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

“Yeah, so again, early days of the web, and they were absolute royalty. I mean, Flickr was one of the first websites to really, even the design language, really take a stand and say, like, here's what we're about. And so I remember just writing to them pretty simple, two-sentence email just saying, hey, I really admire what you made. Here's something that we built over here. any advice and I forget who replied first, but they were basically like, yeah, let's meet up. And I was like, well, I'm not. I'm not in California. And there really wasn't a New York tech scene back then anyways. And so pretty early on in the company, we were like, well, let's go out to California and see if maybe we want to relocate there.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess, like, pretty soon after you launched it, you started to think about, I mean, obviously this is going to take more money if it was going to become something bigger. And I guess you got in touch with the founders of Flickr, Katerina Fake and Stuart Butterfield, who were married at the time or a couple. And you wrote to them, because I guess you liked Flickr and you sort of asked for their advice. Tell me the story.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wrap it up in a big flag that you can wave and say, Look, this isn't what you think it is, this isn't the ordinary stuff. This is something special. And, you know, there was a bit of being more philosophical about it and saying, why would we just try to reprise offline shopping experiences online? This is a new medium. So you shouldn't just take a newspaper, put it online, and make it a digital newspaper. We're not just trying to take an offline marketplace and make it, you know, and put it online. We should be creating these genuinely new ways to shop.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so even just the first things that he was creating when I was going to the investors and when people would talk about Etsy, they would say, oh, that's the website where you can shop by color. And Jared's work played a big role in that. So understanding, again, it all comes back to that storytelling piece of being able to.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pitch to Jared was this will be a kind of laboratory where we'll give you a really interesting set of data and you can kind of work your magic on it. And while we were building Etsy, Jared was a little bit on the fence, you know, before any items were listed. And as soon as some items were listed, he was like, all right, I'm in.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so when Chris and I and I were building Etsy, I knew that we needed to have something in our visual identity that really proclaimed that we were different, we weren't eBay. And there was a digital artist who I had enormous amount of admiration for named Jared Tarbell. And he was doing these kind of generative artworks where pixels would imitate life. And I remember while we were building Etsy, just emailing him and saying like, hey, we're building this. I'd love for you to create some visualization tools for the items that get listed in the marketplace as new ways to discover what's for sale. And there'll be all of these ways that we can shop online that you just could never do offline, like arranging everything by color or that you could zoom through a three-dimensional helix showing you all of the items that were listed in a particular category through time.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the sellers were predominantly women, and the categories were actually laid out by Leah from Crafter. And, you know, they span in some ways all of the obvious things that you would expect, you know, everything from houseware and accessories to clothing to stuffed animals. There was a B2B side from the beginning where there was a supplies category and we relaxed or basically let go of our requirement that something had to be handmade if it was considered a supply. And there was also a vintage category. And a lot of people in the community, they would make things, but they would also buy from other people who make things.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So basically, people started discovering from blogs and from other being pointed to it from other places. And what were the kinds of things that people started to, I mean, what were people selling on it initially?”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Etsy very much embodied that. And I think that's actually a really healthy thing because it ends up becoming something that has a lot of momentum behind it, which means, you know, it's got a lot of staying power. And you see the inverse of this with companies like Groupon, which I think was fastest ever to go from zero to a billion dollars in revenue. So with Etsy, it was this kind of long, slow organic growth. That said, you know, in the first year of business, we did a million dollars in sales. And that seemed like quite a lot. And this was all being driven by the more organic traffic of the early web, you know, being written up on blogs like Boing Boing.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, what happened was we hit the go button and then went for dinner. And I think when we'd come back for dinner, you know, we're checking the web traffic and a couple people had noticed it. We posted on Get Crafty and there was another kind of handmade community called Craftster. And we posted about it in those forums and people started noticing it. There's this beautiful D.H. Lawrence quote that has always resonated with me slow, like growth.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so this sense of the overcoming inertia in the early stages of a marketplace is incredibly difficult. It's almost impossible, which is why there were so many eBay clones that never went anywhere. And, you know, you need to be able to tell a compelling story and you need to build up a community. And the community needs to organically overcome that inertia in the early stages of the marketplace and start get the flywheel going. And one interesting thing is you can't fake that, right? We knew that we had to be that community. And from working with Gene on Get Crafty and really seeing what it looked like to participate in an online community in those days, had a good sense of that.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The business model, thankfully, was very straightforward, even from those early days. Obviously, we could point to a website that already existed like eBay and say, all right, there's going to be a per item listing fee, and then there'll be a sales fee associated when something sells. So that piece of it was more straightforward. And it actually felt really nice because the other websites of the day, you know, watching kind of Facebook's rise and then Twitter were based on ad revenue and we were kind of able to take this. Third party advertisers that will have to kind of cater to, we're just going to, like, the business model felt like it was baked into the website from the beginning”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so in 2005, there's no infrastructure, there's no cloud computing. And apart from hosted servers, which are very expensive and we're doing our best to build the website at that point, the software is by no means as efficient as it could be, and we're compensating for that by bulking up on the hardware side. And so all of the fundraising in those early days, because we were not making much money in terms of what we were paying ourselves, was going towards hardware. And I remember just kind of like countless hours spent ordering from NewEgg and then the hardware showing up in my apartment and these big pizza box one URAC servers on the floor and assembling them and then driving over to Sakakis, New Jersey and installing them in the data center. I remember Christmas Eve crimping RJ45 plugs onto patch cables, setting all of this stuff up. So yeah, those were the good old.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So at this point, I didn't even know that startups were a thing and didn't have a sense of like, oh, okay, there's a difference between an angel investor, an institutional investors. So I went to my grandfather and I told him what my intentions were. He was the kind of businessman in the family and he worked at IBM back in the 50s and 60s and just said, hey, like, here's what I'm thinking of doing. There was this sense of like, okay, he'll know what to do. And I remember telling him, all right, you know, here's my idea for the business and here's the capital that I've raised. What do I do next? And he's like, well, you need to spend this amount of time doing this amount of market research and you need to do this and you need to do that. And I need to meet with Spencer. So Spencer and now with his brother put in a bit more money and a third investor joined in.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He really liked the bar, then I'm sure you can do a good job building this. And he's like, you know, come back tomorrow and I'll have a check for you. And I still remember that experience. He lived near NYU's Stern, like their business school and went back the next day, picked up a check as he's first money in for $50,000 and walked by Stern and was like, you know, I did it, went to the bank. That seemed like a kingly sum of money to me. I was like, this is enough money to run Etsy for, you know, as long as we need to until it gets profitable.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the kind of seed getting planted of, like, okay, let's build our own thing. I now had to go out and do some fundraising. And obviously, like, I've never done fundraising before. And I was actually finishing up building a bar in the apartment of what became Etsy's first investor, Spencer Ain, along with his brother, Judson. When I was done building his bar, we were just kind of chatting. And I was like, hey, you know, here's this other project I'm thinking of doing. Do you have any interest in it? And he kind of looked at the bar and he looked back at me. And he's like, if you can build that.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there was this moment where I was sitting in a chair by my window in my apartment on South Elliot Place in Brooklyn, just starting to sketch out the causal chain of what Etsy could be if we started from these principles with these values in this community. And it just became so clear to me, even at that moment, how big it could be and where it needed to go. And there was absolutely the sense of inevitability pretty much from that moment on.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you said you were thinking about a global brand. So, I mean, it sounds like from the get go, you had. Ambitions about this. It wasn't just let me just build this thing and sell my woodworking stuff. It was more like, let's see what we can do. Let's see how big we can make this.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think in Italian it means Andeaf or something like that at sea at sea. And so I was specifically plumbing the depths of my Latin and Greek language learning to try and come up with a word that Wouldn't mean one specific thing. And I mean, I remember my Greek professor, companies would contact him all the time, usually pharmaceutical companies, to help him create names for different kinds of drugs that they were creating. And I also, I think even at that early stage, had a sense that I wanted it to be a global brand. And so if it was just two English words stuck together, I felt like it would be more difficult. So I wanted to create a kind of playful, nonsensical word that had no branding baggage attached to it.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the naming process there's something quite ineffable about that where it has to feel right. And I was looking for something that could just have this emotional connotation of no baggage plus here's something new and ended up mishearing something in a Fellini film and looking up the dot-com for that and by some very strange stroke of Providence and luck that four letter domain for ETSY.com was available.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this is probably early 2005. And, you know, I'd made get crafty and I'd seen the power of all of these people sharing a space together and communicating about what they were making. And then, you know, my friend is like, can you make me a website? And so I said, instead of making you your own standalone website, why don't I just kind of create a place where we can both sell what we're making? And I remember going to Gene, who was running Get Crafty and saying, you know, could we add a tab on here for a marketplace so people could actually sell some of this stuff? And she's very thoughtful and decided against it because, you know, that energy of commerce really wasn't a part of the community at that point. And so I asked for her blessing to kind of just go off and try and build this thing on my own.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After doing that, one of my friends who also made furniture said, Hey, I need a website. Can you make me one so that I can sell my own furniture? And, you know, it wasn't a big leap.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Compared to, so I've been woodworking more or less continuously for the past 20 years or so. So, I mean, compared to what I can make now versus what I was making then, no, I would not say they were very good. Know again, they were a very good attempt at expressing something and exploring something. And so running up against this challenge of, well, how do I sell it and not really having access to any storefronts? And I was like, okay, you know, I'll try and sell this online. And, you know, there really isn't much infrastructure for doing this at this point in the world. You know, this is 2004. And the only option for selling it online was eBay at that point and really had no interest in doing that. So built a website to sell my own furniture.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At that point, mainly desks, and I was specifically trying to make desks with a computer built into the desk. And I was also just studying the history of furniture and getting a sense of like different styles, different cultures, and trying to think like. What's like a Brooklyn vernacular for a furniture aesthetic in the early 2000s?”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the idea was let's start a little web dev shop and we'll go look for more clients and we'll do bigger work. And we were able to parlay building get crafty into a couple other projects. You know, a lot of times we didn't have any say on the design side. And after several months of that, I remember telling Chris, I just want to build something that's our own that we can kind of steer the direction of. And I set up a wood shop in my bedroom in Brooklyn and got to making furniture. And when I was looking to actually try and sell the furniture, you know, all of the storefronts where you could sell it are taking a large commission and aren't really looking for mediocre furniture made in a bedroom in Brooklyn.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, and there was a dynamic element to it that I didn't know because I was just doing the front end work and didn't know how to do any back end work. And at Gallatin, there was someone known for writing code, and I reached out to him. So Chris and I built GetCrafty, I imagine in a couple months.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Crafty was a community site really like a forum with people sharing what they were working on and talking about life. And one of those beautiful early examples on the web of these kind of like watering holes where people just kind of gathered and talked and there wasn't all of, you know, there were no algorithms manipulating people's attention. There weren't even really any ads being served up on this. And so she was just like, hey, I need this rebuilt. I hear you make websites. Can you help me?”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I made that first website, and because this is, I don't know, 2003, I got known as, oh, this guy can make a website. And the wife of one of my NYU professors. Jean Rayla was running a website called GetCrafty, and she needed that website rebuilt.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the piece that we think Is not what we're going to be, is what becomes the cornerstone of what we're going to build next.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely no idea. I didn't even know how when you type something into a web browser, it went and found the files. I thought maybe the files had to be on your computer somewhere. And, you know, this whole concept of what I now have a pretty good understanding of wasn't present for me at all. But the challenge of, you know, how do you populate this website with content so I had to go talk to people, I had to go take pictures. I remember learning Dreamweaver and put all of these things together that I didn't really know and made what I'm sure is by all means a completely mediocre website. But the process was fascinating to me. And, you know, I remember being in art school and I was learning anatomy and old master painting at that point. And I would go down to the computer lab once a day to check my email and I would see all these people hard at work staring at computers and I would think like that is definitely not for me. But lo and behold,”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As luck would have it, you know, I ended up dropping a rent check off one day, and my landlord was talking on the phone and reading a piece of paper and I jokingly handed him my rent check knowing that he'd have a free hand and with this little pantomime where he couldn't accept it unless he handed me what he was holding and so I took what he was holding and I read it and it was a proposal to make a website for this restaurant that he owned called Acme Barn Grill on Great Jones Street and he said covering up the mouthpiece of the receiver, can you beat that price? And I again jokingly just kind of said I'll do it for half. And he goes, okay, great. And he kind of shoes me out of his office. And I leave his office holding this piece of paper that was someone else's proposal to make a website for this restaurant and was like, all right, I guess I'm doing this. You know, I remember the proposal was for 1,600 bucks and I was like, I guess I'm doing this for 800.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there was always this momentum pointing me towards the arts, and so, you know, I ended up graduating college mid-year and I had a full year's worth of student loans. And a friend called me and told me that his roommate moved out. He was living in Paris. And so I went and lived in Paris for a season. And then coming back to New York City after that,”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I started out with just simple 2x4 framing of things and then ended up taking a full time job at a construction company that was renovating a beautiful brownstone on the upper east side. And I remember waking up at 5 o'clock in the morning and getting on a super packed subway and just doing a very physically demanding job during the day. They were in the kind of demolition phase of the renovation and you're the lowest rung on the ladder. I was essentially just carrying barrels full of plaster lath down four flights of stairs for most of the day. But for sure, being able to watch the other people on the job. And it's not even just the work that they're doing and the skills that are required. It's who they are and how they show up and what their personality is and this kind of community in camaraderie that gets built on a job site full of people doing pretty difficult.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so when you're an art school, the idea of making it as an artist in Boston just doesn't even count. You have to get to New York City. And so I went to New York City and I remember interviewing the Strand Bookstore and getting that job for, again, under $8 an hour and just living pretty close to the bone for my first year in New York City and started doing construction work at night, so trying to just get a little bit more money saved up so I could go back to school.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember during the latter half of my junior year, my mom just dropped me off on the main street in town and said, don't come home until you have a job. And so at age 16, I started working as a cashier at Marshall's. And again, like very valuable experience. Not an easy place to work and making less than, I don't know, $8 an hour at that point. So it would have been 1996. working through the holiday season with, you know, it's probably the only person under the age of 50 working there”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I stopped going to high school for my junior year. And then at the end of that year, most of the advice being given to me was just go take your GED and then we'll figure out where you can go after that. And I was 100% in my like, you know, rebellious phase. graduated with a 1.4 GPA. I mean, I was walking a very fine line to try and figure out, you know, exactly how much effort I had to put in in order to graduate, all the while still focusing on the photography.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's this really strong equation between Duell in school and then be successful after school. And it definitely wasn't an equation that I was subscribing to even at that point. And so fixed my door and that was my introduction to Carpentry. And then from that point on had a pretty strong sense of, okay, I need to figure out what I want to do. And I think in some ways that's one of the most valuable skills I learned going through that public schooling system was just like how to carve out my own path or how to walk away from something and then turn towards who I am and what I want to be doing.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, the Ruse was up when the first report card got mailed home. And what's interesting was I didn't have bad grades, I had incompletes, which I think was the letter N. And my brothers and sisters report cards were on the fridge with their high marks. And I remember. Opening my own report card, highlighting all of the ends, and then putting it on the fridge, and then just kind of going to my room and forgetting about it. And when my dad got back from work that day, my door got forcibly opened. And it was, you know, it was an interesting moment because”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I hit my junior year of high school. I just stopped going to school. I did not tell my parents I stopped going to school. I would leave in the morning and pretend like I was walking to school and I would go into Boston. I was really into photography. I was taking pictures, built a darkroom in the basement. Eventually I got a job at a camera store near Boston and I would just walk by school and go to work and felt like that was a much better use of my time.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is exactly the challenge Rob faced. Back in 2011, he didn't exactly leave Etsy to sail off into the sunset. Rob was fired. Suddenly and without warning. And for Rob, it was a huge personal blow. He was 31, and Etsy was his life's work. For a few years he brooded over what happened, but eventually Rob recovered and settled into a life as a maker. It didn't hurt that Etsy's growth and Rob's stake in the company also made him a wealthy man. So this is a story of triumph and loss, wild success and failure, and everything in between. But we'll get to it. What you need to know for now is that Rob Kalin grew up in the 80s and 90s just outside Boston. His mom was a teacher and his dad was an architect. Rob describes himself as the kind of kid who has”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I read 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. 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.”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, one of my favorite parts of traveling is getting a feel for a neighborhood, the way locals do. A few summers ago, I was in Rome and stayed in an apartment I booked on Airbnb. It was tucked in a quiet neighborhood just outside the Roman forum. Every morning I'd walk to the corner cafe, grab an espresso, and just watch the world go by outside. I even managed to chat with the owner about the neighborhood he lived in for nearly forty years. And he got me thinking about my own neighborhood. There are incredible hiking trails and great restaurants and, of course, the beach. And when I'm traveling this summer, listing my own place on Airbnb could be a really smart way to let someone else experience the area the way I do, like a local. Listing your home on Airbnb while you're traveling is a great way to make some extra money. You could put the money toward your next trip. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much”
2023-10-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Etsy: Rob Kalin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT