Here's a novel idea for flexing your consumerist impulses on Cyber Monday: organize your shopping by a company's cap table. For Cyber Monday, First Round Capital, which specializes in ecommerce, has set a site that shows off exclusive deals from portfolio companies like Birchbox, Chloe & Isabel, Refinery 29, Hotel Tonight, UrbanSitter, TaskRabbit, DogVacay, One Kings Lane, and more.

Honestly, we're surprised New York techies haven't already set up a buy local site that encourages only shopping at startups for Christmas.

"The real power of [the site]," First Round partner Phineas Barnes told Betabeat, "Is the ability to reach out to the tech community for people who care about the First Round brand." Many of Birchbox's subscribers "are probably not in the tech community, but plenty of people in the tech community would enjoy Birchbox or giving it as a gift," he added by phone during a car trip back into the city.

In a blog post introducing the holiday site, First Round managing director Josh Kopelman noted portfolio companies' experimentation with the ecommerce business model like subscription (Birchbox), curation (Fab), and vertical integration (Warby Parker). "These companies," he wrote, "have now go on to to raise over $350,000,000 in follow-on capital and will be shipping hundreds of thousands of products this holiday season to customers all over the world."

Mr. Kopelman was also careful to note the gifting site "isn't meant to replace our annual holiday video." Considering First Round went the Rebecca Black route last year, does that mean we can expect a "Gangnam Style" parody for 2012? "Maaaaaybe," said Mr. Barnes.

RETROACTIVE FOUNDING EDITOR. Last week, Betabeat wrote about Saul Hansell's move from AOL/Huffington Post to betaworks. "The founding editor of the Bits blog!" we trumpeted, as per Mr. Hansell's self-description. Oops. "Saul Hansell was not the founding editor of Bits," writes a source at the The New York Times. "He helped create it as a reporter and played no small part in getting it going as the first lead Bits blogger. But he was not the editor. He never was an editor at the Times."

THE GUESSING GAME CONTINUES. Who is @fakedavetisch? "Your guess is close; it's 2 people; it is one of the people on your list of 4, and the other one is missing," writes a local VC. "All the guesses are wrong for @fakedavetisch," said another founder. "It's a significant other of someone in the community." Hmm... new guesses:

Lauren Gilchrist. Because @fakedavetisch has excellent grammar.

Christine Lemke. Significant other, Twitter says similar to @fakedavetisch.

Elisa Cutrin Aller. Because homegirl is funny.

Phineas Barnes. Because we picked up a Twitter follow from this candidate, although that could have been because of the other thing.

Phineas Barnes: The VC's tweets are stylistically similar, and @fakedavetisch tweeted to his #todayskicks app. "But pretty sure Phineas doesn't have a mean bone in his body," one VC countered.

Caren Maio: We got a tip that the Nestio CEO and TechStar could be the brilliant mind behind the snark. "Haha no, I'm not...but please let me know when you find out! I've been trying to figure it out for months," she told Betabeat in an email.

Phoebe Espiritu: The hackstar doth protest too much, wethinks... "Nooo keep @fakedavetisch's identity secret! It would be like unmasking Batman!" she tweeted. Sounds like something @fakedavetisch would say, we countered. "No! I wish! otherwise I'd give myself hugs and hoodies all the time!" she said.

Sarah Tavel: The Bessemer VC just moved out to S.F. One source said she's too much of a straight shooter; another claimed she "wasn't around for TechStars." But we're not so sure...

Or perhaps it's one of the mischief-makers at Betaworks, well-known for their puckish fake Twitters @ArcticTonyPuns, @bw_ac and @hallwaycat. Got a clue? Tell us all you know.

YOUR MONEY OR... YOUR LIFE. It all started with a question that had been bugging us: do investors encourage their investees to buy health insurance? Or is that not lean? Betabeat hit the phones and we found out something fun: health insurance is rarely a requirement in term sheets, but life insurance often is. Some VC firms are more aggressive about it than others--Union Square Ventures seems keen on it, though, as apparently the Shapeways founders had to get policies. Now the question is, how much are they worth?

HOMETOWN LOYALTY. Yay! Foursquare is here to stay! Betabeat has learned that Foursquare's lease on its new office in Soho is currently drafted until 2018--meaning the startup plans to stick around in NYC for a good long time--it's only like, four years old, remember--despite recently opening an apparently very trendy San Francisco office. The deal hasn't been signed yet, as far as we know, but it's really looking like Foursquare got the space despite a last-minute threat from future building mate ZocDoc.

#freshtodeath

At a certain point, naming your blog after your obsession just doesn't cut it anymore. First Round Capital's Phineas Barnes, who blogs under the URL Sneakerhead VC debuted a truly Made in NYC app today with help from peeps like Amanda Peyton, Foursquare's Eric Friedman, and HackStar Rebecca Zhou.

The app is called Today's Kicks and sounds sort of like an Instagram for sneakers. To populate it with pics, Mr. Barnes pulls every image from the Twitter hashtag #todayskicks, which he started back in 2007 (the domain name was already in use). In keeping with the All Things Social revolution, users can "love" images (liking is for suckers, ya heard?) and a "Retweet" button to spread the images far-and-wide. Indeed, Betabeat's Twitter feed was blowing up with  shoe porn this morning.

The other part of Mr. Barnes' motivation for developing the app was keeping his instincts on point in terms of relating to entrepreneurs. "As an investor, I want to stay sharp by doing and this project has been really valuable. I was able to recruit a team around an idea, work to build a shared vision and be part of executing on a product from concept to launch." So you're saying watching TechStars episodes alone isn't enough?

Betabeat would love to join in the app fun, but the beat-up suede loafer crowd just doesn't inspire the same sense of community. Sigh.

"Having to give up on your company sucks for a month or two and it hurts forever, but it is not failure – if these teams are absorbed back into the world of cubicles and are allowed to return to the jobs they walked away from in the first place, that will be failure, and failure at the community level. When you meet the founder of  a failed business, reach out your hand, pick them up and do everything you can to keep them involved in our community... because our community depends on it."

Mr. Barnes’s plea reminded us of a reoccurring theme we’d heard while reporting on New York’s geek gap. In "Raiders of the Last Nerd," this week’s feature on tech recruiting, Kinda Sorta Media’s Rex Sorgatz offered Betabeat an ominous-sounding take on the struggle to hire local talent, “If you want a CTO, you have to go to, like, Tel Aviv.” But we didn’t have the space in the paper to really delve into why.

In his experience, Mr. Sorgatz said it wasn’t so much that New York was short on rockstar coders. Rather, it’s a side effect of the entrepreneurial bug gone viral. “People now run four-person companies where they may have otherwise led a five-person tech team in a twenty-person company.” (Is this a good time to say we told ya so? No? Okay, just checking.)

As evidence of this epidemic of Markus Zuckerbergius, Mr. Sorgatz offered up a recent incident between a “prominent start-up in town” and TechStars, a high-profile start-up accelerator. The prominent start-up got upset after TechStars convinced a recruit they wanted to hire for a top product position to launch his own company instead.

Charlie O’Donnell, who works with Mr. Barnes at First Round, noted the same phenomenon. “There’s more of a displacement than there is a shortage. If you just looked at all of the available appetite for developers, then you could say, yeah, there’s more money in ideas chasing after good people,” he told Betabeat, adding “But not all those ideas are good ideas.” Mr. O’Donnell, who now spends a third of his time helping start-ups in First Round’s portfolio staff-up, didn’t seem to think it was a lost cause. “To me the fact there’s anybody left working as a developer for Fox News over in Midtown, tells me there’s still work left to be done.”

The flip side of start-up fever, of course, is that not all of those wanna-be Zucks are going to make it. “There are a lot of people working for companies that are going sideways, companies where the writing’s on the wall,” said Mr. O’Donnell. Skeptics about the value of getting paid in equity, take note. “That’s the nature of the seed and angel stage market, not all of them are going to make it to a Series A. That’s where most of them drop off, because it’s the most risky point.” This also happens to be the point where Mr. Barnes is hoping founders who did make it past the valley of death will swoop in with job offers to keep the lost souls from wandering back to the corporate world.

Mr. Sorgatz offered a similar vision of the future. “It’s impossible that the rate of success stays as high as it has been, and many of these start-ups are going to have to decide if they are going to be viable companies, and I suspect a lot of them will not be. I would not call it the bubble bursting, but there will be a shift in the talent.”

It’s a cyclical process, explained Mr. O’Donnell. That’s why you’ve seen so many acquisition hires from start-ups launched a year-and-a-half ago. (Like Brooklyn’s Sam Lessin, whose start-up Drop.io was purchased by Facebook in October... mainly to acquire Mr. Lessin). “It’s saying, ‘Listen, we’ll put a little money in your pocket and make you feel good about that little product you started. Don’t feel bad you ended on a zero.’”

So next time you hear about a start-up with a questionable concept or execution, think of it less as a doomed-to-failure, and more as a rising talent pool for your own (no doubt rock solid) idea keeping you up at night.

Actual logo not pictured.

As far as bloated, staid industries desperately in need of disruption go, it's hard to get bigger than healthcare. Which might be why we've been seeing more start-ups aiming to do just that get some accelerator and investor love recently. Who cares about sexiness when there's a brave new market to create.

First Round Capital is certainly has its ears perked. Earlier this week, First Round, along with Charles River Ventures, The Band of Angels, and Maneesh Arora, a former product manager at Google Health, invested a combined $1.7 million to seed MotherKnows, an online health record service targeted directly at parents. (The start-up is based in Menlo Park, but presented at TechCrunch Disrupt in NYC.)

Currently in beta and accepting sign-ups, MotherKnows aims to give parents round-the-clock access to their kids' health records (immunizations, allergies, growth charts, etc.) The data is encrypted, but parents can decide to share it with doctors, caregivers, or schools-- in theory making the cumbersome, antiquated process of accessing health care records more immediate and user-friendly.

In a post on his Tumblr, Sneakerhead VC, First Round's Phineas Barnes says he sees companies like MotherKnows as "consumerizing" the healthcare in the same way that the video game Dance Dance Revolution brought consumer tech to health and wellness.

The revolution in health care will not require the entry of social security numbers in triplicate with each visit just so they can be transposed via carbon copy, read into a series of dictations on mini-cassette tapes by doctors and transcribed into digital form by the same person who handed you the form when you showed up 15 minutes early for your doctor who was running 45 minutes late. It will not require pencil and paper or photocopies of insurance cards and the memorization of group numbers and co-pays. The revolution will know who you are and remind you where you have been, what treatment you have had and how you got better. The health care revolution will be consumerized.

The revolution will not be installed on a circa 1995 piece of equipment and rented out for thousands of dollars a night. It will not get processed and printed onto a billing statement to be mailed to your home and then forwarded to your insurance provider only to be rejected and re-submitted over and over. The revolution will be found in an appstore and it will run on your smartphone for free. It will capture data, motivate action and enable the treatment of the causes of disease not the symptoms. The revolution will help us all become consumers of wellness through better behavior and enable patients to walk in and demand that their doctor treat them as a person rather than a set of symptoms. The revolution will be consumerized.

Agents of the revolution, you know who to call.