Fab.com is New York’s fast-growing, revenue-generating “it startup” of the moment, a company that landed the rare double-pivot with a design-centric members-only flash sales site. It’s doing well and its business model is simple, so of course the fast followers have started to spring up; no less than seven copycats in the last month, says Fab founder Jason Goldberg. Read More
The biggest come-from-behind startup story this year has to be Fab, which tried out a bunch of different services focused on the gay market before landing lightning in a bottle with a design focused flash sales site. The company just sent along a hilarious slide presentation summing up their year and revealing some new numbers on their rapid growth.
The way Fab CEO Jason Goldberg sees it, the company began as a sort of “gay Yelp.” When that didn’t work they tried to become a “gay Groupon.” Apparently somewhere along the way they also contemplated “gay Facebook” and “gay Foursquare,” as detailed in this handy chart. Read More
For any startup looking to raise venture funding–or even VCs trying to figure out what entrepreneurs want (where is Mel Gibson on that, anyways?)–Jason “Prince of Pivoting” Goldberg offers a transparent look at how he went about raising $40 million for Fab.com led by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz.
In Mr. Goldberg’s case, he faced the added pressure of not having time to go through the usual dog-and-pony show during the run-up to Fab.com’s first ever holiday season. (Yes, that’s right, that $40 million came just six months after the company swerved from a gay social network to a flash sales site for design.)
So the serial entrepreneur decided to do things a little differently. Read More
The big news out of Silicon Alley yesterday was the big $40 million round raised by Fab, a start which pivoted its business model less than a year ago and has now scored a $200 million valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz.
What drove Fab’s sudden success? It’s got a seasoned leader in Jason Goldberg. Flash sales are a big opportunity when executed right. The company builds its own technology. But according to folks in the know, a lot of the credit goes to Ashton Kutcher, who holds a much larger stake in the company than has been reported. Read More
Some data from Fab.com’s blog-happy CEO Jason Goldberg, who checked in with some data earlier this week from Fab’s Cyber Monday sale. Mr. Goldberg includes a triumphant illustration that would be a hockey stick if it weren’t a bar graph (and if it included all those early pivots). But as such, Fab’s orders by month have been steadily growing and in November, the company had what looks like more than a 33 percent increase, likely due to the big sale. Fab did more than $1.1 million in discounted deals on Monday alone Friday through Monday, the company reports.
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You can feel the love in Silicon Alley. The city’s tech scene is a brotherhood of mutual admiration and support. “Proudly Made in NYC” proclaims Meetup’s website; “Hatched in NYC” notes Aviary’s. Founders wear each other’s company T-shirts and tweet each others’ releases. They made “We Are NY Tech” buttons for South by Southwest and wore them proudly. Once in Austin, Betabeat asked the Bay Area superangel Dave McClure about the city’s tech prospects. “New York needs to stop smelling its own farts,” he said.
Yes, on the record.
Still, it turns out there is a limit to camaraderie. When it comes to hiring, especially in a competitive market, the shivs start flashing. Of the 184 startups that have “Made in NYC” emblazoned on their websites, no fewer than 130 are staffing up. That means if you want to build a startup, you’re going to have to poach some devs.
Slideshow: New York’s 20 Most Poachable Techies >>
Engineers don’t hop around in New York as much as they do in Silicon Valley, where noncompete contracts are unenforceable, but the city’s congenial entrepreneurs are raiding one another’s employees with increasing frequency. Before GroupMe was acquired by Skype for about $80 million, the well-endowed group-texting startup plucked developers from Gilt Groupe, Pivotal Labs and College Humor. The CTO of the fast-growing Betaworks startup Chartbeat, Kushal Dave, jumped to Foursquare in July 2010; the Union Square Ventures-funded Shapeways snagged Signpost’s former tech director a few months ago.
But startups don’t just compete over technical talent, which is in famously short supply. Thrillist nabbed Gawker’s Richard Blakeley to manage content strategy in March, and Crowdtap snatched marketing whiz kid Ben Kessler from SeatGeek in September. “We’ve hired about 500 people in the last 12 months,” said Kevin Ryan, the founder and CEO of Gilt Groupe, who still personally interviews every candidate. “They all have to come from somewhere.”
And while some take the Machiavellian view—“Is there any etiquette to that? I thought all’s fair in love and war,” said Lean Startup Machine founder Trevor Owens—most startups do observe certain gentlemanly guidelines. The unspoken rules of poaching are fairly clear cut. Don’t poach from early-stage companies you share an investor with. Get your investors involved if there is a possibility of taboo intraportfolio hiring. And by all means, keep your friends out of it whenever possible if you ever want to show your face at Tom & Jerry’s. “Never poach from close friends or people you know pretty well,” said Jason Baptiste, the swaggering, crew-cut-sporting CEO of OnSwipe. “That’s a cardinal sin.” Read More
Fab.com, the discounter formerly known as the Big Gay Deal Site, now known for design-centric offers (with that domain, who could give up?) is now boasting is four million monthly visits and releasing data to prove it. Founder and CEO Jason Goldberg is teasing a string of blog posts this week revealing data about the business. First up: traffic sources. Read More
The fast-growing design-centric superdiscount site Fab.com, which executed a double pivot, is up to 90 employees and growing revenue at 33 percent per month, CEO Jason Goldberg told Betabeat. With head hunters poking around all the bigger startups in the city, that’s a lot of employees to hide. But Mr. Goldberg isn’t losing sleep over having his employees poached. “We’re a hot company,” he told Betabeat. “We’re growing really fast. We’ve had a number of companies who are trying to recruit some of our team members. When someone on my team gets 10 calls from a recruiter a week, we think they should feel flattered.” Read More
Fab.com has gone from a social network for gay men to a flash sales site for gay men to a flash sales site focused on design. The final iteration seems to have done the trick, as the company added the 150,000th user in its first 45 days and just raised a big $8 million round led by Menlo Ventures.
Fab founder Jason Goldberg is a big fan of the pivot, even when that means starting from scratch. There must be something in the water at the First Round Capital offices, which has seen two portfolio companies, Fabulis/Fab and Stickybits/Turntable.fm, pivot out of dead end businesses and into big rounds within the last month.
