GigaOM » SoHo Tech Labs

Paul Berry’s CasaHop raises $1.2M from First Round, Betaworks

Ryan Kim — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 16:12:17 +0000

CasaHop, the first start-up out of former Huffington Post CTO Paul Berry’s incubator SoHo Tech Labs, has raised $1.2 million, led by First Round Capital, with participation from Betaworks, Lerer Ventures and a number of individual investors. The money will help the company ramp up as it prepares for a wider launch in the next couple months.

The site, which soft-launched in February, uses social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to pair up users across their extended networks who want to swap homes. The goal is to become a regular resource for users, not just for occasional vacations, but for weekend getaways and other trips. Berry, who is also CasaHop’s CEO, said the service has enjoyed a lift from the popularity of Airbnb but it’s going after a different opportunity.

“Airbnb is more about making yourself a mini-landlord and finding a way to monetize your home. CasaHop is much more about communities and clubs and people exchanging and trading,” he said. “We’re allowing you to connect with friends you already have and it’s more about friends staying over. There’s much more of a feeling of community and trust.”

CasaHop has just a few thousand users so far but the goal is to open to a wider audience by the end of this summer. Part of the plan is to appeal to existing communities and clubs, letting them connect to CasaHop and allowing their members to share their homes through the service. Community managers, for example, would be able to plug CasaHop into their clubs and could charge a fee for access to the service, which would get shared with CasaHop. Users could also create their own clubs within CasaHop. That would be one of the ways CasaHop can generate revenue, Berry said.

The new money should give CasaHop 18 months of runway to get off the ground. CasaHop’s new investors will be key in helping the company realize its vision of becoming a go-to resource for travelers and a well-known consumer brand. The list of investors includes hotelier Andre Belazs, former MTV founder Bob Pittman and Nicholas Negroponte of founder of MIT’s Media Lab and One Laptop per Child. Other investors include TechStars’ David Tisch, Moat Co-Founder Jonah Goodhart and Simulmedia CEO David Morgan. Lerer Ventures, which is involved in SoHo Tech Labs, is also participating.

CasaHop CEO Paul Berry

As I wrote about before, Berry founded the SoHo Tech Labs incubator in February after leaving the Huffington Post. Berry has reunited with a number of former HuffPo execs, including co-founders Ken Lerer and Jonah Peretti; former CEO Eric Hippeau; Greg Coleman, former president and chief revenue officer; and Eric Ashman, the former CFO. All are part of the incubator. Berry said that start-ups out of the incubator must pass a few tests before they can take flight. They need to get greenlit by the board, find executives who want to join the team, obtain outside funding and ultimately find viral success with consumers. CasaHop has a team of 14 employees including CTO Kriti Godey and President Florent Peyre, who helped launch Gilt City.

CasaHop still has a lot of work ahead to win over consumers, but Berry believes the time is ripe for a service like this to flourish. He will have his hands full after recently launching RebelMouse, a social publishing platform, the second project out of SoHo Tech Labs. The incubator has two other projects on deck, but Berry said the priority now is to execute on these two start-ups first.

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Ex-Huffpo CTO launches RebelMouse, a social publishing platform

Ryan Kim — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 14:48:51 +0000

Paul Berry, the former CTO of the Huffington Post, is pulling back the covers today on his stealth social publishing start-up RebelMouse, allowing users to get a look at the service and sign-up on the waiting list. The service is a publishing tool that lets people pull in and present their Twitter and Facebook content and mix it with stuff from the web, creating a very personal and dynamic page that represents who they are.

It’s like a flexible version of a Tumblr or WordPress site that is easy to configure, allowing users to create a very robust page out of existing and new content. It can serve as a more personal representation of a user, more than a Facebook, Pinterest or About.me page. RebelMouse users who sign-up for the waiting list today will soon be allowed to view the work of some early private beta testers. The site will open to the public in the next two to six weeks.

Berry told me the idea behind the site came from people constantly asking him for advice on how to create their own site. He said that can be too much of a struggle for people, something he set about trying to solve after leaving HuffPo in February.

“Right now, most of the world is on Facebook or Twitter, usually both. You’re spending way too much time and struggle and getting way too unsatisfactory results on your own website,” said Berry. “You need something to bring it together, to show who you are and that’s true of individuals and companies.”

Berry said the goal is to create something that’s fresh and social. So users can pick and choose what content they’ve shared through Facebook and Twitter and turn it into a post on a larger page. Or they can create an original post with their own media. There’s a bookmarklet for pulling in images from other sites, similar to Pinterest. And there’s analytics for each post so you can see how many people are reading it.

What’s cool about RebelMouse is you can easily arrange the different posts and freeze specific posts to a location, while the rest of the content is updated around it. That allows users to get out of the reverse chronological order that is common on most blogging platforms.

“Reverse chronological is very stone age,” Berry said. “It doesn’t represent how you’re thinking. There should be an element of recency but you should be able to highlight stuff you care about most.”

RebelMouse founder Paul Berry

RebelMouse, the second start-up out of Berry’s SoHo Tech Labs incubator, will be working through the feedback of its private beta testers and adding new features before it opens up. The site will soon have more discovery features to allow people to easily browse what other people are doing. And there will be more sources of content including Instagram, Tumblr, RSS and others. Berry said RebelMouse is also adding a commerce function so people can sell things directly on their RebelMouse pages. And they’re also working on finding a way to connect creators with brands, who might be interested in sponsoring posts.

RebelMouse will be free to people who have their page hosted on the site. It will charge individuals $3 a month to power a domain. Bigger blogs and corporate pages will be charged $3 a week.

For the notoriously impatient Berry, who hates creating anything in stealth mode, it’s a big milestone to finally start lifting the covers on RebelMouse. The goal now is to quickly set the service loose and see how viral and sticky it can get.

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In a SoHo Lab, HuffPo Mafia rekindles the old magic

Ryan Kim — Wed, 09 May 2012 20:34:30 +0000

After the Huffington Post was acquired by AOL last year, HuffPo chief technology officer Paul Berry estimated 15 percent of his time was spent dealing with corporate politics. A year later, that figure had zoomed to 85 percent while 15 percent of his time was devoted to building technology. Now, just a few months after leaving the Huffington Post position he held for more than five years, he’s back to creating things again on a full-time basis.

Berry left the Huffington Post in February and got to work on a new incubator called SoHo Tech Labs, which reunites some of the top former executives of the Huffington Post. Along with Berry, there’s HuffPo co-founders Ken Lerer and Jonah Peretti, former CEO Eric Hippeau, Greg Coleman, former president and chief revenue officer and Eric Ashman, the former CFO. Others from HuffPo’s tech group including Ben Regenspan, CTO of the lab, have migrated over as well.

Channeling the HuffPo spirit

Berry isn’t just assembling a cast of familiar faces. He’s conjuring up the same spirit that helped the Huffington Post become a top online publisher. The idea is to channel the same virality, fast iteration, worldwide development and emphasis on analytics and apply it to a handful of startups that can get up and running with head-spinning speed.

“Our thesis is the social and mobile infrastructure we have today didn’t exist at this scale a year ago. That’s why we’re seeing the rise of Instagrams and Draw Somethings. The speed at which disruption can happen is unprecedented,” said Berry, in a sit-down interview at his office in the former Huffington Post space.

SoHo Tech Labs has already gotten two startups off the ground: CasaHop, a house exchange service that soft-launched last month and Rebel Mouse, a social publishing platform that is still shrouded in secrecy. Two more are in the works with the company prepared to push out up to eight companies this year. It’s not a factory, insists Berry, CasaHop’s CEO, but the pieces are in place to help manufacture startups with almost machine-like efficiency.

Working as a team

When ideas come in, Berry can turn to Peretti, the founder of Buzzfeed, to shape it with an eye toward virality. Hippeau helps with business strategy while Lerer, general partner at Lerer Ventures, works on lining up funding and lends a hand with design and branding. Ashman is responsible for setting up the equity structure on the projects while Berry ensures that the technology evolves in a straightforward manner. All of the projects out of SoHo Tech Labs will be built off the same platform, based on Python, NoSQL, MySQL, JQuery and other technologies. The benefit is that all the companies in the lab can avoid duplicating their work by sharing code easily, plugging in the necessary components needed to build a viable product.

As a project spins up, Berry can tap a team of more than 20 developers along with three designers spread around the world to help get it up to speed. That was one of the key lessons from HuffPo’s growth: it relied on an international tech team that was constantly handing off projects to each other, ensuring that improvements and updates happened quickly. Under this entire arrangement, startups should be able to get an minimum viable product for $50,000 to $80,000.

The key for any SoHo Tech Labs startup is a viral kick, something that can spread quickly via social channels without paid marketing. Berry said the startups out of the lab will also offer an easy entry for newcomers but should also include deeper functionality for people willing to invest. And the companies will be very mobile, either at launch or soon thereafter.

Not a HuffPo competitor

So what kind of startups is SoHo Tech Labs building and will any of them eventually challenge the Huffington Post? Berry said the plan is to build platforms, tools and social sites, not to compete with HuffPo. Berry is sensitive about this subject and knows that the issue is valid, especially considering many of his team came over from HuffPo. Berry, for his part, took his time with his exit, making sure HuffPo was able to prepare for his departure.

“I understand there might be some nervousness (at the Huffington Post) but this is a new space. This is a small group of core people who were not happy at AOL. It’s different working for a small company,” Berry said.

With Berry, it’s all about getting up to 60 miles per hour as fast you can. That also presents a problem for Berry, whose projects are moving along at a nice pace, but aren’t ready to hit the road. Few things irk him more than not being able to gauge how an idea can fare on its own. But it’s good to be back with the old team, trying to see if a small group of people can create some magic again, Berry said.

“The emphasis is on scrappy,” Berry said. “It’s about doing something fun and scrappy and hoping it goes crazy.”

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