Ms. Yeoh (linkedin.com)

When the daily deals trend collapses, the third-party client apps that streamline daily deals will be the first to go. We're getting a whiff of that today with the announcement that CityPockets, a New York-based e-coupon organizer that aggregates all of your deals, is shutting down.

In an email sent out to users today, CEO Cheryl Yeoh wrote:

I deeply regret to announce that CityPockets will completely shut down on June 30, 2012, since we are no longer able to maintain the product for a variety of reasons....We'd like to direct you to our friends at DealsGoRound and Yipit, both offering deal management services and we hope that they will fulfill your needs.

Ouch. Directing your users to former competitors? That's gotta sting.

"We've always been friends with DealsGoRound and Yipit, and wanted our loyal fans to have an alternative to store / manage their vouchers," Ms. Yeoh told Betabeat via email. "It's only fitting for us to show some love to our fellow daily deal friends."

Fortunately for CityPockets fans, Ms. Yeoh also took the opportunity to announce a new venture: It's called Reclip.It, and it's a "social catalog" for the sharing of deals, coupons and discounted products. The social component means that you can follow "deal bloggers, friends, or brands and get notified whenever they clip a good deal into their folder." It looks pretty much exactly like a Pinterest for coupons.

Even though CityPockets will be completely shutting down on June 30th, ReClip.It's similarities--both in industry and concept--make it seem more like a pivot than anything else.

"People have been clipping coupons for decades and the industry that has been primarily driven by ad-ridden, cluttered and outdated coupon sites is ripe for disruption," said Ms. Yeoh.

"We're initially focusing on serving the mommy bloggers who curate coupons and deals on their website to the 32M moms who subscribe to them," she added.

(Source: Warby Parker)

PERFECT TEN. Last Wednesday Time Inc. brought together editors from many of their news properties to bestow upon us the "10 NYC Startups to Watch." Only in the startup picking game since lat year's Internet Week, Time Inc. has already picked winners like GroupMe, which was purchased by Skype for a supposed $85 milion.

The startups that made the cut for 2012 are Adaptly, a social advertising platform; Art.sy, the Pandora of art; Codeacademy, an interactive self-paced tool to learn to code; Enterproid, a mobile platform to segregate work from personal information on a single mobile device; Fab—you already know what Fab does; Fancy Hands, a provider of virtual personal assistants; Loosecubes, a matchmaker for workers and workspaces SideTour; a community marketplace for booking and hosting adventures, Stamped; a five-star-only mobile rating app and Truth Art Beauty; an online platform where users can custom-create skincare blends.

FOUNDER POWER. This Friday Women 2.0 is hosting their New York Founder Friday at 16 East 34th Street. Featured founders Cheryl Yeoh of CityPockets and Eloise Bune of GraciousEloise will begin speaking at 7 p.m. but the event will kick off at 6 p.m. with an introduction by Matt Wolfrom of Makovsky and Company, the event's sponsor. Founder Friday is free, and open to people of all genders, unlike the LOL-inducing "Jews against the Internet" rally, which is $10 and closed to women. Unfortunately, Founder Friday is already at capacity. Add your name to the wait list and cross your fingers.

RALLY IN THE ALLEY. The Association for a Better New York Foundation and Mayor Bloomberg honored the city's technology leaders in Union Square last Thursday including Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley, Greycroft's Alan Patricof, ideeli CEO Paul Hurley and NYTM cofounder Dawn Barber. The Lew Rudin Founder's Award went to New York City deputy mayor for economic development Robert Steel.

MEDIUM MAYHEM. Shelby.tv sat squarely at the intersection of social media and video and last week they began making strides to kick to competition down the block. At The Next Web 2012, cofounder Reece Pacheco unveiled Shelby GT, currently operating in private beta. "Rolls," a tool for organization, curation and the sharing of videos by way of tweets, Facebook posts and other social platforms, make up the centerpiece of this latest social video iteration. Request a private beta invitation to the virtual viewing party here.

DESIGNBOX. Last week LayerVault, an online, unlimited storage space for design files, underwent a redesign adding color extraction and an ability to measure mockups. The "Github for designers" has also introduced "Wormhole," a way to search art files visually by highlighting different design components. That recent shell-out for CS5 might feel a little worse now.

CLOTHES BUY YOU. New York fashion ecommerce company Ruby Ribbon got a $3 million go ahead from Trinity Ventures to launch, sell and market a fashion line "exclusively through social commerce." The company plans to connect to customers on a highly personal level through a national network of stylists who will introduce customers to Ruby Ribbon products at private social functions and in their homes. Ruby Ribbon has been operating stealthily, without so much as a landing page, until today.

PURCHASEST. Ever come across something on Pinterest that you wanted to buy? Well now you can! Sort of. The Fancy wants to treat your eyeballs like a lady while and your wallet like... well pretty much how everyone else treats your wallet. "Everything you see on the site is for sale, or can be for sale, in a function that operates like Groupon in reverse," a press release said. "If someone posts something that develops a huge following -- merchants can come online to sell that item and meet the demand." Fancy just hit half a million users and has big name backers like Square's Jack Dorsey and Facebook's Chris Hughes.

WARBY DARKER. Online prescription eyewear retailer Warby Parker just launched a new line of snazzy prescription sunglasses. At $120 they're a little pricier than their non-polarized counterparts.

COMMUTE. Spotify is on the hunt for a senior product manager with at least five years of experience to drive user revenue. App management platform Appboy wants to add a developer to its small team to provide the server backend for mobile client SDKs and the developer dashboard.

Betabeat caught up with Ms. Yeoh to ask about plans for DealBurner. 

So CityPockets acquired Dealburner. Does that mean Jason Fertel is a CityPockets employee now?

Yes, he'll be our Director of Engineering--our 5th employee.

When did you start thinking Dealburner might make a good feature for CityPockets?

CityPockets has always had Dealburner in our product roadmap. In fact, the week he launched it, was the week we were supposed to build it! Naveen from Foursquare actually saw my demo for SXSW back in March and when we chatted, he actually hinted at this idea and encouraged us to build on top of their API... so we've had this in mind for a long time now. But we didn't manage to get to it with all the fundraising, relaunching of website, hiring, etc. until now.

Anyway so I thought, hey, why reinvent the wheel and compete against another start-up? I decided to meet up with Jason to see if our visions aligned and if he could potentially be a good fit as an employee at CityPockets... and not just an employee but someone who can help us drive the company forward. After meeting with him, I decided it's worth a shot given that it's so competitive these days to find a talented and good engineer. The fact that Jason had previously built an app and a company was a good enough indication that he has the startuppy spirit that we're looking for.

What's the timeline for integration?

We're working on something major right now but I promise you'll see it soon and we'll let Betabeat know!

Is Jason hoping to bring on his former employees from his original start-up?

Not yet but possibly in the near future. We always need great iPhone developers and mobile is going to be a core strategy for us going forward.

CityPockets and Dealburner both started working out of WeWork Labs. Is this a sign of an emerging WeWork mafia?

Yes, out of the five CityPockets employees now, four were previously WWL tenants (including Jin Kim who sat next to me and was my UI/UX consultant to redesign CityPockets before I hired her to be full time). Jin is now my Director of Product & Design and plays an instrumental role in driving CityPockets' product roadmap. She brings years of experience at PayPal & Ebay and is insanely talented.

Not good for Groupon, but also not good for Yipit and other start-ups tangent to the group buyosphere, which includes aggregators like Yipit and Dealery as well as start-ups like Citypockets, a daily deal organizer and second market. If customers get tired of buying Groupons--which we speculated they might, as customers realized getting value out of coupons takes work and the payoff is countercyclical to the economy--the bloated daily deal industry will considerably shrink.

One bright spot: instant coupons. With partnerships between services like Foursquare and Groupon, merchants can now leverage group buying economics to recruit new customers on the spot--a highly efficient mechanism for bringing thrifty, but lazy customers in exactly at slow times. The instant group buying shift may not help Citypockets, but it's great for Yipit, which in addition to aggregating deals has branched out into providing competitive market research to the daily deal industry.

And the e-coupon craze is far from over. Betabeat just got a note yesterday from Coupons.com, "the leader in digital coupons," which just received $200M in funding in June and is estimated to be worth $1 billion. And no one has really figured out the best way to capitalize on the demand for Seamless promo codes, which is raging. Or maybe that's just us. Yipit?

Additionally, Scoop St. has come up with something new (new to us, at least--commenters?).

Meet Scoop St. Lottery, a fun way to earn more Scoop St. Bucks by snapping a picture of your receipt after you use your scoop. With Lottery, members now have the chance of winning Scoop St. credit every day - in a randomly drawn lottery announcement - just by sharing a picture of your receipt! Winners will get notified right inside the app. Not only that, but Scoop St. merchants will have the most transparent and vital information on Scoop St. customers in New York City.

We're seeing flash deals, crowd-sourced deals, a giant pool of money to turn customers into a salesforce, white label services so that brands can offer their own deals, and now a lottery as daily dealers try to differentiate themselves from the mob of Groupon clones. Daily dealers also have their own trade media as well as secondary market and aggregators. Eventually the entire economy is going to move into the dealosphere.

“I can’t tell you the whole idea.” The Internet entrepreneur on the other end of the phone sounded panicky. “It’s going to sound ludicrous and ambitious, more ludicrous and ambitious than most.”

The voice belonged to a 27-year-old Stanford law student—“just about the oldest you can be where I cannot remember not having a computer”—who was in New York last week to talk to people about his new concept for a website.

He gave a few vague descriptors that could apply to half the start-ups in New York.

“I definitely don’t want it in the newspaper,” he said. “I’m worried that even little sign posts toward what I want to build are dangerous.”

When he had the idea in April, he talked about it to anyone who would listen. “I definitely went manic--which has never happened before--when it came into my head, for about 10 days, which were incredibly productive and I wound up talking to a senior engineer at Google and some very well respected people at Stanford,” he said. “I would not sleep. I’d get to bed at like 3:30 and wake up at 6:30 and the entire time I’m just thinking about how to build this thing that was in my head that I think would make the world a better place... I was pacing and talking to everyone I could about it.”

The mania lasted about ten days, followed by four days of crippling depression. His girlfriend seemed to be the only one who noticed. “The fact that I seemed to be taking along some very, very smart people with me was both exciting and in retrospect, a little bit disconcerting,” he said.

“But it is a big idea, and that’s the language of start-ups," he continued. "The language of start-ups is a sort of manic language, it’s, ‘I’m going to change the world,’ which for normal people is like, ‘Whoa, that sounds grandiose,’ and you sound a little bit crazy. In start-up world, it’s like, ‘Can I give you some money for that?’”

We hung up. He emailed immediately to scrub the record. “I know this is going to sound a little paranoid, but I'd appreciate it if you would not include the quote about ----------- being ----------- and wanting to develop a platform for ----------. Paranoia is also a symptom of start-up fever.”

Bankers Pull a Pivot - Read the Diaries of a Fledgling Founder

Start-up fever! Whether it’s due to The Social Network or the new wave of billion-dollar tech I.P.O.’s, lately it seems like everyone has a start-up. Betabeat first noticed it in our own neighborhood, the tech-tending East Village, home of Foursquare. On a recent weekend, we overheard an entrepreneur talking about pitching investors over brunch on St. Marks and glimpsed another demonstrating his website’s Twitter integration to a friend at Ninth Street Espresso. We tried to eavesdrop on a bearded, 40-ish fellow ranting about his start-up to a friend in Tompkins Square Park around 9 p.m. on a Wednesday and caught the words “convertible note.” The trend has invaded our building as well. The Goldman Sachs engineer on the second floor wants to join a start-up. He asked us about tech events.

The start-up mythology—build fast, get cash, save the world—and the low barrier to entry make it tough to resist. “An all-consuming start-up can be very difficult for a mom of young kids,” New York-based mommy blog mogul Philippa Smith said in an email, but “the lure of creating something that was potentially such a benefit to both local moms and the local business community was too great.” Her start-up, Juice in the City or “the Groupon for moms,” recently announced a $6 million round of funding.

“It’s Foursquare, it’s Etsy, it’s Tumblr,” said Zeb Dropkin, a digital media consultant-turned-start-up entrepreneur currently working on RentHackr.com, a website where New Yorkers admit how much rent they’re really paying. “New York City has real investment now, real cycles. This is the real leagues.”

Roger Wu, who organizes the Stamford Tech Meetup, recently raised money for one of his start-ups. The investors remembered him because of his red New Balances, he told Betabeat. “It’s like Hollywood, where everyone’s an actor,” he said. “Everyone with a little idea they had when they were drinking is going to start a company and be the next Facebook.”

(Betabeat got an email recently from a friend seeking cycling routes: “Is there a HopStop for bicycles? Because if there isn’t let’s start one and get riiiiichhh!”)

Cheryl Yeoh was working as a management consultant for KPMG, an 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. gig that kept her in Scotch tastings and Michelin stars, when she realized sometime in the middle of April that she needed to do an Internet start-up for something. Anything. The idea was secondary. What mattered was making something amazing that could reach not just hundreds of people or thousands, but millions. “I knew I could do something greater,” she told Betabeat. “Every time I met someone who told me, ‘Oh, I’m a founder of so-and-so,’ or whatever, I don’t care what company it was, every time they said that I thought, oh my gosh, why am I not doing this, I know I can start something, I know I can do something.

“I was obsessed. You can use the word ‘obsession.’”

Ms. Yeoh had a programmer friend. She took him out to lunch and pitched him a few ideas. He picked CityPockets, a website that imports a user’s coupons from daily deal sites like Groupon and sends friendly reminders when they’re about to expire. “We’d come home at 8:30 at night and right away from 9 p.m. I was writing, researching until like 2 a.m.,” she said. “Or I would spend time going to tech events. Some days I would go until 3 or 4 a.m. because I was talking to my mentor in San Francisco. Even though I was physically tired, I was mentally awake. Every morning I would jump out of bed because I was like, I wonder what new features I can think of next... Even my friends were like, ‘Wow, you’re sleeping so little but you look so much more alive!’” She left her job in August, two months after her 27th birthday. “I told my manager, I have to leave,” she said. “I have to do this thing because it’s consuming me.”

She went on. “I had a one-bedroom in Gramercy, lived the high life, had designer coats and bags, traveled multiple times a year. I quit all that. Moved into an apartment in the East Village—Alphabet City, actually—and slept in a living room on a futon kind of separated by curtains Velcroed up to the ceiling. For five months I did that... I wanted to prove that I can live just bare bones, live the life of a scrappy entrepreneur so that I can just fully focus on the product without any distractions whatever.

“I have enough savings in my bank, actually, to continue living in my Gramercy apartment,” she added. “It was more like I made an active choice to go with that lifestyle.” The day she put the curtains up, she recalled, she giggled until her eyes teared.

“In the Bay Area you have more superstars and guys who have done a bunch of start-ups,” said Shai Goldman, a director at Silicon Valley Bank who moved to New York from the Bay Area in January. “The majority of entrepreneurs here, a lot of them are first-time entrepreneurs. It’s almost like a cohort. They’re kind of all learning at the same time, they’re going through the same missteps. It makes it a little more interesting here.

“Every entrepreneur has the opportunity to make a big mark in New York right now.”

The anonymous entrepreneur we spoke to by phone wants to drop out of Stanford and raise money in New York. “I think New York is kind of the Wild West frontier of investing right now. It’s a little bit unstable and it’s a little bit dirty,” he said. Silicon Valley is “this weird system that’s dominated by these monsters” like Facebook and Google, which are buying "crap companies to get the people."

“The mythology is a little tarnished out there,” he said. “The people I know in New York are really excited about the things that happen here in a way that people at Stanford and the Valley certainly aren’t. You know, it’s big business.”

Evidence of the city’s start-up fever can be seen on Meetup.com—the New York-based, dot-com-era start-up that became a hub for local techsters—where the number of recurring tech events has wildly accelerated: Startup Lunch, 104 members; Dumbo Tech Breakfast, 641 members; UWS Startup Meetup, 164 members; the NYC Startup Garage, 208 members; NYC Startup Weekend, 337 members; the NYC Lean Startup Machine, 1,553 members; the New York Technology Bathhouse Meetup, 25 members.

On a recent muggy evening, about 70 mostly 20-something, mostly male guests gathered in clusters on a rooftop in Chelsea for the summer’s first “Find a Cofounder” party, squinting at one another’s name tags as the sun set. Red name tags were for programmers; blue meant you were more of a business guy. The blue name tags ran out by the time Betabeat got a drink.

“So three years ago, there was the New York Tech Meetup, right?” Gary Sharma said, referring to the 18,545-member organization that draws about 800 attendees to its monthly demo nights. Mr. Sharma was a mild-mannered Wall Street marketing consultant before he became “The Guy with the Red Tie,” per his business card and neckwear. He has been attending tech start-up events and cataloguing them in his weekly newsletter, GarysGuide, for the better part of four years. “That was the start-up meetup, pretty much. I like to call it the mothership. As that gets bigger, I started seeing satellite meetups coming out of it. Video 2.0, Web 2.0. Then you started seeing even smaller ones. Travel 2.0, Fashion 2.0. Then more niche ones. Some people started the Hoboken Tech Meetup. You know where Hoboken is?” We did; we’ve been. The Hoboken Tech Meetup has 901 members. Its monthly Monday night meetings always have a wait list.

“I want to start a social-local-mobile meetup called SoLoMo!” Mr. Sharma said. “No, I’m just kidding,” he added quickly.

“I knew nothing about Internet start-ups,” Ben Wolff, a smiley personal stylist who lives in Corona, Queens, admitted to Betabeat as we sat cross-legged on a futon in a corner of the patio. “I knew I needed to make an electronic version of myself. That’s why I started.”

Last year, Mr. Wolff, whose business consists of going through client’s closets and refreshing their wardrobes, wrote out a set of “if this, then that” instructions in a spreadsheet to formalize his process. A few encouraging conversations with friends inspired him to turn it into a start-up. His dream is to make the “Faster Pants algorithm” part of every man’s shopping experience, he said, as soon as he can find someone to code for equity. “I equate this with a high school dance where there’s more girls than boys,” he said, mock-twiddling his thumbs. “I feel like I’m sitting on the wall going, ‘Oh, please dance with me!’”

“You’re a reporter? Reporters did a lot for me!” said Ray Schmitz. A former real-estate broker who made a small name for himself by passing out business cards at the revolving door of Bear Stearns the day the investment bank announced its sale to JPMorgan, he was also seeking dance partners. He had the idea for a website that lets brokers refer business to each other in 2009. “I remember reading a book by Clay Shirky,” he said. “He makes a wonderful point that the Internet may be the biggest change in society since the printing press. It may be even bigger. The start-ups in New York are forging the life of the future for everyone right now. The way we’ll live, work and play tomorrow is being created here today.”

On our way out, Betabeat ran into Aaron Price, the fastidious organizer of the Hoboken Tech Meetup, who was standing in the bathroom line. Things were going well, he said. He was recently named to the nebulous position of “entrepreneur at large” for the early-stage venture capital fund DFJ Gotham, opened a co-working space, and was working on his start-up, makeMania, a website where crafty people show off their D.I.Y. projects.

He exhorted us, as always, to come to the next Hoboken meetup. We promised to try.

Bankers Pull a Pivot - Read the Diaries of a Fledgling Founder

An early CityPockets design.

CityPockets announced its $750,000 round of funding today, a triumph for the struggling quinoa-eating bootstrappers behind the site--thanks to persistence, careful budgeting and two local angels who fronted more than $500,000. 

The round took just over two months to raise, CEO Cheryl Yeoh told Betabeat, but it seemed like much longer. She and her co-founder basically tried to raise money for CityPockets twice: first as an instant deals platform, a pivot advised by investors.

After wasting two months trying to be heard in the crowded daily deal space, Ms. Yeoh reverted to her original idea--the current incarnation, a site for organizing and reselling daily deal coupons--and found things much easier.

"At the end of February, I started really asking myself what is my passion, why am I building a company based on what other people tell me the opportunity is?" she said. She met "a ton of people" at South By Southwest in mid-March, and came home to New York to try again. "Raising was still hard, but in early April we got our lead investors," she said.

For a while, the investors remained stealthy. But we now know the leader of the lead investors was Ben Lin of Great Oaks Venture Capital, a two-angel early-stage fund with investments in Invite Media (acquired by Google), Trulia.com, 33Across, OKCupid and Warby Parker, among others in a portfolio Mr. Lin estimates is worth $50 million.

"We have a handful of investments in the daily deal sites," Mr. Lin said. "We see a huge problem with the daily deal space where it's getting really crowded, with 500, 600 players trying to chase after the same piece of pie. We see a real need for what CityPockets is doing."

There are two opportunities for CityPockets to take advantage of users who feel overwhelmed by too many deals, Mr. Lin said, and the CityPockets marketplace, where deals can be resold, is key. "Number one, people are more likely to buy [deals] knowing that they'll be able to get rid of them. Number two is, people might be more willing to buy them for the sake of selling them. Almost like ticket scalping."

The second example is close to the model of another Great Oaks investment, Stubhub.

Great Oaks also recruited MI Ventures and several other NYC-based angels and international investors.

CityPockets is now comfortably ensconced in Great Oaks's Chelsea office, where Ms. Yeoh still interviews two or three users a week by phone or instant message to find out "who are these people." She just spoke to a superuser, a mom who tracks 200 coupons through CityPockets at any one time. Another fan is the Groupon Pawn, who tried to use the site to organize hundreds of Groupons--he's trying to survive off the site for a year. Things apparently went a little sour with Groupon, though, when the Pawn's usage of CityPockets became public without an okay from the big discounter. Which reminds us of a problem raised in this post by Xconomy, which asserts, "Companies like Groupon have not given their permission for CityPockets to collect and help resell their vouchers. And the legality of the model hasn’t yet been tested."

The dangers of this were greatly exaggerated, Ms. Yeoh says. "The ending about concerns about Groupon shutting us down, I do not agree. I'm not worried about that at all."

In her user interviews, she said, people have told her they were ready to give up on daily deals until they found CityPockets. "Since they discovered us they're starting to use [daily deal sites] again because they have confidence knowing they can keep track of everything," she said. CityPockets has a working relationship with LivingSocial, BuyWithMe, Tippr and others. Ms. Yeoh says they're going to talk to Groupon "soon."

Maybe it'll go really well, we said. Maybe Groupon will want to buy CityPockets.

"I don't know if we can be bought by any particular site because we want to work with all the deal sites, with their needs and their users' needs," she said.

What about other daily deal aggregators?

"Yipit doesn't have enough money to buy us," she said. "But Google, Facebook are kind of testing the waters by aggregating... Or Amazon, eBay. There's potential with bigger overarching companies."

Baller start-up pro-tip: Raise a seed round? It's fancy sandwich time.

A side project we counseled to turn start-up is headed to San Francisco to join the elite incubator Angelpad, founded by ex-Googlers in 2010. IDoneThis, the productivity hack from Walter Chen and Rodrigo Guzman, told us a month ago they had applied to a few incubators--including New York's brand-new Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator--but it seems they'll be shipping off to Cali even though "New York has been good to us." We look forward to hearing dispatches from the relatively new incubator, which mostly selects start-ups run by more experienced entrepreneurs, and to enjoying the sandwiches at their celebratory open sandwich bar party next week.

IDoneThis is the second company out of new co-working space/incubator WeWork Labs to get funded. CityPockets closed on an oddly-uneven $550,092 about a month ago and moved into a new office. Fast-growing fitness tracking site Fitocracy is sniffing around for investment and could be the next WWL start-up to get capital.

Protein-conscious Cheryl Yeoh

Here's a slice of schadenfreude for struggling boot-strappers. Glowing tech press doesn't necessarily mean the startup life is as glamorous behind-the-scenes. Take fledgling New York coupon aggregator CityPockets. Back in March, Forbes crowed, "Not to sound too cliché or fluffy, but CityPockets is the solution," to the deluge of daily deals sites. A few paragraphs later, they piled it on with:

"To quote Andrew Mason from an email exchange we had in 2009, “[Groupon's] goal is to make Groupon feel 'too good to be true' from beginning to end,” and frankly CityPockets succeeds in bringing an entire industry under that mantra."

With that kind of review 28-year-old CEO Cheryl Yeoh must have been living the Silicon Alley high-life, right? Yeah, not so much.

According to Xconomy, this is what day-to-day life actually looked like back then:

But around the time when these articles were coming out, both Cheryl Yeoh, the 28-year-old CEO of the fledgling tech startup, and co-founder Jhony Fung, 27, were nearly broke. They had burned through most of the savings they brought to the venture, after leaving high-end consulting jobs. Yeoh was down to budgeting $35 per week for food, eating mostly kale and quinoa. (“It’s the grain with the most protein, and the vegetable with the most protein,” she explained.) Yeoh had for months been sleeping on the Stuyvesant Town couch of her newest hire, David Guthu, with only a small curtain, Velcro-ed to the ceiling, for privacy.

Hey, at least it's more nutritious than coffee, ramen, and whatever you can find in the vending machine.

MAGIC AND MAGICIANS: What is designer/angel/connector Matt Shampine doing in this photo tweeted today by Vegas showman Criss Angel with the caption, "In secret project meeting will reveal details about 1 of the projects this Sunday...." No idea what it could be, as Mr. Angel's website is already maximum sick!

IT PAYS TO MOCK UP. The life science inventory-management start-up mock-pitched at a Startup Leadership Program event last week as an exercise, where the company was mock-valued by mock-VCs at a cool mock-$7.5 million. “Most of the VCs tended to gravitate toward Quartzy, which ended up being a very expensive deal,” director Kanchan Koya said. “They had a premoney that was really, really high… A mock VC fund invested $2 million or $1 million on a pre-money of like $7.5 million, but clearly the company needed more than just a million to actually make it.” The start-up's performance landed them a real interview with First Round Capital, which was being represented at the event by Charlie O'Donnell, who demurred when Betabeat tried to find out whether the real pitch went as well as the fake one. "Tons of companies pitch at First Round, 3-4 a day :)," he said on Gchat. "I try to talk to all the really interesting people doing interesting stuff... If you made every company that pitched a rumor, you could make the whole site a rumor round-up."

CITYPOCKETS. After weeks of grinding through paperwork, Cheryl Yeoh got money!

STEALTH START-UP. Galhaus, is in pre-splash page stealth mode, while its counterpart Guyhaus is in pre-alpha. But we're told the product will be more than toothpaste delivery--it'll be more similar to Birchbox.