Etsy’s CEO Josh Silverman is something of serial CEO. He was the CEO of Shipping.com and Skype before he took the reins at the bespoke online retailer. Silverman sat down with Forbes Editor Steven Bertoni to walk through a few stories that have helped form and shape the way he leads.
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00:00I'd say the toughest decision, we had several hundred people who worked for 18 months to launch something called Etsy Studio, which was a marketplace for craft supplies.
00:10And it makes sense, actually, that people on Etsy, buyers and sellers, would be interested in craft supplies.
00:16But I didn't think we needed a whole separate marketplace doing that. I thought we could do it as part of the core of Etsy.
00:20So we had a few hundred people work for 18 months to build Etsy Studio.
00:26I joined on a Friday. It launched on Tuesday, and I shut it down that Friday.
00:33And that was very painful for the whole staff. But ultimately, I think it was the right decision.
00:39How do you kind of make that hard decision and then keep the team motivated and steering in the same direction?
00:47It was really hard, but I think being very transparent about how you made the decision and why you made the decision and what the larger purpose is.
00:54So first, anchoring everyone around the larger purpose, that our sellers need us to be doing the things that drive their sales the most.
01:02That's the most important thing, and it's urgent right now. And that's going to require sacrifice from us.
01:08How do we measure that? We measure that by what we call gross merchandise sales or their sales.
01:13And then saying, I'm going to be rigorous about picking the fewest things that will drive their sales today.
01:19And this project, while it's an exciting project, our own estimates suggest it's going to take three years before that contributes materially to our sellers' sales.
01:30And they don't have three years to wait.
01:33And so while it was very painful for the hundreds of people who were working at Etsy, we serve the millions of sellers who count on us every day.
01:42And in service of that larger mission, we need to accept this sacrifice.
01:45And so while it's going to be a little bit more, we need to accept this sacrifice.
