Prediction Not checkable as stated
Silverman: E-commerce will consolidate into a tiny handful of winning platforms
“I find that thesis exceptionally unlikely. The brain can only remember a couple of brands, and so I think the world is consolidating around Fewer and fewer places to buy things online. I mean, if you're a tiny independent shop, you're going to recount on Googl…”
Opinion
Silverman: Etsy is best positioned to be the alternative to Amazon
“I can't think of any company better positioned to be the alternative to Amazon than Etsy.”
Assertion Supported
Silverman: Etsy refused cloud software due to internal handmade dogma
“Etsy believed that because Etsy was about handmade, Etsy should make everything itself. So Etsy didn't use the cloud and built almost all of its software itself. And that was sort of lore. It was considered strategy, but I don't think it was strategy. It was j…”
Assertion Supported
Silverman: Etsy cut 20% of staff, half of projects in five weeks
“We had to lay off over 200 people, you know, within five weeks of joining the company, we'd laid off 20% of the staff, and of the remaining staff, probably 80% of them had new jobs, and we'd shut down over half of all the projects that the company was working …”
Opinion
Silverman: Silicon Valley is an insular, lemming-like echo chamber
“It's incredibly lemming-like, very internally focused, a giant echo chamber. I really love not living in Silicon Valley so that I can maintain enough objectivity and external perspective.”
Insight
Silverman: Business moves faster and impacts communities better than policy work
“I think when you run a business, you're able to really move much more quickly than in policy, and I think do a lot of things that can positively impact community.”
Insight
Silverman: 20-year career plans are overwhelming and likely to get derailed
“I think this notion that you've got to figure out what you're going to do for the next 20 years can be so overwhelming. And life has so much luck and Fate involved that if you hang everything on some twenty-year aspiration, the probability that something is go…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Silverman: eBay spent four months seeking Skype CEO before hiring him
“When they asked me to run Skype, I was at eBay. Honestly, they spent four months looking to find anyone else, and no one would take that job because, you know, it's in the telecommunications industry, which is highly regulated, and international phone calls we…”
Insight
Silverman: Successful companies confuse what helped them with what hindered them
“The other thing I've observed in companies that have achieved some level of success is they confuse that they've succeeded because of and the things they've succeeded in spite of.”
Insight
Silverman: Untouchable corporate dogmas yield the highest-value experiments
“So in some ways, the things that people are unwilling to test or experiment with are often the things that are most valuable to test and experiment with.”
Insight
Silverman: Being different only matters if it makes you better
“I want to be better than everyone else, and so if you can't tell me why different makes us better, I'm not that interested.”
Insight
Silverman: Teams failing with bold, customer-focused ideas deserve high esteem
“There are teams that have delivered close to zero over the course of the year, and I hold them in great esteem because their ideas are bold and grounded in good customer insight.”
Insight
Silverman: CEOs must build baseline competence in weak areas for empathy
“I think there's table stakes and there's your spikes or strengths, right? So whatever your job is, there's table stakes good enough. I'm not a project manager by nature. It's not What I'm great at. But to be an effective CEO, there's a table stakes level of pr…”
Opinion
Silverman: Executives ignoring personal weaknesses is flippant given employee livelihoods
“Yes. And especially if you're a leader, I mean, I don't know, I feel like if, I mean, all of us are leaders in our own roles, but if you have the privilege to lead a whole company, there's a lot of people whose livelihoods are at stake. You know, it feels trem…”
Disclosure
Silverman: Spent 20 years taking high-risk executive jobs others refused
“In fact, I think every job I've ever had In the past 20 years, I've gotten because most other people wouldn't take it.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Silverman: Automation will increase consumer desire for custom, creative goods
“In a world that's becoming ever more commoditized, and where automation is changing the nature of work, creativity can't be automated. And we're going to yearn more and more for something made just for us.”
Opinion
Silverman: Etsy's market is massive, defined by 'special' rather than 'handmade'
“I don't think it's niche at all. I think it's massive. I just don't define the market as handmade. I define the market as special.”
Insight
Silverman: True happiness comes from hindsight fulfillment, not present ease
“Happiness, you normally, I don't know, in my experience, I don't often have happiness in the moment. I have happiness in hindsight. When I feel like we have achieved something of great purpose, at the end of my life, I will reflect back and determine that I wa…”
Insight
Silverman: Pursuing every good ROI idea leads to corporate failure
“If you do all of the ideas that meet that criteria, you're dead in the water. There's far too many of them. So instead of asking what good ideas do we have, I try to ask, and I think we at Etsy try to ask ourselves, what are the fewest things we need to do in …”
Insight
Silverman: Etsy focuses on seller GMV above company revenue
“For me, the metric of success winning is all about GMV. GMV is the sum sales of our sellers. How much did our sellers sell this year? That's different than our revenue. Our revenue is a subset of that, and our profit is a subset of our revenue. But our seller …”
Insight
Silverman: Leadership requires only defining success, constraints, and hiring correctly
“Leadership is about defining success and defining constraints. And the more I've been on my journey, the more I realize it's those two things plus one. I would add one thing, which is making sure you have the right people on the team. But if a leader does only…”
Assertion Partly supported
Silverman: Pivoting Skype to video calling dramatically altered its growth curve
“Pivoting Skype from audio calls to video calls was probably the most powerful way to drive engagement. And so we made video calling the centerpiece of Skype for that out, changed Skype's brand, really, and mission to be about video. Shipped an amazing product …”
Insight
Silverman: Framework for evaluating decision importance vs rollback cost
“The second decision matrix that I use a lot actually is a two by two framework of the importance of the decision and the cost of rollback. And if you think about each decision you make in terms of how important is it and what's the cost of rollback for There's…”
Assertion Supported
Silverman: Four million sellers rely on Etsy daily for their livelihoods
“Four million sellers count on Etsy every day to feed their families and to connect with community.”
Josh Silverman