As has been written ad nauseam, we’ve seen a lot of activity in the wild and wacky world of cryptocurrency of late, thanks primarily to the tech industry’s new obsession with Bitcoin. Depending on whom you ask, digital currency like Bitcoin will either be worth nothing in 10 years, or its value will make Warren Buffet weep. It’s a polarizing topic at its very essence, but one thing is for sure: So far, venture capitalists are loving this emerging market, and startups are beginning to follow suit.

In late May, we introduced you to the Bitcoin market’s latest growth milestone: The launch of BitAngels, the first multi-city angel network and incubator dedicated exclusively to digital currency startups. Appropriately given its focus, BitAngels is a distributed network of angel investors and entrepreneurs that came together over the course of a few days in the wake of the Bitcoin 2013 Conference.

At launch, some 60 angels had joined the network and had pooled together just under $7 million in Bitcoin, which the founders planned to invest in $20K chunks, or increments thereof. While BitAngels isn’t a formal fund per se (so the Bitcoins are soft-circled, not in escrow), all involved are accredited, experienced investors, many of whom have made themselves available as advisors.

When we first discovered that MakerBot was looking to partner with Stratasys, I was a bit non-plussed. MakerBot, as I’ve noted before, has a certain indie cred that makes this move a bit unpalatable.

But, at the same time, it’s immensely important.

Stratasys makes expensive, industrial-quality 3D printers. They are the “big iron” of the 3D printing world. Items printed on Stratasys hardware are as solid as anything produced by, say, injection molding, and the resolution make them indispensable for engineers and designers. In short, Stratasys is making mainframes and MakerBot is making the Apple I. While I’m loath to claim that Bre Pettis is Woz (let alone Steve Jobs), he is a charismatic leader who makes 3D printing fun, something the folks at Stratasys probably could never do.

Today Stratasys announced that it has acquired MakerBot, as we first reported, in a stock deal worth $403 million based on the current share value of Stratasys. The combination of the companies brings together a leader in 3D industrial printing and manufacturing, with the emerging leader in desktop 3D printing, which the companies said in a press release should help drive “faster adoption of 3D printing” across all categories.

MakerBot will continue to operate as a separate company from Stratasys as part of the deal, which is reportedly stock-for-stock transaction. It’ll be a subsidiary of Stratasys, but will serve the consumer and desktop market segment while Stratasys continues to focus on its existing industry placement.

MakerBot was founded in 2009, and has since sold over 22,000 3D printers, with its most recent model making up 11,000 of those sales coming from the Replicator 2, which it launched back in September 2012. That means traction is on the upswing in a big way, something which no doubt helped pave the way for the deal.

This week on Founder Stories, I sat down with Airbnb co-founder Nate Blecharczyk. One of the things that strikes me as original to Airbnb’s founding team is that, unlike most startups I can think of, two of the co-founders are designers, and Blecharczyk, who’s a co-founder and CTO, is an engineer.

“It’s pretty unusual, and I actually attribute a lot of our success to that combination,” says Blecharczyk. “We see things very differently because of our backgrounds and we’ve discovered that’s an asset. Sometimes it takes a little longer to reconcile our prospectives, but we find that if we take the time to do that we can come up with a superior solution. One that takes into account both points of view.”

Nate continues by explaining how Airbnb has been able to bring the collaborative culture of the founding team to the rest of the company. He and I also discuss being selective about hiring, building cross-functional product teams centered around projects rather than roles within in the company, and transitioning responsibility to Facebook’s Mike Curtis who recently joined as Airbnb’s vice president of Engineering. Watch the full interview above to learn more.

It feels like startups are taking more and more steps to make the website creation process as easy as possible. There are companies like Weebly, which offer drag-and-drop interfaces for building websites. There’s Barley, which doesn’t require any layout work at all. And now there’s Pagevamp, which allows you to turn a Facebook Page into a website.

The company was founded by Atulya Pandey, Fred Wang and Vincent Sanchez-Gomez, three University of Pennsylvania students (now graduates) who ran a small WordPress design agency while they were in college. What they discovered, Sanchez-Gomez said, is that the process is still too complicated for many people. Facebook Pages, on the other hand, are easy to create, but they’re not particularly customizable.

“I think there are people, like my mom or my grandma, where if you said, ‘Hey, just make a WordPress site,’ they wouldn’t know what to do,” he said. “For them to make a Facebook Page is much more in the realm of possibility. And with Pagevamp, if they can do that, then they can make a website.”