Mr. Crowley (screencap)

This week is the New York edition of TechCrunch Disrupt, which means it's time for the annual friendly grilling of Silicon Alley personalities. Taking his turn in the hot seat this morning: Fuelband-brandishing Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley.

This year's conference takes place in the least startup-y of neighborhoods: right next door to Penn Station, in the Hammerstein Ballroom. It's covered in faux rococo detailing, and the carpet has seen better days, possibly during the Ford administration, and don't even try sitting down on the stairs to make a phone call because you will be bounced.

So it was in incongruous surroundings that @dens tackled a no-fun question: Where did all the adulation go? 

"We're not the shiny new thing any more," Mr. Crowley admitted with a shrug. "We're in that interesting hazing period for companies, where people are still skeptical of whether this company is going to be able to pull it off or not."

"It's not terribly daunting," he added, all but literally brushing his shoulder off. "It's fine if people are skeptical of what we're doing--let's just put our heads down and focus on the work we're doing."

That doesn't mean he could resist a couple of digs at "the haters," the metaphorical pebble in Mr. Crowley's cross-trainers. He suggested that, "there's a lot of people who still think of us as 2009 Foursquare," adding that, "the biggest haters and critics haven't opened the app for six months." Makes you wonder about those monthly active user numbers.

He also responded to former Square Keith Rabois, who recently criticized Foursquare on Twitter. "I don't think he's looking at the same data we're looking at," Mr. Crowley said. Diplomatic! He went on to point out that Mr. Rabois is on the board of Yelp and suggested that he probably ought to be worried. "We don't pay attention to people that are misinformed."

Do startup execs take lessons in shade from the contestants of Rupaul's Drag Race?

He also called the perception that Foursquare isn't growing false, saying the metrics they track regularly (like active users and signups) are all growing 10 to 30 percent month over month. On the merchant side, a million businesses have claimed their listing on Foursquare, making it easier to sell them on promos. Mr. Crowley said revenue growth is steady and the company is "routinely signing six-figure deals" with national merchants.

Not that he'd cough up much in the way of hard numbers, though: "We're a private company, so we don't have to disclose our master plan for you," he pointedly replied to one of interviewer Colleen Taylor's more probing questions.

Also, Mr. Crowley described himself as an Uber "super user." So there's that.

Mr. Crowley, who ducked out to run a half-marathon.

Do high-powered tech types have any idea of the right way to spend a weekend? Apparently not: When VC and former Square COO Keith Rabois made a critical, slightly snide remark about how Foursquare is faring, he ignited a two-day-long tussle over when it's okay to criticize a founder.

I swear, sometimes you'd think we were covering the goings-on among seventh-grade cliques.

It all started when newly minted VC Hunter Walk tweeted, "Wow, who knew 40,000 developers use the @foursquare API..." Pretty innocuous! But it seems Mr. Rabois couldn't contain a smart remark, and so began the sequel to his Twitter brawl with @dens from back in November:

We assume it's the months of rumors about a possible down round that has Mr. Crowley so sensitive.

Buddy Media founder Michael Lazerow chimed in (on his LinkedIn blog), tut-tutting Mr. Rabois for daring to shit-talk a founder. Mr. Lazerow complained that "founder-on-founder verbal violence seems to be at an all-time high" and then proceeded to take a swipe at Mr. Rabois, pointing out that as helpful as he is, well, he's never started a company, which apparently makes him a second-class citizen in the Valley:

Keith was the Art Garfunkel to the Paul Simon of each of his companies. The Barney Fife to each of his Sheriff Taylors. Change Entourage to Entrepreneurage and Keith is Turtle to the Vincent that is Jack Dorsey.

Art Garfunkel? Way harsh, Tai.

Business Insider added some real value with a recap that confused Square and Foursquare, as well as mixing up Mr. Walk and the Observer's own Hunter Walker. Whoopsie daisy!

@Dens ducked out to run a half-marathon, as one does, but that doesn't mean Foursquare's honor was simply there for the besmirching. Anil Dash strapped on his suit of shining armor and pointed out that Mr. Rabois is on the board of Yelp and maybe he ought to bring that little tidbit up when he criticizes Fourquare:

Whatever your thoughts on the future of Foursquare, surely we can all rally around of keeping hashtags like #hatersclub out of our tech talk?

(Photo: flickr.com/jaxed)

Several big tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Intel have publicly declared their support for gay marriage. They're part of a corporate group that's reportedly planning to file an amicus brief in support of overturning California's Prop 8. [Bloomberg]

Yahoo would like you to know that its new, anti-work-from-home police has absolutely nothing to do with you (unless you work at Yahoo). [Mercury News]

"While hanging with my 12 year old cousin the other day, I unknowingly entered into the world of Tweenstagram, a vastly different space than the Instagram I have grown to know and love (and refresh too often)." Do go on. [Wisdom of Pearls]

Max Levchin, one of the cofounders of PayPal, is launching a new mobile payments startup with the chipper name of Affirm. “You will essentially be putting a purchase on a digital tab, and we are going to make it work for us by looking at all available data to determine if you are someone who will pay it back." [AllThingsD]

Former Square COO Keith Rabois, who left in the wake of sexual harassment accusations, has landed at Khlosa Ventures as a VC. [AllThingsD]

Mr. Rabois (Photo: Twitter)

Earlier today, news broke that Square's COO, Keith Rabois, had left the company. It was a strangely-timed departure, considering Square recently raised $200 million in a Series D. Now, the Wall Street Journal has broken the news that Mr. Rabois is embroiled in a sexual harassment claim from a fellow Square employee, and resigned so that the allegations would “not cause a distraction for the company.”

Steven Berger, the New York attorney representing the unnamed employee, said that Square had failed to take appropriate actions after the employee claimed he was being sexually harassed. Mr. Rabois told the Journal, "I'm completely confident that all the facts will come out and I will be vindicated."

In a post published to his Tumblr, Mr. Rabois offered his version of events. According to the post, he met the unnamed employee through a mutual friend, and their friendship quickly blossomed into a romance. Mr. Rabois says the employee began working at Square several months after they began dating, following his recommendation to hire.

Writes Mr. Rabois:

Last week, a New York-based attorney threatened Square and myself with a lawsuit. I am told this lawsuit would allege that the relationship was not consensual, and would go on to accuse me of some pretty horrible things. I was told that only a payment of millions of dollars will make this go away, and that my career, my reputation, and my livelihood will be threatened if Square and I don’t pay up.

I realize that continuing any physical relationship after he began working at Square was poor judgment on my part. But let me be unequivocal with the facts: (1) The relationship was welcome. (2) Square did not know of the relationship before a lawsuit was threatened; it came as a complete surprise to the company. (3) He never received nor was denied any reward or benefits based on our relationship. And (4), I did not do the horrendous things I am told I may be accused of. While I have certainly made mistakes, this threat feels like a shakedown, and I will defend myself to the full extent of the law.

Mr. Rabois is a member of the storied PayPal mafia, having worked at both PayPal and LinkedIn prior to Square. Mr. Rabois' active Twitter account yesterday betrayed no signs that anything was amiss. He thanking several followers for congratulating him on moving on from Square.

"I deeply regret that I let my personal and professional lives to become intertwined," Mr. Rabois wrote on his Tumblr. "I apologize to my colleagues and friends (at Square and elsewhere) who I’ve let down, and who will bear the brunt of some of the unnecessary, negative attention this situation will likely bring."

Update (5:26 p.m.): Gawker's Adrian Chen points out on Twitter that as a first-year law student at Stanford in the early-1990s, Mr. Rabois was involved in an incident in which Mr. Rabois and two other students "shouted homophobic slurs in the direction of a lecturer's home." A New Yorker profile on PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who met Mr. Rabois at Stanford, described the incident as a law student's attempt to test the limits of the First Amendment.

Mr. Rabois. (Photo: Yaniv Golan)

Aleksey Vayner, the Yale grad who gained Internet infamy in 2006 for his video resume, "Impossible is Nothing," is dead at 29. [Motherboard]

Square COO Keith Rabois is leaving the San Francisco-based payments company; Kara Swisher says disagreements with CEO and founder Jack Dorsey are at least partially behind the departure. [AllThingsD]

The latest petty sleight in the high-school style feud between two social media giants: Facebook has cut off access to Twitter's new video-sharing service, Vine, preventing the app from using Facebook to find new friends. [AllThingsD]

What asshole decided to name a smartphone made for the African market YOLO? [Mashable]

A French court wants to force Twitter to reveal the identities of users who author racist tweets in violation of the country's hate-speech laws. Twitter is deciding whether to fight the ruling. [NYT]

(twitter.com/justglew)

Considering a move to the West Coast, but not sure if you should do it due to all the Alley-boosting blog posts in Betabeat and your Tumblr feed? Here's an Alley-to-Valley success story for you. TopGuest, a New York startup that launched in the beginning of 2010 to add social and mobile features to consumer loyalty programs, just had its big exit: an acquisition by San Francisco-based global customer service software company ezRez for an undisclosed sum.

CEO Geoff Lewis moved out to California with his two co-founders about a year ago to work on TopGuest, which raised $2 million and sported Peter Thiel as an advisor and Silicon Valley all-stars Keith Rabois and Ron Conway as angel investors, according to AllThingsD.

Mr. Lewis's friends in the New York startup scene aired their good wishes in the comments at TechCrunch. "WOO! Congrats to Geoffrey Lewis and the team! I remember when Geoff arrive [sic] at a meetup in a suit with the pitch deck for TopGuest and announced 'I am completely changing my business.' Amazing to see it go from idea to exit," wrote Carter Cleveland of Art.sy; Brooke Mooreland of Fashism and Josh Weinstein of YouAre.tv, as well as Dave Ambrose also offered congratulations.

TopGuest, for its part, kept mum. Cofounder Ozan Onay tweeted a sly "also, we've been acquired," which Mr. Lewis retweeted.

We're guessing this means they're not coming back to New York for a while (four years, maybe). Not even for the babes. "Yup, one of the big benefits for us of leaving NYC, it turns out, is that there are more strategic acquirers for technology companies on the West Coast vs. East," Mr. Lewis wrote in an email.

CORRECTION: This post originally said Mr. Lewis used to work out of General Assembly; that is not the case. "We weren't based in General Assembly, but we do love them," he noted. Betabeat regrets the error.

Keith Rabois, Silicon Valley super-angel and COO of Square. Photo: TechCrunch.

The idea that blogging is bad is borderline sacrilege in New York, where Fred Wilson, Charlie O'Donnell, Chris Dixon, Nate Westheimer, numerous founders and every biz dev hustler in town post regularly--on Tumblr, at the very least--and hold up the blog as the paragon of self-promotion.

Boo, luminary Keith Rabois says.

"I have invested in nearly 75 companies, no more than 2 of the founders have an active blog, maybe less," Mr. Rabois tweeted on Wednesday. He thinks blogging has a low return and entrepreneurs and investors should spend their time on more productive things, he told founder, venture capitalist and blogger Jordan Cooper during a conversation at TechCrunch Disrupt. Mr. Cooper, of course, blogged about it.

"I could not understand how someone so talented and accomplished in our space could be missing the boat on what seems to be such an obvious and valuable tool for young entrepreneurs," he wrote. "And then it hit me. 'Keith Rabois doesn’t see the value of the blog as a platform because Keith Rabois is Keith Rabois.'

"It is a tool for those who are making their mark in the present (I would put the Fred’s and Dixon’s of the world into that category). I now see why Keith pointed out the lack of blogging by market leaders on the West Coast… it is because on the West Coast, the market leaders are leaders who have earned that title for work they have done over the past 25 years. They are entrenched, their personal platforms built before blogging existed, and now they rest on those platforms, not needing to amplify their voice of prove that they are equal to or better than those that call themselves leaders," he wrote.

(Mr. Rabois conceded that Chris Dixon is an exception to his rule.)

Mr. Cooper cited one of his posts which got 10,000 views, resulting in 30 user sign-ups and two emails, one from a database engineer and "some random kid in Nairobi."

The debate continued on Twitter, where Mr. Cooper linked to Groupon founder Andrew Mason's blog. "Debate over. read Andrew Mason's early posts on http://blog.thepoint.com/. @rabois 9,999 - @jordancooper 1," he tweeted.

But the most recent post was two years ago, Mr. Rabois countered.

Groupme's business development lead Steve Cheney picked up the charge, submitting Chris Dixon as an example of an active founder+blogger. "QED," Mr. Rabois conceded. The parties agreed to disagree. "I'll entertain an argument of 'blog has declining value as you ascend to $25B', but let's do offline when we're next in same city," Mr. Cooper tweeted.

Self described "media addict" Rachel Sklar Storified the conversation. (Does that count as blogging?)