Sony's big announcement is today's worst kept secret on the Internet.

Sony Needs to Work On Keeping Secrets Although Sony is still only referring to it as the, "future of Playstation," everyone knows that tonight's press conference at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City will be for the reveal of Sony's Playstation 4, codenamed Orbis. An image of the next generation system's controller was leaked last week, and rumors of cloud and smartphone integration have been making the rounds. The traditional video game market--and Sony in particular--have been struggling financially (more on that below). Industry experts are hoping that a new gaming arms race between Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft can reinvigorate game sales. The PS4 is rumored to have a November release date.

Because GIFs Need to Be More Complicated Vimeo is getting into the GIF making business, or at least the GIF-video making business, after buying mobile app Echograph last week. Echograph, created in 2011, takes a frame from a 5-second video on your phone or tablet and animates certain sections of the image to make a partially moving picture (think of it as a cross between Vine and GIFs). The app, which previously cost $2.99, will now be free as Vimeo takes over Clear-Media, the company which created Echograph, and moves its employees into their mobile division.

Changing The Game (Market) In another sign that people would rather play Angry Birds than World of Warcraft, Super Data released their first public figures on the digital games market, and to no one's surprise, the market is doing pretty well, albeit in a very different way. Since January of last year, sales have increased 39 percent, or $960 million, but that figure doesn't reveal the major changes that overtook the market in 2012. Whereas console, social media, and MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) games previously lead the way, mobile and downloadable games are now at the forefront, with sales more than double their totals from last year.

Promoted Tweets Are Going to Get a Little More Personal As if you didn't already hate those personalized ads on your Facebook, get ready for a similar experience on Twitter. The social media giant is releasing their advertising API today to specific clients and advertisers so that they can send more personalized and focused tweets to the over 200 million active users of Twitter. The move makes sense, considering the success of Promoted Tweets since its release in 2010, although this new API could face backlash from users in the same way that Facebook users retaliated when that site first began hyper-personalized advertising.

Outer Space Needs An App NASA will be hosting a meet-and-greet February 25 at AlleyNYC (500 Seventh Ave., 13th Floor) to discuss potential ideas for the space program's April 20th International Space Apps Challenge, "a two-day technology development event during which citizens from around the world will work together to address current challenges relevant to both space exploration and social need." The event is open to the public, so if you're in the New York area and think your idea for an app would only really work in a zero-gravity environment, check it out.

Progress in Polyamory Valentine's Day may already be far in your rearview mirror, but that doesn't mean the flood of dating apps is anywhere near stopping, and one of the newest app's in the dating sphere is Martini. A self-touted improvement of Grouper, Martini, which was released last year, "gives users more control over the group meetup experience. Instead of forcing groups on blind dates, we allow our users to make the very important decisions of who and where to meetup." So if you and your friends were holding off on group dating because you thought you would all go for the same guy/girl, you now have no excuse.

Welcome to The Fiternet In a move that seems a little ironic, Pintrest will be posting workout and diet tips from the reality show The Biggest Loser during its weekly broadcasts, in the hopes that users will subsequently leave their computers and work on their physical health instead. During the work out and health segments of the show, pop ups will appear on screen directing viewers to check out the Pintrest page, which will give more direct instruction on what is seen on the show. We suppose this offets all the cupcake porn.

Mr. Waxman. (Photo: Twitter)

Would you answer this mysteriously vague job listing? "Hackers seek hackers in NYC for absurdly fun + challenging startup" is the title of this ad for a Y Combinator startup that claims to already be funded by "some of the best investors in the world" and is now seeking "social hackers." The ad, a repeat of a listing posted back in April, is at the top of the Hacker News forum.

Clues:

1. The startup is in the winter 2012 batch of Y Combinator.

2. "We're leading the online-to-offline revolution."

3. "We're relatively far along"

4. "We make money. We're a real business, not a charity."

5. "Both of the co-founders are technical and have previous startup experience (including at other YC startups and an app that scaled to billions of impressions per month)."

6. "We're in New York, but if you're not we can chat about getting you here to the greatest city on earth."

7. "We're all frequent users of our product, as it should be"

8. "Our ultimate goal is to end loneliness and to create some amazing stories along the way."

9. "Users have already created thousands of these stories (offline) through our product."

10. "We were fortunate enough to go to good schools (like MIT, Princeton, and Yale)"

Who could it be? 

Very few of the current batch of YC startups have anything to do with the offline world: There are two crowdfunding platforms, a slew of ec0mmerce something-or-others, several content platforms, a dose of cloud computing and a few "entertainment" plays. "Communications" is also a popular category. Flutter and Sonalight are hands-free thingies. TiKl, which sounded potentially social, is a walkie-talkie app.

Sources suggested one candidate might be Grouper, which calls itself a "social club." Grouper is a New York-based startup that sets people up on group dates based on their Facebook profiles. (You may remember Grouper's original cofounder Jerry Guo, who resigned after Betabeat revealed him to be a serial fabricator.)

Since then, Grouper's star has risen all the way to Paul Graham's graces. Grouper emphasizes it's for people who want to get online to get offline. It's been up and running since September. It costs $20 to go on a Grouper outing. Cofounders Michael Waxman and Tom Brown are both engineers; Mr. Waxman went to Yale and Mr. Brown went to MIT. They're in New York. Mr. Waxman found a girlfriend using the app. Plus, the wording in the April posting is similar to the wording on Grouper's similarly details-bereft jobs page: "Send us your Github profile and/or Dribbble profile at social.hackers.nyc@gmail.com" vs. "Amazing hackers and designers please send your Github and/or Dribbble URL's to jobs@joingrouper.com."

Further evidence? The listing, like Grouper's public statements, makes no mention of dating. "We never even like to use the ‘d’ word," Mr. Waxman told Tech Cocktail. Hey, "absurdly fun + challenging startup" does sound better than "Facebook dating app."

Mr. Waxman declined to confirm or deny via Twitter.

Download Yoke.me, and you could be kissing your very own New York tech bachelor. (Twitter)

Rob Fishman, former Huffington Post social media editor and eligible New York tech bachelor, has formally launched Yoke.me, the app that raised half a million dollars from investors for a better Facebook-based dating experience. "There's this awkward moment when you're on a date and you say, 'I'm actually working on a dating website,'" the entrepreneur told the New York Post.

Mr. Fishman's new startup, Kingfish Labs, is working out of Lerer Ventures "with lots of other HuffPo alums," the founder told Betabeat by Twitter direct message. Mr. Fishman cofounded the company with Jeff Revesz, whose company Adaptive Semantics was acquired by Huffington Post in 2009.

Yoke.me is already getting a few happy reviews. Jacob Weisberg at Slate likes it! But what's it got that the myriad other Facebook dating apps ain't got? 
"You're right, there have been lots of attempts to introduce friends of friends -- Thread comes to mind," Mr. Fishman wrote in an email. "What we're trying to do is match the sum total of your Facebook profile with other people's."

Let's say you and a potential date share a close friend, went to the same or a similar college, are from the same hometown, and have similar interests—Yoke.me is very interested in that. Where it gets clever is when the startup pulls data in from Netflix, EchoNest and Amazon and throws it in with your Facebook data. "We can say 'You like Vampire Weekend, and she likes Ra Ra Riot' or 'You both like mob movies' or 'You read Great Gatsby and she read The Sun Also Rises,'" Mr. Fishman said. "In that way, we're exposing common tastes without there having to be direct matches. And we're also normalizing your friend list to target close friends (meaning, those with whom you share a lot of friends), so that you're not seeing friends of someone you never speak to."

The idea is not to compete with other dating sites, he said, but to "present an alternate view of Facebook, where you don't see the people you already know, but instead see single people who share your friends and interests." Let's hope they fare better than Grouper.

Fish in the sea

The joke used to be that Grouper was a Y Combinator funded startup, because the founders took the $400 travel reimbursement check they got after being rejected from the prestigious acclerator and used it as the seed funding for Grouper.

Now Betabeat has learned that Grouper was accepted into the new class at Y Combinator, and co-founder Michael Waxman will be heading out to California shortly.

The company used Facebook to match users up on a three on three group outing (it's not a date!). The company billed itself as a sort of online social club. They claimed to be profitable after just 60 days, but that fact, along with many others, came from co-founder Jerry Guo, who turned out to be fairly casual about the truth.

After Betabeat's report detailing his notorious tenure at Newsweek and how he leveraged his past as a journalist to get inside access to other dating startup in New York, Mr. Guo resigned from Grouper.

We're told Mr. Waxman, is determined to bounce back and hopes to find a new partner at YC who can lead Grouper with him.

Jerry Guo and the Dalai Lama

Jerry Guo, international rules-bending journalist turned startup CEO, just issued a public apology on his Tumblr. The apology is addressed to the startup world and to the CEO of TechStars company Ignighter, Adam Sachs. Mr. Guo told Mr. Sachs he was a journalist, visited Ignighter and asked lots of questions about the business. Mr. Guo wanted intel on the competition because he was starting his own company, Grouper. "I didn’t tell Adam this, and met him under false pretenses," Mr. Guo writes.

In the wake of the sudden attention after Betabeat's article earlier this week, and Gawker's subsequent interest, Mr. Guo has left Grouper in what he says was a mutual decision with his co-founder and CTO Michael Waxman.

Startups are not a zero-sum game. We can all win, and by that, I mean create value that ultimately helps those around us—by creating jobs, connecting people, making markets more efficient, etc—and some go on to change the world.

The media world can be a zero-sum game. Getting a scoop means beating someone else to the punch. Coming up with a false narrative garners more page views for gossip rags. I don’t want to stoop to their level and give a point-by-point refutation, but will just let my reporting speak for itself and the love our Grouper members have shown us.

Mr. Guo also publicly apologized to his co-founder:

He’s poured his heart into Grouper and does not deserve the scandals I’ve created, for which only I am responsible for. We came to a mutual decision for Grouper to survive, I will need to part ways. I’m really thankful to Michael for always being there for me and believing in my potential from the start. He’s my best case for why the tech world is so awesome.

Mr. Waxman has not returned requests for comment.

Betabeat tried to get Mr. Guo to write a post, but he declined, preferring to break the news himself.

UPDATE: Here's our take on Jerry's post: Jerry Guo: What I Did Was ‘F-ed Up’ and I Must Leave for Grouper to Survive

Grouper co-founder Jerry Guo has confirmed to Betabeat that he has left the company, which will now be run by CEO Michael Waxman. 

Guo's exploits at Newsweek and AOL, followed by his subterfuge in Silicon Alley, became something of an international sensation.

"We're on good terms," said Mr. Guo of his relationship with co-founder Michael Waxman. Mr. Guo has initially agreed to pen a guest post for Betabeat, giving us his side of how things shook out at Grouper, which he recently told us is growing fast and already profitable.

UPDATE: Mr. Guo is now considering publishing the post on his Tumblr. [You can find it here]

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Mr. Guo has decided to post the tell-all on his Tumblr and declined our offer to republish.

Talking any more about this video would just spoil it.

Image via Gadling

Betabeat received an email this morning from Grant Martin, Editor-in-Chief at the travel site Gadling, alerting us that Jerry Guo, the notorious Newsweek writer and startup scammer, had a troubled history with AOL as well. From Mr. Martin's email:

Jerry was a blogger for Gadling for a couple of years and then was removed in November of 2008. Curiously, his bio photo on Gadling was of him holding a panda.

Jerry was terminated because he
was taking old, past published posts and tucking them into the recent (but out of sight) queue so that our payment system would automatically sweep through and double pay him.

That same week we found out that he was trying to farm out blog posts for our site for $5 each on elance. Still have the screenshot on that one.

Jerry's tenure at Gadling was full of him trying to work our system, squeeze us for more money and earn free travel. I'm glad that he's gone, but I wish that I had been more proactive in reaching out to his other/future editors.

In talking with editors at Newsweek and The Atlantic for this story, Betabeat often heard the same refrain. Typically editors regretted not doing more to out Mr. Guo as a bad seed, but felt it was wiser to sweep things under the rug and protect their own publication. This allowed Mr. Guo to hop from one big name to the next. Since 2008 he has written for the NY Times, Washington Post, Newsweek and Foreign Affairs.

Check Out Our Slideshow of Jerry Guo's Adventures Around the World>>

Mr. Guo

UPDATE: AOL Editor who fired Mr. Guo in 2008 writes to say he regrets not doing more to warn others. Story here.

-- --

Jerry Guo considers himself a modern nomad. The 24-year-old Chinese-American stays in a different apartment each month, couch surfing or subletting, whatever works best. “Moving around makes it easier to find cool new venues,” Mr. Guo explained. His recently launched startup company, Grouper, sends six users on platonic group outings to lux hotspots around New York, so maintaining a fresh supply of trendy locales is key to Mr. Guo’s success.

"I like to keep moving," Mr. Guo told Betabeat, hunching down into a leather chair at our Midtown offices. He wore a purple sweatshirt, jeans and yellow-trimmed topsiders with no socks. Over the last two years the rakish Mr. Guo has touched down in exotic locales on practically every continent on earth. There was a rare trip inside North Korea, which Mr. Guo wrote about for the Washington Post. And the time he spent running with the rebel forces in Iran during the summer of 2009, which he chronicled in The New York Times. It was his Chinese passport that allowed him access to nations typically hostile to America*.

“Jerry is...I think the best word is irreverent,” said his co-founder at Grouper, Michael Waxman, who met Mr. Guo when the two were freshman at Yale in 2005. “After all the crazy shit he has done, he’s lucky just to be alive, so he kind of brings that to the table as an entrepreneur.” Mr. Waxman is the CTO/CEO of sorts, while Mr. Guo handles partnerships, operations and marketing. “He has the kind of charisma you can’t learn.”

Check Out Our Slideshow Adventure Around the World With Jerry Guo >>

Mr. Guo’s charisma—and his irreverence—were on stark display in the spring of 2011, when he reached out to Adam Sachs, CEO of the very successful group dating site, Ignighter. He told Mr. Sachs that he was a freelance journalist who had been commissioned to write a piece on Ignighter for The Atlantic Monthly, and sent along some of his clips from his time at Newsweek by way of credentials.

“It was really strange,” Mr. Sachs said. “He showed up to the interview with this other guy, who I later learned was his co-founder. They asked a ton of questions and we talked for maybe an hour.” A few weeks went by and Mr. Sachs heard nothing, so he emailed Mr. Guo to ask about the story. “He told me it was still being edited and that it would come out soon.” Another month or so passed. “Then all of a sudden I see Grouper.” Both companies relied on users’ social graphs to choose clusters of people they would send on group outings.

Mr. Sachs emailed editors at The Atlantic, who informed him that Mr. Guo had indeed pitched the story but that it had never been assigned. He emailed Newsweek, who told him that his complaint was just one of many they were sorting through involving Mr. Guo. Mr. Sachs was upset, but he didn’t feel threatened by Grouper, and he decided to let things go. We thought the incident warranted a closer look.

The adventure began the summer Mr. Guo graduated from Yale. “Before college, I had never been outside the country, well, except before I moved here,” Mr. Guo explained. His family moved to America when Mr. Guo was six, and he spent his youth mostly in Greer, South Carolina. He showed a aptitude for computers early on, winning an award in 2003 from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, for creating a novel spam-filtering algorithm. At Yale, he studied economics. But after college, the diligent student transformed into a globe trotting adventurer.

As Mr. Guo explained in an interview with the local blog We Are NY Tech, the day after graduation, he flew to Amsterdam, then on to Tehran, where he’d agreed to teach a class on entrepreneurship at the University of Tehran. Due to the growing unrest, the class was cancelled.

“I ended up couchsurfing for the summer, working at a local hedge fund by day while running with the Iranian youth opposition by night,” he wrote. “I started writing about my time with them, and in the process accidentally became the last Western journalist in Iran.”

Check Out Our Slideshow Adventure Around the World With Jerry Guo >>

The clips Mr. Guo landed during his summer in Tehran earned him a spot at Newsweek International, where, according to Newsweek staffers, he was personally recruited by the newly appointed Fareed Zakaria.

Mr. Guo was, depending on whom you ask, an intern, a fellow, a correspondent, a staff reporter or a compulsive liar. "He was a strange egg, that’s for sure," said a former staffer who worked with him. "He would disappear for weeks at a time, then call up saying he had an interview with Hugo Chavez or pirates in Africa. Then he would be back at the office, I would see him sleeping under his desk. People joked he was a spy."

Mr. Guo arrived at Newsweek during a troubled time. The venerable magazine was losing large sums of money and shedding staff. Talks of a takeover rattled bull-pen morale. “It was kind of crazy, for sure,” Mr. Guo told The Observer. “They needed a young guy like me who would go anywhere, produce a lot of copy and not worry too much about whether my job would still be waiting for me when I got back.”

More than 30 pieces from this time now appear on the Newsweek/Daily Beast website. They are an odd mix of reportage: international conflicts and human rights on one hand, luxury lifestyle coverage on the other. A piece on the Russian occupation of Georgia sits next to a story on a $10,000 ski trip at an five-star Helsinki hotel. A interview with Chinua Achebe on Nigeria’s future is paired with a feature on luxury hunting resorts in South Africa.

“I worked for a section at Newsweek called The Good Life,” explained Mr. Guo. “It was basically, you know, advertorial content that they would pair with some really expensive ads.” Newsweek International, short on reporters, was hungry for content and revenue. Mr. Guo would buy a plane ticket and head off. “Basically I would just do things and worry later about expensing them.”

In addition, Mr. Guo would often claim a story had been assigned in exchange for free flights, hotel stays and merchandise. “I didn’t have an apartment, so it was always nicer to be on a plane or in a hotel,” said Mr. Guo, who confirmed that he would crash under his desk during his rare visits to New York.

“Sometimes if I wanted to make a trip work, I would just figure out a way to get The Good Life involved,” he said. “So I wanted to go to Tibet and report on the conflict there with China. You couldn’t get into Tibet from the Chinese side, so I just called up this ridiculous yoga retreat on the Indian side, told them it was a piece for The Good Life, they let me stay for free and next thing you know, I’m talking with the Dali Lama about human rights.”

Both the interview with his Holiness on conditions in Tibet and “UpMarket Facing Dog,” a zippy roundup of high-end yoga spots around the globe, ran in Newsweek International.

Like many news organizations, Newsweek had a longstanding ethics policy that expressly forbid reporters from accepting flights, hotel accommodations and merchandise in exchange for coverage. But current and former Newsweek staffers who worked alongside Mr. Guo said that during his tenure at Newsweek International, Fareed Zakaria changed that policy, specifically for reporters working on The Good Life section.

“It just begs the question, why did Fareed implement these new rules?” said a current Newsweek employee who worked alongside Mr. Guo. “Nobody objected, because Jerry filed good copy. It seems crazy now, but he basically just played within the absurd rules of the time.”

Mr. Zakaria emailed Betabeat to explain the change. The Good Life, he said, was “an effort to provide a service for our readers and attract new advertisers. It is quite common in that world for reporters to, say, go to a special tasting at a new restaurant or attend a weekend retreat at a new hotel. I relaxed our rules on this stuff for those two pages. In retrospect, it was a mistake—my mistake—and I regret it. We should not have been in the business of covering luxury goods—that world is so different from the traditional world of news reporting. I was always uncomfortable with it but was trying to help to help the magazine survive through tough economic times."

The fun came to an end in December of 2010, when Newsweek merged with The Daily Beast. Mr. Zakaria had left by then for a position at Time. Mr. Guo’s internship had already gone well past its allotted time, and the incoming management decided not to renew him.

A few weeks later, the complaints started to arrive. One came from the Tourism Board of Thailand, which wanted to know why they had paid for Mr. Guo and a photograher to fly to Thailand and stay at deluxe hotels. Others involved an expensive watch and a some Gore-tex gloves Mr. Guo had requested. About ten or twelve letters arrived at Newsweek’s legal department.

"After his internship ended, Newsweek International received a number of complaints about Jerry Guo, all of which were dealt with accordingly," said  Andrew Kirk, director of Public Relations at Newsweek & The Daily Beast.

Check Out Our Slideshow Adventure Around the World With Jerry Guo >>

Mr. Guo, meanwhile, had moved on to the world of tech startups. As he navigated the new scene, he continued to employ many of the tactics that had worked so well for him in the world of print media.

When Jerry Guo is nervous, he flushes red and hides his eyes behind his bangs. In a small office at Betabeat's building on West 44th Street, when we asked him about what happened with Ignighter, he looked at the floor and scratched his scarlet neck.

“I think the story here is, like, what happened to journalism,” said Mr. Guo, who had grown accustomed to exchanging coverage for access and gifts. “Coming from that world, I thought essentially, Adam wouldn't have time to talk to us and that this was a great way to get a meeting: ‘Hey I'm a writer so in return for this meeting I’ll write about your startup.’”

Mr Guo has since apologized to Mr. Sachs, who said he doesn’t see the two companies as competitors. Mr. Guo is now eager to put the lessons he learned as a news hack behind him, and focus on growing his company. “Some stats: 93% want to go on another Grouper, we've arranged 1,000+ drinks this summer, and we're already profitable,” he wrote to The Observer in a chipper email a few days after our meeting. He recently went to a secret rave in New York with a friend he met through a Grouper. And at the first New York Meetup for the prestigious startup program Y-Combinator, Mr. Guo, as he always does, made an impression.

“I really like companies doing things with online to offline,” said Justin Kan, founder of Justin.tv and a new partner at Y-Combinator, speaking on stage before 800 hopeful young startup founders. “I met this startup tonight that arranges people into group dates. It’s called like, Grouper or something. That seemed very cool.” In the audience, Mr. Guo beamed from ear to ear.

Co-founders Jerry Guo and Michael Waxman like to joke that Grouper is a Y Combinator-funded startup. That's because they didn't come up with the idea for Grouper--a social service that sets you and two friends up with three strangers based on your Facebook profile--until they got rejected from YC. "We took our $400 travel reimbursement check from YC and used that as seed capital for Grouper," Mr. Guo told Betabeat via gChat.

Does that mean Grouper is a pivot?? "Lol," he wrote, "It's a completely new concept. We applied to YC with paperbuff.com. In the 36 hours before our interview, we ditched paperbuff and built qomments.com, were rejected, then decided to build a product people would actually want (*measured by charging for it)."

Indeed, Grouper, which just launched out of beta in New York today, was profitable after just 60 days.

Here's how it works: Rather than having to fill in a questionnaire about your interests, you sign up for Grouper via your Facebook account. The Grouper algorithm mines your friend graph, "taking into account age / education / personalities / interests / attractiveness," said Mr. Guo, and then sets you up with someone of the opposite sex whom you're not Facebook friends with based on the results. There are no profiles on the site, and the Grouper algorithm does the matchmaking. You invite two friends of the same sex, they invite two friends of the same sex, and you all meet up at a place of Grouper's choosing. "The concept is two groups of friends who don't know each other, but that we think should," explained Mr. Guo.

Although this sounds like a giant Crazy Blind Date to Betabeat, Mr. Guo disagrees. "No not at all. It's not a date.  (For instance, you don't have to be single.) We think the most organic social context is one that's not confined to a bucket/label, whether it's dating / making friends / networking." He did, however, concede one inadvertent matchmaking success. "Anecdotally I know of at least one long-term relationship, but we don't track that since we're not in the dating space. We do ask if people see each other again, and that's been about 1/3 of the groups."

Grouper makes money by charging $20 for the service, which covers the cost, including tax and tip, of the first drink at the venue. To find cool spots in the city, Mr. Guo and Mr. Waxman switch up their homebase to a different neighborhood every thirty days. "For instance last month on the Upper East Side, we found a speakeasy on 89th and 1st that no one knows about called Auction House," he told Betabeat. Previous locations included Apotheke in Chinatown and Bathtub Gin in Chelsea. (Speakeasies appear to be something of a theme.)

Mr. Guo is a former travel writer for Newsweek who uses his experience covering food and nightlife to find venues for Grouper. Mr. Waxman is a serial entrepreneur whose former employee at Batiq, Nathan Blecharczyk, went on to found Airbnb. The two met as freshmen at Yale. Mr. Waxman dropped out a year later to move to San Francisco and found his startup. (Peter Thiel would be so proud!)

Grouper has already put together hundreds of events, with 93 percent of participants reporting with that want to go on another one. Currently, the service is about twice as popular with women. One of the first events they put together included a rather bold-faced name as a seventh wheel: Gilt Groupe's Kevin Ryan. As Courtney Boyd Meyers at The Next Web notes, Mr. Ryan didn't want respond to an initial request, "But when they told him six other recent Yale entrepreneurs wanted to meet him, he said yes within 20 minutes. They ended up having a 3-hour dinner."

"Gilt started off as a high-end members-only club, so we wanted to learn how they did it," explained Mr. Guo, who ended up picking up a trick of the trade. "[Mr. Ryan] had an anecdote about when they launched Gilt. They didn't have the refund feature built, but that was okay because they figured it would take a couple days before people would start asking for refunds. So we've taken on that same sort of 'move quickly and break things attitude.'"

Did Grouper end up hitting up Mr. Ryan for funding? "Ah, no, we didn't put in any seed capital aside from the $400 YC check and we're actually not seeking outside funding," said Mr. Guo. Huh, one more startup and that makes a no-VC trend!