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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

#91

Post by clavalle »

clavalle wrote: post #80
valuearb wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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. " Market value means that your turnover should already be low, your employees can't leave for better paying jobs. Obviously there is more to retainment than just wages, there is managerial competency and how you treat people. Ba…

>Market value means that your turnover should already be low, your employees can't leave for better paying jobs. The curve isn't flat. >Do you really think those people are going to leave Etsy because it no longer has the CEO's cult cheerleader squad decorating the offices? I think people that spend their time learning a craft then peddling hand crafted objects for, let's face it, love over money, will not want to wo…

>The easiest response is to ask you to read some Warren Buffett.

I've read plenty of Buffet, Munger, Graham, Dodd and the rest. Pretty common knowledge.

What you are missing in your analysis is that Buffet et. al. invest in very well understood businesses (hell, they didn't even touch Amazon). Very well understood businesses tend to have very well understood systems (including the people and their roles and contribution to those systems. They have settled to a point where they /are/ interchangeable. They also tend to be boring and have well understood moats like huge capital or regulatory requirements. They can thrive in the fat part of the curve (or even a bit below it if they have stellar management).

Etsy is none of those things. They are carving out a new niche (or an very old niche with very new scope) with new technology in a constantly changing landscape that, really, anyone with a laptop and some free time could monkey. They will die if they try to live with average, interchangeable parts. No doubt about it.

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

#92

Post by ClearAsMud »

To bad they don't sell hand made, home grown artist stuff anymore. The Chinese knock-off Gucci "authentic" syndication machine took over under many names / masks / illusions. It's more the Walmart Hobby Lobby .. where it all looks good on the way or on your back (shirt/whatever) .. it's still most likely made in China. #fact. The revenue is more about the fees and clear profit machine that is required to run a profitable business on their side. The problem? The sellers - the "real" ones like myself and my wife. We sell authenticate stuff with pottery and photography made locally here in Buffalo. However, I find more and more #buffalo search related material are major hub outlets of people I don't know. I've been doing this for almost 7 years now - I know people here and the artists specifically OF Buffalo. It's the trend that then started to go up in margin % and no return. Only recently have I seen an overhaul to the interface for the Store, but it runs like a sweatshop with minimal tools that any of us were accustomed to online. I wish it was better, but we are leaving and concentrating on real world sales.

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

#93

Post by valuearb »

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #53
binarymax wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, since you have an interesting opinion, but in this case Etsy decided to play the game. They could have stayed private and done whatever they wanted without worrying about 'shareholder value'. They chose to IPO, they are now owned by the market. If you can't play the shareholder game then don't go public.

Destroying a profitable, growing or mature company in pursuit of greater second derivatives isn't pro-shareholder -- it's pro a particular kind of investment strategy which views returns through a particular lens. I believe it's deeply myopic. It's a Wall St myth that quarterly returns are the best thing to optimize for generating shareholder value or that executives are obligated to do so. It's the kind of capitalis…

If that profitable growing company constantly takes millions of dollars out of it's accounts and sets them afire, stopping it from doing so isn't going "destroy it".

And it's not a wall street myth that quarterly returns are the best thing, more a CNN/Stock Trader myth. There are a huge number of investors like Warren Buffett who know that is entirely wrong.

But it's a common misconception that cutting spending is bad for business. In this case they are cutting a deluded CEO who had his own personality cult and a massive team of paid cheerleaders. Overpaying employees isn't "investing", paying closer to market isn't going to hurt the business. On the contrary, it can focus it and unleash greater growth.

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple he cut the Newton, dozens of Mac hardware projects, and almost all advanced R&D. He focused the Mac team on four market segments and only four computers. He focused remaining research on areas that could lead to products they understood, mainly touchpads. It took them nearly 10 years of careful iteration, (they designed the iPad first and Steve refused to launch it) before they built the iPhone.

But if Steve hadn't focused on getting Apple's quarterly burn down, they never would have made it. If he hadn't focused their efforts, they likely never would have made great products. If he had thrown money at every half baked idea, they would have died.

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

#94

Post by valuearb »

snuxoll wrote: post #65
MichaelGG wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Real investors care about cash flow, which means the difference between purchasing/depreciating and leasing/renting(OpEx) is negligible. Whats far more important is the business benefits of the best approach for your business.

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

#96

Post by lobster_johnson »

technotarek wrote: post #90
lobster_johnson wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's still plenty of incredible hand-made and vintage furniture and interior design objects on Etsy. The problem, as ever, is about filtering. For every quality piece there 50 amateurish things cobbled together from steel pipes and reclaimed wood (or worse: distressed "shabby chic" furniture made to look like something you'd find in an old B&B on the French Riviera). With all the AI being thrown around, can't some…

You're right about great furniture and objects. We've tried putting a local focus on some of their selection (as well as the selection from additional non-etsy sellers), by selecting/curating furniture dealers from the DC and Baltimore areas so that would-be buyers can have a look in person: https://attic-dc.com Especially in regards to furniture, buying online, sight unseen still isn't a great proposition. We don't…

Cool. Would love something like this for NYC.

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

#97

Post by eropple »

giobox wrote: post #87
djsumdog wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

I completely see how it's theoretically desirable to not be tied to a particular cloud/VPS provider, but I'm not entirely convinced Terraform alone is the answer. In my experience, Terraform does not let you declare VPS resources in a "provider neutral" way - you would still have to completely rewrite your Terraform files if you say, switch from AWS to Azure. Then there's the wider issue that whole concepts in one VP…

You touch on what I think is a bigger concern, as somebody who spends a lot of time on this sort of work: Terraform doesn't actually solve any problem that I encounter. You aren't "provider neutral" when using it, as you say, and moving from one nontrivial provider (AWS, GCE, Azure) to another is a full rewrite. I disagree--and rather strongly at that--that it's a lock-in thing, unless you are aggressively climbing all over the proprietary offerings from each cloud. Even the basics of the stack are different in ways that are pretty annoying to deal with (just trying to port simple autoscaling groups and load balancers is work--not hard work, but work, and work for which you must write code that must be tested). Attempts to encapsulate general functionality (and I've been suckered into this myself) fail because the abstractions are super leaky. It's not worth the fight.

We have a lot of clients who say they want to be multi-cloud, they say they're afraid of being locked into AWS or GCE, and in practice nobody except the supermassive companies out there ever actually do move between them. To that end, we pretty much standardized on using the platform-specific options: CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager, and Google Cloud Deployment Manager.

(There is a small argument to some of the ancillary services that Terraform can wire up, but to be honest I rarely find a compelling reason to put up with Terraform and its lovely habit of fragging my state in order to wire those up declaratively rather than using a little imperative glue within Auster[0] to do it.)

[0] - https://github.com/eropple/auster

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

#98

Post by valuearb »

clavalle wrote: post #80
valuearb wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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. " Market value means that your turnover should already be low, your employees can't leave for better paying jobs. Obviously there is more to retainment than just wages, there is managerial competency and how you treat people. Ba…

>Market value means that your turnover should already be low, your employees can't leave for better paying jobs. The curve isn't flat. >Do you really think those people are going to leave Etsy because it no longer has the CEO's cult cheerleader squad decorating the offices? I think people that spend their time learning a craft then peddling hand crafted objects for, let's face it, love over money, will not want to wo…

The curve isn't flat, but the benefits are massively disproportionately expensive the farther up it you go.

This isn't an argument about making the company "soulless". You can still have a great and fun work environment without spending 25% of sales on admin. And much of what makes work enjoyable isn't benefits, but leadership. Having management that is competent, humble, approachable, and driven to empower employees can change a lot.

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

#99

Post by aantix »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #78
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's still plenty of incredible hand-made and vintage furniture and interior design objects on Etsy. The problem, as ever, is about filtering. For every quality piece there 50 amateurish things cobbled together from steel pipes and reclaimed wood (or worse: distressed "shabby chic" furniture made to look like something you'd find in an old B&B on the French Riviera). With all the AI being thrown around, can't some…

These guys are using deep learning/convolutional neural networks to train their models to detect beautiful/thoughtful photographic images.

https://www.eyeem.com/

They talk about their curation algorithms here:

https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/understanding-aes...

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

#100

Post by benjaminjackman »

technotarek wrote: post #90
lobster_johnson wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's still plenty of incredible hand-made and vintage furniture and interior design objects on Etsy. The problem, as ever, is about filtering. For every quality piece there 50 amateurish things cobbled together from steel pipes and reclaimed wood (or worse: distressed "shabby chic" furniture made to look like something you'd find in an old B&B on the French Riviera). With all the AI being thrown around, can't some…

You're right about great furniture and objects. We've tried putting a local focus on some of their selection (as well as the selection from additional non-etsy sellers), by selecting/curating furniture dealers from the DC and Baltimore areas so that would-be buyers can have a look in person: https://attic-dc.com Especially in regards to furniture, buying online, sight unseen still isn't a great proposition. We don't…

Perhaps with AR or VR but it's still hard to imagine supplanting the experience without an actual tactile connection. Furniture isn't something you buy everyday or even year typically. If I am going to spend any amount of money on a couch or chair or whatever I'd like to sit in it atleast once before I do (though perhaps that's just me others may be different).

Perhaps though online could be a great first step filtering process. Find a bunch of stuff that fits the rough parameters of what you are looking for and looks good in your space then go someplace to try them out with a well kept appointment and ready to go same day follow you home delivery should you decide to buy something.

Maybe this already exists? I haven't had to buy any furniture is several years so not sure what the current state of the markets is.

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