis Crowley on Shutting Out the NoiseIn a conversation at TechCrunch NY, the co-founder and CEO spoke about not letting chatter about his company affect his point of view.

When you're a startup as big asFoursquare, there's bound to be plenty of chatter about you. Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley says that the key to keeping his 6-year-old location-based social networking platform moving forward is to simply tune it all out.

"We've been 'the best thing since sliced bread' to 'oh these guys aren't going to make it' to 'what they're doing is absolutely amazing.' It will drive you nuts if you really pay attention to it," Crowley said during a conversation at TechCrunch Disrupt NY today.

At its beginnings, Foursquare was largely known for its popular check-in app (with badges, points and mayorships), but a few years in,the view of the companywas not quite as flattering, with questions about whetherit could bring in enough revenueand inspire investors to put forth the funds to help them continue to stay afloat, leading to some serious skepticism.

Related:Foursquare Doesn't Want to Be Just 'That Check-In App' Anymore

In the last year, however, the company has ushered in some major changes and partnerships. In February 2014, the company received a $15 million investment from Microsoft andsigned an agreement让科技巨头许可Foursquare的哒ta to help power products such as the Bing search engine and the Windows Phone. Then, in the spring, the company made the controversial decision to split its mobile experience in half, revamping the Foursquare app to focus more on finding and recommending new places and introducing a new app called Swarm that retains the check-in feature and allows users to see and chat with their nearby friends. Over the summer, the company rebranded on an aesthetic level, thanks toa set of new logos. And this past March, Foursquare announced a partnership with Twitter that allowed users to share their locations in their tweets.

In his conversation at TechCrunch, Crowley spoke about leveraging Foursquare's well of data in somerecent big productsaimed at businesses, likeFoursquare Places(drawing on the company's database of 65 million places),Pinpointwhich deals with targeted advertising and theFoursquare Location Cloudaims to help companies reach their customers with analytics and resources to build location-focused apps.

Related:Twitter and Foursquare Team Up to Let You Tag Your Location in Tweets

Crowley said that he stays focused by developing a thick skin. "I try to meet with entrepreneurs and other folks who are trying to get startups off the ground all the time, just to relay this message: Listen, if you have something you want to build just go out there and build it, if it's really good people will want to use it. And if it's not, people will tell you and you'll go back and retool it."

And it seems that he is taking his own advice. Foursquare fans who miss badges and being able to proclaim themselves the mayor of their favorite bar or coffee shop are in luck. "You asked for mayorships, so we'll be bringing them back soon," the companyannouncedin a blog post this week about some new Swarm features. The app is also getting a batch of 100 new stickers that users can unlock and collect, "some evolved from your old badges," and a place for old badges in the app's sticker book.

Related:Is Yahoo Buying Foursquare? Rumors Continue to Swirl.