Mr. Dixon

Earlier today, serial entrepreneur and investor Chris Dixon made it official. The cofounder of SiteAdvisor (acquired by McAfee) and Hunch (acquired by eBay), who invests both personally and through Founder Collective, will be decamping our fair city for sunnier shores to join Andreessen Horowitz as the Sand Hill Road powerhouse's seventh general partner. We spoke with Mr. Dixon by phone shortly after the announcement was made to find out what it means for the many ventures he's involved in here (like eBay's massive new Flatiron R&D lab, which is slated to house 200 developers and data scientists).

Don't hold your breath for an East Coast outpost, as cofounder Marc Andreessen emphasized earlier, his is a "single office firm." In fact, based on the tenor of our questions, Amy Grady, a representative from Andreessen Horowitz who was also on the call, wanted to assure us Mr. Dixon's hire was about more than just geography. "We didn’t hire Chris just because of New York. It’s a huge bonus, he’s obviously really tapped in, but if we find an entrepreneur with a great idea in Idaho, we’ll invest!"

Silicon Prairie, start your pitch decks.

Is this a way for Andreessen Horowitz to keep a better eye on New York without opening up an office here?
Chris Dixon: I’m keeping my apartment in New York, I plan to be there a lot. I plan to make a lot of investments there. I think they saw it as a positive that I have been in New York and know a lot of people there. That said, I’m going to be based in California and I think it’s important with these things--VC firms need to work together as a team and, you know, that just often requires being around each other a lot. But yeah, I’m going to be very aggressively looking for investments in New York.

What about your role at Founder Collective and the fate of Founder Collective in general?
CD: There’s two people who run Founder Collective, Eric Paley and Dave Frankel. They’re the general partners. I’m not a general partner. What I’ll do is I’m going to continue to support any companies that I invested in through them. So if I can be helpful to those entrepreneurs I will be--the same for my personal angel investments. [In addition to Founder Collective, Mr. Dixon has personally invested in Skype, Gerson Lehrman Group, OMGPOP, BillShrink, Oddcast, Knewton, and many others.] But I’ll be doing all my future investing through Andreessen Horowitz.

Will you still be an advisor at eBay or Hunch?
CD: It hasn’t been finalized yet, but I will have some kind of an advisory role at eBay and my cofounder [Tom Pinckney] from Hunch is going to be taking over the New York office. He’s been my cofounder for two companies now [including SiteAdvisor] so they’re in good hands.

You mentioned Andreessen Horowitz’s so-called CAA model of offering help in various domains like recruiting and research. Will your expertise be in bringing in deals?
Amy Grady: Just to be clear, he’s the check writer, he’ll be doing investing.
CD: So the way it works is there are seven general partners and I’m one of them. Those are the people who go out and find new investments and then make the investment and join the board and do things they can do to help. Then there’s 55 other people who provide all sorts of support for the entrepreneur, once the investment’s made.

Was it a difficult decision to leave New York? In a lot of ways you’re representative of the scene from its infancy. You started in Wall Street, transitioned into startups, and then to investing. Were you worried it would be a loss for the community?
CD: To the extent that I can try to get Andreessen Horowitz to be more active in New York, I think that’s a net win for the New York City tech scene. You could look at this glass half full or half empty, but that’s how I see it. I care a lot about the New York tech community, it’s in a great place and it’s growing quickly and I want to keep supporting it.

I’m not sure if Marc Andreessen or Ben Horowitz or anyone there commented on how vocal you are on Twitter or in your blog posts in terms of critiquing trends that you see?
CD: They’ve encouraged me to continue to be vocal and blogging and tweeting and doing all that stuff--Tumblring, Foursquaring [laughs]. So, yeah I intend to do that. They’re totally supportive and they like it.
AG: Yup, we welcome it, no censorship allowed. We welcome feedback. We love a fresh perspective so he actually fits in quite well with the culture.

What are you most excited about in terms of moving out there? To be immersed in a place that has a different kind of expertise than New York’s consumer web?
I think it will be nice to have a different perspective, I think I’ll learn a lot. The people at this firm are really, really impressive and I’ll learn a lot from them. Over the last few years--seven years--that I’ve been angel investing, it’s always been sort of a hobby for me. So it’s just going to be fun to try it as a full time thing.

I imagine part of the appeal is having so many resources behind you? In your blog post, you mentioned founders choosing the investor and Andreessen Horowitz excels at that.
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve always done the angel investing stuff totally by myself. It’s trying to do something on a larger stage with more resources, it’s pretty exciting.

What will you miss the most about not being here?
Well, I’ll be there, okay? [laughs] I’ll be there a lot! I love New York and I’ll be there a lot. And I want to make a lot investments there. I’m hoping I won’t miss anything because I'll be there a lot.

Regardless new startup Pinwheel, which launched out of private beta last night, seems to fit her comfort zone. The app lets users "find and leave notes all around the world." The notes, which are pinned on a specific location on a map, can be both private or shared with an individual or group, as well as organized into sets.

For example, “Every place that you told me that you loved me, circa 2008" (one of the potential sets Ms. Fake offers) you might want to keep private. Whereas "Find me a Nearby Toilet NOW," (another example from Ms. Fake) might be a question you pose to a group. There is, of course, a social networking element, with the opportunity to follow both friends and sets:

"And in the future, you will get notifications on your phone from who and what you choose. Following sets is useful, because that friend of yours with the great taste in coffee shops may also have an unhealthy obsession with, say, 1970s glam metal band KISS, and frankly, in childhood you were traumatized by a photograph of Gene Simmons and don’t need to repeat that in your dotage."

Next on the docket is an iOS version of Pinwheel. Although the startup is seeding community and content in advance, Ms. Fake says she expects the primary experience to be mobile, where monetization would come in the form of sponsored posts, say from a realtor looking to drop a note about its services.

She also anticipates potential deja-vu:

But, that’s like…Flickr for Places!

You said it, not me. Is it like Flickr for Places? Ish. Part of why making Pinwheel is so fun, is so exploding with possibility, is that a note, like a photo, can be a container for all kinds of things. It is the perfect social object. Stories, advice, jokes, diatribes, information, memories, facts, advertisements, love letters, grocery lists and manifestoes can all be put into a note. It is the perfectly constrained, perfectly open thing that you can make into what you want.

What she probably didn't anticipate is the accusation that Pinwheel looks an awful lot like a little-known startup called Repudo. As TechPP points out:

That sounds nice for sure for many people, but for me it sounds like an echo. I remember hearing it somewhere else. Remember Repudo? Here is how Repudo works-

"Repudo is a platform to handle digital objects in the real world. With Repudo, you can drop all kinds of multimedia such as photos, text, video and audio messages at any location."

Ouch! Digital objects turn into notes and that’s it. The concept still remains the same. Both Repudo and Pinwheel are location based with multimedia thrown in to the mix.

We think the bigger hiccup might be the mandatory location-based element. Where exactly would you drop that “Every place that you told me that you loved me, circa 2008" list? And, unless its flooded with content, scrolling around on a wide open map could be an unfulfilling experience. That said, we'd love to see this baked into Google Maps.

In any case, it doesn't look like she'll be returning East anytime soon. For now, on its jobs base, Pinwheel says seven-person team is based out in Hayes Valley, San Francisco.

Now offering classes in business ethics

In the same way that Kickstarter connects users with backers for their projects, SkillShare connects experts with students for their classes. The start-up just raised a $3.1 million in a Series A round of venture financing, led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, to extend its offerings. Previously the company raised a $550,000 round of seed funding from Founder Collective and SV Angel, among others.

Betabeat has been reporting on this funding for some time, but was too gun shy to publish without confirmation from the founders. Lesson learned.

The start-up is expanding quickly, opening offices in offices in San Francisco and Philadelphia, with hopes to expand to Boston, New Orleans, Portland, Seattle and Los Angeles by the end of the year.

The money comes at a time when many start-ups are rushing to close their financing or struggling to secure an A round. It's a nice chunk of change SkillShare can use to get to the next level.

To promote the service, investor Zach Klein is offering $1000 in free classes. Anyone can sign up and invoice him through Venmo (another service he invests in). It's a double plug, but a nice promotion.

In recent months Betabeat has covered the explosion of crowd funded platforms coming out of New York. Kickstarter has seen its the amount of money coming though its service accelerate rapidly. Quirky raised a big round and grew its user base significantly. SkillShare, who has some of the same investors, seems poised to ride the same wave.

These are not the blogger you're looking for

It's not a million dollar round on the first day of class, but Contently.com, which just joined the second class of TechStars NY, has raised a $335,000 debt round from Founder Collective.

The start-up has positioned itself as the anti-content farm, helping freelance journalists to manage their careers and big brands to produce editorial content that stands out, all while avoiding the SEO optimized schlock pumped out by Demand Media and others.

Speaking from personal experience, there isn't much money in making freelance journalists your clients. But connecting professional writers with big brands looking for some high class advertorial could be a strong play. A corporation can afford to pay premium freelance rates, since they are chasing pageviews and online engagement, not a return on their dollars via advertising.

“Contently is something that literally every one of our portfolio companies could use," Founder Collective Managing Partner Eric Paley told TechCrunch. “Contently makes content marketing turnkey for it’s growing base of clients."

The danger here is that what makes for really effective content marketing, take the wildly popular OkCupid Trends blog, is an authentic voice and a deep engagement with the subject. Yes, Contently is finding experienced writers to help create great posts. But a freelancer is never going to have the voice and insight of a person who actually works at the company, the path taken by blogging stars like Robert Scoble and Marco Arment.