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Disclaimer: I worked at Etsy, a long time ago. > The next group, headed by Chad Dickerson and Allspaw, seemed like they wanted to focus on technology for techn

Disclaimer: I worked at Etsy, a long time ago. > The next group, headed by Chad Dickerson and Allspaw, seemed like they wanted to focus on technology for technology’s sake, more than what Etsy was actually doing with that as a company. I think you're missing quite a bit of this story. I was around during the transition of Chad from CTO -> CEO, and the truth is that Etsy needed to focus on the technology badly during that time. The site would go down constantly. We had very little insight into what was going on with sellers or buyers. Every busy day was basically us crossing our fingers that the site wouldn't go down. We needed someone focused heavily on the technology. We could never have continued on that path and grown as much as we did. > Etsy should be focused on one thing: connecting buyers and sellers of handmade art with each other. Deciding what potential buyers are interested in and what items to display to them is a pretty difficult technology problem. Detecting mass-produced goods in a way that's more subtle than "ban all Chinese sellers" is a pretty difficult technology problem. If anything I would argue that Etsy didn't focus nearly enough on that, and focused way too much on "low-hanging fruit" (minor workflow adjustments for sellers and buyers).

code_duck 9y ago
Agreed, there is a whole lot more to the story that sadly this comment area is too small to contain. Dickerson and Allspaw definitely did a great job of modernizing Etsy from the relatively ragtag team that operated it prior, and it seems pretty robust now. That’s great – for their engineering department. What about the guiding vision for their core business? It’s not enough to make IT top notch when their overall aim is floundering. As a customer and developer, I frequently felt that their communications and decisions missed the mark and heard this from fellow customers continually. Etsy needs to be run by artists and retailers, not technologists. Part of the problem is that they want to address the things like eliminating mass produced goods as technology problems, to be eliminated with the right algorithm. I think it risks turning the cozy marketplace into some automated hell like Google or Amazon.
- BlanketApple 9y ago
  > That’s great – for their engineering department. Well, no - it's great for you too. Nobody can buy anything if the site is down. First-time buyers are especially sensitive to that. If their first experience with Etsy is a timeout page they won't be back (we actually had numbers asserting as such). Amazon famously wrote that 100ms of additional latency cost them 1% of sales, and Etsy is very similar in that regard. > What about the guiding vision for their core business? It’s not enough to make IT top notch when their overall aim is floundering. The guiding vision was, and likely still is, to have Etsy be what it is today (but with much better execution, obviously). Amazon with a more hand-made slant to it. I saw this frequently when I was there - sellers want Etsy to be more like ArtFire or ArtYah is now, but that's not what Etsy's leadership and funders want Etsy to be. They want Etsy to be Amazon, but for unique items. Now sure, that's not what Rob Kalin wanted it to be. But that vision was lost years ago, way before Chad et. al took over. > As a customer and developer, I frequently felt that their communications and decisions missed the mark and heard this from fellow customers continually. No argument there. The decisions usually made sense internally, but the external communications were poor. I would not be surprised to find out it's part of why the C-suite was gutted. I'm really sorry you had to be a customer during that phase. Seriously. > Etsy needs to be run by artists and retailers, not technologists. They tried that. Rob Kalin is an artist, through and through. Turns out artists don't always make great business leaders. And let me tell you, definitively, Rob Kalin would have ruined that company had he stuck around for much longer than he did. > Part of the problem is that they want to address the things like eliminating mass produced goods as technology problems, to be eliminated with the right algorithm. It is a technology problem. Etsy can't possibly afford to hire enough people to sift through items manually looking for mass-produced goods. They'd go bankrupt. The marketplace is just way too big for that. Etsy can remain a small marketplace and do that, which is I'm guessing your preference, but that's not the preference of the VCs who backed Etsy. Unfortunately, money has the final say.
  - code_duck 9y ago
    I realize that snappy pages help, as an engineer myself (who often depended on Etsy's API responses...). I appreciate the great job they did taking Etsy from the substandard heap it was circa 2009 to where it is now. My point is that Etsy needed more of a guiding light than their engineering department providing effective technology. Rob Kalin was not an artist - what was his art, Swimmy? BS? A couple wooden computer cases? In my perception he was a con-man hipster who dabbled in craft. I have no praise for him or anything he did, and am not suggesting his vision, whatever it was, or certainly his management, would have been better. I believe he is the one who imbued Etsy with a toxic culture from which that they are still suffering. One inept conman doesn't disprove 'artists' being management, and that's not what I called for - someone with retail experience would be nice, ideally online as well as the typical setting where Etsy members sell their wares offline like art galleries, craft fairs, jewelry stores, boutiques, and so forth. All the time I've dealt with Etsy, I've heard the excuse that it's impossible for them to police their market place in any sort of pro-active way. But the sellers in each category have no problem finding obvious violations in their categories every day, and reports have never been dealt with logically and promptly. I, and others, gave up reporting mass production and resellers after it seemed futile due to lack of response, or even Etsy would claim items that seemed like clear violations were not violations. I don't have a preference for Etsy's future, as I gave up attempting to use it years ago and have recommended to my friends and clients for years that they buy a domain and set up a shop they actually control, using shopify or big cartel to make it simple.

code_duck 9y ago

Agreed, there is a whole lot more to the story that sadly this comment area is too small to contain. Dickerson and Allspaw definitely did a great job of modernizing Etsy from the relatively ragtag team that operated it prior, and it seems pretty robust now. That’s great – for their engineering department. What about the guiding vision for their core business? It’s not enough to make IT top notch when their overall aim is floundering. As a customer and developer, I frequently felt that their communications and decisions missed the mark and heard this from fellow customers continually. Etsy needs to be run by artists and retailers, not technologists. Part of the problem is that they want to address the things like eliminating mass produced goods as technology problems, to be eliminated with the right algorithm. I think it risks turning the cozy marketplace into some automated hell like Google or Amazon.

BlanketApple 9y ago
> That’s great – for their engineering department. Well, no - it's great for you too. Nobody can buy anything if the site is down. First-time buyers are especially sensitive to that. If their first experience with Etsy is a timeout page they won't be back (we actually had numbers asserting as such). Amazon famously wrote that 100ms of additional latency cost them 1% of sales, and Etsy is very similar in that regard. > What about the guiding vision for their core business? It’s not enough to make IT top notch when their overall aim is floundering. The guiding vision was, and likely still is, to have Etsy be what it is today (but with much better execution, obviously). Amazon with a more hand-made slant to it. I saw this frequently when I was there - sellers want Etsy to be more like ArtFire or ArtYah is now, but that's not what Etsy's leadership and funders want Etsy to be. They want Etsy to be Amazon, but for unique items. Now sure, that's not what Rob Kalin wanted it to be. But that vision was lost years ago, way before Chad et. al took over. > As a customer and developer, I frequently felt that their communications and decisions missed the mark and heard this from fellow customers continually. No argument there. The decisions usually made sense internally, but the external communications were poor. I would not be surprised to find out it's part of why the C-suite was gutted. I'm really sorry you had to be a customer during that phase. Seriously. > Etsy needs to be run by artists and retailers, not technologists. They tried that. Rob Kalin is an artist, through and through. Turns out artists don't always make great business leaders. And let me tell you, definitively, Rob Kalin would have ruined that company had he stuck around for much longer than he did. > Part of the problem is that they want to address the things like eliminating mass produced goods as technology problems, to be eliminated with the right algorithm. It is a technology problem. Etsy can't possibly afford to hire enough people to sift through items manually looking for mass-produced goods. They'd go bankrupt. The marketplace is just way too big for that. Etsy can remain a small marketplace and do that, which is I'm guessing your preference, but that's not the preference of the VCs who backed Etsy. Unfortunately, money has the final say.
- code_duck 9y ago
  I realize that snappy pages help, as an engineer myself (who often depended on Etsy's API responses...). I appreciate the great job they did taking Etsy from the substandard heap it was circa 2009 to where it is now. My point is that Etsy needed more of a guiding light than their engineering department providing effective technology. Rob Kalin was not an artist - what was his art, Swimmy? BS? A couple wooden computer cases? In my perception he was a con-man hipster who dabbled in craft. I have no praise for him or anything he did, and am not suggesting his vision, whatever it was, or certainly his management, would have been better. I believe he is the one who imbued Etsy with a toxic culture from which that they are still suffering. One inept conman doesn't disprove 'artists' being management, and that's not what I called for - someone with retail experience would be nice, ideally online as well as the typical setting where Etsy members sell their wares offline like art galleries, craft fairs, jewelry stores, boutiques, and so forth. All the time I've dealt with Etsy, I've heard the excuse that it's impossible for them to police their market place in any sort of pro-active way. But the sellers in each category have no problem finding obvious violations in their categories every day, and reports have never been dealt with logically and promptly. I, and others, gave up reporting mass production and resellers after it seemed futile due to lack of response, or even Etsy would claim items that seemed like clear violations were not violations. I don't have a preference for Etsy's future, as I gave up attempting to use it years ago and have recommended to my friends and clients for years that they buy a domain and set up a shop they actually control, using shopify or big cartel to make it simple.