The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 10 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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 …”
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…”
Danny Rimer: Etsy Scaled From 250k to Over 3M Merchants, Defying Critics
“I'll never forget investing in Etsy and folks saying, well, it's crazy. You know, they already have 250,000 merchants online, all these arts and craft stores. Like, how many more can there be? And I think we're three million plus at this point in counting.”
USV's 2004 Fund Had Four Investments Each Return the Full Fund
“We made investments in Zynga, Twitter, Indeed, and Etsy within about a six month period. In our 2004 fund, each of those returned the fund.”
Rhodes: Etsy and Bonagora failed at wholesale by ignoring retailer demand
“Moving that online, people had tried it. Like Etsy tried this. There was this other website called Bonagora a while back that tried it. Everyone who tried it Would get a bunch of brands signed up, but then they couldn't get the retailers to order.”
Lipman: Two-year-old Slack valued at $2.8B compared to Etsy's $3.5B IPO
“And when you look at, like, the recent IPO this week of Etsy you know, they're a ten-year-old company, and Slack, You know, is a, you know, two-year-old company, and they, Slack is valued at a two-point-eight billion dollar valuation, where Etsy is, you know, …”
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.”
Silverman: Etsy squads ship at least two to three experiments monthly
“Typically, a squad is going to ship two or three experiments a month at least.”
Silverman: Etsy uses 10-person squads focused on a single customer metric
“At Etsy, the way we do it is we're organized in squads. The unit of work at Etsy is a squad. A squad is about 10 people, six engineers, a designer, a product manager, an analyst, roughly. And they're given one customer problem to fix and one metric of success.”
New York City consistently produces billion-dollar tech exits like Etsy and Tumblr
“New York, we believe, has now shown that it consistently can produce billion plus dollar exits, and so that's companies like Etsy and Mongo and Tumblr and a bunch of others, you know, a bunch of e-commerce companies as well.”