WeWork Labs SF

WeWork Labs, the coworking space for early-stage startups, which moved to 17,000 square foot space in March, is planning on doubling its size. By July, the incubatorish offices will occupy both the third and fourth floor of 175 Varick Street. Applications are welcome for June, but it's already at capacity now with more than 100 startups, including Longreads, Fitocracy, Scrollkit, and Material Wrld.

As suspected, WeWork Labs also officially announced its expansion into San Francisco, eWork cofounder Matt Shampine told Betabeat. The two-floor space, at 156 2nd Street, will hold about 100 people and open its doors May 14th with applications open immediately. Three directors have already been named: Kaitlin Pike, a RallyPad Mentor and the "charming host of #sfnightowls," Seth Blank, founder and CEO of Trove, and Dave Nugent, a freelance Drupal developer who runs the SF JavaScript Meetup and GamesJS.

For those of you trying to keep track of the company's seemingly-unstoppable coworking juggernaut, WeWork Labs is the early-stage arm of WeWork, a larger coworking network that offers boutique office space to any startup in five locations--four in New York and one in L.A--and raised $6.85 million in January.

But where WeWork companies are typically in the one-15 employee range, WeWork Labs focuses on the one-three employee range. Through sponsors like Microsoft, Pepsi, JWT and WilmerHale, WeWork Labs is able to offer cheaper space ($300 month-to-month) and access to services like office hours with WilmerHale or flat packages on, say, financial advice for raising a seed round. Organizations like SkillShare are free to host classes there as long as the Labs's members can attend.

"If we have extra resources, like money, we just stick it back into the community," said Mr. Shampine, describing WeWork Labs. "For instance, one of our startups wanted to have an event during Internet Week, so we got Pepsi to throw in the food and drink and her startup is a beer startup so she got the alcohol sponsor and then we helped by throwing in money for cups and napkins and plates and stuff like that."

WeWork Labs doesn't offer investment or take equity. "We think of it more as a residency in a lot of ways because it has all the resources you need in it and you’re surrounded by people in similar situations," said Mr. Shampine.

With its new SF outpost, WeWork Labs can be an asset to bicoastal or peripatetic young founders. "We’ve already had a few startups that started in New York like Tout and Idonethis," said Mr. Shampine. "They both went over to California for accelerators and ended up staying over there—but now they both moved into the WeWork building. It’s all about keeping the community and the family growing and everyone together."

To further support the needs of young startups, WeWork is offering healthcare to all its members--not just Labs residents. "Prices are as low as $360/month and the coverage is good," Mr. Shampine wrote on his personal Tumblr.

Rendering of the new office by WeWork architect Danny Orenstein.

WeWork Labs, the 50-person coworking experiment that at times seems more like an incubator, currently located at the Soho location of coworking network WeWork, will be moving to 175 Varick Street in February 2012. "We hope to take the current incubator format to the next level and will accommodate and mentor hand-selected tech companies in their different stages of growth," Onepager cofounder and WeWork Labs handyman Matt Shampine told Betabeat by email.

The new space will feature dedicated desks for early stage startups and private offices for more advanced companies, not unlike the current setup in the embedded Soho Labs. "The new building on Varick Street will also have a private entrance for all WeWork members that will include a coffee shop, game area, and can be turned into an event space," Mr. Shampine said.

This is the largest lease to date for the rapidly expanding WeWork, which leases another 115,000 square feet or so in its Midtown, Soho and Meatpacking locations, and still has a six-month waiting list. WeWork will occupy 75,000 square feet of the Varick building—that's 700 desks!—of which 17,000 square feet will be dedicated to WeWork Labs. WeWork had been scouting for the location for six months, broker Sean Black told The Commercial Observer.

Onepager, the startup from Matt Shampine and the design team formerly known as Simande, just announced a seed funding round: $350,000 from New York angel investors Daniel Eskapa and Mark Birch. Mr. Birch, who has a similar portfolio of startups targeting small business, is now an adviser to the company.

With their launch party already behind them, Onepager is planning to use the money to market the product--a dead simple website builder for small businesses--and continue adding features. Next up: an embeddable widget that pulls in what people are saying about your company on social media.

Oh, and maybe use some cash to buy the coveted onepager.com, which is owned by a large financial research company, Factset, that is essentially squatting on it. In the meantime, at least onepagerapp.com, the startup's current URL, is the top result in Google for "onepager."

"We have a decent amount of free users and a growing amount of paid users," Mr. Shampine told Betabeat. "They're international--one of our first customers was in the U.K.. I was just helping one today in Spain. We were just going back and forth on Skype for half an hour."

Onepager takes customer service very seriously, he said, although the goal is to make the product intuitive enough that people can figure out how to use it on their own. "The number of customers that we've actually had to deal with on a one-on-one basis, I think I could count on two hands," he said.

Onepager is getting popular with small churches and pastors, he said. "It makes sense because when you move to a city like New York and you want to find a church the first thing you do is turn to the internet."

He said the site is also gaining traction among real estate brokers including Ken Kader, the father of New York entrepreneur Tawheed Kader, of Tout.

Originally, Mr. Shampine described the app as an "About.me for small business." Now he's taken to comparing it to Tumblr. For a while, the model was a 14-day free trial. But the startup was pushing out features so fast that they realized it was undermining their ability to upsell. Now users can sign up for Onepager for free, or pay $8 a month for a custom URL, analytics and integration with MailChimp. The company was founded by Matt Shampine, Matt Moore, Eric Tarn, and Yin Yin Chan, formerly the design agency Simande, and operates out of WeWork Labs.

MAGIC AND MAGICIANS: What is designer/angel/connector Matt Shampine doing in this photo tweeted today by Vegas showman Criss Angel with the caption, "In secret project meeting will reveal details about 1 of the projects this Sunday...." No idea what it could be, as Mr. Angel's website is already maximum sick!

IT PAYS TO MOCK UP. The life science inventory-management start-up mock-pitched at a Startup Leadership Program event last week as an exercise, where the company was mock-valued by mock-VCs at a cool mock-$7.5 million. “Most of the VCs tended to gravitate toward Quartzy, which ended up being a very expensive deal,” director Kanchan Koya said. “They had a premoney that was really, really high… A mock VC fund invested $2 million or $1 million on a pre-money of like $7.5 million, but clearly the company needed more than just a million to actually make it.” The start-up's performance landed them a real interview with First Round Capital, which was being represented at the event by Charlie O'Donnell, who demurred when Betabeat tried to find out whether the real pitch went as well as the fake one. "Tons of companies pitch at First Round, 3-4 a day :)," he said on Gchat. "I try to talk to all the really interesting people doing interesting stuff... If you made every company that pitched a rumor, you could make the whole site a rumor round-up."

CITYPOCKETS. After weeks of grinding through paperwork, Cheryl Yeoh got money!

STEALTH START-UP. Galhaus, is in pre-splash page stealth mode, while its counterpart Guyhaus is in pre-alpha. But we're told the product will be more than toothpaste delivery--it'll be more similar to Birchbox.