(flickr.com/seanvenn)

Steps to success Moteevate, formerly known as Fitango and self described as “the motivational social network,” went live last week. The site makes achieving your goals sound really easy by breaking them down into three steps: choosing from over 600 action plans (or making up your own), inviting your friends to “motivate and cheer you on,” and, finally, following the plan to accomplish your goal.

Keep running Fitocracy, the fitness social network that lets you track your workout progress and compete against your friends, has made some changes to their team. Cofounder and former CTO Richard Talens is now the Chief of Growth and Analytics, and senior engineer Daniel Roesler is stepping in as the new CTO. The company has also hired Jay Patel as a new backend developer.

New and improved The Tumblr app for iOS just got a makeover and is now faster and also looks better, with support for higher resolution photos as well as redesigned notification tabs which make navigation much easier. The improved app also includes offline support, which allows users to write blog posts, reblog, and leave comments while offline, which will be posted automatically the next time the iPhone connects to the Internet.

Perfect pitch The Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of Greater New York (HBSAANY) and the National Association of Investment Companies announced the finalists for their inaugural Venture Capital Access Program, intended to provide “women and diverse entrepreneurs” with access to venture capital through accredited investors. The six finalists, Castle Surgical, MetaLayer, Shadow Digital, Take the Interview, Tiger Trade, and Torsch, Inc. will present their to HBSAANY on Wednesday.

Better Homes and Gardens Hometalk, the online home and garden social network, just launched a redesign. The site also announced that it now has a community of over 100,000 homeowners, renters and home improvement professionals.

Hablo espanol ZocDoc en Espanol launched last week, providing Spanish-speaking users with a free online service that helps find nearby Spanish-speaking doctors and dentists and book appointments.

Now hiring We hear that MoviePass is looking for a Full Stack Lead Developer & Architect, Alta Investors needs a Graphic Designer, and Boxee wants an iPad and iPhone Developer.

There's an old marketing tactic called "eating your own dog food," whereby a founder swallows his own product to prove to the world just now sweet it is. In recessionary times, it appears that strategy has trickled downstream to potential hires. As The Next Web reports, Jeanne Hwang, a Harvard b-school graduate with six years of work experience at Right Media, Yahoo, Accenture, and Kaixin, resorted to launching an online campaign to get hired at Pinterest, including, of course, a "Jeanne for Pinterest" board.

That social media hustle has already paid off in form of a job offer from Pintics, a Pinterest analytics site. Perhaps they were moved by the pin of Ms. Hwang sky-diving (to show she's a risk taker!) or pin of her adorable puppy (someone understands the Pinterest user base!)?

Proving you can handle the merchandise is important for prospective employers. And it's unsettling, but true that your online presence will probably be dissected as much as your cover letter. But it's a slippery slope between feeling like you have to use social media gimmicks to get noticed and being denied a job based on your arbitrary Klout score. (Did we mention Ms. Hwang also has a pin on her Pinterest resume just to showcase her Klout?) Besides, Pinterest is already so chock-a-block full of carefully-curated personaes, we don't think there's room for career aspirations too.

Material Wrld is a peer-to-peer ecommerce site that Ms. Zheng calls "a prettier and friendlier eBay with social features." Like eBay, the company offers a chance to turn the back of your closet into ca$$h money, only in this case its more front-of-closet and fancy.

"It's the most demoralizing experience to walk into a consignment store, offer your nice Rag & Bone jacket that you bought for $600 in top notch condition and they offer you $40," Ms. Zheng added by gChat. Locals who have tried to sell designer items to Michael's on the Upper East Side or Tokio 7, Matiell, Buffalo Exchange, and Second Time Around in the East Village might know what she's talking about.

Although Material Wrld isn't unveiling its beta marketplace until the Spring, yesterday they launched an online pop-up store (and "Whose closet do you want to raid?" Twitter campaign) to generate interest in the concept. During the week-long affair, shoppers have a chance to buy items from a number of stylish New Yorkers, like Leandra Medine, better known as the Man Repeller, freelance stylist Chelsa Skees (longtime girlfriend of Foursquare's Dennis Crowley), designer Steven Alan, Danielle and Jodi Snyder, the cofounders of DANNIJO, and Fueled founder Rameet Chawla.

Like what you saw them wearing at Tom & Jerry's the other night? Now you may be able to buy it, gently used of course.

The pop-up stores (there will be another in April) are designed to "get over the chicken and egg problem," of populating the site with items and establishing the brand with familiar names. During the Spring launch, the site will feature "100 hand-selected sellers and slowly scale up to preserve the quality of our community and content." After that, Ms. Zheng says she plans to scale sellers through an exclusive referral system. "We'll have strict guidelines around types of product that can be sold. So no fast fashion (Zara, H&M, Forever 21)." Add in Urban Outfitters and sadly that eliminates 95 percent of Betabeat's wardrobe.

The idea of curated items sounds swell in theory, but it's hard to imagine how you can quickly grow a market one carefully vetted item at a time.

Ms. Zheng and her cofounder, Rie Yano, a former digital media marketer for Coach, both met in grad school at Harvard. "We're riding the wave of HBS duo female-led startups," like Gilt Groupe, Rent the Runway, Birchbox, and BaubleBar, wrote Ms. Zheng. "The fashion tech community in NYC is pretty close knit," she explained.

"Rie and I have been bouncing around ideas since graduating from b-school," added Ms. Zheng. "Last summer, two of our ideas converged during a trip to Montauk. My idea was a P2P marketplace for pre-owned fashion with community elements (like Etsy but not just vintage/handmade) and Rie's idea was a platform to allow self-expression (e.g. uploading fav items and outfits)." The latter, of course, is a popular concern with New York fashion startups.

In a melding of both concepts, Material Wrld offers a suggested pricing calculator and "Netflix-style shipping" for users that want to sell their clothes, as well as the chance to upload  items just to show off your taste--for those in search of some closet envy from the masses, we suppose.

Mr. Teten

This guest post was written by David Teten, Koen Bremer, Gyorgy Buslig, and Adham Hussein. David is a Partner with ff Venture Capital and Founder and Chairman of Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of Greater New York.  Koen, Gyorgy, and Adham are all Columbia Business School MBA 2012 students and former consultants with McKinsey and BCG.

Even the best VCs and entrepreneurs have a painfully high failure rate.  Lowering that failure rate would be highly impactful on venture capitalist returns, if we could figure out how to do it.  In addition, in light of increasing competition in the startup funding space, a methodology  for helping portfolio companies consistently is a strong competitive advantage.

In an effort to address this, we launched last year a formal study of best practices of VCs in improving portfolio company value. The objective of the research is to define a blueprint for how investors can help portfolio companies succeed through operational (non-financial) support, including  but not limited to facilitating shared services, recruiting, knowledge sharing, and enhancing management skills. To do so, we are working to understand what the best practices in the industry are, as well as what the correlation is between providing this kind of support and start-up success.

We’re now in the midst of surveying VCs and entrepreneurs for this research.  We’ll feature in our published work the most effective firms and practices we identify, subject to the interviewees giving us permission to use their names and data.  We’d greatly appreciate you taking a few minutes to fill out our survey:

VCs please click here.

Entrepreneurs please click here.

The value creation study draws on a wide range of research:  in-depth interviews with over 50 venture capital investors, entrepreneurs, startup incubators and advisory service providers; a proprietary database and survey of VCs’ portfolio value creation practices; a wide scan of academic and practitioner publications focused on the topics of entrepreneurship and venture investing; and the authors’ experience working in venture capital, early-stage technology companies, and strategy consulting.

This study is effectively a sequel to the study David Teten led with Chris Farmer of General Catalyst on best practices of venture capital and private equity funds in originating new deals, published in Journal of Private Equity, Harvard Business Review, Institutional Investor, etc.  Similarly, we plan to publish this value-creation study in a few different major journals.

If you have any questions, you can contact the team at vcbeyondthemoney(@)gmail.com

We’ve summarized below some of our preliminary results. This is the first in a series of articles as our research findings unfold.

Are VCs a different breed of “investors”?

The conventional school of thought argues that investors –generally- should be creating value by selecting the “right” companies, business plans, and teams into which to invest. We argue that on top of that selection function, venture investors have a wider role to play beyond funneling financial resources with a high-risk appetite.

Venture capitalists are financiers of a special nature. They fund highly uncertain projects that usually operate within a very fast moving environment and within consistently shifting technological paradigms. The company teams they work with are usually highly motivated entrepreneurs trying to engage in extensive product and customer development efforts for a product they don’t typically have a full vision of, for a customer whose needs are opaque, and for a use case which is ambiguous. This is a very different world than traditional corporate lending.

Almost every VC will say, “I respond to the CEO’s requests, I put him in touch with someone in my network when he asks me to”.  We view that as the bare minimum.  We think that VCs can add tremendous value by systematically actively supporting their portfolio companies.

So how can VCs help their startups?

We have interviewed over 50 entrepreneurs and some leading VCs around the US about their experiences and pain points while building their companies. Our in-depth interviews have led us to define a framework (TOSCAN) for early-stage investors to systematically support their entrepreneurs, which we believe will in turn increase success and valuations.

-      Team Building: accelerating hiring to help startups build their most important asset; people

-      Operations: minimizing entrepreneurs’ burden in admin, accounting and legal

-      Skill Building: building the right skills, especially for top management, and ensuring they develop inline with the early-stage company’s life cycle

-      Customer Development: identifying the right customers and gaining access to them

-      Analysis: how entrepreneurs measure, understand and report the performance of their early-stage companies

-      Network: helping entrepreneurs building relationships with networks key to their company success

What is important, useful, new, or counterintuitive about your idea?

So far, there are two particularly innovative techniques we found VCs to be using:

• Dedicated teams: Some of the investors we interviewed have started building dedicated business support teams, led by Partner-level experts. We are particularly interested in learning how these teams are organized, their interaction patterns with portfolio companies, and the company’s perception of their value-added.  Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, and ff Venture Capital are all examples.

• Portfolio companies’ networks: Many VCs said that the people who know the most about building a company are the portfolio CEOs.  In order to enable information-sharing, VCs must build very strong online and offline networks between portfolio companies, which organically provide a wealth of knowledge and support to each other.  All of the firms above have online networks for their portfolio executives.