But in reality? With this pivot, Fab isn’t completely changing its product as much as it is changing what the Fab brand means. Instead of selling merchandise from other retailers on its site through flash sales (sales of limited quantities of items for limited time periods), Fab is expanding to include products designed by Fab, products designed by others, and ventures like custom furniture and a brick and mortar store in Europe. The company wants to be one of the “next great iconic shopping brands,” it wrote Tuesday, and that shopping experience will maintain the design focus that the company was founded on.

Goldberg explained the idea behind the re-launch, which he announced in a blog post Tuesday:

“People called it a “pivot.” We called it a complete restart. We threw out the old and started anew. And it took off fast. Really fast. We re-launched Fab on June 9, 2011 and before we knew it we were tracking to $100M in sales and working with tens of thousands of designers and connecting with millions of consumers. We were on to something big. We knew it. So, in January 2012 we did what came naturally to us: We planned to Pivot. Again.”

Focusing on the general concept of a design-based e-commerce brand will allow Fab to both produce its own products and work with others, expanding the items it sells on its site and expanding the concept of what it means to be a physical retailer, the company wrote:

“We believe that part of disrupting design is disrupting it across multiple channels. We’re working on Fab store concepts that reimagine and reinvent how people buy design products by merging offline & online experiences in entirely new ways. We’ve always said that Fab wants to be where its customers are — be it smartphone, tablets, web browsers, or even physical retail stores. And, with less than 5% of home products purchased online today, we think that physical retail has an important role to play in the customer’s decision process. But, we plan to reinvent retail and help guide home product purchased online to 10%, then 20%, then 30% online as part of our disrupting the industry.”

As part of the expansion, Fab is also acquiring MassivKonzept, a custom furniture company, which will give Fab a head-start on this business and the addition of a physical store, with plans to add more of these stores in the future.

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The news was first reported by Kara Swisher. We heard about Pishevar’s exit a few days ago and since then have independently confirmed with two sources that he is leaving the firm he joined as a managing director in 2011. When we got in touch with Shervin, he said that he is switching roles from being managing director to venture adviser at Menlo and is going to join Uber as a strategic adviser.

The reason, he said was to start a new company — Sherpa, which is startup foundry. He explained that Sherpa is a company helping to build other companies, and it will be working with large corporations and other founders to come up with ideas. He declined to offer any details. It is rumored that he is partnering with Scott Stanford, a Goldman Sachs investment banker, for this new project.

“In his continued role as a venture advisor he’ll still be working with portfolio companies, sourcing deals and networking,” Shawn Carolan, managing director at Menlo wrote in an email. “This was a unique opportunity to let him pursue a passion at the formative stage while still have him active in the firm for companies further along.”

During his tenure at Menlo, Pishevar had invested in companies such as Uber, Fab, Getaround and Cinemagram. Pishevar is one of the most liked people in the entrepreneur community. He was an angel investor in about three dozen companies before joining Menlo Ventures in 2011.

Updated with comments from Menlo VC and Shervin Pishevar.

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The list of honorees follows below, and it’s a list packed with newcomers as well as Silicon Valley veterans. Thanks to all for voting in the nomination process, and now that we’ve narrowed it down to five candidates for each award, don’t forget to vote for which person or company you think is most deserving. Voting begins today (the voting page can be found here, and the rules are here) and closes on January 24th.

As a reminder, the Crunchies, a joint production with our friends at Techcrunch and Venturebeat, will take place on Thursday, January 31, 2013, from 7:30pm to 11:30pm at Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco. You can purchase tickets here.

So, without any further delay, the nominees for the 2012 Crunchies are as follows:

Best Technology Achievement
Baumgartner Jump
Google Glass
Mars Curiosity
SpaceX docks with International Space Station
Tesla Supercharger Network

Best Collaborative Consumption Service
Airbnb
Get It Now/Postmates
Lyft
TaskRabbit
Uber

Best E-Commerce Application
Fab
Hotel Tonight
Karma/Facebook Gifts
Warby Parker
Zulily

Best Mobile Application
Evernote
Google Maps
Grindr
Instagram
Square

Fastest Rising Startup
Exec
Lyft
Pinterest
Snapchat
Stripe

Best Content Discovery Application
Flipboard
Instapaper
Pinterest
Prismatic
Tumblr

Best Design
Facebook Timeline
Medium
Paper by FiftyThree
Square
Svbtle

Best Bootstrapped Startup
FreshBooks
Instapaper
Nimbus
Techmeme
Upverter

Sexiest Enterprise Startup
Asana
Box
Cloudera
Plexxi
Zendesk

Best International Startup
Hailo
Rovio
Soundcloud
Spotify
Xiaomi

Best Education Startup
Codecademy
Coursera
Edmodo
Khan Academy
Udacity

Best Hardware Startup
Lit Motors
Lockitron
Makerbot
Nest
Raspberry Pi

Best Time Sink
Angry Birds Star Wars
Buzzfeed
Letterpress
Pinterest
WhatsApp

Biggest Social Impact
Donors Choose
Indiegogo
Kickstarter
Kiva
Reddit

Angel of the Year
Michael Arrington
Chris Dixon
Paul Graham
David Lee
Chris Sacca

VC of the Year
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
Matt Cohler
Jim Goetz
Michael Moritz
Peter Thiel

Founder of the Year
Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia (Airbnb)
Kevin and Julia Hartz (Eventbrite)
Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla)
Kevin Systrom (Instagram)
Nir Zuk (Palo Alto Networks)

CEO of the Year
Dick Costolo (Twitter)
Phil Libin (Evernote)
Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!)
Larry Page (Google)
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Best New Startup of 2012
Coursera
Crowdtilt
Lyft
Snapchat
Waze

Best Overall Startup of 2012
Fab
Github
Instagram
Palantir
Square

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The company’s vision is to ultimately become the IKEA or Amazon of design. Considering IKEA has been around for 60 years and Amazon for 18, Fab clearly has a long way to go. But with 10 million members, the company believes it can be a winner by hammering on its goals, which are to have a unique personality, sell exclusive stuff and “lead on mobile and social.” And it plans on going even bigger globally in 2013.

Goldberg doesn’t go into too much detail on Fab’s upcoming game plan, though he stresses Fab’s success will come down to building out a team of superstars and creating a unique Fab culture. Fab will have to keep up the pace and execution for years to realize its dreams and there’s no guarantee it will get there. But it’s off to a good start so far.

With 104 slides in all, you might not get through them all. But here are some of the highlights:

• Fab has sold 4.3 million products, or 5.4 products a minute. This holiday season, it sold 17 products a minute.
• A third of Fab’s sales come from mobile with 56 percent on Christmas Day sales coming from mobile devices.
• Total sales grew by 600 percent from 2011 to 2012. On a daily basis, two-thirds of sales are from repeat customers. Fab had several days in 2012 with sales of more than $1 million.
• Q4 sales grew by 400 percent in 2012 with 30 percent of sales outside the U.S. Fab now sells in 26 countries.
• 50 percent of Fab’s sales are home products while 20 percent are fashion and accessories. Jewelry and art make up more than 10 percent each. Fab now has 15,000 products for sale, up from 2,000 at the end of 2011.
• Fab ships 75 percent of U.S. orders within two hours, compared to 16 hours last year. Customer response time is down to 15 minutes, from 48 hours last year.
• Employee headcount is now 600, up from 85 at the end of 2011.
• 15 percent of products sold in 2013 will be exclusive to Fab. Fab has worked with 7,500 designers.

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The stage is set now for Fab to expand into India as one of its next big markets. The company already sells to more than 10 million people in 26 countries. In February, Fab purchased European flash sales site Casacanda, which sells designs products Germany, Austria and Switzerland and followed that up with the purchase of UK-based ecommerce company LLUSTRE.

The new investment comes on top of $156 million that Fab has already raised, including a big $105 million round in July led by Atomico with participation from Pinnacle Ventures, ru-Net Technology Partners, Mayfield Fund and DoCoMo Capital. Existing investors also include Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, Baroda Ventures and First Round Capital.

Fab is on a roll this year and announced it pulled in $6.5 million in the first week of holiday sales in November, up from $1.7 million over the same period last year. The company introduced holiday shops last month and also updated its iPhone and iPad apps in October. 

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The Guardian’s traffic by hour

The Guardian’s Anthony Sullivan, group product manager for Guardian Core products at Guardian News & Media, said Monday that mobile — both smartphones and tablets — now contributes about 35 percent of traffic overall. That’s up from 10 percent at the start of 2011, when it was primarily smartphone traffic. (See disclosure below)

But at 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. in the morning local time, the Guardian gets more traffic from mobile devices. It also sees more mobile visitors than desktop visitors on Saturdays at 3 p.m. when the Premier League is under way.

Meanwhile, online design store Fab.com said late last month that on Saturdays between 12:00 a.m. and 6 a.m. local time, it sees 53 percent of its sales from mobile devices. On recent weekends, sales from mobile devices are now up to 40 percent, with weekend mornings before noon leading the way. Saturday evenings are also very popular with mobile users, with 44 percent of users buying on mobile devices between 6 p.m. and midnight.

The numbers are still early and these two properties are pretty popular with mobile users. Sullivan said in a Guardian story that the tipping point in favor of mobile might still be two years away. Fab’s CEO and co-founder Jason Goldberg, however, said based on the fast growth of mobile sales, he believes that Fab will see more parts of the day in which traffic from mobile devices goes over 50 percent in the coming months. And he said mobile will contribute more sales than desktop on certain days “soon.” Currently, 33 percent of Fab’s sales come from mobile devices.

The numbers underscore why mobile is so powerful. And it highlights the continuous nature of computing these days. The reality is today we are constantly on some type of computer throughout the day, moving back and forth between devices for different tasks and different settings. Mobile devices fill in the times when reaching for a laptop or desktop is more difficult, including early mornings, during lunch, as we settle in for the night and during the weekends.

Fab’s sales broken down by day parts

That’s the case with me. My first 15-30 minutes in the morning are spent looking at tweets, emails and websites from bed on my smartphone before heading over to my laptop. My day is largely spent on my laptop except during lunch. And then at night I switch back over to mobile devices primarily. On the weekends, I’m on my iPad and smartphone unless work arises.

Flurry recently found that mobile app usage peaked at 9 p.m. at night and was strongest overall between 7 and 11 p.m. But it apps had higher usage throughout the day compared to Internet usage and TV viewing except in primetime, when TV viewing was greater.

The traditional computer will still have a place but we’re increasingly fulfilling the picture Steve Jobs painted a couple years ago. PCs, he said, are going to be more like trucks, taking on bigger computing tasks while we get more and more done on nimble car-like mobile devices. We’ll still need a decent computer for work, heavier research and content creation. But the rest of our expanding computing time is going to be filled with mobile devices.

Disclosure: Guardian News and Media Ltd., the parent company of the Guardian newspaper, is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Ben Dodson. 

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The Fab Holiday Shops are organized into a dozen categories that cover gifts for best friends, parents, design or pet lovers, him or her, or gifts for a specific amount. Fab introduced its first holiday shops last year but they were limited to “The Best 100 Design Gifts Under $100″ and “Design Holiday Decor.”

Fab, which is now up to 9 million users, is also giving its website a face-lift to go along with the new Holiday Shops. The Holiday Shops will occupy the top left corner on Fab.com, which will now feature a redesigned search bar that helps users pick from Fab’s 10,000 products. Fab is also making it easier to click on popular categories and is introducing a new social strip, which takes some of the best features of Fab’s live feed, including recently trending activity, and makes it more central to the Fab site.

The changes, some of which will be made permanent, complement recent updates to Fab’s iPad and iPhone app. It also caps off a huge year of growth for Fab, which started 2012 with just 1.5 million members. Now Fab, which raised $105 million in July, is selling in 26 countries and moving 4 products a minute. And it just announced that it has also added another $15 million from VTB Capital and Phenomen Venturesto its latest round. 

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The shops will run for a week at a time on specific days and will refresh every week with new products. The Kids shop will launch this Wednesday at 7 p.m. ET followed by Pets Thursdays, Foodie Fridays, Vintage Mondays and Fashion Tuesdays. The fashion vertical will be powered through Fab’s recent acquisition of FashionStake. Users will be able to configure their email settings to customize which shops they want to receive notifications for. With the addition of the new shops, Fab.com will go from having about 3,000 products on the site daily to more than 10,000 items at a time. Ultimately, Goldberg wants to host tens of thousands of products on Fab.com.

Originally, Fab ran 3-day flash sales for a variety of items in categories such as jewelry, art, rugs and home accessories. It added month-long pop-up shops in September for specific themes and designers. Now, Goldberg said the company is trying to address the needs of consumers, who want to go deeper in specific verticals. And in the process, it’s moving away from being a flash-sales site to a more full-fledged e-commerce destination.

“We want to be where people go for design-oriented things, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a flash sale,” said Goldberg. “We think the opportunity is to build an Amazon-scale business in design.”

Goldberg said Fab doesn’t want to necessarily emulate the Amazon style of providing a huge catalog of products. It’s still committed to curating a smart list of items that users can discover through browsing. He said the site can support a lot more products without overwhelming the user experience.

It’s been an amazing year for Fab, which started out as Fabulis, a gay social networking site. The company had just four employees a year ago when it made the move to design sales. Last month, it zoomed past 2 million members, doubling from November, after launching in May. And it expects to hit 4 million members by the end of the year. It opened up to the public without an invite last month and is now rolling out internationally. The staff has grown to 128 employees in New York with another 40 based in India.

Goldberg said it will take years to reach the Amazon-sized scale he’s gunning for, but after the year Fab has had, it seems entirely possible that Fab will realize Goldberg’s dream.

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Marc Andreessen

There’s no question that Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm headed up by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, has become a major force since it was founded back in 2009. The young VC firm has funded some of the best and brightest companies in the tech industry: Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Groupon, Airbnb, Box, Fab.com and Pinterest, to name just a few. And this is just the beginning — Andreessen Horowitz just announced it has raised $1.5 billion in fresh funding to invest in even more startups.

I talked to Marc Andreessen this week to get his thoughts on Silicon Valley, the startup ecosystem, and where the larger tech world is headed in 2012. Here’s what he had to say:

Silicon Valley is still tech’s ground zero

“Our firm is very Silicon Valley focused. Now, we’re not religious about it. We’ll go far and wide to find the best companies and fund them. But there is a magic to Silicon Valley. It’s a lot like Los Angeles with film, New York City with finance or fashion, and Washington D.C. with politics. A lot of people want to work where there’s a critical mass of other people in their field; it’s like a natural force of gravity.

Because the best people in technology keep coming to the Valley, there tends to be a self-renewing property to it. It’s become a place where great technology franchises have been built repeatedly. I would love for there to be a dozen Silicon Valleys around the world. But it’s a very hard thing to replicate.”

When running a VC fund, it pays to walk the walk

“Closing this latest [$1.5 billion] round from our investors was a pretty straightforward process. The key thing is, we’re really focused on the alignment of our interests with the people who invest in us. Each of us at Andreessen Horowitz has a significant personal investment in the firm ourselves. We each pay full management fees and carried interest, so we’re exactly side-by-side with our investors.

We also have a hard commitment that none of our partners will make private technology investments outside of Andreessen Horowitz — you won’t see me investing in a startup as an individual. Our investors really like that, it makes them feel that we’re real partners.”

Tech should learn the language of Washington

“Ever since I arrived in the Valley, there’s been a debate about how the tech industry should approach government and legislation. There’s one school of thought that says we should just ignore Washington and build the future on our own, the idea that we’re going to invent our way out of any problem that comes up. Then there’s the other school of thought, that it’s very important to engage with Washington on their terms, because the industries that are threatened by technology are very good at lobbying. I’ve always been more in the second camp.

Technology is very important and it has a big impact on the world. Politicians are naturally going to want to be involved in something that is that important, and they’re going to try to make laws about it. For every exciting advance we make, there’s someone on the other side that is threatened by it. The oldest and most entrenched industries are lobbying like crazy, so for the tech industry to not participate is just handing the ground to them.

On top of the traditional methods, we can also do new stuff like the SOPA/PIPA blackout, which was a whole new form of engagement and protest. I know that a lot of people in Hollywood were absolutely shocked at the effectiveness of that.”

A startup shakeout is coming, but that’s OK

“There has been a lot more seed funding in the past two to three years. In terms of our own self interest as a VC firm, we want as much seed funding as possible — it presents us with a lot of great opportunities to evaluate for a venture round.

There is going to be a shakeout at the seed stage. A lot of companies will come up for Series A funding at some point, and there are just too many of them to really raise what they’ll need. But that’s not a bad thing. It’s a very small amount of funding they’ve taken on so far, and nowadays a lot of them will have the opportunity to sell as a talent acquisition. It’ll work out fine for them. In the long run, imagination tends to be rewarded, not penalized.”

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The latest business in their sights appears to be New York flash sales site Fab.com, which specializes in daily discounted sales of design products. Tuesday, Fab CEO Jason Goldberg was alerted to a Rocket site called Bamarang.co.uk, which appears to be copying Fab wholesale.

Here are screenshots of Fab (on the left) and Bamarang (on the right).

There’s a small irony in that the victim is a copy of sorts itself; Fab started out as a social network for the gay community, but pivoted last year to become what is effectively a niche version of Groupon.

But it’s not just the business model and idea of Fab that Bamarang is copying: it’s the entire design, look and feel.

In fact, the similarities irked Goldberg so much that he called the site a “complete rip-off” and went on the offensive in blog form:

Let me put bamarang [sic] and the other copycats on notice. Ripping someone off is not going to work in this space. Knock-offs are just bad design. Users will see right through it. Such tactics may work in some industries, but not in design.

You can understand his frustration. However, if he thinks that the Samwer brothers’ tactics will fail, he may be underestimating what’s actually happening here.

True, Bamarang.co.uk appears to be a relatively small operation at the moment. It was incorporated in Britain’s second city, Birmingham, is hiring staff based in London, and has directors including Arnt Jeschke and Christian Cornelius-Weis, who have both held senior roles at Rocket alongside the Samwers (although according to TechCrunch Europe, Cornelius-Weis quit Rocket shortly before Christmas.)

But Bamarang isn’t just a single clone site for a single local market that borrows heavily from Fab’s design: it’s a whole network.

Looking around, it’s obvious Rocket plans to go seriously big with Bamarang. It’s already running the service in Germany and France, and individuals with links to Rocket appear to have registered the name in countries including Italy and Poland too. Also troubling: it has also registered Bamarang.com — although there’s nothing there so far.

If that isn’t enough to get Fab worried, here’s another reason.

Bamarang UK’s domain name was registered through another Rocket subsidiary, the interiors sale site Westwing. Essentially, it’s a very similar operation to Fab but slightly less focused on the same high design credentials. This connection could be an important sign of things to come, because Westwing is a great example of the Samwers’ copy-and-expand strategy in action: It launched just a few months ago and is already in an estimated 20 European countries, including Britain (under the brand name Dalani) and the increasingly hot Turkish market.

In the past, the Samwers were content to stay in Germany, but they are now taking a bigger, broader — and altogether meaner — approach. It’s something Oliver Samwer referred to in an email as a “blitzkrieg.”

Fab may not be facing a small challenge here: It may be facing a knock-off prepared to go much bigger and much faster than it’s willing to.

I contacted both Rocket and Westwing to inquire about their plans for Bamarang, but they did not respond.

In the meantime, while Bamarang’s visual identity and business model may be near-identical copies of Fab, I’m not sure a small protest from Goldberg and an appeal to the design community is going to be enough to stop Bamarang from growing like a weed.

After all, claims of copying didn’t stop the Samwers when they copied eBay to build Alando (a clone they later sold to eBay), or StudiVZ (a Facebook clone), or Citydeal (a Groupon clone, later sold to Groupon), or Zalando (Zappos clone) or Wimdu (Airbnb clone) — or any of the other companies they’ve built.

Clones are a depressing reality all around the world. But Fab may soon learn that you can’t simply rely on ethics to help you overcome them. Faced with a clone, you have to execute better, maintain your vision and — crucially — be prepared to compete globally.

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