Ms. Hornstein (Photo: Facebook)

This week, the world was introduced to Shirley Hornstein: an ersatz entrepreneur who Photoshopped and name-dropped her way through Silicon Valley. For at least a year and a half, Ms. Hornstein has been trading on flimsily fabricated connections to powerful tech investors, startups, and celebrities--always depending, as TechCrunch first reported, on the optimism of strangers.

"She told people she had the authority to approve up to a $1 million investment from Founders Fund. That was her line," an investor from Los Angeles who recently moved to San Francisco told Betabeat, recounting the time Ms. Hornstein cajoled a pair of young entrepreneurs into pitching her on a Saturday, convincing them on Sunday that she had already heard back from the board with good news.

The fact that Ms. Hornstein's roommate was TechCrunch community manager Elin Blesener also helped "legitimize her," the same investor added.

For more credible (or at least Google-able) proof of her position in the tech world, there was this blog post Ms. Hornstein wrote on Women 2.0, which has since been deleted, touting her connections to Founders Fund and Dropbox. It opened with an anecdote about that time she got angel investing advice from Marissa Mayer.

Image doctored by Ms. Hornstein (top), Original image (Photo: TechCrunch)

As part of yesterday's exposé, TechCrunch revealed that Founders Fund filed a legal complaint against Ms. Hornstein in December for her "efforts to improperly trade in on Founders Fund's good name and reputation," leveraging, in particular, a made-up friendship with Sean Parker.

The startup world's collective schadenfreude at Ms. Hornstein's unstable nest of lies could be chalked up to a guilty conscience. "Seems like everyone is besties with Jack Dorsey and Dennis Crowley," Warby Parker's Lane Wood wrote in defense of Ms. Hornstein. "Someone went to the same party, took a photo and regaled their friends about how 'down to earth' person X was or how Person Y is just as much of an ass as all the rumors say."

Betabeat has spoken to multiple sources, however, who say that Ms. Hornstein's deceptions may have been more egregious than exaggerating her social status or professional network. They allege that Ms. Hornstein is also responsible for repeated credit card theft. The incidents occurred both in her personal life and at at least one startup where she was employed.

We obtained screenshots (posted below) of receipts for two airplane tickets and a monthly BART pass, as well as gChats and emails from former friends of Ms. Hornstein's, all related to fraudulent charges worth thousands of dollars that she made by allegedly stealing her friend's credit card numbers.

That alleged theft first occurred during a trip to Vegas, where Ms. Hornstein also accumulated other debts she has yet to repay, including the cost of a hotel room, as well as a last minute ticket to a Cirque du Soleil show for former TechCrunch writer Paul Carr. Ms. Hornstein alleged the two were dating, which is patently false. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Carr never materialized at the show. He would turn out to be the second bold-faced name Ms. Hornstein claimed to be involved with. First, she told acquaintances she was engaged to NHL player Ryane Clowe, with her public tweets to the star confusing even sports fans on niche hockey forums.

Betabeat also spoke to a reputable source within the Silicon Valley tech community, who alleged that Ms. Hornstein committed a similar theft--using a company credit card, this time--to steal thousands of dollars from her employer. That source, who only spoke under condition of anonymity, did not want to name the company, but based on the timing of the theft, we were able to confirm that the incident happened at Giftiki, a small startup that lets you pool your money to buy better gifts, which was acquired by LaunchRock earlier this month.

"[Ms. Hornstein] got access to company credit cards and actually bought things at charity auctions in the thousands of dollars," said the source. As a marketing consultant, "she was given the credit card to buy some refreshments and so forth because they were doing an event. She retained the credit card information and used it on her own behalf." The company and its investors threatened to prosecute Ms. Hornstein if they weren't repaid, but Ms. Hornstein repaid the debt. Her employment was subsequently terminated. "I can corroborate the fact that she was stealing," the source added.

After Ms. Hornstein left, the startup still declined to prosecute for fear that it would reflect poorly on Giftiki, perhaps assuming that once caught, she would be too scared to try again. "The problem," said the source, "is that she just raised her head somewhere else and created more problems."

Ms. Hornstein did not respond to repeated requests for interviews from Betabeat. But the more closely you look at her fragile "house of cards," as one source put it, the more it seems to evoke the familiar tropes of Startupland, distorted through a funhouse mirror.

Self-described builders, doers, and world-changers make skepticism a dirty word if you're "one of us." Safe inside the virtuous bubble, everyone is willing to lend a hand, only latching on to Ms. Hornstein seemed to drag companies down. Rubbing elbows with newly-minted millionaires fosters a sense of possibility and promise, yes, but also pressure to match that overnight success or be left behind. In a rapidly striating sector, no one wants to look like they're on the bottom rung.

Giftiki was operating out of RocketSpace, a coworking spot in San Francisco that also temporarily housed Zaarly, a peer-to-peer marketplace app based in Kansas City. Prior to working at Giftiki, Ms. Hornstein worked at Zaarly as a marketing consultant. (Although she gave herself a promotion to "head of operations and community," in that since deleted Women 2.0 post.) The source said someone from Zaarly tried to warn Giftiki about Ms. Hornstein, but Zaarly cofounder Eric Koester said he had not heard anything to that effect.

"She was with us for 51 days," Mr. Koester said, adding that no fraud occurred during her brief tenure. "It wasn't a long stint and there was nothing mischievous to report other than it wasn't a good fit."

Ms. Hornstein, sources said, invariably brought up her Founders Fund connection within a few minutes of meeting someone. Often, she also mentioned being one of the first employees at Dropbox, the popular cloud storage service. Nearly every source we spoke to mentioned the longstanding rumor in Silicon Valley that Ms. Hornstein also allegedly stole from Dropbox during her time there. In the comments section on TechCrunch's post, Jose Miguel Castello, owner of Don't Retail, wrote:

"Hopefully one of Dropbox's employees in the know will share the story about how Shirley used Dropbox's paypal account to pay for several thousand dollars of her own expenses?"

However, we were unable to track down any evidence to support that claim and Dropbox has not responded to inquiries from Betabeat.

Ms. Hornstein, her friends said, employed the same tactics she used to dupe startups in her personal life--promising parties at Sean Parker's house or Founders Fund's ear for a potential idea. Lily Himmelsbach, director of operations at Let's Gift It, a gifting startup based in New York, first met Ms. Hornstein at a party in the East Village. The two later overlapped at Zaarly.

During a business trip for Zaarly in Kansas City, Ms. Hornstein went through the elaborate ruse of breaking up with Mr. Clowe--the NHL star, whose giant engagement ring she had been wearing--crying on the phone in her hotel room for hours. As Ms. Himmelsbach later learned, there was no one on the other end. "I think she's a good and well-intentioned person, but she's deeply troubled and needs to get help," Ms. Himmelsbach said.

The investor from Los Angeles, who mentioned Ms. Hornstein's standard $1 million Founders Fund line, said he first realized "Shirls" wasn't who she said she was during an elevator ride up to a party at the San Francisco home of a mid-level Google employee. Ms. Hornstein went on and on about Mr. Clowe, not realizing that the NHL player was married engaged to and had a child with the investor's ex-girlfriend.

Unfortunately for Ms. Himmelsbach, she and a group of friends did not realize the extent of Ms. Hornstein's dissembling until that trip to Las Vegas. Ms. Hornstein told the group that she would surprise them by dropping in on their vacation. Once Ms. Hornstein arrived, however she claimed the hotel wouldn't let her book a room with a foreign credit card. (Ms. Hornstein had identified herself as a German national.) The group let her stay in an extra room they had booked, with the promise that she would pay them back.

The day after that Cirque du Soleil show, Ms. Himmelsbach returned to her room to a missing credit card and a note from Ms. Hornstein saying she had to rush back to San Francisco for an emergency board meeting. When Ms. Himmelsbach checked the charges on her card from Las Vegas, there was a purchase for a monthly BART card in San Francisco made near the airport. Michael Herzog, who was also on the Las Vegas trip, found an even more troubling charge on his corporate card, which he still possessed: a ticket back to San Francisco, purchased in Ms. Hornstein's name. Her landing time coincided with the purchase of the metro card.

When Ms. Hornstein was asked about the missing credit card via gChat (a portion of that conversation is screencapped below), she responded, "shit I hope it wasn't in my stuff somehow," later adding, "but I did somehow have michael's id that next day so i dunno haha."

Last October, Ms. Hornstein announced a trip to New York City via Facebook. Sure enough, there was another flight charge on Mr. Herzog's card, this time to New York, booked in Ms. Hornstein's name. (He did not cancel the card because of the number of other services it was already synched up with.) After being confronted, Ms. Hornstein confessed to the theft, but still has not paid back the debt or responded to the email (below).

gChat conversation between Ms. Hornstein and Ms. Himmelsbach

BART receipt via Ms. Himmelsbach

Email from Mr. Herzog to Ms. Hornstein

Despite these alleged thefts, Ms. Hornstein's record is relatively clean, although not spotless. Running Ms. Hornstein's name through the civil records of the California Superior Court in San Francisco turns up three results: the Founder's Fund suit, which TechCrunch has covered in detail, as well as two other cases.

One is a collections suit, filed in March 2011. It's fairly straightforward, alleging that Ms. Hornstein failed to pay off an $1,869.43 debt on a Bank of America credit card. In October, the court ruled that Ms. Hornstein must pay up, but the trail goes cold in December 2011 after the collections agency is serve her with a summons.

The small claims complaint is similarly penny-ante in scale, but perhaps more indicative of what was to come. On October 28, 2009, a Lisa Di Santo filed suit against Ms. Hornstein, accusing her of breaking a contract to sublease her apartment to Ms. Di Santo--then refusing to return $1,400 in pre-paid rent. In the complaint, she alleges:

"Shirley broke our contract and has refused to refund the rent money that i paid to her, up front, in the amount of $1,400.00. Cornelia is her mother, who is the cosigner on her lease , with whom i have had numerous conversations with. My first communication with Shirley was 8/26/09 and the last time I heard from her was 9/26/09."

In February 2010, the court ultimately ruled in Ms. Di Santo's favor. A source who asked for anonymity told Betabeat Ms. Hornstein once said, "My parents are really worried and my mom wants me to come home."

Why, we asked Ms. Himmelsbach, did she think Ms. Hornstein targeted the tech sector? "Maybe because it's not that hard to get into and once you're in, it's pretty easy to climb the social ladder," she responded. "Unfortunately she wasn't building anything except a fake product, which was her life."

Ms. Himmelsbach pointed out that the startup sector is also remarkably collaborative. "I've worked in a couple different industries and I've never met people who are so willing to lend a hand, saying, 'Grab a cup of coffee, let's go talk.' It can be a total stranger. I think everyone is open and maybe that's to our disadvantage. I mean it's just kind of a wake up call to go, hmm, who else is as full of shit as this @Shirls character."

Kelly Faircloth contributed reporting to this article.

We will continue to pursue this story as it develops, so please reach us by email with any information: tips@betabeat.com.

Mr. Miller, hopping to it.

Chad Miller likes to think of running errands for strangers on TaskRabbit as a quasi-religious experience—or at least as close to spiritual as a gay former Southern Baptist from West Texas is likely to find in New York. Mr. Miller is a 38-year-old Columbia graduate who acts, writes and works full-time managing outreach for the university’s Arts Initiative. He signed up for TaskRabbit as his “tertiary job” in September, shortly after the Boston-based startup launched in New York.

“This is going to be incredibly gay as I’m saying it,” Mr. Miller laughed, “but it’s very hakuna matata, Disney-fied—you put it out there and you get a little back. The karma piece is really nice.”

Along with a bumper crop of like-minded companies, such as Zaarly, Fancy Hands and Agent Anything, that have entered the New York market in the past year or so, TaskRabbit offers an updated play on Craigslist for the iPhone-era: buyers post the dirty work they want to get done and nearby “Rabbits” bid on the jobs. Service requests range from the sophisticated—“Motivate me to write a book :)” read a recent TaskRabbit request from Midtown—to the menial. “$50 for a Massage,” a Zaarly user on the West Side posted in November. “General massage,” the ad elaborated, tersely, in the description. For the most part, however, Rabbits are asked to perform domestic drudgery: assembling Ikea furniture tops the list.

It’s easy to see why democratizing the personal assistant might do well in New York, a city largely unburdened by hang-ups about, say, paying $20 to avoid wasting time in a Laundromat, even when one’s budget barely permits it.

In the past three months, Mr. Miller has made a little over $2,000 on the kind of irksome chores overextended urbanites are eager to slough off on someone else, including driving strangers to JFK, waiting in line for hours to save someone’s seat for a Conan taping and lugging furniture to a fourth-floor walk-up. The money’s nice and all, but to hear Mr. Miller tell it, the appeal doesn’t sound far off from “Love thy neighbor.”

“I’m really playing my cards low, but I grew up Southern Baptist,” said Mr. Miller. “I just realized—I’m not one for organized religion personally, but I do very much agree with the sense of community, sense of charity, and volunteerism. Short of working at a soup kitchen, which is something I did a lot when I was at Columbia, this for me is, like, the next best thing! It grounds me back a little bit more to, you know, we’re in a community—everybody needs something done at some point.”

Mr. Miller, ever the theater geek, interrupted his cheery philosophizing to affect a mock sotto voce, “I didn’t mean to sound like, ‘Now I’m St. Sebastian and the martyr for everybody.’”

While his motivation may swing toward the selfless, interview enough cash-strapped Rabbits (Midtown and Brooklyn are active hubs) and you’ll start to wonder where all these shiny, happy helpers have been hiding—and why they’re so psyched about pocketing under $100 to assemble your MALM bed frame. “Don’t drink the Kool-aid! Is that what you’re feeling talking to everybody?” Mr. Miller laughed again.

Actually, a more archetypal laborer in one of these new-fangled markets might be someone like Ivan Rivera, a 27-year-old CUNY senior who signed up with Agent Anything to supplement his job as head cashier at City Sports. Mr. Rivera, who is paying his own way through a marketing degree, has been enrolled off and on since 2003, finances permitting, and recently had to move back in with his parents in Washington Heights.

“They hate hearing how much money I’m making,” Mr. Rivera said when Betabeat asked whether his friends had also signed up for “missions” with Agent Anything, another similar startup that employs only current college students and operates primarily around New York. (Startups tend to come steeped in their own lingo.) But over the past year, Mr. Rivera estimates that gigs like delivering packages for a specialty chef or handing out fliers for a club have only earned him a little over a thousand dollars. “It’s like money you wouldn’t even think about having,” explained Mr. Rivera. “If I can make at least $30 in one week, at least I know I have a Metrocard.”

The last time the tech world tried to build a convenience economy, the markets were in an upswing. But beloved dot-com-era delivery services such as Kozmo.com or its copycat Urban Fetch were filed as a punch line in the annals of bubble lore for squandering millions on armies of bike messengers to keep keyboard jockeys in the packages of gum, cigarettes and VHS tapes to which they had become accustomed. This time around, investors are once again willing to back these kind of startups, partly because this new strain has figured out a way to leverage economic downers, like nagging unemployment and underemployment, in their favor.

Just as eBay turned your castoffs into cash, these mobile and online marketplaces figure they can turn your unused time into money. For the opportunity, Zaarly takes a 9 percent cut of the transaction. TaskRabbit, which puts its errand-runners through a rigorous week-long vetting process, including a video interview as well as a social security and criminal background check, takes a 15 percent cut.

“Now I’m sure you recall September of ’08 was probably one of the worst economic times,” TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque recounted. “The stock market was crashing, people were being laid off left and right and so it turned out that it was very serendipitous that I had had that idea [for TaskRabbit] earlier that year.”

This May, Ms. Busque, a former IBM software engineer, picked up a $5 million series A round led by Sand Hill venture capital firm Shasta Ventures. Zaarly, which was born into a frothier climate this February, got an even quicker response. Mere weeks after launching at a Startup Weekend conference in Los Angeles, Ashton Kutcher, Michael Arrington and other angel investors plunked down a $1 million seed round, followed by an eye-popping $14.1 series A in October led by the VC powerhouse Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with help from newbie investors like clothing impresario Marc Ecko.

“[Zaarly’s] true value is in its ability to remove friction between what we want and what we have,” Mr. Kutcher emailed us, between 140-character plugs for Two and a Half Men. “Bottom line it saves people the most valuable thing in the world ... Time.” (The ellipses are Mr. Kutcher’s.)

“Everybody’s busy,” concurred Fancy Hands founder Ted Roden, a former technologist for The New York Times, whose New York-based startup uses a monthly subscription model to provide virtual personal assistants for tasks like restaurant reservations or “confrontational phone calls” with your cellphone company. “For us it’s outsourcing the stuff you’re doing everyday. It’s the old George Costanza line—‘Busy? Don’t give me busy!’”

Jordan Cooper, a 27-year-old venture partner with Lerer Ventures and founder of the open database Hyperpublic subscribes to Fancy Hands $25-a-month plan. "l ask them to find an esoteric product that was discontinued and send me a link to where I can buy it or I'll ask them to find research a date spot to take someone when I'm in San Francisco that has organic food and is close to my hotel." By email, he described the tasks as, "Things I could do if I wasn't on mobile and had an extra 15 minutes in my day...but that I'd rather someone else do."

With a three-year lead in the market, TaskRabbit, which used to go by the less cuddly moniker RunMyErrand, has arguably done the best job building a culture around its product. Profiles often feature a photo and chatty descriptions of potential tasks. Ms. Busque claims her site gets more than $4 million of economic activity requested monthly from its 2,000 Rabbits. (New York is home to about 500 to 750 of them.) Zaarly, on the other hand, opts for a more anonymous approach, with communication done via little gray message boxes invisible to the public.

After rapidly expanding into a number of cities over the course of a year, Zaarly, which says it processes 1,000 transactions a week, now seems to be finessing its offerings. Listings in New York and around the country still tend toward procuring and selling tangible items, often iPhones, iPads and Kindles. However, both Zaarly and TaskRabbit have bigger designs: selling themselves as engines of micro-job creation.

Over coffee recently in Soho House’s refurbished sixth-floor drawing room, co-founder Eric Koester eagerly discussed how Zaarly’s updated smartphone app could help small businesses. He offered up the example of a landscaper using the app to find a nearby gig that pays less than his normal rate, but still represents income he might not otherwise have access to. “It’s the hottest lead you can get! I want what you have and I’m willing to pay for it,” Mr. Koester enthused. Ms. Busque said her passion is empowering Rabbits to “Be their own bosses. Set their own schedules. Say how much money they want to earn,” noting that top earners can pull in up to $5,000 a month. But since both startups have an average transaction size of about $50, that could easily mean fulfilling up to 100 tasks a month.

At times the rhetoric of empowerment can feel at odds with the fact that, in some cases, “entrepreneurship” amounts to floundering college graduates bidding on a chance to clean your apartment. “I’ve thought about that, too. Like is this a way the 1 percent are outsourcing their lives to the 99 percent?” said Craig Shapiro, founder and CEO of Collaborative Fund, a seed stage firm that likes to back peer-to-peer sharing technology, ideally of the “world-changing” variety, and invested in TaskRabbit’s $5 million round.

The 1 percent, of course, don’t need an app to find others to do their bidding. But in a way these startups are a sleeker version of picking up a day laborer outside Home Depot. As they graduate into non-essential services that means a taste of the pampered life that would otherwise be out of the user’s pay grades. “Certain people have personal chefs, but in my imagination they’re executives and super rich people,” said Bartek Ringwelski, the founder of SkillSlate, another Zaarly-esque market, but with a focus on skills like plasma TV installation or fire breathing (two examples Mr. Ringwelski offered). “On SkillSlate, people don’t want to publish prices on their profiles because they often have a fulltime job where they charge $150 an hour as a personal chef. They’ll do that same exact work for $20 an hour because money is money and there’s not a lot of demand for paying people exorbitant amounts for very skilled things right now. So you can get these incredible values that were previously not available.”

The reality of the convenience economy seems more ingeniously opportunistic than flatly exploitative. “I would say it’s much more evenly split,” said Fancy Hands' Mr. Roden. “The assistants are all the 99 percent and the users are too.”

In fact, in the case of TaskRabbit, Zaarly and the like, a buyer is just as likely to be a seller. Mr. Miller, for example, signed up for TaskRabbit after misinterpreting a message from his partner. “He felt that I really needed to use it to find a TaskRabbit to help me out with my own life,” said Mr. Miller. “But when he sent me the email link, I thought he meant, oh it’s a good way for me to fulfill this other thing that I wanted—you know, the sense of community and getting a little bit of extra income. When we had the conversation, I was like, ‘I went on my first task tonight’ and he goes, ‘You’re a Rabbit?!’”

In some cases, buyers and sellers even live in the same household. Corwin Ip, a 31-year-old IT manager at a prestigious advertising firm, started calling himself a Rabbit four months ago after coming into some unexpected expenses. “I proposed to my fiancée and she said, ‘I want a destination wedding,’” he explained. “All I saw was dollar signs. Like, oh, man, I really gotta go find a second job or something!”

For his first task, Mr. Ip, a former Marine whose day job involves moving infrastructure to the cloud or mobile phone rollouts, ended up assembling Ikea furniture for a young couple on the Lower East Side (“Hipsters? Eh, I don’t want to put a label on that,” he demurred over the phone) before taking the subway back to Forest Hills, Queens. He’s since earned a couple thousand toward his Hawaiian nuptials.

“She’s a Tasker,” said Mr. Ip when Betabeat asked if his fiancée was also a Rabbit. “I told her what I was doing and then she was like, ‘Oh, I can get these things done!‘” he said, adding, “I obviously don’t bid on those.”

The latest iteration of the convenience economy follows an industry trend toward financially incentivized peer-to-peer cooperation—a feel-good niche of the free market that folks like Mr. Shapiro like to call “collaborative consumption.” For example, where 2003 brought us Couchsurfing, an online platform to connect travelers with an available couch, 2008 brought us Airbnb, a chance to get paid for lending out said couch. “People making money is always a good business model,” said SkillShare co-founder Mike Karnjanaprakorn, whose New York-based startup helps professionals hold one-time classes within their area of expertise. Like Airbnb, SkillShare is also backed by Collaborative Fund.

On SkillSlate (yes, we know, it’s hard to keep them straight) Mr. Ringwelski said he noticed popular services shifting from “needs” like a plumber to fix a leaky roof to “wants,” like a personal chef. “I think where the industry is going is almost like a trade of skills.” Mr. Ip, for example, quickly traded-up for carpentry tasks that exercised skills he couldn’t otherwise utilize. “I don’t think Ikea furniture assembly is building something,” he said, bluntly.

The idea of “hyper-sharing” with a network of our peers, as Mr. Karnjanaprakorn put it, rings a little lofty when we considered a comment from Fancy Hands founder Mr. Koden about the “scavenger hunt” of trying to find gigs that fit the schedule of one’s day job. But it does explain why no one we spoke to seemed to feel awkward about giving up a New Yorker’s cloak of anonymity to enter stranger’s apartment and roll up their sleeves.

We introduced ourselves to MaKenzie Morrissey, a 27-year-old recent transplant from Oklahoma who was manning the coat check at a startup fund-raiser the other week and wearing a TaskRabbit T-shirt. “I’m a Rabbit,” she said, by way of introduction. On the phone later, Ms. Morrissey, a petite former bar manager who plans on applying for medical school next year, estimated that she’s probably made around $600 over the course of 30 to 35 tasks. She makes the most on cleaning tasks, but enjoys working events, where she says, “I’ve met a lot of writers and actors and things like that—or bloggers,” who work as fellow Rabbits. She has also rubbed elbows higher-up the masthead with Bon Appetit editor-in-chief Adam Rapaport.

“I don’t know if I’m allowed to say it? I think so, I didn’t sign any clause,” Ms. Morrissey hesitated over the phone. “It was for a small dinner party. He had auctioned himself to make dinner for people at his son’s school. So I worked the dinner party while he had cooked for everybody. They were nice people.”

“I’ve actually thought about it a lot—I use TaskRabbit a lot. Why do these people do this?” said Mr. Karnjanaprakorn. “Because they really don’t make that much money. They really just like helping people. There’s nothing else I can think of.” He mentioned a friend who tasked a Rabbit to deliver him cupcakes and sing to him on his birthday. “She took a picture and sent it to the person who bought it [for me]. I was like, I don’t think anyone would have done that if they genuinely don’t care.”

But it doesn’t mean that everyone understands their remunerative hobby. “I wouldn’t want to tell people at work,” said Mr. Ip about his hours spent as a Rabbit. “It’s just a little weird to say, ‘Yeah, well, this what I do outside of work.’ I told one person and the first thing he said was, ‘Why? Why are you doing this?’ So I try to keep the two lives separate.”

He added, “Most people who work only one job say, ‘I do one job and when I get home I’m tired and I don’t want to do anything else.’”

ntiku@observer.com