As the Tumblr/Yahoo deal continues to be negotiated by press, and the world gears up for whatever is being announced Monday morning, Tumblr founder David Karp is probably having a very interesting weekend. It’s likely, in between multiple discussions with his board members and Marissa Mayer, that he’ll take a break, like a walk or something, to gather his thoughts.

On this walk (or jog or glass of wine at a bar), he will likely mull over two main outcomes. He could take Yahoo’s money, whether it be the $1.1 billion that the board is trying to approve giving him, or the more that he negotiates. Or, well, not.

If he took Yahoo’s money, he would join the Billion Dollar Exit Club — you know, the ranks of Kevin Systrom, Chad Hurley and Steven Chen from YouTube, the PayPal mafia, Tony Hseih, James Clark, Marc Andreessen, etc. He would be considered “successful” by the Valley’s ridiculous standards and everyone else’s, not Zuckerberg successful, but definitely Michael Birch successful. Maybe he’d buy a nice house in Presidio Heights for when he has to be on the West Coast, and fill it with art and an apartment in Chelsea? [And maybe a vacation home for his family. And maybe a plane.]

He’d still oversee the Tumblr product at Yahoo, at least until his lockup expired, and maybe users would leave and maybe they wouldn’t … But the game would be over. The race would be in its cool-down period. Still, a pretty chill life overall. Especially in this economy. What would Kevin Systrom do?

Sell.

But with this, just like with the Instagram sale, comes a nagging, cloying afterthought: “What if Tumblr (or Instagram or _______) could have been the next Facebook?” And this nagging opportunity cost would grow even louder if Yahoo succeeded with Tumblr, finding a way to monetize its millions of eyeballs much like Google did with YouTube.

“Tumblr could have been a contender.”

It’s this thought that will lead to a “No” from Karp and his board if it gets nagging enough. And this thought is weighty — Zuck had it too when he was being courted by Yahoo, and we all know how that turned out. But what happens after the “No,” the fact that Karp will be challenged to build a real business on top of Tumblr’s scale, is daunting enough to turn that “No” once again into a “Yes.”

Can Tumblr turn the process of following other Tumblrs through your dashboard into a stream it can monetize with sponsored, story-style ads? Or find a way to cram ads into the notoriously independent, and risky, content?

Can Karp put on the big-boy pants, hire a Sheryl Sandberg character, and create a money-making machine? Because if he’s not sure, and he’s not ready for a long, hard, uphill fight, he should sell.

Look what happened to Groupon; still trading below its $6bn offer.

A billion dollars is a lot of money.

Any programmer or blogger knows that when you work on the Internet, on a computer, it’s easy to gain weight. Tech office pantries are stocked with Red Bull, candy, chips and even things you wouldn’t think were too unhealthy, like protein bars. Protein bars are basically injections of sugar. That’s why they taste like a Snickers.

But what no one talks about is that the “Startup 15″ or 40 is avoidable if you put in the effort, not to diet, but to be healthy.

Because she is constantly around tech geeks and herself works online, blogger Darya Rose, who is both my friend and the wife of Google Ventures Partner Kevin Rose, is acutely aware of this pain and has a solution: Foodist, a way to stay healthy without going crazy dieting.

Reading her book a couple of weeks ago, I came across a passage that struck me as truth. In “Instagram, A Parable,” Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom described a breaking point in his work/life balance as he tried to build the company. If you’re shoving down burritos in between database sharding, you probably can relate:

“We never ate healthy at the release,” recalled Systrom. “At least in the beginning, we’d be so into our work that crafting a salad out of arugula and radicchio just wasn’t going to happen midday.” Instead, they’d opt for the local food trucks or burritos near the office. Without their even realizing it, weight started to creep on.

“We were looking at old pictures from Instagram, and people were like, ‘Oh my God, you look so young,’ and I was like, ‘What does that mean? Do I have gray hair? That was like six months ago,’” Systrom explained. “After that I kept telling myself, ‘I’ve got to get healthy again.”

Systrom had gained 25 pounds between Instagram’s launch in October of 2010 and its first 10 million users. “I bought a scale one day and realized my weight was up to 235,” he writes in Foodist. ”And I had never been this heavy in my life. I used to be 210, and I was like, ‘That’s not okay.’ But I knew I was not going to pull a sorority girl and just eat salad, because I love food. I can eat less, but I’m not going to stop eating food I like just to lose weight. That would make me unhappy.”

How did he do it? Exercise, by waking up earlier, making sure healthy food options were available in the Instagram office, the buddy system and saving indulgences for the real deal. He also packed a gym bag before bed, like a true hacker of life. “I knew that if I didn’t pack my gym bag with the clothes I was going to wear the next day, I wouldn’t make it to the gym. I also needed to lay out my workout clothes. I’d wake up in the morning and just make myself a deal: ‘Listen Kevin, all you need to do is put on those clothes and you’ll wake up on the drive to work and you’ll be fine.”

The first rule of being cool is not telling people you want to be cool. Yahoo is not following this rule, with its M&A team in full pray-and-spray acquisition mode post-Marissa Mayer hire, hitting on everything that walks, or at least has traction.

I’ve heard rumors that Yahoo was trying to get into the following deals over the past couple of months: Foursquare (at an $800 million asking price). Path (at a $2 billion asking price). Pinterest. Hulu. Zynga. Daily Motion. And at a smaller scale: Gdgt. Wavii. Media Ocean (?). A spate of others. And now Tumblr. “Literally they talk to everyone,” said one person familiar with the matter on the matter.

There was a kid in my high school who used to buy the popular kids lunch so he could sit with them. Yahoo has become that kid. At a reported $1b Tumblr would be a pricey picnic, about all of the cash Yahoo has on hand.

But it could work if it goes through, which I hope it won’t. A Tumblr buy fixes the issue of declining Yahoo traction, particularly amongst us wild, mobile-addicted youth. Yahoo, which wants to be a “key part of everyday life,” is limited by the fact that young people don’t want to use it at all, let alone every day. Tumblr is the exact opposite, hitting the sweet spot of mobile, social communications, messaging and viral distribution — Even bringing in some coin in the process.

Just to heap another dollop of speculation on top of this already absurdly speculative post: It wouldn’t be surprising if Google was also courting David Karp, as Mayer, a former Googler, still thinks like she’s in Google M&A, “Hey, a critical mass of people are using it … Let’s buy it and stick ads on it!.” Imagine what the social blogging platform could do to revive Google+ engagement and content creation … And how much more it would be worth to Google?

And it certainly makes sense for Yahoo to explore this strategy as well, in its larger, non-acquihire deals. But perhaps it should try being less promiscuous about it.

As one is wont to do, I was checking the French iOS app store rankings this a.m. just to make sure that my old mainstay app “ameli, l’Assurance Maladie” was still in spot No. 3 when sacrebleu! — Path was the No. 1 free app in France.

Now I’ve never really clicked with Path, rarely checked in with people there (it’s super awkward to name drop digitally) and have too much FOMO to stomach scrolling through all the things you people are doing on weekends without me. Though I found the redesign to be a vast improvement, I didn’t actually use the app at all until people began to say things like, “Did you see all the crazy stuff he/she posted on Path?”

So I log in every once in a while to use it, morbidly curious, thinking that only people in my rarefied circle use it to brag or complain about their personal lives off of Twitter. Because of laziness, I still use Twitter to complain and brag.

There are plenty of things I don’t use that are popular (WhatsApp?), but I’m particularly fascinated by Path’s erratic growth. Seriously, how does one go from No. 740 in overall French apps on May 8th to No. 1 on May 11th? Dave Morin swears that the startup isn’t using cost-per-install networks like AppGratis or any other sort of paid promotions other than a small number of Facebook ads, which he maintains are not particularly effective. And although the app was accused of being overly spammy and recently blocked from Facebook’s social graph API, it (with the exception of the calls) isn’t more egregious in its outreach than something like Facebook.

In fact, I just onboarded myself again to Path to test whether it was handsy with the invite process and have come to the conclusion that if you experienced the same process I did, and you’re any sort of meticulous person, it doesn’t “spam” your friends. As in, don’t check “Invite Friends” if you don’t want to do that and it won’t invite them. Do you need me to repeat that?

Anyways, God only knows what Path is doing to get users in France if it’s not paying for promotion (we’re working on a whole ‘nother story about this). It might be some sort of David Hasselhoff/Germany-effect where the product market fit across cultures is weird but works. I’ve been asking the French I know why they think this is happening, and, though many of them have no idea, French blogger Gregory Pouy came up with some theories.

In his own (Note: French-as-a-first-language) words:

There is one thing that it is VERY important to understand about France: you’ve got Paris on one side and the rest and the other side. For sure we have other big cities but interestingly enough, Paris is one of the major city for Twitter but is France is rank 17 (I think). I believe Path is big in Paris (not in France) and some other cities which is slightly different.

Then, I believe that France is a mature market (especially Paris) when talking about social media, which mean:

- A need to go private especially that in France we have really true strong relationship.

- Directly connected to the way Facebook evolved (this is not private anymore) and people are a bit fed up/ afraid and just use Facebook for what it became (a mix between professional and personal).

- Twitter is too complicated for many.

Smartphone penetration:

- In France, mobile operator are supporting the smartphone so you don’t have to pay for it – I think the penetration rate is comparable to the U.S. (50%)

PR:

- A lot of bloggers talked about Path (me for example) as a solution for having a private relationships for true real friends

For example I wrote several article but one in a major french Newspaper called Le Figaro on that specific subject pushing Path.

Also there is a strong trend amongst teenagers since a month as they don’t want to share private stuff in a place where their parents are.

Path #1 in France ? Like really ??—
Ouriel Ohayon (@OurielOhayon) May 12, 2013

As others have pointed out, Path has a hard row to hoe over the past three years, having to engender trust as a “private” social network while quickly demonstrating venture-validating growth. Le chemin de la réussite a de nombreux nids de poule.

My parents have yet to receive their Christmas gift. Because they are avid skiers, I bought them gift cards to Heavenly Mountain last December, and because of some issue with either the ZIP code or security code on my credit card, my charge keeps getting rejected. I have tried five different cards.

I have called AmEx. I’m about to call Chase since I just got a new card, and sit there and go through the transaction step-by-step with them to make sure there’s not some sort of security thing on my card’s side preventing the transaction from going through. I’m going to do that once I finish this post. Why won’t you let me give you my money, AmEx?

My mom did, however, receive her Mother’s Day gift yesterday, and the payment experience was exactly the opposite of the middle-class problem described above. That’s because I challenged myself to use Max Levchin’s new startup, Affirm, as a payment method.

Optimized for mobile, Affirm lets you pay without a credit card via phone in literally two taps (that’s their marketing pitch, in case that’s not obvious). It “loans” you the money with no fee, then gives you 30 days interest-free to pay it back. Affirm monetizes by charging a fee to merchants in return for guaranteeing payments through its social media-enabled risk assessment.

Right now the service is only available if you’re buying something from 1-800-Flowers, which is fitting. I don’t know about you, but lots of people are happy to pay $20 more for the convenience of not having to call a random florist by your mom’s house and pay by credit card over the phone during normal business hours.

Pro tip: You can always get cheaper flowers by calling a local florist, but I prefer to do my parent gift shopping at 1 a.m. on my cell phone in bed so …

“Given 1-800-FLOWERS.COM’s culture of innovation, we are always looking for innovative experiences to test and learn [!],” 1-800-Flowers head of VP of Mobile and Social Amit Shah told me on why they chose to be Affirm’s guinea pig during their high season. “This is an important focus for 1-800-FLOWERS.COM as we have been in the mobile space for more than five years — serving a rapidly increasing number of our customers who are using our mobile site and apps to send gifts every day.”

They’re on to me.

The real simple Affirm/1-800-Flowers integration lets you choose “Affirm Express Checkout” as one of the payment methods when buying your “Fields Of Europe ™ For Mom Large” and then asks you to log in with Facebook or Gmail to your Affirm account to complete the order. No credit card numbers, no security codes, no phone calls to customer service. Hallelujah.

Because it is born mobile, Affirm then texts you that you’ve completed your order, and you have about a month to log back in to Affirm to pay for your blossoms. I forgot about it after I did it, and about a week later Affirm emailed me to remind me that I hadn’t paid. So I did. Right then.

“It’s hard to build something really convenient,” Levchin told me in an interview about the startup, below. Though he wouldn’t confirm the rumors, we’re hearing that, in addition to Levchin himself through HVF, a lot of the PayPal mafia (i.e. Levchin’s homies) went in on the company’s $3 million – $5 million seed round, namely Peter Thiel and David Sacks. Competitors include Signifyd and Klarna.

Now it sucks that Affirm wouldn’t let me use a promo code to buy my overpriced bouquet, especially since overeager Google Wallet desperately wants to pay me $10 just to try it, but overall Affirm was worth it. (Levchin says that the Promo Code feature is coming in a new release.) Other than that, I wish that all online checkouts were this painless. This kind of friction removal has the potential to greatly expand the e-commerce market, bridge online-to-offline payments and engender trust among users.

Are you there AmEx? It’s me, Alexia.

Full interview below.

Alexia: Hi. This is Alexia Tsotsis from TechCruch. I am here with
founder, investor, and incubator founder, Max Levchin, and we’re here to
talk about his newest venture, Affirm. Tell me about Affirm. What’s your
elevator pitch?

Max: It solves a pretty major problem for online merchants. Today, as
commerce moves from desktop to mobile, people are actually
spending more time in front of a screen where they can buy, but
spend less money and check out less frequently because the
convenience of checking out on mobile is far inferior to that of
desktop. In other words, if you have your phone out and you’re
ready to buy and you see the perfect thing and it’s in your
shopping cart and the time comes to type in your credit card
number, a screen this big just isn’t quite as convenient as a
desktop where you probably already have your card number anyway.
Affirm solves that by essentially creating kind of a digital tab
for you to put the transaction on, and then Affirm will
guarantee the payment to the merchant, tell the merchant ship
these things, whatever you want, to Alexia right away, and we
will settle with the consumer later on.

Alexia: So you open your phone. You’ve got an Affirm account. It’s
mobile optimized. You actually have one of the most mobile
optimized actual websites I’ve ever seen for at least a payments
company, which I know the bar is very low.

Max: We’ve actually just lowered the bar significantly, but we are pretty
mobile optimized.

Alexia: You have your Affirm account, and it uses certain signals, like
Facebook, other social signals, your ZIP Code, to figure out if
you’re legit, right?

Max: Yep.

Alexia: And then based on that score, it sends money to the merchant.

Max: Yep. The best way to think about is basically the hundred years old
example. You walk into the corner store. You tell the shopkeep,
“I don’t have my wallet. I’ll settle with you at the end of the
month.” The shopkeep says, “I kind of know who you are. No
problem. I’ll get you later.”
On the Internet, no one knows who you are. You could be a dog,
per the New Yorker cartoon. So shopkeeps quite understandably
say, “Sorry, you’re not checking out until I get a valid credit
card number, so the credit card company can actually take that
risk. I will ship you the stuff, and they will pay me. It’s all
going to be okay.”

Except with a phone, typing in a credit card number kind of
sucks. So Affirm resurrects the 100-year-old tradition of a tab
where we say, “Based on who you are, which we can gather from
looking at your Facebook and your various other social signals,
as you said . . .”

Alexia: Which other ones? Twitter?

Max: We try very hard not to reveal exactly how we establish how legit you
are, because then it would be easier for people who are not very
legit to seem more legit. But you can sort of guess. Your
digital footprint online is relatively easy to guess. Your
identity has been verified by probably Facebook, probably
Twitter, probably LinkedIn if you are a professional, and
several other networks where you may be listed. Then you leave
enough breadcrumbs as you move around the Web for a determined
service to figure out who you are so long as you give us
permission. We won’t do this in any sort of a clandestine or
unfair way, but we look at whatever we can find about you online
to make the real-time decision.

Once we make the decision, we tell the merchant, “You know what?
Alexia is, in fact, legit. We are so certain of her legitimacy
that we will guarantee the transaction or the payment to you,
Mr. Merchant. So please do tell Alexia right away that the
merchandise is on its way going. We will send her a bill a
little bit later, and we will get her at the end of the month.”

Alexia: So what would be a demerit on a social network, for example?
Let’s say I’m on Facebook. What’s a bad signal for Affirm?

Max: That I am definitely not telling you.

Alexia: You’re not going to tell me. Would it be an age range or . . .

Max: Actually, to be more precise, we don’t really use Facebook or, for
that matter, other social network information to ascertain
anything but your identity. This is not a Facebook credit score
or anything like that. That’s far too simplistic.

What’s really going as far as the social networks are concerned
is that they’ll provide, essentially, an identity in the sky
kind of a service. It’s the cloud-based password file for sort
of technology nerds.

You can log into Facebook. You can log into Google+. You can log
into LinkedIn. That basically obviates the step where you say,
“Hey, this email address, is it tied to a real person, and is
this person who they say they are?”

That’s the anchor point that we need to figure out quickly who
you are, so you don’t have to establish a new account. From that
point, we know your email address and a few other very, very
basic things about you. From that point on, it’s on us to go
find the rest, and most of that rest isn’t actually on Facebook.
Most of it is on the broad Internet. Most importantly, it’s in
your repeated experiences with us.

So the more you transact with us, the more we see you pay off
your balances legitimately, the more we learn about you, and the
more we understand how trustworthy you are.

Alexia: So is your grand vision for this sort of like an Internet
enabled credit score? Is your competitor FICO, or is it like
Signified or Klarna? What is your big vision for Affirm?

Max: The big vision is to create . . . I think it winds up being
essentially a digital tab, which is a kind of credit system or a
credit network where you can use new signals, new scores, if you
will, to establish rapid access to funds.

I generally believe that credit in a very broad sense of the
word is the lubricant of economies. Credit for consumption
purposes is a very useful thing, a very nice thing. In
established economies, it creates opportunities to space out
payments to afford things you couldn’t afford in a lump sum.
In developing economies or even in a small business context,
credit is the driver that says, “I’m going to go buy a truck. I
can’t buy a truck for cash. I’m going to buy it in
installments.” Or, “I’m going to buy it and pay later when I use
this truck to make more money.”
So it’s a very powerful idea to be able to postpone having to
settle for something that is effectively an investment, either
in you or your small business or your family, and I think
enabling access to that is ultimately the fundamental vision for
Affirm. There are many different expressions of that. The
merchant-facing product that we built is a great way to test the
concept, to prove that it works, to show value to consumers, and
also to enable lift for merchants.

As traffic shifts from desktop to mobile, merchants are losing
transactions that they legitimately have today on desktop, but
will not have on mobile because they don’t have a credit card on
file, because typing a credit card into a phone is difficult,
because it’s just not that easy to check out on your mobile
device. Your wallet is upstairs and you’re on your couch with
your tablet.
All of that is fixed by Affirm, and that’s the first step. But
the bigger vision is to fix many situations like that.

Alexia: So it looks like you’re on 1-800-FLOWERS on your phone.

Max: That is our first partner.

Alexia: You’re often looking for flowers on your phone, and you see a
big . . .

Max: I’m a very romantic guy.

Alexia: You know what? I love flowers. They brighten up a room.

Max: So does my wife.

Alexia: I bet she’s got so many from testing out the partnership.

Max: When I was beta testing the product, several women in my life were
receiving flowers more often than normal.

Alexia: Your next one should be a candy company, like Godiva.

Max: That’s a brilliant idea.

Alexia: See.

Max: 1-800-FLOWERS actually has an excellent line of businesses in gifts
and candies and things like that, so we’re looking forward to
enabling those transactions as well.

Alexia: So you’re looking for flowers or candy on your phone, and
you’re on the 1-800-FLOWERS website, and it says “Pay with
Affirm.” So you’ve got pay with your credit card, pay with
PayPal, and pay with Affirm. You hit Affirm. What does hitting
Affirm do differently than any of the other buttons that you’ve
got?

Max: If you are already logged in to your Affirm app, which you would be
if you had ever used it before, you’ll literally see a screen
that says, “Hey, thanks for using Affirm. Do you, in fact, agree
and promise to settle this bill with us later?”

You say, “Yep. That’s what I want. I want this nice piece of
candy or flowers.” We say, “Great. Okay. Thank you.”
And that’s it. You go back to the merchant site. The merchant
says, “Fantastic. Affirm has guaranteed this transaction for us.
Candy is on its way.”
You get a text or email from us saying, “Thank you so much for
using Affirm. Please settle at the end of the month.”
So it’s about the fastest process of checkout you can imagine.

Alexia: How does it feel to be competing against (a) the credit cards,
but then the big PayPal button? That was your baby. You’re going
up against . . .

Max: I don’t actually feel like I’m competing with any of those guys. I
mean, ultimately, the transaction has to be settled. It’s fine
and dandy to lubricate the wheels of commerce, but at the end,
the bill has to be paid, and it’s not like I am minting my own
currency or using Bitcoin, certainly not yet.

Alexia: What do you think of Bitcoin?

Max: I used to think pretty negatively of it, but I have some very
intelligent friends that have persuaded me to give it a very
careful look. It’s not that I don’t believe in new currencies or
fully-distributed ledgers or all this stuff.

It actually is intellectually fascinating, but the fact that I
don’t think that anyone, myself included, being a payments
professional, can explain what Bitcoin is and how it works to my
mom, who actually is a very intelligent and technologically
sophisticated woman, suggests that it will never really take
off. Until I heard that in Latin America, apparently, they use
Bitcoin to settle very large transactions because the local
currency isn’t trusted enough.

I’m confident Bitcoin is still too hard to understand for the
vast majority of people, but even with its difficult PR
problems, the fact that it is chosen by regular people to settle
things out of sheer trust over the existing hard currency or
fiat currency suggests that crypto-currencies in general have
potential and particularly this one.

So in my mind, the jury is still out, but I am more positive on
Bitcoin than I was yesterday. That’s certainly aided by the fact
that Bitcoin has been rising like crazy since the last three or
four months ago. It’s at the very least very interesting.

Alexia: I think that Cyprus may have contributed to that. I was very
skeptical as well, as anyone should be about something that just
magically appears out of mining online.

Max: Sort of like gold.

Alexia: True.

Max: It magically appears out of mining.

Alexia: Yes, and I am very skeptical of gold as well.

Max: The return to gold standard by way of crypto-currency.

Alexia: Kind of. I think Cyprus has done a lot for Bitcoin. It’s a
whole nother discussion, but as a payments professional, do you
have a Bitcoin for dummies type statement that you use to
explain it to people who don’t know what it is?

Max: No.

Alexia: No. That’s what they need.

Max: That’s my problem with Bitcoin is that I think they need to
immediately hire a phenomenal PR professional that can say,
“Bitcoin is like blank for blank, and you all should have some.”

It is a fully-distributed transactional ledger that allows for
all sorts of very nice properties that, unfortunately, people
with degrees in economics can understand without thinking for
two and a half seconds, and most people kind of go, “Do I really
need that? Do I care about that? What about my privacy? Is this
a value store?”
So it’s hard to explain, but currency in general is hard to
explain. Currency is something you don’t think about very much
other than the fact that it represents your ability to buy
something. There is no store that I am aware of that accepts
Bitcoin like it’s no big deal. There are some online places that
actually do.

Alexia: There are some exceptions. Yeah, I think there might be one or
two really exceptional . . .

Max: Like a physical . . .

Alexia: Yeah.

Max: . . . a physical location that actually . . .

Alexia: Like a coffee shop.

Max: Right.

Alexia: But very few.

Max: I’ve heard of this. But people just don’t have a lot of experience
thinking of currencies. They don’t have any physical
manifestation as an indicator of a capacity to buy, I think,
especially one as kind of vaguely controversial given all the
underworld usage that we hear about more often than anything.

So Bitcoin’s biggest problem may well be its PR strategy or lack
thereof. I’m sure that could be fixed.

Alexia: Somewhere there is a very opportunistic PR professional
watching this interview, Googling Bitcoin and reading a
Wikipedia article.

Max: Good for them.

Alexia: So you’re so much wiser now than you were at PayPal and Slide.

Max: Which way does the relative comparison . . . you used to be so dumb
and now you’re so much smarter?

Alexia: Well, after Slide, I’m sure you’ve learned some hard-earned
lessons.

Max: Sure.

Alexia: So what did you learn at PayPal or Slide about the space, and
how are you putting those lessons into Affirm?

Max: I think the payment space is actually not extraordinarily hard to
learn. The interesting thing about payments . . . there are
actually many very interesting things about payments. Sort of
dumbing it down is no fun at all. One of the interesting changes
in payments over the last 15 years, on the Internet
specifically, it has tracked the change of consumer attitude
towards online shopping.

Fifteen years ago, it was all about trust. “I don’t really know
if you’re going to ship this stuff to me, Mr. eBay seller.” The
proverbial narrative was, “I bought an Xbox on eBay, and I got a
box with a letter X drawn on it.”

Alexia: “I bought a Chanel bag.”

Max: Yeah. All sorts of crazy stories like that. So trust and safety was .
. . eBay had a VP of Trust and Safety. The guy was a former
lawyer. So you could sort of see the intensity of that.
These days, it has drastically shifted towards convenience. “I
have my phone out. I’m going to buy something. I can’t buy it
with one click. I’m going to Amazon.”

That narrative has just shifted towards that, and so the reason
Affirm makes so much sense is because it removes bumps in the
road for most merchants. Amazon has the very privileged position
of saying, “Your credit card is on file. So if you want to do it
with one click, you can do it with one click or one tap or
whatever the user interface calls for.”

Most merchants, as the traffic goes from desktop to mobile, have
the sinking feeling of, “People that used to rely on browser
autofill can’t rely on browser autofill, and I don’t have an
account for them on file. I don’t know their credit card
number.”

Alexia: And they don’t know their credit card number.

Max: They don’t know their credit card number either.

Alexia: The screen keeps scrolling up. That’s a big problem.

Max: The interesting thing about the payment industry is that it was built
around several notions that aren’t really true, and you can sort
of blame or applaud companies like Facebook for fundamentally
lowering our sense for what’s scary and what’s not. Facebook has
taught a lot of people that sharing what seems to be probably
better kept private or secret isn’t actually that big of a deal.
In fact, it’s good. You haven’t been tricked into sharing.
You’ve been enabled to give more value.

Alexia: It’s voluntary, the voluntary panopticon. Like, “Sure, take my
data. I just want convenience.”

Max: Well, and because our lives are so much busier, because we have so
much more access to technology, because we have so many more
opportunities to spend our attention currency, we want
convenience. I used to be okay waiting for predetermined blocks
of time to read my email. I’m not okay now. I’m going to grab my
phone the second this interview is over and check my email on
the way to the cab.

I don’t really imagine the world in a different way anymore. So
when I want to buy something in that cab, I’m not sure I’m going
to record it in my Evernote to buy something later. I’m going to
pull out my phone and start shopping, and if I can’t check out
fast enough or the cab is bumping around too much, I’ll go on
Amazon because I know they have my credit card information
already stored.

So the shift towards convenience has shaped a lot of the
innovation in the world of payments and in the world of online
shopping. I think that’s kind of a profound truism that many
online payment companies have not really become aware of yet.

Alexia: That people are okay, that they feel safe buying stuff online.

Max: They very much feel safe buying stuff online. They are much more
excited, both on the merchant side and on the consumer side,
about having the closest possible experience to one-click
checkout. That may well be the Holy Grail of all online
commerce. How can you enable someone to just see something they
want, grab it, and go?

One of the interesting sort of debates that I think isn’t
happening, but should, is the idea of an online shopping cart.
Remember the whole universe of the universal shopping cart, the
shopping cart that followed you around from site to site? I
don’t know if people shop like that anymore.

I think people go, “Oh, toilet paper.” Toilet paper into Google.
Best price on toilet paper. Same day delivery. The next step
isn’t, “Put it in my universal shopping cart.” It’s about click
and buy with one click with Affirm.

Alexia: Do it. Yeah.

Max: I think at least that’s the hope. My theory of online payments has
been squarely driving me towards asking the question: What is
more convenient? How do you enable access to payments, credit,
and finance at the consumer small business level with the
simplest possible cognitive load, to use Clay Shirky’s
terminology?

Alexia: So is Affirm a convenience platform, or is it a bigger idea?
Because I read that James Temple piece using – unfairly, I
think, in Affirm’s case – the example of the startup’s launch as
something that represented how Silicon Valley wasn’t taking moon
shots or was talking about libertarianism and talking about
innovation, but not actually coming through.

Max: I think it’s important to parse out every idea to its fullest extent
as opposed to critiquing it on its surface. For merchants and
for consumers, the expression of Affirm as you see it today is
all about convenience. It is very much about saying, “Hey,
buying something with one click is more convenient that typing
in a credit card number.” It is true. If you look at Amazon’s
volume of sales or market cap, you can see that that’s actually
a relatively big idea in and of itself.

But the underpinnings of creating something that convenient are
pretty hard. It is, in fact, as hard as starting a brand new
credit network. So if you look pre-credit cards, for example,
the idea of check on delivery or settling with cash and having
to bring, perhaps, a trunk full of bills being replaced by a
single slide of a card, no one doubts that was a tremendous
innovation in the ’70s. I hope that Affirm has a similar level
of ambition all about it as it enables transactions.

Alexia: How does it fit in with the incubator you just launched, HVF,
Hard Valuable Fun?

Max: Well, I think it’s very valuable. Despite the convenience
accusations, I think it’s very hard to build something that’s
really convenient. I happen to think that payments are kind of
fun, but that may make me somewhat of an oddity.

It fits very well. The incubator, as you call it, I call it a
lab, but there really isn’t a good word for it. Lab is a
placeholder name. I’m not sure what the real name should be.
HVF, for lack of a better term, has been around for over a year.
So we didn’t just launch it. We spent 16 or 17 months building
our first project, which is Affirm.

The idea behind HVF is that there is a whole host of problems in
the world that should be solved with data, and I have sort of a
sneaking suspicion that the vast majority of really big problems
at this point, if they’re solvable, are going to be solved by
gathering superior amounts of data and creating superior
insights by looking at that data. But I’m sure there are
probably exceptions.

However, what I’m most interested in or at least where I think I
can add value is by looking at a hard problem and asking the
question or framing the question in terms of what sort of data
sets can be looked at to remove this problem, to fix this
friction, to get rid of the difficulty?

Alexia: Did you ever think at Slide that you’d be going into the

payment sector again? Did you ever think you’d be doing another
payment startup?

Max: No.

Alexia: No.

Max: I did not think that. But then again, I never thought I would be
building a social media company when we started Slide. The life
of an entrepreneur is an exercise in surprises, which is
actually what makes it so cool.

Alexia: This is true. Well, thank you, Max.

Max: A pleasure.

Startups of a feather flock together. Wefollow, a company that was spun out of Digg, has been acquired by about.me, a company that was spun out of Aol.

And get this, there’s more: Lead about.me investor Kevin Rose was also a co-founder of Wefollow (though hasn’t been involved in the project since 2010), and about.me co-founder Tony Conrad was the lead investor in Rose’s Milk — which sold to Google and eventually staffed up Google Ventures. No conflict, no interest.

Right now Wefollow is a discovery tool which allows people to search for Twitter users based on interests. And about.me is a profile creation platform about to double down on its own user search, which is also based on interests. So a merger makes sense, vision-wise. “As more and more people use the search tool to find and get to know other about.me users,” Conrad tells me,”It’s super important to serve up the right results algorithmically.”

Wefollow’s technology will be used to refine the order in which users will show up in search and its prominence scores will eventually be incorporated into the about.me product.

“Wefollow’s goal is to be on the receiving end of any search for a person known for something,” Wefollow co-founder Jeff Hodsdon says, on why the two products are strategically sympatico, “about.me’s primary goal is to provide context of a person describing who they are with a single page. Which they do beautifully.”

“One great thing Wefollow does is expose lesser known people in niche interests that are starting to come online,” he continues, “People known in their respective interests that are much smaller than whats in our tech world. e.g. Florists, Falconry, Cabinetry, Metal Working, Timelapse Photography, etc. Wefollow is a good directory but doesn’t do people justice like an about.me page does when you land on the person you’re looking for.”

Wefollow had been generating revenue at the time of its acquisition, through a “cost per follow” and featured placement functions. “People are willing to pay to promote themselves in their respective interests. And that is an obvious fit with about.me,” Conrad asserted.

Neither company would disclose the terms of the deal, but about.me has raised $5.7 million from True Ventures, SoftTech VC, Google Ventures, CrunchFund* and others to take the road less traveled by and go it alone sans Aol. Conrad eventually views the platform as a place where people will define themselves with an eye towards “calls to action,” competing with Facebook Graph Search, Google and a slew of other products to define your identity or as Conrad puts it, “provide the best set of tools to present yourself on the web.”

“We designed about.me with a movement around identity in mind – to reach a broad audience – to do so, we knew it needed to be nimble, flexible, easy to understand, easy to use and beautiful,” Conrad explains, “The fundamental power of about.me is its simplicity – you know, the person with no tech experience as well as the uber coder, both can have an equally profound, pertinent experience.”

*Disclosure: Crunchfund, you know the drill.

Serial entrepreneur Evan Williams spoke onstage at Wired’s Business Conference, about going from Pyra Labs to Blogger to Obvious to Odeo to Obvious to Twitter to Obvious to Medium. Whew! “Turns out I’m bad at parallel entrepreneurialism,” Williams laughed, joking about why he just can’t stop focusing when a particular startup takes off within one of his many umbrella companies.

The most recent bright, shiny object in Williams’ purview is Medium, the publishing platform that’s focused on “ideas and stories with a longer shelf life.” Williams is now spending most of his time helming the 30 person team of former Obvious and now Medium employees. Curiously, the still invite-only publishing company is paying freelance writers to write for it, much like a traditional media organization.

When asked by Wired senior writer Steven Levy when the time was right to pull the plug on a company or when to stick with a project like Blogger, Williams said it was basically a gut check every time: “There’s something about just hanging in there, on the Internet. If you don’t die, then you win sometimes.” Google acquired Pyra Labs and Blogger for a rumored eight figures in 2003. You probably first started blogging on a Blogger blog. I sure did. And it is still around.

Twitter is another one of the wins. When asked what surprised him the most about Twitter’s hanging in there (seriously), to an eventual IPO in 2014, Williams, who still is on the Twitter board, said, “Everything.”

“I’m impressed and amazed every time I have a board meeting there. You zoom out and you think it’s pretty much the same as it was two years ago, but in other ways it’s just more and more indoctrinated into the culture. And everywhere you go, at least things I pay attention to, it’s like Twitter’s built into everything … It’s been really educational for me to see the evolution of a company that I was involved in from the very beginning now grow to be almost 2000 people. When I stepped down as CEO [two and a half years ago] it was 300 people, which felt like a big company.”

Eventually if you stick around enough, the wins will add up. To close the talk, Levy brought up one of Evan’s recent tweets, a quote from Nassim N. Taleb’s ANTIFRAGILE, a book that Williams is “obsessed” with, “Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain.”

"Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain." – @nntaleb—
Evan Williams (@ev) April 30, 2013

If anything on the Internet is like a mall right now, it’s social shopping site Wanelo. Call it the Pinterest for products or the Twitter for products or the whatever for products, the platform is starting to leave “X for X” territory and become its own thing like Madonna or Beyoncé. Search Twitter for Wanelo and you get stuff like this.

The best things in the world:
Wanelo
Victoria's Secret
PINK
Leggings
Shopping
Starbucks
Makeup
Long hair
Tanning
Summer—
High School Life (@highskoollifee) May 07, 2013

It’s up there with “Victoria’s Secret” and “Tanning.” And today it’s trying to further its inherent stickiness with Wanelo 3.0.

Like Pinterest, Wanelo allows you to upload and explore images uploaded by other users, saving the ones you love to collections. Unlike Pinterest, items you painstakingly save, like this Instagram monster cozy, also can be bought through a big “Buy” link on Wanelo itself, and this is what sets it apart. The company currently monetizes through affiliate revenue, but has its sights set on wider (stealthier) horizons.

Wanelo 3.0 emphasizes the other users part of the above equation, onboarding web and iOS shoppers by directing them to follow stores like Nasty Gal and people like the site’s founder Deena Varshavskaya.

Until today, users on the site and the iOS app (Sorry, Android users, you guys are SOL) discovered products mainly through the “Trending” feed and the search box simply said, “Find products.” With Wanelo 3.0, your shopping graph, i.e. aforementioned sites and people you follow, are aggregated into “My Feed” which becomes the first thing you see when you visit and the first icon in the navigation dashboard. You can now search for “Stores and People” in addition to just products.

“Today’s consumers make sense of the world through the people around them and expect a social experience for every basic human need,” Varshavskaya explains the philosophy behind the new changes, “We’ve lacked one until now with Wanelo which connects stores and people in one social platform.” The prominence of the follow model could be a boon for brands like Nasty Gal, which boasts over 300k followers and 40k products on the platform.

Wanelo has gone from 1 million registered users to 8 million in six months according to today’s press release, which also asserts that the startup is seeing over 5 million products saved over 8 million times a day, from over 200k stores. Users are spending an average of 50 minutes a day on the site, and, while Wanelo declined to confirm its DAU and MAU numbers, this Slideshare on its scale pegs them at 4 million monthly.

It’s no small feat: Last time we checked in on more heavily funded competitor TheFancy, it had 2 million registered users and was trying all sorts of ways to make it work, like subscription commerce and giftcards. And last time we checked in on Wanelo it was rumored to have closed a hot Series A, though the company has yet to confirm specifics officially.

What it did confirm, at TechCrunch Disrupt last week, was that last time it had an app update, it included a developer’s name and email in the “Details” section because it updated on his birthday. Kaan Meralan then became the recipient of an avalanche of emails from the fervent Wanelo community, including stuff like this.

I have no idea who you are…but Happppyyyy birthday!!!! DDD

 

yes…I actually read the wanelo update thing.  And yes I am about to write you a touching, endearing birthday message…

 

I can’t believe it’s your birthday!  It seems like yesterday you were just a young tot bobblin’ around trying to walk…and now you’re all grown up :,)  OH how the time flies!  I have loved getting to know you and seeing you grow up! <3 thanks for being you, kaan.  Stay true to YO SELF.  Don’t be changin’ fo’ nobody, dawg.  …aslo on a realistic note, thanks for workin at wanelo and stuff…cuz that site be poppin’.

 

Yours truly,

Brooklyn

(aka your best bud…aka not really, but virtually…aka the girl that would be your actual best friend but I don’t actually know you, but if I did we would probably be besties…aka the stranger that read the wanelo update and wrote you an email to wish you a happy birthday)

 

P.S. happy birthday! Luv you!!! xoxo

Watch Deena Varshavskaya tell the story, below.

My old boss used to say that a story is something you’d tell someone in a bar or at lunch, so I’m going to tell you guys the tale I’ve been telling people at bars and lunches. Yesterday, Aol Ventures head Mike Brown announced through Dan Primack that he’d be leaving Aol to start his own VC firm, Bowery Capital.

The most interesting part of this story is that Bowery Capital was actually hatched at 670 Broadway in New York, which has the distinction of ALSO BEING THE TECHCRUNCH NEW YORK OFFICES. I’m sitting here right now, and it’s pretty hard to miss the presence of the new firm. Seriously, the Bowery Capital swag and logo is everywhere, and there is literally a pamphlet for their CRO conference on my desk (see below).

In fact, the snazzy team headshots on the new Bowery Capital website were actually taken by a TC videographer. As a favor!

Brown told Aol he wanted to do this last April, and started raising his $33 million fund in October. So, it’s been in the works for a year. When asked why they never got curious as to what was going on beneath their noses and report the story — like what usually happens — one TechCrunch New York staffer said, “I don’t know.”

Well I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

The rise of the company builders is right. As Leena wrote in her spot-on post, “Operators are foregoing the traditional path of joining a traditional VC to instead create a studio-like holding operation.” The latest in a series of accomplished entrepreneurs wanting to lend their expertise to a new generation of companies? Serial entrepreneur Garrett Camp, who has set up the holding company Expa to nurture his ideas for products.

Camp tells me Expa will be very close in model to the holding companies started by entrepreneurs Max Levchin (HVF), Evan Williams (Obvious), Michael Birch (Monkey Inferno) or Ron Palmeri (MkII), and be more focused than organizations like Science or Betaworks. “I’ve come up with 10 ideas over the past year that I’m interested in,” he revealed, confirming that Expa will stay small. “But realistically only three or four will really come to fruiton.”

Camp became an entrepreneur in 2002 when he founded and bootstrapped discovery startup StumbleUpon, taking it all the way to a $75 million acquisition by eBay, and then a spin-out, eventually leaving the CEO role and handing over the company to Mark Bartels. He came up with the idea for transportation app Uber in 2009 and handed that company off to its hyper-focused CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick.

Nowadays, he’s spending time coaching the “Uber for private planes,” Blackjet, through the growth process from his home.

Derived from the words “experience apps,” Camp holds that the words “incubator” and/or “accelerator” aren’t a good fit to describe Expa, which he hopes will be primarily composed of companies that Camp himself built from scratch. “I’ve asked a lot of people what should we call it, and we don’t have an answer.” After a decade-long career, he believes he’s come up with an efficiency system to help startups reach their full potential. “Instead of doing angel investing, he says, “I’m trying to take that same amount of capital and put it into something where I can be involved in the branding and design.”

“I’d really like to be involved in the early stage formation of new ideas and new products,” he says, “And use all my lessons learned in the past 10 years. Every time I make a mistake with a company, I write it out and try to figure out why it happened,” he emphasized, revealing that he also does this for things he gets right. “I’ve come up with a good set of guidelines, and if I apply these guidelines through Expa, I can hopefully end up with a couple of cool companies.”

Right now Expa is self-funded, but Camp tells me that if it gets to the point where he needs to raise money for an individual company or an entire entity, then he’ll raise money. The company is currently focused on a stealth project in the realm of mobile data and analytics, though Camp says it’s too early to reveal specifics. He insists it’s not in the transportation space or “Uber for X” like Blackjet.

Though he’s not going to keep milking that cow, Camp says that Uber is a great structural model for what he’d like an Expa company to be. “When I think of all the things you can do right or wrong, Uber definitely got most of them right. There’s a few that they got wrong, but none of them are fatal. And I definitely see a correlation between how many things a company gets right and how fast a company grows.”

What’s the most important thing a company can get right? “Having the right amount of equity held by the right people,” Camp says. “Your goal should be fairness.”

More than 2,000 people have filled up the historic Manhattan Center with our biggest hackathon and Startup Alley yet, and a set of incisive discussions with tech leaders. Now it’s time for the battlefield finals, and we have our seven finalists picked out.

But first, tomorrow will feature Ashton Kutcher, Joe Lonsdale, a big panel on transportation, an interview with hardware startup leader Limor Fried, the Rap Genius guys, and more.

Finals judges include Nancy Peretsman (Allen & Company), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital), Chris Dixon (Founder Collective), David Lee (SV Angel), Michael Arrington (CrunchFund), and Chi-Hua Chien (Kleiner Perkins).

Enigma.io makes it easy to analyze data from more than 100,000 data sources, and is already being used by journalists to break stories and financial firms and companies to make smarter business decisions.

Floored scans office spaces, apartments and houses using 3D camera technology and proprietary software to build customizable 3D models for real estate purposes.

Glide lets you enjoy video chat on your own schedule, and has made it into the finals round from our Startup Alley.

Handle helps you manage your email overload via a rich web app as well as a companion native iOS app that integrates with Gmail (and soon Microsoft Exchange and Yahoo).

HealthyOut provides users with personalized menus of food from local restaurants, set up as a subscription delivery service to help them lose weight or just eat better overall.

SupplyShift is an enterprise tool that lets companies and organizations track everything that’s going on with suppliers around world, collecting sustainability data to help them reduce risk exposure.

Zenefits helps small businesses manage payroll, health care and other human-resources services for employees.

Ch – ch – ch- changes! The six-year-old media startup Tumblr is going through quite a few right now, namely focusing on profitability versus growth in its product efforts — enabling a promoted post feature in addition to just recently launching mobile ads. The company is looking for a “Sheryl Sandberg-type” COO, amidst a series of executive departures and layoffs.

Business Insider confirmed this with Tumblr board member and Sequoia Roelof Botha, who will take the stage with founder David Karp at TechCrunch Disrupt New York next week to talk about Tumblr’s future and perhaps even announce the COO new hire (we hope!).

In any case, the talk will probably be illuminating after a week filled with tough but optimistic decision-making, ”The team usually walks out of those meetings feeling a little beat up. But your best teachers were probably your hardest teachers. Your best coaches were your hardest coaches,” Botha told BI.

Karp and Botha join our amazing list of Disrupt NY speakers that currently includes Dennis Crowley, Bill Gurley, Chamath Palihapitiya, John Donahoe, Limor Fried, Ron Conway and David Lee.

Tickets are available here. Worth it.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

David Karp
Founder, Tumblr

Tumblr founder David Karp was born and raised in New York City, attending the Bronx High School of Science before dropping out at age 15. An internship at Frederator Studios led to a gig leading product at UrbanBaby. When CNET acquired the company in 2005, Karp started his own development agency, Davidville. In 2007 his team launched Tumblr, now the home and platform for more than 100 million creators. As a top 15 US network, Tumblr serves an audience of more than 170 million people worldwide.

We’re happy to have Allen & Company Managing Director Nancy Peretsman and Kleiner Perkins’ Chi-Hua Chien lend their judging expertise to our TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield competition. One of the most powerful women in New York business, Peretsman worked on Google’s IPO and the Aol Time Warner spin-off, among other things. And from the West Coast, rising star Chien has already worked at two top-tier VC firms and advises startups like Path, Twitter and Spotify.

And for those of you who haven’t been reading TechCrunch for the past two weeks, TechCrunch Disrupt New York kicks off tomorrow with a Hackathon and officially starts Monday with three days of some of the best of tech onstage at the Manhattan Center. Tickets are available here.

Peretsman and Chien join our list of Disrupt NY speakers, whicih currently includes Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, Nasty Gal’s Deborah Benton, investors Roelof Botha, Chamath Palihapitiya, and, yes, Ashton Kutcher and hardware creator Limor Fried, with more still to be announced.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

Nancy Peretsman
Managing Director, Allen & Company

Nancy Peretsman, Managing Director at Allen & Company LLC, has served as advisor to many of the world’s largest media, communications and consumer companies.

Since joining Allen & Co. in 1995, Nancy has provided advice and capital to over one hundred small high growth businesses, including Priceline.com, on whose board she continues to serve.
Prior to Allen & Co., Nancy worked as a Managing Director at Salomon Brothers, heading the worldwide media investment banking practice.

Over the last decade, Fortune has named her among the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business. Additionally, Ms. Peretsman serves on the Boards of Trustees at Princeton University and Institute for Advanced Study and on the Board of Directors at Teach For America.

She received an undergraduate degree from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School in 1976 and earned an MBA from the Yale School of Management in 1979.

Chi-Hua Chien
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Chi-Hua Chien joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 2007. At KPCB he focuses on investments in consumer web and mobile. He serves on the Board of Directors or works closely with the teams at Booyah, Chegg, Erly, GOGII, Home Value Protection, Klout, Path, Reputation.com, Spotify, and Twitter. Prior to KPCB, Chi-Hua worked with Accel Partners as a Venture Advisor and Associate focusing on software as a service, consumer Internet, and online advertising infrastructure. Chi-Hua was instrumental in Accel’s investments in AdECN (acquired by Microsoft) and Facebook, while also working on the firm’s investments in BitTorrent, fbFund, Glam, Trulia, and YuMe Networks.

Previously, Chi-Hua was the Director of Marketing at hosted software provider Coremetrics, where he led the marketing and inside sales teams as the company grew from 20 to more than 200 customers. He also served as the company’s interim CFO through two rounds of venture funding. Chi-Hua’s prior roles include corporate development at Google, business development at start-up eCoverage, and investment banking with Morgan Stanley’s Technology Group.

Chi-Hua has an MS in Industrial Engineering, BS in Industrial Engineering, and BA in Economics, all from Stanford University where he was named a Mayfield Fellow and President’s Scholar. He also earned an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar. Chi-Hua was named one of the Top VCs Under 35 by VC Journal and a member of the Elite Eight VCs To Watch by Forbes.

We’ve just gotten word that Facebook’s Director of Engineering for Ads, John Hegeman, will be moving to Quora to lead the Quora engineering team. While I haven’t received direct confirmation from either Quora or Hegeman on the hire, Hegeman has apparently confirmed the move on his (private) Facebook Timeline according to a tipster, writing:

Today is my last day at Facebook. I feel extremely fortunate to have spent five and a half years working with and learning from such an exceptional group of people. In particular, I want to thank Mark for building this incredible company and my managers Yishan, Kang-Xing, Greg, and Boz for all of the mentorship and opportunities that they have given me. The decision to leave wasn’t easy, but I’m very proud of all that the ads team has accomplished and I’m extremely confident that the team is in good hands. I look forward to seeing the great work I know they will continue to do. Looking forward, I’m excited to be joining the engineering team at Quora in a few weeks. I’m grateful to Adam for this opportunity to work with him and the rest of the team at Quora who are building an incredible product. I can’t wait to get started.”

The company has recently launched a series of products — like a blogging platform and reviews — that attempt to surface the cream of the Q&A site’s content crop, and the Quora engineering team has been strenuously focusing its efforts on growth hacking — throwing the kitchen sink at the problem of attracting and engaging users. Ostensibly Hegeman will be leading this charge.

Taking Quora to the next user-adoption level is a tremendous opportunity if he and CEO Adam D’Angelo can get it right. Just last night Quora was described to me as an “anti-Twitter” at a dinner party, with the specific questions “What does it feel like to murder someone?” and “What does it feel like to be an unattractive woman?” brought up as specific examples of content where people avoid the sorts of knee-jerk reactions as evidenced on Facebook and Twitter in favor of more in-depth and thoughtful responses.

There is definitely room for an anti-Twitter, but will Quora be it in the wake of platforms like Medium and Svbtle? Well …

Only three days left to scoop up TechCrunch Disrupt NY tickets! You can get them here. And view our amazing speaker lineup here.

Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley has had a helluva April. The company just closed a $41 million debt round from Silver Lake Partners and Spark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, O’Reilly AlphaTech and Union Square Ventures, and released a revamped iOS app. Yahoo M&A has also reportedly been sniffing around.

In an effort to foster promising web growth, the company launched a browser-focused redesign yesterday: “Foursquare is quietly breaking through as a place for information about venues,” wrote Drew Olanoff, “its most prized asset.”

The company has 33 million registered users and 50 million unique monthly visitors and now has to come up with a plan to compel them to keep coming back. Is its value as a social company or as a massive location-data-review company? And though some, like Valley angel Keith Rabois, are skeptical of Foursquare’s future, existing investors have faith. “This will be a very important public company one day,” said Bijan Sabet, a general partner at Spark Capital. “And I am in no rush.”

Perhaps this is because of the drive and passion of Crowley. His resilience in the past couple of months, let alone this year, is impressive, and we’ve made room onstage at Disrupt NY next week for him to talk about it. Just last and this week alone could fill up a whole conference day, as Crowley himself was also a participant in the Boston marathon, in addition to everything mentioned above .

**************************

Dennis Crowley

Dennis Crowley is a co-founder of Foursquare. Previously, he co-founded Dodgeball, a network of the same nature which sold to Google in 2005.

He has been named one of the “Top 35 Innovators Under 35” by MIT’s Technology Review magazine (2005) and has won the “Fast Money” bonus round on the TV game show Family Feud (2009). His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Time Magazine, Newsweek, MTV, Slashdot and NBC. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Dennis holds a master’s degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and a bachelor’s degree from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University.

There’s a sign at the back entrance to the TechCrunch San Francisco office that reads, “I’m not delusional, I’m an entrepreneur.” That sign has kept me (relatively) sane for almost three years now, as TechCrunch expanded and contracted and expanded and took me along with it.

The cartoon on the sign was drawn by artist Hugh MacLeod, who’s been illustrating the TechCrunch summer party poster for more than half a decade.

The “delusional” sign was the poster of 2010. I remember hanging 2009′s summer poster, “TechCrunch Dream Big 2009,” very prominently in my cubicle as the Web Editor at the SF Weekly. My big dream was to work for TechCrunch. We all know how that worked out.

Despite the cloying sincerity of some of these cartoons, the cheesiness that the startup ecosystem sometimes spews and that godawful theme song (TECH. CRUNCH. DISRUPT. TECH. CRUNCH. DISRUPT. TECH. CRUNCH. DISRUPT. goes its monstrous heartbeat), I love the Disrupt conference, over the three years and all six of the times I’ve attended. Next week’s Disrupt NYC will be my 7th time attending, my third as co-editor. You have three days left to buy tickets.

Last year, Gaping Void did all of the illustrations for Disrupt San Francisco, and he rose to the occasion. And made a (warning: very) promotional video about it, below.

Call me corny, but what about “The minute you learn how to give is the minute you become successful” doesn’t ring true to you? Thank you Hugh, and of course, Heather and Mike.

Google has finally closed the deal on Wavii, a natural language processing startup, for a price that is more than $30 million, we’re hearing from a legitimate source.

Both Apple and Google were competing for the Seattle-based startup, and Google eventually won. Apple wanted the company, which developed its own aggregation technology and natural summarization algorithms, for its Siri division. The 25-person-strong team, including founder Adrian Aoun, will be moving down from Seattle to join Google’s Knowledge Graph division.

While it was previously reported by Business Insider that the two were in acquisition talks, a definitive agreement has now been signed after the Apple/Google bidding war. The buy comes shortly after Yahoo’s $30 million acquisition of aggregator Summly, which, like Wavii, attempted to summarize stories.

Considering the Siri interest, one would think that Wavii would be a better fit for Google Now, as a smarter Siri alternative that actually was aware of important stories and news. But Wavii’s semantic search knowledge is also a valid addition to Google Knowledge, as it could further contextualize the information Google currently shows on the sidebar of most searches. But their NLP and disambiguation tech could also widely be applicable across many Google platforms, including Google News and Google Glass.

At the time of acquisition, Wavii had raised $2 million in seed funding from Max Levchin, CrunchFund, SV Angel, Felicis Ventures, Mitch Kapor, Fritz Lanman, Max Ventilla, Shawn Fanning, Rick Marini and Dave Morin.

We’ve reached out to both Google and Wavii for comment.

Disclosure: In case this is your first time on TechCrunch, CrunchFund was founded by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. Hence the “Crunch” in the name, see.

We’re hearing from multiple sources that design-focused retail site Fab is raising a new round of funding at a $1 billion valuation. The company has previously raised $171 million in funding and we’re hearing it seeks to raise more than $100 million in this round. At Fab’s last round of financing, the company was worth around $600 million.

Twelve million users strong, Fab is continuing to grow at a fast clip after its initial pivot. Last year, the company saw $150 million in revenue, and revealed in February that sales were up by nearly 300% in January 2013 over January 2012. In fact, January was Fab’s 3rd highest sales month ever.

International is also a huge potential growth area for the company. Fab has 1 million members in the UK, which is generating nearly 40% of its sales in Europe and is its fastest growing market outside the U.S. We’re hearing that the company is seeing a lot of investor interest from Asia.

Past investors include Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, SoftTech VC, Menlo Ventures, Baroda Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, Thrive Capital, Kevin Rose, SV Angel, The Washington Post and others, including, oddly enough, the Times of India. New funding for the company could mean more acquisitions, new products and new areas of business development in the post-Amazon e-commerce world.

Apparently the company has some big news that will be announced next week, including a slight pivot. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, watch Fab founder Jason Goldberg tell the story of Fab’s founding at last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt New York, below.

Everyone has their moments of insanity. The Internet has made that painfully obvious, as our moments of abstracted, often context-less, craziness are haphazardly posted and then, in some cases, amplified for all to see. Because of this dynamic, we’re also given endless opportunities to deconstruct the way in which someone else has come unhinged. To wit: The first thing we do in a national emergency and scandal? See if the suspect had a Twitter, Facebook or Myspace account — and then play comments-section psychologist. Or worse.

“We think of ourselves as sane and other people as crazy but really we are all a little crazy,” says BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti, who will be giving the keynote speech at TechCrunch Disrupt. The talk will be about this exact topic, titled: “Everyone Is Literally Crazy,” like the headline of this post.

After the last two weeks, I can confirm that someone somewhere needs to shed some light on why everyone seems more wacko online. I’m looking at you, Amanda Bynes.

***Buy tickets to Jonah’s talk here.***

“We think of ourselves as having consistent interests but really we are capricious and what we like depends on context more than our own convictions,” Jonah explains. “This all becomes clear on the web because we can measure human behavior so carefully.”

The examples of the Internet exposing and archiving humanity’s darker psychological side keep pouring in: Just yesterday, Gawker posted this email from a sorority girl at the University of Maryland. The article, which garnered over 1.6 million pageviews, featured a Delta Gamma board member lambasting her sorority sisters for “LITERALLY being so fucking AWKWARD.”

Another great thing about the Internet is how often people misuse the word “literally.”

“If you just opened this like I told you to, tie yourself down to whatever chair you’re sitting in, because this email is going to be a rough fucking ride.

For those of you that have your heads stuck under rocks, which apparently is the majority of this chapter, we have been FUCKING UP in terms of night time events and general social interactions with Sigma Nu. I’ve been getting texts on texts about people LITERALLY being so fucking AWKWARD and so fucking BORING. If you’re reading this right now and saying to yourself “But oh em gee Rebecca, I’ve been having so much fun with my sisters this week!”, then punch yourself in the face right now so that I don’t have to fucking find you on campus to do it myself.
I do not give a flying fuck, and Sigma Nu does not give a flying fuck, about how much you fucking love to talk to your sisters. You have 361 days out of the fucking year to talk to sisters, and this week is NOT, I fucking repeat NOT ONE OF THEM. This week is about fostering relationships in the greek community, and that’s not fucking possible if you’re going to stand around and talk to each other and not our matchup. Newsflash you stupid cocks: FRATS DON’T LIKE BORING SORORITIES. Oh wait, DOUBLE FUCKING NEWSFLASH: SIGMA NU IS NOT GOING TO WANT TO HANG OUT WITH US IF WE FUCKING SUCK, which by the way in case you’re an idiot and need it spelled out for you, WE FUCKING SUCK SO FAR. This also applies to you little shits that have talked openly about post gaming at a different frat IN FRONT OF SIGMA NU BROTHERS. Are you people fucking retarded? That’s not a rhetorical question, I LITERALLY want you to email me back telling me if you’re mentally slow so I can make sure you don’t go to anymore night time events …”

(You can read the whole thing here. Nah, just kidding, that’s a link to the Disrupt Eventbrite page. Try here.)

My theory is that this email resonated with people not because it was super extreme, but because it reminded many of the more risky and out there stuff we’ve all done online when we think no one’s looking or even when, or because, people are. “Is it weird that I think this is a normal email?” joked TechCrunch writer Anthony Ha.

Behind every joke is a little bit of truth.

Phone call in the middle of earnings calls: 'Hi Ryan, I just sent you an email about a half hour ago.' MURDER MURDER MURDER KILL KILL KILL—
Ryan Lawler (@ryanlawler) April 18, 2013

Because these social communication platforms are so new, people have no clue what’s appropriate. Even, and maybe especially, the people we’ve hired specifically for that purpose. We’re just letting it all sloppily hang out in some sort of human communication avalanche.

Tomorrow is 4/20. I hope they catch suspect 2 today so by tomorrow he can be stoned! #boston #420—
Shawn Hikichi (@ShawnHikichi) April 19, 2013

“We have content to feed our obsessive compulsive selves, our narcissistic selves, and our ADD selves,” Jonah says. “We have content we like to search for on Google where nobody is looking but different content we like to share on Facebook where everyone we know is looking. We are strange creatures and our behavior on the web is a window into our contradictory souls.”

Come watch Jonah speak about this at Disrupt New York next week. Plenty of other crazy people will be there, as well. Not the sorority girl, though. I wish.

Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning and documentarian Alex Winter will be at TechCrunch Disrupt NY next week, joining our truly badass lineup to talk about their upcoming Napster documentary DOWNLOADED.

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Napster’s emergence was the first time the masses were faced with the power of peer-to-peer file sharing and the Internet. There wasn’t a college campus that didn’t Napster its way through party soundtracks in the early aughts. And the fact that a woman is still involved in a multi-million-dollar lawsuit for downloading just 26 songs is testament to the fact that we still don’t understand how to harness that power.

Not only will we host a special pre-release screening of the film at Manhattan Center after the conference on Tuesday, April 30th, but we’ll be spending some time that afternoon chatting up Fanning and Winter. They will obviously talk about DOWNLOADED, why Napster failed and the state of the music industry in the digital era.

And we suspect Fanning will keep you posted on the state of his latest startup, Airtime, which was in pivot mode the last time we checked.

Fun fact: The name Napster came from a childhood nickname for Fanning’s curly (nappy) hair. The more you know.

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DOWNLOADED trailer below.

Shawn Fanning
CEO & Co-Founder, Airtime

Shawn Fanning created Napster in 1998 while attending Northeastern University.

He is currently the GM of Rupture at Electronic Arts.

Fanning has since founded SNOCAP, a B2B Music Distributor, in 2002, and Rupture, an MMORPG social network in 2006. Both companies were sold in 2008 – SNOCAP to imeem, and Rupture to Electronic Arts.

Alex Winter

Alex began his career as a child actor, with starring roles on Broadway and in feature films, including the immensely popular BILL AND TED franchise and Warner Bros. THE LOST BOYS.

After attending NYU film School, Alex co-wrote, co-directed and starred in the hit MTV comedy series THE IDIOT BOX, following by his feature debut FREAKED, released by Twentieth Century Fox. Subsequent feature films include FEVER, a psychological thriller that Alex wrote and directed. Praised by AO Scott in the New York Times as ‘Pure Hitchcockian panic,’ FEVER was an Official Selection at Cannes and other festivals worldwide. For TV, Alex produced and directed two record-breaking, live-action BEN 10 movies for Cartoon Network, garnering an Emmy nomination for best Visual Effects. Currently, Alex is producing and directing DOWNLOADED, a feature documentary about the Digital revolution, for VH1 Rock Docs. Interview subjects include Napster co-founders Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, as well as numerous musicians and industry executives. DOWNLOADED is due for theatrical and TV release in 2013.

Alongside his feature projects, Alex maintains a busy career as a director, screenwriter and actor.