Mr. Borthwick (photo: screencap)

Stand down, Instapaper fanatics: Betaworks has no plans to shut the service down. That was the first question out of Alexia Tsotsis's mouth this morning at Disrupt, when she took the stage to interview CEO John Borthwick.

Wearing his ubiquitous brown corduroy jacket, Mr. Borthwick told her no, followed by an awful lot of throat-clearing.

"It's a wonderful product, it's a wonderful brand," he said. "It is an important part of what I see as an emerging ecosystem of products, some of which we're building at Betaworks and some of which we see invested in, that relate to the future of news and the future of media. And so we're going to build."

That Instapaper acquisition, by the way, started with a 2 a.m. email from an anxious Marco Arment, which was trying to figure out how to juggle Instapaper with his other commitments. He wanted to grow the service, but he didn't want to, you know, manage people and raise the money. Then came the late-night bolt from the blue: Betaworks!

Mr. Borthwick declined to divulge the terms of the deal, other than to say that Betaworks has a majority stake and there's some revenue share involved. Apparently that app was making a million bucks a year, though, which explains how Marco's paying for all that fancy coffee.

Elsewhere in the Chelsea-based collective, a team is readying a new product due to launch mid-week, and Mr. Borthwick let slip that it's some sort of game. Sadly it's not Digg's much-anticipated (by bloggers, anyway) Google Reader replacement, which "we're dashing to get done in time."

"We were blindsided a little bit by the timing of the announcement" from Google, he added, though a reader product was already on their roadmap at the time. "It's an important part of the puzzle."

Mr. Borthwick sure likes that image. He refused to pick a favorite Betaworks production, too, telling Ms. Tsotsis, "All these products are related in my mind, and so it all fits together in that puzzle. It's the puzzle that fascinates." What schemes are brewing under all that hair, John?

(Photo: theybf.com)

Real Genius Andreessen Horowitz invested $15 million in Rap Genius to help its Ivy League cofounders to annotate the Internet. But how much will they have to pay to rein in the braggadocious Mahbod Moghadam?

In a recent issue of Wakefield, a newsletter covering "tech and startup insight not captured elsewhere," Maboo was up to his old shenanigans, volunteering information about a “feud” with Mark Zuckerberg, who also happens to be backed by Andreessen Horowitz.

Apparently, Mr. Moghadam was at Ben Horowitz’s home, “chilling” with Zuck and Nas as is the new mode of Silicon Valley socializing. (Mr. Horowitz happens to be close friends with Steve Stoute, Nas’ former manager.) Despite Zuck's heightened privacy concerns (it's complicated?) Rap Genius cofounder couldn't resist Instagramming his good fortune.

Apparently Zuck never leaves his house because he’s so afraid of people photographing him, and then our investor – his house is one of the only places where Zuck feels safe – so our investor invited Zuck and Nas over. They were chilling together, and I asked if I could take a photo. He was like “Let’s hold off, let’s hold off,” and I just couldn’t resist – I was drunk, and I went paparazzi and Instagrammed it, and I didn’t even think it would be a thing.

But then the press picked it up and apparently Zuck gets home and his whole PR crew is calling him every five seconds, and he told us to take it down. We wrote a letter of apology and I feel sorry. I regret taking it, I hope this has taught me some maturity, it certainly got me in a lot of trouble. But then on the other hand, fuck that fool – that’s Nas the Don.

Asked by Wakefield if there was anything else he wanted to discuss, Mr. Moghadam again volunteered:

Alright so I told you the New York Times is Carlos Slim’s ho, I told you Zuck can suck my dick, what else is there?

When Betabeat asked Mr. Moghadam about the tenor of those comments on gChat, he said, “i am so sorry, i love zuck, i think he should've made the photo w nas his fb profile pic. I talked to nas, nas loved him and loved the photo.” It was all “tongue in cheek,” he added, “but obvi this offends mark, he got me my last girlfriend, i feel terrible!”

Later, Mr. Moghadam requested that we note that he had taken a Vyvanse to prepare for a UC Berkeley Rap Genius colloquium after the Wakefield interview and was therefore “being negative on the come up." He also noted that he was “not surprised that the ‘guy’ (pun intended) who runs [Wakefield] went to harvard since havartis (as i call them) are little bitches. Also ‘harvard = illuminati, yale = KILLuminati (princeton = chilluminati).’”

Wonder what he calls Andreessen Horowitz?

Bloglords Never Worry In Emily Nussbaum's review of "Girls" for the New Yorker this week, she defined "concern trolling," as "the Internet term for one who ices her sneer with dignified worry." Valley regulars don't seem too familiar with the term. So for a fine example, let us direct you to Sarah Lacy's comments about her former coworker Alexia Tsotsis on Jason Calacanis' This Week In Tech. Whatever happened to putting the blog first?

The Bachelor: Silicon Valley Congratulations to investor Peter Thiel, who made Out magazine's third annual list of "Most Eligible Bachelors." Local suitors, please let us know if you get an invite to his raging Upper East Side dinner parties.

Nap Time Bre Pettis is a busy guy. Between running MakerBot Industries and traveling around for meetings and conferences, he has to get his zzz's in where he can. "Parking lot nap," he wrote alongside an Instagram of his car with a bridge in the background. Perhaps MakerBot should invest in some sweet nap pods a la Google.

(Photo: Instagram)

Be Mine If you didn't get enough fill of Valentine's Day yesterday, perhaps this tool for determining your Twitter crush will come in handy. Twitamore analyzes who you follow, @-reply and favorite to figure out who your Twitter Valentine is. Our favorites? The ones who love themselves.

Belly up the bar Wired editor Ryan Tate has a bone to pick with the makers of the bourbon Maker’s Mark, who recently announced they’d be adding just a little more water to their product. Quartz took questions for the company’s COO via Twitter, and here’s what Mr. Tate demanded to know: “What will you do for a living after burning the American bourbon industry’s reputation to the ground and destroying your company?” Two words, Mr. Tate: Woodford Reserve.

Attention, please Consider this a cri de coeur from your friendly neighborhood scolds: Please, please, please stop making these Harlem Shake videos. Rumor has it that even Sheryl Sandberg is somewhere in this Facebook video. It’s nice to break up the workday with a little caper, but unfortunately, tech companies seem to have trouble rounding up employees with rhythm.

There’s only one exception to this blanket condemnation, and that’s the dude who appears front and center in Google’s version, thrashing about in what appear to be lederhosen. He looks like he’s on serious party drugs, and he is mesmerizing, and he is now a GIF:

For those who read and run? When Atlantic Media launched Quartz, it positioned the digital only business publication as the news source for the new global elite: the type of jet-setting professionals more likely to read a news story from a tablet while sipping complementary champagne at 30,000 feet than to hunker over a desktop PC. It stood to reason then that Quartz would be an early adopter of the smart-watch Pebble.

Quartz reporter Christopher Mims also brushed off concerns that nerdlinger arm candy might look pretty goofy once it actually hit the market.

Rappers will gold-plate their iWatches and Google Glasses, and some guy will wear a phablet on a chain around his neck. You'll see.

— Christopher Mims (@mims) February 14, 2013

We think we know just the fella.

(Photo: Instagram/Mazy)

Airbnb Is a Belieber Early this week, CEO Brian Chesky tweeted out a photo of Justin Bieber, whose startup cred apparently extends to Airbnb renter. The Instagram shot was taken by Mazy Kazerooni, cofounder of #DominateFund, Ben Parr's still hush-hush, celebrity-focused micro-VC. Gee, wonder who their LPs are?

Friday flashback This week the revamped Digg got an unexpected celebrity thumbs-up: Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit fame (infamy?) tweeted at developer Robert Tolar Haining, "I love Digg. Great job and beautiful interface." "Why thank you sir!" Mr. Haining replied, because what else are you going to say when Fred Durst compliments your UI?

Curtain's up This week, Facebook sibling/musical theater devotee Randi Zuckerberg attended and spoke at TedXBroadway. More importantly: She got to meet Lt. Sulu himself, George Takei:

With @georgetakei at #TEDxBroadway! He was so great talking about theater & social media, I don't even have to speak! twitter.com/randizuckerber…

— Randi Zuckerberg (@randizuckerberg) January 28, 2013

Not even gonna front like we aren't jealous.

Devastating It seems Monday was a rough day in the Business Insider office. We speak not of Henry Blodget's regaling the Internet with tales of his air travels, nor of the site's tussle with the Awl over the nature of parody. No, we speak of the fallout from Sunday's episode "Downton Abbey." "Still kinda shaken by last night’s Downton," tweeted deputy editor Joseph Weisenthal. "Sybil?" Mr. Blodget responded with understanding and sympathy, before adding that it had been "brutal."

It's hard but we'll all get through this somehow, just like the Granthams. Stiff upper lip!

Panty Drop Off Softbank principle and devilishly stylish VC Nikhil Kalghatgi got a little surprise in the mail this week. Turns out some silly prankster decided to send him "3.9 kg of panties." Though he declined to reveal just how many pairs of panties equal 3.9 kg, he invited one lucky user to DM him on "Thonger, the all panties Twitter." Sassy.

(Photo: Twitter)

It's all Greek to me I don't think that word means what you think it means.

(Screenshot: Twitter)

The Coworker Is Right WeWork resident Asi Lang guessed the right price on stage with Drew Carey, while his fellow coworkers watched on TV from 175 Varick Street. Between this and all the Foursquare questions on "Jeopardy," game shows seem to have a Silicon Alley bias.

Oh you fancy huh Appcelerator head of partnerships and occasional Betabeat columnist Spencer Chen has some sick Super Bowl plans. Too bad TechCrunch columnist MG Siegler has better ones. Suddenly we feel gloriously populist for our plans to watch it in our PJs on a normal-sized TV.

(Photo: Tumblr)

The cause for celebration was two-fold. The first was showing off demos from its inaugural class of 20 girls, who represented all five boroughs and some disarmingly ambitious ideas. (We're still scratching our head at Cora Frederick's plan to use data mining and machine learning to classify tumors.) The second was to announce an audacious new goal: to train one million girls in computer science by 2020, starting with a national expansion outside New York City next year.

The nonprofit organization, founded by former deputy public advocate Reshma Saujani and run by former Jumo managing director Kristen Titus, offers teenage girls an eight-week, full-time education in robotics, web design, and mobile development, with mentorship from engineers and executives at Twitter, Google, ZocDoc, Gilt Groupe, and more. In fact, Ms. Saujani noted last night, CEO Dick Costolo volunteered Twitter's first philanthropic donation to Girls Who Code, although she politely declined to specify the dollar amount.

On stage, Ms. Saujani pointed out that of the 8 million girls in high school right now, only 3,769 took the AP Computer Science exam. What's more, only 0.3 percent of female high school students decide to major or minor in computer science. But after this summer's session concluded, all 20 girls committed to studying computer science--a small, but integral step toward filling the 1.4 million tech jobs that expected to open up by the year 2020. "That pipeline begins in high school," she told the crowd gathered between the blank screens and buzzing monitors that make-up the floor of the stock exchange after hours.

Girls Who Code sponsors Jack Dorsey and Chris Hughes, who also supported Ms. Saujani's 2010 bid for a Congressional seat, weren't able to make it to the party. But plenty of founders and technologists flocked to the feel-good event, including Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, and General Assembly cofounder Matthew Brimer, just in from a conference in Dublin (one of the few cities without its own GA, judging by the startup's rapid expansion). Also in attendance were Foursquare's lead iPhone engineer Anoop Ranganath, Raptor Ventures VC William Peng, former ICM prodigy Kate Lee, New York City's chief digital officer Rachel Haot, Ms. Saujani's husband and LocalResponse founder Nihal Mehta, and Alex Taub, head of biz dev at Dwolla.

On stage, Twitter engineer Sara Haider and Twitter program manager Olivia Watkins, who closely mentored the girls, praised the program's many virtues. But nowhere was the upside more evident than in a speech from 15-year-old Julia Geist from Brooklyn, who recounted her transformation from the shy kid who liked physics into what Ms. Saujani called a "change agent" for her family of five siblings.

"I learned about Girls Who Code from my librarian, who noticed that I spent all of my days and much of my lunch time on the computer at the library," Ms. Geist told the beaming crowd. "I quickly learned everything from how to build mobile apps to becoming a master of user experience to building video games in Javascript." Ms. Geist is currently working on three separate freelance web development projects and teaching her dad how to code. "He is now working to become an IT professional to replace his substitute custodian job. My sisters are next on the list. Some say I’m a natural coder, but I say I’m lucky to have been a part of Girls Who Code."

For anyone inspired to donate after hearing Ms. Geist, or other equally as moving teenage technologists, there were Square devices on hand to swipe donations right from the NYSE.

Even without a horde of face-palming stock traders, the floor of the exchange is still an intoxicating milieu. Proximity to all those literal levers to the public markets were irresistible--and stern instructions from the guard not to push any elevator buttons didn't help. Mr. Newmark himself seemed tempted toward a little mischief, although he cautioned that anything untoward should only be performed with the benefit of a mask. "Did you see the Batman movie?" he explained, covering his mouth like the villainous Bain. Mr. Newmark was in the midst of this twice or thrice annual trips to New York. "I tend to stay near the K-Mart downtown and that’s where I shop," he said, admitting to a little anxiety about leaving his customer service post. "I’ve been offline for, what, two hours now? People will be nervous."

Luckily, we faired better than TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Tsotsis, who got kicked out the NYSE for an offhand joke involving spilled liquids and Facebook stock manipulation.

The juxtaposition of tech and Wall Street was as symbiotic as we've ever seen it. A Credit Suisse exec eagerly passed Ms. Saujani his congratulations and business card. While waiting in the lobby, we chatted up a Goldman analyst (who has her own startup, natch). Surely, the release of Greg Smith's tell-all must be a startup recruiter's dream? Not so much, she said with a shrug, describing life inside the House of Lloyd yesterday as "pretty normal."

Towards the end of the presentations, Ms. Saujani pulled an Oprah, distributing presents from President Barack Obama to all the girls who joined her on stage. "We have signed letters for each of you! It’s better than One Direction and Justin Bieber, right? I think so too!" she said with pride. "I dunno, Bieber would've been good?" a fellow audience member quipped next to us. "Pandemonium in the stock exchange!"

Thanks to the startup scene's growth spurt, New York City has not been short on well-intentioned initiatives to right the ratio and close the gap for tech talent. Girls Who Code seems to get many of the basics right: The organization reaches out underserved students, who defy the pattern-recognition that plagues the tech industry and its financiers. It also addresses the problem early, and offers sustained training with a practical bent toward employment.

"I wish I had majored in computer science," Ms. Saujani told Betabeat in a trading booth after the speeches. "I wish I could go home and build a mobile app on immigration and undocumented students--build an app on 'Stop and Frisk.' But I’m also taking lessons from the girls and I don’t think it’s too late for me to learn how to code either." Girls Who Code, she said, is an example of the type of initiatives she wants to spearhead in her campaign to become Public Advocate in 2013. "I was talking at some of the community colleges, like if you can teach 15-year-old girls how to code, you can teach adults how to code. And there are so many jobs that are open," she said, noting the 50,000 new jobs added in mobile development.

During the program, Ms. Saujani added, visits to Gilt Groupe and ZocDoc piqued the girls' interest. "I think a lot of them thought initally, I want to be a doctor and didn’t realize the connection between healthcare and technology, and medicine and technology."

On our way out, we asked Ms. Guest, who received her first job offer after the Girls Who Code graduation at Google's Chelsea outpost, where she'd like to work. While Google, Gilt Groupe, and Twitter feel "like a second home," she said, "My dream is to start my own company." Oh man, just wait 'til Peter Thiel hears about her!

Mr. Williams, Mr. Peretti and Mr. Miller.

The elevators to the BuzzFeed office are magnificently slow. Each fits about six people comfortably, and they trundle and groan up to the 11th floor, where the company's ops, tech and marketing people sit. "Considering how fast the company moves, it's amazing how slow its elevators are," quipped one dapperly dressed man as we all awkwardly waited for the doors to open.

Betabeat was visiting the BuzzFeed office for the first time to attend a real-life roundtable. Hosted by Branch cofounder Josh Miller, the event included beers and mingling among some of New York's prolific tech reporters and entrepreneurs, as well as a discussion with Twitter cofounder Ev Williams and BuzzFeed's own cofounder Jonah Peretti.

Before the group settled into white plastic chairs in an event-type space outside the kitchen, Betabeat spotted several tech scene staples, like Paul Ford, Anil Dash and Rick Webb. Scrollkit's Cody Brown and Kate Ray, along with Digg CTO Michael Young, made an appearance. Reporters and writers were also out in full force: Pando Daily's Erin Griffith, The Awl's Choire Sicha and Business Insider's Alyson Shontell all nabbed seats towards the front to listen to the talk. TechCrunch coeditor Alexia Tsotsis sauntered in towards the end in a silver sparkly top.

The event was formatted like a real-life Branch, a conversation platform popular among the tech elite that seeks to "empower people to talk about the world around them." Mr. Miller, who has established himself as a prominent NYC tech entrepreneur in the year since he dropped out of Princeton, proved a confident interviewer, though it probably helped that he is close with Mr. Williams and Mr. Peretti, who both advise him on Branch. The trio sat in tall chairs, not unlike the ones you'd see scattered around a Hollywood set, with the Branch banner hanging behind them.

Soon into the talk, it became clear that Mr. Peretti and Mr. Williams--though clearly comfortable with each other--hold a handful of opposing views. Mr. Peretti is disarming and affable, while Mr. Williams is decidedly more staid, his humor held closer to the vest. It was an interesting juxtaposition to see two successful serial entrepreneurs with visibly different interviewing styles forced to come together and interact for a crowd.

Mr. Williams' new project is Medium, which is currently open to a few select users in private beta. Medium allows them to create valuable content that is categorized not by how new it is, but by how good it is.

"We want to get away from the obsession with newness," Mr. Williams said. "I think an obsession with the new overvalues its importance. Whatever you're looking at in Medium, you see the best stuff first, not the new."

Mr. Williams also argued that a person's social circle doesn't validate content or automatically make it interesting. "Valuable content can come from anyone," he emphasized.

Mr. Peretti, whose own website relies heavily on quickly spotting and posting or reframing the new, pointed out that Mr. Williams' distaste for newness is amusing given his history as the cofounder of Twitter.

"Isn't the prioritization of newness all your fault?" he joked. "You're solving a problem you created."

Mr. Williams, for his part, didn't let Mr. Peretti off the hook either.

"I'm not a big fan of aggregating content," he said a little later. The irony of him saying that while sitting in the BuzzFeed office next to Mr. Peretti was not lost on Betabeat.

To be fair, Mr. Peretti does have some rather controversial ideas. For one, he calls the reframing of someone else's scoop a “conceptual scoop,” which is sure to make journalism students bristle. "On social, nobody wants to pass around the rewrite," he argued. Instead, a lot of what BuzzFeed writers do is come up with a new way to frame an existing scoop. He gave the example of a collection of cat pictures, which doesn't mean anything given the Internet's scope of cat pictures. But when framed as "Bet You Can't Get Through This Post Without Awwing," old material becomes new.

Whether you think that counts as an actual scoop probably depends on how much you value breaking news.

Towards the end of the discussion, the topic turned to Twitter and how it serves as a vehicle--"like a railroad," Mr. Peretti emphasized--to deliver news and information. Mr. Williams agreed, but with a caveat; "Most tweets don't have links," he said, and so it's come to serve another niche. "I think it's the best standalone platform for witticisms," he added, making the audience chuckle. "That's a funny word," Mr. Peretti said, sounding ever-more like the pleasantly silly "accidental" entrepreneur he is.

As BuzzFeed first reported (shocker!), Mr. Williams also suggested that a new way to measure a Twitter user's influence could be in the works. Because many Twitter followers are actually fake, perhaps your follower count isn't an accurate way to gauge your influence. Instead, he stated, "The dream metric is how many people saw your tweet."

As Twitter continues to revoke API access and court Hollywood bigwigs, we won't hold our breath: seems like the company has some more serious issues on its hands these days.

Even though both Mr. Peretti and Mr. Williams have impressive track records as serial entrepreneurs, towards the end of the discussion both expressed that running a company is still a lot of work.

"It's still hard," said Mr. Williams. "There's always new stuff to screw up."

(Photo: Salon)

How does one properly convey just how miffed you are by a newspaper's attempt to make money? By starting a blog post thusly, "Fuckers I am so sick of reporting on incremental tech news for fucking two years now."

So began TechCrunch blogger Alexia Tsotsis' invective-laced late-night rant about the New York Times decision to bring its paywall over to Flipboard, written, if Ms. Tsotsis is to be believed, "in between the downing of tonight’s two bottles of wine." 

But yeah, The New York Times took a step towards the future this blasted Sunday night and all of us tech press are expected to cover it like lemmings. Fine. Sure. It’s a big deal, in a business that is slowly dying, to show an understanding of 21st century distribution mechanisms. Kudos NYT. You’re still worth less than Instagram. Hahahahhaha, lol (drink).

Bottoms up because there's more where that came from:

But still you, The New York Times, are way more important than I am, because you convinced Flipboard CEO Mike McCue to work with you early on, which by the timing of this post you could probably figure out that I couldn’t do (in time). Fail. But we’re still covering it because this is the first time Flipboard has offered a paywall option, and it shows a promising alternative revenue stream for both parties involved  … Welcome to the future, old media assholes.

Lest the reader forget just how personally put out she is by all this, Ms. Tsotsis also ends her post with a Kelis-inspired taunt.

If both Flipboard and The New York Times were public companies and you asked me to convert my invaluable Aol stock into either right now, one and a half bottles of wine deep, I’d instinctively go with Flipboard. Suck it, old media. And please die more slowly from now on, because I (clearly) hate you.

It's hard to pin down the source of Ms. Tsotsis' ire here. Is she upset that the New York Times is experimenting with a new way to finance its (actually invaluable) non-lemming news operation? Does she resent the tech blog as press release regurgitation model? Or does AOL have some swag quota TechCrunch has to fill by the end of the month?

Considering the post came so soon after Jeff Daniel's debut as HBO's own Howard Beale, however, we have to wonder if this isn't some kind of cross-promotional stunt with The Newsroom. Look, it's going viral: Everyone's smug-as-hell-and-leveraging-it-for-their-corporate-owners!