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 23 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
Kalin: VC Fred Wilson fired me as Etsy CEO without giving a reason
“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.”
Kalin: There is a continent of computing between wooden blocks and touchscreens
“I think there's a whole continent of computing in between the blocks that children play with and the way technology currently lands in their lap, which is just phones and tablets and reduces them to poking at pictures under glass.”
Kalin: Maria Thomas was the wrong fit for Etsy CEO due to culture mismatch
“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.”
Kalin: Modern marketplaces like Etsy and eBay optimize for buyers, not sellers
“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…”
Kalin: Meetings not worth standing up for should not happen
“If it's not worth standing up for, you shouldn't be having a meeting.”
Kalin: Nonsense words make global branding easier than compound English words
“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 …”
Kalin: Cold-start marketplace inertia requires an organic community to start the flywheel
“Overcoming inertia in the early stages of a marketplace is incredibly difficult. It's almost impossible, which is why, you know, there were so many eBay clones that never went anywhere. And, you know, you need to be able to tell a compelling story, and you nee…”
Kalin: Internet products must create native experiences, not copy offline formats
“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 …”
Kalin: Slower early growth allows marketplaces to learn lessons at lower stakes
“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.”
Kalin: Building an early childhood tech venture with a former Etsy engineer
“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.”
Kalin: Etsy started as a rejected commerce tab for the Get Crafty forum
“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…”
Kalin: Etsy secured its first $50,000 investment check from Spencer Aey
“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.”
Kalin: Etsy generated $1 million in sales in its first year
“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.”
Kalin: Etsy raised ~$250K at a $1.5M valuation in its early days
“We probably raised like 250 grand on a 1.5 million dollar valuation, something in there.”
Kalin: Early Etsy funding went entirely to servers and headcount, zero on ads
“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.”
Kalin: Etsy approached profitability and faced little pressure during the 2008 recession
“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.”
Kalin: I held under 5% of Etsy at the time of its IPO
“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.”
Kalin: My Etsy shares were locked up for one year post-IPO
“And then once NC went public, my shares were locked up for a year anyways, while the share price was falling.”
Kalin: Undercut a $1,600 quote by half for first web development job
“I, again, jokingly, just kind of said, I'll do it for half. And he goes, okay, great. And he kind of shoes me out of his office. And I leave his office holding this piece of paper that was someone else's proposal to make a website for this restaurant. And was …”
Kalin: Built reputation rebuilding the Get Crafty website in 2003
“So I made that first website, and because this is I don't know, 2003, I got known as, oh, this guy can make a website, and the wife of one of my NYU professors, Jean Rayla, was running a website called Get Crafty, and she needed that website rebuilt.”
Kalin: PayPal was early Etsy's exclusive payment method
“Our exclusive method of payment was PayPal, and so if PayPal worked in that location, then we were able to just
Ride those rails.”
Kalin: Hand-crocheted penis cozies were an unexpected early hit on Etsy
“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…”