The strangest part of writing a goodbye post is figuring out the opening paragraph. Do I share a relatable anecdote, recalling any one of many times I’ve said goodbye to someone only to find that we’re both walking in the same direction for another five blocks? Do I kick off with some silly quote on doors and windows and whatnots? Or do I just ramble on for a few sentences about how strange it can be to open a goodbye post? Yeah — let’s go with that one.

As of this evening, I’ll be stepping away from my duties at PandoDaily. But here’s the twist: this move is by no means made in spite, anger, or with any lack of faith in PandoDaily and its mission. Quite the contrary, in fact.

Soon after I parted ways with TechCrunch, Sarah Lacy pulled me into a café (read: yeah, whatever, it was a Starbucks. Café sounds better) to tell me all about the road that laid ahead for her site. I knew within a few minutes that I wanted to help her get the ball rolling — partly because she’s a friend, but just as much because she is clearly building something fantastic. There was just one caveat: once the ball clearly had a ton of momentum, I was going to step away to build all of the things I’ve wanted to build for years.

Well, that ball got up to speed quite a bit faster than I expected. After a slight post-launch lull, page views are headed for the sky. The PandoMonthly event is just ridiculously good, and is getting better each and every month. The PandoList is one of my favorite things to read each week, and the content our video team is making blows me away with every single upload. Most importantly, the entire team that Sarah built is gelling perfectly, working together and communicating like a family. I’m leaving because I know I can, and that the team will be just fine without me.

I’ll likely still contribute from time to time, and I’ll always be but an arms length away from the team as I work on what’s next. As for “what’s next” is… stay tuned.

AngelList, the community for startup founders and the investors who love them (and who want to show their love with hugs made of money), just had me over to their headquarters to witness the tail end of a week-long battle. For the past seven days, the company’s engineers have been duking it out in an intracompany hackathon, armed only with their wits and their best AngelList-related ideas.

Beyond the glory of taking the belt, the winner also walked away with their pick from a bevy of prizes, like $10,000 cash, a one week paid vacation, the right to be in “Hackathon mode” (read: build-whatever-you-want mode) for months on end, or complete say-so over what the company’s next all-team outing would be. Each entry was pretty stellar, and in many cases offered a glimpse of what’s ahead for AngelList.

The Hackathon’s winner was selected by a wonderfully varied but all totally top-notch audience of industry peers, including Peter Pham, Josh Hannah (Matrix Partners), Richard Chen (Investor), Lukas Biewald (CrowdFlower), and Deena Varshavskaya (Wanelo). I got to help pick the winner, too, but those other people are all way cooler than me.

And the projects demoed today were….

• Paths In Gmail: Ties AngelList into Gmail, showing all of the correlating connections (or “Paths”) you have with the sender of an e-mail. It’s built upon Rapportive for the sake of making distribution fairly simple.
• Press: Adds a “Press” tab to every company’s AngelList profile, allowing them to highlight coverage their company has received. This went live on the site earlier this week.
• Incubator Applier: : AngelList has over 100 incubator programs as members. The Incubator Applier lets companies apply to these programs directly through AngelList. The incubators choose their own application questions and criteria, and AngelList moves to highlight certain applicants based on pre-established connections that might otherwise go unnoticed.
• People Search: Lets you find designers, lawyers, advisors and other types of non-founder people on AngelList based on the question “I want to find [type of worker] near [city]“. Lets you save profiles of those you’re interested in hiring (read: poaching), or hide those you know aren’t good fits.
• Startup Queue: Automatically builds a massive list of startups you might be interested in taking a look at, sorting them based on connection quality, whether or not you’ve already seen it, etc.
• Tools: Think LaunchRock + Analytics. It lets you build a “Coming Soon” sign-up page from your AngelList company profile and then gives you a detailed breakdown (location, number of investors/journalists/etc who have signed up, etc.) on who’s on the wait list. It could also let potential investors see how many users have hopped on board.
• Startup Finder: Essentially a much more advanced search. Lets you limit your search to companies based on market, location, whether or not they’re raising or hiring, the school the founders graduated from, etc.
• Paths In Finder: Ranks search results based on the number and quality of the connections you have to each result.
• Posts: Overhauls AngelList’s posting functionality, allowing companies a status update feature more akin to what they’re used to on other sites. People and companies can be mentioned via @, there’s no character limit to an update, and thread participants can reply to threads by replying directly to the accompanying email alert. Anyone can see your comments, but only those you follow and those that are one connection away from you can reply.
• Jobs/Talent for iPad: An iPad port of AngelList’s Jobs page, allowing job hunters to peruse potential employers by swiping through profiles and marking those they’re interested in. Alas, this project wasn’t finished in time for a full demonstration.

And the winner is…

It was a tie! After a good bit of deliberation, the judges settled on two winners: “Tools,” the beta sign-up/analytics tool, and “Paths in Search,” which lets you sort search results based on your connections to each company or person. As for which prizes the winners picked (and how they’re splitting it, for that matter), that one’s still up in the air.

You can check out demoes of most of the hacks (eight of them are live at this point) right here.

The web is awash with Kickstarter success stories. I mean, just look at the success of the TikTok! or Double Fine! or the Pebble! To the casual observer, it may well seem like Kickstarter is something of an Entrepreneur’s Eden, where every last person with a big idea and a heart full of hope can walk away with a mountain of money.

The reality, of course, isn’t always quite so cheery. For every project that meets its goal, a handful fall flat. Likewise, for every project that pulls in a cash pile far grander than its founders ever hoped to see, others miss their goal (and thus get none of the pledged money) by no more than a pittance.

Enter Kicksaver, a search engine that finds soon-to-end Kickstarter projects in need of just a few more bucks.

So, lets say you’ve stumbled across $100 bucks sittin’ in a sock drawer. Your bills are paid, your family is fed…so why not use that money to help someone else? Yeah, you could drop it into a charity and call it a day — but lets say you want to get a bit more creative with your philanthropy this time around.

So you pop over to Kicksaver. You tell it that you’ve got $100 bucks to burn.

Bam! You’ve got a big list of dreams that could come true if only someone would cough up less than a Franklin. Right now, that list includes helping a class of kids in New Hampshire build a wind turbine, getting a chiptune band through the last leg of their tour, and filming a promo video for one aspiring film maker’s fantasy flick. Each of these projects has less than a week’s worth of time left on the clock, but loses all of the change they’ve raised so far if they can’t pull in that last 100 bucks.

Does the concept have its flaws? Sure. You really should be investing in Kickstarter projects because they truly interest you, not because they just happen to need the amount of money you have to spare. But if this works out to a few more projects getting a few more eyeballs and thus finding the last few contributors they need, it’s nothin’ but a good thing.

Fortunately, we got the whole thing on video and have shared it in full below. Enjoy!

Catch our live notes below!

“Fast forward to February of this year. I found myself, for one reason or another, in a grocery store at 4:30pm on Valentine’s Day trying to buy flowers. There were a bunch of other men there, all with fear in their eyes, hoping there was still something, ANYTHING left at the flower counter so they wouldn’t have to go home empty handed. It was a terrible scene and an even worse feeling, and I wanted to ensure it wouldn’t happen again.

So, we decided to do something about it.”

– Dan Fallak, Co-Founder of KeepHerHappy.

And just like that, KeepHerHappy was born. You plug in the important dates for your relationship, pay a subscription fee, and it’ll take all that pesky remembering nonsense out of remembering to order flowers.

Each KeepHerHappy subscription is good for three pre-set flower deliveries: one for Valentine’s Day, her Birthday, and for your anniversary. Subscriptions are starting at an introductory price of $99 per year — which, considering how expensive last minute arrangements can be, is surprisingly cheap. Oh! And it includes delivery costs and a free vase with each order.

And don’t worry, guys: Unless you slip up and mention it, there’s no way for your gal to know that the deliveries are part of a pre-scheduled subscription service. KeepHerHappy keeps their branding as far away from the actual deliveries as possible, thereby ensuring you score the maximum number of thoughtful-boyfriend/husband points.

The one catch: It’s only available in Canada for now. Dang it.

When we tech-minded folk talk about the flower industry, most don’t really see dollar signs floating about. I mean, it’s all cute little old men with pruning sheers and smiley hippy chicks in brightly-colored flower shacks, right?

Sure. I mean, if we ignore the fact that the floral industry is worth an estimated $100 billion a year, and has held strong at that value for decades. By comparison, the entire porn industry — a sector that is just crammed with folks trying to wring cash out of it — is estimated to be worth about $97 billion annually.

Yeah, there’s some room for disruption here.

Of that huge market, about $40 billion goes toward cut flowers and floral arrangements — and of those, somewhere between 25-30 percent of purchases are made by men.

And that’s where KeepHerHappy found its niche. I can already see the comments. “KeepHerHappy? And what’s all this marketing on their site about ‘staying out of the dog house’ and what not? Sexism! Roar!”

But that’s exactly the point. Of the countless flower sites out there, I can’t find a one that has thought to tailor itself specifically to the flower-buying behaviors of gents. Say what you will about the stereotypes at play here (the girl expecting flowers, the forgetful beau), but the scenario mentioned above by Dan Fallak isn’t a rare one. Hell, it’s not even the first time I’ve heard an entrepreneur mention it as being a good source of revenue; when I first talked to Justin Kan about his on-demand assistant service Exec, he mentioned seeing a huge spike in last minute flower requests on Valentine’s day. I’ve been there. Most guys I know have been there.

KeepHerHappy has yet to raise any capital for this project. Why? Because they don’t need it yet. It’s a two-man operation, and they’ve kept overhead costs low by working out a partnership with one of Canada’s fastest growing flower companies, CanaFlora. KeepHerHappy handles the order scheduling and maintains the boys-club tone, while CanaFlora handles all the arrangements, deliveries, and customer service. They’re considering raising a round to help with marketing costs, but nothing is set in stone yet.

Alas, the aforementioned partnership means that KeepHerHappy is a Canada-only thing for now. With that said, the founders pledge that a US rollout is in the works once they’ve refined the model north of the border.

I hear the word “hustle” used a lot. Probably 10 times a day. It seems to be everyone’s new favorite word.

As everyone hops on the “hustler” bandwagon, the definition of the word has started to get a bit fuzzy. More often than not, the folks using it seem to be stretching it to mean, “I talk to a lot of people and otherwise do all of the basic things I need to be successful, but with attitude!” when its true scope — at least as a slang word — is considerably more focused. To truly hustle is to do whatever it takes to make that next dollar, no matter how crazy or ridiculous.

Vungle’s co-founders are just about the biggest (actual) hustlers I’ve ever met. They’re building an in-app ad platform that uses short, movie-trailer-esque video ads to demonstrate other apps. Armed with nothing more than fistfuls of tenacity and a few crazy ideas, these two mostly-unheard-of British entrepreneurs have managed to raise a rather crazy $2 million seed round from some of the Valley’s most coveted investors.

Vungle wants to put interstitial video trailers for apps within other apps. Waiting for that next level to load? Here — watch a 15 second ad demonstrating another app or game. Vungle will even build the trailer for you in under 24 hours; you just tell them which features you want highlighted.

Here’s an example of one of their ads:

Their story really starts getting interesting with their mission to get into AngelPad.

AngelPad is an SF-based incubator founded by a handful of ex-Googlers. In addition to all the mentorship that such a program can provide, each company accepted into AngelPad gets $120k to get the ball rolling.

When Vungle’s co-founders Jack Smith and Zain Jaffer got wind that AngelPad had just one spot left for its Fall 2011 class, they knew they had to do whatever it took to make it theirs. They could try to score a meeting with AngelPad’s founder Thomas Korte, but time was short, and they were on the wrong side of the globe. They could’ve emailed Thomas a pitch, but with hundreds of other startups all vying for the same spot, there was no way to be sure they’d make it through the noise.

Instead, they found a way to have Thomas come to them.

Using a handful of techniques that he still seems to shy away from talking about specifically, co-founder Jack Smith found a way to build a Google Adsense campaign that targeted not Thomas, but Thomas’ friends. “Do you know Thomas Korte?” the ads read. When clicked, the ads took the visitor to a page with a short video pitch of what Vungle was working on. Next to the video was a big button that read, quite simply, “Email Thomas.”

They put up the site, launched the ad campaign, and… nothing. At least at first.

You see, Thomas had stepped out of the country and away from his inbox for a few days. When he returned, he was greeted by dozens of emails all asking about these crazy Vungle guys. Thomas called up Jack and Zain, as much to ask them to nix the ad campaign that was killin’ his inbox as anything else. By the end of the call, he was convinced that these guys were just nuts enough to deserve AngelPad’s final slot. “You realize this means moving to the US, right?” said Thomas.

Jack and Zain had their bags packed and were on a plane within the week.

Since arriving stateside in August, Vungle has managed to win the hearts (and dollars) of Google Ventures, AOL Ventures, Crosslink Capital, SV Angel, SoftTech VC, Dave McClure, Maynard Webb, Scott McNealy, and Tim Draper. That’s a damned impressive roster.

For each investor, Vungle’s co-founders seem to have some crazy story about what they did to get their pitch heard. Take 500 Startups’ Dave McClure, for example. Knowing that McClure was planning to visit AngelPad HQ and that he was a huge proponent for (and investor in) Twilio, Jack made sure to be wearing a Twilio shirt on the day Dave arrived. He bolted to be the one to greet Dave at the door, used the shirt as a conversation starter, then “jokingly” gave Dave their elevator pitch while they were, in fact, in an elevator. Sure enough, it worked.

While I’m not completely convinced that Vungle’s ads will be a hit amongst app users (making people wait 15-30 seconds in between levels, even in a free app, seems like a solid way to tank your app store reviews), they claim to be overwhelmed with interested parties looking to give it a spin. If you’re one of those interested people, you can find all of Vungle’s contact info here.

(Oh — and be sure to ask them about how they set out to find cheap housing in SF and found themselves temporarily living in a homeless shelter.)

PDFs have been the bane of every Internet-goers life for far too long. Oh, you accidentally clicked into a huge PDF? Screw it, better go get coffee and come back in a few minutes. Hopefully your computer has stopped grinding away by then.

Fortunately, companies like Scribd and Crocodoc have popped up in the past few years with the valiant goal of turning PDFs and other document formats into something a whole lot less terrible. You upload your document, they chew through it, and return an embeddable HTML5 widget.

This morning, Crocodoc is making it clear that they’ve found a new focus: the enterprise. They’ve announced a new “enterprise-grade” document embedding service to let developers integrate Crocodoc into their own Web applications, disclosed four huge new enterprise customers, and have moved the spotlight away from their consumer-centric offering.

Crocodoc co-founder Ryan Damico tells me that the company now sees itself as “95 percent enterprise.” You see, it’s pretty tough to convince an occasional PDF uploader to cough up some change for a service like this — but offering up a snazzy, embeddable HTML5-based document renderer for other companies to integrate into their products? There’s a business there, and they’ve already got a few big customers to prove it.

LinkedIn is using Crocodoc to handle resume uploading and rendering in their Recruiter product. Yammer is using it to let you share and annotate documents with your co-workers. SAP is building it into Spotlight, their internal sales/marketing presentation tool. Perhaps most notably, Dropbox is using it to power all of the document rendering in their recently announced one-click linking feature. If you ever find yourself readin’ through a Dropbox’d PDF — like, say, this one — that’s Crocodoc’s tech you’re looking at.

Crocodoc says their new offering costs these companies “pennies per document”, with the price dropping based on volume.

Meanwhile, the personal document uploading service that originally sparked the concept behind Crocodoc has been toned back a bit. It’s still available for free at http://personal.crocodoc.com, but that seems to be more of a courtesy to the long-time users than anything. Crocodoc is all about enterprise integration now. While the aforementioned competing service Scribd hones in on user document uploads and social sharing with an enterprise offering said to be “coming soon,” Crocodoc has headed in the entirely opposite direction.

Crocodoc began its life as a Y-Combinator backed company (it actually pivoted into a document sharing service right in the middle of the program), and has since received an unspecified amount of funding from Gmail creator Paul Buchheit, Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, 500′s Dave McClure, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, and SV Angel. According to the company’s co-founders, Crocodoc is now completely profitable.

Here’s a sentence I couldn’t have predicted I’d ever write when I became a tech reporter: There’s a controversy brewing in the world of handmade crafts.

Etsy, a site often framed as a beacon of hope for those looking to sell goods that they’ve made with their own two hands, is battling a budding protest amongst the very userbase that makes it worthwhile. As of this morning, 3300+ Etsy shops have pledged to close their doors for a day of Silent Protest on May 10th. The reason for the remonstrance? A perceived notion that Etsy is failing to keep the site free of not-so-handmade wares.

Such complaints aren’t really anything new to Etsy. As the userbase and number of shops on the site have skyrocketed, so too has the number of sellers trying to stretch the definition of “handmade” to include stuff that kinda-sorta looks like it could be made by some dude in his garage but is in fact the end result of mass production. Etsy’s policies have been tightened over time to try to battle such things — simultaneously, other policies have been loosened to allow legitimate sellers a bit more flexibility.

One such loosening was in the introduction of “collectives” and “production assistants.” When Etsy first launched in 2005, they generally aimed to restrict shops to one-man operations. Over time it became clear that many independent business that would thrive on Etsy and still vibe well with the whole hand-made mentality were instead groups of artists — hence “Collectives.” Meanwhile, the production of some items (like those that required precision-milled metal molds) required some degree of outside assistance to be sold at anything resembling a reasonable price but were still mostly made by hand — hence “production assistants.”

For every bit of flexibility that found its ways into the site’s aptly titled “Dos And Don’ts,” a few more sellers would hop in and test the boundaries of what was allowed.

It all boiled over last week, when Regretsy — a popular (and often quite hilarious) site that exists mostly to highlight (read: lampoon) the worst of what Etsy has to offer — raised a number of questions about a shop that had been selected for the site’s much coveted “Featured Seller” position. While that post itself is worth reading, the overarching claim is that Etsy had screwed up and highlighted a company that breaks Etsy’s own policies. Where the shop in question actually falls within the rules is still being debated, but the whole ordeal was enough to push a chunk of the site’s shop owners to protest.

In the past few days, just over 3,300 Etsy shops have pledged to put their site into “vacation mode” as an act of “silent protest” to show their disdain. They’re primarily rallying through a site they’ve dubbed “Protesty” (heh), where the protest’s organizers write:

Etsy was originally established in 2005 to support indie artists, meaning that the person behind the shop was the artist, seller, photographer and everything else involved with the shop. Throughout the years some shops grew larger and to respond to their needs in 2007 Etsy modified the rules so that ‘collective shops’ were allowed to open. These are shops where a group of people work together, all having a say and input in the shop, although this can’t be an employer and its subordinates (this would fall in the firm or factory category) or a person who buys handmade goods from someone else and sells them as their own (i.e. a reseller). Unfortunately, many shops from the latter two categories are allowed to operate and thrive on Etsy, a competition with which small shops and artisans who make every single item by hand simply can’t compete, pushing small shops out of the market.

I reached out to Etsy for comment, and its representatives were quick to point out that the site is very actively working to find the balance between member privacy and policy transparency, all while attempting to avoid knee-jerk reactions that’ll tarnish the community in the long run. They also provided the following comment:

Every single seller on that list is important to us. Right now we think the best way we can address their concerns is to focus on clarifying our policies in the ways our community has requested. These policies have been unchanged since 2009, but they do need clarification. Every marketplace’s policies grow and evolve with their community. We’re committed to that evolution and in fact have been working on it seriously for a few months.

To provide a bit of perspective: While 3,300+ shops are clearly a non-trivial chunk of their audience to be upset, Etsy tells me that there are “over 875,000 active shops as of today.”

As someone who’s never sold a product on Etsy and thus has no skin in the game, I can’t help but side with the company here. When you’ve got a userbase of nearly a million people each selling a handful of completely unique items, policing the content is perhaps the most difficult task to be had. Mistakes are going to happen — Whether it’s shops that slip through the cracks and are allowed to exist for longer periods than what may seem reasonable externally, or featuring an artist with questionably sources goods. The company seems to be quite aware of their shortcomings and seems to be going rather far out of their way to work out the kinks.

[Image via Protesty. This is the image that the protest organizers are encouraging participants to use as their Etsy avatar]

Procrastinators of the world, unite! There are projects that need finishing, now! Or, well, eventually. Maybe not today — I mean, come on, “Supertroopers” is on TNT tonight. Plus, you’ve spent this long working on it, what’s one more weekend spent figuring out how to make it SoLoMo and freemium with an emphasis on your social graph, crowd sourcing, and as many other buzzwords as you can possibly cram in?

No! As a wise dude once said, real artists ship. With that in mind, a new project launching this morning wants to use your wallet (and a looming threat of shame) to make sure you ship on time. Oh — and its name is clever as hell.

Meet Sink Or Ship, an online project accountability service that helps users get their work shipped on time, on pain of a lightened wallet.

To begin, a would-be project shipper signs into Sink Or Ship with a Twitter account. The shipper then picks the date on which he or she expects the big project to be done, and pre-writes a super-exciting launch Tweet (i.e, “Hurray! We just launched tacocopter! Go order a robo-delivery today!”).

And if launch day comes, and you’re not ready for the Tweet to go out because you lost a few days fixing the office’s Kegerator? That’s okay, you can reschedule… but Sink Or Ship will charge you $5 to do so. Otherwise, you’re about to send out a Tweet announcing your project before it’s ready for the harsh criticisms of the Intertubes at large. Ship on time, and you don’t pay a dime.

(Of course, you could always hop into your account settings and remove Sink Or Ship’s authorization token — either way, you’re admitting defeat.)

Sink Or Ship is the brainchild of Richerd Chan and Lim Cheng Soon, the same guys who built the Pair-as-a-hookup-service hack PairMixer. I wasn’t aware of this until a few minutes after I’d already decided to write about Sink Or Ship, making these guys two-for-two in their ability to win me over out of the blue. These guys are quickly becoming two of my favorite developers to watch.