Etsy: Rob Kalin

I had a bi weekly lunch with Fred. You know, one of the investors. Fred Wilson. Yeah, Fred Wilson. I thought I was just going to uh lunch to chat about Etsy and And

Went to their office and met him. And He told me that I was fired. But he didn't tell me why. Sure.

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 fell. Like it was something straight out of a A Kafka novel.

Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements. They built. I'm Guy Raz and on the show today, how Rob Kalen followed his passion for making things by creating Etsy. One of the biggest and best known online marketplaces in the world. Let me tell you a little bit about what Rob Kalen, the founder of Etsy, is up to these days.

He left the company more than a decade ago, and today he lives and works in a small town in upstate New York. and the cat skills. Rob rebuilt his entire house from the ground up. He even built the furniture for it. It's actually beautiful stuff, super spare and minimalist wooden tables and chairs. He started another business not too long ago making handcrafted high fidelity speakers.

Don't bother looking for them at Best Buy, they are custom made and very expensive. Someone is actually selling a pair of them online for close to$50,000. Soon Ra plans to launch yet Another business. A learning tool for kids that blends technology with old school hands-on toys. Now the point of all this is to explain, if it's not already clear, is that Rob is very much

A maker. He is exactly the kind of person he had in mind when he created Etsy. Back in two thousand five when the website went live. Rob and his co-founders wanted to create a marketplace for makers who could sell their stuff and be part of a community. Today, Etsy is one of the biggest online marketplaces in the world.

Close to one hundred million active buyers, and about two and a half billion billion dollars in annual revenue. But a lot of that growth? It actually happened. After Rob left the company.

Like many of the stories we've told here on the show. founders, even the most creative and passionate and visionary founders, aren't always the best leaders. Or they might be great leaders at first, but not necessarily the right people to grow and scale a company. And that's okay, there's nothing wrong with that. But this is exactly 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. We'll get to all of that.

What you need to know for now is that Rob Kalen 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 had trouble sitting still. And as he got older, school got a lot harder, to the point where He just decided.

to leave. When 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 dark room 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. So you would just you just wouldn't I mean and um I mean didn't that catch up with you? I mean

Didn't eventually like your grades start to suffer and your parents start to sort of ask you what what's going on? Oh yeah, the reason 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 brother's 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 Forceably opened. And it was a you know, it was an interesting moment because

there's this really strong equation between do well 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 you know, 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 the Who I am and what I want to be doing.

So you did manage to graduate from high school, I think. And fair to say kinda barely. Yeah. 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 a hundred percent in my like You know, rebellious phase. So I um graduated with a one point four 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, you know, the photography and mm. 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 sixteen

I started working as a cashier at Marshalls and Again, like very valuable experience. not be an easy place to work and making less than, I don't know, eight dollars an hour at that point. So would have been nineteen ninety six. And Working through the holiday season.

with, you know, as probably the only person under the age of fifty working there. I I guess you spent um A little bit of time. um at at our school in Boston. After high school, but you

You eventually made your way down to New York. Yeah, so When you're in 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 eight dollars an hour, and just living pretty close to the bone for my first 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. And what kind of construction work were you doing in New York? Uh started out with just simple two by four 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 five o'clock in the morning and Getting on a super pack 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 it's who they are and how They show up and what their personality is and this kind of community and camaraderie that gets built on On a job site full of

People doing pretty difficult work and That really stuck with me. Even outside of that environment. And I guess when when you were in New York you also kinda went back to school. Oh not kind of you did. I think you you you took some classes at the new school and and and like Greek and Latin and then you transfer to NYU, the the the Gallatin school there, and you studied uh classics there as well, which uh

Which seems like uh kind of a departure from what you were doing like with photography and and the arts. Um, so after you you graduated, what kinds of things were you Thinking about doing. 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 For a season.

And then coming back to New York City. After that. 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 never free hand and me 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 Bar and Grill. And he said,

Covering up the mouthpiece of the receiver, can you beat that price? And I Again, jokingly just kinda 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 sixteen hundred bucks and I was like, I guess I'm doing this for eight hundred dollars. And did you know how to make a website?

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, you know, 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, 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.

So Basically there was an opportunity to build a website and that's kind of Just by default, you kind of Like figure out how to do this. Business.

So I made that first website. And because this is uh 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 Get Crafty and she needed that website rebuilt. What was what was Get Crafty? Get Crafty was a community site really like a forum with people sharing what they were working on and talking about life and you know 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 algorith 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 I need this rebuilt.

I hear you make websites. Can you help me? And this was not a a commercial website. It was just like a community board for people to like, I guess, post photos of what they were work like the crafts that they were working on. Exactly. 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 Get Crafty, I imagine in a couple months. And when you say Chris, you're talking about Chris McGuire, the g the guy you met at at NYU who would go on to f to found Etsy with you. Yeah, so um 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 wanna 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 at 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. Yeah, by the way, what kind of furniture were you making?

Uh 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 furniture aesthetic and

The early two thousands. Wh w were your desks I mean Were they good? Were you good at w woodworking? Compared to so I've been woodworking more or less continuously for the past.

twenty 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. Um again. They were

A very good attempt at expressing something and exploring something. And so Mm. 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 two thousand four.

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. Right. 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. And this is like two thousand this is like two thousand five. Yeah, this is yeah, this is probably early. Early two thousand five. And

Um I 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 you know, she's very thoughtful and decided against it because, you know, that Energy of commerce. Um 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. And Lo and behold, that was the seed of what eventually Etsy. And and so when you and and by the way, the name

That you picked for this website Etsy. Where where did that come from? 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. you know, miss hearing something in a Fellini film. And

looking up the dot com for that and by some very strange stroke of Providence and luck The Or letter domain for ETSY dot com was available. And you'd heard this, you thought that you heard somebody say Etsy in a Fellini film? Yeah, I think in Italian it means and if or something like that, etc. And so I was specifically

Plumbing the depths of my You know, 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 You know, drugs that they were creating. Right. 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.

So so you said you you were thinking about a global brand. So I mean it sounds like From the get go you had had ambitions about this. It wasn't just let me just build this thing and sell my my woodworking stuff. It was more like let's see what we can do. Let's see how big we can make this. Yeah, so

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. Why don't we come back in just a moment. Hab and his partners launch Etsy move from an apartment into an office, which they soon discover. is not an easy place.

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Thanks so much. You guys are the best. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2005, and Rob, his friend Chris McGuire, and another guy from college, Haim Schopik, decide to devote their full attention to building the website that will become Etsy. 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. Um in the apartment of what became Etsy's first investor, uh, Spencer Ain, along with his brother Judson.

And 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. Um, do you have any interest in it? And he kinda looked at the bar and he looked back at me. And he's like if you can build that And 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 you know, I still remember that experience he lived near NYU's Um, Stern like their business school. And

Went back the next day. Picked up. A check gets his first money in for fifty thousand dollars. 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. Yeah. Tell me and and how much did you did you need to raise or did you raise?

Initially. 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 and institutional investors. So I went to my grandfather and I told him what my intentions were. He was the kind of, you know, businessman in the family and he worked at IBM. back in the fifties and sixties and just said, Hey, like, here's what I'm thinking of doing. So there was this sense of like okay, he'll know what to do. And I remember telling him, um

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. Um Sean Meenan, who is a restaurateur who had a restaurant across the street. But at that time, presumably At the time it was just more expensive to build a website. And to to

you know, to get servers. So is that is that why you needed to raise a m I mean today if you were gonna start a a business, you would just You and some friends are just Go start. building a website and you wouldn't need much money to do it. But in two thousand five, I guess you needed the money.

by the services that you needed to buy. To make the the site. Yeah, so in two thousand five 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 um in terms of what we were paying ourselves. was going towards hardware and I remember just kind of like countless hours spent ordering from New Egg and then the hardware showing up at my apartment and You know, these big pizza box when you rack servers on the floor.

and assembling them and then driving over to Secaucus, New Jersey and installing them in the data center. I remember Christmas Eve crimping R J forty five plugs onto patch cables, setting all this stuff up. So yeah, those were the good old days. We were just doing the best we could with what we had. Alright, so so the three of you, uh, Chris, you and Hiam

Uh Basically starting to build out this site. And Before you even made it, you know, launched it and went live. How d what was your business model gonna be? Like when you went to

to Spencer, the guy whose bar you built and who was your investor, and he was like, Okay, how you gonna make money? What did you how'd you explain it to him even before you went live? Mm-hmm. The business model thankfully was very straightforward even from those early days. Obviously we could point to website. that already existed like ebay and say, All right, there's gonna be a per item listing fee and then there'll be a sales fee associated, you know? 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 add revenue and you know we were kind of able to take this pseudo moral high ground and say like we're not gonna be reliant upon third party advertisers That we'll have to kind of cater to We're just gonna like the business model felt like it was Baked into the

the website from the beginning. And when people asked you, Well how is this different from eBay? your answer was Well this is not eBay at all. We're not selling everything. We're only selling handmade items, things that people make. 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 you know 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

You know. inertia in the early stages of the marketplace. And start Get the flywheel going. Hm.

And One interesting thing is you can't Fake that, right? We knew that we had to be That community.

And from working with Jean on Get Crafty and really seeing what it looked like to participate in an online community in those days. Um Yeah, had a

Good sense of that. All right, I guess from what I read it took you guys Just two and a half months. to build this website. And you launched it.

Um in June of two thousand five. Etsy dot com. And Then what happened? Like you hit the go button.

You know, you it's it's it's out there the world. But this is like still early days on the internet. And what happened? Did anything happen? Did Did people start to find it immediately or or not really?

Yeah, what happened was we hit the go button and then went for dinner. And I think when we'd come back for dinner. Um, you know, we're checking the web traffic and a couple of people had noticed it. We post it on Get crafty and there was another Um

You know, kind of handmade community called Crafter. And We posted it. 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. Hm.

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. And which means, you know.

It's It's got a lot of of staying power. And you see the inverse of this with companies like Groupon, which I think was, you know 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.

So basically people started to discover it from blogs and and from other you know being pointed to it from other places. And what were the kinds of things that people started to I mean What kind of Yeah, wha what were people s selling on it initially? So the

The sellers were predominantly women and the categories were actually laid out By Leah from Crafter. And You know they

Then 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 B to B side from the beginning, um, where There was a supplies category and we relaxed, or I 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. Yeah, but uh but again, I mean uh other sites at the time were were doing that kind of thing too. So how did you distinguish yourself from from like from like eBay or or other places that sold the same types of things?

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 like we were different, we weren't eBay. And there was a digital artist who I had an 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 the items that were listed in a particular category through time. Um The the the 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 fans, you know. before any items were listed and as soon as some items were listed he was like all right I'm in. Hm. And and and and Jared would would go on to become like your fourth founder. So it it it would be you and Chris

Heim and Jared and he I think he really contributed to the early look and and feel of the site, right? 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

Wrap it up. In a big flag that you can wave and say like 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, you know, 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. I guess. Like pretty soon after you You launched it, you started to think about I mean, obviously this is gonna take more money.

And if if if if it was gonna become something bigger. the founders of Flicker, Katerina Fake and Stuart Butterfield. Um who are who were married at the time were a couple. Um And you wrote to them.

'cause I guess you you liked Flicker and you sort of asked What'd you do? Tell me the story. Yeah, so Again, early days.

Of the web. And They were Absolute royalty. I mean Flicker was one of the first Websites to really like.

Even really take a stand and say, like, here's what we're about. And so I remember Just writing to them. Pretty simple. you know, two sentence email just saying, Hey, you know, he I really admire what you made.

Here's something. that we built over here. And 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 um pretty early on in the company. We were like, Well let's go out to California and And uh

And see if maybe we want to relocate there. So So you went out there to meet Meat cattering and certain steward obviously, of course, were not found. Slack.

Um You went out there to meet them and what What happened. Yeah, so I still remember the first time meeting them. They definitely kinda took us under

They're wing mainly on like product design and fundraising were the two big pieces. Um, you know, this was Probably Two years. into

Building at C, 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. Um, or I wouldn't want their money investing in this. So She Did

A little bit of filtering. Up front and then kinda work with me to figure out who he wanted to raise money from in the end. Yeah. And and you were I mean I guess the attraction

At at at that point was that you were You had Um like people were set up accounts and they had storefronts and the more accounts they set up the more essentially users you had and and so And you mentioned that in year one

they sold like a million dollars worth of things on Etsy, right? So so the the the artist sold About a million dollars worth of Products that Is that right? Is it your your memory? Yeah, so year one

And again this is the kind of Inertial momentum. getting built up in the very beginning of a marketplace, the like classic chicken and egg problem. Um, here 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 is to just like get the flywheel going. And and a million I mean. a million dollars in in in sales was great, but you guys Only God.

three, four percent of that. So your revenue is still F fairly small, but obviously you were showing a trajectory of growth, of significant growth. Yeah, so at that stage any investor is more concerned about

you know, total addressable market and how big is this opportunity, not you know, there's that other piece of how much we've already captured. And when you're talking with these institutional investors, you know, this was in some ways the best piece of From Sean.

crass in 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 Uh got a lot of swagger to it. But it was definitely helpful Um

To feel like there was some kind of safety net there in the beginning. So All right, so you I guess.

On Um on a trip, or maybe this first trip to San Francisco, but going back to that trip when you when you met with Katterine and Stuart, um, they introduce you to some Potential investors. And'cause the idea was you you wanted to raise, I guess from what I read, you wanted to raise about a quarter of a million dollars at that point. Yeah, so

That was the beginning of this process that has been a kind of long and storied journey, and we ended up raising Yeah, very modest. Um I think this would have been called our series B.

uh just to show how much times have changed. We probably raise like Two hundred and fifty grand on a one point five 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 head count. You know, we weren't spending any money on advertising or anything like that. So when you

I mean when when you guys were really You know, now in the thick of it. you know, you launch in in the middle of two thousand five. Um And you growing.

Organically. How I mean tell me a little bit about what what do you remember about just the work environment. Did you first of all did you guys I initially you were doing this out of your apartment, but at what point did you actually get like an office to work to work out of together? Yeah, 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 travelling.

Um Um You know, late two thousand six. 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 The Brooklyn Bridge and we were just gonna get part of this floor. And we ended up renting the whole floor Yeah. 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 um, you know, sleeping on a little blow up camping pad and I'm freezing and

I'm working blissfully, you know, eighteen hours a day. on on this project and then, you know, the rest of the people would would come in in the morning. Um and and I I I may have missed this, so let me let me ask About this. Um

You were traveling in the first a lot in the first year of Etsy's launch. U w why? Where were you going? What were you doing? 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 a hundred percent 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, um, way back in like Two thousand six. How are you I mean, um you know, when you would go to craft fairs outside the US, how are you Acommodating those Sellers.

Were you able to because today it's easier, obviously, to You know, it's just the infrastructure there, a Shopify or whatever you want to use, but How did you have like somebody in I don't know Germany selling pottery. sell to somebody in the US and then also accept dollars and how how did how did you guys

Make that happen. Was it h I mean it must have been really hard. So as much as we disdained eBay, we were definitely standing on their shoulders in a couple of 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. um 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

And so Etsy was definitely kind of built on the shoulders. Of A Vaya. In that way. And PayPal was owned by by eBay by that point.

Yeah. Exactly. Um and I'm I'm also curious, in those early days, in that sort of first year and a half, when it was really a a sm uh presumably even once you opened Etsy Labs, it was still a pretty probably a pretty small team. Um How are you dealing with like

when things went wrong, right? Because I have to assume that, you know There were Probably You know, more than than a few examples of people. Getting things they didn't like.

Or you know, not being happy with the the product are not feeling it they get their s their money's worth and they would complain to you guys About it. How did you guys handle that? 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 way 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 a refund, you have to take it up with them.

and that insulated us from a certain amount of that. But that said. If we became a place where it was just oh this is scammers and Shotty goods, then

It would have really hurt the brand. Again, I think the 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 Significant later. Yeah, this is when the internet was still innocent.

I know, I miss those days. Or more, yeah. Yeah. 'Cause you g'cause it probably was really earnest community of of makers, right? And so You probably didn't have to worry too much about people just

That would come later. Um And and so and in terms of like Curating. I mean, d did you guys have any standards for what was allowed? Like You know, did you have rules about what you could and could not so obviously it had to be

Initially they get to be handmade. But I mean could people sell, you know Um to you know, for example like Handmade glass tubes to smoke.

pot out of. 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 twenty years old.

And when people were challenging what that was and we were trying to clarify that Yeah. There are plenty of VHS.

Like players that were twenty years old. 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.

Well what's interesting is you know you It's 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 of humanity and all of our foibles and imperfections. And I think ultimately We tend to love things for their imperfections. I know that that

pr pretty you know, early in the early days. Um Mm some of your co founders left. Um but how did you guys I mean how did uh just the i sort of interpersonal relationships, you know, how how did you guys Get along because it's stressful. Right, building something.

together w especially when there you start to get investors behind you. Um, how how was the relationship? 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 um 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. When we come back in just a moment.

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Zip Recruiter. The smartest way to hire. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Roz. So it's 2008, and Rob is starting to realize that as the CEO of Etsy, he's Kind of in over his head. So he eventually decides he needs to bring on someone else to help grow and focus the business.

You know again, um At this point. Twenty eight. And I don't know how to interview someone for this level of job and so

I started interviewing Um, someone with more experience for a COO role. and ended up hiring Maria Thomas from from MPR. Hm. That was a really

Interesting cross current in this office full of You know. 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. Um

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. Um I definitely learned a lot.

And it 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 the CEO and Um looking back on it, it's quite easy to see like

You know, 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 um the right fit in that role. But I initially transitioned to being chief creative officer And then just a board member.

Right. Yeah, I I should mention I I I I haven't seen Maria Thomas in uh at least a decade, but I I I knew her a little bit, uh when when both of us worked at at National Public Radio. She had been the um head of digital media there and and So she came on initially CO and then and then essentially became CEO.

But you you said that it wasn't the right fit. What why why? I mean you wanted a professional to come in and you know, make this company stronger. So You know, first of all, what was it about her? I mean clearly you th you you had felt that she was the right fit for for an operational role. So you must have liked her. You must have thought That you know, that you must have gotten along.

Yeah, we got along. I I definitely Enjoyed. the early discussions. The the culture piece.

becomes evident in a couple of 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 Apart And at that particular point.

There were just too many Where she didn't see Etsy for what it was and what it needed to be. I I mean in you know. from what I understand what I've what I've read about the company, I mean, during that period, I mean it was a t it was a potentially tough period'cause this is the recession.

Financial crisis. But remarkably Um Etsy 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. A growth perspective for Etsy. 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 the recession. And it was approaching profitability at this point. Again, you know, we're a marketplace. This business model's kind of

baked into how we run. And This interesting shift happened, probably s 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 buy 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 would 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

You know, y 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. And that really started under Maria, that was she was like, We need to focus on the and buyer. The person going to the website. Yeah, I think that shift started happening then, and

Is that wrong? I don't Think so? No, I mean I I I it sounds like there was a There the tension came from I mean you're the f you 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 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 a new CO's 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 at the company were going to you and they were like, Hey, I'm not really happy with this decision that that our new CEO is taking.

And And you were like, Yeah, well let me see what I can do. I mean does that Is that fair? Was that happening? I'd like to think that wasn't. happening even just at the most practical level.

I Didn't stay in the C CO role for very long. I completely remove myself from the day to day operations of the company. And I didn't want to Do you

Anything that was gonna Underpin. The authority of this person that I just suggested. To run the company, I care deeply. about the company more than anything else.

So She eventually steps down and you are brought back in. To become CEO. in two thousand ten. And um

Did you feel like, you know, I mean, oftentimes you know, that that could have been a a great opportunity for you. 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

In two thousand ten. you know, back to running the company. Mm-hmm. Did you feel like okay. I got this. Yeah, 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. do my best and everything's going a hundred miles an hour. So I 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

I think taste is one of the most ineffable things about the human condition. Like what gives someone some kind of taste and not another. And so you know her Whatever was guiding her hires for people to run things like marketing and customer support or anywhere else. Um 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 gonna 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 then you know, then it smashed, but I was like, That feeling is what we need to have. Here as we're as we're building Etsy. You were f basically thirty years old when you were brought back and you know, but

But you had star I mean you know, you started the company five years earlier, so there was there was a lot of you've been in the trenches with a lot of people. Um and I imagine it was probably people were excited. Um But there were also I mean

I I'm sure you remember this well. Um while you were CEO. There was um an article that came out in I think in Inc. magazine was critical. And and it was a you had some quotes that We're a little bit

Uh Shall I say. Um, unfortunate, you 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, um I think trying to maximize shareholder value is ridiculous, even if you did believe those things and felt that way. Sometimes you kind of

Uh, you know, wanna not say that. Oh yeah, and you need to learn the lesson to not say those things. So at that point Yeah. I didn't I was used to Well first, right, taken out of context and contextualizing those things with what comes before or after them helps make more sense of them. That's one piece. Another, for sure, still learning. Um, I didn't even know that if a reporter was recording you, they don't have to run any of the quotes by you um before publishing them.

And Yeah, that was very humbling. Like Yeah. Lots of lessons to be learned from that experience.

Yeah. I'm I don't I I hope this is not like piling on. I'm not I'm d but this is important because we're talking about, you know, now more than ten years ago, but and what you've learned from it and and obviously But You know, one of the things in the article, and again

I'm sure there are people who could say You know Things about anyb anybody listening, me, anybody, but somebody in the article said working Ed Etsy was like being in an abusive relationship. Um in that same article.

Do you w do you you were kind of described as being erratic and You know, you'd have a You know twenty, thirty ideas a day and and, you know, change course and you weren't a great manager. Do do you think that I'm sure some of it, maybe a lot of it was unfair.

But was there. Some of it that was accurate. Oh, I'm sure. And no wor 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 Like what's your Let's see. I think everyone's frame of reference for these things is is different. And I was trying

Two get a better sense of You know. 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 and all of this stuff. And I'm just like Is that what being a Uh like you know In an abusive relationship looks like or is it something a lot quieter and a lot softer? And you know, 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 glass 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 this should have been over half an hour ago and like it's just dragging on.

And so I was working late one night. Uh I don't know, probably eight or nine PM. 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 meeting. Yeah. You know, to me this is just something that's a bit cheeky.

And You know. 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 chair back in. And so I'm sure that and I I doubt I even understand all of the different ways That I, you know, to frame it positively, needed to improve Um

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 in a CEO coach. Um And

Eventually. hired another COO Adam Freed. Again, in the back of my mind, there is a piece of me that's just like the culture needs to change and that's the direction that it needs to go in. So all right, so you're

You know, we're working on your leadership and This article comes out. Um, which obviously wasn't a great article on an ink. Mm-hmm. And I guess a couple months later

Um you you are Fire. And this This came as a real shock to you. You you did not see it coming. At all.

Tell me about about that. I mean, is is that the case? Did you not have any Inkling or indication that that was on the horizon? Yeah, absolutely. No idea that it was even in 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 join as COO And

Pretty early on in that relationship. Um, you know, we started Trying to figure out what that dynamic was and not just amongst ourselves, you know, going to a kind of executive coach. Working stuff out. And

I think we both felt that. There was a bit of that. culture mismatch and I definitely Um Didn't support him.

The way that I should have, you know, I remember This meeting where We had to reclassify all of the customer support workers from being like Full time. Salary to having to keep track of their hours.

In its 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 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 like hadn't been involved enough in preparing what the presentation should have been, all of that stuff. And you know, 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 like 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 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. Fred Wilson. Yeah, I've heard Wilson. I thought I was just going to

Uh lunch to chat about Etsy and 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 A Kafka novel. Yeah.

And I'd already stepped aside once. So I remain 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 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? But Rob, I mean, at the time didn't anyone sit you down and clearly explain to you why you were being fired? I mean mean this is twelve years ago now, right? And I don't I don't know, maybe uh maybe you've had a chance to get more insight into it by now, but But looking back, did you have any idea? Were you pretty much in the dark? 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. In advance of this interview.

To try and learn more about what actually happened. And he did shine a little bit of light. on 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 You know, fair enough. I would have greatly appreciated.

That kind of feedback at the time. So you were you were out, and I imagine and it obviously came as a shock to you, and I imagine it was also just emotionally Very challenging. Because it's

It's like a death. Yeah, I was wrecked for quite a while. I mean I'd obviously like 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

uh where I lived. I mean I remember this moment. Um You know, before this happened where I was living in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

And I would ride my bike everywhere. Yeah. to work and it's foggy and Manhattan's to my left and I'm just looking at Manhattan. and biking to work and, you know My fiance was at home and I was like, Wow, I

I figured it out, you know? I made it. And this like feeling of accomplishment and and stability, and then it's just like Nope. You know.

Everything we think is is solid can just kind of Crumble. In that sense. And Yep, it makes it hard, but I've also come to peace with it. The anger's gone, it's just sadness that lingers.

You left, presumably still with a significant amount of equity. Yeah, let's see. Right, so you had that. Um, I have to imagine. Yeah. And

Which Yeah, isn't obviously doesn't entirely mitigate the The pain but certainly helps a little bit. Um

And did you feel like Just from your own I don't know. for for your own mental health, did you feel like you just uh it has to be a cut, a clean break, and you just You know, it was like a break up with a a partner where you just stopped

Any kind of communication or following it or just you just Try to put it out. of your life in in any way possible. 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 five percent that you have to disclose. So

You know, I had some equity in the company. I couldn't do anything. with the equity. Um, you know, I I couldn't sell shares. And then one cent. 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 geographical compartmentalization really helps. So just getting out of Brooklyn was really helpful. Um you

Y when you moved up to upstate New York to the in the Catskills, you got it really involved in the community. Like and and I I mean, I know for example, like you helped build a preschool. Like you I guess pr probably was a to solve a problem you had, which was your children, and you want a good preschool. Yeah, so What was interesting was that whole piece of my identity that was built around I work at a tech company that has no cachet in Catskill, New York. And that was great.

And Worked with Uh a group of moms to start a preschool and then eventually start the Catskill Montessori school, which has over a hundred families at it. Um, I've also been doing some work in the local with 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. So I guess you um

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. Um is it still a secret? Is can you talk about This'cause it sounds like this is your f really your biggest endeavor.

You know, in a in a big way since you left Etsy. Yeah, this is what I hope one day they come back on this podcast and Talk about and show all of the lessons that I've learned. Um

Yeah, the new endeavor I'm working with. A pair of Absolutely brilliant engineers. One of them a close friend from Premetsy. And

It's at the intersection of early childhood development in in 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?

Why you 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. 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 You know, 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 Frabels gifts and Monsory's sensorial materials. But no one's updated that hardware.

So 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 um at the school up the road. Now. But uh huh.

Yeah. Hopefully you'll be hearing about that shortly. Um Going back to the Wright Brothers thing, there was no reason why you know. Why why those guys

What they said, right? They started out Playing around their dad's Toolshed. There are similar there's no reason why Etsy

I mean, It th there probably were a ten thousand reasons why it should have failed or could have failed, because it just the it was too early and the the 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, it you know, its market cap is at eight billion dollars. As we speak today. Um and you know You were raising it at one one half million dollars, Sophie. You're certainly your investors did w very well.

Um certainly early investors did extremely well. I mean it's It's a powerhouse. I don't know. What do you What do you make of it when you look at it today? Yeah, there's this kind of air of inevitability to it. With the ten thousand ways it could have gone wrong, it almost Seems like it's the inversion of that where

We did ten thousand things that could have pushed it off the rails and it didn't go off the rails, you know, including You know? management stuff and my own shenanigans. So How did it persist? And I think ultimately

They The heroes Of all of that. R Are the sellers.

And that You know, in many ways. That's who we should. We should all tip our hats to so 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. That's his primary customer right now isn't the sellers. It's it's the buyers. And so it's gonna 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 stock and now have More wealth than the prior fifty generations of my family or whatever.

And One thing that I really enjoy is the fact that You know. There's a secret.

That it is word that I made up. Is on the lips of so many people. Just the stark contrast of going to those craft fairs in two thousand six 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? Um Until I've heard it. When you think about the journey you've taken and and, you know, what it's enabled you to do. Despite the you know.

The very Traumatic exit. Um how how much of of of your success and and where you are today do you attribute to Your work and your intelligence and how much you think

has to do with The luck that you that you know, broke your way. 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 The 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 You know.

Middle class family Of This really strange path that I took. through school. Uh

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 I think that's the prerequisite, and then all the hard work. Is what?

Is what follows and You get to lean into both. That's Rob Kalen. Co founder. of Etsy.

Um by the way, when when you guys We're at Etsy. What was like the weirdest thing that you saw somebody put on there? Like and and and you were like I don't know if we should allow this thing to go on sale at the site.

Uh 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.

And generally the community was Totally supportive of that. And I thought it was a rather lovely expression of all of the different values and cross currents at play in the Etsy marketplace.

I I don't even want to imagine what somebody needs that for. Wow. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show, and as always, it's free. This episode was produced by Carrie Thomson with music composed by Ramtine Era Louis. It was edited by Niva Grant with research help from Sam Paulson. Our production staff also includes JC Howard, Casey Herman, John Isabella, Chris Masini, Carla Estevez, and Malia Agudello.

Our engineers are Gilly Moon and Patrick Murray. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to how I built this.

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