Dave Morin, Post-Pathgate: Dealing With Unprecedented Scale, Hopeful About The Future

In case you live under a rock (I hate that played out phrase, someone please come up with something better) Path founder Dave Morin has been through a hellish past two weeks — About a week before Valentine’s Day, his app came under major fire for uploading user iOS Address Books. So we had two weeks of tech news BS around this issue, and then all of a sudden Apple’s all like “My bad.”

Sigh.

Morin’s advice for founders that want to innovate in social and find themselves in a similar situation? “When you build social software you’re working with a new model. Sometimes you make assumptions [and] consumers might not think it is the right way to do it. The right thing to do is listen to users and apologize. ”

Morin abides by the controversial philosophy that users are always right, adhering to it almost instinctually,” It was clear immediately, as soon as people started talking about it, that it was not kosher for users,” he explains about the Address Book mismanagement.

Still, a mistake is not a career, and Morin is moving forward. He tells me he’s focused on putting the new Path’s hard-earned 2 million users and 1.2 million MAUs to good use. The company is currently in partnership with Nike+ and is slowly unveiling its Nike Fuelband integration. Rumor has it there are more poignant integrations and partnerships to come.

Also, I saw Morin randomly outside of The Creamery today chatting it up with Zynga founder Mark Pincus while I was on my way back to the office. Mike is right, SF is so hot right now.