Influx

The founder of Etsy (a craft maker
community) goes on the brand’s blog and tells his people he’s raised
$27 million of VC funding, but this is no standard press release, it’s a story.

A story of astonishing growth, the desire to do things differently and explanation of how the millions are going to be spent.

Welcome to Corporation 2.0.

Some extracts..

“In early April of 2005, I sat in an orange chair facing an open
window. It was nighttime and the lights were off. I was back in
Brooklyn after a brief residence in Paris, and I was about to sketch
the initial ideas that would become Etsy. Working with three friends –
Chris, Haim and Jared – Etsy went from these ideas to a site live on
the Web in about two months.

Now, thirty-three months later,
Etsy is a company with fifty employees, a community with over 650,000
members, and a marketplace with over 120,000 sellers in 127 different
countries.

We launched in June of 2005, which means we’re right
in the middle of our first five years. Where are we headed? What do we
need to get there?

So
our vision is to be the eye — to be a kind of organizing principle. We
do not want Etsy itself to be a big tuna fish. Those tuna are the big
companies that all us small businesses are teaming up against.

Those
big companies are holdovers from the days before the Web existed. And
any company that is being run the same way now as it was before the Web
came about is due for some massive restructuring or deflation.

Etsy
is a company born on the Web, literally. I see the company itself as a
handmade project, and we’ll continue to build it this way. There’s much
more to do, and we’re up for the challenge. But we need more than
people to get there.”

He also explains what they are going to do with the $27million.

Here’s one thing..

“It is immensely important to me that all Etsy workers are paid a good
salary, provided with full benefits (medical, dental, vision) by the
company. Many companies, far too many companies, underpay their
employees, don’t make workers employees at all (“permalancers” and
“permatemp” are the new words for this), and provide few if any
benefits. (We also know that many of the sellers on Etsy lack access to
such benefits as health insurance, and we want to work to change this.)”

Wow!

Radical thinking- providing health insurance for the sellers in the Etsy community.

Posted by Ed Cotton