It’s fairly incredible that, in 2013, with the threat of showrooming and predictions that physical retail will disappear entirely, major luxury retailers are still figuring out how to get this Internet thing right.

That’s partly because, for luxury brands, preserving brand integrity comes above all else. A big part of their appeal is exclusivity — not just anyone can own a $1000, or $10,000 purse. Brand integrity is precisely how they get away with those obscene prices.

So it’s natural that the democratizing power of the Web is a terrifying spectre in luxury land. As Adweek asked in 2011, how do they go online without going downscale? From the article:

High-end fashion brands have a problem. Let’s call it the “Kreayshawn quandary,” after the young Bay Area rapper made famous by the Internet and her hit song “Gucci, Gucci,” which has gotten over 16 million views on YouTube. Sample lyrics: “Gucci, Gucci, Louis, Louis, Fendi, Fendi, Prada…the basic bitches wear that shit so I don’t even bother.”
It may have taken a rapper to say it best, but the message has been clear for a while: Luxury designers are losing their cachet. And the problem is only being intensified by the medium that made Kreayshawn a star.

If you’re interested in this topic, I recommend checking out the full article. It’s a solid dive into the way luxury brands have had to scramble to catch up to the new digital realities after years of dismissing the Web as “not for them.”

Except not everyone has scrambled to catch up. Plenty of luxury apparel companies have remained in denial, the most notable of which, is Chanel. Since learning yesterday that Chanel is the most-pinned luxury brand on Pinterest, I’ve been wondering how that’s possible. By the look of it, Chanel seems the most digital-averse of all the luxury brands.

For example, you can’t buy any Chanel clothing or jewelry online, not even on the company’s own website. Chanel.com offers up an infuriating autoplay flash video of the company’s latest runway show when you navigate to the fashion section. There is a “new boutique” for purchasing Chanel makeup and perfume, presumably only because those items are sold in other stores like Sephora and Bergdorf’s, and their corresponding Websites.

Meanwhile, Chanel’s Twitter account is straight-up cold. The brand has tweeted a grand total of 469 times, and its Tweet stream consists of photos of celebs in Chanel or curt demands that its followers “Discover more on Chanel.com.” None of it is Retweetable or engaging. Inexplicably, 1.6 million people follow anyways. And as one might expect from someone so disdainful of the unwashed digital masses, @Chanel follows zero other accounts on Twitter.

There is a Tumblr page for Chanel that’s full of interesting, eclectic, and authentic images. In fact, it’s so good that I’m certain it was created by a savvy fan and is not authorized. (Still, each post gets hundreds of likes and reblogs.)

All of that is why it was a bit surprising to me that Chanel is the most-pinned luxury brand on Pinterest. The distinction was won with little effort from the brand itself. Chanel isn’t even on Pinterest. And yet, Chanel.com generates an average of 400 pins and 3600 repins a day. Of course, the pins are all product shots of makeup and perfume bottles from Chanel’s boutique, since the site only offers flash videos, not pinnable images, of its apparel. It’s almost as if the brand has taken pains to keep itself off of Pinterest.

My question is this: Is Chanel popular on social media precisely because it has iced everyone out? Is it one of those “we want what we can’t have” things, where brand preservation, scarcity and the cold shoulder make us hungrier for more?

Or, has Chanel, with its seeming disdain for social media, missed a huge opportunity to engage with and leverage its fans online?

Compare Chanel’s Twitter account with that of the number two and three most-pinned luxury brands, Christian Louboutin and Jimmy Choo. I am guessing these footwear brands sell at comparable price points to Chanel (since there is no online store I can’t be sure), but their Twitter accounts show a much more accessible, engaging brand. @JimmyChooLTD Tweets in a conversational tone, shares many authentic-feeling Instagram photos, and even (shock!) ReTweets its fans. @LouboutinWorld posts behind-the-scenes images, questions to followers, and witticisms.

Their follower counts? 198,000 and 695,000, respectively. Paltry in comparison to Chanel’s 1.6 million. In this instance, it would appear that whatever Chanel is doing is working for the brand. But I can’t image the company will be able to avoid ecommerce for too much longer.

Image via

Erin Griffith

Erin Griffith covers New York startups for PandoDaily. She's worked as staff writer for Adweek and a private equity blogger for peHUB. Her writing has appeared in VCJ, Time Out New York, Huffington Post, FT.com, and BUST. She plays keyboard in a band called Team Genius and Tweets as @Eringriffith.

And yet! I never cease to be amazed at the way these things can suddenly take off. The app-loving masses have an insatiable hunger for photo sharing apps, apparently.

All week an app called “A Beautiful Mess,” released by a pair of lifestyle bloggers, has been at the top of the app store rankings, racking up 75,000 photos shared via Instagram after just a few days. In fact, the app’s logo is basically a cartoon version of Instagram’s with some pink and a heart. It’s not even free — it costs 99 cents to download and in-app purchases for virtual goods like fonts and sayings to splash over your photos cost up to $10. Everything about it goes entirely against conventional thinking on how to build and launch a successful app.

Not only is the app’s initial traction proof that you don’t have to be original or have a revolutionary idea to gain traction, it’s proof that people will pay for that not-so-original / revolutionary idea. Beyond that, it’s proof that you don’t have to be a connected Silicon Valley wunderkind with a technical co-founder and a million dollars in seed funding from brand name angel investors to build a successful app. You just need a little business savvy, good marketing skills and a lot of style.

A Beautiful Mess is a lifestyle blog run by a pair of 20-something sisters, Elsie Larson and Emma Chapman in Springfield, Missouri. They’ve got multiple book deals and own a vintage shop / bakery called Red Velvet. Their site reaches 1.5 million monthly uniques because they are very, very good at what they do. Like many savvy lifestyle bloggers their age, they live a Pinterest-perfect life, sharing beautifully photographed recipes, impeccably done DIY projects, tasteful fashion inspiration and home decorating tips.

Followers of lifestyle blogs like A Beautiful Mess get invested, not just in the content the bloggers produce, but in the authors’ lives. The personal connection is intense. While I haven’t encountered A Beautiful Mess before this week, I’ve followed similar blogs for years, to the point where I feel like I know the blogger personally and would consider buying any product she endorsed. When I was reporting this 2011 story on the business of fashion blogging, I heard several anecdotes from campaigns, in which the brand paid a blogger a few thousand bucks to wear their clothing, and the blogger drove half a million dollars in sales.

Bloggers are no longer limited to monetizing their influence with display ad deals negotiated through networks like Federated Media. They’ve become increasingly savvy about their value; the most prominent onces have agents to negotiate endorsement and sponsorship deals. They throw parties with makeup brands and design purses named after themselves in partnership with bag makers. Many of them earn affiliate fees through a press-shy company called rewardStyle. They simply use an rStyle.me link to track the clicks and sales they drive. Now, with A Beautiful Mess, the lifestyle blogging set has proven they can build a successful app that makes money, too. (How many photo sharing apps can you say that about?)

The Beautiful Mess app is well-designed, but its functionality is basically just some on-trend fonts, filters, borders and sayings for you to add to photos before you share them on Instagram and Facebook. The add-on fonts and sayings cost money on top of the 99 cent download price. The one photo I posted using the app and its hashtag got me a bunch of likes from ladies with predictably twee screennames like “bestfriendsforfrosting.”

Elsie and Emma may not be playing by the age-old Silicon Valley playbook of trading venture dollars for ever-escalating eyeballs, but they have a big, fiercely loyal audience. This week they beat out the dozens of other photo sharing apps in the App Store. What app maker doesn’t want that?

Erin Griffith

Erin Griffith covers New York startups for PandoDaily. She's worked as staff writer for Adweek and a private equity blogger for peHUB. Her writing has appeared in VCJ, Time Out New York, Huffington Post, FT.com, and BUST. She plays keyboard in a band called Team Genius and Tweets as @Eringriffith.

The theme of storytelling in 2013 rolls on — now, with the launch of Fandium, its being applied to sports. The company was launched by the founders of horse betting site Youbet.com which sold to Churchill Downs for $127 million in 2009. This week Fandium raised $1.25 million in seed funding from angel investors in the gaming industry to fuel its development.

The app’s goals are two-fold. For one, it is a repository for social content related to any given sports game. Using geo-location and hashtags, the app pulls in Instagram photos and Tweets related to games into a single feed for easy consumption. Likewise, there is realtime scoring info and stats, and users can contribute their own observations to games that don’t live on other social networks.

The other element is gaming. Fandium offers virtual points for all kinds of engagement, but users can also make friendly wagers with their friends or strangers over game outcomes to win more points. It makes sense, given the founders’ backgrounds, that the app incorporate some sort of wagering. Right now the points don’t really lead to much, however, users can purchase them in-app to bet against each other. The only kind of online betting that’s legal today is horse betting. But co-founder Larry Lucas says it’s only a matter of time before online gambling is legalized, which might provide Fandium with a business model.

Fandium isn’t the first app to aggregate social content around a live event. Mahaya, which is still in beta, does just that. As does Stublisher. Others, like Tapestry, Treemo and Backspaces, attempt to bring context to social content for people with actual stories to tell.

Fandium may be the first to focus its storytelling tools on sporting events. Lucas says the sports vertical is one of the strongest interest graphs, and that fans don’t necessarily want to communicate with their friends about sports. They want to consume content and communicate with others sharing the experience of being at the game. This is why “Ureport” is set up as a bit of a backchannel to the game to allow people to comment on what’s happening with a community of people experiencing the same thing.

Fandium is set up to work in single-player mode where content is pulled into the app regardless of whether your friends are on the platform, so it doesn’t require network effects to work on day one. “The critical thing is that when you jump into the pool its warm,” Lucas says.

Sports events are expensive, all-day activities now with many different moving parts to track, from the tailgate to the post-game. Says Lucas: “People want to know what is happening at an event whether they’re in the bleachers or in the fancy court-side seats.”

Erin Griffith

Erin Griffith covers New York startups for PandoDaily. She's worked as staff writer for Adweek and a private equity blogger for peHUB. Her writing has appeared in VCJ, Time Out New York, Huffington Post, FT.com, and BUST. She plays keyboard in a band called Team Genius and Tweets as @Eringriffith.

The first wave of social media marketing consisted of fancy publishing platforms that helped brands push and manage content to Facebook and Twitter. Buddy Media (now part of Salesforce), Wildfire (now part of Google), and Vitrue (now part of Oracle) quickly had to expand their offerings to include analytics and ad purchasing.

The one issue they never solved, likely for fear of competing with their ad agency clients, was what brands should be saying on social networks. If Condescending Corporate Brand Page is any indication, plenty of brands are doing social media very, very wrong. Likewise, the sheer volume of social media fails that manage to keep springing up indicate that brands need a lot of guidance on how to best deal with the audiences they’ve painstakingly built since Facebook introduced pages in 2007.

That’s what platforms like Percolate, and now Rallyverse, have launched to do. Percolate’s platform suggests content for brand managers to share via social networks. Rallyverse does the same but with slightly more automation, the team explains.

“Yes, content management systems and listening are important and needed solutions, but where the rubber hits the road in social is what you say,” Gabe Bevilacqua, co-founder of Rallyverse says. Rallyverse is focused on helping people scale their social content by telling them which Tweets to respond to and what they should be sharing where. Now, it has published its API to allow deeper integration with clients.

The Rallyverse REST API will give its partners access to profile settings, which includes everything that goes into making a set of Rallydeck recommendations, as well as the full content recommendations that Rallyverse produces for each profile. That includes trending topics and the most popular stories shared by the users the client follows on Twitter. Basically, it’s a more robust version of what Rallyverse offers existing clients.

Rallyverse also gets compared to Hearsay Social, a social media management platform which is known for its “parent-child” model that helps individual franchise and chain managers to personalize and localize their business’s social media accounts. 

Erin Griffith

Erin Griffith covers New York startups for PandoDaily. She's worked as staff writer for Adweek and a private equity blogger for peHUB. Her writing has appeared in VCJ, Time Out New York, Huffington Post, FT.com, and BUST. She plays keyboard in a band called Team Genius and Tweets as @Eringriffith.

New York-based flash sales site Totsy is laying off its staff of 83 employees. The company, which had 110 employees last year and 4 million email subscribers, has entered liquidation, hiring the investment bank Consensus Advisors to sell off its assets, which includes the member list and $2 million worth of inventory.

According to sale documents obtained by PandoDaily, the company hit $16.9 million in revenue last year and never turned a profit on its flash sales. It lost $22.9 million in 2012 and projects a loss of $16.8 million this year. Totsy converted 10.8 percent of its email subscribers to customers over the last 24 months, a figure which was smaller in 2012. (For context, that’s not great. Ecomom, a comparable business which also shut down, had a conversion rate of 28 percent, according to liquidation documents.)

Anecdotally, Totsy didn’t seem to have glowing reviews from mom bloggers either. News of the layoffs was first sleuthed out via regulatory filing by Crain’s New York.

Totsy, founded in 2009, replaced founding CEO Guillaume Gauthereau in April. But as it was seeking to raise more capital, investors Rho Capital Partners and DFG Gotham Ventures proved unwilling to throw good money after bad — Totsy had raised $34 million across three rounds of funding. Sale documents reveal that investors injected an unannounced $11 million into the company in November 2012, just three months after Totsy’s $17.6 million Series B.

Totsy built its membership list by purchasing names and email addresses through two acquisitions. In 2010, the company acquired 82,000 names from bTrendie, a site it wound down. In January 2013, the company acquired 2.4 million names from Mamapedia for $895,000. Given the news of the layoffs, the email list will likely be all that survives the company.

Ecommerce is a resource-intensive business which involves lots of risk in taking on inventory. Beyond that, flash sales sites as a category have lost their luster. For example, Gilt Groupe went through a rocky period of layoffs and restructuring, although my understanding is that the company has righted the ship and should file for its long-anticipated IPO any day now. Lot18 has gone through several rounds of layoffs, eventually pivoting from one fad commerce business model (flash sales) to another (subscriptions). Rue La La laid off 65 employees when its parent company GSI merged with eBay; the company recently replaced its CEO. Smaller players have quietly shut their doors and sold their customer lists to the dominant market players.

Despite the shakeout, a few winners have somehow managed to survive the backlash and thrive. OneKingsLane, Zulily, and Fab are often held up as shining examples of flash sales done right, perhaps because they’ve diversified away from the category. The artificial deadline of a limited, one-time-only sale seems to work for some, but when it doesn’t, it’s a disaster.

Totsy’s site, which is still operating, is a membership-only flash sale site targeted at moms with an eco-friendly bent. It was a direct competitor of Seattle’s Zulily, which appears to be thriving. Zulily has raised $135 million in VC funds; the latest was at an eye-popping $1 billion valuation on $500 million in annual revenue.

Totsy and Consensus did not respond to messages.

Erin Griffith

Erin Griffith covers New York startups for PandoDaily. She's worked as staff writer for Adweek and a private equity blogger for peHUB. Her writing has appeared in VCJ, Time Out New York, Huffington Post, FT.com, and BUST. She plays keyboard in a band called Team Genius and Tweets as @Eringriffith.

For a hot minute there, it felt like “influencers,” loosely defined as anyone with a respectable number of Twitter followers, were the future of marketing. Thanks to the democratizing ways of the Web, anyone with a Twitter handle suddenly has a voice and an audience.

We saw how quickly bad behavior by companies (ahem, airlines, cable companies) spread through social networks. So why not make that work in the other direction? Let fans advocate for your brand, and suddenly you have millions of authentic micro-advertisements that cost next to nothing. Identify the fans with the most followers, and get the most bang for your buck. Companies like MyLikes, IZEA, Ad.ly, Twittad, or twtMob, allowed us to monetize our followings, while Klout, Kred and PeerIndex, PROskore, Traackr, Twitalyzer and SocMetrics measured it.

Wahooly was one with a particularly novel approach: Tweet for equity. The company offered users a stake in startups on its platform in exchange for things like using the product, promoting it on Twitter, or engaging with it. The idea sounds out there, but enough people were into it because, like all crowdfunding, it provided an attachment between the startups and their users. They felt invested (because they literally were). Likewise, the startups got those crucial early adopters spreading the gospel of their product.

The company had a rough launch, but after working out the kinks, things looked promising. It partnered with financial services startup CapLinked to help legitimize the companies on its platform by performing diligence on them. Video debate company Deeyoon experienced a rapid adoption after the company launched on Wahooly (with a little help from Octomom and Michael Lohan). Wahooly seemed to be building momentum.

Then sometime last year, people stopped caring about Klout. In fact, it became a bit of a punch line (remember Klouchebag?). The category’s me-too companies became quiet, and Klout began a series of attempts to, as Sarah put it, finally come up with something users will love. Influencer affiliate company Referly called it quits. Now “tweet-for-equity” company Wahooly is pivoting too.

The company announced yesterday that, as part of the AngelPad accelerator in San Francisco, it has changed itself to Chasm.io, which focuses now more on reputation than on influence. It seems trendy enough — the word “reputation” is always a part of conversations about the peer economy. Most people on Wahooly didn’t really want equity anyways, he determined. They had opted for various rewards from the startups which they tended to redeem quickly.

Where previously Wahooly offered equity for engagement, the company now offers influencers reciprocal sharing. A sort of “I’ll share yours if you share mine.” The more stuff of other members that you share, the more points you get to redeem to get your own stuff shared. “That’s the social backscratching aspect of our business,” co-founder and CEO Dana Severson says. It’s almost like a Hacker News voting ring.

Existing Wahooly users and anyone with a klout score of 50 of higher will be automatically allowed into Chasm.io. Likewise, you get complimentary points and the ability you can earn more. The amount of points you earn is based your influence score, the uniqueness of your reach, your historic response to posts/shares and the uniqueness of your interests. Influence is dead, long live reputation!

Erin Griffith

Erin Griffith covers New York startups for PandoDaily. She's worked as staff writer for Adweek and a private equity blogger for peHUB. Her writing has appeared in VCJ, Time Out New York, Huffington Post, FT.com, and BUST. She plays keyboard in a band called Team Genius and Tweets as @Eringriffith.

New York has advertising in its DNA. But somehow the city’s two most promising startups — Foursquare and Tumblr — have failed to capitalize on it.

We’re not surprised when Silicon Valley startups focus on product and eyeballs and then waltz into an ad agency’s office assuming advertisers are desperate to give them money. Valley startups are not supposed to understand how advertising works. Or so the stereotype goes.

What is surprising is the fact that Facebook and Twitter built large advertising businesses from the Valley, while Foursquare and Tumblr struggled to do so just two miles from Madison Avenue. Foursquare had a difficult round of fundraising earlier this year, narrowly avoiding a down round by taking on debt. And while Tumblr has crossed the symbolic $1 billion line with its sale to Yahoo, it did so with a gargantuan user base and pathetic $13 million in 2012 revenues according to reports. What ever happened to New York playing to its strengths?

New York tech companies have always been underdogs, not just in comparison to Silicon Valley, but in their own city where fashion, finance and media rule. Five years into this whole startup revival thing, tech is not dominant, no matter how often our cheerleader mayor stops by BuzzFeed’s offices.

Which is why New York techies are constantly yearning for big exits that prove how important the city’s tech industry is. Two memes are often cited in conversations about the future of New York:

1. We need a big consumer Web win to legitimize New York.

This is about taking New York out of the shadow of Doubleclick, and the impression that New York is good for adtech and fintech but not much else. So far our biggest exits haven’t done much to dissuade that argument: Ad exchange company Right Media sold to Yahoo in 2007 for $850 million. Social advertising SaaS platform Buddy Media sold to Salesforce.com last year for $689 million.

2. We need a big standalone tentpole company that doesn’t sell itself to a Valley company.

Again, Right Media and Buddy Media are both adtech companies… that sold to Valley companies.

Tumblr and Foursquare, with their floppy-haired, magazine cover-ready CEOs and exciting consumer-facing products, were tasked with breaking both of those archetypes about New York startups. To do so, they took Silicon Valley approach of worrying about user growth and product first, waiting to worry about monetization. And wait they did. Tumblr, founded in 2007, spent the first six years of its existence thumbing its nose the advertising industry. Twentysomething founder and CEO David Karp famously said the idea of ads on Tumblr’s platform made him sick to his stomach. Foursquare was also skiddish about letting big brands onto its platform. The company always had vague plans to monetize by selling tools to the local restaurants and bars in its network, but never quite executed on that.

It’s not just Tumblr and Foursquare. The New York Tech Meetup famously bans questions from the audience about business models, possibly in an attempt to move New York away from the city’s rational, bootstrapping, revenue-focused reputation. In order to build the next Google, or Facebook, or Twitter, New York needs some magical thinking that goes beyond dollars and cents. We need to “let our winners run,” wrote Fred Wilson, whose firm, Union Square Ventures, has backed both Tumblr and Foursquare.

Well, they may have run too far.

We know how Foursquare has played out. The company, founded in 2009 and backed by $112 million in venture money, did little to earn revenue in its early days. Even in 2012, the company earned just $2 million, Businessweek reported. This year the company raised an emergency round of financing, mostly debt to avoid taking a down round.

Foursquare is building a sales team and revenue is growing with sponsored recommendations and promoted updates, CEO Dennis Crowley adamantly insists. He noted at a recent conference that Foursquare is now “routinely” signing up large national retailers with six-figure deals.

But this may come at the cost of its user experience. Last time I used Explore to find a restaurant nearby, Foursquare suggested I try Taco Bell. With four years of my check-in data, Foursquare should know that I have never eaten at a Taco Bell, and presumably that’s not because I’ve never heard of Taco Bell or never knew one was nearby. (In the US we can assume there is always a Taco Bell nearby, right?) And even if I liked Taco Bell, it’s a pretty lame suggestion. But Taco Bell has deeper pockets and a more sophisticated ad strategy than a local sandwich spot, so that’s the risk Foursquare is taking as it claws its way to revenue.

Tumblr has been slow to monetize too. The company has a very small business of selling templates and stickers, but it has avoided traditional ads, per Karp’s fear of tainting his community. He told the New York Times that Tumblr could be “wildly profitable” overnight, had it decided to switch on banner ads. With a network of 100 million blogs and 300 million monthly uniques, I have no doubt that he’s right.

Instead, Karp decided to go for brand advertising dollars, hiring people from the agency world to sell sponsored posts, a sort of “native ad” approach which is in-vogue at conference panels but represents a tiny portion of ad spend online.

The idea was there, and Tumblr was reportedly on track to earn $100 million this year by the rosiest estimates. Others say that figure will likely be flat, with Tumblr only pulling $15 million in revenue this year. Not great for a company valued at $800 million with 140 employees. Brands have been curious to try the platform, but they hadn’t allocated large budgets to the platform the way they have with Facebook and Twitter.

So when Marissa Mayer offered $1.1 billion, Karp took the offer. It’s a little ironic — Tumblr’s ambitions to bring TV-style creative brand advertising to the web echoed that of Yahoo’s in the early 00′s.

So how did Facebook and Twitter build big businesses with ads ($5 billion and a reported $350 million last year, respectively), while Foursquare and Tumblr could not? If there is something the Valley has that New York doesn’t, it’s not ad expertise. No, as far as I can tell, it is access to far more cash, and talent with experience in scaling.

Having room to run means you need fuel to power that run in the form of talent and capital. When consumer Web companies talk about not focusing on revenue, it’s a bit of a misnomer. The business model implicit to the Valley playbook is trading ever-escalating eyeballs for venture capital. Apparently that playbook only works — so far — in Silicon Valley.

Venture capitalist Chris Dixon, who has built two startups in New York which he sold to Silicon Valley companies, pointed to the benefits of scaling a company in Silicon Valley at our PandoMonthly last week:

In the Valley, he said, “There are people you just pull the people out of XYZ company who did that exact same thing there for the last 5 years. For employees 50-500, you’re not inventing a new thing, you’re just pulling them off the shelf. … You get this whole second layer, right off the shelf and that dramatically accelerates that second stage, and if you look at a bunch of companies in New York and other places, they have to be more experimental, like, “Let me see if this person can do that job.” (Note: Dixon is an investor in PandoDaily.)

That’s not to say that, with Foursquare’s struggles and Tumblr’s sale, all hope is lost. In the last six months, a few new winners have emerged from New York’s tech scene. It started with Mayor Bloomberg’s We Are Made in NYcampaign. The campaign featured six New York startups chosen for their diversity of location, size and sector, featuring ads around the city in subways, taxis, and local media.

The list, which included AppNexus, Songza, Etsy, Dosomething.org, Kickstarter and Learnvest, notably excluded Foursquare and Tumblr. It felt odd — the Karp-Crowley one-two punch seemed a given for every list, article, and award related to New York, tech, youths, what’s hot, important people under a certain age, rising stars, disruptors, or revolutionizers. Their exclusion (or perhaps they declined) sent a quiet signal that the torch had been passed. New York’s tech scene is moving onto phase two: where companies aren’t ashamed of making money, and they don’t want to sell out.

The question is whether the torch has been passed to a group of companies with lower ambitions than its wide-eyed predecessors. Sure, Etsy and AppNexus are easier to monetize than a mobile social network. But are we okay with trading easily monetized “base hits,” for startups with a greater risk and reward?

The new class of leaders I see emerging includes Jon Oringer, CEO and founder of Shutterstock. The company went public last Fall and is now valued at $1.64 billion. And Brian O’Kelley, CEO and founder of AppNexus, which is up to 400 employees and is expected to IPO next year. And Perry Chen of Kickstarter, who may not be comfortable as an “anchor” of New York’s tech scene but is beginning to speak more publicly about his company, defining who it is for (creative people!) and what it is not (a store). And Chad Dickerson of Etsy, who has outlined his company’s plan for providing investors with liquidity while keeping Etsy independent. And 10Gen, a company which is quietly sucking talent from Wall Street to build one of New York’s most exciting hardcore tech companies. And even Gilt Groupe, which should file to go public any day now and has, despite facing some rocky times when flash sales went out of vogue, given birth to its own mafia-like diaspora.

These are companies that don’t plan to sell and have put all the elements in place to ensure they end up in that position. Oh, and the most interesting thing about them? Only one relies on advertising.

[Illustration by Hallie Bateman]

Erin Griffith

Erin Griffith covers New York startups for PandoDaily. She's worked as staff writer for Adweek and a private equity blogger for peHUB. Her writing has appeared in VCJ, Time Out New York, Huffington Post, FT.com, and BUST. She plays keyboard in a band called Team Genius and Tweets as @Eringriffith.

In theory, most of us are opposed to the idea of esoteric chemicals and other potentially toxic things in our food. When pressed, not many people are going to say “I hate the environment and prefer to eat chemical-laden packaged foods.” But in practice, that’s not always how it works out. It’s inconvenient to seek out products that do everything right (local! organic! hormone free! cage free! cruelty free!) and when we do find them, they’re too expensive. Cost and convenience often win.

Meanwhile, the digital generation gets accused of being all talk and no action on these issues. We “like” the local farmer’s market on Facebook, but we still eat Lindt chocolate  or Gatorade, both of which apparently use ingredients from the the evil seed patenting conglomerate Monsanto.

Today I discovered an app that solves the armchair activism problem in such a simple and genius way that I’m shocked it hasn’t been thought of before: Buycott helps you boycott brands associated with actions you don’t like.

The app has exploded in popularity in the last week; Ivan Pardo, who built it as a side project, has barely been able to keep the app up and running. It’s been buoyed by Monsanto’s recent supreme court win, which states that farmers cannot replant seeds harvested from their patented Roundup Ready plants. Monsanto controls 90 percent of the soybean market.

It’s difficult to downright impossible to know which companies use genetically modified soybeans from Monsanto. Buyout allows you to scan the label of a food package, and tell you whether the profits on that sale will end up in the hands of a company you don’t want to support. It takes the confusion out of eating with a conscious, navigating the ridiculously complex web of ownership of these massive food companies. It makes it easy to actually act on causes you care about, while sending a strong message to companies you dislike. Withholding your money is what hurts them the most.

It goes beyond food. Buycott highlights companies related to a variety of causes, allowing you to boycott companies that supported SOPA / PIPA, products created by climate change denier Koch Industries, or companies that have fought against gay marriage.

The beauty of this platform is that it’s cause-agnostic. Maybe you can’t afford to care about buying sustainable, local, organic food, but the thought of spending money at an establishment that opposes gay rights is appalling. You just join the campaigh, and Buycott tells you that the brands Absolut Vodka, Levi’s and Starbucks support gay rights, and that you should avoid Chick-fil-A (obviously) and Exxon Mobil Corporation.

The only problem with Buycott is that you might walk away from the app wondering if there is anything out there that’s acceptable to buy. The boycott targets in some of the campaigns look like comprehensive lists of every large company in the country. The app doesn’t guarantee the accuracy of every target because the companies are added via crowdsourcing. There often aren’t well-articulated proof points for why certain companies are associated with certain causes, though Buyout allows contributors to enter a source for their information. Likewise there are repeat causes and overlap.

The Occupy movement, as outlined by this excellent New Yorker story, eventually collapsed, having too many divergent interests fight over what the disorganized, decentralized cause should be all about. Buycott, like many causes that have momentum, could also run that risk. But as Buycott becomes more sophisticated and more users join, the hope is that it’ll become more trustworthy, too. If worked for Wikipedia, it can work for worthy causes.

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Erin Griffith

Erin Griffith covers New York startups for PandoDaily. She's worked as staff writer for Adweek and a private equity blogger for peHUB. Her writing has appeared in VCJ, Time Out New York, Huffington Post, FT.com, and BUST. She plays keyboard in a band called Team Genius and Tweets as @Eringriffith.

Portland-based Gliph has been building a secure, anonymous messaging app for two years without a strong use case for the technology. It’s also done so while bootstrapping.

And then, as co-founder Rob Banagale put it, ”bitcoin sailed in.” When the virtual currency began to take off this year, the founders knew that they’d found an application for their technology.

“We knew identity and payments and transactions were important but how it was going to fit together we weren’t sure,” he says. “We just knew we needed to start at security and privacy and getting people to connect.”

Bitcoin’s potential for anonymous money transfer was the perfect use case for Gliph’s technology. Banagale set to work building an anonymous social layer on top of a bitcoin payment transfer system. The result launches today.

The first version of Gliph’s product is available on iOS and Android. It uses Coinbase and a secure messaging platform to facilitate seamless bitcoin payments and messaging. By combining both messaging and transfers, users no longer have to discuss payments in one platform and move to another for users to message and transfer separately.

Banagale says no other product in the market combines secure messaging with its payment transfer, as well as showing the balance of one’s digital wallet in Coinbase. That’s the biggest bitcoin wallet company, which recently raised $5 million from Union Square Ventures, though there may be a risk in aligning oneself too closely with one system.

Bitcoin-related startups should have no problem raising money considering the amount of VC interest and dedicated funds cropping up: Union Square Ventures has made a big bet, Andreessen Horowitz is studying the sector closely, and Liberty City Ventures and Secondmarket’s Barry Silbert have launched dedicated funds to the bitcoin ecosystem. Gliph has chosen join Adam Draper’s bitcoin-focused accelerator, Boost.vc. The program announced its official launch this week.

In the program, Gliph and its batch-mates get $18,000 , as well as $50,000 in the form of a capped note when they graduate, which Gliph says it will use to inject bitcoins into its system.

Bitcoin mania may reach a fever-pitch this weekend, as hundreds of bitcoin enthusiasts head to San Jose for Bitcoin 2013, a conference keynoted by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. (They are, naturally, hot on the currency.)

However, excitement around the digital currency has not been without a few setbacks. Aside from skepticism from the media, bitcoin took a regulatory hit this week, when the Department of Homeland Security seized accounts of bitcoin exchange Mt Gox.

However, bitcoin bulls believe that problem was unique to Mt. Gox. Regulators are carefully watching bitcoin but aren’t likely to attack the entire sector. Last night at a New York PandoMonthly, venture capitalist  (and PandoDaily investor) Chris Dixon said the currency will eventually move away from its stigma as a “crazy Libertarian thing,” to something that will revolutionize commerce. Since verifying identity is the biggest factor for online payment companies, bitcoin could wipe away all the fraud and security headaches payment companies currently deal with.

Banagale says the emergence of bitcoin over the last year was exacly what his startup had been searching for. The result of two years of building, bootstrapping and waiting launches today.

Erin Griffith

Erin Griffith covers New York startups for PandoDaily. She's worked as staff writer for Adweek and a private equity blogger for peHUB. Her writing has appeared in VCJ, Time Out New York, Huffington Post, FT.com, and BUST. She plays keyboard in a band called Team Genius and Tweets as @Eringriffith.