Flurry, the Google Analytics of mobile applications used in nearly 300,000 mobile applications, is widely rumored to be IPO-bound though no official paperwork has yet been filed. One job listing mentions that the role will include “managing policies and procedures required to ensure full IT compliance with SOX 404 and all other laws, regulations, and SEC requirements in anticipation of Flurry’s IPO”.

Our sources tell us the company is on track to double their headcount this year, and the 105 person organization currently has 50 open positions they’re looking to fill including director roles in Evangelism, Partner Integration, IT, Product Management, QA and Sales.

As ambitious as this sounds, the company doubled last year and shows no signs of slowing down after hitting cash flow positive and raising another large chunk of funding at the end of 2012. Flurry provides analytics services to developers for free and uses the anonymized data they collet to help developers increase their audience with targeted in-app advertising across their ad network, tracking over 1.2 trillion anonymous aggregated user sessions per month.

Launching a Real-time Bidding Marketplace?

In early March Flurry competitor Tapjoy announced the launch of their mobile advertising platform out of beta, and with it came a real-time bidding platform. A little sleuthing (Google, actually) reveals that Flurry is currently hiring for a Realtime Bidding Manager and has posted their Terms of Service for a realtime-bidding marketplace, which describes the service as:

…the automated real-time auction service that enables you to bid on and purchase inventory for the placement of Ads in the Flurry RTB Marketplace, a virtual marketplace where you may buy inventory for yourself or on behalf of third party advertisers (“Advertisers”) from sellers. “Ads” means your text, graphic, rich media and other advertising materials. The Flurry RTB Service enables you to deliver Ads through the Service by responding to ad requests delivered through Flurry’s real-time bidding application programming interface (the “API”) with a CPM-based bid price for that impression (the “Bid”)

While the TOS page is live, it is unclear whether this service is live to customers and we have reached out to Flurry and will update this post when we hear back.

The bottom line: The launch a real-time bidding platform is the inevitable next-step in Flurry’s path to IPO. But with Gartner estimating the mobile advertising market will continue to double over the next three years, reaching more then $20 Billion by 2015, mobile advertising is hardly a winner take all market. I also wonder whether Tapjoy is considering IPO plans as well, and I’m curious whether Google has made overtures to purchase one of the two companies.

Update: It’s a bit unclear whether this is a new vertical or simply an easier way to see men’s products that have actually been in Wanelo all along. The Wanelo blog has a series called Manelo Monday’s featuring menswear-focused users which indicates they’ve been around longer than we thought. We have reached out to Wanelo for comment.

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CEO Deena Varshavskaya announced today that Wanelo has rolled out their popular “shopping entertainment” service, which was previously gear towards hip Pinterest-loving women, for men as well.

The service curates the best shopping from popular sites like Pinterest, but ensures you can buy everything you find – a common frustration for otherwise satisfied Pinterest users.

The Wanelo Shopping iPhone has quickly risen in the Lifestyle category, and currently holds the #7 spot in the category as well as the #93 spot for free apps overall according to AppData.com. The company also made headlines last week for raising their Series A at a $100M+ valuation.

Check out Wanelo for men

We have reached out to Wanelo for comment and will update when we hear back.

A few weeks ago I announced that Referly would be pivoting, and that we would no longer offer cash rewards for purchases generated on the platform after March 31st. Yesterday, we paid out our last rewards and today I am excited to announce that we have decided to turn our focus to a side project we’ve been excited about for sometime: Tokkr.com

I just stood up the web server this morning!

Those who know me understand that I tend to be a bit type A, but I am hoping this project will give me some time to chill out and achieve a bit more work/life balance. Even cooler, it will be powered by our Reefer.ly commerce platform so we can reuse a lot of the sweet code we’ve already written – so instead of hiring and managing engineers we can take off for Thailand and post tons of amazing pictures of us growth hacking.

What is Tokkr?

And for that matter, how does Reefer.ly work? Well from the names of our two products it should be obvious that we are creating a high end, bespoke, hand curated service for people who want to get high. Tokkr will be a consumer site where people can share their favorite experiences, photos, quotes, all in a social, beautiful way. Think of it as Pinterest meets Potspace, or maybe Quora meets Weed Forums.

We’re not totally sure yet since we’ve written one line of HTML and derped around with httpd conf for a few hours for no good reason, but we went through YC so obviously we’ve got what it takes to figure this baby out. In fact PG has some great insights on weed trees, weeding out people, and not dying that I found very relevant.

You can enter your email here to get updates and find out when we officially launch. Anyone who signs up today will get 50% off all products on Reefer.ly and Tokkr for LIFE!

Our First Partner

We has such a great time working with Love with Food, who were our first paying API customer on Refer.ly, and we are excited to share that they have launched Love with Weed this morning to much fanfare. The site looks gorgeous and we can’t think of a better gift to give your friends.

Onward!

UPDATE: We forgot to mention our awesome friends at Pusher will be powering realtime updates. (Full disclosure: Pusher cofounder Damien Tanner is an investor).

Updated at 1:53pm PST with comments from AngelList CEO Naval Ravikant.

On March 26th The Funders Club received a no-action letter from the Securities and Exchange Commission stating that it will not recommend enforcement action against the year-old private equity investment platform, making it the first government sanctioned online VC.

What has not yet been reported is that AngelList, a competing service used by early stage companies to receive introductions to investors and take some online investment, received its own no-action letter just two days later on March 28th (embedded below). While being first makes for great PR, FundersClub can expect AngelList will be the first of many competitors to emerge now that its business model has been validated.

The letter to AngelList also mentions a currently unformed business entity with an identical model to that of The Funders Club:

AngelList Advisors LLC (“AngelList Advisors”) intends to form a limited liability
company and register as an investment adviser either with the Commission or one or more states.
AngelList Advisors will be a wholly-owned subsidiary of AngelList or its affiliate. AngelList
Advisors proposes to establish a new angel investing platform (or part ofits existing website)
that will assist AngelList Advisors and accredited investors (“Investors”) in identifying
companies that seek capital and in which one or more so-called “angel investors”3 intend to
invest (each such company, a “Portfolio Company”). If Angel List Advisors identifies and
approves ofboth a Portfolio Company and an angel investor (referred to hereinafter as a “Lead
Angel”), then AngelList Advisors will form a separate investment vehicle (“Investment
Vehicle”) for the sole purpose ofinvesting in that Portfolio Company. You state that the
Investment Vehicle will likely be structured as a limited liability company or limited partnership,
and will be responsible for all organizational costs and expenses associated with its formation
and the investment in the Portfolio Company.4 You also state that AngelList Advisors will
provide the initial capital required to pay such organizational costs and expenses.

UPDATE – 1:53PM PST: I have just spoken with AngelList CEO Naval Ravikant, and he has confirmed they have received this letter from the SEC. According to Ravikant, their funding vehicle has been enabled for 28 companies to date and generated $2M in funding in the past month. He also says AngelList on the whole now generates around $10 Million in investment commitments monthly to the larger community of startups receiving introductions on the platform.

He also told us they expect to make money on other services not related to investing, such as Angel List talent which according to Ravikant, “has growing 2-3x in the past month with 1600 mutual matches of about 600 candidates, with 3300 companies recruiting and a reported 5% close rate. AngelList hired their last 3 engineering team members on their own platform”. Giving the hiring challenges in Silicon Valley, this could be huge. Currently AngelList does not charge for talent placements or listing.

“We didn’t really announce this since a lot of it seems like behind-the-scenes inside baseball. It lets us know the legal boundaries of what’s possible in the space and will inform our future products, but right now we’re happy with the SecondMarket partnership – SM vets investors for sophistication, companies for background, and provides Broker-Dealer level protection and compliance.

The /Invest[sic] feature on AngelList is working well so far. We do curate the opportunities to those with a high-quality lead investor, and to date we’ve announced 7 fundings, 14 are closed or in closing, 18 are currently open for Accrediteds, adding about one per day. We’ve received over $6M in commitments in the last Quarter in 915 separate transactions. We have 12,000 Accrediteds on AngelList, and via our SecondMarket Partnership, can reach another 20,000.

Unlike others in the space, we don’t think we can pick the winners – rather, it’s a more open approach for any company with a high-quality lead investor. We also don’t view it as a money-maker for AngelList – more of a community service. We also think it makes sense to augment it with our base service of introducing high-quality companies to sophisticated investors (VCs, Seed Funds, Professional Angels) – we currently drive 500-700 of those introductions per week, and drive about $10M / month there.”

AngelList SEC No-Action Letter from March 28, 2013

Www.sec.Gov Divisions Marketreg Mr-noaction 2013 Angellist-15a1

FundersClub SEC No-Action Letter from March 26, 2013

Www.sec.Gov Divisions Marketreg Mr-noaction 2013 Funders-club-032613-15a1

My site was having hosting issues this morning but I really wanted to get this “morning after” post out, reflecting on the reactions to Y Combinator Demo Day yesterday among friends, investors and the press. You can read the full article on my Distribution Hacks blog “YC Demo Day, the Morning After”.

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Apparently, this year it’s particularly in vogue to express a certain ennui about the batch of Y Combinator startups that presented at Demo Day.

As I checked in with investors and friends who attended the event, the overwhelming response was that there were tons of solid companies but nothing “amazing” or “10x”.

Even the tech press can’t seem to get behind one single company…

Read the rest of this post at DistributionHacks.com

This post is part of my continuous coverage of Y Combinator Demo Day for the Winter 2013 Class. You can see all publicly launched companies from today’s presentations here.

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It’s always exciting to see more female founders, and the Winter 2013 YC batch brings us some awesome new faces (and some familiar ones). These are only founders from publicly launched companies – feel free to contact me at morrilldanielle (at) gmail if I’ve missed something. Enjoy!

Editor’s Note: Updated to include Iolanthe Chronis from Swish.

Iolanthe Chronis – Cofounder & CEO at Swish

Prior to founding Swish in August 2012 she held roles at Kayak, BetterOffline and Microsoft.

Iolanthe received her Masters of Engineering, EECS in 2010 from MIT and also holds a B.S., EECS, Physics from MIT.

Rosanna Yau – Design Cofounder at Backerkit

Rosanna graduated from the California College of the Arts Design MFA program in Interaction Design, and from the University of California Davis Design program with a BS in Visual Communications. In addition to life as a busy cofounder she also is a lecturer for a Community Arts course at CCA. Check out her portfolio and follow her on Twitter.

Photo credit: Mashable

Cindy Wu – Microryza

Cindy is a transplant from Seattle, where she was previously a Research Scientist and Engineer @UW Bioengineering. Microryza was built to serve herself and her colleagues who struggled to fund their own projects even as PhDs. Now they’re enabling anyone to become a modern day patron of science.

She is also a published scientific researcher and received her B.S. Cellular, Molecular, and Developmental Biology in 2011. Follow her on Twitter.

Photo Credit: WeFunder

Grace Garey – Watsi

Grace heads up marketing for Watsi, and previously has experience in the non-profit space working for Kiva, Sandbox Suites, Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life, and International Rescue Committee.

She is a Capps Congressional Fellow, studied abroad at the University of Ghana in Legon for 6 months in 2009, and lived abroad in India with the Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement in 2012.

Erica Brescia – Cofounder & COO at Bitnami

Erica joined BitRock as VP of Business Development in 2005 and served in that role for nearly 3 years before becoming CEO. According to her Linked in profile she is still CEO of BitRock and founded Bitnami in 2011.

Prior to BitRock she spent 3 years as a manager at T-Mobile. She has a BS in Finance from the University of Southern California.

Photo Credit: About.me

Kelly Lau-Kee – Cofounder & Chief Product Officer of PayTango

Kelly was previously at Google as a UX design intern for YouTube and is currently Senior at Carnegie Mellon University double majoring in Human Computer Interaction and Industrial Design. Her academic honors include the Presidential Scholarship and Inc. Magazine, America’s Coolest College Startups 2013.

Photo Credit: PayTango

Kendall Herbst – StyleUp

Formerly an editor at Conde Naste for well-known fashion publications like Lucky, InStyle, and New York Magazine she’s now striking out to disrupt the magazine industry.

Kendall also is currently an MBA student at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Vanessa Torrivilla – Design Cofounder at Goldbely

Prior to Goldbely Vanessa headed up UX and Visual Design at Blip.tv, and was a Senior Interactive Designer for Gilt Groupe. As is the team’s “Food Wench” (don’t get all up in arms, this is a pirate reference which makes more sense when you see their awesome map-themed about page about being “explorers of food”) Vanessa handles UI/UX and all things creative at Goldbely.

As a self-described “metal head” I hope that includes rocking out with some excellent tunes! Follow her on Twitter and check out her Dribbble portfolio.

Photo Credit: Goldbely

Fei Deyle – CEO & Cofounder of Lollipuff

Fei is an electrical engineer turned fashion blogger turned CEO, and admittedly quite the fashionista. In fact, she is the lead blogger for her own site under the pseudo-name Bebefuzz. She is a trusted online brand authenticator, and previously worked a senior sales person in the power industry.

Photo Credit: Lollipuff

Michelle Crosby – Wevorce

Wevorce makes going through a divorce less financially and emotionally painful for everyone involved. Michelle gives a great interview about her passion, personal story, and vision for the future:

Wevorce introduction from wevorce on Vimeo.