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On Friday, I dropped by Foursquare HQ in New York City. They showed me some stickers, and I got to sit down for a few minutes with CEO Dennis Crowley. In the video interview above, he describes his fundraising philosophy (at about the 4:00 mark), which is timely coming from the founder of a hot startup everybody wants to invest in or acquire:

You don’t have to rush through it. If you are building interesting things that people are excited about there is a way to make things work on your terms. It is important to select the partners that will support you and take the time to find the right partners.

Crowley also talks about Foursquare’s plans to give local merchants and brands more self-serve options for managing their venues and offers. “The sooner we can get those self-service systems in place, the better it will be for revenue.” He says that for businesses, Foursquare is building two different products: one for local shops, and another for national brands and media companies. There are only 25 people working at Foursquare, and most of them are “building things,” not “answering phones.” So the self-serve products are a big priorioty.

On whether Foursquare will take advantage of the iPhone’s new background processing in iOS 4, he says he is excited about that possibility but, like everyone else, is waiting to get his hands on a new iPhone so that his engineers can test it out. He supports the idea of an open places database which all location services can contribute.

But it is not until the very end of the interview that Crowley reveals his deepest secret of all: “I only have two mayorships left.”

Last month at TechCrunch Disrupt, we saw the launch of Appbistro, a marketplace for Facebook tab applications that help companies and brands flesh out their Facebook Pages. Developers like it because it gives them an easy way to charge for their applications using Appbistro’s payments system (previously there wasn’t an easy way to charge for Facebook apps). And today, Appbistro is announcing that it’s landed a deal to distribute Facebook apps from a significant new partner: Wildfire Interactive.

Wildfire offers a platform for running marketing campaigns simultaneously on Twitter and Facebook. The company was part of Facebook’s fbFund twice, and has many large clients including Pepsi, Red Bull, Victoria’s Secret, plenty of small businesses, and everything in between.

Through Appbistro, Wildfire is now offering five tab applications, including tabs for contests, coupons, and quizzes. As with all its developer partners, Appbistro does a 30/70% revenue split in the developer’s favor.

This is definitely a win for Appbistro — the more high quality applications it offers, the easier it will be to get the attention of the millions of small businesses (and larger brands) looking to build out their Facebook Pages. Appbistro needs that audience in order to appeal to application developers in the first place, and this is a good step toward beating the chicken-and-egg problem.

You could call it the perfect storm.

Over the last few months, user engagement on Scribd has surged, according to CEO Trip Adler, thanks to its transition to HTML5, the introduction of the iPad, and Scribd’s Facebook integration. Of these three factors, Adler says the conversion from Flash to HTML5 was by far the greatest driver for his document sharing company. According to Scribd’s numbers, time on the site has tripled in the last three months.

In early May, Scribd announced its plans to ditch Adobe’s Flash and began the arduous process of converting every document (of its “tens of millions”) to native, HTML5 pages. “We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash, “co-founder and CTO, Jared Friedman, told Erick Schonfeld. Although many documents on the web are still boxed into Flash players, the HTML5 format turns them into rich, interactive web pages.

That gamble has paid off handsomely for Scribd. Although the number of unique visitors still stands at roughly 50 million per month, those users are spending significantly more time perusing documents and sharing with friends.That growth in user engagement has rapidly accelerated in the past month. On May 25, at TechCrunch Disrupt, Friedman said user engagement had doubled— implying strong acceleration in the last three weeks.

The HTML5 play has also made Scribd’s product very iPad friendly and iPad users are responding in kind. According to Adler, although iPhones clearly outnumber iPads in the wild by a large margin, the number of users accessing Scribd through the iPad is now roughly equivalent with the number of users who are using their iPhone.

Now that the company has its HTML5 and iPad strategy in place, Adler says they are focusing on making Scribd more social and less reliant on search engines. Today, the majority of their traffic comes from Google, but Scribd is putting a greater emphasis on the social by closely integrating with Facebook.

Earlier this year, Scribd revamped its Facebook Connect option (enhanced content sharing and added an activity feed plug-in) and introduced Readcasting, which automatically tells your social networks, like Twitter and Facebook what you’re reading. According to Adler, those initiatives are growing: the number of people who are auto-Readcasting is increasing by roughly 10% each day and daily subscriptions to other users is up 15x (in the last three months). Quick video with Adler above.

A decade ago, tech IPOs ruled the stock markets and Silicon Valley. They were the end-all and be-all for ambitious entrepreneurs and venture capitalists looking to become instant billionaires, or at least millionaires. That was many booms and busts ago. The IPO market never came back, and the multiple financial meltdowns which brought on Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations made going public even less appealing to shoot-from-the-hip entrepreneurs. The founders of the most successful tech companies today—Facebook, Skype, LinkedIn—are pushing off the inevitable IPO for as long as possible. And for smaller tech companies, IPOs seem hardly worth the bother.

And those companies which are going public simply are not the cream of the crop. IPO returns across all sectors this year are down 3 percent, according to Renaissance Capital.  And over the past three years, IPO returns are basically tracking the S&P 500, which hardly justifies the added risk of investing in them.

Even venture capitalists are souring on IPOs. In a post this morning titled “IPOs Just Aren’t What They Used To Be,” Fred Wilson laments:

The cost is just too high and the benefits are just too low for most companies these days.

Wilson shares two anecdotes. One was of a startup which prepared to go public, but couldn’t and was still stuck with a $3.5 million bill it couldn’t afford. The other was of a “successful” tech IPO which raised $75 million, but gave the company a lower valuation than it might have gotten in a “late stage private financing.” (He doesn’t name either company). In his opinion, “only the very best companies” should attempt an IPO: The exit of choice for most startups, he suggests, is selling to a larger company.

And that describes exactly the market today, where the best possible exit for most startups is to be acquired by Google, Microsoft, or (more recently) Apple. And instead of going public, the best tech startups like Facebook, Zynga, and Groupn are getting early payouts for founders and employees via late-stage, private DST-type financings.

But limiting exits to M&A might not be the best thing for venture returns. At TechCrunch Disrupt, technology banker Frank Quattrone argued: “For the VC market to produce above average returns you need there to be an IPO market.” An important part of venture returns come from holding onto some shares after an IPO and riding the public markets a while. “If you lose those longtail returns you lose a lot of the returns,” he concluded.

Quattrone seems to think this problem will be solved when the new standard bearers of the Web decide to go public, as opposed to the lackluster offerings so far:

There are probably 40 to 45 IPOs on file. They are not the category-defining, earthshaking companies the market wants to see. The market wants to see Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, LinkedIn, Skype. They want to see the companies that are changing the way we live.

I’m not sure a few iconic IPOs will bring back the Netscape years. First of all, it might still be a couple years before we see a Facebook IPO, and even longer for a Twitter IPO. But even if and when those kinds of tech companies do go public, the IPO option for lesser startups will remain limited for the reasons Wilson outlines. Unless, of course, a Facebook IPO makes public investors irrational once again and we get another bubble. But nobody wants that, or do they?