Mr. Morton.

They grow up so fast, don't they? Local social shopping site Lyst, which launched April 2011, has just raised a $5 million Series A. Led by London-based DFJ Esprit, with Accel Partners, Alex Zubillaga and Venrex participating, the round will allow Lyst to staff up and work on building out its back end.

Ironic, right? Considering they're a fashion startup and all.

Like Pinterest or Tumblr, the site allows users to follow feeds from brands, stores, bloggers, and so forth. That creates a curated feed of products that you might like to perhaps purchase. If you like an item but not the price, you can add it to your "lyst" and receive a notice when it goes on sale.

That creates some technical challenges. Asked about his plans for the cash via email, CEO Chris Morton told us, "The funding will let us continue improving our site and the data behind it  - every single day tens of thousands of brand new items come onto Lyst so we're dealing with some quite complex problems!"

"Our aim is to put the consumer at the centre of the shopping experience: everyone is different, they like different things, so we want to give everyone their own, personalized experience when they shop," he added.

While they have everyone's attention, the company also announced it's been doubling its sales each month for the last three months. Of course, that could mean a lot of things. Mr. Morton told us,

"We don't disclose our actual sales figures, but last quarter millions of people used Lyst, driving millions of dollars in sales. Our average order value is $300."

In a statement released with the announcement, DFJ Esprit partner Nic Brisbourne called the company's potential for expansion "tremendous," and added,

"Social networking is part of all aspects of life today and fashion brands are keen to gain exposure through channels such as Facebook and Pinterest, with Lyst converting this exposure into purchases. The monies raised will be invested in development, marketing and partnerships to improve the user experience on Lyst and accelerate growth.”

The company will also continue to grow its teams in both New York and London.

Mr. von Themsche (right). (Photo: thecools.tumblr.com)

Picture the cash-grab hustle of eBay with the stylish sensibilities of Tumblr’s fashion community and you have The Cools,  the latest entrant to the social shopping fray, which offers users a chance to express themselves--and the ability to sell their stuff.

The site launched yesterday, with $2.5 million in funding from private investors including MTV founder Bob Pittman and a roster of big-name advisors, including LVMH heir Antoine Arnault, Fiat heir Lapo Elkann, and Fab.com COO Beth Ferreira (as far as we know, not an heiress).

As you might expect from the presence of those names, browsing the site today reveals a lot of vintage and a lot of painfully fashion-forward clothing.

Asked about the site's genesis, creator Olivier van Themsche pointed to his Parisian friends in the fashion industry, who, three years or so ago, always seemed to be buying and selling interesting items on eBay: "I was surprised, because the most stylish people I knew were using eBay, which for was me not the sexiest platform out there. On top of that, eBay was not really convenient for fashion," he told Betabeat.

Combine the concept of a more stylish alternative with that of social media and style blogs, and he had this idea for site that "allows people to express themselves and to mix product and content," he said.

Upon signing up, users customize their feed by answering a series of questions, then by following profiles of bloggers, sellers, stores, artists, and so forth. "You will be interested and naturally attracted by different types of profiles, so if we do a good job, we should push you towards the type of profiles, whether they're creators, whether they're sellers, or whether they're just users, that could be interesting for you. And then you make your choice," Mr. von Themsche told us.

Then, on the profile side of things, you can either treat it as a kind of Tumblr-like style blog or take it a step further and list items for sale.

It's the sale aspect where The Cools makes its money. The site takes a 12 percent commission on any sales, but there's no charge for users to create a profile and list items for sale. So your average user could turn to the site to unload that bag that doesn't quite suit her closet any more, but small designers and artists can also deploy it as a kind of quick-and-dirty ecommerce offering.

Mr. von Themsche believes that's what distinguishes the site from platforms like Pinterest, The Fancy, and Svpply: "You take a product that is anywhere on the web and you can create a discussion about the product, but you don't have in that discussion the owner of the product."

Mike Lazerow

You always remember the ones that got away. Tell us about the start-up you regret passing on the most.

Well I bought into Facebook pretty early, but looking back, I had the chance to get in much sooner. They were pre-revenue and the valuation seemed high, so I passed. Zynga is like that too. Mark Pincus is a board member of Buddy Media and was at the time he was founding Zynga. I could certainly have been more vocal, could have pushed harder, to be an early investor in that, but at the time I didn't really see it. Veterans like Fred Wilson or Brad Feld, who can separate the signal from the noise, they looked at Zynga and saw a company with a proven founder entering a wide open space with a huge market. I saw an online poker app. 

What “me too” trend should we avoid or invest in?

Inside the beltway consumer tech start-ups, these light apps that aren’t solving a real business problem or a deep human need, are going to get crushed. Foursquare is going to do very well, but even the largest check-in app is 10 million people, compared to Facebook’s 700 million. It’s really hard for me to believe that there is enough real business to support the explosion of mobile and tablet apps I see these days.

What’s the weirdest pitch you ever heard?

I like crazy ideas, so to me most pitches don't sound strange. I thought Netflix was the worst idea ever. I mean for years, the bigger they got the more money they lost. Reed Hastings had the balls to keep investing in the company and to ignore the markets and the naysayers. Turns out Netflix is one of the biggest and best businesses to come out of the last wave of the internet. Oh wait, I did get one strange pitch recently. Someone pitched me a shoe company for women with six toes. No, I'm not kidding.

What’s the best way to ride out a bubble?

I've been angel investing for about five years, but this is the first year I've taken it really seriously. I was just heads down with Buddy Media and now its running on its own steam to the point where I can blink, where I can take one percent of my time for something else.

Over the last year I have done a dozen deals in the spaces I know best, ad-tech and social. Because of my position with Buddy Media, and the way social has become central to everything, I am being invited into a lot more deals.

I'm not a very experienced investor, so I don't like to lead. I look for a great management team and strong partners in the funding. Having really big, smart money in your syndicate is the best way to avoid getting your ass handed to you.

I know I can't pick the next Facebook, so my strategy is to try and get into as many goo deals as possible and hope a third of them turn out to be hits.

The last thing you want to hear from a founder is?

"I can't." It takes someone to will these companies into existence and at the end of the day its not going to be the investors. I look for great DNA in a company, and so often when the founders leave, they take what was driving the business with them.

Explain, without jargon, what the word pivot means to you.

Pivot is a really annoying, overused word. But I think by definition what a good start-up does is to pivot, and to continue to do that until they are a real company and no longer a start-up. Your job is to become a mature, profitable business, and you react and you iterate until you reach that goal. That is the kind of approach that has driven the tech ecosystem in this country for decades. So even with a company like Sticky Bits, which became Turntable.fm, and that's maybe something beyond a pivot, its such a big change, but more power to them. Now when I see a big established company with 500 employees and they are telling people about how they plan to pivot from a location-based service to mobile games, that is not a pivot, that just means your company is fucked.