Source: This Storque article
Etsy has a new hire on the product team, named Sean Flannagan. Etsy username sean11.
Sean Flannagan graduated from the New School in New York and previous to working for Etsy, was associate web director at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.
Source: http://deeplinking.net/about/
Today this Storque article announced the departure of original Etsy founders Haim Schoppik and Chris Maguire (RevolvingDork).
Last week Chris and Haim announced to us that they’re moving on from Etsy. They’ll be at Etsy through the end of this month, sharing their knowledge of Etsy’s systems, network architecture, and all things technical.
We owe so much to these two guys. They have given their lives to Etsy, all the way down to their sleep cycles. It’s been an amazing three years: the team led by Chris, Haim, Jared and Rob built Etsy from an idea in Brooklyn to a global handmade marketplace.
We were immensely fortunate to have had Chris and Haim present at the creation, leading the company’s technical efforts through Etsy’s first three years. Please join us here at Etsy in wishing them many more successes.
Chris and Haim have also written a personal good-bye to the Etsy community which is included in the article:
Friends,
The last three years have undoubtedly been the longest and most eventful of our lives. We’d like to thank each and every one of you for enabling us to build Etsy into what it is today. Through many sleepless nights your kind words and commitment to the marketplace kept us going gladly forward. The cookies didn’t hurt, either.
With a heavy heart now we move onto other ventures. We hope to stay in touch with many of you, and we wish the best of luck to our fellow Etsy employees.
– Chris and Haim
marymary has started a Forum thread to discuss the Storque article on Rob Kalin’s changing role at the company, changing titles, and the hiring of a new Chief Technology Officer.
Dear Etsians,
Here are a couple important news items, one from Rob and one from Maria.
From Rob:
I am happy to announce that, with high hopes and expectations, Maria is now Etsy’s CEO. My new title at Etsy is Chief Creative Officer (CCO), a nice loose moniker that will allow me to focus on what I’m best at: product work and long-term, big-picture thinking.
I will also be spending time developing Etsy.org, a non-profit organization that will focus on the educational side of how to make a living making things. (Lots more details about this are coming soon. Right now, it’s in the planning stages.)
I’ve been filling many roles since Etsy began, all of them new to me in some way. It’s been an incredible and exhausting education, much of it public. Watching Maria, with her experience and expertise, has enabled me to make this decision. I’m excited to get back to what I enjoy most, and maybe even work less than seven days a week for the first time in a long time.
From Maria:
I am thrilled to announce that Chad Dickerson will join Etsy in Brooklyn as Chief Technology Officer on September 1, 2008. As Etsy’s CTO, Chad will be the company’s top technology executive and will join Rob, me and the Etsy team in helping to shape Etsy’s strategic direction, development, and future growth. Chad will manage our entire technical organization, including application development, network infrastructure and quality assurance. He will report to me.
In my recent “Long View” article, I spoke about seeking “a few talented, experienced people to join Etsy and help us more quickly and successfully do things we’ve never done before, while continuing to celebrate Etsy’s creative, quirky and independent culture.” Chad is the first of these few folks. He’s an experienced leader of technical teams and a home brewer!
Chad joins us from Yahoo! where he has spent the last three years leading technical teams in innovative product development. He is currently Senior Director for Yahoo!’s Brickhouse & Advanced Products team, a group outside of Yahoo’s! corporate structure designed to be more nimble and customer-focused. In this role Chad heads up a cross-functional team of over 30 engineers, designers, and product managers who incubate and launch Web-based, high availability, consumer-facing products.
Before Yahoo!, Chad was CTO at InfoWorld/Media Group IDG for five years and before that, CTO at Salon.com for three years. In both CTO roles, Chad was the senior executive responsible for technology strategy and execution.
Chad started his Web career as an Internet Developer and Gopher Administrator at “The News & Observer” ( http://www.newsobserver.com/ ) in Raleigh, NC. He is a Tar Heel native, and his parents will be very pleased to have him back on the east Coast.
Read more about Chad at his blog: http://www.chaddickerson.com/
Please join us in welcoming Chad to Etsy.
Etsy founder Rob Kalin and new Etsy COO Maria Thomas have posted the following article on The Storque. (The first part is by Rob, the second part by Maria.)
Hello out there,
Etsy just turned three, and we’re at a turning point. Some people reading this have been part of our community for all three of those years, and many are just arriving. This letter is the perspective of someone who’s been here for the full three years.
Etsy needs to change. Some of what worked for us two or three years ago doesn’t work now, and we need to shift how we do things. This seems obvious, but it’s easy to overlook that you can’t get to where we are now without the past three years.
Etsy up till now
In January of 2006. Etsy Inc. was just four people: myself, Chris, Haim and Jared. We were working for free, working day and night all the time, and there were about a hundred new forum posts each day. Etsy has changed since then: we’re now a company with 63 employees, a community that has seen 1,000,000 registrations in over a one hundred countries, and now there are 15,000 new forum posts every day.
Looking at changes in numbers is easy. How can I articulate the other changes?
I remember when Etsy reached 10 employees: it was the first big shift in our work flow. When you’re starting a company, you do what works. It’s tautological: how do you know what works? It works. This meant working seven days a week, around the clock. It meant skipping out on rent, foregoing regular meals, not seeing family or friends. (There’s a reason that small groups of people are able to launch things that large companies can’t.)
Once we hit 20 employees, we created teams inside the company. (These teams have evolved over time, but they still exist, and it’s how we group employees on our About page.) At the next stage of growth, as each team grew, we needed team leads, and a shared space to keep track of what everyone was working on (we chose to use a wiki with a ticketing system).
When you have teams inside a company, you have to be careful that silos don’t develop. People tend to work heads down on what their immediate tasks are. When you have team leads, you need to setup a reporting structure. As new employees come on, they are oriented inside the company. This may all sound obvious, but when you’re in the trenches at a startup, without someone who has done this before, you learn as you go. We have certainly done a fair share of what Oscar Wilde would call “conducting our education in public.”
Alongside the company growing, the community grew. This was wonderful to watch, and it added to our responsibilities: the more people using our service, the more ideas for how to improve it. This is the beauty of the Web; it’s a permanent focus group. The tough part is meeting everyone’s expectations, and that will always require attention.
What will change?
Etsy Inc. has new leadership. I have been working with Maria Thomas since she joined Etsy six weeks ago. We’ve been taking a clear look at what works and what doesn’t work right now, and planning what we need to move forward. Maria brings heaps of experience with her, and her arrival marks a change in how Etsy is run as a company.
Her arrival also marks a change in my own role at Etsy. I am 28 years old. Before Etsy, I worked many jobs: cashier at a Marshalls department store, stock boy at a camera shop, freelance carpenter, lowest rung on the ladder at a demolition company, minimum wage floor help at the Strand book store (saving up to go back to college), amanuensis for an eighty-year-old philosopher from Vienna.
All of these jobs prepared me for being an entrepreneur and starting a company. Maria has the skills and experience required to lead Etsy though the upcoming years, and that is what she’s here to do.
Right now we’re focused on getting the right people and the right process inside Etsy. We can’t make specific promises regarding when and what we will build – but I promise that your requests and suggestions and complaints and kudos have been heard. The proof will, of course, be in the pudding, and rather than offer any more promises, we want to let the results of our organizational and structural changes manifest themselves in the most important real result: a great product, a great seller experience, a great buyer experience, and great customer support.
______________________________________________________________________Dear Etsians,
A little over a month ago, after a year of watching and exploring, I joined Etsy to help lead the company. During that year I watched Etsy grow and its community evolve both as a marketplace for handmade items and as an intimate and sophisticated gathering place for people to connect, share ideas, learn, and experience joy in purposeful living.
I became an Etsy member in early 2007. My Etsy username is “Pesmou,” which is Greek for “Tell Me.” I originally chose Pesmou because, as a Greek-American, it’s an easy word for me to remember. It now seems like a very fitting user name: I want the Etsy community to tell me what they want and need and how we can do better. In fact, I’ve spent most of my first month reading Forum posts and emails from Etsy members. But, I am getting ahead of myself.
My first Etsy purchase was a sterling silver Star of David pendant. I bought it as a Bat Mitzva gift for my college roommate’s daughter. I later learned that the maker is Etsy’s own in-house lawyer, Sarah Feingold!
That first purchase got me hooked. It was fun to browse Etsy’s pages and admire the high quality handmade items described so passionately by their makers. I experienced the joy of discovery and the satisfaction of offering a truly personal gift while also supporting someone’s craft. Over the next few months, I found myself visiting the Etsy site not only to buy beautiful things but also to participate in the burgeoning community and to read the engaging, creative content in the Storque blog.
Over the course of a year, I had the opportunity to on several occasions visit Etsy’s offices in Brooklyn, NY and get to know a few Etsians, including co-founder Rob Kalin. I was inspired by Rob’s vision of a global marketplace full of handmade items, stories, sights and sounds.
I also began to understand the challenges presented by trying to advance the young company beyond its start-up phase. It takes time, focus and investment to build a lasting and profitable company.
What do I bring with me to Etsy? Nearly ten years of experience operating consumer-oriented Web-based businesses at Amazon.com and NPR.org. I have learned that building a great company requires more than just a great idea. It requires an organization that knows what it wants to achieve, and is staffed properly to reach those goals. It requires a relentless, detailed focus on execution informed by constantly listening to customers.
My current goals at Etsy are:
* People: seek deeper experience to lead Etsy through things we’ve never done before.
* Process: create a disciplined approach to planning and execution.
* Product: build the best marketplace for connecting makers and buyers.Above all, my goal is to get things done. This ranges from improving the user experience on Etsy, to communicating more consistently, to adding more sophisticated analytical tools so that we can measure our performance.
First, I am listening: to our members, our browsers, our fans, our critics, our staff, and our investors. I am actively reading the Etsy forums and sitting side-by-side with Etsy customer support representatives. I am reading emails and blogs to understand the needs and desires of people who sell on Etsy, who shop on Etsy, who browse Etsy, who love Etsy and who bash Etsy.
I am studying other companies that have successfully (or unsuccessfully) combined discipline and hard work with “keeping things human,” as Rob says. I am talking to a lot of talented, experienced people and looking for a few of them to join Etsy and help us more quickly and successfully do things we’ve never done before, while continuing to celebrate Etsy’s creative, quirky and independent culture.
I am looking closely at how work is organized at Etsy. My experience in Web-based businesses is consistent with my early observations at Etsy: there’s always a giant list of things to be built to make a better Web site that people want to visit regularly. Many of these desired features or functionalities involve technical development and therefore draw on a limited pool of resources to help accomplish them.
Thus, another part of my early agenda is to develop a well-understood project prioritization process inside Etsy. That process should take into account the need to build a highly reliable and scalable technical infrastructure and one nimble enough to accommodate the dynamism of a business like Etsy’s.
It takes time and talent to fully realize the power of a great idea. Etsy is on its way, but there’s still much to do.
There are many great discussions going on about Etsy, both on our site and outside of it. We’d like to engage with them. To start, we’ll hold office hours in the Virtual Labs’s Treehouse Room on Wednesday, July 9th at 7-8 pm EDT. This will give everyone a chance to talk to us directly about what’s going, and share their thoughts.
The Washington Post announced yesterday that Etsy is getting a new Chief Operating Officer, Maria Thomas, formerly NPR’s digital head.
Thomas was the head of digital for more than six years, and was responsible for NPR’s multiple forays into digital, including its early jump into podcasting and developing NPR’s online music efforts. Prior to joining NPR in 2001, Thomas spent three years at Amazon.com (NSDQ: AMZN), and played a key role in launching its camera and photo store.
This comes a month after former CEO Ken Stern left and a new interim CEO Dennis L. Haarsager took over. “It is about an opportunity for me, and not much to do with NPR,” she said. NPR will search for a replacement.
This Storque article has introduced the most recent additions to Etsy’s staff.
They are:
Customer Support team:
Amber aka adubois
Caleb aka calebwalt aka Inflataboy
Claire aka mermaidclaire aka onceinadirtywhile
Matt aka projectmattnyc
Joe aka joethebeard aka DeepInTheWoods
Jason (no username given)
Storque team
Both the new staffers will be making films for Etsy
Bre aka brepettis
Tara aka weirdwolf
Engineering team
George aka Georgyo
Kyle aka twokb
David aka davidgiffin
Bryan aka bschwab
Etsy has added two new forum categories: Critiques, where you can, “give and receive specific advice about your shop” and Techniques & Materials, where you can, “share and seek advice about creating items.” You can find out more about the changes in this Storque article.
According to the Storque article, some staffing changes are accompanying this new set-up. Daniellexo will oversee the forums as the “forum conductor”, and MaryMary will also now moderate the forums full-time. Robwhite will continue to keep an eye on the forums at night, while Stellaloella has been moved to “large-scale projects”.
edit Feb 19 by JB
The Storque article is closed to comments but the forum thread is still open for now.
EDIT by GreenMamba 2.24.08: FYI
Apparently, when the forum categories were updated, a change was also made to the forum link titled “Visit the Storque for Etsy News”, found in the upper right corner of the page, below “View topics you’ve posted in”. It now takes you directly to the News section of the Storque, rather than the Main Storque page. The ‘News’ link in the top grey nav bar, which appears on each Etsy page, still links to the Storque’s front page.
In this Storque article, Etsy’s First Five Years, co-founder Rob Kalin discusses Etsy, from it’s early beginnings, to a point in its not-too-distant future. Kicking off with a reading of a children’s book, Swimmy, to help illustrate his ideal company model, he goes on to give a quick introduction of Etsy investors, then outlines why a nearly-solvent Etsy needed another financial boost:
- Given our current rate of growth — with how many images we store and how much traffic we serve — we estimate that we’ll need to spend $5 million on hardware and hosting in the next two years. This is not only to keep up with what we have now, but to support new features and expansion.
- Right now, Etsy only supports the US Dollar and the English language. We want to support many other currencies and languages, but to do so requires significant resources: from people to translate the site as it exists now, to providing customer support in new languages.
- The checkout experience on Etsy is not ideal. Every buyer has to pay every seller individually when checking out. Based on our own tests, and based on a lot of unsolicited feedback, this is a major hurdle to increasing sales. People shopping on Etsy expect an experience comparable to other leading ecommerce sites like Amazon.com. We aim to build an in-house payment system, and to do this properly requires a significant amount of capital investment.
- In the same vein as the previous point, people searching for items on Etsy expect search to be comparable to Google. This is quite a lofty goal, but we’re up for the challenge. Our new investment will help us achieve this.
- Etsy is a platform on top of which tens of thousands of other people run their own businesses. We have a huge responsibility to keep our service humming and improve it based on community feedback. In order to do this, first of all we need to stick around. While it’s nice to know that we can cover our own operational costs, I never want to make the excuse that we can’t succeed because we lack funds to buy servers, cover a bandwidth bill, provide a warm office for our employees and so on. In other words, we need a bit of a cushion in order to provide the best service we can, confident that we can spend a bit more when need be.
- We need to be able to make it through any hard times that hit the economy. We believe that the current economy, favoring megacorporations and supersizes, is unstable. People who make a living making things, especially those we have on Etsy, will play a key role in revitalizing and stabilizing the world.
- The services Etsy provides, from customer support to shopping tools, need to grow and improve. We want to offer superb customer service, including live phone support; we want to provide our sellers with detailed stats on their shop. We can do these, but they require more resources than we currently have.
- It is immensely important to me that all Etsy workers are paid a good salary, provided with full benefits (medical, dental, vision) by the company. Many companies, far too many companies, underpay their employees, don’t make workers employees at all (”permalancers” and “permatemp” are the new words for this), and provide few if any benefits. (We also know that many of the sellers on Etsy lack access to such benefits as health insurance, and we want to work to change this.)
He wraps up the article with a double postscript:
P.P.S. I’m planning another Town Hall, so please think up any questions and post them in the comments. I’ll gladly answer them during the online meetup.
Admin responded swiftly today to user concerns about the number of times items from EtsyLabs appeared in the Gift Guides.
matt says:
Hello Friends,We discussed this, and we think you are right. The items are now removed. Thanks for the feedback.
Love, Matt
Prior to the decision to remove the items, EtsyLabs had 14 items throughout the various guides.
What is EtsyLabs? Admin Mary explains:
EtsyLabs says:
Hey there!Thanks so much for your question and concern. The purpose of the Etsy Labs shop is to supply buyers with promotional Etsy merchandise that would like to help us spread the good Etsy word in style. Almost every design we sell in the shop has the Etsy brand name on it. We also use it as a space to purchase classes that are taught in our community workspace housed in the Etsy offices.
All the money made from the Labs shop sales goes to offset the cost of promotional goods for events and street teams.
Update!
Apparently admin’s items will also be removed from the Gift Guides.
matt says:
We are also working to remove the admins from there too. It takes a minute, because there are so darn many of us.Un Moment, SVP
x,m
“Arts and Crafts Find New Life Online” describes the growing popularity of crafting, starting with a snapshot in the life of Etsy admin Anda Lewis Corrie (a.k.a. simply “Anda” around here).
It’s an overcast December afternoon, but the Pop Up Community Center in downtown Manhattan is buzzing. Spread along a white wooden table, a half-dozen people are ironing plastic bags together to create a fabric made of recycled material. Others are bent over sewing machines, turning the plastic into colorful tote bags, wallets, even pillows. Occasionally they turn for advice to Anda Lewis Corrie, who is leading this workshop on transforming old plastic bags into useful objects.
This article compares Etsy to Ebay and does give some profit estimations:
Etsy won’t reveal its revenues but expects to turn a profit early next year on what it takes in from a 20 cents-per-item listing fee and the 3.5% commission on goods that merchants sell through the site. In 2007 those merchants sold 1.92 million items worth a total of $26.5 million, according to Etsy. The 2 1/2-year-old startup produces online videos, hosts virtual town halls, and runs workshops with the goal of persuading more folks to teach each other to create and sell crafts on Etsy. Since it’s a sort of eBay (EBAY) for handmade crafts, the more people who sign up to sell their handiworks on the site, the better the company does. Says Corrie: “We want to help people make a living making things.”
Etsy’s revenues have been reported in other articles, so you can read our press coverage archives for that information.
