Etsy

“Looking back on it, it's quite easy to see like, you know, that culture piece was too important to be a mismatch at that phase of Etsy's growth. And so she ended up not being the right fit in that role.”

“And I remember going to Jean, who was running Get Crafty, and saying, you know, could we add a tab on here for a marketplace so people could actually sell some of this stuff? And, you know, she's very thoughtful and decided against it because, you know, that e…”

“The new endeavor, I'm working with a pair of absolutely brilliant engineers, one of them, a close friend from Etsy, and it's at the intersection of early childhood development and technology.”

“Why would we just try to reprise offline shopping experiences online? This is a new medium. So you shouldn't just, you know, take a newspaper, put it online and make it a digital newspaper. We're not just trying to take an offline marketplace and make it, you …”

“And then once NC went public, my shares were locked up for a year anyways, while the share price was falling.”

“From that point on, most of the fundraising was primarily driven by needing to buy hardware and then just headcount. You know, we weren't spending any money on advertising or anything like that.”

“There was one class of items that took off that I didn't even know was something that existed, and that is penis cozies, and they are hand crocheted cozies for male genitalia, and generally the community was totally supportive of that, and I thought it was A r…”

“And I also, I think even at that early stage, had a sense that I wanted it to be a global brand, and so if it was just two English words stuck together, I felt like it would be more difficult. So I wanted to create a kind of playful, nonsensical word that had …”

“Because the scale and the growth of the marketplace was a gentle enough slope, we could learn the hardest lessons when the stakes were lower. And I really like that kind of crawl, walk, run approach. To building a business in general.”

“We probably raised like 250 grand on a 1.5 million dollar valuation, something in there.”

“I didn't have a huge amount, you know, and the company went public. I didn't even make the threshold of shareholders with over five percent that you have to disclose.”

“And you look at a marketplace, like, I would say Etsy now, or eBay, And the primary customer is clearly the buyer, where the whole experience is optimized on the buying side, to the point where, you know, I pay a listing fee, and here's my item, but the websit…”

“In the first year of business, we did a million dollars in sales, and that seemed like quite a lot, and this was all being driven by the more organic traffic of the early web, you know, being written up on blogs like Boing Boing.”

“So there really wasn't much of any financial pressure on the business building it through the recession. And it was approaching profitability at this point.”

“And went to their office and met him, and he told me that I was fired, but he didn't tell me why. And he just said, we have to do this.”

“Our exclusive method of payment was PayPal, and so if PayPal worked in that location, then we were able to just Ride those rails.”

“Went back the next day, picked up a check, Etsy's first money in for 50,000 dollars, and walked by Stern and was like, you know, I did it.”

“You can't be an Etsy with better values. You got to be Etsy with a different product.”

“So this all really got started when they increased their fees a second time by 30% in 2022 and they announced that fee increase in the same week that they announced record profits.”