Pieratt. (Photo: Brooklyn Beta)

eBay announced on its blog today that it has acquired Svpply, the NYC-based social shopping site that curates personalized collections of clothing and products. Located on Broome Street in Soho, Svpply raised $550,000 in seed funding back in 2010 from investors like Founders Collective, Spark Capital, SV Angel, Dennis Crowley and Jason Hirschhorn. Since then, Svpply has been bootstrapping itself to 620,000 product views per week and 140,000 registered members (as of May).

Last May, founder Ben Pieratt offered a candid perspective on first-time entrepreneurship, admitting his vulnerability. "I have zero experience or expertise in building a company," he wrote in a 2011 blog post. "So I'm learning on the fly."

Mr. Pierrat summed up a list of things he'd need to learn how to do, or Svpply would fail. Hey, in startup parlance, we'd say an acqui-hire counts as quite a success.

At least Svpply's other cofounder, parallel entrepreneur extraordinaire Zach Klein, brought some experience to the team. Mr. Klein is a partner at Founders Collective, and has had a hand in a plethora of successful startups. He cofounded Vimeo and BustedTees, helped launch CollegeHumor, worked as chief product officer at Boxee and serves as a director for both Skillshare and Svpply. According to AllThingsD, Mr. Klein linked up with Svpply in the spring of 2010 when he "connected with Ben Pieratt, a Boston-based designer who started Svpply in late 2009."

eBay's blog post suggests that the move to purchase Svpply is largely an acqui-hire:

With Svpply.com, eBay gains access to technology talent to further improve the shopping and selling experience for its customers. Svpply.com assets – including a talented team of six designers and developers – are well-suited to help eBay advance more personalized experiences and merchandising options on eBay.com.

Based in New York (see the office, above), the Svpply.com employees will work on merchandising, non-search discovery and browsing.

eBay has been aggressively ramping up its presence in New York as of late. Back in November, the online auction platform acquired NYC-based Hunch, a personalized recommendation engine. Then in April, eBay snapped up a massive 350,000 square foot office in the Flatiron. Guess they needed a few more devs to fill up those desks.

Svpply insists in a blog post that the site's not going anywhere anytime soon. "Svpply is not going away," it reads. "We’ll continue to bring our users new products each day—allowing our loyal fans to explore beautiful products and stores, all of them hand selected by the community."

Greg Leppert, Svpply's third cofounder, said the Svpply team would work on both eBay and the Svpply site. "We'll continue to build Svpply and our community and apply what we learn to eBay," he told Betabeat by email. Mr. Leppert also said that Svpply will not be rolled into eBay, but that both sites will remain distinct from each other.

"We’re excited to join the eBay and Hunch teams in the new state-of-the-art technology development center in New York City!" Svpply added in a blog post. Shake them pom-poms, y'all.

Additional reporting contributed by Nitasha Tiku.

Betabeat has learned that ZocDoc has been in the market for new space--60,000 square feet, ideally on one floor--for a move at the end of 2012. There's not much out there that meets that criteria. Wouldn't it be nice to take the tenth floor at 568 Broadway, directly above the teal-painted ninth floor? That way they wouldn't have to say goodbye to that conference room with the mural of Sanjay Gupta high-fiving Dr. House! ZocDoc would probably really like it if Foursquare would only take one floor, which is more than three times the size of Foursquare's current office, so that ZocDoc could take the other.

But both companies are growing like gangbusters--ZocDoc already expanded in March and then again in October, Foursquare is the hottest startup job in the city--and have to look out for expansion down the road. What's a big startup in a small town to do?*

VERY PINTERESTING. Betabeat, when we first glimpsed the Silicon Alley darling Pinterest for ourselves: "It's for girls!" Apparently, it's also for middle America. Pinterest's biggest market is Utah, we heard, and it's gaining steam with users in other middle-America states, contrary to the usual outside-in adoption pattern most startups see.

Betabeat mentioned to a source that many peeps using Pinterest in New York, who responded. "Don't people just use Svpply?" Do they? We don't see too many peeps using Svpply either. One thing we do see peeps using is Tumblr--although we've documented that startup's other problems on the business and developer relations fronts. Could Pinterest--which picked up New York angel Brian Cohen as an investor after taking the NYU Stern business plan competition by storm--be on the way to taking down two New York startups in one fell swoop?

NOM NOM POSTLING. "Some big companies are considering acquiring Postling," a source told Betabeat. "Can't say names. Big, multi-billion dollar public companies." Well! Cue completely random speculation! Microsoft! Amazon! Google! Nielson! If one of these is right, you all have to buy the rumor roundup a cookie!

HIGHLY-COVETED ZOMBIE TAXIS. Groundlink, the latest app-enabled car service to blunder its way into the city that epitomizes mass transit, is grinning over Uber's decision to charge double-price on Halloween (a notoriously HORRIBLE night for cabs). Fingers crossed! Perhaps the first mover's hike can be Groundlink's gain. But the second mover could find itself in the same pickle that provoked Uber into pumping up the price--overwhelming demand. "Ninety-five percent of requests resulted in 'No Cars Available,' leaving Uber riders stranded," Uber wrote on its blog. "Even worse, those few riders who succeeded had to refresh their Uber app for an hour or more before getting a highly-coveted Uber ride."

SECOND GUESSES. Portfolio managers at the mega-hedge fund SAC Capital just don't get SecondMarket! The fund was recently hunting desperately for people who understand SecondMarket to join the team. Ah, where did we hear something about the billionaire-run hedge fund and the secondary markets? Right, Dealbook reported SAC investors have listed more than two dozen side-pocket stakes with Shelley Capital Advisers, which advises hedge funds on the secondary market.

IF YOU CAN CODE, PEOPLE WILL LITERALLY BUY YOU ANYTHING YOU WANT. Apparently a Swiss-based startup, iKentoo SA, is announcing a hackathon-slash-dream-vacation--a one month development sprint, as the company puts it. IKentoo is proposing to fly independent developers, all expenses paid, to the famous ski resort at Verbier, Switzerland to spend one month coding and skiing with the iKentoo team. Upon completion of the one month hackathon, the participants will also receive about $5,000 USD in Swiss francs.

*Joke explainer: While New York City is a big place, the startup scene feels like a small town.

Not true, says ADstruc's John Laramie. "We raised $1.1m on September 27th 2010, which means we would have had to burn $90,000 a month for a team that was just four people as of a month ago to be officially out of money," he said in an email. "ADstruc isn't even close to spending that much money on a monthly basis. We couldn't be more pleased with how and where we have invested our money and the great results we continue to see." However, Mr. Laramie had promised Betabeat a present. We never got said present. Also, when we asked if this meant ADstruc was not raising a round, Mr. Laramie stopped responding. The company is now up to six people and hiring for three positions.

VISITING DIGNITARIES. ZocDoc had a secret birthday party today for its four-year anniversary, to which press were not invited. The guest speaker was Tom Daschle, the former U.S. senator from South Dakota and Senate Majority Leader who co-authored a book on universal health care and is now working for global law firm DLA Piper.

WOOD CABIN FOR SALE. Angel-faced technohipster Zach Klein of CollegeHumor/Vimeo/Svpply broke up with his girlfriend, Courtney Lewis of Hard Candy Shell, and is moving to California, stomping out the last faint possibility of the "Zach Klein, upstate woodsman" story that every New York media outlet has been frothing to do. So. What happens to the cabin?

BLIND BETS. Two startups which have had extensive Betabeat coverage have raised money, Betabeat has heard. The first, a hardware startup, we heard secondhand. The second, which is not a hardware startup, was extended an offer to join 500Startups. A startup Betabeat has never written about (but we should have) will most likely be bought by Dropbox in the very near future. (Can you tell we're bursting to spill? But we pinky-swore to be patient upon promise of greater rewards. When the time comes we will write articles, glorious articles.)

I have zero experience or expertise in building a company. I’ve never worked at a web or product startup, I’ve never worked in a healthy team environment. The design studio I co-owned was flawed to its core, and the companies I’ve worked at have had mediocre management.

So I’m learning on the fly.

Things I don’t know how to do that I have to learn soon or Svpply will fail:

- How to find and recruit talent
- Recruiting the appropriate kind of talent
- Managing people and keeping them fulfilled in their work
- How to develop and design a work schedule
- How to communicate a vision

Speaking publicly about the slow development of new features, the bouts of worry and depression and the deep technical problems at his company was probably a relief for Pieratt. It generated an burst of support from the Tumblr community and drew attention from various media outlets. The post is title "My Job Pt. 1 - I have no idea what I'm doing", and Pieratt's investors and employees are no doubt waiting to see what he reveals next.