Silverman: Etsy refused cloud software due to internal handmade dogma
Josh Silverman · 20VC: Etsy CEO, Josh Silverman on 2 Defining Traits of Great Leadership, The Danger of Attaching Happiness To Milestones, How To Structure Teams To Optimise for Experimentation and Agility &Whether You Learn More From Success Than Failure · Jan 18, 2021 · at 12:50
Etsy CEO Josh Silverman explains how Etsy's early ethos of handmade goods dogmatically led the engineering team to reject cloud infrastructure.
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“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 just dogma. And it was dogma that was, in fact, holding the company back in many, many ways.”
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