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Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

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Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#61

Post by jartelt »

jly wrote: post #29

They made a deal with the devil (went public) that made many of the employees and shareholders wealthy, and now the price is being paid. The rules have changed and the primary goal now is maximum profit above everything else, no matter how many speeches about "social responsibility" they may deliver internally or externally. The opening quote by Friedman tells you everything you need to know.

They agreed to pursue profits back in 2006 when they raised a Series A and then affirmed this when they raised Series B, C, D, E, and F rounds. It's unfair to pin this on going public. Profit and growth has been the name of the game since they first raised outside capital from VCs. If employees didn't want to be part of capitalism, they probably should have picked a non-profit or a private company that didn't raise >$100M in VC funding.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#63

Post by skizm »

Opportunities created by Etsy's shortcomings:

1) Create an Etsy review site/blog/mailing list that points to the "good" merchants.

2) IndieHackers for Etsy. Do some interviews with legit Etsy owners who sell quality stuff and make a living on Etsy.

3) Independent review company that rates etsy sellers.

4) Hard mode: compete directly with Etsy and have some sort of verification process that you're not drop-shipping crap from China.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#64

Post by clavalle »

valuearb wrote: post #47
clavalle wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a beautiful example of dogma. It has some meaning but can be bent and molded to fit almost any argument. The obvious argument, especially in Etsy's case is 'well, this works for the short term but can mean no profits in the long term as you commoditize your business and what makes a company like Etsy, Etsy fades into market oblivion.' To which the next statement is 'Oh. Well, Friedman meant all expected profits…

Yea, if you twist Friedmans meaning you can make all sorts of nonsensical arguments. Value is profits extending into the long run forever, he spoke and wrote clearly enough that he doesn't have to spell that out for you. In Etsy's case, paying above market wages and benefits does nothing for the company and it's shareholders, it's just a gift from the CEO to workers, paid for out of shareholder accounts. Etsy didn't…

>paying above market wages and benefits does nothing for the company and it's shareholders

Again, we can use Friedman on both sides of the argument (which was my original point as to the meaningless of the statement if not in original intent then in popular application).

I could argue under the same statement that such a move would do plenty for the company in establishing itself as a very good place to work making it likely to attract and retain top talent. It could also make individuals 'hand crafting' items to sell, who are more likely to be a conscientious lot, feel good about continuing to do business with Etsy. These factors could lead to a more solid niche in the market, longer company survival, and more consistent profits over time.

I'm not saying that's what I believe but let's assume it is true.

Since long term profit projections get hazy, the safer bet almost always is to follow a short term profit argument and take surer profits as soon as possible even though, in perfect hindsight, a long term approach would have yielded greater overall profits.

I'd bet this happens a lot and this idea that everything is subservient to profits paradoxically hurts value more than it helps.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#65

Post by snuxoll »

MichaelGG wrote: post #46
hueving wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are certain benefits of cloud or not, but this kind of thinking confuses me. Why stop there? Because using EC2/GCE infrastructure is an incredible waste of money if you have any reasonable-sized base-load and bandwidth utilization.

As I said, there are benefits to not using cloud, sure. But don't pitch it as because anyone that loves programming should build their own servers.

Build their own? Probably not, unless they are doing it at massive scale and the cost of replacing parts beats out buying a server with a 3/5/7 year warranty.

If you have static usage, or at least a base load owning your own hardware to support it does make sense though, colo space is cheap, the biggest disadvantage from a financial perspective to owning your own gear is you have a depreciating CapEx instead of a 100% deductible OpEx.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#66

Post by kafkaesq »

MichaelGG wrote: post #27

Bizarre. I've only tried to use Etsy once, figuring it'd be a great place to get some sort of unique jewellery as a gift. It's filled with junk, both of the super-manufactured kind and of the "modern art" kind (someone glues 2 pieces of crap together and wants $500.) I haven't gone back, though I did enjoy the Regretsy blog while it was up. >Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based s…

Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based services and software offered by companies such as Google and Amazon—an emphasis that was known, under Dickerson, as “code as craft”

Yup, this is definitely something only a non-technical person would say (or more specifically: something a business analyst cut-and-pasting snippets of advice fed to him by the various tech-oriented randos he happens to know very likely would say).

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#67

Post by dkarapetyan »

I've lost count now of how many companies have started unconventional and then migrated to just being another regular old corporation with all the usual corporate problems.

Investors are regular people and like regular people they like being around the devil they know vs the one they don't.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#68

Post by dboreham »

sametmax wrote: post #57
MichaelGG wrote: post #27

Bizarre. I've only tried to use Etsy once, figuring it'd be a great place to get some sort of unique jewellery as a gift. It's filled with junk, both of the super-manufactured kind and of the "modern art" kind (someone glues 2 pieces of crap together and wants $500.) I haven't gone back, though I did enjoy the Regretsy blog while it was up. >Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based s…

The cloud is very, very expensive. If you want low cost, you do your own servers for anything under 20 nodes. Which, given the power of modern machines and with unmethered bandwidth, will take you to the millions of user easily. I have setup a streaming website with 500k/d visitors, and it runs on 7 servers for 2000$ a month give or take. That's very, very cheap compared to GAE or AWS.

There has to be something very wrong when an article about the problems with a company that facilities an online marketplace is talking about the details of how their servers are run and paid for..

By this I mean that in such a business the issues surrounding servers and even software should be very minor compared to the bread and butter of helping people sell stuff so money is made. The costs of said servers and software should also be minimal vs things like sales and marketing costs.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#69

Post by olewhalehunter »

ballenf wrote: post #32
MichaelGG wrote: post #27

Bizarre. I've only tried to use Etsy once, figuring it'd be a great place to get some sort of unique jewellery as a gift. It's filled with junk, both of the super-manufactured kind and of the "modern art" kind (someone glues 2 pieces of crap together and wants $500.) I haven't gone back, though I did enjoy the Regretsy blog while it was up. >Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based s…

The cure when I start getting tempted to "roll my own" is watching that Ted talk about the guy who tried (failed) to build a toaster from raw materials to match the 5 quid discount store equivalent.

That failure wasn't due to skill, it was due to demand. That discount store has a high volume low skill patronage that needs toasters, if 100 engineers collectively wanted to make 100 of their own toasters for less than 5 dollars a unit, they could probably do that, or other things, much better.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#70

Post by djsumdog »

hueving wrote: post #42
MichaelGG wrote: post #27

Bizarre. I've only tried to use Etsy once, figuring it'd be a great place to get some sort of unique jewellery as a gift. It's filled with junk, both of the super-manufactured kind and of the "modern art" kind (someone glues 2 pieces of crap together and wants $500.) I haven't gone back, though I did enjoy the Regretsy blog while it was up. >Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based s…

>There are certain benefits of cloud or not, but this kind of thinking confuses me. Why stop there? Because using EC2/GCE infrastructure is an incredible waste of money if you have any reasonable-sized base-load and bandwidth utilization.

Most of the larger shops I've worked at have started moving away from hosted providers to save money.

When you're starting out, hosted solutions will save you a lot of time. Running your own servers is a high cost and you need a dedicated team. But once you're pulling in that revenue and can afford it, running your own can save you some money and add a lot of flexibility.

If you're starting out, I highly recommend not tightly coupling yourself to a single service (using AMIs or any really specific AWS stuff) but write your provisioning scripts in such a way as you can plug in different services or deploy locally. Things like Terraform + a provisioner (Ansible/Puppet/etc) can make it easy to move your system to another provider or host your own and more easily measure costs.

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