The Future Is Now: Isaac Brodsky Of Foursquare On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The Tech Scene
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Be aware of cultural differences that impact how you design systems. Differences in names, dates, addresses and more are everyday occurrences. For instance, different countries might write the parts of a street address in different orders, or they may have entirely different parts to their addresses — only the US calls postal codes ZIP codes after all. It requires research, thoughtfulness, and attention to detail.
As a part of our series about cutting edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Isaac Brodsky.
Isaac Brodsky is a principal engineer at Foursquare. He co-founded and was COO of Unfolded, which was acquired by Foursquare in 2021. Prior to that he worked at Uber on marketplace data systems. He is an active contributor and leader of the H3 open source project. He lives in Burlingame, CA.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
My journey started in college at Webster University where I majored in computer science. After college I ended up at Uber working with geospatial data on the engineering team. My team was working on marketplace systems which was my first true introduction to big data and geospatial data. I got hooked on this type of work quickly. Uber divided the world into hexagons with the H3 system, and I found the work both technically challenging and rewarding. I wanted more of it.
After I left Uber, I co-founded Unfolded in late 2019 with my colleagues Sina Kashuk, Ib Green, and Shan He. Unfolded is a geospatial analytics platform for data unification, enrichment, and visualization. My work with Unfolded presents never ending opportunities to continue to work on cutting edge open source geospatial software.
Unfolded was acquired by Foursquare in mid 2021, in fact, we just passed the first anniversary of the acquisition. I’m excited about what Unfolded can do and be within the Foursquare ecosystem, and we’ve made some great advancements since coming here. And there are more coming down the pike. I’m grateful to be part of this team.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
Without a doubt the most interesting part of my career has been starting a company. Coming from the tech side of things, there is a lot that goes into the day-to-day operations of building a business from the ground up that I had not previously considered. Everything from hiring to making sure employees have health insurance to accounting for and filing taxes is something that requires skill and attention. While working on the technology remains my favorite part of the job, it was a valuable experience and I learned a lot. It gave me a new respect for business owners, and for the people who handle all of those tasks so people like me can focus on what we do best.
Can you tell us about the cutting edge technological breakthroughs that you are working on? How do you think that will help people?
I spend most of my time on Foursquare’s Unfolded platform, which includes technologies like Hex Tiles. Unfolded and Hex Tiles help people work with large geospatial data sets. A lot of technologies that help people work with this data are open source. However, the knowledge needed to effectively use these data sets and tools is quite niche. This means that a lot of companies are sitting on incredible geospatial data that they do not know how to use.
In particular, Hex Tiles is a huge technological breakthrough. It is a new next gen tiling system for working with large, hexagon-gridded datasets. Before we launched Hex Tiles, the tools needed to work with these datasets were very burdensome and complicated for the user to set up. In addition to that, it was difficult to visualize the data. Hex Tiles brings accessibility into this process, making a method that used to take days be shortened into mere hours, saving data scientists time, energy, and company’s resources.
How do you think this might change the world?
I think this technology could help save lives. Take Foursquare’s partnership with Kontur, a geospatial analysis firm, where we use data visualization and mapping to help humanitarian organizations manage the worst impacts of the climate crisis. The analyses we produce with Kontur helps humanitarian organizations pre-position aid and work with local authorities to set up cooling stations and hospital space in the areas most likely to be hit by wildfires, extreme heat, or other deadly natural events.
There was a time not long ago when visualizing this data would have been impossible. Creating clear, detailed maps, after all, relied upon 20 years’ worth of data on temperatures, wildfire paths, and a host of other inputs. Displaying the full, living map online, with updates in real time, requires tremendously efficient data processing, and Hex Tiles is the first program to enable it at this scale.
Companies can use large geospatial datasets and data visualizations to make better decisions, too, of course. They do, and that improves their bottom line. They can do some truly world-changing work. It is the example with Kontur, though, where we can see most directly how technology like Hex Tiles can literally save lives.
Keeping “Black Mirror” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
At its heart, Black Mirror is about morality, with a backdrop of amazing technology. That’s not an argument to stop making technological advancements; it’s an argument to consider the moral implications of technologies that people create and use.
One of the reasons I’m happy at Foursquare is that the company does a great job instituting and living by a moral code. We are committed to the principle that data is a privilege. We have strict rules in place to protect individual consumers. In order to ensure that all consumers are protected from harmful practices, we filter out visits to sensitive locations such as religious centers, women’s shelters, military locations, and LGBTQ centers, among others. Further, we do not provide audience segments for locations where children under the age of 18 may frequent.
Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?
One difficulty when working with geospatial data is working with large hexagon-indexed datasets. I remember discussing this problem with my Unfolded co-founder Sina Kashuk. It was a problem he encountered on a regular basis.
This conversation, one that at the time felt like normal work chatter, ended up being the impetus to think about different ways of storing and computing hexagon-indexed data. This eventually became Hex Tiles, which Foursquare launched a few months ago. Hex Tiles gives data scientists like my co-founder Sina the ability to easily unify diverse spatial datasets, conduct on-the-fly analytics, and quickly visualize and explore big data on a planetary scale.
Moral of the story, there are oftentimes solutions for the problems that seem unsolvable and a normal part of our work routine. Don’t take those seemingly routine conversations with co-workers for granted, they could be a source of inspiration for your next big idea!
What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?
While tools like Hex Tiles are only used by a select group of people who work directly with geospatial data, the impacts of this technology are far reaching and cast a much wider net than only those involved in the day to day.
At Foursquare, we believe in the power of location. All of our products are created with the purpose of helping our customers understand that where people go, and how they spend their time in the physical world is a reflection of their values and what they care about. Geospatial data in particular is a powerful way to visualize this, especially at enterprise scale.
What have you been doing to publicize this idea? Have you been using any innovative marketing strategies?
To publicize our innovative technology we’ve been making a number of datasets available to the public for free as part of the Unfolded Studio data catalog. It has been exciting seeing that people are able to get their hands on this great data.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
A few people come to mind for this question. First, one of my college professors who opened the doors of computer science and programming to me. When I began at Webster, I was not a computer science major. But I enjoyed this professor’s classes and she showed me a path through school that I enjoyed much more, which greatly impacted my career trajectory. I would not be where I am without her.
Next a few of my former colleagues from Uber come to mind. I had the pleasure of working with a few senior engineers who embodied the characteristics that I want to develop myself. They had great empathy combined with technical expertise and dedication. They were curious and always on the journey of learning more. I remain grateful for the time I spent working with them.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
In my personal time, I volunteer with the Spinal CSF Leak Foundation, an organization that plays an important role in my life. In my role on the Patient Advisory Panel for Research, I am able to utilize my working knowledge of data and statistics by helping the Foundation look at data heavy research proposals and discussing with academics and researchers since I work with both of those groups on a regular basis in my professional life. It is nice to know that my skills as an engineer can be translated into things that I know are making a difference in the lives of so many people and would encourage others to do the same.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why.
Before I started working in the technology industry as a whole and particularly with geospatial data, there are a few things I wish I would have known or kept in mind.
- You must be able to communicate the unique value proposition of your technology in a way that translates through the industry. It’s important to explain the value of the product you’re working on while also explaining what is different about it to more technical audiences. Other engineers and scientists want to quickly learn how your product builds on knowledge and skills they already have.
- Something else I wish I would have had a stronger grasp of when working with geospatial data is to let go of our attachment to the exact coordinates and think of the data we are working with as a grid system. In real life, that looks like calling an Uber. The GPS might not know what side of the street you are standing on. While that is an important detail, it is not always the one the system needs to be designed for. And while systems like GPS are considered the true standard, there is always some error involved because the signals GPS works with are complicated and noisy.
- If you see something strange in the data you are working with, ask why. Speaking from personal experience, you may be tempted to come up with a conclusion about why the data looks the way it does, or why it seems harder to work with, and move on to the next thing. However, I would encourage those working with data to dig into it — you may be surprised by what you learn. Sometimes people can be intimidated by asking the tough questions without a clear idea of where the answers will take them, but in the long run it is worth it.
- I have a saying I frequently use, and that is “time is relative, clocks are hard.” This translates to the fact that working with temporal (time) data is difficult and requires its own way of thinking. For example, even basic concepts like what day the week starts on are not settled concepts — some would say Monday, while others would say Sunday. This comes up practically when analyzing data over a week-long period. Clocks are complex things, and two people chatting on an app might have phones that show different times!
- Be aware of cultural differences that impact how you design systems. Differences in names, dates, addresses and more are everyday occurrences. For instance, different countries might write the parts of a street address in different orders, or they may have entirely different parts to their addresses — only the US calls postal codes ZIP codes after all. It requires research, thoughtfulness, and attention to detail.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
If possible, I would love to inspire a movement that combines the missions of public libraries and book fairs. There are many foundations that put this concept into action. Many cities have a non-profit foundation supporting their public libraries. Getting involved with these foundations is a wonderful way to support free and low-cost educational resources in your area, and to connect with new books, movies and music.
Oftentimes, library foundations and nonprofits will host book sales to sell off library books that are out of circulation or donated. I have wonderful memories of the book fairs where I grew up in St. Louis. These systems, both public libraries as well as fairs where books are sold at a steep discount, help young people invest in their interests, particularly if those interests go beyond what they are being taught in the public school system. For instance, if you learned about the basics of physics in your science class and wanted to do a deep dive, you can head to the library. It is applicable to any topic. Reading opens doors to knowledge and learning and should be widely accessible.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“You never know until you try.” This saying resonates with me both in my personal life and as a technologist. Personally, I find meaning in this quote in “breaking out of one’s comfort zone” and being open to new ideas, people, and activities. As an engineer, I find meaning in this in prototyping and demonstrating new systems, as well as maintaining a healthy skepticism of claims until proven.
Some very well known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed the way that people live and move in the physical world. On top of that change, we are seeing an ever increasing use of data driven decision making, including artificial intelligence. Foursquare sits at the intersection of those changes and as the industry leader in location technology, we are at the forefront of this revolution. Thanks to our location data, organizations’ investments in location intelligence are driving positive business outcomes.
Technology can change the way people interact with their surroundings forever. With the digital transformation in full effect, it is necessary for businesses to make greater investments in technology solutions in order to stay ahead, especially with consumer demand and behaviors more varied than ever before.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
You can follow me on Twitter at and keep up with all the work I am doing with Foursquare and Unfolded.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
The Future Is Now: Isaac Brodsky Of Foursquare On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
