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.

GENERAL ASSEMBLY DEMO NIGHT. Is tonight (and $10, why?)

NEW WORK CITY. Hit 100 members.

WEWORK LABS. Has an important announcement to make tonight about the future of the coworking space. (We hear it's good news.)

PARTIES PARTIES. Yext holiday party, December 12 at The Standard.

HIRING. Signpost seeks a chief miscellaneous officer, a publisher and channel relationships manager and a business development associate. Sageworks Capital, an interesting breed of investment firm, seeks a software developer and a biz dev associate. "Sageworks Capital’s cloud-based platform allows borrowers to increase their pool of prospective lenders from beyond traditional banks to include private and institutional investors. Sageworks Capital is a newly-formed subsidiary of Sageworks, Inc. and is based in New York City."

JUST SAYING HI. "I recently founded InsideDigs.com, a free peer-to-peer community for apartment hunters looking for rental information on apartments before they hit the market. The site launched in December 2010 for New York City and already has more than 2700 members."

FASHIONABLE CAPITAL. "FashInvest, Ltd., has released its list of companies that will be presenting at its Second Annual Capital Conference on Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.  After receiving a record amount of applications from companies vying to present at this year’s conference, the selection committee has carefully chosen a select group of innovative companies from the Fashion, Fashion Tech, Retail and Branded Goods consumer sectors to present their distinctive opportunities to an audience of venture capital, private equity, institutional and individual angel investors." The list of companies is here.

IDK WE MIGHT GO. Does anyone else here hate Plancast? Betabeat does! We also hate Google Calendar! So much clicking! So it was of great interest to us to see that WeWork Labs-based startup Tentative.ly has soft launched to let you easily bookmark events across the web.

CAPTURE THE FOURSQUARE. From New Work City and New Zealand startup Snapr: "We are launching a new app - Capture the Flag "The Mobile Photosharing Game of World Domination" that's built off our API and takes advantage of our soon to be announced location based gaming features. You can see a demo for the game and download the app here: http://capturethefl.ag/. In the game people join teams and then check in photos to win territory."

GLAD TO SEE YOU'RE WELL! New York-based content recommendation engine writes in to say they're doing awesome. According to public relations reps, "Outbrain has grown 600 percent growth over the last 18 months. We're installed on more than 3 billion content pages. We generate 23 billion links each month. Content shared through Outbrain has a six percent click-through rate." Betabeat might kill ourselves if we had a six percent CTR. But congrats! You can also see Outbrain at their event during Advertising Week.

BUILDING A BETTER NEWSLETTER. "FanBridge has announced the launch of Social Digest, a service that aggregates the most popular content posted on a performers or athlete’s social media accounts into a singular email [was that word use intentional? -ed]. For brands and performers, social Digest ensures that the stickiest content and most popular posts and comments are seen by subscribers. For advertisers, it’s more of a direct path to the influencers they want to target. They did a beta test in July that pulled an 18% click-thru rate on social content , which is three times more than a general campaign."

MAJOR, GAME-CHANGING LAUNCHES. "Good morning Adrianne, I wanted to take a minute of your time to send you information on a major, game-changing launch NYC’s BuyWithMe is announcing today: BuyWithMe is announcing the launch of MerchantConnect, the industry’s first performance based marketing platform. MerchantConnect allows businesses real-time access to customers engaging in daily deal and loyalty enhancing promotions. By using a card-linked engagement tracking system, businesses are now able to monitor and track the success of their daily promotions. This allows businesses to better understand customer buying habits, trends, patterns and repeat purchase habits."

LEARNIN'. Fall HackNY student hackathon is the weekend of October 1. Only students can code, but everyone can watch.

Betabeat caught up with Ms. Yeoh to ask about plans for DealBurner. 

So CityPockets acquired Dealburner. Does that mean Jason Fertel is a CityPockets employee now?

Yes, he'll be our Director of Engineering--our 5th employee.

When did you start thinking Dealburner might make a good feature for CityPockets?

CityPockets has always had Dealburner in our product roadmap. In fact, the week he launched it, was the week we were supposed to build it! Naveen from Foursquare actually saw my demo for SXSW back in March and when we chatted, he actually hinted at this idea and encouraged us to build on top of their API... so we've had this in mind for a long time now. But we didn't manage to get to it with all the fundraising, relaunching of website, hiring, etc. until now.

Anyway so I thought, hey, why reinvent the wheel and compete against another start-up? I decided to meet up with Jason to see if our visions aligned and if he could potentially be a good fit as an employee at CityPockets... and not just an employee but someone who can help us drive the company forward. After meeting with him, I decided it's worth a shot given that it's so competitive these days to find a talented and good engineer. The fact that Jason had previously built an app and a company was a good enough indication that he has the startuppy spirit that we're looking for.

What's the timeline for integration?

We're working on something major right now but I promise you'll see it soon and we'll let Betabeat know!

Is Jason hoping to bring on his former employees from his original start-up?

Not yet but possibly in the near future. We always need great iPhone developers and mobile is going to be a core strategy for us going forward.

CityPockets and Dealburner both started working out of WeWork Labs. Is this a sign of an emerging WeWork mafia?

Yes, out of the five CityPockets employees now, four were previously WWL tenants (including Jin Kim who sat next to me and was my UI/UX consultant to redesign CityPockets before I hired her to be full time). Jin is now my Director of Product & Design and plays an instrumental role in driving CityPockets' product roadmap. She brings years of experience at PayPal & Ebay and is insanely talented.

Strictly varsity, ya'll.

. . . You gots to put a shingle up to attract the start-up talent. With a 1.7 percent acceptance rate for its last class, TechStars NY already bested the Ivy League at its own game: the enviable aura of exclusivity. But New York's glut of incubators, accelerators, and co-working spaces—all loosely-organized around the goal of mentoring, housing, funding and growing baby start-ups into big companies—have led to a noticeable distinction between the varsity and JV leagues of support networks.  Admission into TechStars vaunted ranks, of course, comes with $18,000 in funding—and exposure. And even General Assembly is known for having VCs saunter-through its effortlessly cool coworking space, which has led to some investment deals.

This coming Monday, less-proven concepts like NYU-Poly, one of NYC EDC's earliest booster investments (before they went the more grassroots, General Assembly-route), as well as Hive 55, NYDesigns, and WeWork Labs, are hosting a "Incubator Showcase" to show-off what they can offer. It's free for NYTECH members and sponsors, but $20 for non-members.  Hey, no one wants to look cheap.

Baller start-up pro-tip: Raise a seed round? It's fancy sandwich time.

A side project we counseled to turn start-up is headed to San Francisco to join the elite incubator Angelpad, founded by ex-Googlers in 2010. IDoneThis, the productivity hack from Walter Chen and Rodrigo Guzman, told us a month ago they had applied to a few incubators--including New York's brand-new Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator--but it seems they'll be shipping off to Cali even though "New York has been good to us." We look forward to hearing dispatches from the relatively new incubator, which mostly selects start-ups run by more experienced entrepreneurs, and to enjoying the sandwiches at their celebratory open sandwich bar party next week.

IDoneThis is the second company out of new co-working space/incubator WeWork Labs to get funded. CityPockets closed on an oddly-uneven $550,092 about a month ago and moved into a new office. Fast-growing fitness tracking site Fitocracy is sniffing around for investment and could be the next WWL start-up to get capital.

Fitocracy, which tracks workouts and turns personal fitness into a social game, has had a good six months. The two-person, bootstrapped start-up has users foaming at the mouth for invites--and we've got some!--and they've just hired a third developer to join the team working out of WeWork Labs. "Every time we've introduced Fitocracy to a forum community, people go nuts for invites," co-founder Brian Wang wrote on Quora yesterday in a call for angel funding. 

Fitocracy, which launched in February, encourages users to hook into their social graphs in order to broadcast their fitness activities, compete with friends and earn those little happy brain chemical rewards that are triggered when points are earned and "badges" are awarded.

The site blew up on the fitness section of Reddit and hit its first challenge: performance slowed to molasses. Fitocracy's founders decided it would be better to have a wait list than have new users experience a laggy app while they scrambled to upgrade their servers. The list has ballooned to more than 6,000.

Fitocracy also hired an early power user, Daniel Roesler, an engineer from Houston who lobbied for his job with home-brewed beers and programming advice over Skype.

But a similar start-up, Boston-based Runkeeper, is also doing really, really well; and just announced the Health Graph, an API that will aggregate data from scales, phones, and other fitness devices.

"People might consider us competitors, but we don't see it that way," Mr. Wang said. "For one, they're focused just on cardio, and mainly running at that while we're capturing much more. And beyond that, we see them as a data layer, whereas we're trying to do some interesting stuff on top of that with the so-called 'game layer.'"