Rob Kaelin, Etsy's founder, talks about the handmade marketplace hitting $100M in annual sales with 60 employees. He emphasizes keeping resellers out, getting backing from Union Square Ventures and Accel, and plans to expand internationally and launch parachutes.org to educate makers.
Questions this video answers
About $100 million.
About 60 people.
Flickr founders (Katerina and Stewart) and Joshua (from Delicious).
Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures.
Accel (Excel in transcript) led the Series D and Jim Breyer joined the board.
We're here in the World Economic Forum 2009 in Davos. We're walking through Davos and hanging out with some cool people. Who are you?
I am Rob Kaelin, founder of Etsy.
And what is Etsy?
Etsy is a handmade marketplace. So you can go on there and buy things from people all over the world who are making what they're selling.
That's really cool. And you just told me you sell about $100 million worth of stuff every year.
Well, last year.
Last year. And it's going up.
Yeah. This year should be significantly more than that.
That's crazy. Even in a downturn, you're doing so well.
Yeah. I think that's consumer behavior, though, Right. When you don't have as much money to spend, what is value to you? And I think to a lot of people, value isn't how cheap something is. Value is how meaningful something is.
Yeah.
And that when you're buying something from someone who. You know who the maker is, there's a lot more value in that.
What's the hottest thing on your site? What's the hottest genre?
We've seen lots of trends kind of come and go. Jewelry still has, ever since you launched, pretty much been the top selling category. There's also a really vibrant B2B side where people who make supplies. So people who make things that the makers make stuff out of are doing really good business as well.
Very cool. And how are you funded? Actually, hold on a second. Is this filming? Yeah, it is. Funny, it's hard to see in the sunlight whether these things are filming or not.
So we started with some angel capital from the Flickr founders, Katerina and Stewart, and from Joshua at Delicious, and then took some VC money from Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures.
Yep.
And then we had our Series D probably about a year ago now from Excel, with Jim Breyer joining the board. That's awesome. I'm gonna fall on camera.
Yeah. Really? Let's know. You have 60 people working for you, right?
Yeah. We have our office in Brooklyn. And the final piece of advice would be don't wear cowboy boots in the snow.
Yeah. That's why we bought these big old clunking boots. Actually, Ayrton has these. Clamp on metal.
No, they're like galoshes.
Oh, man, they're great. I wish I had known about those. What's next for you? I mean, what's the challenges right now for your site?
Internationalization is the big next project. So figuring out. I mean, our goal is to have a unified global marketplace. So I don't want to do what ebay did and kind of buy up all these different companies in other countries and keep the marketplaces fragmented, because I don't think that's leveraging the real power of the web. I think the web offers something that you've never been able to have before, where you can have direct access to people who are making stuff. But I want to do it in a way where you're buying directly from the people who are making it. We don't allow resellers on Etsy, which has been kind of a contentious point since the beginning.
What was the best thing you did to get the word out? Because obviously you have a successful website now. How did you get the word out?
Was partnering with Gene Raila and Leah from Craftster, Leah Kramer. So there were two really vibrant online communities for the crowds of people who were making stuff. And I worked with them when I was just starting out to get their input and work with their communities. So really just working with communities of people is the key to success.
What have you been doing here at Davos?
Slipping and sliding and watching Putin and Clinton.
How was that?
Really uneven. Some of the people are a lot more interesting to watch than the others. It's also the first time I've ever worn headphones and done the whole live translation, listening to someone talk. So you have to map their body gestures to what they're saying, but there's like a 10 second spread in between the two, which kind of makes it really hard to evaluate what they're saying.
You're a technology pioneer here this year.
Yes, I'm a technology pioneer.
That's awesome. Well, look at this weather. Eat your heart out. The world walk around.
There's a sign in my hotel for midnight or moonlit snowshoeing that I'm gonna try and line up. Well, it's incredible. The snow on the roofs never melts.
Yeah, it's pretty cold here. That's why. Well, cool. Thank you very much for spending a little bit of time walking. My walks are gonna be famous because last year I did Mark Zuckerberg. What you talked about, your board members. Tell me a little bit about your board and how having a really good set of people on your board really matters.
Yeah. Our board's Katerina Fake, Fred Wilson, Jim Bryer, myself and Maria Thomas.
Katarina Fake, Star, Flickr Maria Thomas. What does she do?
She used to work at npr. She's now SC CEO. Wow, really? Yeah, It's a fantastic board. And just really candid open conversations. There's certainly no dancing around any of the issues that we have to talk about. And so the mission of Etsy as a whole is to enable people to make a living making things. What I quickly realized is there's a whole offline component to that of just people really understanding how a business works, a really small business. So I'm starting a non profit called parachutes.org which is going to focus on the educational side of teaching people how to make a living making things, teaching people in general. So creating a new framework for how education can work on the web. So that's something I'm really excited about right now as well. Cool.
