I was a carpenter. I made furniture and couldn't find anywhere to sell it online. eBay was for used junk. Amazon was for mass-produced stuff. So I built Etsy.
Etsy isn't an e-commerce company. It's an economy. Two million sellers feeding their families because this platform exists. That matters more than the stock price.
When I became CEO, people said Etsy was a charity pretending to be a company. We proved you can have values and margins. They're not mutually exclusive.
COVID hit and suddenly everyone needed masks. Etsy sellers made 29 million masks in the first month. No corporate memo. No supply chain meeting. Just two million entrepreneurs responding in real time.
I got fired from my own company. Twice. The board said I couldn't scale. Maybe they were right. But the soul of the company — that was mine.
Amazon sells you the cheapest version of everything. We sell you the only version of something. That's not competition — that's a completely different value proposition.