Zuccotti Park, the Occupy Wall Street protest's headquarters. (flickr.com/shankbone)

On the Saturday that thousands of protesters marched to Times Square, the brass bells of the New York Stock Exchange rang out at noon--signifying the takeover of the trading floor by the New York startup community. Companies like Etsy, Meetup and ZocDoc were handing out t-shirts and branded ping pong balls to fresh-faced engineers in backpacks who circled the screen-filled roundabouts while munching the complimentary sandwiches provided for SA500, a Silicon Alley recruiting event.

The choice of venue could be interpreted as symbolic aggression. New York startups compete fiercely with the finance sector for programmers and MBAs--and while they can’t match Goldman’s salaries, they do make the social argument. Knewton wants to transform education, Sulia wants to reinvent news, and the mobile payments app Venmo wants to replace credit cards. Meetup is “starting a local community revolution”; Etsy’s mission is to “empower people to change the way the global economy works.” The lofty talk of startups is not unlike the rhetoric of the protesters, who are advocating--albeit vaguely--the most radical agenda of any political movement in recent memory.

“I see them as very, very similar,” said Scott Heiferman, co-founder and CEO of Meetup.com, who orchestrated a field trip to the protest after a recent board meeting. “Most of the successful startup people are out to make a dent in the universe and change the world in some way, and that's what they're trying to do downtown. I can't speak to the people who are just hanging around for the free pizza, but there are people downtown who are really fired up to see some sort of systemic change in culture.”

But while they’re definitely talking about the protest, many techies aren’t sold. The movement has high engagement (and revenue!) but the brand, the marketing and the roadmap need work.

“It's all about your pitch,” said Reece Pacheco, the co-founder and CEO of the hot video-sharing startup Shelby.tv, who was at the N.Y.S.E. that Saturday scouting for talent. “Right now Occupy Wall Street’s pitch is really bad because no one know what they're really about. You got some people saying ‘yeah, stop spending money, and get the troops out of Iraq,’ and like, ‘free Nelson Mandela!’ They’re all over the place.”

“My view of it is that they have not been utilizing technology to their full advantage,” said Brandon Diamond, founder of the Hacker Union, a collective of New York programmers. “What they should start with is a centralized resource where people can find out what they're protesting. Even a Twitter account.”

“I think the way it's been executed has been really poor,” said Melanie Moore, a former financial analyst who is now on her second web startup, a subscription-based site for fashion essentials. “That list of demands that came out? It was like, Marxist bullshit. It was crazy. Like, ‘we should abolish government.’ Like anarchist ... they've gotten to the point where their brand is very diluted.”

Ms. Moore, who lives on Wall Street and regularly walks past the protest, advocated a pivot. “If I wanted to go about it the right way I would get a group of people together, break off from Occupy Wall Street, call it something else, rebrand it and start the right way, with people who maybe have some connections in Washington.”

Despite criticism from the techie peanut gallery, Occupy Wall Street is nothing if not tech-savvy. (One of the earliest criticisms was the preponderence of Macbooks among the protesters.) The protest has had a near-constant Livestream from the headquarters at Zuccotti Park, which has also broadcast from Times Square and during the now-infamous mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s a fixture on geeky forums like Reddit and SomethingAwful; even the Bitcoin community and the hacktivists of Anonymous are into it. The protest has also voted consistently to use open-source software for everything from its website to its accounting, and the still-grassroots funded movement is hip to crowdfunding sites Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, which raised money for tangential projects such as The Occupied Wall Street Journal. There are also more than 200 occupation-related campaigns on the Y Combinator-incubated WePay.com. “It's not a coincidence that much of the success of the #OWS movement comes from their nimble use of technology to organize and get their word out,” the venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote on his blog.

Betabeat happened to be standing at the corner of Zuccotti Park on the second Saturday of the protest, as a march that had resulted in about 80 arrests was returning to the park headquarters. As the much-thinned stream of sign-holders neared, the N.Y.P.D. tensed and started to shoo protesters off the sidewalk and into the park. “Cameras up, cameras up!” one man shouted, needlessly, as the small crowd had already sprouted a halo of smartphones.

Atlantic staffer Conor Friedersdorf, who lives in the redwoods of Northern California, discovered a sign at the New York protest bearing an excerpt from one of his blog posts--alerted to him by a reader on Twitter who had seen it on BoingBoing. The way his words had traveled, transformed and disseminated back to him led to an epiphany: “I now see how Occupy Wall Street is like the internet,” he wrote, adding another layer to the remix by referencing words written by CNN’s Douglas Rushkoff. “I now understand a little better what it means for a protest movement to be without ‘a traditional narrative arc,’ to be ‘the product of the decentralized networked-era culture,’ to be about ‘inclusion and groping toward consensus.’”

The New York tech community would seem to be in a prime position to help the webby movement. The protest has been using Vibe, an anonymized broadcasting app similar to Twitter built by a New York techie. One Meetup engineer organized a small hackathon that produced a few Occupy Wall Street apps including OccupyVotes, a platform for deciding on the specific demands everyone has been clamoring for, which has already collected some 19,000 votes on 64 proposals.

And yet most of the New York tech community, while fascinated by the protest, is keeping Occupy Wall Street at arm’s length. Most of the techies we spoke to had not visited Zuccotti Park. First Round Capital’s Charlie O’Donnell, who has sounded off about the protest on his blog and weekly email newsletter, has merely “biked by it several times,” he said. “I think I’d be too frumpy if I went down there,” said Mr. Diamond, who has stayed away.

Part of the hesitation seems to derive from the self-deterministic nature of founder exceptionalism: entrepreneurs are the ones who quit the comfort of cubicles and health insurance and convention in favor of uncertainty, 80-hour work weeks and the remote possibility of glory. Startups, not protests, are the real mechanism for change, some feel.

“Anger doesn't create wealth or work,” said Jason Kende, a founder who works out of the SoHo coworking space WeWork Labs, where members have been debating the merit and meaning of Occupy Wall Street in an internal email thread. “For me, it's a loud giant arrow pointing to the underlying problems of how we work, how we make wealth, the lack of flexibility or margin for error in our lives, and the enormous gap between relevant talent and real opportunity in our workforce. I think we all want solutions. It's just a question of whether we demand someone else fix everything for us or create real solutions ourselves.”

While the protest against big banks raged outside the stock exchange that Saturday, Mr. Pacheco told Betabeat, the startups inside were seducing Wall Street’s workforce away. “Outside people preaching against capitalism, and then inside there were people who were pro-capitalism but saying ‘don't do it the way they're doing it, come do it with us,’” he said. “I've never really liked the system. But I’ve always known that I've had to play within the system to win, you know what I mean?”

Tech entrepreneurs have plenty of reason to feel conflicted. They’re funded by one-percenters, to start (although some tech VCs seem to recognize a familiar potential in the upstart movement: “#occupywallst proving to be a classic disruptor. dismissed as whiny hippies a few weeks ago now doubling every three days,” tweeted Bryce Roberts, co-founder of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, who flew to New York from San Francisco explicitly to check out the protest). Technological innovations tend to eliminate American jobs; tech companies are also scraped for programmers, which sometimes means outsourcing to Mechanical Turk or a development shop in Estonia.

And of course, for a startup, the ultimate win is an IPO on Wall Street.

“I believe in business, I believe in capitalism, I believe in the free market and the ability of one to say, ‘I'm going to create a business, I should be able to do that the way I want,’” Mr. Pacheco said. “If you make money, you should make money! On the other hand, there's a strong part of me that is always looking out for the social good of the world, and it’s tough to say, ‘oh well, sorry you didn't start a company,’ or ‘sorry you didn't get a job at a bank, you're screwed.’”

But the symptoms of Occupy Wall Street mania are strikingly similar to to the startup fever that’s been going around. Betabeat recently accosted a spokesman for the movement’s finance committee, Tim Hollinger, who had deflated on a park bench after hollering an update at one of the protest’s nighttime assemblies. He was too tired to follow our line of questioning. “I was just going to go home and sleep for a few hours,” he admitted, reminding us of a young type-A founder. Another organizer, Patrick Bruner, the 23-year-old who has taken the lead on the protest’s press relations, told Betabeat his work on the protest will be “the most important thing I ever do,” in an awed voice reminiscent of the esteemed Biz Stone, who once said, “Twitter is not a triumph of tech. It is a triumph of humanity.”

Occupy Wall Street is in many ways, a triumph of Twitter--although the fact that #occupywallstreet has not cracked the trending topics has become a pet cause for a certain subset of activist Twiterati. It’s also a triumph of Facebook, Tumblr, Kickstarter, Livestream, Wordpress, Google Docs and the iPhone, without which it would be considerably impaired. And Occupy Wall Street could end up setting the stage for startups like BankSimple, an online-only bank that proposes to take the pain out of personal finance.

“I think that if you look at a lot of the most exciting startups in the country right now, they are right in line with what's at the heart of Occupy Wall Street,” Mr. Heiferman said. “So if you think about, what is Kickstarter, what is Airbnb, what are things like Meetup, Skillshare--at the heart of it all these things are about creating an economy where people are, they're creating a new economy, creating this people-powered economy as opposed to a top-down corporate economy.”

Many local entrepreneurs don’t seem to see it that way, we noted.

“If any startup can wrangle the attention of the country and the world as fast as Occupy Wall Street has, then I'd love to hear about that startup,” he said. “Like, if you're running a startup that no one's ever heard of, and you're complaining that this movement has gone from nothing to near 100 percent awareness in the developed world, well then, you know …” he trailed off. “You get my point.”

He'd advise Occupy Wall Street to worry about making the jump from early adopters to mainstream users, he said. "One of the seminal Bibles of the startup technlogy world is an old book called Crossing the Chasm, and it talks about how there is an adoption curve," he said. "Plenty of startups that get popular amongst the social media crowd don't make it to Middle America and the moms."

But there’s one question no one’s asked so far: Is Occupy Wall Street a bubble? "I don't think there's a bubble," the sardonic tech pundit Alex Blagg told Betabeat in an email. "In fact, I'm aggressively bullish on Occupy Wall Street. It has all the hallmarks of any real buzzy tech startup: seemingly limitless idealistic potential, great 'anti-establishment' brand positioning, and most importantly, a vague coolness among kids on Tumblr."

He estimated the protest, which had raised about $300,000 as of Tuesday, could get a valuation of more than $6 billion.

Bloomberg's TechStars finale, which included a cast reunion.

The finale of the TechStars reality show is out, and it's starting to look like Bloomberg took the Davids for a ride. Everyone in TechStars was required to participate--Bloomberg kept referring to the show as a documentary, and the program directors insisted it would be good publicity for everyone. "Tisch and Cohen fought VERY hard to make sure the finale episode was positive," Melanie Moore, one of the first New York session alumni who was uncharitably portrayed, wrote on Hacker News last night when her blog post, "TechStars, Lies and Videotape," hit the front page. "They felt just as disappointed and betrayed by Bloomberg as I."

The show stitched together unrelated scenes and built a narrative that was in places entirely fabricated. It made Ms. Moore look like a ditz, David Tisch look like jerk and Jason Baptiste look like a braggert. But how did it make TechStars look?

From the Hacker News comments:

• "It's nice that the startup founders are defending Techstars, but as a potential applicant, this whole thing does raise red flags for me. Doing a startup is hard enough with your personal emotional ups and downs. To add a reality tv show to that just seems like the worst idea ever. Maybe it's good for media startups to get as much press as possible, good or bad. But this blog post seems to suggest otherwise. If the people running Techstars really got fooled by Bloomberg, then how can I trust these people about giving good startup advice?" -revorad
• "This actually reflects poorly on TechStars that they gave so much access to a media source without proper negotiaion and/or enforcement." -badclient
• "But still, forcing companies to do something or drop out? That is not how an accelerator should treat its companies, like they were your bosses. The only boss a startup should have is its customers, and now TS, due to its poor judgement has done the opposite of what it was meant to do. Not only do they make poor calls, but they also bully founders?" -abbasmehdi

And the worst:

• "I would be shocked if PG allowed a program like this about YC to air." -marcamillion

Ms. Moore and the other Bloomberg stars jumped to the incubator's defense. "Please do not let the show color your opinion of TechStars. I would do the program over in a heartbeat, and made lifelong friends and mentors along the way," she told one potential applicant, who answered: "I'm not. Friends and advisors who have gone through it or are otherwise related to the program have very highly recommended it so we're still full speed ahead on the application. Incidentally, our company is working in technology around video editing."

Says Mr. Tisch, by email: "The show presents only a tiny fraction of what actually happened--under one percent of what was probably filmed was used, and obviously focuses on drama. Our goal was to encourage mentorship and to help others understand the difficulties and challenges of doing a startup and we hope that's the case. But people do have to remember that they're watching TV--a narrated and massively summarized version of events."

Mr. Suster, left, and Mr. Feld

Entrepreneur-turned-investor Mark Suster has already dispensed email advice for "us sarcastic bastards who have slitting tongues,” but on this week's episode of TechStars he gives David Tisch a run for his money on the real talk/insult-o-meter, to some amusing ends. (Check out our top five list after the end.)

In Episode Four, Mr. Tisch is trying to prepare the teams for Demo Day and "access to a room full of money," in some cases by throwing ping pong balls or fake cash to see if he can distract them. He also encourages them to "try your best to get a third of what you're looking for soft circled," so they can present with some momentum. The VC weather report might be frothy, but not all the teams are finding it easy.

OnSwipe, Meet Humility

If you've ever watched an episode of "America's Next Top Model," you know how much Tyra appreciates it when a bratty girl finally breaks down in tears in front of the judging panel. OnSwipe's Jason Baptiste doesn't go that far, of course. But he does ask for help with hiring and is SPOILER ALERT!!! awarded with a meeting with AOL's Tim Armstrong. OnSwipe found a great potential team member, but they're worried that startup hours will scare off the family man. Mr. Tisch advises them to be clear about expectations, but frame it as hard work breeding success, "Don't phrase it like, 'Hey dude, how often do you have to see your fucking kid?'" After Mr. Baptiste asks AOL whether OnSwipe can launch on one of their properties, Mr. Armstrong says he'll consider it, as long as they stay awake, "Sleep is bad, you can sleep in a couple years, you gotta go after this market now."

Family Affair

Family ish is something of a theme this episode. Immersive, the Minority Report-esque video advertising startup, almost falls apart when CEO Jason Sosa admits in front of his co-founders and the Davids that he took $2,000 out of company funds for his wife and kids because the financial burden of two foreclosures left them without gas or groceries. It's a heart-wrenching moment for all parties involved as David Cohen warns him about embezzlement and his co-founders wonder if they can trust Mr. Sosa again, but the frank discussion seems to have cleared the air.

The 11th Hour

We learn that Veri, who thankfully ditched the name SocratED so Betabeat can stop tripping over the caps lock, almost didn't get in to TechStars, but got picked at number 11 thanks to an un-ignorable 30 recommendations. There's some nice symmetry when Tisch reveals that users are spending 30 minutes per visit on the site. Oh yeah, did we mention they picked up $100k?

Who Needs a Business Plan Anyways?

Hurricane Melanie may have significant funds soft-circled, but that was for ToVieFor. Now that she's pivoted into a LinkedIn for fashion, investors like Golden Seed have given her the dreaded, uh, let's hold off until there's more traction shpeal. "Traction is a universal 'We don't want to do it' answer," notes Mr. Cohen. Ms. Moore seems incredulous that her investors would hold her back, telling the camera, "My investors won't let me do it because they haven't seen  business plan? It's so fucking stupid, like building a luxury retail company is hard." Luckily, Mr. Suster likes her practice demo, well except for the "Music drama cliche" at the top where she pulls out the old standby: quoting the size of the overall market. For an update on how this plays out, check out: Before ToVieFor’s Corpse Is Cold, TechStars Alum Melanie Moore Launches New Fashion Startup.

Our Top Five Mark Suster Insults

And without further ado, here's what you came for. Unfortunately there was no way to write out the part where Mr. Suster schooled Nestio on their voice immodulation disorder, but you can watch that for yourselves:

1. "He was being kind saying it was good, it's not."

2. "It's a 1 out of 10, it really is."

3. "You tell a mild confusing story."

4. "You've been working in video for how long? [Over three years] Then fucking say it!"

5. "What I think they've done is take group think, which is I've gotta do a platform, it's gotta be social, it's gotta be curated, it's gotta be the good stuff rising to the top. I suspect investors will generally speaking like this and that's a problem. It may get funded, because there's a lot of dumb money. It's not for me. I'll tell you why, I live in LA, I see these every fucking month." Mr. Suster, was discussing Homefield's pivot to Shelby.tv, but he did have some words of encouragement, "I loved their first business."

TechStars New York alum and co-founder of the high-flying-for-a-while-but-now-defunct ToVieFor Melanie Moore didn't mourn for long. ToVieFor closed up shop just months after it graduated from the local TechStars incubator--Ms. Moore penned a long and thoughtful post-mortem with her reflections on the fashion industry. "No regrets," she told Betabeat.

Apparently. "Hurricane Melanie" has already launched into her next project, another fashion startup with Girl Develop It co-founder Sara J. Chipps. "We got our first customer (and she bought the largest subscription option)!" Ms. Moore wrote in an email to Betabeat. "We have only sent the site out to about 20 people, so that's a great conversion rate. Very exciting."

Indeed. The new startup, Elizabeth & Clarke, is a subscription-based delivery service for "women's basics" like "designer-quality white shirts, delivered to your door each season, for under $30."

That's the business? Every three months, you get a box of white shirts?

Actually, they're just starting with the white shirt. E&C will eventually expand to other feminine wardrobe essentials. Perhaps the little black dress is next? (Please?)

Ms. Moore explains more:

E&C solves a problem I have myself: every season I am out searching for the perfect white shirt that I will end up pairing with almost every outfit. Right now my choices are: (1) something cheap from H&M or Zara that will fall apart immediately (2) something in the $50-range from J. Crew or Club Monaco - which is fine - except when I go back next season to buy the shirt I loved so much again - and it has been discontinued, or (3) something really beautiful and unique from Kain, The Row, or Oliver Theyskens - but that costs $250.

By building a brand totally online, we avoid all of the infrastructure costs of a typical brand, one that must either build their own brick-and-mortar stores, or sell at wholesale to a department store, which significantly cuts into gross margin. Because of this, we can produce basics that are similar in quality to James Perse or Alexander Wang but without the crazy mark-up.

The name is a combination of Ms. Moore and Ms. Chipps's mothers' maiden names. Lily Kwong, another ToVieFor alum, is also involved.

This time around, Ms. Moore plans to focus on the product and customer development. One problem with ToVieFor, she felt, was that she and her co-founder spent too much time winning a business plan competition and getting into TechStars. "We aren't thinking about press, funding, hiring or anything else until we make a significant amount of progress on the product," she said.

This is a guest post from "Hurricane Melanie" Moore, co-founder of Elizabeth & Clarke, a stealth fashion/tech startup in New York. This is a post-mortem on Ms. Moore's first startup, the

As you all know by now, the grim reaper has paid ToVieFor a visit. Sad face. I want to talk a little about the root cause of the closure, in the hopes that others who might be starting a new business do not make the same mistake. Also, some broader industry thoughts below--as I'm sure no one wants to hear me keep yapping about my failed startup for weeks on end.

Wither ToVieFor

The reason ToVieFor failed is the same reason almost all businesses fail: we did not build something that people wanted. I know it sounds like a *facepalm* moment, but following the steps of the Lean Startup method in order to discover what people want is so easily said, but so hard to actually do.

While we all worship at the altar that is Steve Blank and the Lean Startup Movement, I have noticed that it is somewhat rare to find entrepreneurs truly applying the principles of Customer Development. I know we didn't do this at ToVieFor, not even close. In fact, in the beginning, I had never even heard of Steve Blank or Eric Ries. What? Blasphemy you say? Yes, I know it is a little shocking to those in startup land, but for many aspiring entrepreneurs, recent MBA graduates, or those leaving industry to start their own thing, there may not be anyone around to enlighten one of the wisdom of The Four Steps to the Epiphany and the beautifully simple formula to starting a business.

In addition, as much as those in the startup world pay lip service to these ideas, and as much as we *thought* we were implementing them at ToVieFor--we were not--in fact, by the time I had even heard of a Lean Startup it was already too late. We had passed that golden time period that every startup has: the time when nobody knows your name, when you have almost no users, no press, no investor will give you the time of day, it's the perfect time when you can massively fuck up over and over and over again, and no one will be the wiser. It won't affect your branding, your user acquisition targets, or your next board meeting because you do not have any of those yet. We squandered this time away winning a business plan competition, when we should have been trying to find out what our users actually wanted.

Every time I thought: "Oh, we need to raise money" or "We need to get more press" or "We need whatever-the-fuck-we-do-not-actually-need"--I should have been focused on the product. Lesson learned for company no. 2. We thought we were doing Customer Development. We were looking at our own "vanity metrics" as per the industry vernacular. But the reality is that we were afraid to ask our customers the tough questions and get the hard answers: we don't like your product (or worse, who are you? what do you do again?). That fear of your own customer is more common than one might think. Many times, when I speak with other first-time entrepreneurs--clearly more in tune with startup land and its golden principles than I was--there is a lot of lip service paid to Customer Development, but not a lot of action. But in the hopes your startup does not receive the next visit from the grim reaper, please please please, get over it.

We did do one thing right though, one thing that I see so many other fashion Internet startups get wrong, which was to build a balanced team of technology talent and apparel industry experience. That included my co-founder Eric Jennings, an enormously talented engineer who spent the previous four years hacking on the e-commerce company MyShape and Lily Kwong, who has worked at every fashion house from Dior to Altuzarra, is a model, a Vogue contributor, and just a general Conde fav.

Fashionably late

Over the past two years, after probably a couple hundred meetings with people involved in either tech or fashion in some way, I have noticed a distinct and divisive cultural attitude of one towards the other. I have found it enormously common to sit with a first-time fashion entrepreneur who constantly complains about her outsourced tech team, "I asked them to do this a million times, why don't they get it?" "I don't know what's wrong with them, I told them they need to add Facebook Connect, why is this taking so long?" "It's just an e-commerce website, I don't know why they can't build it faster" ad infinitum. There is a clear lack of respect for the technology and the (typically outsourced) developers who are building it.

Luxury brands are among the worst offenders. I challenge you to find a luxury website without (1) a black or dark "sexy" background color, (2) a crazy-long, unnecessary Flash-intro, (3) infinitesimally small font everywhere, (4) and impossible-to-click, three-level drop-down menus. It's no wonder brands like Calvin Klein, which generate about $6 billion in revenue annually, only produce about $60 million through e-commerce.

However, technologists do not escape scrutiny either. I can't tell you how many times I have talked to a previously successful entrepreneur in gaming, video, social media--or maybe a recent alumni of Google or Twitter--that is now starting something that is going to "revolutionize shopping on the web." The distinct attitude is "I worked at Facebook and sold my last company to Google, how hard can this fashion thing be? This will be cake." Ha. Talk to anyone who has spent a day of their life in apparel, and I'm pretty sure the last word used to describe the industry would be "easy."

In fact, to quote a wonderfully eloquent commenter on my last post:

Instead of listening to this writer's advice, any company going into fashion should look at how backward thinking most people in the industry are, how little they understand technology, and how they are unwilling to admit the core purpose of fashion. The easiest entry is discoverability and influence and that's also the most powerful element of the fashion ecosystem. If you become the discovery engine and the decision engine then it's game over for everyone else. If you become the decision engine (something Google and Bing are trying to do with there [sic] Flight Search and other initiatives in various verticals), then you can easily take over the entire business. If people are coming to you and you help them decide what to buy - then you can start selling them that stuff. You start off as the starting point and then you start taking over more and more until you start producing the products you were originaly [sic] only linking to.

The Internet is destroying entire industres [sic] - yet she thinks fashion internet startups should instead compete in the real world. That makes no sense. We should all play to our strenghts [sic]. While she's trying to do backend stuff and help existing Fashion [sic - again] companies, some 'only 3 to 8%' earning Internet startup is going to disrupt the entire industry. A hacker, in my opinion, is not meant to figure out how to solve the problems the existing industry power players created or want solved. A hacker, again in my opinion, should solve the most elegent [sic] things and solve things for actual people.

While it is difficult to defend an argument that is not rational, in this case, I do not need to. The words speak for themselves.

There are very few companies that have been able to conquer the cultural divide of apparel and technology and, instead, bring together top fashion industry execs and talented technology entrepreneurs. Ironically, the company that has been so far ahead of this curve, is also over a decade old: Net-a-Porter, the Platonic Ideal of the fashion internet company--and also the one that has paved the way for every flash sale website in existence. Typically, new apparel startups fall distinctly on one side of the other: Moda Operandi has very deep connections and industry experience, but no engineering talent. Inporia has incredibly successful technology entrepreneurs behind it, but couldn't pronounce "Rodarte" if their life depended on it. The problem is that both think the other's job is easy or unimportant: 'the technology is not core to the product and can be outsourced' or 'fashion is so simple anyone who is a consumer can understand it.'

If we (we being the collective ecosystem of fashion entrepreneurs and investors) have any hope of solving the difficult supply chain and remnant inventory problems in apparel, disrupting a 100+ year old industry and building amazing companies, we have to realize that each function--both engineering talent and apparel expertise--is equally important and necessary. The ability of your company to build a brand and an emotional connection with your consumer is just as important as your engineers who churn out lines of node.js each night so your site can handle concurrency issues and RACE conditions after Style.com runs a fabulous piece on your new brand.

With all this said, there are a few startups I am super excited about, and believe can cross this divide: Edition 01 (deep fashion expertise + some excellent East Coast technology investors), The Lookk (one of Carmen Busquets's first investments since the sale of Net-a-Porter), and The Runthrough (a way for stylists to request samples for shoots without having to send interns running all over town to physically hunt them down) are a few. In addition to the more established fashion startups like Warby Parker and Bonobos, I am incredibly excited to see how they change the industry, and hope that many others will follow suit.

Cinema verite.

Last week on the premiere of TechStars, the startups got the good news about their golden ticket into the inaugural New York class (more selective than Hahvard, didja hear?). Last night, the reality show's second episode (you can watch the whole thing here) focused on Lesson One: Humility--as in, it just might behoove you to get some. Fast. One startup picks up $1 million in funding. One startup goes to Hollywood to meet their idol. And we learn that you don't have to know a whole lot about gaming to throw around the words "gaming mechanics." Here's what you missed!

First things first, how can Betabeat score an invite to the weekly 10.10 pm parties Wednesdays at the TechStars loft? There appears to be pizza and shots of Johnny Walker. We want in.

In true reality show format, this week's winner (as determined by the judges mentors) gets a special prize: a chance to meet with their tech idol. Urban Apt's Caren Maio says Guy Kawasaki;  one of the dudes from Homefield says Al Gore "because he invented the thing." Pretty much right off the bat, the producers make it clear the lucky lady isn't going to be OnSwipe.

After finding out about a $1 million investment from Spark Capital while "chomping on a hamburger" at Wendy's, OnSwipe CEO Jason Baptiste comes into the TechStars loft a little too cocky. "'Mo money, 'mo problems," quips Mr. Baptiste and indeed an Antoine Dodson reference ("Hide your developers, hide your designers because we're hiring everybody") does not go over well with other finalists. "Let me give you some advice, I wouldn't tell the other companies you're trying to hire their people," says David Tisch on the special black-and-white David's cam set up in his office. OnSwipe appears confused. "We can hire their teams?" asks Mr. Baptiste. "No!" exclaims Mr. Tisch.

Hey, it's not Mr. Baptiste's fault they didn't get his sense of humor. "You know what, I like to speak in soundbites," he admits.

Next up comes the mentor speed dating, which is giving startups like ToVieFor, UrbanApt, SocratED, and Homefield mentor whiplash just in the first week. Homefield might like the emphasize their athleticism--and the Bloomberg TV producers might like to emphasize co-founder Reece Pacheco's chiseled cheekbones--but it's Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson who agrees to mentor them and urges them to pivot into a bigger market that just sports: video.

Mr. Tisch, David Cohen, and Roger Ehrenberg, who function not unlike the prophetic Three Witches in Macbeth, are skeptical."Do they have the technical chops to go build something in a technical market where everybody else is lining up with Google engineers?" wonders Mr. Tisch. "The road is littered with video companies that have gone splat," says Mr. Ehrenberg. At least Mr. Pacheco picked a direction, earlier he said, "In the last week I've been sitting right on the fence about where to go and I fucking hate it."

Speaking of swears, even the announcer got in on the game. "It only takes a few mentor meetings for Urban Apt to realize they don't quite have their shit together," intones what we think is the Bloomberg voiceover. "Urban Apt at the beginning--coming in and thinking they're gonna dominate the real estate market in New York without a day in the real estate industry? Arrogant," says Mr. Tisch. "I think that's been a lot of my frustration seeing these companies think that they could do stuff without knowing how to do it/why they are he ones to do it."

Investors may be turned on by the notion of a gamification, but both ToVieFor's "Hurricane Melanie" and SocratED are struggling with layering in gaming without, well, quite knowing what they mean by that. "Maybe Angry Birds for fashion, or I dunno something not cheesy," says ToVieFor CEO Melanie Moore.

Lucky for SocratED Gary Vaynerchuk gives the startup a solid pro tip. After admitting, "[SocratED] was the one that was least in my zone. Learning? I don't like to learn," Mr. Vaynerchuk tells offers some advice on finding someone who's "Jedi" in gaming. "I highly, highly, highly, highly, highly, highly, highly recommend putting somebody on your board--and give them real equity--that comes from Zynga or Playfish or Playdome or one of these companies that really really really gets it." Afterwards, he tells the camera, "That could be one of the better mentor jobs on my part . . . because I'm completely right," before scrunching up his face in self-mockery.

In prescient bit for Ms. Moore, whose startup started winding down two months after Demo Day, she seems sanguine after a rocky meeting with a potential retailer wary of discounting their handmade handbags to play ToVieFor's game, "Even if we do totally fail and the company blows up, it's fine, it's a good thing," says Ms. Moore. "An investor is much more likely to invest in a failed--an entrepreneur who has done a startup and failed rather than someone who's a first-time entrepreneur."

SPOILER ALERT!!! The week's winner ends up being Wiji, who got to meet every tech blogger's favorite brainiac, UI designer John Underkoffler the man behind the futuristic devices and technology in Minority Report. That prize should cushion the blow when Wiji, which is now called Immersive, hears what the Davids & Co. said about their name. "Everybody hates the name," says Mr. Tisch, "Roger, what is your reaction to the name?" Mr. Ehrenberg, "I think Wiji is the shittiest name I've ever heard in my life. Easily top five shittiest. It sounds like a disease. Oh, my Wiji!"

The best takeaway, however, might be from Jeff Clavier, who urged Homefield, now ShelbyTV, to give investors a demo to look at during a pitch. "I was listening to you, which was interesting, but I was like what the fuck does that mean?" Mr. Clavier told Mr. Pacheco. "You never want the what-the-fuck to happen because some investors will try to engage and others will just check out and take their BlackBerry out."  Cue Mr. Tisch in the audience, tap, tapping away.

RealityStar, via Bloomberg TV Twitter.

Although the tongue-in-cheek excitement of a reality show that substitutes David Tisch for Heidi Klum and Bloomberg for Bravo was lost on some people, exactly no one in the packed house at Fiddlesticks in the West Village last night seemed to give a hoot. They were too busy watching their friends--and themselves--show up on teevee for the New York tech scene's illustrious small screen debut.

RRE Ventures footed the bar tab for a breathing-room only crowd that included the grinning founders of TechStars companies like OnSwipe's Jason Baptiste and Shelby.tv's Reece Pacheco, along with the usual suspects like GroupMe's Steve Martocci and Jared Hecht and Aviary's Alex Taub, and the adorable "Bubby" Tisch, the eldest of the three generations in attendance, who gamely sat near the screen in over-sized glasses watching her grandson getting the f7$%ing bleep bleeped out of him on Bloomberg TV.

"It should be fun, it should be weird, it should be nerdy," Mr. Tisch promised on stage before the screening. Bloomberg TV head Andrew Morse showed a little less restraint, comparing the TechStars "revolution" to something short of the invention of the lightbulb, "I think when the history book's are written about this period, the changes that your companies are making, the changes that your mentors are making, the changes that your investors are making will be as significant a shift in the way we live and the way we work as when Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin." More like tires, Mr. Tisch said afterward.

Once the show got started, the TechStars co-founders chimed in on their scenes, or lack thereof. "We were too boring to make the cut," Crowdtwist co-founder and CEO Irving Fain told Betabeat's @benpopper. "We came in with our plan, we kept out team together and we didn't pivot. I guess revenue isn't sexy enough for Bloomberg." After watching the tech bona fides of their venture critiqued by "the Davids" (Mr. Tisch and Mr. Cohen), SocratED co-founder Brian Tobal, whose startup now goes by the name Veri, acknowledged, "We are definitely going to be the underdogs this season."

The way the producers cut the episode, however, that title might actually go to ToVieFor, the fashion auction site that started winding down two months after Demo Day. Co-founder Melanie Moore looked teary-eyed before a scene where her co-founder got called out for being habitually late (something about being stuck in a stairwell) and then quit off camera, but not without wrangling over equity and demanding to be in charge of marketing. From his seat, Mr. Tisch reached back to squeeze Ms. Moore's hand in support.

But no amount of skepticism from the mentors could keep Mr. Baptiste down. Despite watching Mr. Tisch say, “Okay you raised your money, stop being douchebags,” and Josh Stylman wonder if OnSwipe is the kind of company that gets crushed by Google, Mr. Baptiste looked elated. In fact, he told Betabeat, he's getting t-shirts made to commemorate a scene where Fred Wilson expressed his distaste the idea of a "bridge" solution, which came moments after Mr. Wilson said OnSwipe "makes me puke." We guess raising a $5 million "Series Awesome" round is funding's answer to rose-colored glasses.

After episode one, it looks like the TechStars equivalent of the Jersey Shore's GTL--gym, tan, laundry, my dude!--will be Justify (your strategy to the Davids), Grimace, Pivot. But there are still six more episodes til until the live finale on October 18th, which just happens to coincide with TechStar’s summer program Demo Day, so stay tuned.

No, wait! Didn't Jeff Bezos invest in someone local recently? Someone, someone, who was it? Ohhh, now we remember: Mr. Bezos deigned to gave the local startup scene a boost in the form of a check to General Assembly. Standing on the shoulders of giants!

THE NEW BLACK. We recently wrote that TechStars alum Melanie Moore has officially shuttered her fashion startup ToVieFor for pastures unknown. Last we heard, she was considering two opportunities and would decide in the next few months. Ms. Moore has quietly updated her website, however. "I run an awesome fashion / tech startup called Elizabeth & Clarke in New York City. Though, you might know me from my first company, ToVieFor."

BLIND FUNDING. Which tasty startup raised a $1.2M seed round led by Kapor Capital?

BLIND NUMBERS. Which shredded startup has 55,000 users and more than 100 percent of that number on a wait list?

BLIND WANTED. Which Lerer Ventures-funded, Soho-based startup is hiring front-end developers?

BLIND HANDLING. Which mischievous techster is making fake Twitter accounts with an 'i' instead of an 'l' and duping decent folks all over town?

BLIND ANNOYANCES. Which social network information delivery system was being really janky this afternoon?

BLIND BETABEAT. Which Betabeat reporter has been banned by Hacker News?

So long and thanks for all the handbags.

New York-based ToVieFor, a members-only auction site for women's luxury goods, has closed up shop after about a year of building the business followed by a spring at TechStars. The site is shuttered, the Twitter account is down, Tumblr is quiet, and co-founder Melanie Moore changed her LinkedIn profile to the past tense. "On the surface, we shut down because we ran out of money," Ms. Moore said. "However, the root cause of this was a flawed business model. We were attempting to compete solely on price in a world where brands not only do not compete on price, they have essentially formed an oligopoly and set prices (vs take prices). As a result, it was incredibly difficult to convince brands to allow us to change up their pricing structure. And in retail, having those brand partnerships is critical to survival."

At the beginning, ToVieFor had incredible momentum. The startup won the $75,000 grand prize at NYU's Stern School business plan competition, debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt and went on to make the cut into the first TechStars NY class that ended April 15. When they applied for TechStars, ToVieFor had revenue, 5,000 users and a four-person team with 15 years of collective industry experience; they were also filling out their board with fashion insiders, including an editor at Gotham magazine and a finance executive with Burberry.com, according to the New York Times, which reported that "the company’s live presentation, said one judge at Stern’s finals this year, Paul Sciabica, executive director of New York Angels, was 'investment-bank quality.'"

The audience at the TechStars demo day seemed pumped about ToVieFor. It was targeting an industry with a lot of money and Ms. Moore put on a poised presentation ("It's eBay done right"). But of the total $237,000 raised, which included $12,000 from TechStars, $20,000 from the founders and $130,000 from angel investors, Ms. Moore said, none of the funding came after demo day.

During TechStars, ToVieFor tried to adapt to be more like a typical, full-price retailer. "This satisfied the brands, and we began to establish partnerships with designers in the luxury category," she wrote in an email. "But as a result of this change, we lost our competitive edge in the marketplace. We were then going head-to-head with retailers like Net-a-Porter and Shopbop, with no real competitive advantage over these businesses."

Betabeat asked if she had any regrets. "Nope. Everything that happened, for better or worse, is a lesson I can now take with me to my next company," she said.

It sounds like there were several lessons to be learned in the company's whirlwind journey from contest winners to startup darlings. "Throughout the program, it became clear that the business ToVieFor was pursuing had a significant amount of business challenges," TechStarsNY director David Tisch said in an email. "There were questions around the game layer, how to get brands on board, and the competitive differentiation in acquiring customers. There were also some significant team challenges."

Co-founder Susanne Greenfield left the company before TechStars started. Co-founder and CTO Eric Jennings left for Singly about a month after TechStars ended, when ToVieFor was struggling to get funding. About three weeks later, Ms. Moore decided to shut the company down.

"I am incredibly proud of how mature Melanie was in the decision to shut down ToVieFor," Mr. Tisch said. "It was the right decision for where she was at. I am excited to see what she does next."

Ms. Moore isn't sure what her next step is yet, she told Betabeat in an email. But she's evaluating two opportunities at the moment and plans to speak more publicly about her experience at ToVieFor and her take on the fashion industry in the next couple months.

Ms. Moore recently wrote some of her thoughts on the fashion 2.0 space in a blog post called, "Building a Fashion Company on the Internet? Please Stop. Just Stop. And Read This," about the tendency of investors and web entrepreneurs to overemphasize "discoverability" when the real business opportunities are closer to the supply chain.

"Fashion 2.0 is really not that much different than Fashion 1.0," she wrote. "In order to win, one must focus intently on building a better product that solves a real problem--you know, just like every other successful business in the world."