> My point is that Etsy needed more of a guiding light than their engineering department providing effective technology.

They had that, though. Amazon for unique items.

I think that's just not the guiding light you wanted for Etsy, but it's been there for a long time. They were missing the technology ~2009 up until a couple years ago. It was absolutely the most important problem at Etsy at that time. Now? I'll agree, not so much.

> Rob Kalin was not an artist - what was his art, Swimmy? BS? A couple wooden computer cases? In my perception he was a con-man hipster who dabbled in craft.

I have no love lost for Rob Kalin as a CEO, and I would never work in a business run by him again, but this is an extremely unfair characterization of him.

He's an artist. Sorry. To call him otherwise is to pull a "no true scotsman."

> someone with retail experience would be nice, ideally online as well as the typical setting where Etsy members sell their wares offline like art galleries, craft fairs, jewelry stores, boutiques, and so forth.

Etsy had plenty of people like that in senior leadership roles. Not the C suite, sure, but high up there.

I also don't see any reason why Etsy needs people like that, to be honest. Bezos had little (if any) retail experience before starting Amazon. Clearly hasn't impeded them any.

> All the time I've dealt with Etsy, I've heard the excuse that it's impossible for them to police their market place in any sort of pro-active way. But the sellers in each category have no problem finding obvious violations in their categories every day, and reports have never been dealt with logically and promptly.

You're grossly unaware and underestimating of the volume of support emails Etsy got (and probably it's even worse now).

Sellers outnumber Etsy employees by a godawful amount. Reports outnumber Etsy employees by a godawful amount. Not sure if it's still the case, but we used to have so many reports that we needed employees to all go on rotations where they answered emails and went through reports.

I personally must've gone through close to 1,000+ support emails and reports a year during my time there just doing these support rotations. The full-time community staff probably handled that much each day, if not more.

Even with all that, I bet we answered maybe 25% of all reports and emails. And this was way, way before the IPO.

> I don't have a preference for Etsy's future, as I gave up attempting to use it years ago and have recommended to my friends and clients for years that they buy a domain and set up a shop they actually control, using shopify or big cartel to make it simple.

That's fine, but I think it's naive to assume Etsy's future would look anything other than this. Actively managing a marketplace of Etsy's size is a technology problem.

You can bring up Myspace/etc. all day, but don't forget that in addition to monitoring for resellers and mass produced goods Etsy also has to watch out for:

1) Illegal activity e.g. money laundering
2) Pornographic/inappropriate items
3) Scammers
4) Legitimate support complaints (missing items etc.)
5) General complaints (I don't like this new feature, etc.)

Support staff monitoring all of those numerous issues would bankrupt Etsy, even if they did farm it out to a developing nation for pennies.