Rumor Roundup: The Winklevoss Twins Do Burning Man and Zady Has a Launch Party
Fashion, turn to the left Wednesday night, Betabeat ventured down to the Bowery for a party celebrating the launch of Zady, the anti-fast-fashion startup founded by Soraya Darabi and Maxine Bédat. Attendees tended toward the leggy, and the bar was serving “moonshine” cocktails. At one point, we watched a meticulous mustachioed man line up an iPhone shot of a piece of paper on the wall, printed with the party’s official hashtag.
“‘Stealth’ mode is such a terrible word,” said Ms. Bédat (a patterned clutch from their holiday line-up tucked under her arm) when we asked about the company’s hush-hush birth. “Working on things quietly!” she corrected.
The pair met in high school but reconnected about a year ago and started cooking up Zady. ”Maxine had a nonprofit, the Bootstrap Project,” Ms. Darabi explained, which aims to connect shoppers to craftsmen in developing countries. ”I was really excited to see what she was doing.”
“In my techie mind, it was Kiva meets Etsy,” Ms. Darabi added.
So Ms. Darabi started making suggestions of “digital techniques” Ms. Bédat might employ, but as they talked, they decided to collaborate on a venture that’d take the mission of the Bootstrap Project (which is still kicking) and add offerings from artisans in places like, you know, Brooklyn. Ms. Darabi says she’s committed to the venture full-time.
Playa hater Tyler Winklevoss and everyone else involved in the much-litigated birth of Facebook has come a long way since Harvard. Most recently, he sampled the anti-consumerist pleasures of Burning Man, with a visit that involved giving Dustin Moskovitz a hug and even a budding friendship. “Almost immediately when I got back, I had a Facebook friend request from Tyler and we started a thread mutually extolling the virtues of the festival,” Moskovitz wrote on Medium.
So he’s a convert, but based on , it seems he hasn’t gone whole hog on the costume front, yet. He threw on a pair of Mad Max-ish goggles, sure, but mostly he took as an opportunity to brandish his pecs:
Tummmm….blurr…er! Conventional wisdom dictates that Yahoo’s influence would eventually work itself into the Tumblr culture somehow–we just didn’t expect it to be in this way. Staffers at the blogging site joked about Yahoo’s shitty new logo by flashing a Tumblr-ized version of it…and it wasn’t doing the redesign any favors.
A staffer confirmed that it was just a joke, but honestly, you never know over there.
https://twitter.com/missambear/status/376014727614566400
Ill-advised The cofounder of buzzy TechStars startup Plated has a piece over at the Huffington Post about a trip he took as a 24-year-old student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The title: “I Met Bashar Al Assad. He Was Pretty Cool.” Close that tab!
Welcome Back, Mr Porter Speculation arose a few weeks ago that former OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter, who left Zynga in April, was going to partner with Entourage inspiration Ari Emmanuel for a flashy new job title. Turns out, he did! AllThingsD reported this week that Mr. Porter was promoted to full-time status at WME. He will “oversee all of the company’s online and mobile initiatives and help identify digital opportunities for clients.”
People problems Former Google Glass marketing manager Amanda Rosenberg has fallen quiet since the web lit up with stories that she’s dating married Google cofounder Sergey Brin. She’s been silent on social media and hidden from the public eye since then, but that didn’t stop People magazine from publishing a photo they thought was of her.
In fact, it was of a completely different woman named Nathalie De Clercq, who also happens to be half Chinese and wear Google Glass, but that’s about where the similarities end. The photo even showed Ms. De Clercq riding a CitiBike, a New York staple, while Ms. Rosenberg lives in San Francisco. The gossip mag will be issuing a pretty mortifying correction next week.
Of course, this still doesn’t explain why Ms. De Clercq uploaded a YouTube video of herself wearing Glass and a shirt that says “+Sergey” and called it “AMANDA ROSENBERG CONFESSES.” The video has since been taken down, but here’s a screenshot:
Tudor city Real estate gossip has it that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and her husband Zachary Brogue recently plopped down a handsome sum for a gorgeous tudor-style mansion in San Francisco’s swanky Pacific Heights neighborhood. The house was listed in April for a whopping $ 33.9 million. According to the Real Estalker, the 11,000-square-foot house has:
five fireplaces; two kitchens; two terraces—both on the front side of the house where they don’t benefit from the toe tingling city, bridge and bay views; an underground garage parking for four cars; at least five storage rooms; a 3,000 bottle wine cellar; and a compact, somewhat awkwardly positioned passenger elevator that services all four floors.
Sounds just like my apartment.
Aloha Zuck Everyone’s favorite Harvard man was recently spotted perusing the property offerings of the Hawaiian Islands with his wife, because, as Priscilla Chan has said, they like to focus on enjoying “just simple things.” Apparently some people might have been peeved at the thought of a filthy rich man scouring a gorgeous island for a house to buy. Luckily, Arianna Huffington came to Zuck’s defense.
https://twitter.com/ariannahuff/status/375652587954921472
These social media puns are cool and all, but what we really want to see are paparazzi photos of Zuck downing pineapples in cargo shorts and man-sandals. Anyone?
Reddit or not, here he comes Alexis Ohanian is going on a book tour, but it’s not a book tour, he says, because it has aliens and it’s going to be epic and also it’s meant to promote Internet entrepreneurship. It’s “technically” to promote his book, Without Their Permission, but it sounds like it’ll be more of a meet-and-greet for collegiate redditors.
People who attend the epic tour will be able to, once they’ve doffed their fedoras, hang out with Mr. Ohanian, exchange high-fives with him, and receive a doodle of a reddit alien from the man himself. He’ll be sourcing discussion topics from each college’s subreddit a week before he hits campus, and then taking questions onstage “for an AMA IRL,” he says.
He’s trying to hit a whopping 65 colleges, listed on the Reddit blog post wherein he announced the tour. Mr. Ohanian is also still looking for alumni to tote to the speaking engagements, so if you went to one of the schools on the list and you’re into men’s rights or no fap, give him a call.