• #146: Etsy – The Online Craft Show

  • Mar 27 2024
  • Length: 21 mins
  • Podcast
#146: Etsy – The Online Craft Show cover art

#146: Etsy – The Online Craft Show

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  • How to build a tech company without being techy! No seriously, Rob Kalin, an artist, started Etsy and then polled more artists to make it awesome. Dave Young: Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I'm Stephen's sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today's episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it's us, but we're highlighting ads we've written and produced for our clients. So here's one of those. [No Bull RV Ad] Dave Young: Welcome back to the Empire Builders Podcast. I'm Dave Young. Stephen Semple is here with another fascinating story about building an empire, and we're looking at a tech empire today. We're going to talk about Etsy. Stephen Semple: Yes. Dave Young: And so all I know about Etsy is you can buy all kinds of weird stuff on Etsy. Stephen Semple: Etsy is very much a technology company. In other ways, Etsy is very much an arts and craft company when you really think about it, right? Dave Young: Yeah, yeah. A community of arts and crafts people. Stephen Semple: Yes, very much so. Etsy was started by Rob Kalin and it was founded on June 18th, 2005, and it went public 10 years later in March, 2015, raising 237 million and giving it an evaluation of 1.8 billion at that time. They do about two and a half billion in sales. They've got 2,800 employees. So you know what? A pretty big deal. Dave Young: Yeah. Stephen Semple: And Rob Kalin, he's like this artistic hands-on kind of guy. He's not involved with Etsy any longer, but the home he lives in today, he built the entire thing from the ground up, including all the furniture. Today he's got this thing where he makes these custom-made speakers that are these $50,000 speakers. And he's constantly looking at this whole idea of trying to match technology with old school tools and craftsmanship, and he really thinks about himself as being a creator. And Etsy started because of a need that he had. Like a lot of these empires we covered, it came from filling his own need, because he would make stuff and he'd want to try to find a place to sell it. Dave Young: And I just know from being in the art glass and that kind of world, before the internet, if you're a crafts person or an artist, however you want to put it, well, you got to find a show somewhere, right? You got to go to a craft show, you got to go to a fair, a Renaissance Fair or something and set up a booth, drag all your stuff there and hope that you sell some. Stephen Semple: Yeah, Dave Young: And Etsy became that online. Stephen Semple: It did, very much so. Very, very much so. Dave Young: Yeah. Stephen Semple: So he grew up outside of Boston. His mom was a teacher, his dad was an architect. Rob was one of those kids who couldn't sit still in school and he stopped going to school. He wouldn't go to school and he didn't tell his parents. He got a job at a camera store and he had to figure out what he wanted to do. And he graduated from high school, barely. Dave Young: Started wearing suits and carrying his lunch in a briefcase. Parents didn't notice. Stephen Semple: Exactly. So he graduates from high school, barely. He did the GED approach and he became a cashier at Marshalls, and he said it was a good learning experience, but not a lot of money in it. He decides he wants to go to art school and he had to get to New York City. So he gets to New York City and he is working at a bookstore, and he started to do construction at night to make money because what we know is not a lot of money in retail, right? Eventually that construction at night turned in the full-time and he was then taking classes at night. It sort of flipped around, and he was doing classics and languages and things a...
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