I was immensely inspired today by Etsy founder’s announce about new funding coming their way. Through his personal approach, his announce summarize how Etsy started, the details about the new investment, and where is the company heading to.
I’m sharing here parts of this announce, which i found myself inspired by for two reasons: first because it shows the power of a simple idea put in place by friends together, and second, for the way corporate information is shared here – with heart, authenticity and passion – something the old’corporate world will probably never learn how to do.
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.
Then the story of Swimmy is used to explain the big idea behind Etsy…
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.
And at last but not the least, in the many points explaining why Etsy needed these all brand new 27 Million dollars:
We believe that the current economy, favoring megacorporations and supersizes, is unstable. People who make a living making things, especially those we have on Etsy, will play a key role in revitalizing and stabilizing the world.