YouSaid · the spoken record

Rob Kalin

lines on the record: 92
first: 2023-10-30
most recent: 2023-10-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“There was one class of items that took off that I didn't even know was something that existed and that is penis cozies and they are hand crocheted cozies for male genitalia and Generally, the community was totally supportive of that. And I thought it was around.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, such a great question. How much of it is under my control, which is my own hard work, and how much of it is out of my control, which is luck. And Older I get, the more it feels like there's at least one other force in play that kind of karmic force or providence or whatever. So without all of these different forms of luck of being born in the United States, of being born in a middle class family of this really strange path that I took through school of literally handing my rent check to my landlord when he happened to be holding a piece of paper to make a proposal for a website, like how can you look at that and not think it's both luck and some form of providence so Think that's the prerequisite, and then all the hard work is what follows. And you get to lean into both.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stock and now have more wealth than the prior 50 generations of my family or whatever. And one thing that Really enjoy is the fact that there's a secret that this word that I made up. On the lips of so many people. Just the stark contrast of going to those craft fairs in 2006 and handing out these flyers and nobody knowing about it to now being at a concert and knowing that like anyone I walked up to say like, hey, do you know about this thing, they'll have heard it.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's this kind of air of inevitability to it with the 10,000 ways it could have gone wrong. It almost Seems like it's the inversion of that, where we did 10,000 things that could have pushed it off the rails and it didn't go off the rails, including management stuff and my own shenanigans. So how did it persist? And I think ultimately the heroes of all of that are the sellers and that, you know, in many ways that's who we should all tip our hats to. Here's this publicly traded company and the people who are running it, I'm guessing, are not part of that community of sellers that they're serving. And I would also venture to guess that, you know, Etsy's primary customer right now isn't the sellers. It's the buyers. And so it's going to keep optimizing along those lines. So it's just different. It's obviously put a huge financial cushion under me. You know, I come from peasant Ukrainian.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going back to the Wright brothers thing, there was no reason why those guys were the ones to make it except for what they said. They started out playing around with their dad's tool shed. There's no reason why Etsy was going to make it. I mean, there probably were a 10,000 reasons why it should have failed or could have failed because it just was too early and the business model wouldn't have worked. But today it's a powerhouse. I mean, it is a, you know, it is a publicly traded company with a, you know, its market cap is of $8 billion as we speak today. And you were raising it at $1.5 billion. So certainly your investors did very well. Certainly your early investors did extremely well. It's a powerhouse. I don't know. What do you make of it when you look at it today”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As children, we had access to our father's workshop, and we encountered these tools. And if we didn't have that as experience as children, we wouldn't have gone on to do what we did, which is what led us here. And there's this long history of making beautiful hardware for children in order to kind of calibrate their senses and learn about the world around them. You have Freibel's gifts and Montessori's sensorial materials. But no one's updated that hardware. I'm trying to, I think there's a whole continent of computing in between the blocks that children play with and the way technology currently lands in their lap, which is just phones and tablets and reduces them to poking at pictures under glass. So we're exploring this continent of computing and don't have anything specific to share yet. We're starting to work with the school up the road now.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this is what I hope one day to come back on this podcast and talk about and show all of the lessons that I've learned. Yeah, the new endeavor I'm working with a pair of absolutely brilliant engineers. One of them, a close friend from Etsy. And it's at the intersection of early childhood development and technology, the general thinking is there's this famous story where this journalist asked the Wright brothers, Why did you succeed in building the world's first flying machine when thousands of people have been trying YU? There's nothing special about you guys. And they think for a minute and they say, well, no, there is something quite special about us.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I guess you, in our conversations before this interview, you mentioned that you're working on something at the intersection of technology and humanity. You mentioned it's still a secret. Is it still a secret? Can you talk about this? Because it sounds like this is really your biggest endeavor in a big way since you left Etsy.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so what was interesting was that And that was great and worked with a group of moms to start a preschool and then eventually start the Catskill Montessori School, which has over 100 families at it. I've also been doing some work in the local public school. And yeah, reconnecting with this sense of place and sense of purpose outside of I live in a big city and I'm working at a tech startup.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you moved up to upstate New York in the Catskills, you got it really involved in the community. I know, for example, you helped build a preschool. I guess probably to solve a problem you had, which was you children, and you wanted good preschool.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so those two different things are connected that you said. So, you know, I had some equity. I didn't have a huge amount, you know, and the company went public. I didn't even make the threshold of shareholders with over 5% that you have to disclose. So, you know, I had some equity in the company. I couldn't do anything with the equity. I couldn't sell shares. And then once NC went public, my shares were locked up for a year anyways while the share price was falling. And I was trying to communicate with people at the company to kind of arrange some kind of secondary sale. So that was interesting. Like, you know, now I have to talk with Fred about trying to sell some of my shares. And, you know, Fred was very professional about all of that. Yeah, I think that has to do with my own personal coping mechanisms too. Like compartmentalization was there a bit. I had geographical compartmentalization really helps, so just getting out of Brooklyn was really helpful.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You left presumably still with a significant amount of equity in Etsy, right? So you had that, I have to imagine Which obviously doesn't entirely mitigate the pain, but certainly helps a little bit. And did you feel like... Just from your own, I don't know, for your own mental health, did you feel like you just has to be a cut, a clean break, and you just... It was like a breakup with a partner where you just stopped any kind of communication or following it or just you just tried to put it out of your life in any way possible.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was wrecked for quite a while. I mean, I'd obviously built up a lot of my sense of self-worth around like, here's what I do, my identity wrapped up in it, my friends, where I lived. I mean, I remember this moment, you know, before this happened where I was living in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and I would ride my bike everywhere, and I'm just riding to work and it's foggy in Manhattan's to my left, and I'm just looking at Manhattan and biking to work and my fiance was at home and I was like, wow, I figured it out, you know, I made it. And this feeling of accomplishment and instability. And then it's just like, nope, you know, everything we think is solid can just kind of crumble in that sense. It makes it hard, but I've also come to peace with it. The anger is gone, it's just sadness that lingers.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, I've tried to reverse engineer why I was fired so suddenly and hasn't been easy. But I did reach out to one of the investors Advance of this interview to try and learn more about what actually happened, and he did shine a little bit of light. The situation, and you know the feedback that he gave me, sometimes I was too involved, sometimes I wasn't involved enough, and sometimes I was a bit unkind. And fair enough, I would have greatly appreciated that kind of feedback at the time”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Fred Wilson. I thought I was just going to lunch to chat about Etsy and went to their office and met him. And he told me that I was fired, but he didn't tell me why. And he just said we have to do this. And I remember saying like, you don't have to do this. Like you're choosing to do this. And the whole process felt like it was something straight out of a Kafka novel. I'd already stepped aside once, so I mean, I remember when Fred was like, you need to go. And the strangest part of that experience to me was, you know, he's like, do you want to resign? And I'm like, what would that look like? And he said, well, you'd stand in front of the company and, you know, tell everyone that you've decided to leave. And I'm just like, who would believe that?”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember talking about that with Adam afterwards, and I was like, look, the way to do that is like slide one says this sucks. And slide two says this really sucks. We don't want to do it. And you just talk to him, like, don't wrap it up like that. And I'm not even saying my way is like, quote, the right way to do it. It's just like knowing the people in the room. So that was one piece was like my relationship with Adam wasn't great. The investors were checking in with him. And I had a biweekly lunch with Fred, you know, one of the investors.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had to reclassify all of the customer support workers from being like full time salaried to having to keep track of their hours. It's ostensibly for labor laws to protect them, but it also created this whole like second class of worker inside the company. And it sucked, like having to do that. But Adam was kind of leading that process. And I remember this meeting where it was being communicated and I was standing in the audience and he was standing up front with the head of HR and they were trying to pitch it to the customer support team. They were dressing it up as this like this is an improvement. And, you know, just not Etsy's culture. And I was standing in the audience and I had the same reaction to it that they did. And I obviously hadn't been involved enough in preparing what the presentation should have been, all of that stuff.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely no idea that it was even within the realm of possibility that would happen. And again, this is one of those situations where looking back, it's much easier to see things. So Adam had joined as COO, and pretty early on in that relationship, you know, we started. Trying to figure out what that dynamic was, and not just amongst ourselves going to a kind of executive coach, working stuff out. I think we both felt that there was a bit of that. Culture mismatch, and I definitely didn't support him the way that I should have. You know, I remember this meeting where.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know to me, this is just something that's a bit cheeky, and lo and behold, like the next day, the engineers are doing some kind of like long triage of something that happened and there's no chairs in the room. And, you know, eventually they just end up bringing the chairs back in. And so I'm sure that, and I doubt I even understand all of the different ways that I, to frame it positively, needed to improve. I did really feel like I was on the path to learning that. And, you know, again, I'd stepped aside once. I was not holding on to that position with tight hands. Like I was coming back to it and saying, like, let me do a better job here. So I got an SEO coach and eventually hired another CEO, Adam Fried, again in the back of my mind, there was a piece of me that's just like the”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That would be in an abusive relationship looks like, or is it something a lot quieter and a lot softer? And one of the things I did that I remember bothered a lot of people was we were, you know, we had these conference rooms with lots of class on them so you can see in. And there were these meetings where it very clearly to me at least, you know, half the people in the meeting were just like the shipping over half an hour ago. And like it's just dragging on. And so I was working late one night. I don't know. Probably 8 or 9 p.m. Some people in customer support are still there. And I was like, let's just remove the chairs from the meeting room because if it's not worth standing up for, you shouldn't be having meetings.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I'm sure. And no worry about piling stuff on. I am amazingly self-critical. I can't walk by a stick without picking it up and finding some way to hit myself with it. So these were things where... Let's see. I think everyone's frame of reference for these things is different. And I was trying to Get a better sense of how to manage and all of these things. I don't ever remember once yelling. I just don't raise my voice at all. And then, you know, you read these biographies of Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs and they're screaming at people that they're morons in front of the whole company and all of this stuff. And I'm just like,”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was used to, well, first right taken out of context and contextualizing those things with what comes before after them helps make more sense of them. That's one piece. Another for sure still learning. I didn't even know that if a reporter was recording you, they don't have to run any of the quotes by you before publishing them. And yeah, that was very humbling, like lots of lessons to be learned from that experience.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You were basically 30 years old when you were brought back. But you started the company five years earlier. You'd be in the trenches with a lot of people. And I imagine it was probably people were excited. But there were also, I mean, I'm sure you remember this well. There was an article that came out, I think in Inca magazine is critical. And you had some quotes in there that were a little bit, shall I say, unfortunate. You said, you know, I speak to people in the business world and technology world, but I don't admire them. You were quoted saying, you know, I think trying to maximize shareholder value is ridiculous, even if you did believe those things and felt that way. Sometimes you kind of want to not say that.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think taste is one of the most ineffable things about the human condition, like what gives someone some kind of taste. Not another. And so, you know, whatever was guiding her hires for people to run things like marketing and customer support or anywhere else. Just also didn't fit. So rejoining was a bit of kind of getting it back on the rails. And that part felt good. So I wanted something to kind of show when I was returning that we're going to make some changes. So I remember like throwing a coffee mug up into the air. And this look on everyone's face when it's just in the air before it drops, like that look of expectation and excitement. And, you know, then it smashed. But I was like, that feeling is what we need to have here as we're building Etsy.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was a really interesting time for me because I'd spent a year being immersed on the community side of Etsy again and just making things. And when I was asked to return, I was like, if I go back and do this, it needs to be in a much more mindful manner, not this kind of ad hoc. Let's just. Do my best, and everything's going 100 miles an hour. Remember really thinking about that, and then when I rejoined, Etsy was in a new office. You know, they totally moved offices. The office was concrete floor and fluorescent lights. And I was just like, oh man, that didn't feel right. So we put a wood floor in and put, you know, warmer bulbs in the fluorescent lights. It sounds so trivial saying it now, but like the office didn't reflect the ethos of the company. And then she'd hired a lot of senior people where”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So she eventually steps down and you are To become CEO in 2010. And did you feel like, you know, I mean, oftentimes that could have been a great opportunity for you. You had two years to watch a professional run the company and to learn things and maybe gain more experience and come back in with a sort of a renewed vigor. And so when you came back in 2010, back to running the company Did you feel like okay, I got this?”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd like to think that wasn't happening even just at the most practical level. I didn't stay in the CCO role for very long. I completely removed myself from the day-to-day. Operations of the company. And I didn't want to do anything that was going to underpin the authority of this person that I just suggested to run the company. I cared deeply about the company more than anything else.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean, it sounds like there was the tension came from. You were the founder, and then you brought in a professional COO who becomes a CEO, but you're still there. And in some ways, I think you would even admit this. It almost never works out. Because when a CEO is brought in and the founder still has power, it creates a lot of conflict. I mean, usually it works out when the founder leaves and the new CEO is brought in, but when they're both there, because the people in the company don't know who to go to. I'm sure half the people, maybe lots of people in the company were going to you and they were like, hey, I'm not really happy with this decision that our new CEO is making. And you were like, yeah, well, let me see what I can do. I mean, is that fair? Was that happening?”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say Etsy Now or eBay, and the primary customer is clearly the buyer where the whole experience is optimized on the buying side to the point where I pay a listing fee and here's my item, but the website is going to place other items on that page that are similar because it's primary, you know, it's catering to the buyer now. It's not really there to support the seller.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I always did my best to insulate the majority of the company from any kind of financial concerns, even in the early days working with the engineers. They would tell me how much money we needed for hardware and I would go out and raise the money. So there really wasn't much of any financial pressure on the business building it through the recession. And it was approaching profitability at this point. Again, we're a marketplace. This business model's kind of baked into how we run. And this interesting shift happened probably starting with Maria where this sense that like, who's your primary customer? And for me, Etsy's primary customer was always the sellers because they were the ones that we were generating, you know, collecting our revenue from. And the buyers were our sellers' primary customer. And so our role as a company was to support our sellers as best we could. And you look at a marketplace like I”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, from what I understand, what I've read about the company, I mean, during that period, it was a potentially tough period because this was the recession, the financial crisis. But remarkably, Etsy actually really benefited from people not going to traditional retailers and looking at Etsy for maybe ways to save money. So actually, it turned out to be a pretty good time from a financial perspective and a growth perspective for Etsy.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we got along. I definitely enjoyed the early discussions. The culture piece becomes evident in a couple key ways. And remember that Etsy's commerce is very much kind of standing on the shoulders of the community side of Etsy. And so that community, especially the community of sellers, she just wasn't a part of that. And at that particular point, there were just too many consequences that fell out of that where she didn't see Etsy for what it was and what it needed to be.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I should mention I haven't seen Maria Thomason at least a decade, but I knew her a little bit when both of us worked at National Public Radio. She had been the head of digital media there. So she came on initially as COO and then essentially became CEO. But you said that it wasn't the right fit. Why? I mean, you wanted a professional to come in and make this company stronger. So, you know, first of all, what was it about her? I mean, clearly you had felt that she was the right fit for an operational role, so you must have liked her. You must have thought that you must have gotten along.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reached a point where I was like, look, you know, the way that you're doing this is so different from the way I'm doing it. I think you should just do it. So you should be the CEO Looking back on it, it is quite easy to see if that culture piece was too important to be a mismatch at that phase of Etsy's growth. And so she ended up not being the right fit in that role. But I initially transitioned to being chief creative officer and then just a board member.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cross current in this office full of younger folks and who are just kind of very earnestly going all in and are very much part of the community that they're serving. And then Maria entered and just brought with her a very different culture. You know, I still remember the first all-hands meeting we had where I introduced her in her opening speech. She kind of said the most important thing for us to do is execute, execute, execute. And I could just kind of see the air go out of the room. Like, that's such a strange word to focus on. And I tried to kind of make it into a joke. And she had her way of doing it. And I wasn't about to assume that like, oh, this is wrong for Etsy. And so watching her work and giving her the space she needed to run operations, I definitely learned a lot.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, again, at this point 28, and Don't know how to interview someone for this level of job. And so I started interviewing someone with more experience for a COO role and ended up hiring Maria Thomas from MPR. Was a really interesting”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, in the beginning, there was just this sense of incredible sense of camaraderie, and we're all in this together. It doesn't mean to say there wasn't plenty of arguing. There were just so many things we were doing that it was the first time everyone at the company had done it. And we would be making these first-timer mistakes. And Jared was recently sharing a story with me where when we were in Noe Valley and walking to get lunch, one of the other guys was just berating me about something. And Jared thought he was witnessing the dissolution of the company. And after lunch, I was like, no, that's just normal.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like the marketplace itself develops this kind of immune system, and so when they list that, hundreds of people flag it. It's just this beautiful expression of humanity and all of our foibles and imperfections. And I think ultimately we tend to love things for their imperfections.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in the beginning, it was more here's our list of categories, and if it doesn't fit into one of these categories, it shouldn't be on the site. And obviously you can get a bit creative with that. My general view on that stuff was, again, just like celebrate the diversity of it. One of the funny jokes that we had was we defined the vintage category as something more than 20 years old. people were challenging what that was and we were trying to clarify the terms of service There are plenty of VHS like players that were 20 years old. And so it's like under our rules, you could list a VHS player on Etsy and it just felt so wrong. Like someone listed a Ferrari on Etsy once and I was just like and not even in the vintage category. It's like. What's interesting is”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or more, yeah. Yeah, because it probably was really earnest community of makers, right? And so you probably didn't have to worry too much about people just being jerks because that would come later. And so in terms of like curating, I mean, did you guys have any standards for what was allowed? Did you have rules about what you could and could not sell? Obviously, it had to be initially, I think it had to be handmade, but I mean, could people sell, you know, for example, like handmade glass tubes to smoke pot out of, you know, did you have any rules?”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that said, if we became a place where it was just, oh, this is scammers and shoddy goods, then it would have really hurt the brand. Again, I think the slow-like growth approach to this helped us there because we didn't really have to deal with high levels of fraud until, you know, significantly later.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so lots of different ways things can go wrong, especially when you're building a marketplace like this. I was just rereading a lot of our early blog posts, and most of the ways things were going wrong was the website itself wasn't functioning. And because the scale and the growth of the marketplace was a gentle enough slope, we could learn the hardest lessons when the stakes were lower. And I really like that kind of crawl walk run approach to building a business in general. On the seller side, again, we were able to leverage PayPal. PayPal had different kinds of dispute resolution procedures. And so I'm not proud that we did this, but we would basically just kind of kick people to PayPal's customer support and say, look, you know, if you want to refund, you have to take it up with them. And that insulated us from a certain amount of that.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, as much as we disdained eBay, we were definitely standing on their shoulders in a couple different ways. And one of them was our exclusive method of payment was PayPal. And so if PayPal worked in that location, then we were able to just ride those rails. Another piece of it, which I think could have ended up making things a lot more complicated, but didn't, was that Pierre Midiard decided not to patent all of the basic mechanisms of e-commerce at that point. And so, you know, we were able to learn a lot from how eBay did things and make ample use of one of their services. And so Etsy was definitely kind of built on the shoulders of eBay in that way.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How are you, I mean, when you would go to craft fairs outside the US, how are you accommodating those sellers? I mean, were you able to, because today it's easier, obviously, to just the infrastructure there or Shopify or whatever you want to use, but how did you have somebody in, I don't know, Germany selling pottery sell to somebody in the US and then also accept dollars? And how did you guys make that happen? It must have been really hard.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, part of it was to just kind of go visit all of these different craft fairs, and I would walk around the craft fair handing out these little postcards that said what Etsy was. And 100% of the people had never heard of it and didn't know how to pronounce it. And so part of it was just kind of traveling to start connecting with the community, but just this sense of like, oh, our community is online. We're spanning different time zones and we can kind of check in and work from wherever we want. I guess that was a glorious glimpse of remote work way back in like 2006.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, for the first two years, we didn't have an office, and I remember just traveling around the world, bumming around Europe. And when we came back from traveling in late 2006, the community was growing enough that we needed to hire more people to support it. And we're like, well, let's get a small office. And so we started looking and ended up finding a place near the Brooklyn Bridge. And we were just going to get part of this floor. And we ended up renting the whole floor. And I was literally for a period of time living there. And it was, you know, an office building. So they didn't heat it outside of nine to five. And that first winter, I remember, you know, sleeping on a little blow-up camping pad. And I'm freezing. And I'm working blissfully.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so that was the beginning of this process that has been a kind of long and storied journey. And we ended up raising very modest. I think this would have been called our series B, just to show how much times have changed. We probably raised like $250,000 on a 1.5 million dollar valuation something in there. And from that point on, most of the fundraising was primarily driven by needing to buy hardware and then just headcount. You know, we weren't spending any money on advertising or anything like that.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so at that stage, any investor is more concerned about total addressable market and how big is this opportunity, not, you know, there's that other piece of how much we'd already captured. And when you're talking with these institutional investors, this was in some ways the best piece of business advice ever got from Sean. It's a little bit Kras and his Brooklyn way, but he's like, you're the drug dealer, they're the drug addict, where he's like, you have what they want and maybe you'll let them invest. And obviously, right, that's very haughty and got a lot of swagger to it. But it was definitely helpful to feel like there was some kind of safety net there in the beginning.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so year one. Again, this is the kind of inertial momentum getting built up in the very beginning of a marketplace, the classic chicken and egg problem. Year one did a million dollars in sales, which looking back on it now is far more than I remembered. And I'm pretty proud of that. I think that's one of the hardest pieces in a marketplace to just like get the flyable going.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I still remember the first time meeting them. Definitely kind of took us under their wing mainly on product design and fundraising were the two big pieces. This was probably two years into building Etsy, maybe not quite that far in. And Katerina was the one who kind of, you know, she could at that point just kind of pick up the phone, make one call, and get a meeting with different investors. Those meetings were kind of all over the place. That was definitely my introduction to the world of venture capital. And a lot of those meetings, I just remember leaving them being like, I don't understand how that person would want to invest in this. Or I wouldn't want their money investing in this. So she did a little bit of filtering up front and then kind of worked with me to figure out who we wanted to raise money from in the end.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT