Continuing my series of interviews with interesting personalities at the World Economic Forum at Davos: Here’s a 6 minute talk with Etsy founder Robert Kalin on the state of his four year old business. Robert Scoble helps with the interview.

28 year old Kalin, who coincidentally looks a lot like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, talks about how he’s grown the person-to-person ecommerce business despite competing directly with eBay. Etsy focuses on hand made items, and has a rabidly passionate community of buyers and sellers (also, 97% of Etsy users are women). Kalin also eats his own dog food – most of his clothing was purchased from the site, he says in the interview.

$100 million worth of goods were sold on Etsy in 2008. The company is generating over $1 million/month in revenue, Kalin told me.

We first covered Etsy in late 2005. Since then the company has raised over $30 million in financing, and counts Jim Breyer as a board member (he’s also on the board of Walmart, Facebook and Marvel).

The full transcript is below: → Read More

Etsy, the anti-eBay shopping site for handcrafted goods, raised $27 million in a series D round. It previously raised a total of $4.6 million from Union Square Ventures and angels Caterina Fake, Stewart Butterfield, Joshua Schachter, and Albert Wenger. Union Square Ventures invested again in this round, as did new investor Acel Partners. Accel partner Jim Breyer will take a seat on Etsy’s board (he is also a board member of Facebook). Fake, a founder of Flickr with her husband Butterfield, and Union Square’s Fred Wilson are existing board members. Since launching in June, 2005, Etsy now has 650,000 members, 120,000 of which are craft sellers, in 127 different countries. The Brooklyn-based startup employs 50 people. Etsy founder Rob Kalin says in a blog post: This means that we now have the resources to extend Etsy’s reach in this world, to enable so many more people to make a living making things. We want Etsy to exist for hundreds of years. Our goal is for Etsy to be an independent, publicly traded company, focused on all things handmade. He says that Etsy is “almost break-even” on profits, but he plans on using the money to: —Buy $5 million worth of hardware and hosting over the next two years. —Support more currencies and languages other than the U.S. Dollar and English. —Fix the checkout system (there is none now, every buyer has to pay every seller on an individual basis. There is no Etsy payment system that works across all sellers). —Fix search. —Provide a cushion in case of a recession. —Offer customer service —Provide competitive wages and take care of his employees. In other words, Etsy is growing up. And it needs cash to do so. The site reached 1 million unique visitors in the U.S. last month, according to comScore (1.6 million worldwide), doubling from last April. Update: the word on the street is that etsy was valued at $90 million pre money in this round. wow. → Read More

A relatively new company called Etsy has recently captured my attention. Etsy is a P2P ecommerce company (like ebay) that currently limits sales to handmade items. It’s smart to focus on a niche to iron things out…and Etsy could easily expand into other categories as well. Etsy does lots of things like ebay – They charge sellers a listing fee and final sale percentage (although at $.10 and 3.5% they are way below what ebay charges), there is an ebay-like feedback system (side note: there is a huge market waiting out there if someone would create an independent third party feedback system with open data and APIs), and they have integrated paypal as a payment option. Unlike ebay, Etsy has architected the buyer experience from the ground up using web 2.0 priciples. Tagging First, Etsy has a very flat taxonomy – top level categories such as Bags & Purses, Toys, etc. Everything underneath these top level tags is based on seller tagging. For instance, look at the “Bags & Purses” category and note the tags (called subcategories) on the right hand side. Click on anyone of these and you go deeper into the taxonomy…although really it is a folksonomy. Further refine items by clicking on additional tags, or on a different set of tags based on materials used to produce the product. The benefit of this folksonomy is that it is user generated and based on popularity. If a new item gets hot fast, the folksonomy will take that into account. It’s a beautiful use of tags and the first launched product I’ve seen that does this. Flash Etsy also does some amazing things with flash – the geolocator on the home page is a great way to find sellers by location. You can also use their “shop by color” widget…less useful but an interesting feature. Finally, they have a time machine feature, although I can’t figure out what it does. Nice product. It looks like more features are coming, too. Check out their blog. → Read More