TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde announced her departure today.

I’m so angry.

Drift back to the end of 2006. TechCrunch was a year and a half old. My hobby had turned into a business. Federated Media was selling our standard ads and sent a small check every month. Nik Cubrilovic had “invented” the notion of a 125 pixel square ad that we’d sell for a flat rate, which was an unqualified success and was quickly copied by everyone else. We had enough money to have a staff, and things were looking pretty good.

But we had a massive hole in the organization. There was no sales team, and no one to handle all the important parts of a business. I began to recruit Heather Harde, an executive at Fox, to fill that hole. It took months before she agreed, but in March 2007 she was on board.

Heather was a perfect fit at TechCrunch. She’s dogged and ambitious and willing to take massively risky bets when it makes sense. She’s also the most even tempered, thoughtful person I know personally. Think Dalai Lama calm, even in the face of my monthly “the sky is falling” proclamations. No matter how messy things got, Heather just kept on marching, and everyone followed.

What I did right, and this is important, is I hired Heather to be my boss. That gave her the authority she needed to run the company. A lot of our competitors seemed more ego driven, with the blogger demanding to stay CEO. That meant they hired less awesome people, and then those people didn’t have the room to maneuver. As a result, we grew much more quickly than they did.

Revenue was marginal when she joined, maybe $500,000 in 2006. By the time we sold TechCrunch revenue was $10 million a year. And this last year under Aol Heather grew revenue by another 50% or, based on what I’ve seen reported.

Other than dial up, TechCrunch is/was the most profitable and fastest growing business unit inside of Aol.

That, ultimately, is why everything fell apart.

When I jointly announced CrunchFund with Aol a few months ago, everything was humming at TechCrunch. The core writing and business team was intact nearly a year after the acquisition, no small accomplishment. We were crushing our competition. Not just beating them but actually dominating the tech news space.

TechCrunch continued to get so much attention that, I later understood, it chafed Arianna Huffington. Even though TechCrunch reported to her, in her eyes any attention TechCrunch got was just less attention for her.

This became a turf war between me and Arianna Huffington, although I had no idea that there was a war going on until I’d lost it. Arianna made her classic political power move by publicly terminating me without approval or knowledge from Aol, and despite the fact that she’d already approved the CrunchFund announcement. My counter was to just blow the whole situation up and create chaos.

But I was also trying to carve TechCrunch away from Huffington Post via endless conversations with Aol. Give us the freedom to operate on our own, I begged, or sell TechCrunch back to us.

It seemed an easy thing to do. Aol’s multiple conflicting press statements left little doubt that things were a mess. But Aol, above all else, wanted to save face for Arianna. There would be no independence from HuffPo because Arianna would be upset. And TechCrunch was growing too fast, and was too profitable, to sell.

In other words, it makes perfect business sense to sacrifice TechCrunch and let it fall apart. The company has bet everything on Huffington, so anything that challenges her power, real or perceived, has to be destroyed.

If only Heather had slacked off that last year, and tanked the business. If that had happened, TechCrunch would almost certainly be independent and thriving today.

So it never happened. I “decided to move on“. Paul Carr resigned shortly afterward, and was knifed on the way out.

Then MG Siegler left to join me at CrunchFund. Heather and I (now as an outsider) worked hard to keep him at TechCrunch writing full time. But if he’d done that Huffington’s “principled” position on terminating me – that I was now an investor and could’t therefore write blog posts – no longer held water. So he was shuffled to the background, and TechCrunch lost the best tech writer on the planet. Siegler continues to write amazing content on his personal blog. All of that would be on TechCrunch, but for Arianna.

Then Sarah Lacy resigned in a hastily written blog post, afraid her credentials would be turned off like Carr’s were. How ridiculous that the people who built the site were, in the end, forced to run out the back door to preserve some dignity. I spent the last week before she resigned trying to find a way to keep her at TechCrunch.

And now Heather, who for some crazy reason stayed on at TechCrunch, dealing with constant verbal abuse from HuffPo execs (they refer to her by the “c” word over at HuffPo), just because it was the right thing to do.

It’s insane. She could do any job at AOL better than the person currently doing it. She should have been embraced and treasured. But Arianna had to…save face. So today Aol loses one of the only executives left in the company who actually knows how to run a business, profitably. I’d trade 100 Arianna’s for a Heather any day.

The body count at Aol is rising, and too many of these people were casualties of Arianna’s ego. Jon Brod was kicked to the curb for disagreeing with her about how to run the Huffington Post business. Brad Garlinghouse fell out of favor at least partially because he was the only one willing to call bullshit on her power grabs. And there are others.

Aol needs to decide whether it exists for the benefit of stockholders, users and employees, or whether it exists for the greater glorification of Arianna Huffington. She’s waging this political power war inside of Aol against anyone who stands “against” her. But no one’s fighting back because that’s not how they see the world. Instead they just drift off, to create real value at other companies who actually value them.

I’m still a shareholder in Aol (I bought stock earlier this year). I still believe that Tim Armstrong will figure this out and save the day. But the damage keeps piling up. It’s time to lead.

Photo Credit: Scott Beale

A lot of Jawbone Up users aren’t happy with their devices. There are so many issues, in fact, that the company is giving people a full refund for the device, no questions asked, and they can even keep the Up. The device is no longer for sale, but we can expect it back soon (I, for one, continue to use mine daily).

Lark, a competitor of the Up, is taking this opportunity to introduce Up users to their device, for free. Like the Up, Lark wakes you up with a silent vibrating wristband (it works, really well). Unlike the Up, Lark is completely focused on sleep health. Their app tells you how well you slept each night and gives helpful hints about improving your sleep. There’s a good review of the device here, and reviews on Apple are strong.

The Up also has an excellent pedometer and a way to track calories, so the two devices don’t overlap completely. But for people who are sick of their Up, they can now trade it in for a free Lark device, shipping included. Not bad for a device that sells at Apple stores for $100.

Details are here. All you have to do is ship your Up device to Lark and they’ll then send you a Lark device. There’s no limit to the number of devices Lark will send out, but if they’re overwhelmed they may eventually shut down the offer. So if you want to do this, do it fast.

As far as I can tell, the Up guarantee doesn’t preclude sending your device in to Lark even if you take the full refund. So you can get your money back from Jawbone and still get the Lark for free. Not a bad deal at all. And, yes, Lark says they’ll deliver the devices by Christmas if you trade in soon.

Full disclosure – Lark launched at a TechCrunch Disrupt event and is a portfolio company of CrunchFund. I continue to use, and love, both the Lark and the Up.

Here’s an interesting tidbit about Aol that’s being whispered around Silicon Valley – Aol is working with recruiting behemoth Spencer Stuart to hire a new business lead for the Huffington Post Media Group. The executive will report to Aol CEO Tim Armstrong, apparently, not Huffington.

Currently Arianna Huffington runs both the business and editorial sides of the group. Running a business is fairly new to her. Before the Aol Acquisition Eric Hippeau was the CEO, but he resigned just before the Aol deal was closed.

Aol exec Jon Brod ran the business after the acquisition, as COO of the group. But a dispute with Huffington led to a reassignment for Brod, who currently runs Patch at Aol.

By far the most interesting part of all this, though, is it’s not clear that Arianna Huffington is aware that the new position will report to Tim Armstrong, not Huffington.

Whatever happens, I’m pretty sure I won’t be getting my old job back.

Location based service Gowalla is going to shut down at the end of January. The two founders, Josh Williams and Scott Raymond, will be heading off to Facebook. Loyal Gowalla users will be stranded as the service shuts down. And some of the investors have told me that they’re pretty angry over the whole thing.

Is it an acquisition? Or rather a shutdown with the founders taking new jobs?

There’s no clear answer to that. Williams’ blog post is intentionally vague on that point. An email sent to investors, though, suggests that some kind of deal between the companies is happening.

Some investors seem to know the terms of the deal – they’ll be getting twenty or thirty cents back for every dollar invested (the company has raised a little more than $10 million). But most of the investors I spoke with had no idea what was going on, and what if anything they’d be receiving back for their dollars in.

This is a tricky topic for me to write about, since I’m now an investor. But in 2010 I dove into the topic, noting a trend of startups being acquired for not much money, but founders and key employees were being given rich stock deals on the side.

This goes way back to Parakey, acquired by Facebook in 2007. Parakey investors got their money back and a little more, but stock grants were given to the founders that are probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars today.

I was more blunt in 2010 when Facebook acquired Hot Potato – and noted that there’s a real issue of breach of fiduciary duty when a founder takes a side deal but doesn’t cut investors in.

Two Ways To Look At This

When a startup gets acquired in this way – where investors get very little compensation and founders get a whole lot of compensation – it can be seen in two ways.

The first way is this: Investors see themselves as being taken advantage of, providing capital for founders to essentially buff up their resume to get their dream job. When a company is acquired, they say, the value of stock grants should be considered acquisition value and divided up among all stockholders. If a founder leaves stockholders behind to take a lucrative side deal, they’re not acting ethically. I’ve mostly taken this position in the past, before becoming a VC.

But there’s another way to look at this, too. Some investors, particularly Ron Conway and David Lee at SV Angel, have told me for years that they aren’t bothered by these types of deals. The argument is that the company (whatever company was being acquired at the time) was clearly not going anywhere and would eventually shut down, so who cares if the founders cut themselves a nice deal going forward. The investment was already a write-off. Investors in this group tend to focus their attention on the winners in their portfolio, the companies that will eventually provide a 10x – 1000x return. There’s little chance the founders will bail out in those companies to take middle management positions at Facebook, they say.

In this case, Gowalla was a goner anyway, so there’s no real harm done with the pennies-on-the-dollar acquisition. Clearly the founders could have communicated a little more effectively to investors, rather than just thank them in the blog post for “playing a special role in seeing us to this day.” That feels like gloating and condescension, said one investor.

Also, Facebook and other companies doing these deals aren’t to blame. They want the employees and not the other assets, and they’re doing deals that make sense to them. It’s not their job to protect the shareholder rights of the companies they’re acquiring.

These deals will continue to happen, and investors will continue to be frustrated. But there’s very little they can really do to fight it without looking anti-entrepreneur. And I mostly agree that there isn’t anything to really fix, anyway, given that these startups were all on life support.

Focus on the winners, and don’t lose sleep over the losers. Seems like a good investment philosophy to me. And yes, I’d probably want to invest in Josh Williams and Scott Raymond the next time they start a company. They fought long and hard for a win. Next time they may get there.

Image credit

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. – Karl Marx

Jamie Zawinski takes issue with my post yesterday where I quoted him. Here’s his new post:

Watch a VC use my name to sell a con.

Normally I just ignore navel-gazing tech-industry articles like this, but people keep sending it to me, so I guess this guy is famous or something. Michael Arrington posted this article, “Startups Are Hard. So Work More, Cry Less, And Quit All The Whining” which quotes extensively from my 1994 diary.

He’s trying to make the point that the only path to success in the software industry is to work insane hours, sleep under your desk, and give up your one and only youth, and if you don’t do that, you’re a pussy. He’s using my words to try and back up that thesis.

I hate this, because it’s not true, and it’s disingenuous.

What is true is that for a VC’s business model to work, it’s necessary for you to give up your life in order for him to become richer.

Follow the fucking money. When a VC tells you what’s good for you, check your wallet, then count your fingers.

He’s telling you the story of, “If you bust your ass and don’t sleep, you’ll get rich” because the only way that people in his line of work get richer is if young, poorly-socialized, naive geniuses believe that story! Without those coat-tails to ride, VCs might have to work for a living. Once that kid burns out, they’ll just slot a new one in.

I did make a bunch of money by winning the Netscape Startup Lottery, it’s true. So did most of the early engineers. But the people who made 100x as much as the engineers did? I can tell you for a fact that none of them slept under their desk. If you look at a list of financially successful people from the software industry, I’ll bet you get a very different view of what kind of sleep habits and office hours are successful than the one presented here.

So if your goal is to enrich the Arringtons of the world while maybe, if you win the lottery, scooping some of the groundscore that they overlooked, then by all means, bust your ass while the bankers and speculators cheer you on.

Instead of that, I recommend that you do what you love because you love doing it. If that means long hours, fantastic. If that means leaving the office by 6pm every day for your underwater basket-weaving class, also fantastic.

A few thoughts:

1. I’ve been a VC for four months.

2. “He’s trying to make the point that the only path to success in the software industry is to work insane hours, sleep under your desk, and give up your one and only youth, and if you don’t do that, you’re a pussy.” – No. I was making the point that people have been working crushingly hard in our industry for quite a while now, and that today’s hard workers shouldn’t assume this is something new.

3. “He’s telling you the story of, “If you bust your ass and don’t sleep, you’ll get rich”” No. I’m saying that working very hard is a necessary ingredient to being successful. Unless you are very, very lucky. But working hard doesn’t mean you’ll get rich. You’re chances are still abysmally, wonderfully slim.

4. “I did make a bunch of money by winning the Netscape Startup Lottery, it’s true. So did most of the early engineers. But the people who made 100x as much as the engineers did? I can tell you for a fact that none of them slept under their desk.” – Is the problem that the money you made wasn’t enough to compensate you for what you gave up? Or is the problem that other people at Netscape made far more money than you? Or, both?

5. The question I’d want to ask Jamie is, if he could go back and do it all over again, would he? He implies he would, but he never says it.

6. Lots of bitterness against venture capitalists and management. I get it. I was an entrepreneur for a lot longer than I’ve been a VC (10 years v. four months). I’ve been burned badly by VCs. Treated unfairly. But my response was simply to stop doing what I was doing and start doing something else.

7. Most VCs today that I know are a whole lot different than the VCs I knew a decade ago. Competition has driven them to behave much more civilly. In the process, many of them have learned that they can make a lot more money by simply chilling out, too.

8. I said this before, but I’ll say it again. Startup life isn’t for everyone. Do it with your eyes wide open. If you don’t like it, leave. If you do, don’t leave. If you like the life but hate the company, start your own company. Join, I guess, the dark side. And remember, being broke is no excuse. Move back with your parents and get free food and rent. Learn how to code if you don’t already. Just make it work. Or don’t. But don’t expect to get tons of equity and perks from a startup that someone else was willing to risk it all to start in exchange for average work. This isn’t the place for that.

I too have slept under desks, or wherever I fell. I too have at times worked so hard that there was nothing in my life except that work. The reason why I did this for all those years wasn’t because some VC was driving me to, or even because I thought I would get rich doing it. We never raised any venture capital at TechCrunch, and for the first several years I thought it was nothing more than a hobby, then a small business.

I did it because I was fascinated with the community around me. In love with it. There was nothing else I wanted to be doing. The courage and imagination I see every day from founders. And low level employees who struck out on their own to follow their own destiny.

Things are a lot different today than they were in Marx’s time. Today’s labor gets to nibble on organic food, be pampered with acupuncturists, and generally be coddled like no other employees on the planet. And when they get frustrated, or it’s just their time, they go out and start companies of their own, take venture capital or not, and see what they’re made of.

That’s the way I see Silicon Valley. It’s the same way I saw it as an employee being leveraged by bosses and venture capitalists who had far more equity than I did. It’s the same way I saw it when I started my own companies. And it’s the same way I see it as as an investor. Like an old, busted up ballplayer, I don’t have the stamina any more to start companies (maybe I will again in a couple years). But I can invest in, and cheer on, those that do.

I can’t think of anything more fun than continuing to be a part of the community that has fundamentally changed the world’s cultures and economies in just a few short years. A community that constantly creates somethings from nothings.

There is so much more to build. And, unlike the coal miners and child laborers in Marx’s time, we all get the chance to be a boss in this world. All you have to do, is do it. And maybe, when you’re the boss, you’ll see how hard it is to grow a company, with thousands of employees and their families relying on you to make the right decisions. And maybe, when those bosses aren’t perfect all the time, you’ll see why it’s just because they’re humans. Not soul sucking vampires.

So you see, Jamie, I wasn’t using your words as an argument to trick people into selling their souls. I just assume people will give them freely, drinking the same narcotic-spiked startup Kool Aid that I am. I was using your words to simply note that today’s hard workers were preceded by generations of other hard workers. Who sometimes also complained. In the end, we all know sausage making isn’t pretty. But sausage is, you know, delicious.

I’ve taken my shots at Zynga before, but this New York Times article is just odd.

It talks about crying employees, of course (see my article here) and warns that “Zynga’s tough culture risks a talent drain,” and “signs of trouble are emerging.”

The problem? A focus on metrics? Emphasis added: “But the heavy focus on metrics, in this already competitive industry, has also fostered an uncompromising culture, one where employees are constantly measured and game designers are pushed to meet aggressive deadlines. While some staff members thrive in this environment, others find it crushing. Several former employees describe emotionally charged encounters, including loud outbursts from Mr. Pincus, threats from senior leaders and moments when colleagues broke down into tears.”

Measuring employees and pushing them to meet aggressive deadlines doesn’t sound all that outrageous to me, to be honest.

The infamous stock option renegotiations were once again surfaced as well, but the article failed to point out that a grand total of four employees, out of thousands, were affected.

But the article also points out the perks. I’ve never had perks like this:

The company has added data centers and expanded teams to ease the burden on its engineers. It is also encouraging managers to schedule a bigger buffer between project phases and to give teams the week off before a game’s debut. Zynga — which offers employee perks like acupuncture, Friday happy hours and a cafeteria with organic food — is also spending millions on focus groups and other initiatives to strengthen its manager training programs.

Acupuncture?

And:

Zynga dispenses lavish gifts like vacations and $100,000 in vested stock. After the game Mafia Wars reached a milestone two years ago, Zynga sent the team to Las Vegas to celebrate, buying some 80 plane tickets and providing $500 in cash for each person and luxury hotel accommodations, according to one former senior employee.

Next, rival Electronic Arts’ fingerprints are all over this story. There are two quotes from EA executives:

“I expect a lot of game and tech companies will begin recruiting Zynga’s talent after their equity becomes liquid,” said Gabrielle Toledano, head of human resources for Electronic Arts. “Competitors will make the case that they offer much more compelling opportunities for creative people.”

and

“We’ve learned that when companies treat talent as a commodity, the consequences are severe,” said Ms. Toledano of Electronic Arts. “It takes years to repair a reputation.” (probably referring to this EA lawsuit)

And there’s also a quote by famous venture capitalist Roger McNamee saying Zynga will end up a cautionary tale (McNamee, with all due respect, is the man who predicted Palm would kill the iPhone).

“Zynga should be an example of entrepreneurship at its best,” said Roger McNamee, a co-founder of the venture capital firm Elevation Partners. “Instead it’s going to be a Harvard Business School case study on founder overreach — this will be a cautionary tale.”

The fact that McNamee’s former founding partner at Elevation Partners, John Riccitiello, is now the CEO of EA, isn’t mentioned. Nor is the fact that Elevation Partners tried at one point to invest in Zynga.

And Zynga, in the IPO quiet period, can’t do a damn thing to fight back.

All’s fair in love and war, and with the hundred plus former EA employees and executives now at Zynga, I’m not surprised they’re fighting back. But the New York Times should have known better than to become a tool for EA. That article just smells bad.

I slept at work again last night; two and a half hours curled up in a quilt underneath my desk, from 11am to 1:30pm or so. That was when I woke up with a start, realizing that I was late for a meeting…But it was no big deal, we just had the meeting later. It’s hard for someone to hold it against you when you miss a meeting because you’ve been at work so long that you’ve passed out from exhaustion.

Suddenly everyone’s complaining about how unfair things are in Silicon Valley. How hard everyone has to work so darn hard, and how some people don’t get venture capital or a nice sale to Facebook or Google even though lots of other people are getting those things.

Silicon Valley is an unfair place, say all the headlines. The CNN racism documentary was just one piece of this. Another are the cries from the press that Zynga would actually consider renegotiating contracts with highly compensated employees no longer pulling their weight. Expect more articles soon about the woes of being asked to work hard at a startup. People are working so hard, they’re crying themselves to sleep!

As if all of this was new. The quote above isn’t from some overworked Zynga engineer. It was written in 1994 by Jamie Zawinski, an early engineer at Netscape. Here’s more:

I saw Ian today, for the first time in months. His first words were, “Wow, you look like shit.” He says I seem really strung-out and twitchy. I thought I had been doing ok! I got a full night’s sleep last night and everything. I have no life. I never see any of my non-work friends, and I’m wasting away my one and only youth. I ought to be out doing fun things and active things, the kind of things I won’t be able to do when my mind and body finally decay. But instead I’m stuck inside under fluorescent lights, pushing bits around inside a computer in ways that are only interesting to other nerds. I glanced at a movie listing and there are movies out that I haven’t even heard of. How did that happen? That freaks me out. I bought some wrist braces at a drug store, and I’ve been typing with them for a couple of days.

I don’t think it’s helping much; my middle finger doesn’t hurt quite as much, but my ring finger is just as bad. This job is destroying my body. This can’t be worth it.

and

Well the kids went out to get drunk, or rather, more drunk. I think they might have actually gone out to a strip club again. How classy is that?

Oh good, the kids are back, and they are well hammered. None of them can walk properly, and they keep bumping into the cubicle walls and making everything on my desk shake. Since I’m not drunk, the impedance mismatch makes it impossible for me to carry on a conversation with them, so I’m just trying to block them out. But now they’re all playing networked DOOM at top volume, so in order to concentrate, I have to wear headphones with music on at top volume, and even that doesn’t quite work. Since, as I mentioned, they keep making the mistake of trying to walk, and they’re making all the shit on my desk bounce around.

It’s a saturday night, and I’m in my cubicle surrounded by a bunch of drunken farmboys from Illinois who haven’t been more than two miles from our office in scenic downtown Mountain View in four months.

My ears are going to be ringing after this. Fuck it, I’m going home. (Check that — my ears are ringing.)

and

I’m so fucking burnt. Existence is suffering.

We’re doomed.

I’d work on my resumé, but I don’t even have anything new to put on it yet, because we haven’t actually shipped anything.

I’m going to go home and cry myself to sleep now.

Yes, there was crying. Even way back in 1994.

But then, the payoff. That fleeting moment of glory that every twenty-something overworked engineer dreams of:

The power came back on, and we put the damnable program on the FTP server, and two million people all started attempting to download it at once, before we had even posted the announcement message, and we’re done done done and I suppose now we can all live happily ever after.

We sat in the conference room and hooked up the big TV to one of the Indys, so that we could sit around in the dark and watch the FTP download logs scroll by. jg hacked up an impromptu script that played the sound of a cannon shot each time a download successfully completed. We sat in the dark and cheered, listening to the explosions.

You can imagine the same words, the exact same words, being written by the guys that created the early Zynga games. Or Google. Or Facebook. Or some startup that failed miserably and was forgotten. Maybe some of those people think that they’ve been worked harder than anyone else has ever worked in Silicon Valley. That working so hard, working all the time, is an extraordinary demand on their soul.

They’re wrong. This is what startups are made of.

If you work at a startup and you think you’re working too hard and sacrificing too much, find a job somewhere else that will cater to your needs.

But if deep down you know that you’re part of history, that the things you are building will be written about and thought about forever, then maybe after that good cry after a short sleep under your desk you’ll pull yourself together and remember. That you are a person in the Arena. A Pirate. That you are here to make a dent in the universe.

You might be sad that you work long hours and that sometimes your boss yells at you when tensions run high. But you also know that there is nowhere on earth like Silicon Valley. Nowhere else that is structurally designed to help you make whatever you can imagine into reality. Nowhere else where there are so many like minded people who are willing to sacrifice and work hard to create something new.

There’s so much money in Silicon Valley now that a lot of non-like minded people have rolled in. Looking for easy stock options at a hot startup. They start whining when they realize that they have to give so much to make it all work. This happens periodically, and I wrote about it back in 2007. Then a downturn happens and suddenly everyone left is just thankful they’re still here.

But if too many people like this roll into town, a tipping point will be reached. And the magic will be gone.

It feels like we’re getting there. That not too long from now people will be talking about maximum working hours, minimum numbers of engineers assigned to complete a given task. And, shudder, unionization of startup workers.

I really hope that doesn’t happen. If it does, all the really necessary people will just leave and do their thing somewhere else.

Work hard. Cry less. And realize you’re part of history.

Update: Zynga “colleagues broke down into tears.” FFS, the place has free acupuncture and an organic cafeteria.

Update 2: Evil, bad, horrible Zynga

Breaking this morning: Ebay will announce the acquisition of New York based startup Hunch, say sources. The price tag will be somewhere around $80 million.

Hunch was founded by Chris Dixon, Caterina Fake (who left last summer to start a new company but remains an advisor), Tom Pinckney and Matt Gattis. The company has raised just under $20 million in funding.

The Hunch recommendation technology will be used by Ebay to revamp their own ecommerce recommendations. Dixon will take over Ebay’s existing 50 person recommendations team, and start a new office in New York.

That New York office will eventually grow to some 200 employees, I’m told, who’ll focus on recommendations. But the team will also analyze lots of Ebay data, and perhaps productize some of it or otherwise release it. As an example, Ebay purchase and sale data may help predict inflation or a looming recession better and sooner than any data the government can get their hands on.

It’s been a long journey for Hunch. The company was founded in 2008. In early 2010 I interviewed cofounder Fake, you can watch that here. In mid 2010 there were whispers that Google was taking a long look at the company as well, although I haven’t heard anything to suggest they were bidding against Ebay this time around.

Congrats to the team, and to investors General Catalyst Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, SV Angel and Khosla Ventures.

The first thing most people think about when they hear “evite” is “ad spam attack.” For years we all hated the service, but we used it anyway because it’s free and everyone else used it.

These days Facebook events has replaced evite for a lot of us. Facebook events doesn’t exactly scream “classy,” but at least people don’t cringe at the thought of using it.

For the last few years, though, a small startup called Paperless Post has emerged that lets people create beautiful event invitations online. Paperless Post isn’t free. In fact, that seems to be part of the attraction. You have to pay to use it, and just like certain trophy virtual goods that you can buy on Zynga games, the fact that there’s a real cost seems to create perceived value.

There’s been very little tech press about Paperless Post, but they get plenty of other attention. The NY Times has written about them at least twice, for example.

The company has sent some 50 million invitations, has raised $6.3 million in funding and is break even with 35 employees in New York and San Francisco. Marissa Mayer uses Paperless Post for her events. Metropolitan Museum of Art, The White House executive branch, The National Gallery and even The Prince of Wales have all used the premium invitation service.

It’s a fascinating case study against the notion that people will always choose free over for pay online services.

Evite Clones Paperless Post With Postmark

Copy/Paste innovation is certainly nothing new in our world. Evite has even defended itself in years past against services, including threatening a lawsuit against Socializr for creating a “confusingly similar” service.

It’ll take a little verbal dancing for evite to defend it’s latest move, though – an outright rip off of Paperless Post’s business. Evite’s Postmark hasn’t officially launched yet, but they promote it on the evite home page and people have noticed it.

“Evite’s Postmark looks like someone hired a programmer and told them to copy every aspect of Paperless Post,” says the person who pointed it out to me. And that’s true. The business model is identical – charge for every invitation sent, plus optional fees for specialized designs and other customizations. The pricing is nearly identical.

And the product itself is almost exactly the same as well. Compare the design and opening animation of a Paperless Post invitation to an Evite one, for example. Here’s a video:

Evite has also copied the exact look and feel of a number of the Paperless Post invitations as well.

Of course, Paperless Post could hardly have hoped that no one would ever copy their product and business model. But the hypocrisy of Evite is pretty comical here. I particularly like the line they use at the bottom of the Postmark website – “The comfort from knowing that Evite Postmark is as reliable, effective and innovative as Evite.”

Innovative, indeed.

And I certainly don’t weep for Paperless Post. In fact, this is great for their business. As much as Postmark has retreated from the stain of the evite brand on its website, most people will still understand where this service came from and remember the years of horror using the evite service. My guess is Postmark will just raise awareness of Paperless Post, and even more people will flock to the service when they want to send a premium event invitation.

Liz Welch at Inc. Magazine interviewed me in 2010 as part of her regular “The Way I Work” series. I had just moved to Seattle as part of my overall goal of (occasionally) detaching myself Silicon Valley.

In the article I talk about my erratic sleep patterns and my overall weight gain – some 50 pounds since I started TechCrunch in 2005.

In the year since I visited a sleep center and began focusing on getting enough sleep at regular hours. After a year of that my life has changed dramatically for the better. But the weight just kept creeping up. In the late summer 2011 I was a good 70 pounds heavier than I was when I started TechCrunch. And probably 90 pounds over my ideal weight.

Basically, I’m fat.

Being fat sucks. I’m not talking about the way I look. I’ve always been fairly comfortable in my own skin. But there are a whole bevy of health issues that fat people have to deal with. You don’t live as long as you should, and your quality of life is diminished substantially.

I’m trying to take control of this issue in my own way, and for the last several weeks I’ve been experimenting with a complete shift in lifestyle. So far, so good. And since a lot of people in our world deal are dealing with weight gain and health issues resulting from sitting in front of a computer for 16 hours a day, I thought I’d share.

The lightbulb went off in my head as I was reading Neal Stephenson’s new book Reamde (buy it here). In the book a character works at his computer from a treadmill, stationary bike or elliptical machine.

That prompted me to research “treadmill desks” and read about people’s experiences with them. Some people can’t stick with it, but a lot do. And the benefits are staggering. You’ll burn an extra 150 calories or so per hour. Most people say that they’re significantly more alert during the day, and they sleep much better at night.

So I jumped in. I elected not to buy a $5,000 unit (there are a couple out there), and building one myself seemed like too much trouble. Instead I bought a “TrekDesk” on Amazon and a cheap treadmill. I’ve been walking at 1.5 mph for 7-8 hours a day on average over the last few weeks. Some days I’m logging over 15 miles walking.

That’s not all though. I’m also using a Withings wifi scale to track my weight, and I’ve shared it with friends so they can keep an eye on it. The scale itself works great. The software is terrible but it does the job.

The final product I’m using is a Jawbone Up device. It’s a pedometer (very handy), it tracks sleep and it has a vibrating alarm feature to wake me up – much like the Lark device that I love so much. The only complaint I have about the Jawbone Up is that it doesn’t track steps very well on a treadmill with my hands up at a keyboard. But from what I can tell all pedometers seem to have this problem.

Things are just getting started. But the fact that I’m sleeping properly and have revamped my diet with my doctor, combined with actually walking miles and miles a day, has already had a profoundly positive effect on me.

I’ll update in a couple of months with any progress. If all goes well, in a year or two my body may have forgiven me for the TechCrunch years. We’ll see.