Fireside Chat, Interview
Josh Silverman: The Future of the “Etsy Economy”
- Gross merchandise sales (GMS) are projected to be materially affected by projects inflecting the curve no later than 2019, with significant GMS projects expected to launch within the next 18 to 24 months.
- Urgent "ambulance" projects declared for immediate impact are scheduled to move to market within weeks rather than months.
- An organizational restructuring involving layoffs of approximately 20% of the workforce and role changes for over 50% of employees is planned to enhance speed, nimbleness, and accountability.
- Anticipated takeover speculation and activist actions are expected to result in increasing negative news coverage, requiring the company to consistently demonstrate its viability as an independent entity.
- Within the next 12 weeks, the organization aims to increase its pace, operating with a presumption of trust while acknowledging the inevitability of communication failures.
- Stakeholders will be exposed to direct seller perspectives through video testimonials integrated into all-hands meetings to align understanding of company value.
- The simultaneous execution of three defined values—economic empowerment, diversity, and environmental sustainability—is projected to expand the total value generated for all combined stakeholders.
- Current female representation in engineering stands at 30%, with a target of 50% and commitments to further improvements in diversity.
- The implementation of the Mansfield rule, mandating at least two candidates from underrepresented backgrounds on in-person interview panels, is expected to yield a more diverse workforce over time.
- A strategy of holding roles open until a diverse candidate pipeline is established before making offers supports the goal of building a more diverse team long-term.
- Innovation infrastructure designed to bring ideas to market in days or weeks for thousands of dollars will allow the organization to fail frequently without incurring significant costs.
- Requiring teams to declare certainty alongside effort and impact is intended to resolve internal resource competition dynamics.
- A balanced risk and return portfolio, including projects with a 20% probability of success, is planned to ensure quarterly stakeholder delivery while stretching organizational capabilities.
- The company intends to focus on orthogonal risks rather than direct marketplace competition to mitigate the threat of being disrupted by alternative solutions to core value propositions.
- Analysis of core value offerings and alternative delivery methods is being employed to prevent oversight of competitors that solve the same underlying problems in fundamentally different ways, such as search engines.